Funerals can be occasions which confront unbiblical, even pagan, notions concerning our bodies. Such notions were expunged from my own thinking during my Mother’s funeral. The room was crowded at her viewing. I stood by the door greeting the visitors. A lady entered and asked me, “Where is your Mother?” I pointed to the place in the room where she lay in her casket. As I watched the lady being engulfed by the crowd, two thoughts came to my mind. The first struck me as humorous. I realized that she was wearing the exact same outfit that my Mother was wearing! Could that be something like “catching the garter” at a wedding?
But the second thought was a bit more serious. When asked, “Where is your Mother?” I did not point “up” and assert my faith in the disembodied state. Yes, I was confident that she was absent from the body and at home with the Lord [2 Cor 5:8]. But by directing my visitor to Mom’s casket, I unwittingly affirmed a cardinal Christian conviction: Jesus redeemed my Mother, soul and body. My Mother is now in an abnormal state called “death.” She is absent from the body and at home with the Lord, and she is in her grave. Her physical body has personal identity. She has entered the disembodied state, but her body is no less her. She awaits the resurrection from the dead.
Gnosticism views the physical, material world as inherently evil, or at least, irrelevant. The spiritual and the immaterial is what has value and worth. The body is seen as merely a glove which covers the true person who subsists in the soul. We are not Gnostics. We are Christians. We need to fend off Gnostic notions of the body, even when we speak of the duality of the body and the soul, of man as a psychosomatic being.
The Bible’s duality is not one of the material and the immaterial, it is rather a duality of the life of this age and that of the age to come. It is an eschatological duality. Men are either alive merely in this age, which is an eschatological death; or alive now with the resurrection life of the age to come having passed out of death into life [Jn 5:24e]. The duality, the either-or, of Scripture is not either the material or the immaterial, but either death or life. We might be tempted, for example, to interpret 2 Corinthians 4:16 like Gnostics. Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day. Yes, the spirit and body is alluded to, but Paul is speaking eschatologically. As Christians, we are alive with resurrection life. Therefore, although we experience the severance of our souls from our bodies in physical death [see Jms 2:26], neither our souls nor our bodies are separated from Christ in an eschatological, eternal death. As Christians, our inner man is regenerated, already alive with the life of the age to come and is thus being renewed. Paul uses the vocabulary of the resurrection for both the inner and the outer man [see Col 3:10; Eph 4:20-24]. Paul does not speak of the outer man like a Gnostic, telling us that our outer man is worthless and to be discarded. No, he points us to our hope of a resurrection body, which in 2 Corinthians 5:1ff, is described as a building, a house, and as clothing. Paul is not speaking like a Gnostic, but like a Christian whose hope is for the resurrection of the body, not its obliviation. The disembodied state is not our final end. It is a furtherance of our sanctification, another phase along the way to our complete salvation in the resurrection of our bodies which will be fit to dwell in a resurrected cosmos.
If you’ve ever been with someone at the time of their death, it is easy to think like a Gnostic because there is such a stark difference between the living and the dead. At that moment, we say, “She’s gone.” And in a sense, she has left the life of this age, and we experience death separating her from us who yet live in this present age as embodied beings. But death has not separated her from Jesus [see Rom 8:38-39]. Even in death, our bodies are united to the living Lord and we are said to fall asleep in Christ, rather than “to die” [1 Cor 15:18; see Dan 12:2; Jn 11:11; Acts 13:36; 1 Cor 11:30; 15:6, 20, 51; 1 Thes 4:13-15; 5:10]. Therefore our bodily resurrection is likened to being awakened from sleep. Awake, sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you [Eph 5:14]. Your dead will live; their corpses will rise. You who lie in the dust, awake and shout for joy, for your dew is as the dew of the dawn, and the earth will give birth to the departed spirits [Isa 26:19].
Our salvation is indeed physical, material, and bodily. The Son of God assumed true flesh and blood [Heb 2:14] and bore our sins in His body on the cross [1 Pt 2:24]. The gospel announces the bodily resurrection of Jesus as the first Man of the age to come. He ascended bodily into eschatological glory and now reigns over heaven and earth, advancing His kingdom among the nations and building His church. Our exalted Lord gives us His Holy Spirit as a down-payment of resurrection glory [2 Cor 1:22; 5:5; Eph 1:14]. His Spirit now indwells the Christian and the Church, constituting us to be His New Covenant temple [1 Cor 6:19; 2 Cor 6:16], calling us to glorify God in [our] bod[ies] [1 Cor 7:19-20]. We hope for the bodily return of this same Jesus [Acts 1:11], who will resurrect all mankind [Jn 5:28-29] with eschatological bodies fit either for an eternal death, separated from Christ [2 Thes 1:9], or an eternal life, to be lived in union with Christ in a glorified physical cosmos [Rev 21-22].
Our resurrected bodies will have continuity with our present bodies. The body buried is the very body that will be resurrected, like a seed which issues into a glorified tree. But the resurrection body will not be merely a reconstruction of our this-age, perishable, dishonored, and weak body which returns to dust [1 Cor 15:42-43; Gen 3:19]. It will be transformed into a new order of live called life-giving spirit. It will not be a natural body, of this present age, but a spiritual body, animated with resurrection life. Our resurrection bodies will be even better than Adam’s original, pre-Fall body [1 Cor 15:44-45]! The only analogy we have by which to consider this hope is the resurrected and glorified body of our Savior, Jesus Christ. As it goes with our covenant Head, so it goes for us who are united to Him.
The passing of fellow believers occasions a poignant pain and grief. Although Jesus summoned Lazarus from the dead, He yet wept as He overcame death with intense emotional turmoil [Jn 11:35-44]. So we too grieve, but not as those who have no hope [1 Thes 4:13]. Those who have fallen asleep in Jesus are with Jesus and will return with Jesus to be reunited with their resurrection bodies and with us who are yet alive at His return. At the trumpet sound, those who have died in Christ will rise and those yet alive shall be changed into resurrection glory [1 Thes 4:13-18; 1 Cor 15:51-52; Phil 3:20-21].
So the next time you stand weeping next to the casket of a beloved believer, do not only recall the life she lived in that body, recognize that her body is her and that she is yet alive in Christ. Still, she is physically dead. Her body and soul are separated in a temporary and abnormal state. With faith in our risen Lord, look at her in her casket, contemplate her glorious future, and declare: Death is swallowed up in victory [1 Cor 15:55]! We are completely saved, body and soul! We eagerly wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ; who will transform the body of our humble state into conformity with the body of His glory, by the exertion of the power that He has even to subject all things to Himself [Phil 3:20-21]. Therefore we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body [Rom 8:23].
When Jesus was at Lazarus’s funeral, He revealed His identity. I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me shall live even if he dies, and everyone who lives and believes in Me shall never die. Then, in the presence of death, He asked the question we must all answer: Do you believe this?