1 Corinthians 15:23,51
- Eternal Resurrection and Temporary Resurrection, True Resurrection and Temporary Resurrection
Mechanism means organization, structure, composition, and device. If we interpret the mechanism of the resurrection of the saints, we can think of it as the structure and composition of the resurrection of the saints.
1 Corinthians 15:23 talks about the principle of the order of the resurrection. ‘But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then those who belong to Christ at his coming, then the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all rule and all authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.’
1) Order of the Resurrection
Here, the first person to be resurrected is Jesus Christ, the first fruits of the resurrection. The second group of resurrected people in the text are those who are attached to Christ when He comes. What does “Christ, the first fruit” mean here? Let’s say you bought and planted a young apple tree. Two years later, the first apples ripened. They were red in color, and when you took a bite, they were sour, sweet, and crunchy. You can imagine what the apples would be like the next year. The color of a fully ripened apple tree would be red, the taste would be sour, sweet, and the flesh would be crunchy. That’s because the first fruit was like that. The first fruit of the resurrection means that the first resurrected person is Jesus Christ. And the second resurrected people will be those who believed and were saved. after the Lord came again two thousand years later, and the resurrection of these second resurrected saints will be like the resurrection of Jesus, the first fruit of the resurrection. That resurrected body will have flesh and bones, but it will be a body that transcends time and space, and it will be a resurrected body that can eat and drink. The resurrection of these saints is called the first resurrection in Revelation 20:5,6. Therefore, Christ, the first fruit of the resurrection, and those who are resurrected when Christ returns are those who will have an eternal resurrection, a true resurrection.
2) Temporary resurrection, shortlived resurrection
Then, what kind of resurrection are those who were resurrected in the Old Testament era, those who were resurrected while Jesus was alive, and those who were resurrected by the apostles after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension? The resurrection of these people is called the temporary resurrection, or the shortlived resurrection. For example, in the Old Testament, the only son of the Shunammite woman resurrected by the prophet Elisha in 2 Kings 4:33-37, the dead body thrown into Elisha’s bones about a year after his death in 2 Kings 13:23, the son of the widow of Zarephath resurrected by Elijah in 1 Kings 17:20-24, Lazarus who was said to have stinked after being dead for four days (John 11:43), the son of the widow of Nain (Luke 8:14), and the daughter of Jairus, the synagogue leader (Luke 8:54) were all resurrected before Jesus was resurrected. These are all temporary resurrections. They are temporary resurrections. This is because they are placed before Christ, the first fruit, in the order of resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15:23. The true resurrection is Christ, but those who were resurrected before him are not true resurrections, eternal resurrections.
And there are those who were resurrected by the apostles after Jesus was resurrected and ascended to heaven. The resurrection of the Dorcas woman by the Apostle Peter and the resurrection of Eutychus by the Apostle Paul are not true resurrections but temporary resurrections. This is because 1 Corinthians 15:23 says that the true resurrection is those who are attached to the Lord when Christ descends. In other words, the eternal resurrection is the resurrection that takes place after the resurrection of the Lord, the first fruit, and when the Lord descends to meet the saints. This is the true resurrection, the eternal resurrection.
However, when we look at these temporary resurrections, all of them had been dead for only three to five days at most. Eutychus was resurrected immediately after his death, Lazarus after four days, Dorcas after four days, and the son of the widow of Nain was resurrected during the funeral procession. Among the people who had these temporary resurrections in the Bible, there was not a single one who had been dead for one, two, or five years.
However, in Matthew 28:52, when Jesus died, “the tombs were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. After his resurrection, they came out of the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many.” Some people question what kind of resurrection these people were. The resurrection of these people was also a temporary resurrection. It was before Jesus was resurrected, and they were not resurrected when the Lord descended. Also, they must have been buried only a few days after they died. These temporarily resurrected people will die again after a certain period of time. That is why it is called a temporary resurrection.
- The Relationship between the Resurrected Spiritual Body and Our Current Body
This is a question asking what the relationship is between the resurrected body and our current body. This is a question that the saints of the time of the Apostle Paul also had. In 1 Corinthians 15:36-38, it says, “Foolish one! What you sow is not made alive unless the seed dies. And what you sow is not the body that will be, but a bare grain, perhaps of wheat or some other grain. But God gives it a body as He has chosen, and to each seed its own body.”
If we interpret the meaning of this verse,
- Just as the resurrection is like the body that comes out of a plant’s seed when it dies, a person’s body must die to become a resurrected body.
- The fact that God gave each body to each plant’s seed, the seed of wheat becomes a plant, and although it looks completely different from the seed, its body comes out through the seed. The resurrection of a person is not something that is completely unrelated to the current body, but rather the resurrected body is formed from the body we currently have.
In Genesis 2, it says that man was made from dust. It says that you are dust and to dust you will return. The human body is dust. This is because we eat dust and live. We eat vegetables, and those vegetables grew by eating the elements of dust. We eat beef, pork, and chicken, but these livestock ate vegetables. Those vegetables ate the elements of the earth and became the elements of the earth. Therefore, the human body is also composed of the elements of the earth. However, when the minerals that make up our bodies were chemically analyzed, it was said that sixteen or seventeen of the elements found in the soil on the surface of the earth are the same as the elements that make up our bodies.
The human body is composed of 43.5% calcium, 29.1% phosphate, 10.2% potassium, 7.1% sulfur, 4.3% sodium, chlorine, magnesium, iron, iodine, manganese, silicon, copper, zinc, and other elements in the earth. When a person dies and is buried in the earth, the body is decomposed by bacteria or maggots, and the elements of the body return to the earth. When we die and are buried in the ground, we rot in the grave and return to the earth. And when God resurrects us, He combines all the elements that originally made up our bodies and makes us into corpses. The corpses are the words of Revelation 20:1, “The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them.”
Here, “the dead” refers to corpses. These corpses are “corpses for resurrection.”
In 1 Corinthians 15:43-44, it says, “So is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption, it is raised in imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.”
If a space traveler leaves the Earth’s atmosphere and a rocket explodes, the corpse will disintegrate in space and the elements will float around in space. How will that person be resurrected? Or, if that person dies while sailing the sea, his body will rot in the water and all the elements that made up his body will be scattered across the five oceans, so how will he be resurrected? Psalm 139 says, “Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book, before one of them came to be.” Since God created that person and knows all the elements of that person and has recorded all the elements of that person’s body in his book, He will find all the elements of my body anywhere in the universe and resurrect my body.
1 Thessalonians 4:17 says, “Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air….” It says that the living will be caught up together with them in the clouds. If the Lord descends while we are alive, our current bodies will change and become spiritual bodies and we will be raptured. Therefore, it is related to our current bodies. In 1 Corinthians 15:51-52, it says, “Behold, I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. …”
Looking at these verses, it says that our original body, our present body, will change in an instant. It says that the resurrected spiritual body will be transformed from our present body. In the cases of Elijah’s and Enoch’s ascension, their bodies were probably changed in an instant and they ascended.
III. Mechanism of Resurrection (Mechanism of Resurrection, Mechanical Explanation of Resurrection)
In Revelation 20:12-13, “And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. And another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged out of the things which were written in the books, according to their works. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead which were in them, and every man was judged according to his works.”
When analyzing the words “the sea gave up the dead which were in it,” of course, there could have been someone who died on a ship sailing on the sea and was buried in the water, and at that time, God resurrected the bodies for judgment, so the bodies could have floated up to the surface of the water right away.
However, in the sea, countless people have died over the past tens, hundreds, and thousands of years, and their bodies have been dissolved in the water and floated on the five oceans, so how did the elements of their bodies come together and float up as corpses? If we take this word lightly, it may seem like nothing, but if we think about it closely, it is an amazing event. How did a corpse rise above the water when it would have rotted and dissolved in the water and been scattered in the sea for thousands of years?
We can imagine that something amazing must have happened in the water before the corpse rose above the water. Ezekiel 37:1-10 explains the secret of how the elements of each body scattered throughout the seas of the earth could come together and be combined into the original corpse.
- Each bone moved and joined together, that is, the bones that originally belonged to the person joined together (verse 7),
- Then, the flesh that belonged to the person filled up the skeleton, that is, the skeleton, and sinews were formed, and these are the corpse. Revelation 20 shows the state of the ‘corpse’ rising (verse 8).
- The breath of life entered into it, and the person came back to life (verses 9, 10).
- However, this mechanism of the resurrection of the body begins with the word of God (5, 6, 9).
In Ezekiel, the bones gathered together, flesh grew, and sinews were formed by the word of God, and the life entered into the corpse was also by the word of God.
However, in the New Testament, in 1 Thessalonians 4:14, 16, 17, in verse 14, what entered the corpse was said to be life in Ezekiel, but in the New Testament, it refers to the soul of the person. It says that Christ brings those souls (verse 14). In Ezekiel 37:9, God commands, “Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, breathe on these slain, that they may live.” In the New Testament, in 1 Thessalonians 4:16, it says, “For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet of God. The dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.”
It also says that Christ will shout. And it says that the archangels will shout. In Ezekiel 37, God told Ezekiel to command, but in 1 Thessalonians 4:17, the archangels are shouting. What is the sound? Perhaps, just as in John 11, when He raised Lazarus, He commanded loudly, “Lazarus, come out,” and in 1 Thessalonians 4, the Lord is commanding. Shouting is giving a command with a loud voice. When Jesus Christ shouted to the whole universe, “Children, come out!” the archangels must have followed the Lord’s command and shouted loudly. Then, the mechanism of the resurrection of the dead throughout the universe will occur as in Ezekiel 37.
In Luke 8:54-55, when Jairus’ daughter was raised, when he commanded, “Child, arise,” it said, “The spirit returned to the body, and the child came back to life.” It was as in Ezekiel 37:9-15. In John 5:29, it is said that there will be a resurrection of saints and resurrection of unbelievers. “Those who have done good will come out to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil will come out to the resurrection of judgment.” Revelation 20:12-15 shows how the resurrection of unbelievers will occur and what the end will be at the Great White Throne Judgment after the Millennium.
In conclusion, when we are resurrected as a spiritual body, it will not be done without any relation to the body we currently have, but the spiritual body of resurrection will be established using the elements of our current body as materials. In 1 Corinthians 15:36-38, when a seed of a plant is planted, a seed is buried in the ground and dies, and based on its nutrients, a sprout will grow and a plant of a completely different form will come out, just as the seed will be buried in the ground and die, and the resurrection of our body will also be based on our current body and become a spiritual resurrected body.
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