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Resurrection of the Dead

Foundations of the Christian Faith
Foundations of the Christian FaithSteve Gregg

In this session, Steve Gregg discusses various eschatological theories surrounding the resurrection of the dead. He addresses the idea of death being an unconscious state and how it is often misconstrued in different belief systems. Gregg also explains the biblical concept of resurrected bodies being different from our current bodies and how this ties in with the idea of sin and corruption. Overall, Gregg highlights the impact of these beliefs on a Christian's daily life and emphasizes the importance of understanding these eschatological concepts.

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Transcript

Today, we have our 11th session in the Foundation series, and this session is devoted to an examination of the biblical doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. We have talked about repentance and faith, both of which have to do with conversion, both have to do with personal commitment, personal decisions that one must make to be a Christian. We've talked about baptisms and the laying on of hands, which subjects take our focus away from the personal aspects to the communal or community aspects of the Christian life, and our involvement and connectedness to other believers.
In the early church, people were baptized into the fellowship of the church,
and when hands were laid upon them, there was a sense of connectedness and unity and impartation and interdependence, mutual dependency, and so forth that was symbolized by that act, so that even such blessings as God might give without the process of laying on of hands, he has often chosen to give through that process, that we, by submitting ourselves to the laying on of hands, might dignify one another as members of Christ, receiving from Jesus the blessings through his people that we could otherwise perhaps seek directly from him. Some of those blessings, though, are quite ordained to be administered through the laying on of hands, and we studied that subject yesterday. Today, we are now in the last couplet, Resurrection of the Dead and Eternal Judgment, and in talking about these things, we are, of course, talking about eschatology.
Now,
we have an entirely other series that we'll be covering on eschatology, where we will get into particulars. We'll get into the issues that have, where Christians have differed over things like the rapture and the tribulation and the Antichrist and the millennium and stuff like that. That is not what we really are focusing on in the foundation series, because those things are not really foundational.
Your view of when the rapture occurs is not a foundational question, although,
in my opinion, the early church knew what the correct teaching of the apostles was on this subject, but I don't know that having the correct opinion about the millennium or the correct opinion about the rapture or the tribulation is fundamental to your health as a Christian person, and one of the evidences of that is the fact that so many Christians who have been spiritually healthy and holy in their lives have held differing views about some of those variables, which must indicate that none of those views are necessarily damaging to a person's Christian walk, though I would not suggest that the views have no impact on one's viewpoint. They may have minimal impact in terms of negative impact, and so we don't think that issues of eschatology are all that fundamental to what a Christian believer needs to know, except in the broad sense of the term of eschatology. Resurrection of the dead and eternal judgment are eschatological issues, but they are of the most broad category.
There is really very little dispute among genuine Christians
over the question of whether there will be a resurrection and whether there will be a judgment, and these in fact are the eschatological questions that do have very practical impact on the way we live. You might think that it has practical value to know whether you'll be raptured before the tribulation or after the tribulation, but it really wouldn't have any practical value if you're thinking rightly about Christianity, because if you're prepared to suffer martyrdom for Christ, then it'll matter little to you whether you go through the tribulation or not. After all, even if you don't, you still might go through something very much like tribulation, very much like the tribulation in Mongolia or some other country.
People may be tortured and killed
without the tribulation coming in your lifetime. It's happened to many millions of Christians through the years, so it hardly matters whether we go through tribulation or not as far as the way we live our lives. We have to be prepared to suffer and die for Christ.
If we're not prepared
to, then we need to re-examine whether we're really Christians or not, because it seems to me that conversion implies denying yourself and taking up your cross, which certainly would involve the willingness to suffer and die for your faith, and if you've not come to that point, maybe what you have isn't what the Bible calls conversion. What I'm saying is the question of whether you go through the tribulation or not doesn't necessarily have to have a tremendous impact on your life. I have heard some Christians say, well, if we're going to go through the tribulation, then I don't even want to be a Christian.
Well, I'd say that belief in pre-trib rapture has
an impact on their life, but only an illusory one. It allows them to think they're Christians when they're not. As long as they think they're going to miss the tribulation, then they'll pretend to be Christians, but as soon as they think it won't help them to be a Christian, won't help them avoid the tribulation, then they're going to bail out.
Well, then we'll find
out that they really weren't Christians after all. Anyone who would bail out before they'd suffer for Christ, I seriously doubt is what the Bible would call a Christian. So, you know, real Christianity is not necessarily affected by those kinds of issues, but the whole concept of whether there is a resurrection or not, and whether there's a judgment or not, is stated in the Bible as having a very powerful effect on the way we live our lives.
For example, Paul said that the
resurrection from the dead is the hope of the believer, and this hope gives a person endurance and perseverance and staying power. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul said, if there's no resurrection of the dead, then why do I subject myself to life-threatening situations every day? If there's no resurrection from the dead, we're the most miserable of all persons. In other words, I'm giving up the joys of this life in the hopes that there's another one.
Let me see here. I'm not
having planned to use that. It's in 1 Corinthians 15, 30.
He's suggesting if there is no resurrection
of the dead, 1 Corinthians 15, 30 says, then why do we stand in jeopardy every hour? I affirm by the boasting in you which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord. I die daily. If in the manner of men I have fought with beasts of Ephesus, what advantage is it to me if the dead do not rise? Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.
A similar thought is there in Hebrews chapter 11, when it talks about
those who did not allow themselves to be delivered from their sufferings when it would have required that they compromise their convictions to do so. It says in Hebrews 11, 35, women received their dead raised to life again. Others were tortured, not accepting deliverance so that they might obtain a better resurrection.
In other words, because the resurrection was in their focus, it was their
destiny to be resurrected from the dead, they were willing to surrender their lives in the natural, their natural lives. They had another life that was better that they were looking forward to. And therefore, they would not be delivered from their torturers at the expense of compromising their soul.
It's interesting how many theologians there are today that would suggest that you can
compromise all you want and still not miss the resurrection. That you can live in sin to the day you die and you're just saved by some mystical thing that has nothing to do with the way you live, and that you're saved in spite of the fact that you live in sin. These people apparently didn't feel that way.
They allowed themselves to be tortured rather than compromise their holiness
and their commitment because they were holding out for the resurrection. How sad for them if modern theology were true that they could have denied the faith and not been tortured and still made it in the resurrection. Apparently they knew no such doctrine, nor has any biblical writer known any such doctrine.
Only modern, flimsy, wimpy Christians have manufactured such doctrines,
but it's not biblical. The fact of the matter is the resurrection comes at great cost, and that cost is being faithful unto death. When Jesus wrote to the church of Smyrna, the suffering church, in Revelation chapter 2, in the letters to the seven churches, there's one church in particular that stands out as the one facing severe sufferings.
In Revelation 2, 1, it says to the angel of the
church of Smyrna, write, these things says the first and the last who was dead and came to life. I know your works, tribulation and poverty, but you are rich. I know the blasphemy of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan.
Do not fear any of those
things which you are about to suffer. Indeed, the devil is about to throw some of you into prison, that you may be tested and you will have tribulation ten days. Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life.
He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the
churches. He who overcomes shall not be hurt by the second death. There's very much pastoral information in this letter to this suffering church.
Jesus identifies himself as the one who
was dead and is now alive. Why does he identify himself like that? He doesn't identify himself in those terms to the other six churches, because they were looking at possible death. And the fact that Jesus died and came alive again is the basis of our hope that the same will happen to us.
Paul
makes that very clear in 1 Corinthians 15. We'll look there later on this point, but Paul makes it clear that Jesus, having risen from the dead, is the first fruits of the general harvest. We're the general harvest.
And so the fact that Jesus has risen from the dead is the guarantee that
others will who are in him. So Jesus says, I rose from the dead, so you be faithful until death, and I'll give you the crown of life, and at least the second death won't hurt you. There's much in this to suggest you've got to be faithful until death if you're going to get the crown of eternal life.
That crown of eternal life is received at the resurrection. And therefore, the resurrection
is held up before the Christian as the motive for endurance. Paul said in Philippians 3, verse 7, But what things were gained to me, these I have counted loss for Christ.
Yes, indeed, I also count
all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of God, of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I might gain Christ, and be found in him, not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith, that I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings being conformed to his death, if by any means I may attain to the resurrection of the dead. Sounds rather difficult. Sounds rather costly.
Sounds as
if Paul felt it was worth it, however. He suffered the loss of every other thing. He counted it as rubbish.
Of course, in the Greek, dung. I heard a preacher who suggested that there was another
four-letter word that it could have been translated as in order to convey Paul's disdain for it in our modern language, and he actually said the word. I won't say that from the pulpit, but the point here is that, by the way, it shocked his congregation too, but he was trying to impact the congregation with an awareness of how much Paul was heaping disgust and disdain on everything the world had to offer that could be counted as gain to him, when it required the loss of those things in order to gain Christ and to attain to the resurrection of the dead, so that he might know Christ in the power of the resurrection, and in the fellowship of his sufferings.
The resurrection provides strong
motivation to the Christian to be willing to surrender this body to the flames, or to the stake, or to the lions, or to the gladiators, or in modern times to other more hideous technological means of torture. Isn't that a lovely thought? Now, the idea here is that the resurrection of the dead is our hope, and hope is a wonderfully practical thing to have. It makes a big difference in the way you live.
In fact, in many cases, it makes a difference in whether you choose to live
or not. There are many who have committed suicide, of whom no doubt they differed from one another in their reasons, but one thing they all had in common, they all lacked hope. Nobody who hopes that things are going to get better, no one who has hope in a brighter future, takes the drastic step of committing suicide.
Whatever else they may have differed in, they had this in common. All who
commit suicide have come to the end of all hope for a happier future. And by the way, the irony of it is, by taking their lives, they bring an end to all credible hope that they ever will know a happy future.
But hope has a very powerful effect in creating perseverance. You've very possibly
heard of a very well-publicized experiment. I've heard about it a great number of places, and therefore I think it likely that many of you have heard of it too.
Some psychologists were doing
experiments with laboratory rats to discover what kind of effects hope has upon behavior. And they put these laboratory rats into a barrel of water where they had to swim or die, and they swam. They swam for about 20 minutes, and then they got through their little heads that there was nowhere to go, that they were going to die, and they surrendered themselves to their fate, and they just stopped swimming and sunk.
However, the researchers rescued them and pulled them out of
the water, put them back in their cages, gave them time to dry off, and in a later experiment put them back in the water again. And whether surprising or not, I don't know, but they didn't stop swimming after 20 minutes or after an hour or after two hours. They just continued swimming and swimming and swimming.
Now, the theory that was reached as a result of the experiment, and
seems a reasonable one, is that the reason that the rats surrendered to their fate after 20 minutes the first time is they had no concept of deliverance. They had given up all hope. They looked for every exit, there were none, and they surrendered themselves to doom.
But once having
been delivered, there was something of a memory of that in their consciousness. And the second time they were put into the water, it is assumed, I'm trying to not be dogmatic, but it seems a reasonable assumption, that because they had been rescued once, the concept of being saved, the concept of being rescued, if they just hold out a little longer, motivated them to continue on and on and on, whereas before they'd given up hope. Now that there is some hope, because there was a consciousness of a past deliverance, they thought, well, there might be one in the future.
I'm not
sure they were thinking that sophisticatedly. But no doubt, in their memory, this awareness that they'd once been delivered inspired a hope that they might yet be delivered if they didn't give up. And so they didn't, for a very long time.
And it very graphically would appear to illustrate
how hope can inspire perseverance. And the Bible indicates that this is in fact the case in the Christian life. Our hope is the hope of a resurrection.
Other people, of course, who are not
Christians, may hope for eternal life, or hope for heaven, or hope for resurrection, but they don't have a credible hope. The only person who can give a credible guarantee of a resurrection from the dead is Jesus, and the reason his guarantee is credible is because he proved he could do it. He proved he could conquer death.
He proved that he could enter the domain of death and break out
again. And that he, and by raising others from the dead, like Lazarus, he showed that he could put his money where his mouth was. When he promised that the righteous would rise in the last day, he showed that he had the power to make that promise good.
And the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the basis
of our hope, a credible hope, that others can only hope in the sense of wishful thinking for. To the Christian, hope is not wishful thinking that is really disattached from reality, like when a man says, I sure hope it doesn't rain tomorrow because I want to play golf or something like that. There's no guarantees it won't, and therefore his hoping is simply wishful thinking.
But when a Christian
hopes in God or hopes in the resurrection of the dead, it's not just a wishful thinking that's arbitrary and separated from any reality. It is, in fact, the word hope, it biblically means confident expectation. It's different than just saying, I kind of wish it would.
It's saying,
I know that it shall. I am confident and I expect it. And because I expect and have this hope of resurrection, I live differently than if I had no such hope.
Paul says, I battled wild beasts in
Ephesus. I am in jeopardy every hour. I face death daily.
When he says I die daily, in the context,
he means he's in death-defined situations on a daily basis. He faces death as a real potential contingency in his life. All the time he says, why would I do a thing like that if I didn't have every confidence that there's a resurrection from the dead? Now, having said this, this raises some some questions that are relevant, at least to our curiosity.
One of them that comes up very
frequently, and I'm sure when you hear it, you'll say, yeah, I've sometimes wondered that myself, is if there is a resurrection of the dead, then what shall we say about the people who are dead now prior to the resurrection? Where are they? What has become of those who have died? Now, there are two theories about this held among Christians. The most widely held evangelical theory is that Christians, upon death, go immediately to be with the Lord. A somewhat less widely held theory, and I believe a wrong one, by the way.
You usually expect me to take
the one that's least held, I imagine, if you're getting to know me. But I don't always hold the least held theory. I just hold the right one, whether it's least held or most widely held.
The lesser held theory among Christians is that the soul actually goes into a state of unconsciousness until the resurrection, and it is in a state analogous to sleep. This view is called soul sleep. It is held by many non-Christian groups.
Well, I shouldn't say non-Christian,
I'd say fringe groups. Groups that are kind of not, people aren't quite sure whether they're Christian or cults or whatever. I'm thinking particularly of the Seventh-day Adventists.
They hold the soul sleep. The Jehovah's Witnesses, of course, are a cult, and they hold the soul sleep. There are some Christians I've known who have held to the doctrine of soul sleep, and since some Christians do, it is worth looking at the reasons that they hold to this view, though I consider it to be a wrong one.
The basic reason, well, there's probably a couple of reasons.
One reason is because sleep, I should say death, is likened to sleep in the Bible. At least in the teachings of Jesus and Paul, there are a number of times where death is being discussed, and the term sleep is applied to it.
For example, when Jairus' daughter had died,
and Jesus came into the house, and all the mourners were there, Jesus said, why are you all weeping? She's not dead, she's only sleeping. And they all laughed and just scorned, knowing she was dead, it says. And likewise, when Lazarus died, and Jesus was not present, he said to the disciples, our friend Lazarus is asleep, we need to go to wake him up.
And the disciples said, well, if he's asleep, he'll get better.
Last they'd heard, he was sick. And they heard, well, if he's just sleeping, there's no immediate peril, he'll get better.
And Jesus said, well, I mean, he's dead. So we see Jesus more than once
speaking of dead people as being asleep. Paul, no doubt picking that up from Jesus, or maybe even from the Old Testament, because in Daniel 12 it says, many of those who sleep in the dust shall arise, so that presumably those who are dead are spoken of as sleeping in the dust.
Paul picks up this idea, and in 1 Thessalonians, he says, now concerning those who sleep in Jesus, I don't want you to be ignorant. Those who sleep, he will bring with them and so forth. Likewise, yeah, that's in, actually begins, I think, as far back as verse 14.
It's 1 Thessalonians 4.
It might even start as early as verse 13. The more famous verses are in verses 16 through 18, but from about verse 13 or 14 to the end of that chapter. And also in 1 Corinthians 15, 1 Corinthians 15, starting around verse 50, Paul says that, he says, behold, I show you a mystery.
We shall not all sleep, but we shall be changed, where he uses again the word sleep. So we have numerous places in the Bible where death is spoken of as if it is sleep. And this, of course, gives the principal reason for referring to death as sleep and to believe in soul sleep, that when you're dead, you're unconscious.
Now, there's, I'd like to respond to that a bit. This
would be sensible if the presuppositions were correct. The presupposition that they're making is that death is an unconscious state and therefore should be likened to sleep.
But
there's a problem here, and that is that sleep is not an unconscious state. I am told that everybody dreams. Whether you remember your dreams or not, it is said that everybody dreams.
And even
if that's not true, it's quite clear that many people dream, and I think most people dream. And therefore, it would be quite inaccurate to speak of sleep as an unconscious state. The mind is quite active and quite aware of certain things in the dream world.
It may not be aware of what's
going on in the same room in the real world, but the mind is not at all unconscious during sleep. In fact, if there was the desire on the part of Jesus or Paul to convey the notion that death is an unconscious state, they should have just used the word death because most people think of death as an unconscious state. To call it sleep would only confuse the issue because sleep is not an unconscious state.
The reason, in my opinion, and I think it can be shown from the
evidence to be the most likely true opinion on this point, the reason that sleep is chosen as the metaphor for death is because sleep, it's not an unconscious state, but it is a temporary state. Death conveys the notion of permanence, sleep the notion of temporariness. And if you'll pay attention to the context in which death is called sleep, it is invariably in a context where the resurrection is in view.
Jesus said, our friend Lazarus is asleep. I got to go wake him up. I'm
going to go raise him from the dead.
This is not a permanent situation. Earlier he said this sickness
is not unto death. In other words, this was not going to end in the permanent end of his life.
It's more like sleep because he's going to wake him up. He's going to raise him from the dead. Likewise, Jairus' daughter, she's asleep.
Well, what did Jesus do? He went and woke her up as it were.
He raised her from the dead. It is in context like 1 Thessalonians 4 and 1 Corinthians 15 and Daniel chapter 12, where the word sleep is introduced as a metaphor for death.
In every case, it's in a
context where the resurrection of the dead is being spoken of and therefore signifying that as a person wakes from sleep, so people who die are going to get up in the resurrection. And death, far from being a permanent condition, is like sleep, a temporary condition. But that does not address the question of whether it's a conscious or an unconscious state.
Now on this other question of whether it's
conscious or unconscious, the principal text in favor of saying that death is an unconscious state is in Ecclesiastes chapter 9. In Ecclesiastes 9.5, this is the most often quoted verse by those who believe in soul sleep to try to prove their point. You might as well know it and you might as well know how to respond to it because Jehovah's Witnesses will use it and others will use it to try to prove to you that you have no immortal soul. They believe that your soul is not immortal.
When you die, you're
dead and when you resurrect from the dead, you're alive again. It's not immortality, it's just given a new life again. Now you might say, who cares? And the answer would be, I don't.
It wouldn't matter to me
if I did sleep until the resurrection, knew nothing about it until the time, that wouldn't bother me at all. The only thing is, if we're going to have opinions about things, might as well have the right ones instead of the wrong ones. So we might as well see what the Bible reveals since it must have some value or God wouldn't have told us about it.
But in Ecclesiastes 9.5, Solomon says, for the living know that they
will die, but the dead know nothing and they have no more reward for their memory of them is forgotten. Now, this statement, the dead know nothing, is one of the favorite texts of those who promote the idea of soul sleep and a man has no immortal soul. That when he's dead, he knows nothing.
His consciousness
is blank. However, the verse proves too much because it goes on to say there's no reward after this either. Is that agreeable with the rest of Scripture? And that their memory is forgotten.
Well, that's not
agreeable with Scripture elsewhere either. Now, what is going on here? This verse seems to contain things that aren't agreeable with the rest of Scripture. If you are familiar with the book of Ecclesiastes and if you understand for what purpose it was written, the mystery will be solved.
Unfortunately, people who just go searching for proof texts without any concern about the context often get a lot of ammunition for heresy out of the book of Ecclesiastes. And the reason is Solomon wrote the book of Ecclesiastes in his old age after he had spent some time backslidden. He makes a, it's a written confession of his backslidden years when he was seeking for the chief good of man under the sun, that is apart from considering God.
Factoring God out of the picture for a period of his life, he sought the chief good of man. He sought it in education and books. He sought it in parties and women and in wine and in horticulture.
He sought it in philosophy. He sought it in many places. He catalogs it for
you in the book of Ecclesiastes.
I said, I thought this, I checked there and his repeated conclusion
was, and I found that that too was vanity, which means emptiness. Basically, Ecclesiastes was written after Solomon returned to the Lord to warn others not to take the path he had taken, the path of vanity, the path of seeking for man's chief good without God. It is a, it's like a long testimony of someone saying, this is what I was like before I was saved now or while I was backslidden.
And it's very valuable to us. You might say, well, why is it in the Bible? Because
it's extremely valuable. The guy had the opportunity to try everything that most worldly people think they'd love to try and never have a chance to, but they're quite sure if they could, it'd make them happy.
If I could just have a thousand women, if I could just have limitless money, if I could
just party all the time, if I could just have the best education going, if I could just have servants and music and, and, uh, recreation, he had it all. And he had it in Aces. He had it.
He had the whole
thing. He had everything that a man under the sun could seek happiness in and which most men will never have a chance to experience, but they can save their time. They can save their trouble.
If they're thinking about searching for happiness in those places, the guy who's already had it all says, don't bother. Tell you what it was. It was emptiness.
It was like striving after the wind.
And that's what Ecclesiastes is all about. Now, in the course of that, uh, presentation, on many occasions, he says, and this is how I thought at that time.
I thought such and such
was true. And I thought so and so was true. In fact, four times in the book of Ecclesiastes, he says, and this is the conclusion I reached that there's nothing better than to eat and drink and enjoy the fruit of your labor.
Now, is that good doctrine? No, but that's what he says. He
concluded that was his opinion at the time. There's nothing better to do for a man to do, but just enjoy his food.
Well, certainly that's not what the Bible teaches. Bible teaches elsewhere.
Man should not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.
In
fact, Paul said, if there's no resurrection, we might as well say, eat and drink and be married. That's the very view that Solomon had when he was backslidden. We have in Ecclesiastes, the catalog of his wrong behavior and wrong thinking during his backslidden years.
But
if you read the final chapter, in fact, the very last words in the book, verses 13 and 14 of chapter 12, it says, let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter. And the conclusion is very different than the things he said earlier in the book. He says, fear God and keep his commandments for this is man's all for God will bring every work into judgment, including every secret thing, whether good or evil.
Now, does that sound agreeable with Ecclesiastes nine, five,
the dead have no more reward. The dead are not remembered anymore. They don't know anything.
The grave is all there is. Then why does he conclude at the end? Well, everything's going to be brought into judgment. Everyone's going to be rewarded according to his works, whether it's good or evil.
Obviously what we have in the earlier chapters of Ecclesiastes before we reach the
conclusion is the tentative conclusions. He reached philosophizing without factoring God and God's revelation into his life. And he's saying, this is how desperate I was.
This is
how hopeless it was. It's like he says, it's better to be dead than alive. He says, uh, in some places in the, in the book, they constantly contradicts himself continuously in the book because at different times he thought different things.
But one of the things he thought, look
look at Ecclesiastes nine, one. What are the first words in that chapter? For I considered that is back then. This is how he thought.
I considered that such and such was true.
Particularly. I thought that the dead knew nothing.
I thought there was no reward for
the dead after they died and so forth. Obviously, if he had consulted the revelation of scripture, the things God had revealed, even in his time through the law, uh, he wouldn't have reached that conclusion. You see Ecclesiastes is not a book of good doctrine.
Ecclesiastes is a testimony
of a life of sin and error. And it's, it's almost like saying, quoting the devil, thou shalt not surely die in Genesis three and say, well, that must be true because in the Bible, no, the Bible expects you to understand that that's the devil speaking. And Solomon, when he wrote this, we want you to understand that he was seeking things under the sun.
He was seeking meaning and fulfillment under the sun. And he tells you all the places he looked for it. You could hardly mistakenly feel like he had it right.
And so if in the course of his search,
his, he considered in his heart, the dead don't know anything. What's the use? Eat and drink. Tomorrow we die.
This can hardly be put forward as a specimen of Christian doctrine. And yet it's
the best that the soul sleep people have to suggest that the soul is not there, is not alive, is when you die, there is no more consciousness, the dead know nothing, but it hardly is a good specimen to bring forward or for exhibit A for their point. You got to be careful about the things that are in Ecclesiastes.
Some of them show some good common sense. Others are way far
of the mark as far as what the Bible declares to be true elsewhere. And it's not because Ecclesiastes isn't inspired.
It's an inspired confession of a man who had failed and wants to help others avoid
that failure. And so he says what they'll find if they do take that road and basically says, don't bother. Now there's one other question, of course, that comes up in favor of soul sleep.
And that would be the basic question of if, if in fact, when you die, your soul goes to be with the Lord and you never lose consciousness or anything, what's the point of the resurrection? If you're already gone to heaven in your spirit, then why bother resurrecting the body? This was in fact, the way the Greeks thought about things. It is not the way the Bible speaks. The Greeks, of course, and you've probably heard this from Phil, I don't, I don't know what occasion he's had to bring it up, but this comes up, Bible teachers have to bring this up all the time when trying to explain things in the, in the way that the New Testament writers had to address.
The Greek thinking of Plato and
beyond his time was that matter was evil and spirit is good. Therefore your body, which is material, is evil. Now there's a very strong temptation for Christians to believe that because our bodies do have desires toward evil things.
And so Christians often buy right into this Greek notion that the
body is evil. However, the Bible indicates that when God made men and women's bodies, they were very good. And yet they were physical.
And the world that God made was very good too,
and it was physical. There's nothing intrinsically evil about things physical. It is true that sin has invaded the body and has perverted the desires and so forth.
And there is sin in our bodies.
But it does not follow that physical bodies are bad in themselves simply because they're physical, but the Greeks thought so. And that's why they struggled so much with the idea of the resurrection.
The Greeks believe that when you die, your spirit is released from the prison of this evil body, and that it is forever freed from the captivity of flesh and of the physical matter. And Paul had more difficulty with Greek people than any others in trying to get across the idea of the resurrection. Now I had problems with the Jews over other issues, but the Jews had no problem, most of them, with the resurrection.
The Sadducees didn't like it very much, but the Pharisees and the general
Jewish thinking believed in the resurrection. So Paul didn't have to hammer this home with Jewish audiences that much. But when it came to Greeks, he got himself into hot water sometimes, championing the view of the resurrection, because the Greeks thought, well, why in the world, once you've escaped from the prison of a body, what kind of sane God would ever recapture you and call that a good thing, you know, for you to be in a physical body again? That doesn't make sense because matter is evil, they thought.
And so when Paul was speaking in Athens to those
Greek philosophers, they listened intently until he mentioned Jesus had risen from the dead. And then they hooted him out and threw tomatoes, and they wouldn't listen to another word he said. The idea of resurrection seemed an absurdity, not because they didn't think the gods or God could make it happen, it just, it was philosophically an absurdity.
Why would God want
to do that? Once you've escaped the body, why would he in any sense want to bring you back into it again and resurrect it again? And it just seemed evil. It seemed wrong. And the Corinthians also were Greeks.
It was a Greek city. And that's the one church where Paul seemed to have the
hardest time getting across the doctrine of the resurrection. It's the only church in which he had to write an entire chapter in a very lengthy one, the longest one, I think, in the whole book of 1 Corinthians, over 50 something verses long, 1 Corinthians 15.
And he says, why is it that some
of you say there's no resurrection? Obviously, the Greek Christians had trouble with that concept. Well, the soul sleep people would have trouble with it too. If, I should say, they would point out that we should have trouble with it, I say.
They would use that as an argument against the
idea of the immortality of the soul. If we say that when you die, your spirit goes to be with Jesus, they would say, well, then why have a resurrection? What's the point? But you see, their reasoning is based on, presumably, a wrong dichotomy, the idea that it's better to be free spirit than to be resurrected body. That is not at all the assumption that the Jews would have made.
That is a Greek philosophical notion, not at all a biblical or Hebrew concept of things. The Bible would indicate that God, when he made man and woman, put them in physical bodies in a physical garden, and had they never sinned, they would have lived forever and ever in that condition. It is only because they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that that had to be interrupted, that they died.
But the Bible suggests that when Jesus returns, he's going to restore the
things that were lost. In the New Earth, in Revelation chapter 22, it says there's no more curse. There's the tree of life.
There's the river flowing from the throne of God. There are many
things reminiscent there of the Garden of Eden, and I think we're supposed to understand that God plans to get things back to how he planned them in the first place, before the fall. Before man ruined it, it was just the way God wanted it.
It was very good, and it was all physical. There was
a physical world, physical bodies, immortal bodies that could not die, no doubt were incapable of getting sick or aging or whatever. And all those things, no doubt, are the way we're supposed to understand God's purpose ultimately.
Once he's settled the sin problem in the world, he's going
to burn it off and give us another world, and try it again, but this time with no devil. He's going to be burning in the lake of fire, and no doubt with a population that's not anywhere near as naive as Adam and Eve were. Some people have wondered, you know, in the New Earth, if maybe there's going to be the chance to sin again, you know.
What if the whole Garden of Eden fiasco
repeats itself in the New Earth? Well, one thing that you can be sure of, first of all, no one will have to sin. No one's going to have a sin nature there, for one thing. There's not going to be any devil there.
He seemed to have caused the problem in the first place in the Garden of Eden. Those
are two advantages we'll have. Thirdly, we will have a knowledge of history, which Adam and Eve didn't have to go on.
We have seen, I'm sure Adam and Eve had no concept of the consequences of their
act. When you look at the world full of child molesting, and war, and horrendous crimes against humanity, all of that, none of that would have happened had they not sinned. Had they dreamed at all that their sin of eating that fruit would have brought that on, no doubt they would have had strong motivation not to do it, and maybe wouldn't have.
But we will have all that knowledge of
history to prevent us from making that kind of naive mistake. But even if, and I don't believe it will be possible to sin in the resurrection, I just don't think it's gonna be possible. But even if it were possible, it would not thrust the earth into another problem like Adam did.
And the reason
for it is this. Adam was the Lord of the earth. God gave it to him, gave him dominion over everything that he'd made.
When Adam fell, he took it all down with him. Neither you, nor I, nor any other
individual are going to be the Lord of the new earth. Jesus will be.
If it were possible for you
to sin in the new earth, I'm quite sure that the consequence would simply be that you'd go to hell and leave everything else undisturbed. The only way the whole new earth could fall into the similar disaster would be if Jesus sinned as Adam did, and that's unthinkable. He's the second Adam over a new creation.
Where Adam failed, Jesus will not. And therefore, we can be quite sure there will
not be a repeat performance of what took place in Genesis chapter 3 in any new earth. But the point is that the earth and the human bodies and the paradise of God that God put Adam and Eve in, this, if they had never sinned, would have represented his eternal plan for their existence and was interrupted only because of the introduction of sin, which suggests that when we're in a new earth without sin, I should say when God has set things back the way he wants them, it'll be in an analogous situation.
There will be a new earth. There will be sinless persons,
persons who are not capable of dying. Of course, these will be in resurrection bodies.
Now, why
that would be important to God instead of just being disembodied spirits, I can't say why that's so important to him, but it is certainly his expressed purpose. And Paul states that it's the Christian's purpose also and desire. If you look at 2nd Corinthians chapter 5, 2nd Corinthians chapter 5, Paul speaks about our bodies here as a house or a tent.
And he speaks about death as
being the dissolution or the destruction of this tent that we're living in, our bodies. At the beginning of 2nd Corinthians 5, at verse 1, he says, for we know that if our earthly house, this tent, is destroyed, that means if we die, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed with our habitation, which is from heaven.
If indeed having been clothed, we shall not be found naked. For we
who are in this tent groan, being burdened, not because we want to be unclothed, but further clothed, that mortality may be swallowed up by life. Now, this being clothed is a metaphor for being embodied in a body.
This is a tent. This is a clothing that we wear. We look forward to being
released from it.
We do look forward. We're burdened in this tent and we're looking forward
to getting out of it, but not so we can be unclothed, not so that we'd be disembodied spirits forever, but that we'd be further clothed, that we move out of a tent into a house, something more permanent, something that doesn't wear out. This is how Paul expresses the Christian hope.
Sure, we look forward
to death and what lies beyond it, but what we look forward to ultimately is not to float around disembodied in heaven, but to be further and more gloriously clothed with a new body. Let me show you what Philippians chapter 3 and verse 21 tells us about this body. Philippians 3 and verse 21 says, well, at verse 20 he says, "...our citizenship is in heaven, from which we also eagerly wait for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body, that it may be conformed to his glorious body, according to the working by which he is able even to subdue all things to himself." So Jesus will transform our lowly body into the likeness of his glorious body.
When Jesus
came out of the grave in his glorified body, his body was somewhat different than before. His friends didn't quite recognize him a lot of the times, although they'd spent many years with him previously. He could appear and disappear in a room, even if the doors were shut.
He did some
of the same things as before. He ate and he drank with them. He had physical form.
They mistook him
for a disembodied spirit at one point or twice, and he said, look, touch me, feel me, see that a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see me have. He took pains to affirm to them that he was not a spirit. He was in the same body.
Why do you think the grave was empty? If it was just the
spirit of Jesus that lived on, the body of Jesus could have stayed in the tomb and rotted. But the fact that the grave was empty is the declaration that it wasn't just a spirit. It was the body of Jesus that came back up, but different.
Physical enough to be touched and to eat food and so forth,
but different enough to appear and disappear and to be invulnerable to death or pain or sickness or aging. A miraculous body, which is his glorious body, which the Bible indicates is to be ours as well or like his. If you turn to first Corinthians 15, this whole chapter is about the resurrection of the dead.
But he says in verse thirty five. But someone will say this is an objector, apparently,
how are the dead raised up and with what body do they come? Now, if this was an honest question, I think Paul would not have answered the way he did. I think they're raising this as a challenge.
Now, how are the bodies going to rise up? I mean, let's face it, most of them have gone back to the dust. How's that going to happen? What bodies are they going to be? They're going to be the same bodies as before. You know, where are they now? What if they were buried at sea and the fishes have eaten them and every cell of the body is now in a different part of the ocean? What kind of body are these people going to come up in anyway? How are they going to be raised up? And so Paul treats this not as an honest question, just seeking information, but as a heckler, a person basically challenging on the whole, the whole legitimacy of his premise, the body will raise it all.
And he says, foolish one, what you sow is not made alive unless it
dies. And what you sow, you do not sow that body that shall be, but mere grain, perhaps weed or some other grain. But God gives it a body as he pleases and to each seed its own body.
All flesh
is not the same flesh, but there's one kind of flesh of men and other flesh of animals, another of fish and other of birds, implying that there's also another kind of resurrection body. That's different flesh altogether. There are also celestial bodies and terrestrial bodies.
That means heavenly
bodies and earthly bodies. But the glory of the celestial is one and the glory of the terrestrial is another. There is one glory of the sun, another glory of the moon and another glory of the stars, and one star differs from another star in glory.
He's basically saying there's a lot of differences
and it's not, they're not all going to be the same as it turns out. So also is the resurrection of the dead. The body is sown in corruption.
Now the word corruption in the old English,
probably in modern English too, but it's not used this way so much. When we think of corruption, we usually think of moral corruption. We think of corrupt government or corrupt, you know, landlords or corrupt this or that.
And corruption to us has a more of a moral quality that they're
immoral people. But the word corruption literally means subject to decay, that which can decay, that which can wear out and decay. So he says the body is sown in corruption.
It means that the body
that's sown or buried, the dead body, is in a state of subject to decay. But it is raised in incorruption, means it's raised in a state that is not capable of decay. Now think about the only reason you age and eventually wear out and die of old age, if you're not, if you don't die some other way, is because of the process of decay.
The Bible indicates that this process was not
present prior to the fall. It was after Adam and Eve fell that God said, well, now things are going to start getting worse. You came from the dust, you're going to go back to the dust.
You're going
to start deteriorating. And we all have known that process, though some of you are too young to have seen it very clearly in your own lives. It is said that from the day you die, the day you're born, you begin to die.
And your body, of course, until you're about 30 or so, is in a process of
metabolism where it's mostly building up, although there's still cells dying all the time. You're continually got cells that are dying. In fact, it's an interesting thing that cells replace themselves.
And someone has said, I don't know who, you know, this is the most current science, but I heard this years ago from scientific sources, that every cell in your body replaces itself every seven years. Which, if true, means that you have a whole new set of cells every seven years. Why don't you remain young? Why do you ever get old if you have all new cells? Every seven years you should never get any more decayed than a seven-year-old child.
Why is that? Because each new generation of cells
is inferior to the previous because of an aging process. There is a law that scientists call the law of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, which suggests that everything, not just you, but everything decays. Everything tends to wear out and everything's subject to decay.
But apparently in
the resurrection, it will not be so. Keep your finger at 1 Corinthians 15, because I want to continue reading in the same passage we were at. But look over at Romans 8 for a moment.
Romans
chapter 8, beginning with verse 18. Paul says, For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God.
This would be at our
glorification at the resurrection when Jesus returns, when we're revealed as what we really are, sons of God. The world doesn't, by the way, recognize us yet as sons of God. It says in 1 John 3, Beloved, now we are the sons of God, but it does not yet appear what we shall be.
But when he shall
appear, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. This is 1 John 3, oh, around verse 2 and 3, somewhere like that. So it doesn't yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he shall appear, we will be like him.
And so here he says there's a time we look forward to when we will be revealed
as the sons of God. We are already, but it hasn't been revealed yet. The world doesn't look at us and say, oh, there's a son of God right there, because they don't know that.
They can't see that,
but they will when we're glorified. But not only do we look forward to that, but the whole creation looks forward to that. Why? It says in verse 20, for the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it in hope.
Some think him who subjected it is God,
reflected in the translation I'm using, capitalizing the word him. The Greek is not capitalized. Some believe it's Adam it's referred to, but the point is against its own will, the whole creation was subjected to the same forces of decay that we are subjected to, but not forever.
It says in verse 21,
because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption or decay into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now. Not only that, but we also who have the firstfruits of the spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, namely the redemption of our body.
We've been redeemed in soul and in spirit, but our body has yet to be redeemed from
corruption. When it is, the whole creation is going to be redeemed from corruption. That is, when you rise from the dead, the whole earth is going to, as it were, rise from the dead as well.
It will be a new heaven and new earth. And there will be no forces of corruption, no forces of decay, and the body that you will receive will be custom-made to fit into a world that also can't age or decay or have thorns and thistles or germs or anything else that's a product of the fall, because as it says in Revelation 22, verse 3, there is no more curse in the new earth. Now, back to 1 Corinthians 15, as he continues to talk about the difference between our present body and the resurrection body.
We read verse 42. It says that in the resurrection of the dead,
the body is sown in corruption. It's raised in incorruption.
It is not subject to decay or aging
or other deterioration. Verse 43, it is sown, that is, the body is planted or buried in dishonor. It's raised in glory.
It is sown in dishonor. It's such a dishonorable thing to die. It's a
thing for those who are unprepared for it, but it's really dishonorable for all.
It's an embarrassing
thing to die. And that's going to change when the body is buried. It is so pitifully helpless, and yet it's going to come crashing out of there glorious, like the glorious body that Jesus had.
It says in the same verse, verse 43, it is sown in weakness. Clearly, if we die, it's because we are subject to powers greater than ourselves and forces greater than ourselves. Death is a very exhibition of weakness.
It is even said elsewhere in 1 Corinthians that Jesus
was crucified in weakness, but that's because death always is apparent weakness. But it says it'll be raised in power. So, the resurrection body will not be subject to decay.
It'll be
glorious and powerful. Further, it is sown a natural body. It is raised a spiritual body.
There's a natural body and there's a spiritual body. Now, how are we to understand this? It is sown or buried a natural body. It's raised a spiritual body.
Some would understand that to
mean that when we rise from the dead, it won't be physical, it'll be spiritual. Then how do we account for Jesus saying, touch me, feel me, see my hands, you know, I have flesh and bones. Spirits don't have that.
He described his resurrection body as not a spiritual, but a
physical body. Why does Paul say our natural body is sown in that state, but raised a spiritual body? We have to understand that Paul is here not contrasting physical with spiritual. Spiritual is not the alternative to physical in this statement.
It is the alternative to natural.
He doesn't say it's sown a physical body and raised a spiritual body as if the spiritual body is not physical. He said it is sown a natural body and spiritual therefore means supernatural.
It's the contrast of natural. It is raised a spiritual body, which means
that as spiritual dynamics that our present body does not possess, he is not denying that it is physical in many respects, just like Jesus' resurrection body was physical, but that it is not a natural body any longer. It's a supernatural body that the spiritual aspects that made Jesus' resurrection body different than his pre-resurrection body will be there with ours as well.
What all those are, I don't know, but no doubt that has something
to do with the ability to vanish and reappear, to come into rooms without opening the doors. I mean, that perhaps has something to do with the spiritual dimension of the resurrection body, but to suggest that it is raised a spiritual body means it is not physical is to go against the whole revelation of Scripture on the subject, and Paul doesn't state it that way. He doesn't contrast spiritual with physical.
He contrasts it with natural. Therefore, spiritual
doesn't mean immaterial. It means supernatural.
Yes, that's possible. That's possible. Could
it be that natural suggests our fallen nature, our nature as we have always known it, to be Adamic, but it is raised having a spiritual nature that is no carnality in the sense that we now know it in our nature? Very possibly.
That's a good possibility. I'm not certain
that that's correct, but it's a good suggestion. So here we have the basic teaching on the resurrection body.
I have critiqued soul sleep,
and in the process of critiquing soul sleep, I have said that one of their arguments would be why resurrect if you're already, you know, if you're really already in heaven, then why resurrect? And since the Bible does talk about resurrection, there must be no life between the grave, that is, between burial and resurrection. There must be a sleep or unconscious. I have not really shown you any scriptures to show that soul sleep is really wrong.
I've only
critiqued their arguments and said that they're not valid arguments to suggest they're right. There is, I think, in the scripture much to suggest that the spirit of a man lives after death prior to the resurrection. We're talking now about what is usually referred to as the intermediate state.
Intermediate between this life and the resurrection life. Intermediate
between natural body and spiritual body. Between those two, you're in no body.
You are somewhere
else. Now, James tells us in James chapter 2 that the, in verse 26, that the body without the spirit is dead. Alright? He's making a different point than that, but he uses this delicacy.
He says, for as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also. But it's an interesting thing. James assumes this to be an axiom.
A dead body is one where
the spirit is no longer there. The body is without the spirit. Of course, the word spirit penuma there could be translated breath, so that some who would be critical of this argument would say he's simply saying a body without breath is dead.
Well, maybe. Not always.
A person may stop breathing for a while and not be really dead yet.
But I don't want to
be too much of a nitpicker about this. I will go with the traditional translation. The body without a spirit is dead, and I think it agrees well with the other data of scripture, including a story that Jesus told, which is in Luke 16, and the only story that Jesus told that would reflect on the question of whether people are alive after they die or not, and before the resurrection.
In the intermediate stage between death and resurrection, in Luke chapter
16, beginning at the 19th verse and to the end of the chapter, there's a fairly long story. Some call it a parable. Jesus doesn't call it a parable, so the question of whether it's a parable or not perhaps should be discussed.
But let's read it first. Luke 16, 19, Jesus
said there was a certain rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen and fared sumptuously every day. But there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, full of sores, who was laid at his gate, desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man's table.
Moreover, the dogs came and licked his sores. So it was that the beggar died and
was carried by the angels to Abraham's bosom. The rich man also died and was buried.
And
being in torment in Hades, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham afar off and Lazarus in his bosom. Then he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me and send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am tormented in this flame. But Abraham said, Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things and likewise Lazarus' evil things.
But now he is comforted and you are tormented.
And besides all this between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, so that those who want to pass from here to you cannot, nor can those from there pass to us. Then the rich man said, I beg you therefore, Father, that you would send him to my father's house, for I have five brothers, that he may testify to them, lest they also come to this place of torment.
Abraham said to him, They have Moses and the prophets, let them hear them. And he said, No, Father Abraham, but if one goes to them from the dead, they will repent. But Abraham said to him, If they will not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rise from the dead.
A very powerful and poignant story. First of all, it suggests
that those who believe that signs and wonders will produce repentance, do not have Jesus agreeing with them. He said, No, if the word of God and the conviction of its truth doesn't change people, seeing signs and wonders, even a man rising from the dead won't change them.
And Jesus, of course, might have even been referring to the fact that he would rise from the dead and this itself would not result in conversion of all the Jews. But the point here is that these two guys died. Now that we are talking about the intermediate state here rather than the state after the resurrection is very clear.
See any evidence that we're
not talking about the resurrection here? See, after the resurrection, people are thrown in the lake of fire and go to be with the Lord in the new earth. But what is what's the evidence that this is what we're looking at here? The guy still has five brothers who haven't died yet. The resurrection has not happened yet.
Jesus has not come back and raised all
the dead. He still has five brothers who have not lived out their natural life yet. And he's concerned that they might die unprepared and find him in that in that place and find themselves there.
This is a very powerful story, if it's true. Because it means that
every reckless sinner that takes no heed to his soul on a daily basis may have many friends of his who are in hell saying, God, just if I could go back and warn him about this place. But they go heedlessly on their way, totally oblivious to the fact that those who've gone before them, maybe their parents, grandparents, friends who've been killed in accidents or died of drug overdoses or whatever, or even of old age, that they're down there wishing against all hope that they could warn these reckless souls.
But they have one chance.
They have the scriptures. If they'll listen to those, good for them.
If they won't, they
don't really get anything else. That's their only chance. But the point I want to make is, is this a true representation of the intermediate state? Now you might say, of course, because Jesus said it.
He doesn't lie. But he does tell
parables. And his parables are not necessarily case histories.
When Jesus said a sower went
out to sow or a fisherman lowered a net or a woman put leaven in a lump of meal, he wasn't talking about, probably, actual individuals. He was making up stories to illustrate points. It is not generally understood that the parables of Jesus were based on true events, although they were very true-to-life events.
They were events that could happen and did happen many,
many times, but no particular case was in view. Just an idea was in view. Some feel that this is such a case, that this is a parable also, and therefore that it does not really give us a true picture of what it's like on the other side of the grave.
Now, on the point of whether it's a parable or not, we're not told that it is or that it isn't, all right? And many of Jesus' parables begin by just saying a certain man went out to sow or whatever, and begin a bit like this. There are, there's at least one thing, though, that has made, I think, most Christians throughout history believe this is not a parable but an actual case, and that is that a man's name is given, Lazarus, as if he were a historical person with a real name. There is no other parable among those of Jesus where any of the persons, any of the characters were given a name.
It was always a certain person. A
certain man had two sons. A certain woman did this.
A certain man did that. A certain
judge. A certain city.
And there was never any specificity in the parables because they
were generic. But this story says there was a rich man who, out of mercy, is not named and identified, but the good man is, his name is given. This guy's name was Lazarus.
Now,
that in itself would seem to tip the scales in favor of it being a true story, not a parable, but even if we concluded that it was a parable, and some Christians have, some Christians believe it is a parable, yet that does not eliminate it from consideration as a true account of what happens to people after they die because even if it is a parable, one thing about all parables is they are true to life. If you have a story where trees talk and men fly and things like that, that's not a parable. That's not true life.
That's what you call
a fable. Aesop's fables are that way. The trees and the animals talk.
That's why they're
called fables. There's a fable in the Bible, in the book of Judges, chapter 9, about the trees going out to seek a king for themselves and they invite certain other trees to be their king and so forth. That's a fable, when a story, to make a point, is couched in unrealistic imagery.
But parables are, by their very definition, stories that are
very much like what really happens. In fact, they are very generic in the sense that they happen all the time. All the things that Jesus told in parable are events that really do happen all the time.
He just picked the generic fact of it out to illustrate some point he
wanted to make, but he never told anything that was fantastic or sensational or speculative or unrealistic in his parables. So even if we would allow that Jesus is here using a parable to make some point, what is the whole point? What is the point of the story? I mean, what could be clearer? The entire story is made up of this conversation between two men who are dead in their afterlife. If it is even a parable, we would have to say it is at least true to life.
And if it were not, then Jesus is perpetrating, without explaining
that this is what he's doing, he's perpetrating a wrong notion of what takes place after the grave. Certainly his listeners, whether they took it as a parable or a true story, would understand Jesus to be saying that after you die, you're either going to be tormented in flames like this guy, or you're going to be in a place relatively comfortable and secure and conscious of it. So I don't really see any way around any approach to this story of Lazarus the rich man that would enable one to say this is very much unlike the way it really is.
And in fact, when people die, they're unconscious. I don't see how that
could really work out in giving any kind of consideration to that passage. If you look at Revelation chapter 6, John is caught up into heaven.
And I admit, in
fact, I'm the first to admit, that much in Revelation is symbolic. And many times the visions symbolize something. But even so, the question has got to be, they must mean something.
What do they mean? And here we have in verse 9, Revelation 6, 9, it says,
when he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar, this would be in heaven, the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the testimony they held. They cried out with a loud voice saying, how long, O Lord, holy and true, until you judge and avenge our blood upon those who dwell on the earth. Now, is this after the resurrection or before? The evidence is right there in the passage.
Vengeance has not yet come. They're
waiting for it. How much longer? Jesus has not returned to the earth yet.
Jesus has not
raised the dead yet. Besides, it's not resurrection bodies he sees. It's souls of those who are beheaded.
It's disembodied souls. They are in heaven. They're in communication with
God.
Now, even if the vision is somewhat symbolic, it certainly conveys the idea that those
who have died are with the Lord and are anticipating the resurrection, anticipating the end when God will set everything right. And of course, consequently, he'll raise the dead. Likewise, in Revelation chapter 20, we see the same guys.
Revelation 20 in verse 4, John says,
and I saw thrones and they that sat on them and judgment was committed to them. Then I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded for the witness of Jesus and for the word of God, who had not worshiped the beast or his image and had not received his mark on their foreheads or on their hands. And they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years.
Now, the question is, is this on earth or in heaven? Of course, it depends on how you view the millennium, because this is the chapter about that. We'll talk about that another time in another context. But let me say this.
If it is on earth after the second coming of
Christ, why are these souls not in their resurrection bodies? The teaching of scripture is that when Jesus returns, he will raise the dead. Why does John see during this thousand year period disembodied souls of martyrs, just like he saw in chapter 6? To me, the evidence would point to this being prior to the resurrection, prior to the second coming of Christ. Whatever it may mean, the people he sees are in heaven, because after the resurrection you won't see the souls of these people.
You'll see the people themselves. In the book of
Revelation, the souls of the martyrs repeatedly appear in heaven, and that's where they are until the resurrection, at least. Now, let's turn over to a couple of very well-known passages often quoted, or actually often misquoted, in favor of the point I'm making.
They can
be misquoted in favor of the point, or they can be correctly quoted in favor of the same point. But in 2 Corinthians 5, where we were a little earlier to make a point about if this tent is dissolved, we don't want to be uncultivated, we have a house we're looking forward to being in, our resurrection body. As the discussion continues, 2 Corinthians 5, 6 through 8, Paul says, So we are always confident, knowing that while we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight.
We are
confident, yes, well-pleased rather, to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord. Now, I say this is sometimes misquoted. Sometimes people say, Paul said to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.
Well, he didn't say it quite in those words,
but he certainly implied it here. When we are in the body, we're absent from the Lord. We're eager to be absent from the body and present with the Lord.
Certainly the implication
is when we're no longer in this body, where we've gone, if we're Christians, is to be with the Lord. And that agrees with, I think, what we've seen also in other passages just in the past few minutes. If you look at Philippians again, this time chapter 1, Paul languishing in prison and quite uncomfortable, actually says he'd be a lot better off in some respects if he died.
And he kind of liked that, as a matter of fact, he said. In Philippians
1, 21 through 24, Paul said, For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. It's an improved situation over this one.
If I die, things improve. To die is gain. But Paul says
if I live on in the flesh, that's in this body, this will mean fruit for my labor.
Yet
what I shall choose I cannot tell, for I am hard pressed between the two, having a desire to depart and to be with Christ, which is far better. Nevertheless, to remain in the flesh is more needful for you. And therefore he felt he would not be released quite this soon.
But notice what he says. I'm hard pressed. In this body, it's laborious.
We've grown in
this body. We're looking forward to the redemption of our bodies. But he says, At least I'd like to depart from this body and go be with Christ.
Now if Paul didn't believe that death would
issue him into the presence of Christ, then this hope was a vain hope. He obviously speaks as if that's what he expects would happen. If he left this body, he'd go to be with the Lord, go to be with Christ.
That agrees with Revelation, that agrees with Jesus' statements,
and so forth. Now you might say, Wait a minute, Jesus didn't say Lazarus went to be with the Lord, it says he went to be with Abraham. Well, I'll tell you what I understand and what most evangelicals I think understand about that point.
And that is that Jesus described
an actual case of a man who, in the past tense, this had already happened in Jesus' time, therefore it happened prior to the cross. And saints who died in the Old Testament, who of course Jesus had not yet come and made a new and living way into the Holy of Holies. And while the Old Tabernacle was still standing, the way into the Holy of Holies was not yet made manifest, it says in Hebrews.
Therefore, people could not, even if they died in faith
and saved, they couldn't go directly into the presence of God. There had to be an offering of the blood of Jesus to make that way open. So they apparently went somewhere else.
Somewhere
that was not tormented in flames, but somewhere else other than heaven. Most evangelicals are told, and they could be wrong, but we're just working on the little data we have, that before Jesus died and rose again, throughout the whole Old Testament period, if a person died in faith, Abraham's a good example, or David or many others. If a person died in faith, they were saved.
They didn't go into the flames like the rich man did, but they
didn't go right into the presence of the Lord either until Jesus could die and resurrect and make that way open. Instead, they went somewhere else. Abraham's bosom, it's called in the parable, the place where Abraham went, in other words.
Where men died, who died in
faith, they went to this place. Jesus probably made reference to that place when he said to the thief on the cross, today you will be with me in paradise. Paradise apparently was a reference to this same place that was called Abraham's bosom, because Jesus had to go there himself, and so did apparently the thief on the cross.
But when Jesus rose from
the dead, according to Ephesians chapter 4, he led a host of captives, apparently out of their captivity, and went up to heaven, and he opened heaven for the saints so that the Bible would indicate that now, since the cross, if a Christian dies, they don't have to go to this holding cell, or holding tank, or whatever it is, that they can go directly into the presence of Christ by the new and living way which he has consecrated for us by his blood. That does not eliminate the need for the resurrection. If we were to live forever in heaven, as Christian songs and traditions have said is going to be the case, then we wouldn't need a body.
Heaven is a spiritual place. The angels are spirits,
God is a spirit, they live in heaven, have lived there forever. We could live there forever without bodies if that was where we were going to live, but the Bible indicates that we're only going to be in heaven until Jesus leaves there.
And when he leaves there, he's coming
here. And when he comes here, he's going to bring those with him who have fallen asleep in Jesus. Why? To reunite them with their bodies, and to inhabit a new earth.
So the
idea that we're going to spend eternity in heaven is not exactly biblical, it's very traditional. If you die today, you and you're a Christian, you go to heaven, and you will be there until Jesus leaves there. And you'll come with him when he comes, and there will be a general resurrection of your body and those of others, and we'll live with him in a new Jerusalem and a new earth if we are to credit revelation with any sense of accuracy or literalness.
In 1 Thessalonians 4, we have this very language from Paul. 1 Thessalonians
4.14, Paul says, For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with him those who sleep, or those who have died, in Jesus. So the Christians who have died, what's their future? Well, they're in heaven with Jesus right now, but when Jesus comes, he'll bring them with him.
This very statement suggests that they're in heaven
now. How can he bring them with him if they're not with him already? They must be with him prior to him bringing them back here. So their spirits are with the Lord.
When Jesus comes,
the Bible teaches in many places and many ways. Some of these we'll study further under our eschatology series, because there are many particulars about the resurrection of the dead that are the debatable points, and we don't want to bring those up in this fundamental foundational lecture. But the body will rise by a reunion of the spirit of the believer who has been in heaven with Jesus, awaiting the resurrection since they've died.
He brings
them back and the spirit reunites with the body, which takes on a supernatural nature at that time, a glorified state, incorruptible. Why do they return on horseback if they don't have bodies yet? It's a good question. Let me just say this.
My approach to Revelation
sees that as a very symbolic vision for one thing. I, for instance, don't believe there are stables full of horses in heaven. We love horses.
There may be some on the new
earth, but I don't think there are horses of flesh and blood in heaven, to tell you the truth. And for us to take an extremely literal approach to this, which many people feel is the right thing to do, we would have to postulate that there are physical horses to be ridden by physical people. Jesus is a physical person in his resurrection body, and therefore presumably he'd ride a physical horse, if he has really come in on a horse.
By the way, the idea that Jesus is going to come back on a white horse is taken only from that one verse. There's no other place in the Bible that suggests his coming will be characterized by this. My understanding, defective as it may be, is that that is a picture of the militancy of Christ and the Church, conquering with the sword that proceeds out of his mouth.
I am doubtful that it is even a reference to the second coming of Christ. In my understanding, the movement is not vertical there, but horizontal. They go through and smite the nations with the sword that proceeds out of his mouth.
True, he sees heaven open and he sees it there,
which might give the impression that this horse is coming out of heaven. But see, John frequently sees heaven open, and when he sees heaven open, he sees some vision transpiring before him, which symbolizes some reality. It's like the curtains open on the screen and he watches the picture.
So to say, I saw heaven open and I saw this guy on a white
horse, we might picture it as the clouds part and out comes the horse out of heaven and comes down to earth. Not necessarily. Throughout the book of Revelation, he's continually seen the heaven opened, and when he does, he sees this or that drama taking place before him, which to my mind, and to the minds of many interpreters, but I don't necessarily follow them, it's just the way I understand the book, these dramas that he sees depict earthly realities, but he's kind of seeing them in the sky, as it were, in the heavens.
So I guess, if we
would take the view that Jesus and the church would come back on literal white horses, that is, of flesh and blood, we have to suggest that heaven has a great number of these horses in stables somewhere right now in the spiritual realm, and that the bodies that would ride them back would be physical bodies, perhaps resurrected people. I don't really, I don't know anyone of any eschatological position that holds that view, though, that holds the view that we'll come back on physical horses, but maybe there are some, I guess maybe it's possible that the dispensationalists may believe that view, I'm not sure. But I've never heard anyone explain where these horses are being bred at the moment, you know.
There's no
marriage in heaven, so the angels don't breed, but maybe they're breeding horses up there. They're stock handlers. It is not impossible, it's not impossible.
Stranger things have
turned out to be true, but I must say that's not how I personally envisage the situation or understand that vision in Revelation. But there are a lot of different ways of understanding it, and mine may be the wrong one. Even though the clock says it's time to quit, we started a few minutes late, so I want to take the remaining minutes that are available on the tape to just make a point or two that have concerned Christians when the subject of the resurrection is discussed.
One is, of course, and I even raised it earlier but didn't answer
it, what about people who's, well, what about people who are cremated? I didn't raise the issue of cremation, but there's a number of people who wonder whether it's unethical for a Christian to be cremated. Now, there's two issues here that concern Christians about it. One has bothered some in that if you destroy the body, will this not in some way inhibit the resurrection? The other issue is that Paul said in 1 Corinthians chapter 6 that whoever destroys the temple of God, God will destroy, and that a Christian is the temple of God, his body is the temple of God, and therefore to destroy it through cremation is to do something that will bring God's judgment upon you.
In response to that particular
point, I would say your body is not the temple of God after you've left. God doesn't continue to reside in the dead body after your spirit's gone. Your body is temporarily a temple of God, a tabernacle as it were, a tent, a temporary place for God to dwell while you're there.
But once you're gone, the Holy Spirit doesn't just stay in your body and go to the grave and rot there. The Holy Spirit's residence there is only so long as yours is there. Once the body is dead, it's a body without a spirit, and therefore to destroy a dead body by burning it, for example, is not to destroy that which is the temple of God.
It may destroy a body
that at one time housed the spirit of God, but not at the point after death where it's burned. So I personally would not see that scripture as forbidding cremation. On the other point of whether cremating the body is working against the interest of the resurrection, of course one only needs to pause for a few moments and think rationally and realize that whether a person's cremated or not, within a very short time after death, it's all the same.
The body goes back to ashes and back to dust in only a very short number
of weeks after death. So if the total decomposition of the body was going to somehow prevent God from raising it from the dead, then the only hope of resurrection would be for those who died within a few weeks prior to the second coming of Christ. All others are hopeless.
But since the Bible indicates that God formed the first human bodies from dust in the first place, I think we're to understand that he'll have no difficulty reconstructing bodies out of dust also. Whether he'll use all the same atoms and same molecules of dust as once belonged to that body, we're not told. But I don't think God will have a problem with it.
While you're
alive, the hairs of your head are numbered. When you're dead, I have no doubt that God can keep track of all the atoms and molecules. And if they happen to be in all the seas in the world, in the bellies of fishes that have died and been eaten by other fishes and died and been eaten by other fishes, then God knows where they are.
He's not limited in his knowledge
or in his power, I have no doubt. If being cremated or being physically burned would inhibit people from participating in the resurrection, then all those Christians who were burned at the stake simply are out of luck. Their faithfulness to God has not really won them the resurrection after all, because they're now burned up and can't be resurrected.
Or
for that matter, Christians who've simply died accidentally in houses that burned down or whatever. Many bodies are burned. In fact, that's the means of death in many cases, but to burn a body that's already dead can hardly be worse, can hardly be bode worse for the person in terms of their participation in the resurrection.
This is a concern to some
Christians, maybe not to you, and I don't want to linger on it too much, but as far as the ethics of it, I don't think the Bible would forbid cremation. As far as the logistics of it, I don't think it in any way inhibits resurrection from the dead. God is quite capable of doing whatever he needs to do to get you raised from the dead.
I would say this, that
when Jesus raised from the dead, it was the same body, presumably with most of the same atoms that were in his body before he died, that rose from the dead. So I think it's very probable that God will find those atoms again, or those molecules, and put them back together into you, a new you. There are interesting stories about, and this really raises the question of how difficult this is going to be for God, although nothing is difficult for him, how difficult it would be for you and me.
There are, in certain graveyards,
instances known where tree roots, for instance an apple tree, has put its root right through a coffin in a grave, and right through the chest of a corpse, and actual, taken nutrients out of the dead body into the tree, and into the apples. And other people eat the apples, so that the atoms that were in the dead body became part of the tree, and became part of the apples, and became part of somebody else who ate them, who later died. I don't know if God is going to have to make duplicate copies of some of the atoms, or what, but it's not really a problem.
I don't think, see there's only, if the laws of thermodynamics
are correct, there's only one stable amount of atoms. There's not any increase or any decrease, so there's rearrangements of atoms, but all the atoms in your body will never, you know, they'll continue to exist until they're reorganized and so forth. Anyway, that's almost moving from the sublime to the silly, but there are all kinds of things people wonder about this.
The point is, of course, there is a resurrection, there is a paradise
that God has made man to live in. We will be resurrected to live in it, in bodies that cannot die, cannot become sick, cannot age, cannot corrupt, and are glorious and powerful. And in that resurrection, the Bible would indicate it's worth the loss of all things in this world, including our earthly life, to obtain it.
And that is the hope of the believer
that motivates him to endure all things, even torture and death, if necessary, in order to obtain that resurrection. And thus we run out of time for this subject. Next time we will talk about eternal judgment, and I believe in one session we will manage to finish up this entire series.
So, you're dismissed.

Series by Steve Gregg

1 Thessalonians
1 Thessalonians
In this three-part series from Steve Gregg, he provides an in-depth analysis of 1 Thessalonians, touching on topics such as sexual purity, eschatology
Esther
Esther
In this two-part series, Steve Gregg teaches through the book of Esther, discussing its historical significance and the story of Queen Esther's braver
Numbers
Numbers
Steve Gregg's series on the book of Numbers delves into its themes of leadership, rituals, faith, and guidance, aiming to uncover timeless lessons and
Obadiah
Obadiah
Steve Gregg provides a thorough examination of the book of Obadiah, exploring the conflict between Israel and Edom and how it relates to divine judgem
The Tabernacle
The Tabernacle
"The Tabernacle" is a comprehensive ten-part series that explores the symbolism and significance of the garments worn by priests, the construction and
Strategies for Unity
Strategies for Unity
"Strategies for Unity" is a 4-part series discussing the importance of Christian unity, overcoming division, promoting positive relationships, and pri
1 Samuel
1 Samuel
In this 15-part series, Steve Gregg teaches verse by verse through the biblical book of 1 Samuel, examining the story of David's journey to becoming k
2 Peter
2 Peter
This series features Steve Gregg teaching verse by verse through the book of 2 Peter, exploring topics such as false prophets, the importance of godli
Hosea
Hosea
In Steve Gregg's 3-part series on Hosea, he explores the prophetic messages of restored Israel and the coming Messiah, emphasizing themes of repentanc
Titus
Titus
In this four-part series from Steve Gregg, listeners are taken on an insightful journey through the book of Titus, exploring issues such as good works
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