1 Corinthians 15 - Resurrection bodies (season six, episode five)

Greetings and welcome to the Faith Chapel Podcast. My name is Jason and I am

the pastor of Faith Chapel.

In the podcast, we are continuing our resurrection series as we look at the

text of 1 Corinthians 15 to glean information about the reliability of the resurrection

of Jesus and what that means for us now and in the future.

In this episode, we look at how Paul describes the future resurrection in relation

to what he experienced in his day,

like a seed and the transformation that takes place there, as well as the heavenly

bodies that have different degrees of glory.

We'll see how he uses these two examples to describe our future resurrection bodies.

Thanks for joining us today.

This week, I had the opportunity to sit at a pastor's breakfast and to hear

the testimony of a graduate of Place of Grace.

And as we're going through the series on 1 Corinthians 15,

my focus really when I'm looking at things is to see what I'm learning and discussing

in other people's story.

And in this woman's story, I saw resurrection on three different occasions.

It's a fascinating, beautiful story of how God can call people into a relationship with him.

And for this woman, it started with her literal death.

She overdosed on drugs and had to be brought back to life.

So obviously that is something where your heart stops, where you need to be resuscitated.

That, to me, screams out like Lazarus as a resurrection.

And so that's where her journey began into her recovery and she had a pretty

good stretch of about two and a half years, she said,

where she was sober, where she was not partaking in these substances.

But inevitably life caught back up with

her and she came to a place where she

started using meth again And

that leads us to the second place where I saw resurrection in her story She

was driving with a needle that she thought was meth in her backseat She was

pulled over by a police officer in Huntington County And this police officer,

she was very open and honest with him She was like, yeah, I have drugs in my

backseat She was done trying to pretend, she was done hiding She was just getting

it out there And so that cop could have done multiple things to her,

could have taken her to jail, booked her, charged her, and done all of that to her.

But instead, he decided to let her go.

And he said, I really want to encourage you to check yourself into a detox place,

a place where you can come off these drugs with medically trained personnel

and then get your life in order.

And again, I saw a resurrection. Someone who was destined to go to jail,

someone who had enough evidence against her to be in a jail cell for a lengthy period of time.

That next Monday morning, just a couple of days later, she was checking herself into a detox place.

Change from one trajectory to another.

And even more astonishing in that particular instance is when they examined

the drugs, they found that it was not meth, but it was fentanyl,

which would have taken her life.

And so again, she was brought back from the dead.

She said that she was going to take that when she got back to Bluffton.

She was going to inject herself with it, and it would have been her death sentence.

And she saw in that moment for the first time, God's grace.

She saw how God was calling her into a relationship with her through that interaction

with the police officer.

Lastly, after she went through the detox program, she enrolled in Place of Grace.

And at this woman's graduation, every single staff member pointed to a time

in her stay at Place of Grace where things changed.

Where a light bulb seemed to go on and where she started to get it.

So for about six months, she said she was fighting against the people that were

there, thinking that they were just

doing what they wanted to do and not necessarily what was best for her.

And so she kept pushing back.

She kept fighting. And this woman has a very strong personality.

She came to a point, though, where she realized these people are actually trying to help me.

These people that I am pushing against, that I am at odds with them at whatever

they say, these people really care about me.

And these people really want what's best for me. And so she stopped pushing against these people.

And she started to trust the workers at Place of Grace.

To the point where now she is not just a graduate of Place of Grace.

She is the house manager of one of their buildings, and she is able to walk

alongside women who she was in their shoes 15 months ago and say,

I know what you're thinking.

I know you think these people are against you, but they're really doing what's best for you.

And so in these three instances, whether it was like Lazarus and using Narcan

to bring her back to life, or whether it was the cop saying,

hey, I'm going to not press charges against you.

I highly encourage you to check yourself into a detox program.

And she went from sure jail time to sober living.

And then in the moment where she realized that the people at Place of Grace

were for her and not just doing things at their own whimsy tour.

Transformed her into being the house manager and is able to influence people

who are where she was 15 months ago.

I see resurrection after resurrection after resurrection in her life.

And it is a beautiful, beautiful thing.

But where we ended in 1 Corinthians 15

last week is Paul saying that these three instances in her life do not matter

if they just end in the grave.

If that's the end of it, these three instances where we can see hope,

where we can see vitality, where we can see God moving and working in her life

are meaningless if that's the end.

But Paul knows that's not the end.

And he knows that these three instances are filled with hope,

are filled with God's resurrection power.

And it all has to do with Jesus walking out of the grave on Easter morning.

And as we get into our scripture lesson today, Paul has ended his section on

his defense of the resurrection.

Now he's moving. He's going to transition into a time where he's going to talk

about what he knows. And it's not that great of knowledge that he knows.

Like it's not a wealth of knowledge.

He's going to say, this is what we know of the resurrection.

And it's not some light bulb that goes on.

Like it's stuff we've already discussed and covered, but he goes into more depth into them.

But what does our resurrection look like?

And so he begins in verse 35 of chapter 15.

But before I read that, let me pray.

Gracious Heavenly Father, we come before you and we exalt your resurrection

in our lives and in the lives of this graduate of place of grace.

And we pray, Father, that you will use your word to light our path so that we can follow you.

Jesus, I pray for this in your name. Amen.

1 Corinthians chapter 15, starting in verse 35.

1 Corinthians 15 · chapter mention

Paul writes, but someone may ask, how will the dead be raised?

What kind of bodies will they have?

So he begins his argumentation towards what the resurrected bodies of believers

will look like when Jesus returns by asking this question.

And this is a rhetorical device that Paul uses and other ancient writers use.

They are making up these hypothetical arguments that other people might bring

to them in defense of, in this case, the resurrection of the dead.

And I first wanna say that I really love questions.

Questions are so important to our journey in faith.

Many of you may have heard Jason Wyatt say, Jason, I have a question for you.

And when we sang the song, his question was, where did God come from?

That is such a good question.

And I want to encourage people to ask questions.

I would rather have 10 people in a church who are asking questions than 200

people who are just nodding their heads.

Because to me, questions mean you want to learn.

You are curious and you're not satisfied with the knowledge that you have.

And I am 100% convinced that God is able to answer these questions.

Through his word and through the people that he has put in our lives,

we have the ability to answer these questions as best as we can.

For Wyatt, his question is so good,

but it's a very weak answer that we have, in my opinion, because it's hard for

us, especially if you're three years old, to be able to understand God never started existing.

He's just always existed.

We live in time and space. God lives outside of time and space.

And there's never been a moment where God has not existed.

And that's hard for a three-year-old. That's hard for us to really grasp and understand.

But it's true. And it's what scripture tells us.

He is outside of time and space. And therefore, he does not have a beginning

like you and I have a beginning.

And the questions that Paul raises here, I would say are good questions.

But Paul is going to take them in a different direction.

And so I just wanted to talk about how important questions are before we get into that.

Because there are some questions that we can ask that are very leading.

Take, for instance, Jesus in his last week when the Pharisees come up to him

and say, is it lawful for us to pay taxes to Caesar? That's a trap.

They are clearly trying to get him to say something that they can take him to

Pilate and have him punished somehow, some way.

Or the Sadducees who came up after Jesus answered, give to Caesar what is Caesar's,

give to God what is God's.

The Sadducees come up and they say, all right, so they bring forth this scenario.

A woman has seven husbands.

Each of her husbands has perished and she has married the brother of that husband

up until the seventh one.

She has no children to tie her to any of these brothers.

And so they pose this question, whose wife will she be in the resurrection?

For she had all seven of them and Jesus sees through their hypocrisy.

He sees them trying to trap him. And so Paul is using these questions as a trap.

He sees people who are antagonistic towards him, asking these,

trying to trip him up in his answer.

And that's why he answers the way he does. Not because he doesn't like questions,

but because he's using this make-believe scenario as someone who is trapping him.

And so I hope that makes sense as we go forward into verse 36,

where he writes, What a foolish question.

When you put a seed into the ground, it doesn't grow into a plant unless it dies first.

And what you put in the ground is not the plant that will grow,

but only a bare seed of wheat or whatever you are planting.

Then God gives it the new body he wants it to have.

A different plant grows from each kind of seed.

And so he says, okay, if that's your trap question, I'm going to give you a different scenario.

What about a seed? This is an agricultural area.

Everyone knew about seeds. And so you have a seed in your hand and you say,

is this, when you put this in the ground, is this just going to grow and grow and grow?

And the answer is no. It's not just going to get as a bigger seed.

What it's going to do is it's going to produce a stalk. It's going to produce

leaves. If it is wheat, it's going to produce a head of wheat.

This is what the plant does. But what you are sowing, what you are putting in

the ground is not the plant.

You are putting in the seed and it's not going to produce what it's supposed

to produce unless it becomes something different, unless it dies to itself.

And Paul is going to use this later to declare peace.

That's what happens to us when we return to dust and ashes, we will be raised to life again.

And he's going to use this analogy in that way. But first, he talks more about changing bodies.

Verse 39.

Similarly, there are different kinds of flesh, one kind for humans,

another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish.

There are also bodies in the heavens and bodies on the earth.

The glory of the heavenly bodies is different from the glory of the earthly bodies.

The sun has one kind of glory, while the moon and stars each have another kind.

And even the stars differ from each other in their glory.

And so he says, all right, these are different bodies.

You can look at reptiles, you can look at human beings, and you can see that

God creates different bodies.

In nature, God produces these different bodies.

And so whether it's fish with scales, or whether it's mammals that breathe through

lungs, we have these different bodies.

And God is capable and able to make different bodies.

Again, he's leading to the point that saying that our resurrection bodies are

going to be the same is nonsense because God can create new things.

God has already created marvelous bodies that we can just experience on this planet.

But then there are also bodies that we can see in the sky.

And so the sun has one type of body. And through science, we understand more

and more that the sun is a burning ball of gas that provides us with heat,

that provides us with so many good things.

But we look up there and we can see the moon. And sometimes we can take a piece

of paper outside and read because of the light that's coming from the moon.

And we can read like we would read with the sun outside.

But there's definitely a different

glory. We can stare at the moon that's reflecting the sun's light.

We should not stare at the sun because it will do permanent damage to our eyes.

These are different bodies that have different glories.

And also the stars, some are brighter, some are dimmer.

This is what God has created. Different glories for different bodies.

One interpreter also made mention of how it is on earth, where my family and

I, we went to Pokagon a few years ago and we stood at the highest point of Pokagon.

And we could see a lot of marvelously beautiful things there.

Trees and canopy, we could see a long distance away. It was really, really a nice sight.

But then we went down to the Smoky Mountains. It is a completely different sight down there.

It is more majestic. It is better of a view, in my opinion.

And so we have the highest point in really flat Indiana compared to a mountain range.

But even if you take the mountain range in the Smoky Mountains and compare it

to the Rocky Mountains, I haven't been out there, but I've been told it is way,

way better to see the Rocky Mountains than the Smoky Mountains.

And so we have these things that have different glories all around us.

We have the seven pillars that are near Peru, Indiana, about 45 minutes away.

And they are cool to see, but they have no comparison to the Grand Canyon.

It is not even close. And so we have these different natural features that have

different glorious sights to them.

And that's what Paul is trying to drive home here to the Corinthians.

This, it should be no trip for you.

This should not trip you up to understand that God creates different bodies

and that different bodies have different glories because you're experiencing this in nature.

You experience this here on earth.

And so he piles all of this information before them and he ends this section

by saying verses 42 and 43.

It is the same way with the resurrection of the dead.

Our earthly bodies are planted in the ground when we die, but they will be raised to live forever.

Our bodies are buried in brokenness, but they will be raised in glory.

They are buried in weakness, but they will be raised in strength.

So Paul is, again, going back to his analogy of the seed.

When we return to dust and ashes, that does not limit what God can do with our bodies.

It does not limit what God can do, because just look at this seed.

Yes, those bodies are corruptible. They are going to wear down,

but that doesn't mean God can't use those as a seed for the future.

And so he's talking here about how similar our future bodies will be to our current bodies.

There is going to be some similarity. And we can see this in the story of Jesus.

Although it was hidden for a while to the people on the road to Emmaus,

they eventually had their eyes open to see that it was Jesus.

And when Jesus entered into that locked room with the disciples,

they weren't scared that it wasn't Jesus. They were scared that it was a ghost

and not a physical bodied Jesus.

So it's going to have some similarities, but it's going to be so much better.

It's going to be so much better. They will be raised in glory.

They will be raised in strength.

They will be raised to live forever.

This is what the resurrection body will be like. It will be similar to what

we currently have. It will be a physical body.

But it will be so much better because it will not succumb to cancer.

It will not succumb to sinus infections. It will not succumb to broken bones.

It will not be subjected to the things that our bodies are now subjected to.

It will be much better. It will be glorious.

And so I go back to Paul's point from last week.

When we experience resurrection, When we see God working and moving in people's

lives, when we see people come to faith in Jesus Christ,

when we see people make substantial changes in their life to God for him and his purposes.

It is so good to see, not because we're applauding just what human beings can

do, but we know that the grave is not the end.

And we know that those who believe in Jesus will live forever with him.

That's why we celebrate these resurrections when people come back to life,

when people have a turnaround in their life.

We celebrate them because of what it leads to, a glorious, glorious day that has no end.

And as we approach the resurrection of Jesus, as we approach Easter Sunday,

please keep in mind that it's not just about one day on a calendar. It's about our forever.

That's what Jesus signifies. by defeating death for us. Let's pray.

Gracious Heavenly Father, we come before you today and we give you thanks.

Thank you that we have the ability to see you at work.

Thank you, Father, for the sacrifices of following you being worth it because

of being with you in eternity.

And thank you, Father, for your word, which points to this end today.

Father, I pray that we can get excited about Easter.

And I pray, Father, that it will be a joyous celebration that we recognize and

realize it's not just Jesus' resurrection we are celebrating.

Because of your gift to us, it is our own. Jesus, I pray this in your name. Amen.

Thank you again for joining us in our discussion of Paul's description of the future resurrection.

We may not know everything about it, but we do know that it will be better than

what these mortal bodies are like now.

Next week, we will learn about how the weakness of this body will not transfer

to our resurrected bodies when Jesus comes back.

If you would like more information about Faith Chapel and its ministries,

please visit the website GoFaithChapel.org.

Have a great week.