First Corinthians 15:35-41 How are the dead raised

Okay, for those of you who are visitors, what our church is all about is God's word. And we do a systematic study like we're going through 1 Corinthians. We do line by line. We try to ferret out of the scriptures exactly what God meant, and we trust the Holy Spirit to teach us. So that's why our sermons usually lack as much opinion as we can get out of them and rely on what God's Word has to say. So, up until this point, Roger has been teaching us about the practical life of a believer who, being governed by the truth of resurrection, takes his place separated from the world.

But now he's gonna meet some rationalistic objections of some who were asking, some will say, how are the dead raised? And what kind of a body do they come with? And I looked up that highly spiritual book, Marian Webster, and they define body, I like their definition, the organized physical substance of an animal or a plant, either living or dead. or definition number two, a mass of matter distinct from other masses.

So what Paul does now is he turns from warning to meeting objections in the form of physical questions. And it's a lot like what the Lord Jesus had to deal with when he was faced with the Sadducees about resurrection. Here he thoroughly is the inquiring mind of man questioned. In other words, a man asks a question and it's a man's man.

And especially so in this instance where the clear revelation of God is doubted or it's denied in the process. The how of the resurrection may not be understood. or the character of the risen body. What's interesting for us as believers, I think, our wisdom is to know the scriptures, to know his word, and without questioning his power, to give bodies meaning. Lewis Perry Chafer, I spent some time with Chafer in these verses. I thought what he had to say was pretty good.

He writes in, he quotes Romans 8.23 that says, the redemption of the body, not only this, but also we ourselves who have the first fruits of the spirit, even we ourselves grown within ourselves, waiting eagerly for the adoption as sons. comma, the redemption of our bodies. He says that this phrase evidently comprehends the metamorphosis, which is wrought either by becoming incorruptible or immortal.

This truth, respecting the redemption of the body, closely parallels the resurrection doctrine, for the saints are redeemed in this present estate, in this present body, yet their bodies are to be redeemed in the future. So we have a positional truth that says we have been redeemed, but my body isn't yet redeemed, which is similar to the fact that though they are now raised in Christ, their bodies have yet to be raised or changed. William Newell says, waiting for our adoption to wit the redemption of our bodies. The instructed Christian, knowing that his body belongs to the Lord and is not yet redeemed, he longs for, he yearns, he groans for that day when his body will be placed in a position of openly acknowledged sonship and glory, even as his spirit now is. now is, till that day he can't be satisfied.

If you think about it, this is a pretty touching scene because one who redeemed belongs in heaven. We all belong in heaven. We've been redeemed, yet we're somehow kept in this dying body which causes us to groan, and we groan about the creation. Then, amazing goodness, a blessed spirit, we may say, represents God's tender feeling towards his creation, abiding as he does in us while our bodies are not yet redeemed. So we have an unredeemed body engulfed by the Holy Spirit. We repeat and repeat that Christian's hope is not disembodiment or mere going to heaven, For knowing that our citizenship is in heaven, we patiently await for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that we may be conformed to the body of his glory.

William Newell also commented and said, this is an element And Newell's pretty aggressive here. We fear of cowardice as well as unbelief in setting our hope on getting in heaven and leaving, so to speak, our body behind. God began with man's body in Eden in Genesis 2, and he will end with our redeeming bodies. The heart of God and of Christ, yea, the indwelling spirit is set upon that. Let our hearts also be set upon it, from Romans verse by verse.

So it's an engaging question, when you think about it, that has some interest. How are our bodies to be raised? How's that gonna happen? And what's it gonna look like when it is raised? Verse 35. But from verse 36 to 44, he answers it. The problem of a literal and actual reappearance of the believer's body by resurrection after his dissolution in the grave, or after an immediate destruction of the elements, let's say you got blown up somewhere, is one about which there are many, many theories. What happens to all of those molecules? So rather than answer the question directly, I thought this was pretty interesting.

The first thing Paul does is call the guy who's asking the question a fool. He says, you fool. And then he explains why. That which you sow does not come to life unless it dies. This word fool means you're mindless or you're stupid or a term I like to use, you're an idiot. So, it actually, a fool who exposes himself by self-confessed ignorance and the rejection of the testimony of God. Who knows, who alone knows? He quickly exposes the true character of the person asking the question.

The one who raises such a question proves that he is a fool because he measures the all-powerful and all-wise God by human limitations, and he rejects everything that he can explain. So Paul here criticizes those which would feel and who trouble themselves and were foolish enough to overlook the parallels that go on in nature before their eyes and refute the assumed likeness between the body as it is and the body that shall be. Death must come before resurrection. Death is termination, but it's not annihilation. Understand what I mean by that? Death terminates, but it doesn't annihilate. It terminates our existence here in the body.

The seed as such dies in order that it would bring forth the plant in nature itself. Use with the striking analogy on the point, an analogy used previously by the Lord himself when he said, except a corn of wheat fall in the ground and die, it abides alone. Speaking of himself. But if it die, it brings forth much fruit. He's talking about his own death and his own resurrection.

So for the believer, death is not a barrier to resurrection. It's the cause or the predecessor of resurrection. There may be change as shown afterward, but there is no resurrection unless there's a dead death first. There's a breaking up of the old system. disunion or disruption of constituent parts in death before the molding of a new being. Louis Sperry Schaefer said, even in the existence of the present body, there is difficulty in identification of its parts over any period of time.

The constant flux of its substance is such that the entire body is dissolved and rebuilt at least every seven years. Is that true? Seven years. So I've known all of you more than seven years. You don't look as good as you used to. Chester McCauley says it's obvious.

Nobody can be raised until they've died. This gives the Christian a unique view of death. Death is the first step, not the final step. Death is the doorway and the prelude to glorification. We know from nature that a plant comes from the seed, but we don't know how. Consequently, Paul doesn't tell us how the body is raised, though he scolds the foolishness of those who deny resurrection of the body because they can't conceive of how it could be accomplished.

But the seed dies as such in order to pass into a plant. So he adds, and that which you sow, you do not sow the body which is to be. but a bare grain, perhaps of wheat or of something else. But he says, you do the sowing. And notice how in God's scripture, he talks about burial as sowing. Sowing, planting. A seed is sown in the earth, and though its identity is preserved, it comes up with a vastly different body. Donna goes up to Laura's farm every Tuesday, and that vastly different body from the seeds they planted back in the spring is apparent now, because there are crops everywhere.

The showing of this is on the point before us is plain. The dead body of the saint is laid in a grave, is sown in a grave. In the resurrection, it will come up vastly different. yet with its identity preserved. That's just amazing. We're gonna know each other, but we'll be vastly different.

Chester McCauley says, the metaphor of burial is that of seed being sowed in the ground. Properly speaking, believers are not buried, they're sown. So Roger and I are gonna have to remember that the next time we do a memorial service. We talk about the person being sown. The implication of this metaphor will be picked up in the rest of this chapter. The metaphor is appropriate because it's only in dissolution of the material particles of the seed that life comes forth.

So it's true of the believer's physical body. One has said that there's no doubt there is germ or physical life, but what does the one who asked the question know about this? Probably not much. If he is utterly unacquainted with this, even in the seed, is he in a position to quibble as to the body? This is God's work. Charles Coates makes an interesting point here.

He says, burial refers and death refers to the saints viewed as having been buried, but not as having gone to heaven. It is all who are in the tombs. The person as identified with his body is buried or sown. But when we bury the body of a saint, you're burying something that's very wonderful. Because you bury that which has been for years a temple of the Holy Spirit, a sanctified vessel, dedicated as a living sacrifice to God. He went on to say, when you bury a saint, you sow a suitable seed for the resurrection into life.

Something has been identified with that body that is morally suitable for and indispensable to God's new creation world. And if God did not bring it up again and give it its place in his new creation, there would be a divine element missing in that new world. So we're talking about the new creation. And the resurrection of believers, it will suit them for the new creation only.

Slide six. But God gives it a body just as he wished, and to each of the seeds a body of its own. Now I know I put a little marker there that in Genesis 6, or Genesis 1-11, then God said, let the earth spout vegetation, plants, yielding seeds, fruit trees. on the earth bearing fruit after their own kind with seeds in them and it was. So this isn't new, this concept.

God set it up in the garden and the key phrase in this verse, bearing fruit after their own kind. Everything that God created that could reproduce only reproduces after its own kind. If he created a dog, he didn't create flying dogs. He created dogs, and then he created birds, and we'll see more of that in a minute.

Chester McCauley says that God gives a seed, a body that accords with his sovereign will. It's God who decides. The body that accords with his will is exactly, exactly the right body. Our resurrection bodies will be perfectly suited to the environment which we will function in. So no matter what you think now about what the resurrected body gonna be like, it will be to function perfectly in the new creation.

Man can put the seed in the ground, we're the ones that do it, but man can't make it grow. Even less can man give it a body according to man's own determination. No doubt there is a germ or a principle of life, but again, the person who asked this question, what does he know of that? He's utterly unacquainted with even what a seed's all about. Is he in a position to be picky as to a resurrection body? You and I who study God's word, we can reason fairly from the truths that we know from the word. but you can't reason from ignorance.

I remember one time in a conversation with some guys in Miles, Stanford, the question came up, well, what kind of clothes are we gonna wear in this new body? He said, well, you won't have to worry about clothes. That sparked everybody's interest. He said, because you'll be clothed in light. And I thought, oh, how cool is that? Clothed in light.

So, if one rejects whatever is not understood, where will such unreasonable doubt end? Not only is all spiritual knowledge being swept away, but the questioner must begin by denying the existence of himself and every other being. Nothing is less rational than to make reason the only inlet of thought or feelings or knowledge or consciousness of anything. There are indeed different bodies in the plant world. Every seed has its own body as God has given it. The thought of seed introduces the idea of purpose.

I have to laugh. You know, Don and I walk around the neighborhood and we look at plants and trees and stuff and we say, well, I wonder what those are. Well, I got an app. And the app says, take a picture and it'll tell you what it is. Well, somebody took God's given names for every plant. And if I take a picture of it, it'll tell me what it is.

So it's great. You say, well, we ought to have one of those. Well, what is it? I don't know. Let's take a picture of it. Oh, that's an oak tree. Okay. The thought of a seed introduces the idea of purpose. Something is in view in sowing of a seed which doesn't actually appear in the seed itself. It's bare grain.

But everybody who sows a seed has in view the complete perfect result the harvest the idea is that God is going to perfect all that is his own mind and Resurrection is necessary in order for him to do that What springs up is different extensively from what is sown Yet each seed issues in its own plant There is such a thing as species, and this fixed on every beginning of the creation as it pleased God. It's interesting that the seeds you plant today came from the plants that God created in the Garden of Eden, and it's the same thing every time.

Charles Coates said, I thought we might consider what is gonna be gathered up in the resurrection. the glory with which God is going to clothe his saints in that world. It would be a very good thing for us to have more faith of resurrection. Keep that phrase, faith of resurrection, in mind. He says, we all believe, as Martha did, that the dead will be raised, but has the moral force the importance of it's got hold of our souls so as to exert an influence in our everyday life.

If so, we should be ordering our lives not in view of this present world, but of the resurrection world. A great deal depends on whether we are living in view of this age or in the age to come. You can't live for the age to come except by faith in the resurrection. Certainly one who's living a self-indulgent life has not the faith of resurrection. And as I think Roger talked about, let us eat, drink, for tomorrow we die. We may say, like most of Christendom does, I believe in the resurrection of the dead, but it's quite another thing to have the faith of resurrection.

Those who have that faith want to live on a line that there should be something God can raise into his new world. The Corinthians didn't understand this. They didn't have this faith of resurrection. They were living self-gratifying, self-indulgent lives occupied with their own desires, ambitions, and private objectives.

What Paul brings before them as to resurrection is not merely to correct a doctrinal error, but to put them right in the center of their moral being, to put the faith and light of resurrection in their souls in order that they should live not in view of this age, but in view of what was coming.

And what would happen? It would transform the lives of the people of God if they had the faith of resurrection. It's interesting that nothing can put away sin but death. And nothing can annul death but the resurrection. And resurrection is in view of our being quickened to live in an entirely new order of things, which is according to God's divine purpose. Something which was in the mind of God before he ever made man, he had this purpose.

So then he starts to delineate a little bit. He says, all flesh is not the same flesh, but there's one flesh of man, another flesh of beast, another flesh of birds, and another of fish. Notice that there are different kinds of flesh of men and flesh of animals. Again, nature teaches us that this presents no difficulty to God, for he is of infinite resource. All you have to do is look around and look at the variety of his creation. I have a screensaver on my computer that shows exotic animals and fish and birds every day, and I've yet to recognize what one of them is, but I know God created them, and they're really pretty cool. There are different orders of flesh. There's men, beasts, fishes, birds.

Within those orders are, again, vastly different bodies. How many different, like Courtney likes to tell me, you have to go scuba diving and see God's creation on that reef, the very different thousands of different kinds of fish, how beautiful they are.

The flesh is clearly different in men and clearly different in cattle and quadrupeds and birds and fishes. It's really unreasonable then if we are to take for granted that our body must be just like it is in resurrection and with no distinctions. It's gonna be totally different. I think Paul here wants to show how pointless is the assumption of a condition for the body and resurrection to be similar as to the present state.

From the diversity, even the flesh of the animal world that now is. What's cool is, is that there isn't any boredom in God's creation. In the animal world, there's so much variety, it's just, I don't know if you even have identified all the species. In the material world, there are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies. In the heavenly bodies, there are differences. There's the sun, the moon, the planets, the stars, they all differ. But he gives an answer. And the answer is that there is a great variety of forms and bodies in God's creation.

It's not strange that God will give believers a transformed body in resurrection or in the rapture. Quote from Schaeffer, according to the transformation that comes by resurrection, and we will study these in the weeks to come, that which is sown in corruption is gonna be raised in incorruption. That which is sown in dishonor will be raised in honor and glory. That which is sown in weakness will be raised a powerful body. And that which is sown in natural body adapted to your soul is raised a spiritual body adapted to your human spirit. We talked about that a little bit this morning. My body and your body today is adapted to your soul. Your resurrected body won't be adapted to your soul, it'll be adapted to your spirit, which will control your soul.

I think it makes far more sense if we conceive the most spectacular differences. It's not a question, however, whether of reason or imagination, but of faith as far as God is revealed. But there is a further illustration which Paul wants to draw now.

From sight to set-aside experimentation, petty-minded and groveling is always that there are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly body is one and the glory of the earthly body is another. There's an order which presents to us that God himself is very orderly. There are bodies of the earthly order. We know, and we know pretty well the earthly order, pretty well the makeup of earthly bodies, although we're studying them all the time, but we don't know anything about outer space other than it's there.

And the speculation about what it's gonna be like. It's probably true that no two stars in all respects are the same. And stars are things like the sun. The glory of one differs from the other. The manifestation of them differ. And not only this, but the heavenly ones, the sun, the moon, the stars, et cetera, they all vary from one another. Our moon differs from the other moons. Everything differs. What's interesting is we're spending all this time and all this effort to spend four months in a rocket and go to Mars.

Why? What's there? What's the answer? Why would we go there? There's nothing there that fits a human being. Nothing. I mean, the press tries to make a big deal out of, well, there might be water there. Well, okay, but how come there aren't any plants and trees and grass and golf clubs?

No. So the objection to understanding heavenly bodies of the sun, et cetera, as if it's too modern of a term is simply the lack of knowledge. We don't know. It's merely trivial that if we apply these words accordingly, we must suppose Paul to have imagined the stars to be endowed with bodies in a literal sense.

No, God puts his glory in everything that he created, his glory. So what happens? His creation manifests a facet of His glory. If you've ever looked at a really nice diamond ring where the sun is shining into it and you move it in front of your eye, you'll see different facets of it. I view that as how God's glory functions. Everything that He created manifests a facet of His glory. And it's observable In every individual thing he created, you can see it.

The Lord Jesus told his disciples, or the Pharisees, if I told you earthly things and you don't believe me, how will you believe it if I tell you heavenly things? So he says, then there's one glory of the sun and another glory of the moon and another glory of the stars. For star differs from star in glory or in manifestation.

So also is the resurrection of the dead. The object here is not to prove the different degrees of glory in heaven. That's not what he's trying to do. As though many ancient people and modern people, that's what they try to do. But the object here is to contrast the risen from the natural condition. That's what he's trying to do.

So also is the resurrection of the dead. This is made plain from what follows. These people were quite wrong in asking these questions to make the glory to be excessively heavenly or to make it excessively earthly. Both will be found in God's new creation. Constable made an interesting point here.

He said, likewise the fact that celestial bodies differ in glory, and he used glory as brightness, should help us realize that human bodies can also differ in glory. The glory of a perishable mortal body is much less than that of an imperishable immortal body. Also, the differing glory in the heavenly bodies argues for difference among glorified believers.

Now, up to this point, through this chapter, We've noticed that Paul, at the very beginning, he speaks of the gospel which he preached and that it was according to scripture. And then he goes on and he mentions the great effects of the gospel, that they were all according to scripture, everything he had to say. And then it goes far beyond the need of man and introduces the thoughts of divine purpose, and that's where we're working now.

Yes, and death and resurrection are the way into seeing the divine purpose. Therefore, Christ went the way of death. It's important for us to see the simple fact that the Lord's life upon the earth and his death and his resurrection are all on the way to the accomplishment of God's divine purpose. But the purpose of God is not actually come into view until Christ takes his place in the heavenlies, when he's glorified. See, we forget sometimes that the Lord Jesus Christ is a human being. And God centered all of his purposes in Christ as a human being, a glorified man in the heavenlies.

Paul brought all this truth before the Corinthians, not merely to counteract the error that he found in the minds of some of them, but to develop conformity to Christ. And conformity really brings us onto the ground and the divine line of God's purpose. And I think his purpose for all of us, a spiritual man who would have before his mind that what was in the mind and heart of God. And what is in the mind and heart of God?

It's the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ. Let's close. Dear Father, how grateful we are for your word. How grateful we are that you will cause us, even though we're in these bodies, to be resurrected. But before that, you will conform us to the very image of your Son in which All of Your glory is resident within him as a man. We thank You. We pray in Your Son's precious name. Amen.