The
Glory to be Revealed
Saving Souls?
It is interesting that when many Christians think of salvation,
they have in mind something to do with their soul or spirit living forever in
the presence of God. Though they may also believe that they will be given a new
body, this tends not to feature so much in the foreground of what it means to
actually be “saved”. Hence, evangelists speak of “saving souls” but not “saving
bodies.”
I would like to counter this trend by suggesting not merely that
this account is radically incomplete, but that it is meaningless to speak
merely of the salvation of a soul (whatever you may mean by the term) with no
reference to the “the redemption of the body” (Rom. 8:23) which occurs at
resurrection. This will become clear if we consider what is involved in
salvation. Now it is plain from the Scriptures that salvation is essentially
being rescued from sin and death. Therefore, before we are in a position to
properly understand salvation, we must first consider what is involved in sin
and death.
Death: A Disintegrating Influence
The way that sin and death affect things is by causing
disintegration. Disintegration is the opposite of integration. Any system,
whether it be a human being or a car, is healthy to the extent that there is
integration among the constituent parts. When Adam and Eve sinned, separation
occurred where there had previously been wholeness, health and integration. An
almost endless list might be constructed of areas where this occurred: mankind
became disintegrated from his Maker, from each other, from nature, from the
animals, etc.
The disintegrating influence of sin in our world is not total,
only partial. If it were total then there could be no possibility of life at
all. Consider our own lives in this regard. We are continually subject to a
tension between the force of physical disintegration and the force towards
physical integration. At first the force of integration seems strongest. A baby
enters the world and begins quickly to integrate: the various components of his
body begin integrating with themselves as he learns to walk, respond, touch,
talk and control his movements. As his mind grows he begins integrating with
the outside world, with others and with nature. Yet, as life continues, as the
person grows old, the process of disintegration sets in. Complete
disintegration of body occurs only when the mind, soul and spirit become
detached from it. Thus, we say that a person has died at precisely that moment
when disintegration between body and spirit becomes total. Even before we die,
however, the body and spirit are constantly in tension with each other. Death
is merely the consummation of this tension.
It follows that if Christ has defeated death, this must necessarily
involve the bringing back together of things that have been disconnected. Our
salvation must involve the reintegrating of body, spirit and soul or we have
not really been saved from death. As Paul put it, if there is not the hope of
resurrection “Then also those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.”
(1 Cor. 15:18) For this reason, it is meaningless to speak of the salvation of
the soul independently of the salvation of the body, for any independence
between these things is itself a result of sin and death. (The reason we have
no trouble imagining the salvation of one and not the other is because all our
experience has been colored by the hand of death, making it difficult to
imagine wholeness as a deaf man finds it hard to imagine music.)
Heaven: A Waiting Room
If what I have said is correct, we should not think of going to
heaven as the be all and end all of our salvation. Rather, heaven is a place
where people wait for their resurrection.[i]
That is why Revelation speaks of the dead in heaven waiting for the time when
they will be vindicated on the earth (Rev. 6:9-11). To be sure, heaven is a lot
more than merely a waiting room, but the point is that it is not until the new
body is given to a person that their salvation is complete. That is why Paul
can write that “now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed” (Rom.
13:11).
This truth was more generally understood by Christians of the
past. It is instructive that on the tomb of William of Orange there is an
inscription with the words “he awaits the resurrection”, not “he has gone to
heaven.” This idea is consistent with the meaning of the Greek word for
salvation which literally means “preserved.” Implicit in the idea of salvation
is being preserved for resurrection. Thus, as soon as a person puts
faith in Christ, they are ‘saved’ in the sense that if they were to die they
would go straight to heaven to await their resurrection.
If this account is correct, then it follows that salvation is not
the goal of the Christian life as many have made out; rather, it is the thing
salvation preserves us for that should be the focus and hope of every
Christian. Salvation is a matter of hope – hope for something we do not yet
see.
Not only that, but we also who have the firstfruits of the Spirit,
even we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, the
redemption of our body. For we were saved in this hope, but hope that is seen
is not hope; for why does one still hope for what he sees? (Rom. 8:23-24)
As the above passage shows, it is not all a matter of sitting back
and waiting for resurrection. Paul taught that the Spirit has been given to us
as the firstfruits of our salvation, a salvation to be consummated at the
redemption of our body (Rom. 8:23 & 2 Cor. 5:5) but which still affects our
present existence.
But what will it be like
practically to have a glorified body. The accounts of Jesus after He was in his
resurrection body seem to indicate that He was able to travel at the speed of
thought. That being the case, we should also expect to be given such abilities
when our lowly body is transformed to conform with His glorious body (Phil.
3:21; 1 John 3:2). We should expect not merely to be able to travel around the
earth or the universe, but across the very dimensional boundary into heaven
itself. Hence, the symbolism of ascending that I have explored in my essay on 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17.
Heaven will be open and the angels will ascend and descend, as Jacob saw in his
dream about the ladder. (Again, probably a picture of trans-dimensional
travel.)
But this raises an important
question: exactly what function will heaven play in the new earth? From the
point of view of biblical focus it is certainly true that the earth is where
God’s purposes are outworked. However, this shouldn’t lead us to reduce heaven
to merely a kind of bus stop in our minds. It is a waiting room, to be sure,
but not merely a waiting room. Remember, God promises to renew the heavens
as well as the earth (Rev. 21:1). Since God’s kingdom exists in heaven as it
will one day exist on the earth (Mat. 6:10), the heavenly region of God’s
kingdom will require subjects and rulers just as much as God’s kingdom on the
earth. No doubt some people will be called to populate and govern God’s kingdom
in the heavenly dimension, while others do so in the lower dimension, while
there is travel between the two dimensions.[ii]
It is now time to turn to Paul’s letters to the Corinthians to
gain further insight into the resurrection body.
One of Paul’s greatest
expositions on the glories of resurrection occurs in his first letter to the
Corinthian Christians, chapter fifteen.
There is one glory of the sun,
another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for one star differs
from another star in glory. So also is the resurrection of the dead. The body
is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption. It is sown in dishonor, it
is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a
natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there
is a spiritual body. And so it is written, “The first man Adam became a living
being.” The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. However, the spiritual is
not first, but the natural, and afterward the spiritual. The first man was of
the earth, made of dust; the second Man is the Lord from heaven. As was the man
of dust, so also are those who are made of dust; and as is the heavenly Man, so
also are those who are heavenly. And as we have borne the image of the man of
dust, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly Man.
Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit
the kingdom of God; nor does corruption inherit incorruption. Behold, I tell
you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed – in a
moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will
sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For
this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on
immortality. So when this corruptible has put on incorruption, and this mortal
has put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is
written: “Death is swallowed up in victory.”
“O Death,
where is your sting?
O Hades,
where is your victory?”
(1 Cor.
15:41-55)
There is a lot to unpack in this passage if we are to understand
what Paul is saying. However, it is just as important to be clear on what Paul
is not saying. At first it might be easy to think that Paul is saying
that the resurrection body is non-physical, especially when he contrasts the
“natural” body with the “spiritual” body. Some translations even render natural
body as ‘physical body’ which seems to further reinforce the idea that the
glorified body is non-physical. However, the Greek words that are translated
“natural” and “spiritual” are psychikos and pneumatikos. Greek
words ending in kos do not describe the substance out of which the thing
is made but the force that animates the thing in question. Thus, the word psychikos,
which is derived from the word psyche (life or soul), simply describes a
physical body that is animated by the natural soul-life. This is contrasted
with pneumatikos, which is physical body animated by the “spirit.” But
both are physical bodies. A more accurate translation would be “spirit-powered
body” vs. “natural-powered body.”
Even without recourse to the original Greek, the context makes it
obvious that by ‘natural body’ (again, a bad translation) Paul is not referring
to the physicality of the body. This follows from the fact that Paul clearly
defines what he means by the ‘natural body’ by using a number of strong words:
corruption, dishonor, weakness, mortality, death. Notice that the word
‘physical’ is not included in that list! The natural body Paul refers to is, of
course, physical, but this is beside the point since the spiritual body is also
physical.
The same point can be made in a different way. In verses 45-49
Paul explains that the ‘spiritual body’ is in the pattern of Christ (see also
Phil. 3:21). Now we know that Jesus, after He was in His resurrection body,
could eat and be touched. Just because He could travel at the speed of thought
and therefore appear to go through walls does not mean that He was an
immaterial ghost. In fact, Jesus specifically said He wasn’t a ghost and told
Thomas to touch him.[iii]
Paul makes it clear that the spiritual body we will be given is
not subject to corruption, death, etc. I pointed out earlier that physical
death occurs when our spirit is separated from our material body. This
separation between spirit and matter is why death is so devastating. Everyone
feels the sting of death that Paul refers to - the sheer unnaturalness of it.
When someone we love dies, even if objectively we are happy that they have gone
to be with the Lord, there is something that strikes us deep. Like Thomas
Browne, even if we are not afraid of death, we are certainly ashamed of it.[iv]
Whether we are aware of it or not, the reason death stings us so acutely is
because the separation between spirit and matter is fully actuated. Spiritually
we become naked at death, to use Paul’s imagery from 2 Corinthians 5. We become
naked because we cease to be clothed in flesh.
For we know that if our earthly house,
this tent, is destroyed, 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. (2 Cor. 5:1-4)
As this passage makes clear, we do not want to become fleshless,
immaterial ghosts floating around eternity forever, as some have imagined. This
tent of mortality is a burden to our spirits, not because we long to be
unclothed in flesh, but because we long to be more fully clothed. To be
fully clothed in our heavenly habitation - that is, our resurrection body -
involves more than simply a long life without end, for when our body is fully
fused with our spirit, then the physical experience we enjoy in our body will
take on a quality that is inconceivable in our lower state. In the new body the
spirit will no longer be in tension with material flesh. In a way that is
presently inconceivable, resurrected flesh will be the very means by which our spirit
will be liberated, as water liberates a fish or as air liberates the bird.
Our spirits, confined as they now are to our corruptible bodies,
are currently held back and restricted. Flesh is not a prison for the spirit,
but our present corruptible flesh Isa. That is why if we die and go to heaven
our spirits will no doubt feel a certain degree of freedom even before we are
clothed with our new body, as Paul implies in 2 Cor. 5:8. But that cannot be
the end of the story, for like Job, we know that “though worms destroy this
body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.” (Job 19:26; see also Isa. 26:19)
Anything short of this dishonors the work of Christ, for as N. T. Wright put
it,
If bodies are not raised, death has not been defeated, only
redescribed. To say that we live on in a spiritual, non-bodily sphere is not to
say that death has been defeated, only that death is not so bad after all.[v]
Imaging God Through Resurrection
Another reason why the doctrine of resurrection is so central to the
Christian faith is because it is only through the medium of resurrected bodies
that God’s original purpose for the world can be fulfilled. In my book The Gospel of the Kingdom, I have
try to show that when God created mankind as His image, He intended for those
images to mark out all creation for His glory. As images of God, each person
was intended to reflect characteristics of the Lord Himself, as a mirror
reflects a visual image. At the moment God’s people are like broken mirrors,
still reflecting God but doing it imperfectly. The brokenness of our image
reflects the sin wrought by the first Adam. “And as we have borne the image of
the man of dust [Adam], we shall also bear the image of the heavenly Man.” (1
Cor. 15:49) Notice that Paul does not say we already bear the image of Jesus
(though Paul did believe we are currently imperfect images), but that we
shall. He is clearly referring to resurrection. Only through being
resurrected can God’s images be restored and, therefore, can God’s purposes for
the earth be fulfilled.
Without this overall vision, a grossly truncated view of salvation
ensures. As Macaulay and Barrs write in Being Human, “the New Testament
teaches explicitly that the purpose of salvation is to restore this image.”[vi]
This process begins the moment we put faith in Jesus, but must await
resurrection for culmination.
(As an aside, I strongly recommend Macaulay and Barrs’ book Being
Human. The authors show how the doctrine of the image of God is the
organizing principle for understanding the whole of the Christian life. Being
Human is an excellent practical introduction to the Bible’s teaching on
what it means to live as a human being in this world.)
The Weight of Glory
The hope of future
bodily resurrection is meant to be the keystone that inspires the Christian
waLuke Paul even went so far as to suggest that without the hope of
resurrection, the appropriate philosophy for life would be “Let us eat and
drink, for tomorrow we die!” (1 Cor. 15:29-34) For the early apostles, the
harder the road became, the more they kept their eyes fixed on their unseen
hope – the hope of an eternal weight of glory that would be consummated at the
resurrection.
Therefore we do not lose heart. Even though our outward man is
perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day. For our light
affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding
and eternal weight of glory, while we do not look at the things which are seen,
but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are
temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal. (2 Cor. 4:16-18)
But as it is written:
“Eye has not seen, nor ear heard,
Nor has it entered into the heart of
man
The things which God has prepared for
those who love Him.”
(1 Cor. 2:9)
This hope is not
just a nice idea to take our minds off present difficulties – a kind of happy
escapism. No indeed! The implications of our hope are above all practical. “And
everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure” (1 John
3:3). The hope John is talking about is this hope of bodily resurrection:
Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been
revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be
like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. (1 John 3:2)
We shall see Him as He is! The hope of perfect communion with
Jesus after our resurrection is a hope that should permeate every moment of our
lives right now.
Matter Matters
It
is interesting that in the second century, certain Gnostic teachers tried to
argue that Paul’s comments on resurrection should be understood as referring
merely to a “spiritual” resurrection. Those who took this line also denied the
physicality of Christ’s resurrection. Much literature in the early church,
including the writings of Irenaeus, Tertullian, Justin Martyr, Ignatius of
Antioch, Origen and many others, was written to combat such heresies and defend
the doctrine of a future bodily resurrection. In his letter to Timothy, Paul
had to counter the heresies of two people who were teaching that resurrection
had already occurred (2 Tim. 2:17-18). They had probably spiritualized
resurrection to mean something other than a future bodily resurrection.
In contrast to this, the biblical writings, particularly John’s
first letter, emphasize that the physicality of Christ is central to
Christianity. For this reason, we should revolt against any form of Christianity
that de-emphasizes the importance of matter, even if it doesn’t actually deny
the physicality of Jesus. Christianity is a very fleshy religion, with the
rites of baptism, marriage and breaking of bread at the heart, a testimony that
God Himself took on flesh. And it will not be until we actually see Jesus face
to face in the flesh, that our joy will be complete.
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[i] There are two senses of the term resurrection. One is when a dead
person is brought back to life, as when Lazarus was ‘resurrected’ by Jesus. The
other sense of resurrection refers to a state of existence in which the
death-principle is no longer operative. In the New Testament there are two
words for resurrection. The first is anistemi
in its verb form or anastasis in
its noun form. The later is a compound of ana
(up, or again) and histemi (to
stand). Hence the idea of standing up again is central to the notion of
resurrection. The second word that is translated resurrection in the New
Testament is egeiro in its verb
form and egersis in its noun form.
The verb literally means “to arise”. The noun form egersis is not used as such, but the verbal form also
attracts the prefix sun. sunegeiro means “To stand up together”
with someone, and is found in Ephesians 2:6; Col.2:12. In both cases, the idea
is of being in a supine or sitting position, and then to stand up, or to arise.
[ii] For
various reasons that would be too complex to present here, I suspect that the
flow of time in the heavenly dimension does not run parallel to our own
time-line. If this is the case, then it is conceivable that a resurrected
person on earth could enter heaven and return to find no time or very little
time had passed. But that is another whole subject.
I
have only mentioned two dimensions: earth and heaven. But actually, my research
has seemed to indicate that heaven consists of two different dimensions, making
a total of three dimensions when the earth is included. In Genesis 1:1 when it
says “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”, the Hebrew word
for “heaven” is plural. It is a special kind of plural that was possible in the
Hebrew language (known as the dual number) which indicates just two of a
thing. It indicates that in the beginning God created two heavenly
dimensions. This would be consistent with the three references in Revelation to
“mesouranēma” which should
literally be translated ‘middle heaven’ (Rev. 8:13; 14:6; 19:17). The lower of
the two heavenly dimensions is ‘middle’ in so far as it is between the earth
dimension and the top heavenly dimension. As the lowest heavenly dimension is
greater than the earth, so the highest heavenly dimension must be that much
greater than the lower heavenly dimension. I personally think (again for
reasons that would be too detailed to reproduce here!) that it is in the middle
dimension that warfare occurs between the Lord’s angels and Satan’s angels, while
no evil is allowed to enter the highest heaven. If this understanding is
correct, then the “new heavens” spoken about in Revelation must refer to the
renewing of this middle dimension when Satan and his angels are finally
imprisoned.
If this model is
correct, then meeting the Lord in the air could be symbolic of the Lord
descending from the top heaven into the middle dimension to meet those who had
been raised from the earth. Since heaven is not a place located in our universe
but another dimension of existence, then it is hard to speak of travelling to
heaven except with the kind of metaphoric language Paul employs in his letter
to the Thessalonians.
[iii] Commenting on this passage, Wright says that “What Paul is
asking us to imagine, stretching his readers’ minds no doubt as much as ours,
is that there will be a new mode of physicality which is to our present body as
our present body is to a ghost. It will be as much stronger, more real, more
firmed up, more bodily, than our present body as our present body is more
substantial, more touchable, than a disembodied spirit. We sometimes speak of
someone who’s been very ill as being now ‘a shadow of their former self.’ If
Paul is right, you as a Christian today are a mere shadow of our future
self… (‘Three Score Years – and Then? Exploring the Easter Hope’ Westminster
Abbey Lectures 2001 by the Canon Theologian, Dr. N. T. Wright,
Lecture 7, ‘The Weight of Glory: The Hope of Bodily Resurrection’, September
24.) See also Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God (Augsburg Fortress Publishers,
2003).
[iv] Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, Part
1, Section 40.
[v] Wright, (‘Three Score Years – and Then? Exploring the
Easter Hope’, op. cit.
[vi] Ranald Macaulay & Jerram Barrs, Being Human: the nature
of spiritual experience (Inter-Varsity, 1978), p. 5.