Tag: Heavenly body

Jesus’ Resurrected Body

One of the promises the Bible makes to those whom God has saved is that we will one day receive a resurrected body. A resurrected body is not necessarily the same as a body that has been raised from the dead. Some of the people raised from the dead in the Bible account (Lazarus, Jairus’ daughter, etc.) were merely repaired and revivified. Their bodies still would wear out. They would die again.

“Resurrected” is a nearly complete remake. There will be some retention of what makes us unique persons. Other than that, we are remade to be without sinful nature and many other genetic defects that have arisen along the way. Paul gives a description of a resurrected body:

42 So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. 43 It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. 44 It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.

1 Corinthians 15:42-44

Breaking this down, what can we learn? First, it is imperishable. Can a body of flesh and bone be imperishable? It is not too hard to imagine that our genetics could be modified to create systems that would not wear down and cell reproduction that could go on indefinitely. The people who lived before Noah’s flood apparently had genetics that allowed them to live nearly a millennia. God actually modified them down. We could also be given systems that would make us disease free. What about injury? The resurrected body might be self-repairing.

“It is sown in dishonor”, is likely a reference to sinful nature. The genetics that give us a proclivity to sin and resist God will be gone.

“It is raised in power.” This is an exciting description that would suggest higher limitations and new abilities for our resurrected body. How much fun would it be to run faster and farther, to jump and climb, lift and maybe even new stuff like teleport or use telepathy for communication. What will it do for our intellect? As many of us experience the decline of our physical and mental self, due to aging or disease, it is exciting to think or the 2.0 version of ourself that is coming.

“It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.” This always baffled me. Now I think it means this. A natural body is one limited to this time-space dimension. A spiritual body is one that can be either here or in the time-space of Heaven or Hell. Paul doesn’t explain, but other places speak of or hint at a Heavenly body (1 Corinthians 15:40, 2 Corinthians 5:1).

The only example of a resurrected body is that of Jesus after His resurrection. Jesus is described as the “first-born of the dead”. This basically means that He is the first to be resurrected with more to come. What can we say of Jesus’ resurrected body? He eats. He is recognizable when He wants to be, and not recognizable when He doesn’t. He moves differently. He doesn’t have to use the door. He still retains the marks of His crucifixion as a badge of honor. That is about it. Do any of these things reflect Him as the Son of God versus a resurrected human? Maybe. Maybe not.

My interest in Jesus’ resurrected body is primarily out of curiosity about what God has planned for me. We have only a little information, but what we do know and the possibilities that flow from that information are exciting. If you are part of a church that says the Apostles’ or Nicene Creeds, I hope that you will think about these things when you say, “I believe in the resurrection of the body” or ” I look for the resurrection of dead and the life of the world to come.”

The Way That We Are Made

What makes a human being special, if anything? A Materialist would say that nothing is special. We are just a biological robot doing what chemistry is forcing us to do with no specific purpose. Materialism is a very disparaging philosophy that doesn’t fit our experience. I don’t believe it at all. I experience myself making choices, contemplating my existence, living with purpose; and even though I have not died and returned from the dead yet, I have a sense that I am not limited to my physical lifespan. That may lack scientific vigor, but the atheistic claims of a Materialist do as well, and are clearly rubbish.

Human beings are more than interesting chemistry. Complex chemistry is a part of our being, but not the whole of it. Most people have thought so. The dissenters have a clear bias–they don’t want God to exist.

The Bible says something different about humans. It says we were created in the “image of God”. What does that mean? I don’t think it is the common meaning of the term “image”. The Bible declares several times that God is a spirit or is spirit. While the meaning of “spirit” is also vague, I would gather from usage that it means that God is not set in his appearance by a defined physical form. Part of being created in the “image of God” is having a part of our being not connected to a defined physical form.

Our bodies are a “defined physical form” the way I am using the phrase. The Bible speaks of humans as also having a “spirit”. Our spirit may be what we experience as consciousness. But our spirit is not the whole of us. We are body, and possibly bodies, and spirit. Our spirit can be liberated from connection to our body. That is what death is. Our spirit can interact with our body. That is why we can control it and that is what is observed when mapping brain activity.

We know that our earthly body can die and decay. Our spirit cannot, which is another aspect of being made in the image of God. We are eternal. While I do not believe in reincarnation, I understand the Bible to say that we can have a heavenly body (1 Corinthians 15:40, 2 Corinthians 5:1). In that case, our spirit is interacting with a body made for the physical dimensions of Heaven. I also know from the Bible that we will have a “resurrected” body. In this case, our spirit is interacting with a recreated, indestructible body built for the physical dimensions of this universe. Being eternal, we will never lapse into non-existence.

Being created in the image of God means, among still other things, that we have an eternal, non-material part that can interact with material bodies that can exist within their respective physical realms. This is theorizing that Heaven is a parallel universe to this universe rather than a remote part of it. The same can be said for Hell. How we will spend eternity depends on our relationship with God.

Humans were not created by God to be in an antagonistic or forsaken relationship to Him. We were created for Him, to be with Him. But that relationship was broken a long time ago. When we come into being at our conception, we do not arrive with a good relationship and with an unblemished image of God. God creates us, but in the sense that He created the biological system of reproduction that makes us. We do not start from scratch. As such, we inherit physically a nature that is antagonistic to God and under God’s judgment. (Romans 7, Psalm 51:5 et al). The only fix for us is Jesus. Jesus’ actions created the opportunity to repair our relationship with God. God seeks us out to connect us to Jesus; and, if successful, to restore us to what we were originally intended to be.

Would we know this without being told about it by God? I doubt it. We would only experience a vague sense of something amiss. We would see a troubled and often ugly world made painful by human actions. We would walk blindly into our own deaths, perhaps expecting the end of our existence. Finding instead a far worse continued existence.

Created in the image of God is what we are for better or worse. Thank God, He did not abandon us to a hopeless fate.

We Will Be Made Multi-Dimensional?

No doubt God has some pleasant surprises for us in the eternity He has planned.  Some of these things are kept as surprises because we wouldn’t understand them if He did tell us ahead of time.  What I am writing about in this entry is possibility one such surprise.  I will admit that it is speculation based on very little data, but it still is consistent with Scripture and mentally graspable.  At least I hope you get it.

It confounds many people that the Bible talks about Heaven and a New Earth.  Why would one want a New Earth if we have Heaven?  The tendency is to conflate the two, though this is clearly wrong.  Both are distinct.

What if it where possible to move freely between Heaven, with unique and glorious qualities of its own; and a New Earth, for that matter a New Universe, made perfectly as God intended it from the beginning and now being the official dwelling place of God?  In other words, it would not be one or the other but both.

Part of understanding this idea is having a concept of where Heaven is in the first place.  Is Heaven just far out in the time and space dimensions we know?  I doubt it.  The Bible just describes Heaven as being “up”.  It doesn’t really say where it is.  With a little more sophistication about how reality is structured, other possibilities for the location of Heaven come to light.

With the study of the bizarre behavior of particles at the atomic (quantum) level, the theory that there may be other dimensions has come to light.  Our experience only accounts for three physical dimensions and one time dimension.  With these we can locate any point that has ever existed, or so it seems.  Quantum mechanics suggests that there may be other dimensions that we are currently unable to access with our senses or our instruments. (Do not confuse this with the baseless theory of the “multiverse”)

Could Heaven, Hell, Sheol, the Abyss and who knows what else exist in other dimensions, and the only current way of accessing them is through our death?  I think it is more than possible, but rather likely.  Consider the Biblical account of the movement of angels.  They properly exist in Heaven.  That is their habitat.  But for God’s purposes they also seem to be able to access Earth.  Consider also the account of Satan’s expulsion from Heaven in Revelation 12.  Previously, he had access to Heaven and Earth.  After his expulsion, he only could access Earth (or this universe).  Perhaps the travel between Heaven and Earth is a matter of movement along the dimensions we already experience, but it seems more likely to me that Heaven is from outside of these dimensions.

That is a long explanation to get to my point.  It seems that we can have, through Jesus, a place in Heaven with a heavenly body.  At the point of Christ’s visible return, there is the resurrection of an earthly body and the creation of new dwelling place for us–a new Earth.  Do we just lose Heaven and the heavenly body or do we gain a resurrected body and a New Earth?  2 Corinthians 5:1 says:

For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with human hands, eternal in the heavens.

This is referring to our heavenly body.  Or to say it another way, the body that we will have in the dimensional space where Heaven exists.  We will have it eternally.

So what will we be?  We will be beings who can enjoy a perfected earth-like planet with a resurrected body that has new capabilities, and we will have the capacity to move to the Heavenly plane and enjoy the significantly different realm of a new Heaven.

That doesn’t sound boring to me.

We Will All Be Changed (Part 2- Physical Frailty)

When I ask kids what they would like to have changed when they enter Heaven, many choose to have more formidable physical skills.  ” I want to be better at basketball”, for instance. We are all often earth-bound in our imaginations of what a Heavenly or Resurrected body may be.  That said, Scripture does say of the Resurrected body, “It will be sown in weakness, it will be raised in power.”  What kind of power might this include?

Greater speed, strength, impermeable to damage or illness; I expect “yes” to all of them.  Greater beauty, shorter recovery time, more intelligent?  Sure, why not?  According to Genesis people were living for hundreds of years prior to Noah’s flood.  Is this merely mythic?  I see no reason to say so.  There is a branch of science that studies the genome looking for ways to extend human life expectancy.  It is believed that there is a built-in clock within our DNA, and I agree.  In Genesis 6, God seems to adjust that clock so that human life expectancy will slide back to 120 years.  It eventually does so, and remains so to this day.  Can God give us a different genetic code or even use a different means of encoding the construction of our bodies?  I’m sure it is not even hard for Him.  God is able to make us physically immortal. “The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable.” (1 Corinthians 15:42).

I expect our brains will be a vast improvement over current models.  Many people ask if we will recognize each other.  I expect that you will not only recognize those you knew, but you will also know those you never met.  On the Mount of Transfiguration, Peter, James and John knew Moses and Elijah.  They had the gift.  It was not introductions or name tags. I expect we will be capable of vast learning without the frailties and maladaptions of our current brain.

Will there be pain, hunger, thirst, nausea, itching or other unpleasantries.  “No” says Revelation 7 for the Heavenly body and Revelation 21 for the Resurrected body.  Could there be any injury, or will we be like the Terminator?  This is hard to say.  There will be no mortal injury, but there might be a need for healing and the source will be quickly provided.  The Tree of Life exists at least in the New Earth, and I expect also in Heaven.  It is for the “healing of the nations”.

Will we age?  Aging as it currently plays out is part of dying.  It is the wages of sin.  We will not get old and frail or lose our beauty, but there might be a life cycle.  Isaiah 65:17 and following is a strange passage that says it is about the New Earth.  In verse 20 it speaks about infants and old men.  This passage needs to be understood in light of other passages that say that we are eternal.  So how can you be an infant or old man; or is this just a figure of speech?  The “Immortal Jellyfish” might give us a model.  This species goes through stages like a frog or a butterfly, but it can revert from its “mature” stage back to its initial larval stage without dying.  The Isaiah passage would be referring to the Resurrected body.  Perhaps we go from infant to adulthood and back to infancy.  Who knows?  Eventually, we will.

Do You Get a Body in Heaven?

Do you like your body?  Probably the majority of people have some complaint about their bodies.  Either they are the wrong shape or size or their functioning is poor.  Or both.  If you have a body that you consider beautiful, that is great.  Don’t get to comfortable with it.  Age comes to everyone.

We will all grow old, unless we die young.  We will acquire physical misfunctions.  That is the way it works in a world altered by sin.  And that is really all we deserve.  It is only by the forgiveness that comes through Jesus’ death and resurrection that we have a promise of more.

This blog has tried to bring out what is promised in the Bible about life after death.  There is Sheol and then, after Judgment Day, the lake of fire for those who remain unforgiven.  There is Heaven and then, at Judgment Day, a resurrection of the body and a New Earth for those who belong to God.  Details are limited.  Questions are abundant.

Do we get a body in Heaven?  The resurrection of the body is for the New Earth, so is Heaven a sort of body-less dream state?  There is surprisingly little said about our heavenly experience, but there is enough said to establish that Heaven is a destination for the Redeemed.  A couple of passages talk about our heavenly “physicality”.  First, 2 Corinthians 5:1-5:

For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. 2 For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling, 3 if indeed by putting it on we may not be found naked. 4 For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened—not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. 5 He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee.

Because Paul is using a metaphor, you might not catch that “the building” is your heavenly body.  Our spirit is “clothed” with a body (house) “eternal in the heavens”.  Now that is confusing.  We know that we will have a resurrected body on a New Earth from the Bible.  How can we have also a body that is eternal, not temporary, in the heavens?  Furthermore, why would you want a resurrected, earthly body if you have an eternal, heavenly body?  What are the differences?

I will be honest, I don’t know.  But I am really excited to find out.  I also have a theory that I can neither test nor substantiate.  More about this in just a bit.  Another passage that seems relevant here is 1 Corinthians 15:39-41:

39 For not all flesh is the same, but there is one kind for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish. 40 There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is of one kind, and the glory of the earthly is of another. 41 There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory.

While “heavenly bodies” may refer to the type of thing mentioned in verse 41, but I think it is referring to our heavenly bodies.  The glory of that body is different than the glory of our resurrected earthly body, but we have no details of how they are different.  They both glorious, however.

When we consider the complex creativity of the function of our present bodies, you could say that they have a glory of their own.  It is a glory altered from the original design, accumulating genetic flaws as we move generation to generation, and slowly dying because of sin.  We can count on sin, aging, defect and disease being gone in our future bodies.  Isn’t it exciting to think about what capabilities God has in store for us and what beauty!

A metaphor that comes to mind is the girl who was awkward and a little homely in middle school, who grows up to be a knockout as an adult.  We might be quite a mess at this point, but just wait.

The converse is true for the damned.  There seems to be a body for those in Sheol, for they suffer physical torments.  The resurrection of the body is for all, but the damned are forsaken by God and cast into Hell.

So besides the vague description of differing glories, how can we have an eternal heavenly body and a resurrected earthly one?  My theory is that it has to do with where you are dimensionally.  I think Heaven is in a different dimensional space, so our heavenly bodies are constructed to be a part of that “universe”.  Our resurrected and current bodies are for this dimensional space.  Perhaps, after Judgment Day, we can move freely in both.

%d bloggers like this: