Our Hope: "We Will All Be Changed"

“I declare to you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed—in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory’.” --1 Corinthians 15:50-54

The passage points to another vital part of Christian hope. When Jesus Christ returns and the dead are resurrected, those who inherit eternal life will be changed. We will be clothed with what is imperishable and immortal.

People always want to know: What will that look like and be like? The best answers can be found in those verses at the end of the Gospels that report the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus. Because it is the precursor to what Christians will become, I want to say a few things about Christ’s resurrection.

First, when Christians say that Jesus was raised from the dead—that we serve a risen savior—we are not talking about the survival of a memory about Jesus. Nor are we referring to the growth of his influence in the world. I mention these views, not because they have any merit in light of the witness of Scripture, but only because they have become fairly popular among believers whose worldview precludes the supernatural. Such interpretations are clearly out of sync with the assertions of the New Testament and should be rejected.

Second, to speak of the resurrection of Jesus is not a reference to his resuscitation. This is where Christians should make an important distinction that is sometimes overlooked. To take two biblical examples, what happened to the widow’s son in Luke 7, and what happened to Lazarus in John 11, is altogether different from what happened to Jesus on the third day after his crucifixion.

Strictly speaking, none of the biblical accounts of someone besides Jesus coming back to life should be thought of as resurrection stories. In those cases, divine power brought an individual back to this life, but not to new and unending life. To put it simply, Lazarus and company were resuscitated, only Jesus was resurrected. (There’s a quaint passage somewhere in the writings of C.S. Lewis where he remarks that being raised must have been hard for Lazarus and the others. Knowing the experience of death, they eventually had to do their dying all over again).

In contrast to misrepresentations and misunderstandings about the resurrection, the New Testament tells us that when Jesus was raised, God the Father by the power of the Holy Spirit transformed Jesus’ body into a never-decaying (incorruptible) never-dying (imperishable) body, the sort of body that makes eternal life with God a possibility for someone who was once human.

From the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus, I gather that such a body could, at times, be difficult to recognize, even by those who were close friends with the person before the radical change. The mysterious character of the resurrection body also shows up in John 20:26, where Jesus suddenly appears in a room where the disciples were holed up; and also in Luke 24:42 where the resurrected Christ eats broiled fish.

In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul’s main point is not that resurrection happened to Jesus; it is, rather, that the specific event of Jesus’ resurrection is the first occurrence, and therefore the promise, of what will occur for all of God’s people when Christ comes again:

“But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in his own turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him.” --1 Corinthians 15:20-23