Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church
## Pastor Dennis Tuuri

He is risen. He is risen indeed. Please stand for the reading of 1 Corinthians 15 beginning at verse 12.

1 Corinthians 15, beginning at verse 12, dealing with this resurrection. Now if Christ is preached that he has been raised from the dead, how do some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty.

And we are found false witnesses of God because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ whom he did not raise up. If in fact the dead do not rise. For if the dead do not rise, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile. You are still in your sins. Then also those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable.

But now Christ is risen from the dead and has become the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since by man came death, by man also came the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive, but each one in his own order, Christ the first fruits, afterwards those who are Christ at his coming. Then comes the end when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father, when he puts an end to all rule and all authority and power.

For he must reign until he has put all enemies under his feet. The last enemy that will be destroyed is death. For he has put all things under his feet. But when he says all things are put under him is it is evident that he who put all things under him is excepted. Now when all things are made subject to him, then the son himself will also be subject to him who put all things under him that God may be all in all.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for the glorious message of the resurrection of the savior and its implications for our lives. Help us now by means of your word and spirit to understand it better, to be transformed by it, that we also might live in the resurrection future of the Lord Jesus Christ. In his name we ask it and for the purposes of his kingdom. Amen.

Please be seated.

I’m afraid that I might dampen your enthusiasm for some of the songs we sing, even some we sing here as a result of this sermon. I want to talk about the unexpected glorious news of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. It’s an astonishing discontinuity with the rest of created history. And there’s really nothing we can do to fully grasp that astonishment and awe and wonder. But I hope at least that by the end of the sermon we will have brought ourselves to a sense of awe and wonder at what Christ has accomplished by his death and resurrection for us and what salvation is in a more holistic way than just our own personal ticket to heaven, whatever that might be.

It’s interesting that we think that way, that the purpose of Christ was to get us a ticket to heaven. We just sang, for instance, in the opening song, I think it was, “Christ hath opened paradise.” That’s true. He told the thief on the cross that he would be with him that day in paradise. But when was Jesus raised? Three days afterwards. So paradise is really an interim step as it were to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.

We sang in verse four of that same song, “So are we now where Christ hath led, allelujah, following our exalted head, allelujah. Made like him. Like him we rise, allelujah. Over the cross the grave the skies. Ours the cross the grave the skies, allelujah.” Well, we can think about that and reinterpret it in a way that’s going to be consistent with what we talk about today. But these sorts of songs and this sort of at best kind of sloppy approach to what the resurrection of Jesus Christ is about has created a situation where N.T. Wright in his newest book called *Surprised by Hope* is viewed as some kind of strange propounder of weird doctrine when he talks about the resurrection body of the Lord Jesus Christ and the fact that we’re not going as much as the Bible says that Jesus is coming to us.

We don’t go up to heaven, and ours is the skies now in the sense of this earth is unimportant, that heaven is what’s true. No. Jesus returns. And when Jesus returns, heaven and earth are united in a fuller sense. Which is a little prefigurement of that is the Lord’s day worship service when Christ comes in special presence at the table with us. You know, Christianity has become a little bit like the movie *2001: A Space Odyssey*.

Salvation is sort of seen that way. In *2001: A Space Odyssey*, I know many of you younger people haven’t seen it, but it’s worth seeing. It’s a beautifully made movie with nice music, etc. And salvation is sort of portrayed there as release from the body. As you watch the movie, there are all these eating scenes. Every time a scene goes on, there are people eating all the time, eating all the time. They’re going to the bathroom. You know, they’re exercising bodily functions. And when the starship gets halfway into the movie, it goes to where it’s being led by the beacon forward, into salvation. The man, the new Adam, we could say, from the perspective of Arthur C. Clarke—whose death was just last week, by the way—he is saved by being transformed away from his body in the concluding scenes of the movie, up to him becoming the star child in the skies.

He’s released. He’s shown not eating, not going to the restroom, and not sleeping. And the idea is that salvation for Clarke’s vision of *2001* is transcendence away from the body. We want to be released from this body. We want to fly away. I’m going to go up into the heavens and I’m not going to have this horrible body to deal with anymore. And the star child is in the heavens and it’s we’re kind of one with the universe now.

Many Christians fall into the same way of thinking because, you know, not being careful with what we say. And there’s an interview with N.T. Wright by *Time* magazine online you can read, and there’s also a YouTube video of his appearance on *Nightline* a couple of weeks ago speaking of this new book. And in both the interview and the YouTube interview on *Nightline*, they asked him, “Well, this doesn’t sound like *Left Behind*. You’re not consistent with the, you know, popular novels *Left Behind*.”

And he says, “Well, of course I’m not.” And he deals with that in the book as well. But those things have become so popular that our vision of salvation has become more like *2001*, an escape from the body, rather than the resurrection body of the Lord Jesus Christ and the almost superhysicality that body exhibits, which we’ll talk about in a minute.

On a better note, we sang “Christ is risen, Christ the first fruit, fruits of the holy harvest field,” and that’s a good imagery. His resurrection day that we celebrate is the first fruits, and we’ll all have bodies like Christ. That’s what 1 Corinthians 15 said, which will with which all its full abundance at his second coming yield. The resurrection of the body happens at the second coming of Jesus. We’re not going to heaven in the long term. Heaven is coming to earth. Well, heaven and earth are united. But Jesus comes back and when Jesus returns the bodies of his people then are transformed into his glorified body, which we’ll talk about in a minute from 1 Corinthians 15.

So this second coming is all-important. The resurrection promises the resurrection of our bodies at the second coming when he returns. We’re not so much going as he’s coming back again.

Now there is an interim stage when we die. We’re present with Christ. Paul says that in a condition of restfulness and peace and consciousness. Surely Christ Paul looked forward to the consciousness of his rest with Christ. But that wasn’t the end of the thing. His soul with Jesus. That’s another thing. We read about our souls all the time. And that’s okay if by soul we recognize the fullness of who we are. But when we talk about soul, we usually mean disembodied spirit. And this again would be a false view of the eternal state. Here on earth we have bodies. Heaven and earth are combined together. And so this is a good verse.

“First fruit of the holy harvest field, which will at its full abundance at his second coming yield. Then the golden ears of harvest will their heads before him wave, ripened by his glorious sunshine from the furrows of the grave,” a resurrection of us in relationship to what the savior has accomplished. So we sing good songs, but sometimes these songs are a little different.

Maria Shriver in a popular children’s book these days describes heaven as a beautiful place where you can sit on soft clouds and talk. If you’re good throughout your life, then you get to go there and sit on these nice soft clouds. And we’ve seen pictures of angels, men becoming angels with harps in heaven, etc. There’s some truth to the harp thing. But this is a radical misstatement of the Christian truth.

In Christianity, what really is of significance in terms of the resurrection is what Wright calls “life after life after death.” So there’s a life after death—a presence with Christ in a disembodied state—but that’s temporary. And when Jesus returns, we have our new bodies. And that is the culmination. That’s what we point to. That’s what the resurrection is a signpost pointing us toward: life after life after death. So that’s what we want to talk about today a little bit. Jesus had a transformed body, and 1 Corinthians talks about that.

Let’s turn to the text then, and I want to make several brief points here. We read first of all in verse 12 that there are some that deny the resurrection of the dead. Now Paul makes a big deal out of this. It’s interesting, isn’t it? Because we know that in Judaism all kinds of people didn’t believe in the resurrection of the dead. There’s a whole group of them called Sadducees. And even the ones that did believe in the resurrection of the dead had various concepts or truths about it. It wasn’t central to what they were as a church, as Judaism. But in the Christian church, the resurrection is an absolutely necessary truth. It’s at the core. It’s the foundation of everything else. Paul makes that point here, doesn’t he? Without this, he says, “Well, we’re the most pitiable of all men.”

Resurrection changes. This is kind of a radical new thing. Yeah, we can see some prefigurements of resurrection in the Old Testament. Psalm 22, looking back on it, we can see that it sort of portrays Jesus and his death and the father raising him up and all that stuff and then the world gets saved. We can sort of see that, but to the reader at the time I don’t think they could see the resurrection. The Messiah was never perceived as one who would die and resurrect.

Now there was a belief in the general resurrection. When Jesus said that Lazarus would rise, you know, his sister says, “Well, I know he’ll rise in the resurrection,” and by the resurrection they meant the general resurrection. Something very unusual is happening here with this “first fruits” idea. Jesus Christ and our resurrection—these are split events. So resurrection, the general resurrection, is now going to happen because of the singular resurrection that happens in history two thousand years ago.

Now, when the Bible uses the term resurrection, it doesn’t mean resuscitation. Jesus’s body—and we’ll look at this in a few minutes—but Jesus’s body, his resurrected, glorified body, is not just his old body brought back to life. You know, Lazarus was in the tomb. He was raised back up. And God somehow, you know, dealt with the destructive, corruptive elements that resulted in a bad smell in the tomb from Lazarus having died. But it’s still Lazarus’s old body. Lazarus doesn’t have his new body yet, and he’s going to die again. And that’s rather obvious. So that’s different.

But in the resurrection, when the term resurrection is used, it always means this: not resuscitation, but something transformed, something new—at least in the context of the Christian church, not so in Judaism. So there’s this radical new emphasis on resurrection from the dead. Yes, we can see it being prefigured somewhat in prophetic text. But have you ever noticed that as you read the gospel accounts of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus? Nearly all of the references to scripture are found in the crucifixion side of that. The resurrection side has relatively few, very few direct citations back to the Old Testament.

Something new and radical has happened, and I think God, you know, sort of likes to put wrappings on the present and keep it a little hidden for a while. And in the Old Testament, the resurrection was there, but it was kind of wrapped up. Jesus Christ comes and he makes known what is the great foundational event of his people and all of history: the resurrection. And so we read that here.

Now, Paul wants to make sure that nobody in the Christian church—unlike having a group of Sadducees—nobody will mistake the fact that there is a resurrection from the dead. You know, Jews also had various conceptions of what that resurrection would look like and what sort of bodies it is. Not so Paul. He wants to make sure that we understand this core doctrine of the faith. He says then in verse 14, if Christ isn’t risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty. This is not some optional doctrine as it was in Judaism. This is essential to the Christian message.

And let me say this quite clearly. You know, if you are here today and you do not believe in the resurrection—the bodily resurrection, the new body of the Lord Jesus Christ with physicality to it. If you do not believe in that historical event, Paul says whatever else you might believe, it’s all vain. There’s no point to it. You’re really not, you know, a Christian. Paul says being a Christian has as its core a belief in the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. Faith is in vain if we don’t believe that.

And not only that, he says—you know, I’ve heard this argument from wonderful, excellent Christian people—and they have a few doubts about, you know, some things about resurrection or resurrection life, and they think, “Well, even if the Bible isn’t true about this, we at least have lived really good moral lives here as opposed to pagan lives.” And Paul says no. He doesn’t want you thinking that way. He doesn’t want you thinking it’s okay not to have dealt definitively with God’s claim in the scriptures that is true, that Jesus Christ has been resurrected. Because he says that if we do this, we assert a false resurrection then he says that we of all men are most pitiable.

To Paul, the resurrection was a resurrection, not a resuscitation. It was a coming into a new body. Now notice though that Jesus’s new body has connection to his old body. When they go to the tomb it’s empty. So the new body is not totally discontinuous with the old body, right? The old body is totally gone. It’s totally transformed in the context of the new body. So this is what resurrection is in the scriptures: this transformation of the old body into a wonderful new body. But the old body is all used up.

But in any event, this resurrection is absolutely critical and it is a core doctrine of the Christian faith. And without that doctrine, our faith is vain. It is exceedingly important—the implications of this aspect to us and then to what Christianity is. So 1 Corinthians 15 tells us these things.

And then in verse 20: “Now Christ is risen from the dead and has become the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.” Now if we just remember “first fruits,” then we’ll not go into this ridiculous notion that somehow we’re a disembodied spirit being released into non-physicality. Because remember that Christ’s resurrection body is the first fruits of our resurrection bodies.

So the resurrection is of central significance. Without it, everything else is in vain. The resurrection is this new body being transformed from the old body. It’s coming, that body, coming into new, more real we could say, dimensions. And that doesn’t apply just to Jesus. The message of the resurrection is that you, brother and sister in the Lord Jesus Christ, you will have new bodies. If you had hope to live apart from the enslavement of a body, forget it. The scriptures say that Christ is the first fruits and as a result we also will be raised up.

Continuing on in 1 Corinthians 15: “For since by man came death, by man also came the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive.” So those who are in Christ will be—it’s a set. That set of people in Christ is exactly identical to the set of people who will be made alive, who will have resurrection bodies.

“But each one in his own order, Christ the first fruits, afterwards, those who are Christ at his coming.” And this is another emphasis point of this text: that we’re to look forward not to going to heaven, but we’re to look forward to heaven—if we want to use that term—coming to us.

Now, as I said, when we die, we are with Christ and in a disembodied state. The scriptures are clear about that. But the real focal point of the resurrection is that Jesus will come. And when Jesus comes for the second and final time, then our bodies will be involved in this transformation, this resurrection state as well.

So he’s first fruits and the accomplishment of the full harvest is the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ.

“Then comes the end when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father, when he has put an end to all rule and authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all enemies under his feet.”

Now this says that the resurrection is directly related to the reign of Jesus Christ in heaven but affecting things on earth. And when we pray, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” we have to understand that while the connection between heaven and earth will become ultimatized in the resurrection and the second coming, heaven and earth will be joined. There’s a sense in which they’re joined now because a body like this is now at the right hand of the Father in heaven.

Now, heaven isn’t some place way up there. We can talk about transcendence, but it’s another reality. You know, it’s sort of like the science fiction stuff. It’s another dimension. It’s not here. But wherever it is and whatever it is, there is physicality to it. Jesus Christ reigns from heaven and that has an impact on earth. He reigns until all of his enemies become his footstool. And so, the resurrection is directly linked in Paul’s treatment of it here to the reign and victory of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So the resurrection is about—it is always seen in the scriptures as the resurrection of a new body. It is of great importance in the doctrine of the Christian faith. It is of central and most significant importance.

Third, yet we’re also going to be raised up. He’s first fruits.

Fourth, this resurrection body we will receive at the second coming.

And then five, in the meantime, there is an eschatological significance to all of this. The resurrection of Jesus Christ means that he now reigns from heaven and he will reign until all enemies be made his footstool. So there’s a resurrection and there’s an eschatological dimension to the resurrection. Jesus is the Messiah who has been crucified and now has been raised up and he rules from the right hand of the Father. And all those messianic hopes have begun already. In other words, the putting all enemies under his feet does not wait for the second coming. He waits. He sits at the right hand of the Father and rules there on earth, and the end result of that is changes to things in the context of the world.

So you know, if you take an Arthur C. Clarke *2001* approach to eschatology, then these bodies, the food, all the physicality of this world—it’s all pointless because it’s all being transcended. We’re going to evolve away from it and we’re going to have no need for these things. Okay. But if you take a biblical position, well, there’s physicality in heaven and that physicality produces reign of Jesus Christ in a heightened sense in the New Covenant times on earth. And all of this is directly affected. It’s of great significance.

If all of this is going to go away and is not going to be transformed, then this loses significance. What I do to my body is unimportant because who likes the darn thing anyway? I want away from it. What I do with this world is unimportant because Jesus is going to come back and throw it all away and set up a new heavens and new earth.

But what is that new heavens and new earth in Revelation? It’s pictured as glorification coming over the old heaven and old earth, as it were, transforming it and glorifying it. You know, one of the few movies I actually cried at was *Beauty and the Beast*, a cartoon. But the conclusion of that movie—when the spell is broken, when sin is dealt with—they have this beautiful conclusion to that movie. This is in other Disney movies as well. But the cups and saucers and things that were really people start to spring to full physicality of their human bodies again. And the castle and its grounds that had become kind of thorn-infested and kind of dingy looking—it all becomes gold and silver, roses where thorns were.

Now it’s not a whole new castle and it’s not a whole new garden. It is a transformed, mature, glorified old world. So what we do in the context of this world has significance. And I think that eschatology of Jesus Christ that 1 Corinthians talks about in direct relationship to this treatment of the resurrection of Jesus is very significant for us. It ties together the physical resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ with what is happening now in the context of our world.

Sixth—and I didn’t read this text, but we skip down—and look at verse 44. And this is sort of where some of the problems we have as Christians with the resurrection begin to come into play.

Look at verse 44: “It is sown a natural body. It is raised a spiritual body. And so we begin to think in terms of flesh and spirit, physicality and non-physicality. But remember, he’s expounding on what happened to Jesus. Then Jesus was physical. So dump that idea.

Now the particular Greek words here have to do with all that a man is and then his new spirit-filled existence. But just understand: if these words start to throw you, think of them in terms of what happened with Jesus because he’s the first fruits. So it’s sown a mortal body, it’s raised a spiritual body, and he goes on and develops this.

“Then 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.’ So the same with us. You know, Jesus had a body, a natural body subject to the fall and all that stuff, and then he has a spiritual body. And there’s a transformation in his bodily state.

“The first is of the earth, made of dust. The second man is the Lord from heaven.”

Now, it’s interesting because when we talk about heaven as disembodied spirits, they seem less real to us. But here he’s making the point that the natural body is not more physical or more real. It’s dust compared to heavenly materials.

C.S. Lewis captures this imagery in his book *The Great Divorce*. So, people go to heaven and they’re maturing in their glory. They’re becoming more weighty. But other people are not. Well, the grass there is so real that it hurts to walk on it. Things are more substantial in heaven.

And because of our Greek ideas that we bring to this text, we think of the spiritual as being dust-like. But God says no. That we’ll be a shadow of our former selves. But we are now shadows of our future selves, okay? Guy loses a lot of weight. He’s a shadow of his former self. And that’s what we think salvation is. But salvation in the scriptures says that no, our insubstantial state is now. And the transformation of that becomes a more substantial, heavier thing. We’re like dust now. We have bodies of dust. But then: “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.”

Well, the heavenly man is Jesus, right? In the resurrection accounts. And he could walk through walls. He could appear in the midst of rooms. Why? Because this world, as much as we think it’s so solid and stable compared to the heavenly realities of the new resurrection, the new creation, our new bodies, is rather insubstantial in comparison to all of those things.

So, Jesus is the model for us here. He—we bear the image of the man of dust. We shall also bear the image of the heavenly man. We shall also bear the image of the heavenly man.

So, this Jesus is what we’re going to be like. This Jesus is what we’re going to be like.

Let me read some of the accounts of this. Yeah, from the Gospel accounts, Matthew. Matthew’s gospel, Matthew 28. We read in verse 9 that Jesus met them saying, “Rejoice.” So we have a physical body that can speak words, that can make sounds—not a spirit. It’s heard by other ears that pick up sound vibrations. He speaks. “They came and held him by his feet.” He had real feet. Okay? They held him by his feet. He’s not a spirit. He’s not some sort of a disembodied spirit.

Mark 16 says in verse 19: “So then after the Lord had spoken to them, he was received up into heaven, sat down at the right hand of God.” So his essential base of operations is heaven. Now again, we don’t want to think of heaven as somehow spiritual only because this body that could be held and had feet and could speak, and we’ll see in a minute, could eat—this body is what goes to heaven. He doesn’t change again. He’s got his resurrected, glorified body and he goes to heaven with it.

In Luke 24, we read in verse 16: “Their eyes were restrained so that they did not know him.” And I bring this up because, you know, the recognition of Christ in his resurrected body—people do recognize him, but sometimes they don’t. But here we’re told they didn’t recognize him because their eyes were restrained. So, I’m not sure about the recognition factor, but it seems like more often than not Jesus is given as one who is recognizable because it’s a transformed, glorified version of his previous body.

Luke 24—this is one of those instances where he appears. Now, as they said these things that were meeting, Jesus himself stood in their midst. And the idea is he just appears in the context of them. How he gets there, we don’t know, but he has this ability in his body to come into the midst of them in a rather radical state.

Verse 39: He says, “Behold my hands and my feet that it is I myself. Handle me and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see I have.” So he’s saying that, you know, if I’m just a ghost I wouldn’t have flesh and bones, but I do. I got flesh. I got bones. I got hands. I got feet. You know, he’s a real man. His body is not a spiritual, non-physical body.

Now listen, folks. If you don’t believe this, then you’re more pitiable than all men. This is what you have to believe. This is the orthodox faith. This is the central doctrine of the faith according to Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 15 and the rest of the New Testament. This is it. The resurrection is the whole deal, so to speak.

And then he says to them in verse 41: “Do you have any food here?” So they gave him a piece of broiled fish and some honeycomb, and he took it and ate it in their presence. You see, Arthur C. Clarke’s wrong. The heavenly state, the eternal state with our bodies, will be ones that can eat and will eat. That’s what Jesus did.

1 Corinthians says we’re like him. We look at his example of his physicality and then his super-physicality, not the loss of physicality. And he can be touched, he can be held, he says things, he can push sound vibrations into the air. And he can eat things. And not only can he eat them, he wants to eat them. Jesus is hungry in the resurrection. I don’t know, you know, no need for that. I don’t know what it is, but I know that in our resurrection bodies, we’re going to eat. We’re going to feast in eternity.

He’s then in the ascension account in Luke’s gospel, he’s parted from them and carried up into heaven. So there is the ascension there, which is a different thing we’ll talk about in a few weeks.

In John’s gospel—I think this is John’s gospel. Yeah—we read in verse 19 that the same day at evening being the first day of the week when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in the midst and said to them, “Peace.” So again, he can go through shut doors. He can go through shut doors.

And then in verse 22, he breathes on them and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” So this is a body that has capability of breath. Okay? He can blow in his resurrection body.

And again in verse 26, he came and the doors were shut. And then he says this time to Thomas, “Reach your fingers here and look at my hands and reach your hand here and put it in my side.”

Now this is a remarkable thing. He—we know he has physicality. We know he has a body. But in his resurrection body, his wounds still are there. See, this is very much relating to this transformation of the old body. His wounds are still there.

Now I don’t want you to worry that, you know, the martyrs who are beheaded—they’re going to end up in the eternal state without heads or their head will be over here and their body over there. That’s not the idea. The other—the medieval church, the early church—talked about this and they said, “Well, what happens if a Christian is eaten by a cannibal and the cannibal converts? In the resurrection, is it for one body or two?” And the answer was: God will take care of all this stuff.

So I think that what we’re told here, and this has to do with its application to us in our lives, is that the sacrificial work of Jesus Christ for other people—it’s dying on the cross. The wounds he received, they are not done away with in heaven. They’re glorified in heaven. And this has to do with, you know, one of the basic points I want to make about so what about all this. And that is that what Jesus did follows him into the heavenly existence.

So the emblems of our sacrifices, our sufferings, the things we’ve suffered. You see, some of those, at least according to the example when we look at Jesus as our example, we can see that they’re going to follow us. We’ll talk more about this in a couple of minutes, but one way to think about this is: I don’t know the details of what all this means in terms of the resurrection state, the glorification of the earth, what happens to the structures here and the trees, etc., the second coming of Jesus, and exactly what it means in terms of our bodies.

But these things that are given to us are like signposts pointing us to kind of a misty thing that we can’t see, but we have some concept of it. Much like the Old Testament had some misty hints of that great present that would be opened in resurrection morning, right? And then revealed for us in the scripture. And what we know is there’s tremendous blessings for us. And those blessings in the future are somehow tied to our work now in the present. And that seems quite important.

And so we read that Jesus has these wounds that Thomas can put his hand into.

Verse 9 of Acts chapter 1: We read that when he had spoken these things, while they watched, he was taken up and a cloud received him out of their sight. This is part of the problem we run into, is that, you know, people think a cloud received him out of sight. So Jesus goes up and people make fun because we send the spaceships up and, “Oh, heaven isn’t up here after all.”

Well, it was never intended to be taken that way—that if we just go far enough, we can reach heaven. No, it’s again to use a science fiction sort of term: it’s more like—I hate to put it this way—it is the ultimate parallel universe that gives sense to our universe. It’s the reality from which this image of reality has come. And so it is. And the idea of a cloud—we would have to read into this the ideas of clouds throughout the scriptures. Clouds are like the places of angels, God’s presence, his glory chariot. And it is the Father’s glory chariot that can be said to transport Jesus into the right hand of the Father.

And then we read in verse 11: The angel tells them, “They’re looking up and the angel says, ‘This Jesus who was taken up from you into heaven will so come in like manner as you see him go into heaven.’” So, he immediately points them not that they want to fly away with Jesus. He says, “Jesus is going to come to you.”

So again, it corrects us.

Now, now listen to some of the ways we deal with this stuff. And I don’t want to pick on these songs necessarily. A modern songwriter who died about thirty years ago, Al Brumley, who was inducted into the Country Gospel Music Hall of Fame, has this famous song. Allison Krauss has a recent edition of it: “I’ll Fly Away.”

And listen to these words: “Some glad morning when this life is over, I’ll fly away to a home on God’s celestial shore. I’ll fly away. I’ll fly away. Oh glory. I’ll fly away in the morning when I die. Hallelujah, by and by. I’ll fly away.”

When the shadows of this life have gone, I’ll fly away. No continuity with this life in this song.

Now, we could read it again in a charitable way, which I should do, I suppose. Yeah, we’re going to leave troubles and trials. But they’re connected to what we are in the future like a bird from prison bars has flown. “I’ll fly away.” See, the flesh is seen as prison. It’s something we don’t like. Physicality. We want to get away from it. “I’ll fly away, oh glory. I’ll fly away in the morning. Just a few more weary days and then I’ll fly away to a land where joy shall never end. I’ll fly away.”

See, that just leads people into woefully mistaken truths about the resurrection state.

Now, as I said, you know, when we die, we are with Christ. We are at present with him. But this doesn’t say that this is an interim state. This is what we’re supposed to be forever. And the implications of *2001*—sort of salvation—is a few more weary days on my way. All of this doesn’t mean much either. This is the whole world. The created order that God said was what? Good. Is seen as something evil and bad and wicked. And we just want to get away from the whole thing, the created order. We don’t want to see its transformation and we certainly then don’t work for its transformation.

You don’t polish brass on a sinking ship. And I would say we do polish brass on a sinking ship. I would say that we absolutely polish brass, and that in the transformed state in the second coming, the brass becomes gold, but it’s still there. And somehow our polishing of it is part of all of that.

The early church talked about collaborative eschatology. They thought that the end result of the resurrection was that our new life in Christ, that heaven, eternity, this thing we’re talking about in the future, the transformed new world, has now entered present reality and begins to leaven this thing. It begins to change this thing. And so what we do has tremendous significance.

But the other view—that the body is a prison—makes all of physicality a prison. We want to get away from it.

Charles Wesley—Arminian—says this: “And let this feeble body fail and let it droop and die. My soul shall quit the mournful veil and soar to worlds on high. Shall join the disembodied saints and find its long sought rest, that only bliss for which it pants in my Redeemer’s breast.”

Now, if this is talking about the interim state, great. But this seems to be Wesley’s vision of what heaven is. At least if you sing this song, there’s no, you know, conclusion moving from that into the eternal state, the second coming with physicality. No, the body is seen as something horrible and feeble. He wants to get away from it. “Quit this mournful veil. This world is just a mournful veil.”

“In hope of that immortal crown, I now the cross sustain and gladly wander up and down and smile at toil and pain. I suffer out my three score years till my deliverer come and wipe away his servant’s tears and take his exile home.”

So here the second coming itself is said to take us—to make us home. Where in reality the second coming is to transform us and have us live here with heaven and earth combined.

So this view is the earth is never a permanent place even in a transformed state.

“Oh what hath Jesus brought for me before my ravished eyes? Rivers of life divine I see and trees of paradise I see a world of spirits bright who taste the pleasure there. Spirits! See again, disembodied spirits! They are all robed in spotless white and wearing palms they bear.”

“What are all my sufferings here, oh Lord, if Lord thou count me meet with that enraptured host to appear and worship at thy feet? Give joy or grief, give ease of pain, take life or friends away, but let me find them all again in that eternal day.”

So the eternal day is described as this disembodied state.

Now maybe I’m being uncharitable toward Wesley and maybe you’ll correct me, and that’s fine. But when Christians in our day and age who are not taught orthodox about the second coming are singing this stuff, we end up like Maria Shriver, like so many people today, that heaven is just some sort of disembodied state.

Even Watts—now we picked on the country western guy and we picked on the Arminian Wesley. Now we’ll pick on one of our favorites, Isaac Watts:

“Absent from flesh, oh blissful thought, what unknown joys this moment brings. Freed from the mischiefs sin has bought from pains and fears and all their springs.”

Okay, if you think of it just in terms of the transformation of this body. But that doesn’t seem to be what he’s getting at.

“Absent from flesh, illustrious day, surprising scene, triumphant stroke that rends the prison of my clay. And I can feel my feathers broke.”

So the clay is a prison. It’s, you know, it needs to be broken through. We want to be like the star child transcending eating and bodily functions.

“Absent from flesh. Watts continues: Then rise my soul where feet nor wings could never climb beyond the heaven where planets roll, measuring the cares and joys of time. I go where God and glory shine. His presence makes eternal day. My all that’s mortal, I resign, for angels wait and point my way.”

“All that’s mortal, I resign.” So the interim state seems to be ultimatized by Watts in terms of this reality.

So this is the problem we have: as we’re so affected by all of this that we forget who we really are.

Now, the text goes on to say after it says that we’ll bear this image, this transformed state—going back to 1 Corinthians 15:51: “Behold, I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall be changed.”

Now, sleep is a metaphor for death in the scriptures. It’s a term that’s used for death. We’ll be changed. Our physical states will be transformed. We won’t be disembodied spirits. He’s saying we’ll be changed. But there is this sleep notion and this is a notion that can help us to think about this.

We live, we die, and in our death, the New Testament kind of connects it to sleep. Now, it’s different than sleep because we’re conscious of the presence of Christ. But it is a restful, peaceful, conscious existence with the Savior. That’s what the sleep of—if you die tonight or tomorrow or whatever it is—that’s where you’ll be for a while. You’ll be with the Savior, your conscious, resting, peaceful. This is like sleep, but you don’t stay asleep, right? You get up in the morning and you come back to your body again, and you then do things in the context of that body. So this is what the scriptures teach.

There is death, but because of the work of Jesus, when we’re when we die, we sleep in this eternal state of presence with Christ—not eternal, rather an interim state. But the eternal state is one of wakefulness. We come back from the dead, so to speak. Jesus gives us our new bodies and we do things here on earth in a physical, super-physical world.

The scriptures in Romans 8 draw connection between this transformation of the body and the transformation of the created order. This physicality change that the resurrection of Jesus Christ produces is said to also be then the image for the created order. So the new heavens and new earth—we can think of it in the same way. Of this he—this earth and the new earth and this body and the new body. And all the significance of the connection between our bodies now and our future body, seen in the body of Jesus Christ and his glorified body.

This we can think of as well the scriptures say in terms of the actual created universe as well.

So a better song comes from originally attributed to Thomas à Kempis in the fifteenth century. Listen to this verse from one of his songs:

“Oh how glorious and resplendent fragile body shalt thou be, when endued with so much beauty, full of health and strong and free, full of vigor, full of pleasure that shall last eternally.”

Now that’s the doctrine of the resurrection and its application for us. Our fragile bodies will become full of vigor, resplendent, enjoying pleasures—not some kind of Gnostic, pleasureless, soulless exist—or disembodied spirit existence. But rather a fullness.

There’s a movie called *Wolf* with Jack Nicholson, and I hate to—I don’t want to compare this to Jack Nicholson or a what do you call that—a wolf man. But in the movie, he gets bit by a wolf, not a normal wolf. And he becomes a wolf. But the transition to that happens through sleep. So he gets bit and then he sleeps for twenty hours and he gets up and starts acting lupine. He starts acting like a wolf.

Well, in the same way, that’s with us, or the opposite. We’ve been kissed by the Lord Jesus Christ through faith and belief in him, given by his grace. We, after this life is over, we’ll enter a period of sleep. But the sleep will end. We’ll wake up. Jesus will return. We’ll have a new heaven, a new earth joined together. This physicality will become super-physicality. And this body, as 1 Corinthians says, will put on—the spiritual body will become eternal in what it is.

So, that’s a good illustration I think of what these scriptures teach.

Finally, going back to 1 Corinthians 15, he says in verse 57: “But thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

“Therefore, my beloved brethren, so you know, Jesus was raised up, got a great new body, has eternal life, sits at the right hand of the Father. Well, that’s perfectly good for him, you know, nice for him. What does it have to do with us?”

And we’ve talked about the promises of what it does have to do with us. But here’s the cash value. What’s our response to this tremendous gospel of new creation? Paul, after giving us this very involved treatment of resurrection life says, “The therefore, okay, so what’s the point?”

“Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labor is not in vain in the Lord.”

Now, I don’t understand all that means, but it means at least this much: that this vision of heaven—as opposed to the *2001* vision—doesn’t take away the significance of what we have here. Paul uses the whole argument to tell us that what we have here has heightened significance. “Therefore, be steadfast, immovable, abounding in the work of the Lord. Why? Because your labor isn’t going to be burned up and thrown away. You’re not oiling a machine that’s going to be rolled over a cliff. You’re not planting a rose garden that will just be burned up and discarded.

What you’re doing, in some sense, is not in vain. There’s a sense in which what we do here—Jesus’s wounds again are in that new creation. They’re in his body. All the labors that you do, and I know so many of you do so many things for people that is not appreciated, that’s discarded, that’s trashed and thrown away. I think women do this more. It’s interesting the resurrection. It’s women who are the first witnesses, right? Unexpected and surprising.

Women need to hear that all that stuff they do has significance. The sacrifices you have done for your families, for your children, for the church, for other people that have not been appreciated by other people will be appreciated—are appreciated by Jesus Christ. And somehow those works will follow you into eternity. It’s a signpost. I don’t know what it means specifically, but I know that it’s true. I know that it has significance for us.

You know, in Philippians, we read that our citizenship is in heaven, from which also we eagerly wait for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body, that it may be conformed to the glorious body, according to the working by which he is able, even to subdue all things to himself.

“Therefore, My beloved and long for brethren, my joy and crown so stand fast in the Lord.”

What’s he saying? We think our citizenship is in heaven. That’s where we’re going. To heck with all of this. I’ll just paddle through this veil of tears and these weary days and I’ll just put up with it all because I know my citizenship is in heaven and that’s where I’m going.

Philippi was a Roman colony. Their citizenship was in Rome, and they were established as an outpost for Rome and for Hellenism and the culture that their own wanted to spread. That’s what he’s alluding to here. Our citizenship is in that heavenly reality, the super-physicality at the right hand of the Father. Now, that’s where our citizenship is. And therefore, because of that, we’re to see ourselves as an outpost of the Lord Jesus Christ, transforming this world, changing the world, bringing his culture, his politics, his view of beauty, his salvation—which is holistic—to the whole world.

This is what we’re doing now. It’s not disconnected from what will happen in the future. This is what he says: our citizenship in heaven, but he’s transform—he will transform our lowly body. He will transform our lowly body. He, and that will happen in terms of the work you do as well, and conform to it. And therefore stand fast in the Lord. Work hard at what you are doing. What you do is not in vain.

Let me quote from Revelation 21. It says: “The kings of the earth shall bring their glory into it.”

Now, Jeff Meyers writes this about this quote: “Now, I think that statement refers to the present time, but there’s an application to be made to the final new heavens and new earth after the coming of Christ. All of our cultural accomplishments will be carried over into that new era so that there will be continuity with human history.”

Now, I guess the Dutch Reformed people have developed this at some length in their history—that this statement in Revelation, that the kings of the earth shall bring their glory into it, the new heavens and the new earth, means that the cultural work we do, the transformative work we do, the sacrificial work and the transformative work, will be brought into that new creation. And so we don’t do things in vain. We’re God’s fellow workers.

We’re told in Corinthians the second coming will burn up wood, hay, and stubble. But it doesn’t burn up silver and gold and precious stones. It purifies them. And so our work here is like silver and gold—the work in Christ. And the second coming will transform those things, not completely obliterate them, and start new. Jesus didn’t get a new body that wasn’t somehow connected to his old. His old isn’t there anymore because it had become transformed into the new. And the same is true of us.

Quoting from I think this is N.T. Wright: “What you do in the present by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself will last—will last into God’s future. These activities are not simple ways to make the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether. They are part of what we may call building for God’s kingdom.

Doing close up in the present the resurrection of Jesus. Doing close up in the present what he was promising long-term in the future. And what he was promising for that future and doing in that present was not saving souls for a disembodied eternity but rescuing people from the corruption and decay of the way the world presently is so that they could enjoy already in the present that renewal of creation which is God’s ultimate purpose. And so they could thus become colleagues and partners in that larger project.”

Beauty and the Beast. What you do has significance. He has brought us to this. And so Wright says that salvation affected by the resurrection is:

Number one, about the whole human being, not merely souls.

Two, it’s about the present, not just the future. The future has invaded the present. The new world has come and the resurrection body of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And three, what God does through—not merely what God does in and for us. There’s an aspect that all the cash value then is to do work because this is what this is all about. We now are supposed to do the work of the church in transforming the world in ways that somehow in an odd way that we cannot fully understand, but which the scriptures clearly point us to, has some eternal significance. The riches of the kings will be brought into the new creation.

Salvation. We’re not just saved from something. We’re saved to something. We have political elections going on. The biblical doctrine of election isn’t away from a punishment. It is election to do something for Jesus, to be conformed to his image in the present world and then ultimately in the eternal world as well. We’re electing Jesus Christ for a purpose. Our purpose is absolutely rooted to the historical realities.

I’m going to quote. I criticized Isaac Watts. And now I’m going to quote favorably a poem by William Blake, highly unorthodox, not Orthodox Christian mystic, Christian mystic. But these words, I think, do sort of get at some of this stuff.

“Let the slave grinding at the mill run out into the field. Let him look up into the heavens and laugh in the bright air. Let the inchained soul shut up in darkness and in sighing whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years rise and look out. His chains are loose. His dungeon doors are open. And let his wife and children return from the oppressor’s scourge. They look behind at every step and believe it is a dream, singing, ‘The sun has left its blackness and has found a fresher morning. And the fair moon rejoices in the dear and cloudless night. For empire is no more. And now the Lion and wolf shall cease. For everything that lives is holy. For everything that lives is holy. For everything that lives is holy.’

“What is the price of experience? Do men buy it for a song or wisdom for a dance in the street? No. It is bought with the price of all that a man hath, his house, his wife, his children.”

That’s the price that Jesus Christ paid. All that he had. He paid that price. And the end result was buying us this wonderful world characterized in this poem by Blake and by the prophets of the Old Testament and by these wondrous truths from 1 Corinthians 15 as well.

Surely, surely God has come to bring us a sense of wonder, a sense of awe at the beauty of what he has accomplished in bringing heaven and earth together definitively in the work of the Lord Jesus Christ in his resurrection and then culminatively at the conclusion of time to which our lives move as well.

Let’s pray.

Lord God, we thank you for the wondrous work of the Lord Jesus Christ. We thank you for its implications for our lives. Help us, Father, to be built up to the end. That we would indeed be steadfast, immovable, abounding in your work, knowing that what we do here, we labor not in vain. That the righteousness of the saints comprises the garment of the wedding feast, that the bride goes to. That the works we do here are somehow eternalized at this second coming of our savior that works for him.

Help us then, Lord God, to rejoice today, to have awe and wonder at what’s been accomplished. And tomorrow morning get up from our sleep ready to serve Christ, taking these future realities into the present world.

In Jesus name we ask it and for the sake of his kingdom. Amen.