Bearing A New Image

I Corinthians 15:35-58

Welcome! Today we continue our exploration of the book of I Corinthians, finishing Chapter 15. This entire wonderful chapter focuses on resurrection. Today we will look at verses 35 to 58, but I want to first review the earlier part of the chapter.

Before I do this, though, I want to talk in some depth about Gnosticism. We have touched on Gnosticism at various times while going through I Corinthians and in other series, but I think a deeper treatment will help us in appreciating some of today’s passage.

The first thing to understand about Gnosticism is that it is a heresy – that is, it teaches things contrary to the Bible. As such, if you are a Bible believer, you may find your blood pressure rising as I share some of these things. For a believer, some of the things Gnosticism teaches – especially when it comes to their understanding of who God is – are offensive. Now Gnosticism was not singular in its beliefs, but instead had many variations and evolved over the centuries, much like modern “New Age” theology is far from unified but almost has an “anything goes as long as it denies Christianity” flavor to it. It is possible that the origins of Gnosticism occurred in places where the Bible was unknown, but there is no question that many of the strands of Gnosticism were very aware of the Old Testament and presented their claims as a direct countering of Bible claims. Later versions of Gnosticism attacked the Gospels as well, and this is why you see refutations of Gnostic ideas frequently in the New Testament letters and also in many of the writings of the early church fathers.

So what did Gnosticism teach? I am going to present the answer through a series of terms. The first is Monad. The Monad was the Supreme Being. Literally, the word means the “one”. Other names include the Aion Teleos (meaning the perfect higher being), the Bythos (the Deep or Profound One). Another name is the Proarche (meaning “before the beginning,” a dig against God – because Genesis starts with “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth.” The idea of Proarche is that this is the being doing stuff before that.)

Flowing forth out of the Monad, according to Gnostics, were Aeons. It’s hard to explain what Aeons were believed to be, because they varied so much depending on which specific Gnostic group was naming them. But they were always thought of as non-material beings proceeding forth from the Monad.  They would combine in some way – in some groups explained as a male-female pairing – and further generations of Aeons flowed from the first. In total there might be a few dozen such Aeons, depending again on the particular group’s theology. Their names? Things like mind and truth and hope and love and so on. The Aeons were generally viewed as good, with one exception – Sophia (wisdom), one of the final generation of Aeons.

What did Sophia do? She birthed the Demiurge. She knew she was wrong to do it, so he hid him from the Monad and the rest of the Aeons. In isolation, and thinking himself alone, the Demiurge created materiality – that is, stuff, that is, the universe and all that is in it. Other names of the Demiurge include El (the Hebrew name for God) and Yahweh. He is called “the one who is weak…, for he said, ‘I am God and there is no other beside me,’ for he is ignorant of … the place from which he had come.”

Is your blood pressure rising yet? Yes, this is offensive! But do you see how it gave the Gnostics the ability to talk down to Christians and Jews alike, saying, “You live in ignorance, just like your so-called God”? This is not all that different from how secular courses in the university approach topics like religion, sociology, and even, to some degree, psychology and economics. They argue a higher “meta-narrative,” a greater story from which Christianity is easily explained away.

Even people in Greek culture who did not particularly believe in gods of any kind still were often highly influenced by the cultural ideals of Gnosticism. In particular, the idea that the physical world was bad, at best a copy of some much better nonmaterial ideals (a theme of Plato) was adopted and intrinsic to how people thought about things.

Now as Christianity began to spread after the resurrection of Christ, the Gnostics updated their theology to incorporate the Trinity, Thomas, Mary Magdalene, and even Judas into their worldview, all of these highly changed versions (and highly offensive to Christians). I’m not going to spend any time on their heresies. Through all these changes, however, the basic ideas about God as bad because he created the material world and about the material world as bad because God created it – persisted.

Given this framework, how do you think Gnostics viewed death? Generally they believed that death was a great release, a chance to get rid of our evil material bodies once and for all, and then, as purely spiritual beings, getting a chance at last to experience what the Monad and the good Aeons knew.

Now many of these ideas were pervasively believed in Corinth, and so it is not all that surprising that the some of the believers in Corinth were torn between their Gnostic ideas and the entirely different message of Christianity, a message that God the Son became flesh in Jesus Christ, who after being killed, rose from the dead not as a ghost or other incorporeal entity but instead rose in the flesh, in a body, that He was recognizable in this body, which still bore the marks of crucifixion but yet seemed to appear and disappear, going through closed doors, etc. Just as the Gnostic ideas about God being the demiurge are offensive to us, so was the idea of Jesus being resurrected in a body offensive to them. And on top of all this was the claim that after they the Corinthian believers died, they would not leave their bodies behind but would instead, upon Christ’s return, be resurrected into bodies themselves. This was not a pleasant thought to these Corinthians! And so this brings us to Chapter 15 of I Corinthians.

Two weeks ago Fred taught on verses 1 through 11. These verses focus on the (physical) resurrection of Christ, with Paul describing sequentially a number of the people who saw the risen Christ. He calls this list “Of First Importance,” which is what we have given the name for the title of this series that takes us from I Corinthians 13 through 16. He also says he has received it and is passing it on. There is good internal and external evidence that I Corinthians is one of the oldest two books in the New Testament, probably written only a few decades after Christ’s death and resurrection. This list of people is likely significantly older than that, since Paul is “passing it on.” In this way, it may well be the oldest portion of the New Testament that there is. In accordance with the Scriptures (by which Paul means the Old Testament), Christ died, for our sins. He was buried. On the third day He rose. Then He appeared to Peter, then the Twelve, then to a crowd of 500 people, then to James, then to all the apostles, and, Paul adds, last of all to me! 

Last week Tim taught on verses 12 through 34. Paul immediately addresses those Corinthians whose thinking has been tainted by Gnostic ideas, specifically those who think physical resurrection just doesn’t happen. He points out the severe cognitive dissonance they are exhibiting – you can’t simultaneously hold on to your Gnostic beliefs and believe that Christ was raised in bodily form from the dead! And if you deny Christ was raised from the dead, you have nothing – in fact, you are to be pitied, because it is on the resurrection of Christ that we base our beliefs about everything! Because He said He would rise, and then did rise, we can trust that He really was God and that everything else He taught was true! If He didn’t rise, then we can no longer trust anything He said.

But, Paul asserts in verse 20, Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have, Paul says euphemistically, “fallen asleep.” In the future, likewise those who follow Him will also be raised, and He will destroy all enemies, even death itself. Paul goes on to say that, if the dead are not raised, why does Paul endanger his life again and again for the sake of the gospel? He then says “do not be misled.” There is no doubt he is talking about those who hold to Gnostic beliefs here. “Don’t listen to them!” he says. “Come back to your senses, and stop sinning.” Is disbelieving God sinning? Yes, absolutely.

By the way, although the formal religions of Gnosticism have fallen away with history, key ideas from Gnosticism persist today. This is especially true in Eastern cultures. Among Buddhists, there is often found the idea of the incorporeal spirits of our ancestors watching us. In Hinduism, there is the idea of Nirvana, finally breaking the cycle of reincarnation and becoming one with a great consciousness, losing ourselves in a nonmaterial reality. Beyond these traditional religions, you see lots of explorations of variations of these ideas in manga and anime, art forms that are super popular among young Asian people (and many Americans).

You also see the idea of shedding our physical bodies and living on as pure thought (with the aid of machines into which we “download” ourselves) in science fiction and among Western “futurists.” (I put the term in quotes because they are often almost universally wrong.) To me such an idea sounds horrible, but to many people this sounds wonderful. Two and a half years ago, the book Machine Man by Max Barry was the book Clemson University chose for all incoming freshmen to read and discuss the first week of classes. Isaac and Sarah read the book, and Isaac described the plot to me in some detail. Much like a modern version of the Tin Woodman from the Wizard of Oz books, the main character loses a limb and replaces it with an advanced prosthetic. He likes it so much he begins to replace more and more of himself with machine parts. Finally, he becomes a machine soldier, rebuilt from the neck down, and then goes on to have his mind uploaded into a computer. The three of us took it to be a “warning” type book, speaking of the dystopia that would inevitably result from such processes, and considered it to be a pretty good dystopia at that.  But then the author came to Clemson and waxed on and on about how wonderful the future will be! Honestly, we were tempted to wonder whether someone had replaced his brain with a machine one! Didn’t he read his own book? But this is a common theme. A quick search on the Internet will find you hundreds of articles about how wonderful this future looks, how we will finally achieve immortality – without that pesky God, of course. To these scientists and futurists, the idea of resurrection back into physical bodies is likely just as repugnant as it was to those early Gnostics.

I think the whole idea of resurrection is even fuzzy among people who call themselves Christian or who at least think they know all about Christianity, having grown up in the West. For example, a recent article entitled “Leaving the Body Behind: A History” on the web magazine Motherboard [link: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/leaving-the-body-behind-a-history] writes “The ancient Egyptians called it Auru, the ancient Greeks called it the Elysian Fields, the Abrahamic religions call it heaven, and the Norse called it Valhalla, but the basic idea is the same—your physical body may die but a non-physical part of you lives on eternally.” Well, as we will see, that’s not what the Bible teaches. By the way, this article is one in a series on the topic of science enabling us to leave our bodies behind and live forever. The name of the series? Goodby, Meatbags. Sounds pretty Gnostic to me.

Well, this brings us to today’s passage. Let’s start in verse 35.

But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?” How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body. – I Cor. 15:35-38

The “how” in this question can be viewed in the category of “How is it even possible? What, are we going to be a bunch of half-decomposed zombies or something?” Or as one theologian has suggested, “What about a guy who dies at sea, is eaten by a bunch of sharks, and some of those sharks are caught and eaten by other people? What is God going to do then, huh?” Paul’s response is, in effect, “What, are you stupid or something?” To say that God, the Creator of the entire Universe, and the one who made Adam from dirt, can’t do something like reconstitute people any way He wants, is well, just being stupid. The NIV here says “How foolish,” but more literally it is “What a fool you are!” Paul goes on to give an analogy from botany. If you want to plant an apple tree, you don’t bury in the ground a baby apple tree, you plant an apple seed. An apple seed looks nothing like an apple tree. Paul is saying that just because you bury a dead body doesn’t mean you are going to get a zombie! In fact, you don’t even need to get an exact copy of what the person was before he died! You might get something much better!

At the same time, it is also true that apple seeds to give rise to oak trees, and oak seeds (acorns) don’t give rise to apple trees. That is, when I am resurrected I won’t be a new and improved version of Daniel Custer, and when Daniel is resurrected he won’t be a new and improved version of me. We will still be us. We will still have our personalities (the part that isn’t just sin). We will still be recognizable (although you might have a hard time recognizing me with hair). And we will still have our memories. The seed analogy, though simple, is brilliant because it captures both sides of these truths.

Paul goes on:

Not all flesh is the same: People have one kind of flesh, animals have another, birds another and fish another. There are also heavenly bodies and there are earthly bodies; but the splendor of the heavenly bodies is one kind, and the splendor of the earthly bodies is another. The sun has one kind of splendor, the moon another and the stars another; and star differs from star in splendor. – I Cor. 15:39-41

What is Paul’s point here? Well, it’s really in verse 42, so I won’t steal Paul’s thunder. But Paul is simply saying, “Hey dude – there’s more than one kind of flesh, just as there’s more than one kind of body, and more than one kind of splendor.” Then his point:

So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; 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. – I Cor. 15:42-44

The new body that we have will have a different kind of flesh. It will be a different kind of body. And it will have a different kind of splendor, or exaltedness. Our current bodies are perishable; they have an expiration date. But our new bodies will go on functioning perfectly forever. Our current bodies are in dishonor (the Greek word actually is used elsewhere to describe a dead and decomposing body), but our new bodies will be glorious (full of splendor – the same Greek word used a few verses ago). Our current bodies are weak, but our new bodies will be powerful (the Greek word is our root for the word dynamite). Actually, each of the negative words, perishable, dishonor, and weakness all often are used in the New Testament to describe moral failure, sin. It reminds us that the wages of sin is death. But our new bodies will not be subject to the curse, and neither will we bring death to them because of our future sins, because we won’t want to sin any more, and we will have the power to do what we want. The words natural and spiritual in the last sentence both refer to breath, but the natural, psychikos, refers to the breath of animals, whereas the spiritual, pneumatikos, refers to the spirit, or even the Holy Spirit. And we know that believers are “sealed” with the Holy Spirit. That “sealing” goes beyond the grave to our eternal life with Christ.

If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. So it is written: “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit. The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual. The first man was of the dust of the earth; the second man is of heaven. As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the heavenly man, so also are those who are of heaven. And just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man. – I Cor. 15:45-49

The word for body, here, soma, refers to a physical body. So a spiritual body is still a physical body, but one that comes from spirit rather than nature. The last Adam here is Jesus. The men Adam and Jesus both have unique heritage. Neither came from the genetic code of a combination of a human mother’s and father’s DNA. Adam came straight from the dust, so he is truly the earthly man, and as for Jesus, yes, he was born of Mary, but He had no human father. His father was God Himself, and so He is the heavenly man.

We have all been under the first Adam’s curse, and part of that curse was a change to our bodies so that we age and die, so that we are vulnerable to disease, so that we physically wear out. But upon resurrection, we are no longer of that first Adam, no longer under his curse. We will be of Jesus, and so our bodies will be entirely different, no longer subject to death, disease, or decay. We will have eternal bodies.

Not only that, but our new bodies will no longer bear the signs of our sin. No longer will our bodies bear the sign of how we were perishing, or how we were weak, or how we were dishonorable; all of that will be gone. Instead, we will bear the “signs” of Jesus – victorious, without sin, love Himself.

What does it mean to “bear the image” of either the earthly or the heavenly man? The word describes the wearing of clothing, but I think more appropriately it also describes the wearing of armor. Our old armor bore the sign of our failed leader, Adam. Our new armor bears the sign of Jesus, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, or alternatively the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.  Or yet again, the one in the white robe whose eyes blaze like fire. Each of these describe Christ, and we will bear His signs, His images, literally His icons.

I declare to you, brothers and sisters, 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. – I Cor. 15:50-52

Our old bodies won’t and can’t inherit the kingdom of God. They won’t work in heaven. They would die even by coming in the presence of God, for our God “is a consuming fire.” Think of how Moses had to hide in the cleft of the rock to get even a glimpse of God’ glory. Think of the various Old Testament people who were certain they would die because they got a glimpse of God. We in our old bodies are no different. I love the imagery C.S. Lewis used in his fiction book The Great Divorce, where heaven is “too real” for old bodies – they can’t even walk on the grass because the grass doesn’t even bend under their weight; instead, it cuts right through their feet. Lewis takes the old Gnostic fallacy and turns it entirely upside down; in his heaven, we are more real, more physical than we were on earth, so that in comparison, our lives on Earth were the incorporeal ones! You get hints of the same in the last book in his Narnia series, where in heaven the colors are brighter, the tastes fuller, the smells richer, and so on. For me, Lewis’ description of heaven at the end of the Narnia series is the best I have read anywhere. I don’t know how anyone can read that ending without longing for the day when we too are changed and are with Christ, when the eternity of joys that we cannot begin to imagine begins for real.

Beginning with the second sentence in this passage, Paul goes on to explain what happens to those who are alive at the time of Jesus’ return. You may have heard this all your life, so you never thought to wonder about it, but it really is a wonder, a valid question. If indeed our new bodies are entirely unlike our old ones, and if our old ones absolutely cannot enter the kingdom of God, then how are those alive at Jesus’ return supposed to get in? Is He going to kill them all? The answer is NO, they won’t experience death as others do; instead, in an instant, they will be transformed from their old bodies to the new, from bearing the sign of Adam, to bearing the sign of our Savior Jesus. And just like those who die first, in their new bodies they will be free from sin, free from the desire to sin, free to live as we were made to truly live.

Let me give you quickly a parallel passage:

Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord Himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage one another with these words. – I Thess. 4:13-18

I hope you are encouraged! These are encouraging words! We will be with the Lord forever! Forever, in case you don’t know, is a really, really long time. And trust me, you will never be bored.

Let’s turn back to the I Corinthians passage:

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.” “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. – I Cor. 15:53-57

The first quote is from Isaiah 25; here is a bit more of the passage:

On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine—the best of meats and the finest of wines. On this mountain He will destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations; He will swallow up death forever. The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces; He will remove His people’s disgrace from all the earth. The Lord has spoken. In that day they will say, “Surely this is our God; we trusted in Him, and He saved us. This is the Lord, we trusted in Him; let us rejoice and be glad in His salvation.” – Isaiah 25: 6-9

Again, I hope you are encouraged! This day will really happen! We will really live forever with Him: in transformed bodies, with transformed hearts, doing things we cannot imagine, experiencing a depth of love we cannot imagine, experiencing joy we cannot imagine.

Paul ends this chapter with an important “therefore”:

Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain. – I Cor. 15:58

There are many wonderful Greek words in this last verse. “Dear brothers and sisters” in Greek is adelphoi agapetoi; that is, the NIV understates it with the word “dear” – the word used has the root agape, so Paul is saying, “brothers and sister whom I love”. And what does he tell them? Stand firm. Literally it means to sit down, like a stubborn mule that refuses to move. Don’t get carried away or confused by the winds of your culture – don’t fall back into Gnostic thinking. We will have real, wonderful bodies, eternal bodies, forever with Christ. “Let nothing move you” has as its root the Greek word kineo from which we get the word cinema, moving pictures. Again, the word outside of scripture has been used to describe a stubborn mule.

And then, “give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord.” Be overabundant in working for the Lord. Why does Paul say this? Because he knows that doubts lead to inaction. But if you absolutely remain steadfast in your hope in Christ, for your future with Him, then you will be motivated to serve Him without holding anything back. You will want to burn yourself out for Him! You will be willing to take risks for Him. You will make serving Him your top priority.

Your work for Him is not in vain! It will be remembered. Every bit of it! Jesus Himself is watching closely. We don’t serve Him to get into heaven – what a horrible thought! We don’t serve Him to get Him to like us more – an equally terrible idea! We serve Him because He loves us and because there is no one in the universe more deserving of our love, of our service, of our sacrifices, even of our lives. We will have eternity to thank Him, to worship Him, to be with Him, but our lives in this world are fleeting, are short. Make the most of them by serving Him in the ways He has taught us – through loving and serving one another, through using our gifts to build up the body of believers, and through sharing the astoundingly good news of the gospel to all who will listen (and maybe even to those who won’t).