The Body That Will Be Raised

Today's Scripture

The plan ends where Christian hope ends: not in escape from the body, but in its resurrection.

1 Corinthians 15:42-43 — "So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power."

Philippians 3:20-21 — "But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body."

Revelation 21:3-4 — "Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man... He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away."

The Big Idea

The Christian hope is not that you will finally get rid of your body. It is that God will raise it — this body, the one that hurts — and remake it imperishable. That changes what your pain means now: it is not a dead end. It is labor pains.

Reflection

Sown, not thrown away

Many Christians carry around a hope the Bible never taught them: that when we die, our souls float off to heaven and the body — this aching, failing, embarrassing container — gets left behind for good. That idea has a name. The early church called it gnosticism, the belief that the body is a prison and salvation means escaping it, and they fought it as a heresy for two hundred years.

The real Christian hope is stranger and better. 1 Corinthians 15:42-43 — "What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power." Look at Paul's verb: sown. You do not sow garbage; you sow seed. A seed goes into the dark ground looking small and finished — and what comes up is the same plant, gloriously more itself. Burial, for a Christian body, is planting. The body that has carried your illness is not headed for the landfill. It is headed for harvest.

N.T. Wright has spent much of his career trying to get this doctrine back into the church's hands:

"The point of the resurrection is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die. What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it." — N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope

Think of a packet of seeds — the kind with the glossy photo of tomatoes on the front. Inside, the seeds look nothing like the photo: small, dry, hard, frankly dead-looking. No one shakes the packet and despairs, because everyone knows what seeds are for. Paul is saying your body, right now, is the seed and not the photo. Its weakness, its dishonor, its perishability are real — and they are the before-picture of something God has already printed on the front of the packet: the glorious body of the risen Christ.

So taking the medication, doing the physical therapy, resting, eating, praying for healing — none of that is unspiritual fussing over a doomed shell. It is maintenance on a body God has plans for. Philippians 3:20-21 says the risen Jesus "will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body." Not replace. Transform.

Groaning is labor, not a death rattle

But what about now — the years between here and harvest? Paul does not pretend they are pleasant. Romans 8:22-23 — "the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves... groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies."

Childbirth. Choose your groan-metaphor carefully, because everything depends on it. A death rattle is pain going nowhere. Labor is pain with a delivery date — agonizing, real, sometimes unbearable, and aimed at a birth. Paul says your groaning, and the groaning of the whole creation, is the second kind. Something is coming out of this.

That is what lets him write a sentence that would sound cruel from anyone who had not been shipwrecked, flogged, stoned, and chronically afflicted: 2 Corinthians 4:16-17 — "So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison." Light? Momentary? Only on one scale — the scale where decades of pain sit next to an eternal weight of glory and the scales tip so hard the pain flies up like a feather. Paul is not minimizing your suffering. He is measuring it against something most of us never put on the other side of the scale. Romans 8:18 — "For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us."

The scars that made it to glory

Here is the detail that should stop every chronic sufferer mid-sentence. When Jesus rose — the firstfruits, the prototype of every resurrection body — he still had his scars. John 20:27 — "Then he said to Thomas, 'Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.'"

The resurrection body of Jesus is glorious, powerful, beyond death — and it carries the marks of what he suffered. The scars were not erased; they were glorified. They became the evidence Thomas's faith was built on. Whatever your suffering has carved into you, the resurrection does not delete your story. It transfigures it. C.S. Lewis put it in one staggering sentence:

"They say of some temporal suffering, 'No future bliss can make up for it,' not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory." — C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

Heaven works backwards. The years you are living right now — the eleventh year of depression, the lifetime in the chair — will not merely be compensated. They will be made part of the glory, the way Christ's wounds are part of his.

Nobody alive says this more credibly than Joni Eareckson Tada, who has been quadriplegic since 1967:

"I still can hardly believe it. I, with shriveled, bent fingers, atrophied muscles, gnarled knees, and no feeling from the shoulders down, will one day have a new body, light, bright, and clothed in righteousness — powerful and dazzling." — Joni Eareckson Tada, Heaven: Your Real Home

She has also said, many times, that the first thing she will do in that body is kneel. The hope is that specific. And it is ancient: the oldest resurrection cry in Scripture comes from a man sitting in ashes, scraping his sores — Job 19:25-26 — "For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God." In my flesh. Job, with ruined skin, staked everything on a Redeemer who raises bodies.

He will wipe them himself

So how does the story end? Not with us going up to a disembodied heaven, but with God coming down. Revelation 21:3-4 — "Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man... He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore."

Read the tear-wiping slowly. The promise is not that there will be no tears at the end — there will be, the accumulated tears of every year of this. The promise is that he will wipe them, the way a parent takes a child's face in two hands. He does not delegate it to an angel. The hand doing the wiping has a scar on it.

In The Lord of the Rings, Sam Gamgee wakes after the ring is destroyed, sees Gandalf alive, and asks the question J.R.R. Tolkien said the whole story existed for: "Is everything sad going to come untrue?" The gospel's answer is yes — not by pretending the sad things never happened, but by Revelation 21's "Behold, I am making all things new." Augustine, finishing The City of God after a lifetime in a failing body in a collapsing empire, described that newness in a sentence the church has never improved on:

"There we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise. This is what shall be in the end without end." — Augustine, The City of God

And until then? Spurgeon — gout-ridden, depressed, and preaching anyway — tells us what hope is for in the meantime: "A little faith will bring your soul to heaven; a great faith will bring heaven to your soul." You can start spending this hope now, in the waiting room, in the eleventh year. Elisabeth Elliot, who buried two husbands, said, "Of one thing I am perfectly sure: God's story never ends with ashes." It did not end with ashes for Job, or for her, and — because the tomb is empty — it will not end with ashes for you.

Look back across these ten days. Paul prayed three times and kept his thorn. Job sat in the ashes and met God there. Spurgeon preached through depression; Calvin wrote through a failing body. The prosperity gospel was weighed and found to be a different religion. We asked for healing with both hands open, learned the dignity of the no, prayed Psalm 88 without editing it, and let the body of Christ carry the stretcher. Every one of those days was pointing here — because none of it holds together without an empty tomb. If Christ is not raised, the thorn wins. He is raised. It doesn't.

So the last word of this plan is Paul's last word after his resurrection chapter. 1 Corinthians 15:58 — "Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain." Therefore. Because the body will be raised, getting out of bed in pain is not in vain. Praying through year eleven is not in vain. None of the small, unseen faithfulness of a suffering life is wasted. The healing may not have come. The Healer is coming. Walk on.

Going Deeper

Read 1 Corinthians 15:42-43 and Revelation 21:3-4 aloud, over yourself, as the closing word of these ten days. Then do one small thing today that treats your body as a seed and not as trash — take the walk, keep the appointment, rest without guilt, or simply look at your hands and say: "Sown in weakness, raised in power." The plan ends here. The road continues. The Redeemer lives, and in your flesh you shall see God.