8. Resurrection of the Dead

What is Resurrection?

There are two things that are certain about every human life: it begins with birth and it ends with death.

Or does it?

After Adam had eaten the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, God said to him:

But as time wore on, God began to show man that physical death is not the end, but that life continues beyond the grave, that there is a place, known to the Hebrews as ‘Sheol’, where existence continues, but without a body. It is a place of darkness (Job 10:21-22), of silence (Psalm 115:17), of sorrow (Psalm 18:5).

More will be said about this in the articles on Eternal Judgement and The Day of Judgement.

The ancients feared death (Hebrews 2:15) because they faced uncertainty and the prospect of unending misery beyond the grave. They had no clear revelation of what was to come, and nothing on which to hang any shred of hope.

God’s revelation to us through the Bible is progressive. It begins in an earthly garden with a man of dust, and it culminates in the heavenly city with the man of heaven. Bit by bit, in between, God gradually builds up a picture of where He is taking us to.

The Sign of the Prophet Jonah

One of the most remarkable stories in the Bible is the account of Jonah, not only because of the astounding effect that his preaching had on the people of Nineveh, so that the king commanded that all the citizens repent in sack-cloth and ashes, but also because of the level of faith that Jonah exhibited in the midst of his personal trial.

In Matthew 12:38-40 when Jesus is challenged by the Pharisees to show them a sign of His authority, He answers by telling them that they will be shown “the sign of the prophet Jonah”. What did He mean by that?

I believe that the answer lies in Jonah Chapter 2, in verses 2 and 6 in particular:

Where did Jonah believe he was? Where did he cry from in verse 2? From where did God raise him up in verse 6?

Very clearly Jonah believed that, having been cast into the sea (Jonah 1:15) and then swallowed by a great fish (Jonah 1:17) that he was now in Sheol (Jonah 2:2) – cramped, hot, stinking, and painful because of the effect of the fish’s digestive juices.

Yet, in the midst of all this he had confidence that God would somehow bring him out (Jonah 2:6) and that he would once more stand in the presence of God before the altar of burnt offering in the temple courts (Jonah 2:9).

In short, Jonah believed in resurrection.

There are two types of resurrection.

Of the first type we find three examples in the Old Testament (1 Kings 17:17-23; 2 Kings 4:18-21, 32-35; 13:20-21) and quite a few more in the New Testament (Matthew 9:18, 23-25; 27:51-53; Luke 7:11-15; John 11:38-44; Acts 9:36-41; 14:19-20; 20:7-12).

In this case, the person’s physical body is brought back to life shortly after they have died. You could almost say that this is an extension of the healing ministry. Jesus even commanded his apostles to do it as an integral part of the ministry of the gospel (Matthew 10:8).

The second type of resurrection is the one that we are concerned with in this article. In this case, every human being who has died will be brought back to life at the end of the present age.

The first person to experience this type of resurrection, and the one who made it possible for the rest of us, was Jesus, “the pioneer and perfector of our faith” (Hebrews 12:2), who, as we have seen, refers to His resurrection as “the sign of Jonah” (Matthew 12:39-40; 16:4).

His resurrection has already taken place. The rest of us will have to wait a little while longer!

Who Will Be Resurrected?

Let's compare what Jesus says against what is said by both Daniel in the Old Testament and Paul in the New Testament:

Note: Most English translations put ‘many’ where the NIV puts ‘multitudes’. However, we would normally understand ‘many’ to mean ‘many, but not all’, but this would be in conflict with the other scriptures, such as John 5:28-29, which tell us that everyone will participate in the resurrection, so the NIV rendering ‘multitudes’ is more appropriate.

In these passages, the scripture makes it clear that all human beings, both the righteous and the wicked, will experience resurrection, but what we will experience afterwards will be dependent on our standing in the sight of God.

When Will the Resurrection Take Place?

The passages cited above associate resurrection with judgement.

The Day of Judgement (which is covered in another article) will occur between the close of this present age and the inception of the new age. In John 11:24, Martha’s comment to Jesus, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day”, concerning her dead brother Lazarus, clearly indicates the understanding that the resurrection would occur “at the last day”.

However, there are a number of scriptures that indicate that there are to be two separate resurrections – one for the righteous (Luke 14:14; 20:35) and another one for the unrighteous.

In what has come to be known as His Olivet Discourse, because He was on the Mount of Olives when He was speaking (Matthew 24:29-31 and Mark 13:24-27), Jesus predicts His return to earth, His “Second Coming”.

Although He does not specifically mention resurrection, the gathering of His chosen “from one end of the heavens to the other” would suggest it. This is confirmed in Paul’s response to a query from the saints in the city of Thessalonica concerning those who have “fallen asleep” (i.e. died) and their desire to be reunited with them:

The Book of Revelation is even more specific than this, in that it gives us a time-line for the final events of this age.

In chapter 19:11-16 we are told of the return of Christ to establish His kingdom upon the earth, and then in the following chapter (Revelation 20:4-6) we read that there will be a First Resurrection for those servants of Christ who will reign with Him for a thousand years, but that “the rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended”.

(A note of caution: since the Book of Revelation is expressed in prophetic imagery, we must be careful about attributing too literal an interpretation to any portion of it. However, the point here is that there are two distinct resurrections – one of the righteous and one of everyone else.)

Why is Resurrection Important?

If you were to select at random a number of people from a church background and ask them the question, “What happens to Christians when they die?”, they would probably all answer, “They go to heaven.” Or if you asked them, “Where will Christians spend eternity?”, the majority would probably give a similar answer.

Is this what the Bible teaches us?

Our western European way of thinking has been shaped by the influence of Greek philosophy. Even the western church has borrowed many of its attitudes and opinions from the Greek philosopher Plato, in whose thinking the physical world is merely a shadow of that which is real or true, and therefore has no intrinsic value.

In Greek thought, it is necessary to get rid of the body and its limitations so that the spirit can be truly free.

The so-called ‘Gnostic heresy’, which was already beginning to creep into the church in the days of Paul (e.g. Colossians 2:8-10, 16-23) and John (e.g. 1 John 3:4-10), is based on this idea. Some schools of this doctrine insisted that the body is evil and must therefore be rigorously disciplined; others taught that the body was of no importance, so it made no difference whether your physical acts were ‘sinful’ or ‘righteous’, as it is only what your spirit does that matters in eternity.

In Hebrew thought, however, the physical is every bit as ‘real’ as the spiritual. To the Hebrew mind, a human being without a body is incomplete and must be reunited with the body in order to be a whole person.

God did not choose Greeks to write the Bible - He chose Hebrews, the one notable exception being Luke, 'the beloved physician' (Colossians 4:14), Paul's occasional companion in ministry, who wrote two books of the New Testament (i.e. his gospel and the Acts of the Apostles).

If we are going to understand the Bible, therefore, we need to learn to think like Hebrews rather than Greeks.

John 3:16 is one of the best-known and most-quoted verses in the Bible. Here it is:

What is meant by “everlasting life”? Does it mean eternity in heaven as a purely spiritual being, like one of the angels?

One of the main religious groups in Jesus’s day was the Sadducees, and one of their distinguishing features was that they did not believe in angels, demons, or life after death (Acts 23:8). Some of them tried to trick Jesus by asking Him how the difficult problem of a woman having more than one husband during her life on earth would be resolved in the resurrection.

Jesus answered by referring back to Moses, because the Sadducees recognised only the five books of Moses as being divinely inspired scripture:

The interesting point here is that Jesus equates “living” with “being raised from the dead”. In other words, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob may well be in heaven today, but they are not fully alive. They will only be fully alive when they have been raised – when they have been provided with a new body.

Paul demonstrates the same attitude in the passage in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-17, which has already been quoted. Note that he does not reassure the living saints that they will be reunited with their brothers and sisters when they all go to heaven, but rather when those who have “fallen asleep” are resurrected.

Paul identifies the Christian hope with the resurrection in the following passages:

• Acts 23:6 (Paul was on trial because of his hope in the resurrection)
• Romans 8:23-25 (“… adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies”)
• 1 Corinthians 15:19, 29, 32 (read verses 12-23 to get the context)
• 2 Corinthians 5:1-5 (the earthly tent, or tabernacle, is the physical body – compare 2 Peter 1:13-14 – so the heavenly dwelling is the resurrection body)

Some 600 years before Christ, the prophet Isaiah presented to us a vision of new heavens and a new earth, where the days of a man are as the days of a tree, and the wolf and the lamb will play together (Isaiah 65:17-25).

The apostle Peter also speaks of new heavens and a new earth “the home of righteousness” (NIV) (2 Peter 3:10-13), as does the Book of Revelation (Revelation 20:11; 21:1).

In Revelation, however, we see an expansion of Isaiah’s vision with the return of Christ (19:11-16) inaugurating a 1,000-year period of His reign upon the earth, assisted by “those who had been beheaded for their testimony to Jesus”, the resurrected saints (20:4-6; compare 1 Corinthians 15:21-25).

It is this period of Christ’s reign on the present earth that we see described in Isaiah 65, where those who have survived the period known as the Great Tribulation and are still alive in their physical bodies will enjoy long life, but will eventually die of old age, even if it takes them a lot longer to get there than it would do today. Those who have been resurrected, however, will not die again (Luke 20:36), but will pass over on to the new earth as soon as God has created it.

Those who do not participate in the first resurrection will be raised from the dead and given a new body to enable them to appear before God on the Day of Judgement (Daniel 12:2; Revelation 20:5, 12). Of these, any whose names are not found written in the Book of Life will endure what is referred to as “the second death” (Revelation 20:6,14,15).

The first death is the death of the physical body; the second death is the death of the resurrection body. This is dealt with more fully in the article on Eternal Judgement.

How Will the Resurrection Happen?

The Bible says very little about this, and the only writer who tackles the subject is Paul.

If we look again at the passage in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-17 we see that it is going to happen very suddenly, very quickly, and very spectacularly:

In the church at Corinth there were many difficulties. One of the issues that Paul had to face was that there was a group of people who did not believe in the resurrection. We see how he dealt with the matter in 1 Corinthians chapter 15.

In verses 3-11 he shows not only that Christ had to rise from the dead in order to secure our salvation, but also that He was seen by all of the apostles plus some 500 other men, so there is no doubt that He did actually rise from the dead and remain on the earth for a number of days afterwards.

In verses 12-19 and 29-34 he argues that if there is no resurrection of the dead then the whole Christian life is a waste of time, as we will all simply die like everybody else and that will be the end of it.

In verses 20-28 he gives us a brief summary of the end-time events that we find in more detail in Revelation chapters 19 and 20:

• the return of Christ to the earth;

• the resurrection of “those who belong to Christ”;

• the establishment of Christ’s kingdom upon the earth and the process of putting all His enemies under His feet (compare Revelation 2:26-27; 19:15-16).

In verses 35-50 Paul attempts to answer the question “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” The brief answer is, “Well, it won’t be like the one you’ve got now!”

He contrasts the two bodies in verses 42-50 as follows:

In verses 51-57 we read of the same event that Paul describes in the now familiar passage in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-17. This will all occur “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye”.

The saints who have already died will be raised and the saints who are still alive in the body will, along with them, put off this perishable nature and put on the imperishable, put off this mortal and put on immortality, and stand before Christ in total victory, with Him, over death and sin.

The Bible does not give us any details about how Jesus rose from the dead. All we know is that after He was crucified His body was hastily prepared and then laid in the tomb (Matthew 27:57-60; Mark 15:42-46; Luke 23:50-56; John 19:38-42), but on the morning after the Sabbath, the stone had been rolled away from the mouth of the tomb, and the body was no longer there (Matthew 28:1-7; Mark 16:1-7; Luke 24:1-8; John 20:1-9).

Matthew’s account would seem to indicate that Jesus had already left the tomb before the stone was rolled away, which would suggest that the resurrection body does not find even the hardest of physical materials to be a hindrance to its progress. This is borne out in John’s account of Jesus’s visits to the disciples in the following days (John 20:19, 26).

An interesting point about Jesus’s resurrection body is that while His appearance was so different that no-one recognised Him at first (Luke 24:15-16; John 20:14-15), yet He retained in His torso, His hands, and His feet the wounds that He had sustained during His passion (John 20:27-29), and it would seem that His voice was also recognisably His own (John 20:14-16), and that He retained certain personality traits that gave away His true identity (Luke 24:30-31, 35).

Not only was Jesus’s body able to pass through solid rock, He was also able to disappear and reappear in an instant (Luke 24:31, 36-37). Despite that, He was still able to eat ordinary food along with His disciples (Luke 24:41-43).

The most astonishing feature of Christ’s resurrection body, however, is this: He was able to rise up to heaven and He will return to earth from heaven (Acts 1:9-11), and for the past 2,000 years He has remained in heaven and performed all of His divine duties while living in a human body!

The hope of the resurrection for us is this – that we will be like Him. Whatever Jesus was able to do after His resurrection, we also will be able to do:

The writer to the Hebrews tells us that, whoever we are, it is appointed to us to die once, and after that to face JUDGEMENT (Hebrews 9:27), so let’s now move on to consider that important subject.