I Believe In The Resurrection Of The Body And The Life Everlasting Series

A few year back, the newspapers carried the story a few years ago about a man who had been in a coma for several years, but suddenly and unexpectedly awoke. What happened was that the medical staff decided to work on his teeth while he was in the coma, and in preparation for the dental work gave him an intravenous injection of Valium. When the drug took effect, the man awakened from the coma like someone coming back from the dead. It was a dramatic news story, and a wonderful event that will always be remembered by his doctors and family members as one of the most amazing moments of their lives.

As good as that news was for the man, there is more important news, for even if he fully recovers, another problem will eventually take him. He can have a better hope than just being healed of what currently ails him. For in the end, God is not just going to awaken us from a coma, he is going to awaken us from death.

And this is the first point: God has created us for immortality. God has done more than just promise us a cure for disease, he has guaranteed us a cure for death. He is not offering us a remedy for illness, he is offering us a resurrection from the grave. Jesus said, “Because I live, you also will live” (John 14:19). Is there life beyond the grave? The Bible is very clear about the fact that God has not created us merely to be born, struggle through life, age and then die to live no more. God does not do anything that ends in defeat. When God does something he does it right, and he does it permanently. When God created you, he did not do it with the intention of having you decay in the ground and let that be the end of you. He created you to be immortal. And not only was your soul made to live forever, but your body was as well.

God will change your mortal body and make it immortal. The sin which we have welcomed into this world has caused disease, decay and death, but God is going to deliver us from it all on the day of the resurrection, if we belong to him. The Bible says, “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end” (Ecclesiastes 3:11).

Recently, there has been much talk about people who have had near death experiences. They report experiences of leaving their bodies, meeting a figure of light and being transported to another place. But it is not those experiences that convince me of life after death, it is because Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die” (John 11:25-26). I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.

You are an immortal being. You will never cease to exist. God has made you that way, and whether you decide to spend your eternity with God or without him, you will live forever. Even Job, in the Old Testament, understood and believed that when this life was over there was something else, something more that awaited him. He said, “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God” (Job 19:25-26).

Like an apple that falls to the ground to die and decay, only to feed the seed within it and be raised into something greater than itself, so it is with the human body. To illustrate it by comparing it with nature, it is as if our bodies, even though we die and decay, will find that the seed within us has brought our bodies to life in a new and glorious way. If God does that for a tree, he will surely do it for you.

The second thing I would like to point out is: What God is going to do cannot be duplicated. Several years have now passed since the first mammal was cloned — Dolly the sheep. Then, four years after Dolly was cloned, Brigitte Boisselier, a chemist working with couples who want to use cloning techniques to create babies, claimed that a group she was a part of was determined to clone a human. She read to congress a letter from a father who had lost his 11-month-old son after heart surgery and 17 days of “misery and struggle.” In the letter he stated: “I decided then and there that I would never give up on my child. I would never stop until I could give his DNA, his genetic makeup, a chance.” Dr. Boisselier is the scientific director of Clonaid, a company based in the Bahamas devoted to creating human clones for grieving parents. (It is a whole new concept in getting back your child.) On December 27, 2002 Boisselier announced that Clonaid had successfully cloned the first human, a girl known as Eve who was born on December 26 at an undisclosed location. And although the proof of the baby’s arrival was supposed to have been provided early this year, we have still seen no evidence that the claim is true.