The angels came to the shepherds saying do not be afraid, we bring you good news of great joy. Jesus said “I have spoken these things to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. What brought Jesus the joy? The only place it really tells us is in Hebrews 12, “… let us run the race with endurance looking to Jesus, the founder and perfector of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God”. The joy wasn’t in the suffering, it was in the outcome of the suffering, to be raised to be with the Father and reign with Him. That is the joy he wants us to have.
That is what I want to talk about this morning beginning in 1 Cor 15 and verse 35 Our Resurrection. But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” You foolish person… Excuse me, do those sound like foolish questions to you? When I first read that I wanted to give Paul a piece of my mind. “How many dead people have you seen raised?”
I think what he’s saying is that, “After all you have been told from the eyewitnesses of Christ’s resurrection in a new body, you ask this question? It’s already been explained to you and its going to happen to us the same way it happened to Jesus.”
He goes into an extensive explanation using natural world phenomena about what gets sown – a seed – has to die before the much more glorious plant comes to life. Just as there are differences between animal, fish, bird and human bodies, just as there are differences between the sun, moon and stars, and even each individual star, so there is a difference between the earthly bodies and the heavenly bodies of human beings.
The first body has to die for the second one to come into being, but that second one never dies, it is eternal, imperishable. It is way better than the first, but the first must exist and die for the second to come into being. I think we get it right?
We don’t know exactly what this body will be like, but what we do know is that the bible says we will be like Him. We shall one day bear the image of Jesus both physically and in character. Whereas those without the Spirit, those who don’t believe will also inherit imperishable bodies, but will not bear the image or character of Jesus. In other words a flesh animated/empowered body cannot inherit the Kingdom and eternal life with God, but a Holy Spirit animated/empowered body can.
Paul says in verse 21 that we will be changed whether dead or alive. Now I just want to address a question I have been asked on more than one occasion. Should Christians be buried or cremated. Is it wrong to be cremated? Well the Bible doesn’t really say. It appears that it was very rare for people to be cremated, most were wrapped up and put in a tomb. These tombs were like caves, not very often holes in the ground. They had wood and could make boxes, but they didn’t. So I think it’s very misguided to say that the way we bury people today is the only way the Bible would approve of. There is certainly no command in the Bible either way even though it seems like burial was the norm. Many people die in fires, many Christians were burned at the stake? Will they not be resurrected? I think if we can be raised up from the decayed body that we inhabit in this life, I am sure God can put together a bunch of ash, which is more like what we’re made with in the first place, just as well as he could put together some bones. You decide for yourself, maybe you find one way more respectable than the other, but you can’t use Scripture to prove that one way is more approved of by God.
So that’s all the how of resurrection, and we can’t fully understand it, but we get an idea of the process. But then we get into the “when” in verse 51. When are people physically resurrected? This passage is about physical resurrection in our new heavenly bodies and Paul mentions that it is at the last trumpet. This brings us to the Rapture & Tribulation
Now some believe this passage is talking about a rapture, in the sense that at some instant in time all believers dead and alive will be raised at the same time. The only thing we can say for sure is that yes the dead and the living will be raised in imperishable bodies in an instant. But does this rapture occur before the tribulation? I’m not so sure because it says it happens at the last trumpet.
If we read the whole chapter it is clear that this resurrection Paul is talking about is not a pre-tribulational rapture. In verse 23 it says at His coming. Then here in verse 52 it says at the last trumpet. There is no trumpet mentioned at the first resurrection (which is at the start of the millennium) in Rev 20.
In Mt 24 Jesus says that immediately after the tribulation of those days, the trumpet sounds and the elect are gathered from the four winds. And 1 Thes 4:16 says, Jesus will descend with the trumpet, then we will be caught up with the Lord, that’s not pre-tribulation either. In Mt 24 Jesus also says that for the sake of the elect these days will be cut short, it doesn’t say we will be taken out of it. He also says that false Christs will even try to lead the elect astray, so clearly at least some of God’s people are still around. Not only that, He says that all these things will happen and the one who endures to the end will be saved.
Some will say that verses 36-40 are evidence for a pre-tribulation rapture. Jesus will come when no one expects it. “No one” there means those who do not know God. Noah knew what was coming and was ready even though he didn’t know exactly when. We are told to keep watch, why, if we can’t know exactly when he’s coming? Because he gives us the signs mentioned in this chapter of Matthew beforehand that unbelievers will not have or understand.
Then he talks about the final harvest spoken of in Revelation 14 where one will be taken and the other left. Yes at the end the believers still alive will be harvested or raptured first to be with Jesus, then the others will be harvested for judgment. It’s all at the end and we will see all the signs Jesus mentions before He comes and we should know what they mean so that we can be ready.
Other verses here that surround verse 52 also put into question the idea of a pre-tribulation rapture in verses 51-55. There is a clear presumption here that some believers will be physically alive on earth at the final trumpet, they were not raptured before the tribulation. “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.” Then as we read in 1 Thessalonians we shall rise to meet Jesus in the air, when? Not before the tribulation, but at the last trumpet.
You see in order for there to be a pre-tribulation rapture there has be a secret, intermediate coming of Christ prior to the final judgment. Nowhere does the Bible teach that. The Bible says we will have tribulation, we will be protected through it, but we must persevere and endure. We will not experience God’s wrath at the end when he comes the second time, but we may live through the time of tribulation, that will be shortened for our sake, before he pours out his final wrath. Jesus himself in his final prayer in John chapter 17 prays that God not take us out of the world, but protect us from the evil one.
If you’re still not sure look at a couple passages from Revelation. First Revelation 13:5-10. In verse 7 it says the beast was allowed to make war on the saints and conquer them. It was allowed to exercise authority over every tribe, people and nation for 42 months. Is this not the unbinding of Satan after the millenium? That passage ends here with a call for the endurance and faith of the saints. We are to have faith during the tribulation, not be removed from it, though we may be removed through a martyr’s death.
Look at Revelation 14:12-13. Here is a call for endurance of the saints who keep the faith and the commandments. And here is the key in the midst of all this trouble just before the harvest: “Blessed are those who die in the Lord from now on” - believers are still here. They are blessed however and will be given rest.
The words Paul uses back in 1 Cor 15 again to “meet him” in the air are the same as when people go out of the city to accompany royalty into the city, much like people did when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on the colt. That time they went out to meet the dying messiah king who was to begin his reign by being crucified and raised from the dead. The next time we will go to meet him in the air to accompany him as King of Kings, and we will accompany him back to earth to dwell with Him forever.
The other thing is that Death is defeated right after this change of bodies (v 54). This happens after the millenial reign when Death and Hades are thrown in the fire at the final judgment. We know there are two resurrections for believers. The first is seen in Revelation 20 and is clearly a spiritual resurrection. This is supported by Ephesians 2:4-6, “Even when we were dead in our trespasses, God made us alive together with Christ… and raised us up with him and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus”. So not only are we raised, we already reign with him. Paul is using the past tense there.
He confirms it again in Col 3:1, “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God”. And if we want it straight from Jesus, he says in John 5:25-29, “Truly, truly I say to you, an hour is coming and is now here when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear (or believe) will live”. (Remember all of us are dead in sin even when living until we believe his voice, so that phrase can refer to the living but spiritually dead in the present, the dead before Jesus came, and those who physically die in the future).
That is the first resurrection, a spiritual one. Down to verse 28, “Do not marvel at this for an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs (representing the physical body) will hear his voice and come out either to the resurrection of life or judgement”. That is the second and final physical resurrection of all souls for judgment.
Of course this all must be understood in relation to The Millenium (1000 year Reign)
So when does the first resurrection occur. When one hears the voice of Jesus and believes. We know it’s before the 1000 year reign of Christ with the saints. So when and what is the millennial reign? It says in Revelation 20 that Satan is bound, or restrained in chains for a1000 years and cannot deceive the Nations. Remember the nations always refers to the Gentiles and up until Christ’s death and resurrection, the Gentiles had no part in the plan of God. After His resurrection Satan no longer had a full hold on them and the Gentiles were able to also enter the kingdom, they were no longer completely deceived.
Many will argue that there is no way Satan is bound today because of all the evil in the world. Well what about 2 Thes 2:5-12…
Do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you these things? 6 And you know what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time. 7 For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work. Only he who now restrains it will do so until he is out of the way. 8 And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will kill with the breath of his mouth and bring to nothing by the appearance of his coming. 9 The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders, 10 and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. 11 Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false, 12 in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.
Now many pre-millenial thinkers will say that the he who is restraining Satan here is the Holy Spirit. That is a huge stretch. Especially when we read in Revelation that it is an angel (possibly Jesus himself). The man of lawlessness is already at work but is being restrained. Jude and Peter talk about angels who did not stay within their position of authority (that includes Satan) being kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the great judgment day. But clearly they are still having a spiritual influence on people, so they cannot be totally limited.
Now it says in Revelation 20 that Satan is bound for 1000 years so that he cannot deceive the nations. Deceive them about what? If we look at what Satan deceives them about when he is released after the millennium, we see that he then has complete control and is actually allowed (by God) to eliminate the church and the Bible from the world, claiming that he is God. Remember chapter 13 says that he will be allowed to wage war against the saints and conquer them, and he will even try to deceive the elect who are still here at the time.
After he conquers the saints, he is then able to deceive all the nations completely because all traces of the church and Christ are gone. Remember it says “the nations” being those who are not part of God’s kingdom, they are non-believers who have not believed in spite of hearing the gospel. So during the millennium Satan cannot physically reign on earth, because the church does. So he cannot fully deceive the nations, the truth is still here. After his release he has a very brief time and it is essentially just for gathering his followers for battle. But really he’s just unknowingly doing the work of gathering them for the final judgment.
We also see that the believers come to life and reign with Jesus during this 1000 years. When did believers start coming alive? At the first resurrection before the millennium right? When was that? When Jesus was raised. That was the completion of Jesus’ saving mission, and from that point on the Bible clearly says that those who believe are raised from death to eternal life in Christ. I already talked about this.
So that is the beginning of what I believe to be the symbolic 1000 years. Believers in heaven become judges and kings with Him, and we will all be priests. The royal priesthood of believers. Now the rest of the dead did not come to life until the 1000 years were completed. Clearly those are unbelievers who get raised for judgment at the second coming of Jesus. Notice it’s a second coming, which is a final coming, there is no third or intermediate coming to earth. Revelation 1:6 says Jesus has already made us a kingdom, priests to His God and Father. When? Verse 5 says when he was first born from the dead and freed us from our sins by his blood.
This seems to make the 1000 years be the time from Christ’s resurrection to His second coming. It’s not hard not to take the thousand years symbolically because the other place in the New Testament it is used for time in 2 Peter, it is symbolic. Peter says with the Lord a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like a day. There is no such thing as time in God’s spiritual realm, so why didn’t he say a day is like a million years, or 720,806 years or 1 year. It’s because in the Bible the number 1000 represents an uncountable full or complete amount.
Is there any other evidence? In Deuteronomy 1 God tells Moses that “the Lord has increased your numbers so that today you are as many as the stars of the heaven (innumerable). May the Lord make you a thousand times as many as you are and bless you”. He’s not talking about duplicating Moses a thousand times, he’s talking about his offspring. And it is obviously not exactly 1000 biological children but refers to making Him the Father of all God’s people, the promise that was made to Abraham that passes on to and through Moses.
The only time a thousand could be literal is in books like Deuteronomy, Isaiah and 1 Chronicles where it is used historically to refer to numbers of troops. But we need to be very careful when it comes to times and numbers in the bible. I am a proponent of taking the Bible literally, unless Scripture itself suggests doing otherwise, but that is in the original language, not necessarily the English language.
Our Baptist confession of faith says like many others, that we take the Bible as infallible and inerrant in its original manuscripts. And that’s not what we have. Numbers are one thing but even the words we translate as days, weeks, years, hours and so on have much broader meaning in both the Greek and Hebrew languages. In fact the word hour almost always means a short specific time.
Also the word we translate as week in the Old Testament (sabua) is literally “sevened”. Now if we take the word seven in the Old Testament, we see that this word means in its basic form, “sacred full one”. That includes in the book of Daniel where we hear about the tribulation.
Now the root word for all these words is “Saba”, which literally means to satiate, or to fill to satisfaction. So when we see the word week, remember literally “sevened”, we can accurately translate that literally as fulfillments, or completions. We get week from it because the calendars that were developed express full weeks as seven days, that’s just an arbitrary man made thing.
God doesn’t have, nor did he create calendars. He created everything in six days and on the seventh day he rested, because he was finished. Whether we take those as literal days or not, they represent what we have termed a week, and I believe those were literal days, but to God those numbers may have just meant that he was finished on the seventh day (the day of completion or perfection) and could now rest.
So what does the word day (or Yom) mean? Well let me tell you that this word in Strong’s concordance literally means to “be hot” representing the heat of the day. It is used as an adverb often and in this form can mean 54 different things, including age, everlasting, season, year, forever, elder and on and on it goes.
Why is this important? It’s important because we do not have the literal Bible. Does that make it wrong? No, it just means that as we have translated the original languages over time, we get the gist of the word, or the best choice of the translators. So when we talk about taking the Bible literally, we have to remember that the literal Bible is Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, and our translations are the best guesses, and are probably sometimes based on our biases. That’s why you get some disagreement about specific words even amoung our best English translations.
Now some will say that we should use the King James for the most accuracy as it is the first English translation. The problem with that is it is also based on newer Greek and Hebrew manuscripts. Now they are pretty accurate, but since the 1600’s we have uncovered thousands of much older original manuscripts that had not gone through as much translation as the ones the King James uses. My point is that we cannot fully understand the little specifics of the Bible unless we can read the original manuscripts in the language and context they were written.
Remember God mixed up the languages at the tower of Babel so that we could not understand, just as he had to kick Adam and Eve out of the Garden for danger that they would know what God knew and be able to do what God did. Nothing would be impossible for them.
God wanted humanity to be dependent on Him, in other words to have faith in Him, like the baby Jesus did all through his life. The more we know what he knows, the less we need to have faith. He wants us to know principles not always specifics. And our translations of the Bible portray the principles we need to know very well. Could Jesus have not let the disciples know when he was coming back? I think so, but he didn’t, he says only the Father knows. The Father is in Him, so I think he knew, but we would not understand so he just refers us to the signs and principles. If we did have all the details, then everyone could wait until the day before he comes back, live any way they wanted and quickly repent and turn to Jesus right before he returned.
The point in all of this is that we are not to know the times or seasons, or the day or hour. We are given the signs, we are told it is coming, and we are told it will surprise those who don’t belong to God, so we must be ready for it at any time. It requires faith when we can’t know or agree upon the specifics.
So why then does God bother to put numbers and times and such in the Bible. Well, in the historical records it is because that has happened on earth and can be spoken of in earth time. The historical chronologies in the Bible are accurate. But the future events can’t be given to us in literal earthly time because in the spiritual realm there’s no such thing as time. Only events and series of events that lead to some sort of culmination.
I believe this is what God has told me, that we are not to take the times in unfulfilled prophecy literally but as representations, and as we see from most research, very few scholars agree on what the specific times really mean, and what events they pertained to. And when someone does try to make predictions based on calculations in the Bible they are always wrong.
The way I come to these conclusions is though struggling with all the possibilities of interpretation to the point of exhaustion and frustration, and then eventually as I write, God inevitably gives me something that brings a sense of peace over me after struggling to the point of giving up. That is when I know I can bring the information to you. And I always pray that I will be accurate and that Scripture will not refute what I’m saying.
And I want you or anyone else to examine what I say and call me on it if it does go against Scripture, because one of the most important roles I believe I have, is to protect the flock from false teaching. So obviously I don’t want to be the false teacher. That is one of the reasons I also put my sermons online on a site that is used by thousands of other pastors. Paul begins some of his writings, specifically in 1 Thes, that he doesn’t want us to be uninformed, and that is my goal as well.
So the more I’ve studied over the years, my beliefs have changed to believe that the millennial reign of Christ is a spiritual reign with born again believers in heaven and on earth through the church. Therefore the rapture of souls occurs continuously throughout the church age since Jesus was raised, with a final rapture before his final coming. The first resurrection then is ongoing from the time of Jesus resurrection to His second coming. The instant a believer dies they are with the Lord in Spirit, in the air.
It never says in Revelation 20, which is the only place we hear specifically about the millennial reign, that Christ reigns on earth, and nowhere in the Bible is there a specific mention of a time on earth where Jesus is present bodily and peace reigns, until after his second coming and the creation of the new earth.
Just to put a nail in it and this is what really matters, in Rev 11:15 it says that when he reigns, He shall reign forever and ever, and in Revelation 22:5 believers are included and it says they will reign forever and ever. No indication anywhere in the Bible of a non-continuous reign in heaven or on earth.
Again you are free to choose to believe otherwise, I just ask that you base your belief on a thorough study of all the Scriptures from all the different angles, and not just your opinion or tradition. So if you choose to believe this, you have already had your spiritual resurrection and have eternal life if you have repented and believed in Jesus Christ’s work on earth. And you are now living in the spiritual millennial reign with Christ as we speak. One day you will come back to a new earth in a new everlasting body with Jesus to live forever.
So here, back in 1 Corinthians we are talking about our physical resurrection bodies that will cloth us when Jesus physically comes again to dwell with us on a new earth forever. These new physical bodies will be imperishable, they will last forever and not age. In order for us to go through this transformation, our old body has to die or be transformed, and verse 49 says we will bear the image of the man of heaven. All the other details aside, that is what we need to know, and may it bring us great joy this Christmas season.
