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.
But regardless of these claims, cloning can neither change the reality of death, nor nullify the pain of grief. Cloning is the shadow of a reality that God has planned for each of us.
Science is only now touching on the fact of what the Bible has always said: Our bodies have the power to regenerate themselves in seed-like fashion. But what God is going to do is far greater than cloning—just duplicating our present body. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15: “But someone may 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... 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. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body” (1 Corinthians 15:35-37, 42-44).
The mystery of the resurrection is revealed in the natural world: Death and decay are the necessary precedents of new life. And this new life appears in a new and superior form. God has built this truth in nature for us to see as a living illustration. We, like the plant and the rest of nature, will die only to rise to a new and greater life. Our bodies are but the bare kernel of what they will be in God’s final plan for us. Now our bodies are mortal, then they will be immortal. Now our bodies are subject to disease, but then they will not be. Here our bodies age and we are burdened with increasing limitations, but in God’s eternal kingdom we will know nothing of age or aging. The Bible says, “Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as he is pure” (1 John 3:2-3).
The Apostle Paul writes: “What I am saying, dear brothers and sisters, is that flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God. These perishable bodies of ours are not able to live forever. But let me tell you a wonderful secret God has revealed to us. Not all of us will die, but we will all be transformed. It will happen in a moment, in the blinking of an eye, when the last trumpet is blown. For when the trumpet sounds, the Christians who have died will be raised with transformed bodies. And then we who are living will be transformed so that we will never die. For our perishable earthly bodies must be transformed into heavenly bodies that will never die” (1 Corinthians 15:50-54). This will all happen at the second coming of Jesus Christ at the end of the age. The trumpet Paul is talking about is the seventh trumpet of the book of Revelation. It is the day that Isaiah was talking about when he said: “But your dead will live; their bodies will rise. You who dwell in the dust, wake up and shout for joy. Your dew is like the dew of the morning; the earth will give birth to her dead” (Isaiah 26:19).
The third point of importance is: God’s gift of immortality changes our life’s perspective. This is the great hope of the Christian world. How futile life is if this is not true. How unfair God has made life if he has not provided us with a resurrection to a new and better life. How hopeless we would be if all there was in life was knowing that with every breath you took, with every tick of the clock, you were closer to the grave, closer to the disease that would finally take you, closer to death which would be final and irreversible. There would be no promise of future reward, no hope of meeting God, no promise of heaven where God would make right all the wrongs of our lives. No place or time where he would substitute pleasure for pain, love for rejection, comfort for hurt, strength for weakness, health for disease and life for death.
The greatest joy I have is knowing that my family belongs to God, and that no matter what happens in this world, no matter what disease or tragedy may come, it cannot ultimately separate us. Even death cannot keep us apart, but can only take us to the safety and security of God’s Kingdom. It is there we will wait for each other until we are united again. There is not an insurance policy in the world that can begin to touch that. We will know each other, as the Bible tells us. Hebrews 12:1 tells us that we are surrounded by “a great cloud of witnesses.” The heavenly witnesses the writer was referring to were the people he talked about in chapter 11. Not ghosts, not angels, but real people who lived and breathed. People who had families but who are now watching the drama of creation unfold. I believe we will enjoy greater love and fellowship than we have ever known before. We will experience a closeness and love that we cannot even begin to imagine now. And if we belong to God, we will one day say to each other: “Could you ever have dreamed what this would be like in your wildest imagination? The love we feel, the joy we share, the God we worship and the greatness of his kingdom is more than we could have ever believed.”
My mind often goes back to the time when I was a boy and our whole family—all of my uncles, aunts and cousins—would get together for holidays. There was always a lot of laughing. The windows were steamy from the food Grandma was baking in the oven. The fragrance from the food floated all through the house, and we would run in to see the pies and get our noses down as close to them as we could. We would talk with Grandma as she worked in her apron. She would always have a smile and a hug for us. Then she would give us a playful swat to send us off into the other room until the dinner was ready. We would sit and listen to the grown-ups talk, or play with our cousins, and finally sit down to eat together as a great and happy family. Those are some of the most pleasant memories of my life.
And that is exactly the way I think heaven is going to be. In fact, the Bible says we will all sit down at one great feast. Jesus said, “I say to you that many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast. . . in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 8:11). Not spirits floating around in cold space, but all of God’s people with new bodies, real and warm, in close fellowship that is full of love and happiness. And it is made secure by the knowledge that it can never be spoiled. There will be no tragedy to dread, no terror to fear, no death to die, nothing which can ever again go wrong or separate us from God’s love. It will take a lot of adjustment just to get used to that idea. Anything that we have suffered here will be long forgotten, lost in the ecstasy of that place. The Lord says in the book of Isaiah: “Behold, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind” (Isaiah 65:17).
I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. It is a reality for me. I cannot explain it completely. I do not pretend to understand it all, but I am certain of the truth of it, for I believe in the Christ who rose from the dead and who will one day raise me from the grave and give me a transformed body. Everything that seems impossible now will then be reality, and I will see with new eyes all that God has promised he would do. Philip Yancey writes these wonderful words, “All the beauty and joy we meet on earth represent only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” When that reality comes, then the scripture will come true which says: “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9).
In 2002, A&E produced a made-for-TV movie entitled Shackleton: The Greatest Survival Story of All Time. It is the account of the British explorer Ernest Shackleton and the 27 men with him who attempted to cross the continent of Antarctica. Temperatures around the South Pole can reach as low as 100 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Shackleton advertized for men to join him on the expedition with these words: “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages. Bitter cold. Long months of complete darkness. Constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.” But one problem after another plagued them. Their ship , the Endurance, was caught in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea for ten months. With extraordinary endurance and great suffering from the cold and hunger, they left the ship and finally reached Elephant Island. With all hope gone of accomplishing their goal, Shackleton set his mind to the greater challenge before him — bringing his men home alive. Shackleton and two other men endured a hazardous journey in an open boat across the world’s worst seas, and a hazardous three day climb over an arctic mountain range in order to reach a whaling camp and find help to rescue his men. In Shackleton’s absence, the men had made a crude hut of rocks with the life boats on top as a roof. For months they suffered in that squalid hovel waiting for their leader to rescue them. One day a man who ventured outside spotted the rescue boat, and ran toward the others shouting, “Ship! Ship!” The men emerged from the hut like those who were coming out of a grave, wanting to hope a hope that seemed too fantastic to be true. Not a life had been lost, and as Shackleton shouted from the rescue boat about the condition of his crew, they shouted back: “All is well. We are all well.”
This is the way it will be when our Savior comes to rescue us from the grave and take us to our eternal home. As we emerge, the suffering of the past will not be remembered. We will say, “All is well. We are all well,” for our Savior has come for us.
Rodney J. Buchanan
July 8, 2012
Amity United Methodist Church
rodbuchanan2000@yahoo.com
