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The state of final bliss is not one of abstract immortality. In a great deal of non-Christian thought, there is a dualism which conceives of the human body as exercising a degrading influence over the human spirit and the state of bliss is thought to consist in the release of the spirit from the defiling influence associated with bodily existence.

From the outset the Bible contradicts this dualism. "The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground" (Gen. 2:7). Dignity belongs to the human body and man's spirit was not imprisoned in it. God created man very good and man was body as well as spirit. The separation that takes place in death is not the debt of nature nor the inevitable outcome of man's physical constitution but the wages of sin. Death is abnormal because it is the curse of sin.

When redemption is brought to bear upon man, it is brought to bear upon him in his totality. His body, no less than his spirit, is drawn within the scope of that redemption. The normal and the natural, disrupted by sin, is restored and the goal to be achieved in the consummation of redemption is not a blissful state of the soul's immortality, but one in which death is swallowed up in victory; the corruptible puts on incorruption and the mortal immortality.

This is why the Scripture lays such emphasis upon the resurrection of the body. Our Lord intimated that the resurrection was guaranteed by the fact that God is the God of his people and that he is not the God of the dead but of the living (Matt. 22: 32). And Paul called the resurrection the redemption of the body and accorded it no lower a designation than "the adoption" (Rom. 8:23).

The resurrection of the body means resuscitation of what is laid in the tomb. Unbelief recoils from such a notion. But resurrection cannot be construed otherwise. The resurrection of believers is patterned after the resurrection of Christ, and it was the body which had been laid in Joseph's tomb that rose on the third day.

It was not a mere body that rose, but Jesus' body. More properly, Jesus rose as to his body. Scripture takes pains to assure us that Jesus was buried. The angel said to the women on the day of the Resurrection, "Come see the place where he lay" and prefaced this by saying, "He is risen, as he said" (Matt. 28:6). We are not allowed to think that our Lord was disunited from his body when it was laid in the tomb. And the same is true with believers. They go to the grave in respect of their bodies and from their graves they will rise when the last trumpet sounds. There is therefore identity and continuity between the body that returns to dust and the body that will be raised incorruptible.

The body will indeed be raised "a Spiritual body;" a momentous change will have been wrought. But "a Spiritual body" is not a body made of spirit. That would be contradiction—a body made of spirit would, of course, be no body at all. "A Spiritual body" is a body that is immortal and incorruptible, not characterized by the mortality and infirmity of our present bodies, a body transformed by the resurrection and adapted to the world of the resurrection inaugurated by the resurrection of Christ as the firstfruits from the dead.

This is what Paul means when he says, "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God" (1 Cor. 15:50). He is not denying the physical composition of the resurrection body but asserting that the resurrected bodily entity will not be subject to the frailty and corruptibility of the present age. The powers of the age to come will be operative without restraint in the resurrection-the body "is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power" (1 Cor. 15:42-43).

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June (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47