“The Resurrection of the Body”

Job had no comfort in this world. He friends couldn’t comfort him. They saw his suffering and told him to repent; God must be punishing him. But Job wasn’t suffering for sin. He was a righteous man, the most righteous man on the earth. And yet Job did not take comfort in his righteousness. His righteousness made his suffering seem all the more grievous. Why was God allowing these things to happen to him? Why had he gone to all the trouble of remaining faithful, if God now repaid him with curses? No, Job didn’t take comfort in his righteousness. There was only one thing that gave Job comfort, and that was the hope that after the curse, after his suffering took its toll, after his flesh moldered and slipped off his bones in the grave, he would stand up once again and rise out of the grave and walk with his Redeemer on the face of the earth.

For I know that my Redeemer lives, and He shall stand at last on the earth; And after my skin is destroyed, this I know, that in my flesh I shall see God. (Job 19:25, 26)

Job found his comfort in the hope of the resurrection of the body.

It’s Easter season, and in this bright, jubilant season we rejoice in the glory, the hope, and the comfort we receive from our Lord’s bodily resurrection from the tomb. The tomb is still empty, and we rejoice. But the joy and hope and comfort of Easter, in a sense, only begins with our Lord’s resurrection; it’s concluded, so to speak, with the hope of our own bodily resurrections from the grave. This is our great Easter hope: that if Christ was raised bodily from the tomb, so will we who believe in him be raised bodily. This was a central element in the apostolic preaching of the gospel. It is an article of our creed. And it is this very doctrine – the belief in the resurrection of the body - that is to be the Christian’s true comfort.

St. Paul, writing to the Christians in Thessalonica, wanted to make sure they understood this. He says, “I do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning those who have fallen asleep [i.e. died], lest you sorrow as others who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who sleep in Jesus… For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them…And thus we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words.” (I Thess. 4:13-18)

“Comfort one another with these words” These are the comfortable words of Easter. What other comfort could there be when you contemplate the inevitable reality that one day your own skin and flesh will molder and fall off your bones in a dark, dank box six feet under ground?

Unfortunately, so often Christians today do seek another comfort when faced with the reality of death, but it is a false comfort. It’s the false comfort of denying the importance of the body. It’s the false comfort of saying, “You know, it’s really only the spirit that matters. The body is just flesh. All the body is is the outer husk that keeps the kernel of the soul trapped, in a sense, in this earthly life.” How many of you have heard Christians say things like that? How many of us have heard preachers preach things like that at a funeral service? I certainly have.

It’s false comfort. It’s the false comfort gained by looking at the body as a kind of prison-house of the soul, and what needs to happen is we just need to be delivered from these earthly prisons. It is the false comfort, ultimately, of denying the reality of death – of denying the Biblical truth that the body is just as much a part of us as our souls, and that when we die half of us gets separated from the other half of us; the one half of us most assuredly goes to be with the Lord - i.e. our souls – but the other half of us goes down into the ground to rot. Okay? That’s the reality. The comfort we should find in facing that reality shouldn’t come from denying the importance of the body. It should come by affirming the hope we have for our bodies through the victory of Christ over death and the grave. That’s the comfort of Easter. Christ affirmed the importance of our bodies; he affirmed that our bodies are just as much a part of us as our souls, by dying bodily and rising again bodily.

I used to work for a counter-cult ministry called CRI – The Christian Research Institute, founded by the late Dr. Walter Martin. Some of you may remember Dr. Martin. He was “The Bible Answer Man” on the radio five days a week. Walter Martin was my first teacher of theology. He was a great apologist for the Christian Faith. His favorite verse of Scripture was Jude 3: “Contend earnestly for the Faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.” That verse was so much the driving principle of his life that he had it engraved on his head stone. Beneath it is says, “I rest my case.”

Walter had a great sense of humor. “I rest my case.” What I think he really meant to say (actually, he told me this) was, “I’m done arguing for the truth of the Christian faith; now I’m resting in the confident hope that I’ll be proven right on that last great day when my body comes bursting out of this grave and is re-united with my soul.”

So if Walter Martin could have heard what was said at his own funeral, I’m certain he would have done more than roll over in his grave. He would have stood up right there in his coffin and declared his eulogist a heretic! That was just Walter’s style.

You see, trying to comfort the hundreds of people who gathered there in the church to mourn Walter’s death, this man said, “When I went to the viewing and looked into the coffin and saw the body, I said, ‘That’s not Walter. Walter is gone!” And almost everybody in the church nodded his head in approval. Some of them laughed in joy and praised God. And that was the greatest irony. Here were all these people, gathered to mourn the loss of a man who had contended earnestly for The Faith once delivered to the saints, and they were giving their approval to a man, who in one statement –“That’s not Walter” – tacitly denied the central tenet of the Gospel.

If that’s not Walter in that box, then there is no need for a resurrection of the body. And if there is no need for the resurrection of the body, then there was no need for the Son of God to be born in a body; there was no need for Him to live a life of perfect righteousness in a body, to suffer and die in a body, and there was certainly no need for him to rise again in a body. You see, to deny that the body is an essential part of our being is to deny the need for the resurrection of the body. And to deny the need for the resurrection is to deny that the Resurrection of Christ has any importance other than as an interesting side-show.

Someone once told me that Christ’s resurrection – being that it was a bodily resurrection – was unique, seeing that we Christians will be raised with spiritual, that is, immaterial bodies. That’s a heresy. Christ didn’t come to do anything uniquely. He came to live our life, and to die our death, and to become the first-fruits of the resurrection. That’s what the Scripture says.

I’ll say it as strongly as this: if there is no resurrection of the body then there is no truly Christian hope; we might as well become Hindus, whose only concern is about the transmigration of their souls, and have no concern for the physical world because it’s all maya – an illusion. Paul said it himself: if there is no resurrection, then Christ himself is not raised, and we’re still in our sins.

Think about it from this perspective also: If there is no resurrection of the body, then there is no need for your body to be in church today. There’s no need for you to kneel down in prayer. There’s no need for you to use your voices to say the prayers and sing the hymns. There’s no need for color, or symbolism, or ceremony. If there’s no resurrection of the body, what you believe in your heart is the only important matter, and it has nothing to do with your body. Your body is just the cage of your soul.

If there’s no resurrection of the body, there was no need for your body to be baptized with water. If there’s no resurrection there is no need for you to come now and eat the bread and drink the wine of communion. There’s no need to receive the sign of the cross in the absolution. In the end, if there is no resurrection of the body, there is no need for an incarnational Christianity, because there is no need for an Incarnate Christ.

Beloved, Jesus didn’t come to save you from your body; He came to save you in your body. He didn’t come to save only half of us; he came to save all of us. And that is the real comfort and hope of Easter. Easter teaches us that Christ was indeed raised bodily from the tomb. It is a fact of history. It’s something we can know and be convinced of, and it’s something that can give us true comfort and true joy. Because in looking back to Christ’s resurrection we can look ahead with certainty to our own resurrections. That’s Job’s message to us today.

“For I know that my Redeemer lives, and He shall stand at last on the earth; And after my skin is destroyed, this I know, that in my flesh I shall see God.” +