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September 25, 2005
What Happens to us After we Die?
“We believe in the resurrection of the dead.”
Psalm 23 / Daniel 12: 1-3
I Thessalonians 4: 13-18
September 25th, 2005
This morning I have invited Dan Taylor from Trinity Mission to share with us something of Trinity’s ministry. He reaches out to people whose lives have been hurt badly by destructive aspects of popular American life. Drugs and alcohol attack the soul through the body. The devil’s avenue to destroy the soul is the body.
This coordination of the theme before us this morning with the ministry of Trinity mission is timely. You may remember that in these morning messages I have been exploring that great first statement of faith of the Church, the Nicene Creed. We have come to the second to last phrase, “We look for the resurrection of the dead.” It is a teaching that presumes the worth to God of our bodies.
So this morning I want to speak first of bodily life, and second of the resurrection life.
This ancient statement of faith begins remembering God as the “Creator of heaven and earth, of all things seen and unseen.” – or “of all kinds of bodies.” The physical side of creation, the only part we know specifically, matters to God.
The Creed ends reminding us of what God will do with us. God will bring these bodies back to life because they are worth it -- created in the image of the eternal God. How strange it seems to think, as I look at the human form in all its variety, that somehow it reflects the image and likeness of God who is the eternal Spirit, not limited by a body.
Paul wrote that Jesus was “the image, the _____, as the Greek has it, of the invisible God,” and again, “In him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.” What remarkable words. He writes of Jesus’ embodying God because those who read this, which is a “spiritual truth,” read with physical eyes. These bodies of ours are far more significant than we realize. They are the means by which we know about spiritual things. Jesus was God coming to us in a body because what we are begins with our bodies.
Sometimes I get the feeling that Christians think the soul is more important than the body “spiritually speaking.” How fuzzy that word “spiritual” can be, a total cop-out on reality. We imagine God is more interested in our invisible souls than in these disposable bodies. Perhaps we hope this is true so that we can get away with doing things our Sunday School teachers said we shouldn’t do. But perhaps, in a more positive way of looking at it, we get this idea a bit more deeply than that because Jesus taught, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.”
Jesus did not mean the body was not important. It’s very important, so He taught us to pray for our food, “Give us this day our daily bread.” He meant that when a test comes between living in obedience to God and being killed, it is more important to live in obedience to God than to do everything possible to remain alive.
Scripture tells us, “Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” How broad a category is “whatever you do.” Our conversation, our friendships, our careers, our hobbies, our entertainment—our everything—to the glory of God.
I have the hunch that when you hear this you hear a word of warning. “Be careful little hands what you do, for the Father up above is looking down in love!” Of course, there is this aspect to it. There are deeds our little hands can do that they cannot do to the glory of God.
Indeed, there is a caution implied in this guidance to do all to the glory of God. We are to do all to the glory of God in this body life because corporately, as the church, our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit.
We seldom think of things this way in our heightened idea of personal independence, but it seems Paul is telling us that what we do in our bodies individually matters to us corporately as the Temple of God. Imagine a brick and mortar Temple with hidden structural flaws. You wouldn’t feel safe in it, much less offer it to God. While each of us has a private and a public life, what we are in private matters as much as public because all that we do and are contributes to the makeup of the Body of Christ.
How often when we think of privacy it has to do with evil that is done hopefully unnoticed. Tragically the misuse of God’s wonderful gift of our differences as men and women occupies a lot of the misuse of may peoples’ privacy. The whole sex thing has gotten out of hand. It has so intruded into the seamy privacy of many men that their minds are polluted. Christianity Today has reported how polluted very many so-called Bible-believing Christians have let their private worlds become. Our sexuality, though created by God as a marvelous component of society that makes the landscape attractive to us, and that eventually can bind one and one woman together in a life-producing embrace, has often been distorted and made ugly. Christians, in private we are called not to add to this pollution of the Body. We who are married, ought to make of our oneness something beautiful for the glory of God and our joy. Let our children see where joy is found by cultivating marriages that make the heart sing.
The whole personal freedom thing has gone crazy. We imagine we are so free that even the teachings of Jesus are optional—completely in the custody of our preferences. So, when we’re told to do all to the glory of God it is a word of warning not to misuse God’s good gift of life.
But there is a much greater positive incentive to this call to do all to the glory of God. Jonathan Edwards wrote a little book called, A Narrative of Surprising Conversions. He gives mini-biographies of men and women whose lives were totally chaos that came to faith in Jesus and were changed. You see a person with eyes dull with drugs, his speech slurred with drink, his body showing the effects of long neglect and think, “Nothing good can become of him?” Edwards tells of many who left behind the stupor of drink that they once craved and became thoughtful, productive members of society after they gave themselves to God.
What great benefit not only to one’s drive, but also to one’s emotions that comes with deliberately living to the glory of God.
The discipline of the heart teaches us how to live in private to the glory of God so that our lives are, in their entirely, a seamless garment of praise to God. Your body and mine matters in this great enterprise. Glorify God in your body, God tells the Church, and to each of us in it.
But now, the second benefit in knowing the promise of the resurrection. God considers our bodies important enough to bring them back to life after they die. This has always been a difficult teaching to accept. We imagine the ancients were gullible enough to accept stuff like this, but modern people know better.
The Apostle Paul asked King Agrippa, a half-Jewish client of the Jews, “Why is it thought incredible by any of you that God raises the dead?”
In the second century, a Greek skeptic named Celsus ridiculed Christians for their foul doctrine of the resurrection. He thought it simply obscene that they thought their God would take decomposing flesh and bring it back to life. There are many variations of the theme of outright rejection or doubt concerning the bodily resurrection. The inability to understand or to accept that God will bring these mortal bodies back to life, to immortality, is not new.
Both the selection from the prophet Daniel and I Thessalonians speak about the resurrection of the body. The selection that we just read from I Thessalonians, telling of what will take place at the Second Coming of Christ sounds strange to the modern ear. “The dead in Christ will rise first, then we who are alive . . . shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.”
The reason why graveyards used to be built right beside churches was not only to preserve the memory of the dear departed, but also to help God with the traffic control at the resurrection. If the Second Coming took place when people were at church, the graves would open and the beloved dead would rise first, and then the sanctuaries would be emptied as the living joined them to meet the Lord in the air.
I wonder what it says that churches no longer have graveyards. In the last church I served, before we built a new building with no graveyard, in the old wooden building when folk sat in those strait-backed box-pews they saw Tiffany windows at the side dedicated to the beloved memory of deceased members. Their names were inscribed in the windows that let in the light by which we could see. Out back there was a little graveyard with those gravestones with the barely legible names of relatives of some of our flock from many years back. It also included a grave with no headstone of someone’s anonymous hired man. Why the graves next to church and the windows with names etched into them? Because we who are alive and remain will be gathered together with those who have died in the resurrection.
But the Bible gives other dues to the significance of this end time. The prophet Daniel writes of the start of the end game:
There shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation till that time; but at that time your people shall be delivered, every one whose name shall be found written in the book. And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.
It is impossible for us to understand perfectly the things God has given us in Scripture concerning the resurrection. But as we put together the pieces of the puzzle we see that there is this two-fold aspect of the resurrection. For some the resurrection is followed by everlasting life; for others it will be shame and everlasting contempt. We do not commonly speak of the second kind of resurrection. But we are foolish to ignore the fearful teachings of Scripture, or to deny their pertinence, while focusing only on what seems to give us comfort.
The Parable of the Sheep and Goats that we love to quote in part ends with the righteous Judge saying to some who stood before Him, who had ignored the needs of the hungry, the naked, the imprisoned, and the ill, “as you did it not to the least of these, you did it not to me.’ And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
Though we believe that we are justified by God’s grace through faith and not by good works that we do, Holy Scripture is very clear that our eternal destiny is affected by what we do as well as by what we say we believe. Jesus said frightening words to people who are very vocal about their faith in Him, “Not every one who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, “’I never knew you, depart from me, you evildoers’.”
It is after this that we read that parable that is the basis of one of our children’s favorite Bible songs—about the wise man building his house on the rock, and the foolish man building his house on the sand. I wonder how much of good, verbal American Christianity is the stuff of building a house on the sand. “The rains fall, the floods come, the wind blows, and beat against that house, and it falls, and great is the fall of it.
These are teachings of our Lord that point to the outcome of the resurrection. We are apt to think of different questions than whether there are two destinations in the resurrection. I have wondered, and many of you have expected me to be able answer questions like this: “What about old, sick people who are raised, or babies? How will they be in the resurrection?” “Will we recognize our loved ones in the resurrection?”
Of course, I know no more than you do the answers to these questions, but the Scriptures teach that what will happen is analogous to what happens in planting a seed in the spring. What you plant and what comes up look very different. I believe we will be our best selves when God refashions us into glorious, immortal bodies. I won’t have steel and plastic knees, and you won’t have scars or pace-makers or hearing aids. Our babies who have died will be in the flush of mature life, skipping over the intervening years when most of us endured being teenagers and all of the other growing pains of life. I think John Wesley may have been right that we’ll even have our pets in heaven. I don’t know this, but I think it is harmless to hope there might be pets in heaven. I think we can safely assume God will give us a good party in the resurrection.
St. Augustine wrote: God, the wonderful and inexpressible Artisan, will, with a wonderful and inexpressible speed, restore our flesh from the whole of the material of which it was constituted, and it will make no difference to its reconstruction whether hairs go back to hairs and nails go back to nails, or whatever of these had perished be changed to flesh and be assigned to other parts of the body, while the providence of the Artisan will take care that nothing unseemly result" (Handbook of Faith, Hope, and Charity 23:89 [A.D. 421]).
As interesting as this is, far more important it is for us to remember that how we live in these bodies now has a bearing on this final event. Do not be indifferent to the appeal, “Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” It is natural for us to become indifferent to what we have heard often. Let us hear as a congregation that what we are together, our body is the Temple of the Holy Spirit. It matters how we are together not only now, but in the end. To this end, it matters to you how I live, and how you live to me. Let us glorify God in this Body called Faith Presbyterian Church.
Let us pray: O Lord, thank you for the gift of our creation, in bodies, in your image and likeness. And thank you that you intend for us throughout our life, both now and in the hereafter, to enjoy your glory. Give us grace to live now so as to be glad in the resurrection that you will provide, through Jesus our Lord. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at September 25, 2005 09:30 AM