You want a brand-new body right now? Your wish will be done—but only at the right time! Let’s learn what the Bible says.
This part of theology is called the ultimate or final redemption and salvation. Right now your spirit and / or soul are saved, and your body can be saved to a certain degree, as in divine healing and sustenance.
Word Study on Spirit, Soul, and Body
Is Humankind Two or Three Parts?
But your body will eventually fade away and die and decompose. On your death, your spirit and / or soul will immediately be with the Lord:
6 Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. 7 For we live by faith, not by sight. 8 We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord. 9 So we make it our goal to please him, whether we are at home in the body or away from it. (2 Cor. 5:6-9)
22 If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! 23 I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; 24 but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body. (Phil. 1:22-24)
But what happens when Jesus returns?
The points are numbered for clarity and conciseness.
Please go to biblegateway for the translations.
1.. The Triunity will give you a resurrected body.
God the Father will give you a new body, which is called the redemption of your body (Rom. 8:23). The Father raises the dead (John 5:21)
God the Son is the means or instrument of the resurrection. He will raise you up on the last day (John 6:39-40, 44, 54).
God the Spirit will give life to your mortal body (Rom. 8:11).
The Trinity: What Are the Basics?
The Trinity: What Are His Roles in Creation and Redemption?
The Trinity: What Does He Mean to Me?
2.. If you are in heaven at his Second Coming, you will descend with Jesus and meet your new body, after it is resurrected.
There is a dual operation when Jesus comes back. You will be in your spirit-soul when you are in heaven. When Christ returns, you as a spirit-soul will descend with him in your spirit bodies and you will reunite with your resurrected body (1 Thess. 3:13; 4:13-16).
28 “Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice 29 and come out—those who have done what is good will rise to live, and those who have done what is evil will rise to be condemned. (John 5:28-29)
Everyone Shall Be Judged by Their Works and Words
This transformation will take place in a flash. He will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body by the power that subjects everything to his control (Phil. 3:20-21). Then you will descend with him and reign on the earth.
3.. If you are a believer and alive on earth at Jesus’s Second Coming, your body will be transformed.
When you meet Jesus in the air in the rapture, a snatching away (a rapture), your physical, degraded body will be raised and transformed in the twinkling of an eye into a new, resurrected body. You will then descend with the Lord to the earth and reign with him.
51 Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed— 52 in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. 53 For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. 54 When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.”
55 “Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?” (1 Cor. 15:51-55)
Once again: What Does ‘Parousia’ Mean?
4.. This transformation will be done in the air.
If you are alive at his Second Coming, you will be snatched up or caught up or raptured, and your body will be instantly transformed in the air (1 Thess. 4:17).
“Rapture” comes from the Latin words rapto (or rapio), “to seize and carry away, hurry away.”
However, the New Testament is not in Latin, but in Greek. And the key Greek word is harpazō, which has the same definition (“caught up”). The Latin and Greek words are synonyms.
So, the word Latin-based rapture does not appear in the New Testament, but the concept and reality are certainly taught in Greek.
15 According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. 16 For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. 17 After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up [harpazõ] together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. (1 Thess. 4:15-17)
One great aspect of the location of your change is that Satan is and his kingdom is called the prince of the air (Eph. 2:2). Our change there is God announcing to Satan that his time is up.
Please see my post:
Rapture = Second Coming and Happen at Same Time on Last Day
5.. The soul-spirit is not contained in the body like a prison.
The ancient Greek conception of the soul-body is that the soul is in the prison of the body, but this is not biblical. It is true that our body right now is fading away and getting old, but God will reconstitute and restore it in a transformed, resurrected body. None of God’s good and redeemed creation, including your body, is so awful that it will be permanently destroyed.
Outline of Plato’s View of Justice and the Soul
6.. Your new body will not be purely natural but also spiritual.
Your resurrected body will be like Christ’s resurrected body:.
And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, 21 who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body. (Phil. 3:20-21)
John the apostle agrees:
Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. (1 John 3:2)
Your mortal and perishable body will put on an immortal and imperishable quality to it (1 Cor. 15:53). “For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality” (1 Cor. 15:53). You will be able to eat and drink, but somehow the body will absorb the food and liquid without purging out the waste (Luke 24:37-43). The disciples recognized resurrected Jesus when he willed it, for the 500 knew it was Jesus when he appeared to them at one time (1 Cor. 15:6). In another appearance he showed them the wounds and his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord (John 20:20). And so your new, transformed body will be recognizable to your friends and family.
Renewal theologian J. Rodman Williams draws this conclusion from those verses:
Indeed a transformation had unmistakably occurred. There was something unique here. Other resurrections are reported in the Gospels, but none such—for all their wonder—signify a new mode of spiritual existence. They were only resuscitations of corporal existence. They represent transitory returns to physical life, and in due time the resuscitated person died once more. Jesus, on the contrary, was raised not to die again but to continue living. Thus, the resurrection, though it is bodily, is not a continuing physical life but a spiritual one. … Thus while there is an essential identity and a continuity between Jesus’ existence prior to and after His resurrection (there is no transition into a disembodied state), there is also an otherness and a certain discontinuity from what had preceded. (vol. 1, p. 387)
That passage is about Jesus, but your body will be like his, under the control of the Father and the Spirit.
7.. Your body can enter a heavenly and spiritual dimension.
You will not suffer the limitations of our current space-time dimension. When the resurrected Jesus entered the room where the door was shut and locked, he probably entered the heavenly, spiritual dimension on the outside of the room and left the heavenly, spiritual dimension inside the room (John 20:19).
God will enable you to do the same, but by his will. You will have to surrender your spiritual body to a new set of spiritual rules, just as your physical body has to obey natural laws. God set them up right now, and he has rules in his heavenly-spiritual dimension. Your bodies will also have to obey the rules–whatever they turn out to be–in the renewed and renovated and recreated heaven and earth. All of this will be done by the will of the Father, so redeemed people with transformed bodies cannot do these things on their own. But we will have free will, to a degree which we don’t know yet.
8.. It will have a mysterious quality to it.
Here are some verses about the resurrected Jesus.
At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus. 15 He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?” Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.” (John 20:14-15)
But they were kept from recognizing him. (Luke 24:16)
Mark 16:12: This verse says he appeared in another “form.” Even if one were to say that the verse is not in the best manuscripts, it does reflect early church belief in some quarters.
J. Rodman Williams writes:
Thus all the resurrection narratives are on the mysterious borderline between the commonplace and the unusual, the natural and supernatural. Another dimension of human reality is for the first time becoming manifest. There is both identity and otherness, continuity and discontinuity, familiarity and unfamiliarity. It all suggests that something new and inexplicable has for the first time come about. This is the transformation of physical existence into a higher order of spiritual existence: the spiritual body of the resurrection! (vol. 1, p. 388)
9.. You will have no more disease or physical degradation.
This is true by the nature of the case. With your new, glorified, transformed body, you will not suffer physical pain or disease. You will have thrown off our degraded and weak “mammal” body and enjoy a new, glorified body that will never grow old or decompose. As noted, your body will be like that of Jesus.
10.. You will not become angels.
Angels have no bodies like ours will be, because they are purely spiritual bodies, though they can manifest in bodily shape. Your body will be corporeal, but transformed and glorified. “At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven” (Matt. 22:30)
How does this post help me grow in Christ?
You have loved ones who have died. Right now they are with the Lord in their spirit-souls (or just souls). They are not lost, because you know where they are. Lost things or missing persons are in an unknown location.
Right now they are perfectly fulfilled and complete and happy and blessed. They are home, but you are not yet home. Don’t pity them or wish they were with you—though that is a natural reaction. Instead, you must eventually celebrate their home-going and coronation. When it is your turn to die, you will be with them forever.
This spiritual existence in heaven is called the intermediate state, because it comes between our physical bodies (now) and our resurrected bodies (at the Second Coming). In contrast, this post was purposed to look at our resurrected body at the Second Coming. Your loved one who has died will descend with Jesus and be reunited with his body, but it will be transformed to become immortal and imperishable. When Jesus returns and you are alive down here on earth, your body, as it ascends or is caught up or raptured, will be transformed into a resurrected one, as quick as a twinkling of the eye. Now your deceased loved one and you will be together forever, equal and in the same state.
Don’t grieve as the world does, who have no hope. You do. So get your hopes up!
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