Sunday Sermon: Raised Imperishable (1 Corinthians 15:42-49)

You are listening to the teaching ministry of Gabriel Hughes, pastor of First Southern Baptist Church in Junction City, Kansas. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday on this podcast, we feature 20 minutes of Bible study through a New Testament book.

On Thursday is our Old Testament study, and then we answer questions from listeners on Friday. Each Sunday we are pleased to share our sermon series, presently going through the letters to the Corinthians.

This is the sermon that was preached last week from our pulpit. Here's Pastor Gabe.

The Resurrection Body in 1 Corinthians 15

In honor of the word of the King, would you please stand. First Corinthians 15, beginning in verse 35. But someone will ask, how are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come? You foolish person.

What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as He has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body.

For not all flesh is the same, but there is one kind for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish. There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is of one kind, and the glory of the earthly is of another.

There is one glory of the sun, another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars, for star differs from star in glory. So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable. What is raised is 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.

Thus it is written, the first man, Adam, became a living being. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the natural and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust.

The second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust. And as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.

Let us pray. Our Lord God, as we consider these words today and the good news of the gospel that is there in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, I pray that our hearts would be enlivened, our hope restored, in knowing that though this body dies, though it is decaying even as we are, and goes into the ground, yet our soul will be forever with the Lord if we are in Christ Jesus.

It is this promise that we have from Christ, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For it is in him that we also will receive the resurrection of the dead if we believe in Christ Jesus and endure to the end.

Teach us what it means to believe, what it means to have faith. It's not merely to acknowledge that Jesus was a man who came to this earth, who lived and died, who rose again and ascended into heaven, but it is also to follow Jesus and do the things that Jesus did and obey the things that Jesus commanded.

This is also what it means to be a follower of Jesus. For it is the one who obeys who has the son and will see life and will receive the kingdom of God as an inheritance. I pray that these words would continue to encourage our hearts this morning.

And I pray that we would recognize in a smaller congregation this morning those who aren't here because of weather or illness or traveling or otherwise, and that we might reach out to one another as brothers and sisters in this body and say, hey, we missed you, looking forward to seeing you again when we can gather together as the saints.

Be with us this morning as we come into your word. And as this would also be an encouragement to us, help us know how to take these words and be an encouragement to others. And we pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen. Thank you. You may be seated. Imagine waking up in the morning and you got a notice on your cell phone that you're going to die today, and here's how you're going to die. This has been the plot of TV shows and movies.

There was a television show several years ago called Early Edition. And I never did see that show, but correct me if I'm wrong, wasn't that show about a guy who received a paper early in the morning that told him of a tragedy that was going to happen later that day, and then he had to go and help somebody, you know, not fall victim to that tragedy?

Wasn't that the point of the show? So Early Edition, he got news in advance of a tragedy that was going to happen. There was another show that came out just a few years ago that was about a couple of guys who got some numbers from a computer, and it was somebody's social security number.

And they didn't know if that social security number meant that person was a good guy or a bad guy. It could be that person was about to perpetrate something, or it could be that that person was about to become a victim of something, and they had to go to try to find that person to figure it out, whether they were going to stop them from committing a crime or prevent them from being the victim of some unspeakable tragedy.

So this has been the plots of movies and of TV shows where we have fantasized this idea that you can know how you're going to die in advance. It's prophetic. Or it may be because of some advanced technology, like this computer that was belching out these social security numbers.

Just yesterday, though, at 8 .05 in the morning, the state of Hawaii became a state of panic when 1 .4 million citizens and hundreds of thousands of visitors and tourists to the islands received a notice on their cell phone that a ballistic missile was headed their way.

Take cover immediately. This is not a drill. And you can imagine, with that notice on their cell phones, and it was also being beamed on all of the television stations there in Hawaii, everybody went nuts.

Panic ensued. There were people running and screaming in the streets, people hugging one another, crying, sharing tears, friends and family, and even complete strangers. People took pictures of the screenshots of their smartphones, posted it on Facebook and Twitter, and started saying their goodbyes.

People were checking up on loved ones. I watched a video just this morning of a couple who was lowering their children into a storm drain because if a nuclear weapon was going to strike one of the islands, hopefully the steel and concrete of that storm drain would protect their children from the blast or from the radiation fallout.

They couldn't fit in the drain themselves, but they could get their children in there. This was the panic that went on in Hawaii for about half an hour. Within 10 minutes of the notice being sent out, somebody who worked with the emergency management personnel got a word out on social media that it was a false alarm.

One of the congresswomen from Hawaii said the same thing. She said, folks, this is a false alarm, but it wasn't for another half an hour, almost 40 minutes total, before a notice went out to everybody's phones saying, hey, disregard the previous notice, false alarm, there is not a ballistic missile that is headed our way.

I can imagine the amount of relief that would have been experienced in the hearts of Hawaiians and probably a little bit of frustration and anger as well. All of that panic for nothing. Some were a little bit more level-headed even.

I mean, if a nuclear weapon is going to come and wipe us out, what is running around and panicking about it going to do? I read another exchange just this morning between a father and a son. The father was doing business there in Hawaii and the son was here stateside.

And he saw the notice on Facebook that people were posting there's a ballistic missile headed our way. And so the son texted it to his father and his father said, yeah, I know about it. He said, everybody in the restaurant where I'm sitting panicked and went screaming and running out of the restaurant.

He said, what did you do? And he said, I went to the buffet and filled up on more food. He said, the lines cleared out. It was like a smorgasbord. And I was going, that's my kind of guy right there. That's the way I would have thought about that situation too, I think.

You know, that situation could have been way worse than it turned out being. And not just because it could have actually been a real emergency, but because just since that notification went out, if North Korea had known about it, they may have tried to launch a nuclear weapon thinking that the United States was launching a weapon against North Korea and trying to warn their citizens of a retaliation.

And so we need to get our nukes out there before there's nothing left of us to be able to launch anything. So North Korea could have responded to that false alarm with something that would have been actually very serious and devastating.

So praise God that it was not as bad as it could have been. But imagine knowing, imagine getting a notification one morning, you're going to die today, and this is how you're going to die. Very few of us will ever know exactly how we are going to meet our end.

And none of us know what that will be like. I can say that I am not afraid of dying. I am confident in my Lord and Savior and the promises that have been given to us in Scripture that when I die, the moment I die, my soul goes to be with Him in glory.

I have nothing to fear of death. Now while I tell you that I'm not afraid of dying, I'm still a little concerned about how that's going to happen. I'll be real with you, I hope that it's going to be peaceful in my sleep, not that it's going to be some sort of painful or worrisome experience.

I can't imagine what that would be like in that half an hour of panic wondering which minute it's going to be that that ballistic missile is going to hit strike somewhere nearby and I could be vaporized and my life could end today.

I can imagine that would be pretty panic-inducing. I'm not afraid of dying, but I don't know how I'm going to die or what's going to happen when I die. Even those who have had those near-death experiences, like their bodies would be verified by doctors as being clinically dead.

There's no life left in that body, but somehow is able to be rejuvenated, enlivened again, life comes back into that body. When you ask those people what it was like, they really can't tell you. Some might give you stories of, oh, there was a light, and I was going toward the light.

But most of the time the story that you get is, I don't know, there was nothing there, it was just I fell asleep, and then y 'all woke me back up again. That's generally the kind of account that you hear.

Paul Washer, who is a great teacher and evangelist within the Southern Baptist denomination, had a heart attack last year, practically would have been declared dead at that point, but they were able to jumpstart his heart and get his heart going again.

When he was asked what that experience was like, he said, I don't know, it was just darkness, just going to sleep and waking back up again. Then he put out a public notification to everybody who follows Paul Washer and some of the people who were praying for him, and he said, I want you to know that I did not go to heaven, I did not see angels and other things, and I've not come back to write a best-selling book about it.

There are those that try to do that as well, and I tell you that what they say that they saw on the other side, they did not actually see. So we don't know what death is like. We don't know what it is that we're going to see on the other side.

What Paul is pointing out here in 1 Corinthians 15 is simply this. It's different. We live in the body now. Our soul inhabits this body, and we're all aware of that. There is a difference between the body and the soul, but at the same time, they coexist with one another.

The body can't even live without the soul, nor can the soul live in this life without the body. And so while the two things are separate, they're also one and the same. But what is it that separates a body that has been declared clinically dead from a body that is still alive and may just be in a coma?

Chemically, there is no difference between the two bodies. You talk about in a hospital, a body that is lying in a bed in a coma versus a body that is downstairs in the morgue. Chemically, everything is the same about those two bodies.

There is no difference chemically. But medical science is not able to account for or explain why one body is alive and the other body is not. And even though all of the chemicals are there for life in that body and all of the organs are assembled and everything, no matter what you do to the body, you can't give life to it.

We certainly know how to take life. We don't know how to give life. It cannot be done. The difference between alive and dead seems obvious and at the same time is scientifically unexplainable. But what we know is the difference between a living body and a dead body is the soul.

A living body has a soul. A dead body is just a carcass. The soul is one kind of vessel. The body is another kind of vessel. Wherever the soul goes on and lives forever is a different kind of existence than this body that the soul currently inhabits, which is definitely limited.

We know when we began and we know eventually we're going to end, even though we don't know when we're going to end or the manner in which our death is going to come about. So there are things we know, but things we don't know.

And so Paul is saying, when it comes to the resurrection of the dead, it's the same thing. There are things we know and there's things we don't know. There are things that we can apply to the resurrection of the dead just from what we see and experience in the world.

What you sow does not come to life until it dies, Paul says in verse 36, and we know that from nature. The seed goes into the ground and it must die. It must break open for that plant to come out of it and spring forth new life.

And so even from nature, we recognize that something must die in order for something to live. The body must die for the soul to continue to live on forever with the Lord. That's simply what Paul is pointing out here.

But the Corinthians doubt. They don't understand this. They don't understand how there can be a resurrection of the dead. I've never seen a body come back to life before, have you? So how can there be a resurrection of the dead?

Verse 35, someone will ask, how are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come? Now the Corinthians are simply asking questions that you and I might ask. What happens when we die? How does the soul go on and live forever?

How does it come back to life again? How do we go and be with the Lord? And Paul responds in verse 36 by saying, you foolish person. Now the way that he says this is not supposed to be degrading. It's not supposed to be, oh, you're an idiot.

What's the problem with you? That's not necessarily the reason why he comes at this. It's just they're using examples of nature to try to explain why there is no resurrection of the dead. And Paul says, well, you're foolish.

You can use examples of nature to explain how there is a resurrection of the dead. And then gives the example of the seed. What you sow is not the body that is to be. It is a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain.

But God gives it a body as he has chosen and to each kind of seed its own body. For not all flesh is the same, but there is one kind for humans, another for animals, another for birds, another for fish.

So likewise, Paul says, it is the same with the resurrection of the dead. We exist in this life in the flesh, but in the next life we exist in a different way. We exist in a spiritual existence, whereas here we're a combination of body and spirit.

In the next, it's going to be more spiritual than it is body, more spiritual than it is physical. Even our physical bodies that we inhabit right now will be brought back to life, will be made to be like his glorious body on the day that Christ returns.

Then our dead bodies will be reformed and reunited with our souls, but what was once perishable will be made to be imperishable, and then we will have a body that is just like Christ's. The first to receive a glorified body, but we likewise who are in Christ Jesus will also receive glorified bodies.

Now, even though I explained this to you, you might be thinking, oh, okay, well my body just comes back, it still looks like this body, but it exists spiritually forever in a body that just never dies.

Well, I don't know. I don't really know that for sure. I don't know when your body is reformed, when your soul is reunited with it, that it actually looks exactly like it does right now. It's fairly often that I will field questions either through when we understand the text or even from the congregation.

Somebody saying, will we know each other when we get to heaven? Will we be able to recognize each other? Will we know one another's names? Will we meet new people and we will automatically know their names?

Or will we have to do the whole, hey, I'm John, hey, I'm Matilda? Is that what we're going to have to do? Is it going to be a thing where we have a new name? Is there something in Revelation about that, that we have new names?

Here's my answers to those questions. I don't know. I don't have the foggiest idea. I know that I'm going to die and I'm going to live forever with the Lord because the Bible says so. That's the promise of God that I have.

But what all of that's going to be like, I don't know. And our tendency is to take the things that we like of this world and then apply it to the next and just think it's going to be like that. So oftentimes when you'll hear these stories of somebody who's had a near-death experience where they died and they said that they saw heaven, the version of heaven that they say that they saw is a very Americanized version of heaven because they're taking all the stuff that they like in America on earth and they just live that way in heaven.

Everybody lives that way in heaven. All the stuff that I like is exactly the stuff that I get in heaven. One of the most common ones, one of the most popular attributions of heaven that we use, not only from those who claim that they have seen heaven, but even those of us who long for heaven.

We like taking the passage out of Isaiah where it says they will mount up with wings like eagles. They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not faint. And we like to apply that to heaven like we're running eternal endless fields and just never getting tired.

Or we actually get angel wings and we get to fly around. That's the way we try to interpret that passage, even though that's not what Isaiah was talking about there at all. And I was addressing that one particular Sunday.

I was talking about how our tendency to take that passage and apply it into some sort of heavenly realm that's just like our physical realm, only you're invincible. You're like Superman. So it's the way I am on earth, but Superman or Wonder Woman in heaven, you know, however that would go.

But what I said in response to that, in addressing that Isaiah passage, and I quoted from Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, where he says in verse 36, you foolish person. When we take a passage like that out of Isaiah and try to apply it to our thoughts or our ambitions or our desires of heaven, we're being foolish because we're making heaven what we want it to be rather than what the Bible says that it is, a different kind of existence and present with the Lord.

So oftentimes our fanciful notions of heaven or our accounts of what heaven looked like when we went there always include these big paradise descriptions, descriptions of just like a tropical paradise that we live in.

But very rarely do you hear somebody say, I saw Christ and I glorified in Him forever in heaven, which is exactly what heaven is. It's the place where God dwells and it's the place where we will dwell with Him, glorifying in Him forever.

That's what eternal life is. That's what the Bible says that it is. That's the picture that we get in Revelation. All of us with the saints forever in glory, praising God. And that's a wonderful, awesome thing.

That should be the thing that we're looking forward to. But very rarely in a person's account of what they're looking forward to in heaven, do you hear them say, oh, I can't wait to see my Lord. It's rather, I can't wait to run in endless fields or walk down streets of gold or mount up wings like eagles.

The great thing about heaven is not that we will have any of those things. The great thing about heaven is that we will be with our Lord forever in glory. In a place where there is no more dying, no more tears, no more pain, Christ will wipe away every tear from our eyes, as it says in Revelation 21, 7, for the former things have passed away and all has been made new in Christ Jesus.

What we should desire the most about everlasting life is to be with our Lord Christ. We glorify him now in this life, and we glorify him forever in the next. So anyway, as I said, I was confronting some of those false notions or those Americanized notions of heaven in a sermon one time, and I quoted from Paul who said, you foolish person.

And I had somebody who came up to me afterward and was very, very angry. Was very angry that I had just demolished all of her notions of what heaven is going to be like. And she said, why can't I think that heaven is going to be those things?

Why can't I think that? And I said to her, you know, I'll be honest with you. I don't know what heaven's going to be like. Is it going to be like the things that you want it to be like? Maybe it will be.

I don't know. But what I am trying to encourage you in is that you not make heaven about those things. You make heaven about being with Christ. Being with our Lord. That's what you look forward to. As Paul said to the Colossians, Colossians chapter 3, if then you have been raised with Christ.

Let me stop there for a minute. If you have been raised with Christ. Not if you're going to be raised with Christ. But if you have been raised with Christ. Do you realize now that all those who are in Christ Jesus, Christians following in the way of Christ, we've already been raised from the dead?

You were once dead in your sins and your trespasses in which you once walked. Ephesians 2, 1. But now in Christ you have been raised to life. So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above where Christ is.

Seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. Don't take the earthly things that you like and try to make heaven about that. We're leaving all that stuff behind.

We don't take any of that with us. That's the stuff that perishes when Christ comes back and judges the world. We shouldn't want it. We shouldn't long for any of it. What we desire is Christ, to be forever with Him because we know He's eternal and none of this stuff is.

Seek the things that are above where Christ is, not the things on earth. Paul says, Colossians 3, 3,. And your life is hidden with Christ in God. Your life right now is with Christ in God. Seated at the right hand of the Father.

Verse 4,. Now try to give me a spiritual description of that picture. How is it that I'm hidden with Christ in God? What does that look like? Because my soul's still here in this body. It's not up there with Christ.

So how does that work? I don't know. But I know the promise is given to us in Scripture. There are things that with our physical eyes, our physical minds, our physical bodies, we can't understand about what the eternal is like or what that spiritual realm looks like.

We don't get it. Which is why, by the way, Revelation is so hard to understand. Why is it that everybody's so confused about what's said in the book of Revelation? Why is it that there are so many different interpretations and there are people that argue and debate with one another regarding some of these things that the book of Revelation is saying?

It's because John is seeing something that is in a completely different realm that he's now trying to describe to people who don't live in that realm. How do you do that? Can you describe a color you've never seen before?

Or even try this. Try describing a color to a blind person who's never seen before. How easy is that to do? I remember when I was in a social studies class in junior high and we were reading about Marco Polo.

And Marco Polo goes to China and he sees great animals and beasts and things that the people of his native land had never seen before, never laid their eyes on before. And when he came back and tried to explain to him what it was that he saw, they didn't believe him.

They didn't understand him. They actually thought he was mad. And I remember my social studies teacher trying to help us to understand, you know, try describing an elephant to somebody who's never seen an elephant before.

There's this great big animal, this great big long nose. What's the matter with you? Great big long nose. They thought that Marco Polo was just being fanciful, that he was just making things up, claiming that he had seen a land that didn't actually exist to try to entertain person's fancy.

So there are things even in life today we try to explain to somebody who's never seen it or never experienced before. It's difficult to understand it. It's difficult to explain a color to somebody who's never seen that color before.

So how do you explain things of the heavenly in an infinite existence to people who are earthly in a finite existence? It cannot be done. What we do see, though, in Revelation is that the saints are forever with the Lord and praising him in a kingdom that is perfect, that is glorious, where evil has been done away with, and where we praise God for the fact that we were once evil and we deserve to be wiped out with this world, but by his grace and mercy he saved us, and we get to be forever with him in heaven.

That's the picture that we see in Revelation. And all manner of words and pictures and things like that John uses to try to help us understand what it is that he sees on the other side. We're going to go on as long as we are in this life debating about what the book of Revelation means.

People will have different interpretations. A lot of times those interpretations are just secondary or tertiary. We can disagree on certain things, and it doesn't necessarily mean that somebody's a heretic or a false teacher.

Some people can take Revelation and turn it into something false teaching. But as long as we understand that what's being shown to us there is our Lord Christ returns, he puts an end to evil, he finally destroys the devil.

He does, as Paul says here in 1 Corinthians 15, he destroys death, which is the last enemy. 1 Corinthians 15, 26, the last enemy to be destroyed is death, for God has put all things in subjection under his feet.

When that's the expanded picture that we see in the book of Revelation, then you understand the point that John is trying to get to by what it is that he is writing there, even if you don't understand some of the symbolism that he uses to explain it.

So it's difficult for us as finite creatures to understand the infinite. Paul is kind of making that point here in 1 Corinthians 15, but still showing us that even from nature and even from what we experience in the physical, we can have some sense of what's going on in the spiritual.

You know that a seed has to die in order for a new life to come out of it, and so it is the same with the body. The body is like a seed, and it's going to die, and the soul is going to spring forth and live forever with the Lord in glory.

Each kind of body has its own glory. So just as we will have a different glory in heaven, angels will have one kind of glory, God will have all the glory, we who are saints who are resurrected will have a different kind of glory, just like the heavenly bodies and the earthly bodies have glories of their own.

There is a glory for the sun, there is a glory for the moon, there is another glory for the stars, for star differs from star in glory. Verse 42, so it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, 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. Understand the specificity of what Paul is mentioning there. If there's a natural body, there's a spiritual body.

Folks, this means that every single living human being has a soul and is deserving of receiving Christian love, respect, and compassion. From conception to natural death, as I had stated it last week, we cherish all life from its earliest stages to its final stages because it was created by God, because Jesus himself experienced life that way, from conception to natural death.

Now, Jesus rose from the dead, and as it's explained in the Psalms, as Peter also preached at Pentecost in Acts chapter 2, Christ's body didn't even seek corruption. It came back restored, brand new, glorious, just like we who are in Christ will receive glorious bodies.

But our body in the meantime is perishable. When it is raised, it will be imperishable. The way that we leave this life is going to be dishonorable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. Why is it sown in dishonor?

Because remember Romans 6 .23, the wages of sin is death. We die because we're sinners. But the rest of that verse, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. It's sown in dishonor, but it's raised in glory.

It is sown in weakness. Amen? Everybody feels weak this morning, right? When you walked out the door this morning, you got hit in the face with that blast of cold air, and you felt the snow seeping into your shoes, you felt weak.

So we are sown in weakness, but we are raised in power forever with the Lord. We are sown a natural body. We are raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. For every person that has a natural body, there is a soul within that person that will be raised again by Christ, excuse me, for those who are in Christ Jesus and live forever with him.

This is why we must share the gospel, so that those who hear it would repent of sin, would believe in Christ, and have eternal life. Paul goes on to explain this statement that he just made. If there's a natural body, there's also a spiritual body.

In verse 45, by appealing to the scriptures, thus it is written, the first man Adam became a living being. The last Adam, who is that? Jesus Christ. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the natural and then the spiritual.

There's a double meaning to this. That Adam came first and then Christ to redeem Adam, and also that we are born in a physical body that is given a spiritual body, and then when the physical body dies, that spiritual body goes on and lives forever.

But the physical must come first. The natural comes first, which is what Paul goes on to say. It is not the spiritual that is first, but the natural and then the spiritual. The first man Adam became a living being.