1 Corinthians chapter 15, and we'll be looking at verse 35 to the end of the chapter. Before we read, let's pray. Heavenly Father, we pray that as we come to Your word, You would open the eyes of our heart, that we might behold wondrous things, that we might see what You have done for us in Jesus Christ, that we might believe and lay hold of the hope that we have in Him. Lord, we come acknowledging our need of You at this time. Help us, we pray, in Christ's name. Amen. 1 Corinthians chapter 15, starting at 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 kind. There is one glory of the sun, and 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 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. I tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: “Death is swallowed up in victory.” “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain. This is the word of the Lord. (Congregation: Thanks be to God.) You were made for an existence that surpasses the most enjoyable and complete life that you could possibly imagine experiencing. You were made for an existence that surpasses the most enjoyable and complete life that you could possibly imagine experiencing. When you lean back in the couch after a perfect three-course meal with your closest family and friends and settle into that mysteriously free and peaceful conversation that occurs in long-developed, battle-hardened friendships—you ever experienced that? Remember those nights? Yeah? That sense of peace, security, calm, and satisfaction is weak and pale in comparison to what you were made for. When you finally receive that job offer or that promotion and have your hard-won skills and disciplined determination rewarded and publicly acknowledged, that accolade is shrunken and shriveled in comparison to the reward and acknowledgment your heart really desires. As you marvel at the sun rising over the ocean, as you look down over the crashing waves on the pure white sand of the beach below, the almost overwhelming sense of awe and delight that you experience there is just the invitation to the dinner party you were designed to attend. You were made to experience a life that surpasses the most complete, full, delightful joy that you could possibly imagine. Remember those moments you felt most elated, most peaceful, most delighted, successful, secure, and strong, whether it be physical, emotional, relational, or intellectual. Each and every single time you've experienced glory and beauty, you have not even begun to taste the fullness of God's design for His people. How do I know this? Because Jesus's resurrection was unlike any other resurrection that has ever happened. There were other resurrections. People have come back from the dead throughout history—not many, but some. Elijah and Elisha had performed resurrections in the Old Testament. Jesus raised more than a few. And even when Jesus died, the scriptures report that the graves were opened, and saints came out and walked among the streets of Jerusalem. Coming back from the dead is strange, it's unusual, but it's not unique. But all of these other resurrected people came back to a life where they would once more decay. They came back to die again. I think it's kind of a rip-off, really. And that's the point I want us to wrap our heads around, or one of the points I want us to wrap our heads around today, that this life is one of decay. This life is one of passing away. It doesn't matter if you find love. One day your lover or you will stop breathing and be buried in the ground. Money or accomplishment or fame may give you joy for a moment, but soon enough you will die, and within a generation or two, even the most famous of men will be forgotten. If you think about it, there's a handful of people who are remembered for their great achievements for hundreds or even thousands of years, but it's exceedingly rare. It's almost certain that every single one of you and me will be forgotten 150 years from now. No one will remember your name. And even those who are remembered are not around to enjoy being remembered. There is nothing you can find or have in this life that will not perish, fail, or decay. Moth and rust eat away our possessions, and death comes for us all. But as I mentioned, Christ was raised from the dead on Easter Sunday with a resurrected body that was completely different to the bodies of those who were raised to face death once more. Christ's body was not raised to another shot at mortal life. Jesus was raised to an incorruptible, imperishable, glorious life, bodily life. Jesus was raised to eternal life. He was raised to another kind of reality altogether to the one that you and I experience. He still had a body. We just read passages that speak to us about the disciples' experiences of Jesus after He was raised from the dead. Did you notice how much Jesus is keen for the disciples to see that He has a real body? “Come, touch Me,” He says. He eats with them even. “Touch Me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have,” He said in Luke 24. He showed them His hands and His feet and even ate with them a piece of broiled fish. You might remember He had breakfast with Peter and the disciples on the beach. He's a real bodily existence. But His body is strangely different. You might recall from other readings of the gospels that the women who find Jesus in the garden don't recognize Him at first. Takes some time for them to realize this is Jesus. The disciples on the road to Emmaus also failed to recognize Jesus, seemingly for hours. We also read of Jesus appearing in locked rooms, twice. Did you pick that up? John's at pains to make you realize it. He mentions it explicitly, and like I said, twice. “On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them.” And then He showed them His hands and His side. And again, eight days later, His disciples were inside, although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them. And again, in that instance, He points to His physicality. “Thomas, come, put your fingers in the wounds, put your hand in My side.” And then, if you read further in Luke 24, after speaking to the disciples on the road to Emmaus, Jesus did the opposite of appearing in a locked room. Luke reports that when He was at the table with them, He took the bread and blessed it and broke it and gave it to them, and their eyes were opened, and they recognized Him, and He vanished from their sight. You see? The gospel writers are trying to show us, Jesus is resurrected to a bodily form. He's a real human being. You can touch Him, you can talk to Him, He eats food, and yet there's something different about Him. I wonder what that is. What is the nature of this resurrected, bodily life that Jesus experiences and still experiences to this day, that no other resurrected human will experience, but that He promises to all of His followers when He comes again? What is the nature of that life? And that's why I want us to look together at 1 Corinthians 15. 1 Corinthians 15 is a wonderful chapter about the resurrection, where Paul deals with the necessity and the fact of not just Jesus's resurrection, but also its implications for Christians. And as Paul works through this issue, he comes to a rhetorical question in verse 35, which we read: “With what kind of body do they come? With what kind of body are people raised from the dead?” What a fascinating question. And in this passage, he reveals to us more about the nature of the resurrection that Jesus is going to bring to all of His people than any other passage in the Bible. Paul answers this question and starts to delve into this mystery of what eternal, bodily, resurrected life is going to look like by considering two arguments from nature. He talks about seeds, and then he talks about different bodies. In verse 36 to 38, he starts by pointing us to seeds to make the point that resurrected life is going to be different to this life. Verse 36 to 38, he talks about how God gives, sorry, when you sow, 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 some other grain. But God gives it a body as He has chosen. See what he's saying? He's saying that you should know these things. I love how, again, we saw this on last Sunday night, if you were here, we saw how God has built into nature some of these realities. You want to understand the resurrection that is to come? Well, look at the seeds. When you plant a seed, you place a bare kernel in the ground, perhaps of wheat or some other thing. That kernel dies, it has to. It's buried, and then it is raised, and what comes out of the ground looks nothing like the seed. It looks much more glorious than the seed, but it looks nothing like it. It's organically connected to the seed. It's the same thing. It came from the seed. It's not disconnected, but it's different. It's got a different body. It's radically different. That's the point he's making there. And then he goes on in verse 38 to 41 to point to the fact that God gives different types of creatures and beings different types of bodies. He says, “not all flesh is the same. There's one kind for humans, another for animals, another for birds, another for fish. There are heavenly bodies and earthly ones, and the glory of the heavenly is of one kind and the glory of the earthly is another. There's a glory of the sun, there's a glory of the moon, another glory for stars, and even the stars differ in glory from one another.” What's he getting on? What's he talking about? Well, he's inviting us to think about how God has given different bodies to different animals that suit their particular situation and have a glory that is suitable to that situation, right? The body of a bird is perfectly structured to enable a bird to exist in the heavens, right? The body of a fish is perfectly suited to existing in water. A human body can't extract oxygen out of water, but a fish's body can. A human body is slow and cumbersome in water, but a fish's body, it's made for it. You see? Even our bodies, as strange as they are, are suited to our particular type of existence. We've got opposing thumbs, which are awfully helpful, right? And that's the point. Each of these creatures and beings has a particular body that is suitable for the place that God has placed them and for the glory that God has purposed for them to display. So he's taken these two pictures: a seed dies and rises again in a different but connected, more glorious form, and God knows how to design bodies that are suitable for their particular type of situation. And then he says in verse 42, “So it is with the resurrection from the dead.” So it is with the resurrection from the dead. And then he goes on to use this sowing language to compare our existence now to the resurrected life that we will experience when Jesus comes again and transforms us into His image. He says we currently sow perishable life. Our lives are perishable, full of decay and corruption. Our lives are dishonorable in verse 43, and weak. We experience shame, we experience disgrace, we experience sickness and frailty. That's a pretty good description of our life, I think, in many regards, isn't it? Decaying, corrupt, dishonorable, weak. In comparison, he says, the body that we will be raised to is going to be dissimilar, right? It's going to be more glorious, like the seed that's planted and comes up as a wheat plant. So this perishable, dishonorable, weak life will be sown and an imperishable, incorruptible, immortal, unending existence will rise from the grave, a glorious existence, a powerful, strong, able existence will rise. Paul then shifts. He stops talking about the seed growing up, and he starts talking about Adam and the second Adam, or the last Adam. And he says, notice that everyone who is born has the same nature as Adam. Adam was a man made from the dust. He was connected to this world. He was natural. You could understand that as sensual. He's consumed by his senses, by the physical, if you like. And this is what we're like. And he's mortal. “From dust you are, and to dust you shall return,” is what God says. But in comparison, Christ, the last Adam, the second man, the last man, is spiritual. Now, we know from the resurrection passages that Jesus is still physical. So the distinction's not between physical and spiritual, as if the spiritual is some kind of ghostly, ethereal experience. The distinction is between natural or earthy and spirit-filled, spirit-driven, spirit-empowered, a life that's connected to God by His spirit. A life that's from heaven. So rather than being intrinsically connected to the earth like Adam was, a dusty man, the second Adam is connected to heaven, a spiritual man. You see? Spirit-filled, empowered by the Spirit. And these two pictures that we have are so true of our experience of life in two different ways. This idea of a perishable, dishonorable, weak, dusty, natural life is true in the sense that so much of our life is dusty to the taste. Tastes dusty. That moment you lower your grandfather in a coffin into the ground. It's a dusty experience. It's a perishable experience. A work colleague spreads gossip about you behind your back. You lie to your friend and feel the strain in that relationship for years to come. These are the pains and the difficulties of life, the corruptions of life. Those times in life that remind us and scream to us of the perishability and the mortality of this world. Death, suffering, disappointment, guilt, pain, sickness, betrayal, abandonment, loss, and failure. Can you taste it? That's Adam. But this is also true of our life in another sense, because there are moments of life that are a delight, aren't there? They don't taste like dust. They don't look like decay and dishonor and weakness. Your wedding day, clothed in splendor, your family and your friends rejoicing, the love of your life across the aisle. That doesn't feel dusty. Reaching the summit and feeling the twin pleasures of of completing a hard climb and seeing the deep valley spread out before you. Steak and potatoes. Love, satisfaction, feasting, friendship, peace. These things taste like heaven. But what Paul wants us to grapple with and grasp is that even our greatest works and highest joys in this life fit into the category of perishable, decaying, and weak, and dusty. In 2 Corinthians, Paul speaks about how our sufferings are not worthy to be compared to the glory that is prepared for us. It is also true that our joys, our delights, are not worthy to be compared to the glory that is prepared for us. We were made for more than that. We were made to be transformed, transposed, if you like, lifted up. We were made for more. And this is one part of what the resurrection of Jesus means for us. Not only does it mean that Jesus is who He says He is, not only does it mean that Jesus has defeated sin and death and paid for our guilt, it also means that Jesus is going to transform us radically, as radically as His body was transformed in His resurrection. If you are one of Christ's, if you are following Him and trusting in the salvation He offers, you are destined for imperishable, glorious power, a spiritual, not immaterial, not ethereal, but a spiritual, spirit-filled life connected to heaven. I want to ask, why do we need this transformation? We are going to be transformed. If you're in Christ, you're going to be transformed when Jesus comes again and raises the dead. Why? Why does there need to be an, a kind of next level of existence? Well, remember the different bodies that Paul spoke about? Remember how Paul gives different bodies to men, animals, birds, fish, the sun and the moon and the stars? A body given to them to perfectly suit the space they inhabit. This is why we need this transformation. Our body Christ raises will be suitable for its dwelling place. It will be equipped to experience the glory of that place. And what is that place? Paul tells you in chapter 15 verse 50. He says, “I tell you this, brothers, flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” You see his point? You have insufficient capacity right now. Because your flesh and your blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. The perishable cannot inherit the imperishable. You see, there's a kingdom that God is preparing. He's preparing a place for His Son. God is going to remake the heavens and the earth. He's going to join heaven back with earth and create a glorious place that is suited to the glory of His Son. In fact, Jesus is the template for this new heavens and this new earth. That's the point of this new creation, is we need a place that will be able to see the great glory of Jesus. That glory will be heavier and richer than this world, not lighter and more ethereal. Don't think of the new creation as clouds and harps. Think of it as something more solid than this world, richer than this world. Perhaps Jesus could walk through walls, as it seems He's doing, something to that effect, not because He was ghost-like, but because the walls were ghost-like in comparison to Him. Try and wrap your head around that one. The new creation will be capable of handling the heavenly man, the resurrected Jesus Christ, because brighter light is needed to reflect His radiance. Richer colors will be required to display His glory. Louder sounds, more complex melodies and harmonies, higher mountains, deeper depths, more vibrant animals and flowers and greener trees. And as with the first creation, God will bring us, redeemed humanity, resurrected humanity, transformed humanity into this new creation, and our senses and bodily functions will not be abandoned, but will be shifted upwards, changed gear, if you like, so that all our activities here on earth will not be made meaningless. Remember there's an organic connection between the seed and the plant? There's some sort of connection between what we are like here and what we will be like there, but it's different in an upwards direction. Our senses and activities will not be made meaningless and redundant but will be somehow transformed or translated into something greater. Perhaps we will have greater joy, clearer minds, faster legs—I think R.C. Sproul used to talk about jumping, jumping over things. I can't remember. More agile fingers, closer relationships, greater affections, more abundant words and mouths that can speak and sing and declare the glories of the righteousness of the risen King Jesus for eternal ages to come. When the Bible speaks about the new creation, we're given pictures of the highest delights this life can offer: streets of gold, rivers of pure water, fruitful trees, singing multitudes, music, weddings, temple worship, kings, a city, a beautiful garden. These are the pictures. And my point is that these glories, I think, are shown to us not to display the fullness of the new creation, but to show us that the starting place will be higher than the highest heights. Stretch your mind to consider delight and magnificence, and then times it by 10. That's where I believe we will start. That's the beginning of resurrected existence. And there's no reason in my mind to think that we won't grow into our glorious bodies, finding more and more joy in our deeper and richer abilities to know and glorify and enjoy our Creator, our Savior, our Lord, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, God Himself. This is the picture that God create, that Paul paints in 1 Corinthians 15. This perishable will put on the imperishable. Glory, power, spiritual, resurrected life. Now, what's the point of all this? Well, one thing, there's two main points. The first thing is, I want you to long for that. I don't want you to settle for this life. It's perishable, mortal, fleeting, and dusty. It's dirt, and you know it. If you just stop for five seconds and think about it, you know. You think about this in two ways again. Think about it as in terms of what fasting does for us, or suffering. When we fast or suffer, we are reminded that this world is passing away. We're reminded that the things of this earth do not fully satisfy, and so we reject those things, or we are denied those things by God, so that we would long for the world that does satisfy. But you can also think about it in terms of feasting. Because feasting is there, joy, delight is there to expose us to the slightest glimmer of the glory of heaven. You know that feeling of overwhelming delight? You get it in all sorts of different parts of life where your heart like burns within you, and you feel like, I'm, I'm like incapable of handling the joy. You ever felt that? Lean into it. But don't settle for it. Don't be blinded by the light. See that that's a dim glow and let your heart yearn for its source. The divine light of the glory of God that will shine ever, ever more brightly in the heavenly kingdom for which we're destined. You see what I'm saying? When you lack, long. When you have, long. Let both drive you to yearn and desire the heavenly kingdom, the new creation that is coming for you. Because that's what they speak to you of. This world is dust, it's passing away, and the life to come is higher than the highest joys. Paul speaks about this a little bit in Philippians 3, he says, “Our citizenship is in heaven.” That's what we long for. We long to go home. “And from it, from heaven, we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like His glorious body, by the power that enables Him even to subject all things to Himself.” Can you feel the longing? I want to be there where it does not fade. I want to be there where I'm transformed into glory, and where I see Him as He is and am made to be like Him. Because that's where I'm from. If you trust in Jesus Christ, He has given you citizenship in heaven, and you've renounced your citizenship on earth. That's really what repentance is. One of the ways you can think about it. It's saying, I don't want this world. I don't want the glories of this world. I don't want the pleasures that sin offers. I want God. I want to dwell in His presence, and I believe that the delight and the joy and the satisfaction that He is going to bring me is worth the renunciation of everything here. So that's the first thing I want you to go away with. Long for the new creation, long for the resurrection. But the second thing is this: work and hope for resurrection life. Work as if your work is going to mean something in the resurrected world. Understand the connection. And this is what Paul's whole point of 1 Corinthians 15 is. This is how he applies it in verse 58. “Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord, your labor is not in vain.” And you might say, “Hang on, Paul, you just said that this life is perishable, decaying, falling away, mortal. How is it that my work is not going to decay with it?” And he says, “Have you not understood the seed?” When you plant a seed, there is a connection between the seed and between the plant. Yes, it's transformed and more glorious, but it's still connected in some way. Your life is a seed. Yes, Jesus's call to you is, “Come and die. Come and lay down your life, pursue the glory of God, repent from your sin, give to God's work and to the needy, take up your cross and suffer for Jesus.” But he says this because what seem like scars will be transformed into glorious marks of grace. I think it's amazing that Jesus's resurrected body still has wounds. Nail marks in His hands, a hole where the spear pierced Him in His side. Why? Because the suffering that He endured for the sake of His people and for the glory of His Father have been transformed by His resurrection into glory. The marks of His shame have become the statements of His honor, the trophies of His grace. And this way of seeing the world is the way that Jesus saw it. That's what we looked at last week. He knew that the seed must die in order for it to rise to glory and to bear fruit. But this is exactly the same way that Paul viewed things. Think about Paul's letters. He speaks so openly all through his letters about the suffering that he endured for the sake of Jesus, the marks that he bears on his very body because of what he's suffered. And why could he rejoice in these sufferings? Why could he walk through life saying, "Hey, I get beaten up all the time because I share the gospel, and people don't like that very much"? Because he understood that scars become symbols of splendor at the resurrection. He knew that any worldly honor and pleasure he achieved would perish with his perishable body, but the shame and pain he endured in pursuit of the glory of God would turn like a seed into something beyond imagining as Jesus transforms it into glory at the resurrection. This is true of all our greatest heroes of the past. Christians are a weird bunch. We celebrate suffering people. It's what we do. You go and you read the biographies on the shelf of a Christian bookshop, and you will find men who suffered and died, who gave up their families and their finances, who gave up their time and their energies, who gave up their honor and took upon themselves shame and starvation and suffering and abandonment and betrayal for the sake of Jesus. And we see them as glorious. Why? Because of this very truth. Because the seeds of suffering become the plants of glory. Work like this, giving yourself over to death and suffering for the sake of Christ will spring forth into the new creation with a sparkling glory. But this is also true of all the acts of service and obedience that are less biography-worthy. It's worth remembering that Jesus saw and honored the little old widow who put a copper coin in the temple offering box. No one wrote a biography of her, but Jesus sees even that act of sacrifice and obedience, and says, “That's going to spring forth into something splendid.” The pain of repenting of a sin, of confessing to someone you have wronged. Feels like dying. Feels like you're giving up your honor, you're giving up your ego. It's going to spring forth to glory. The suffering of losing sleep as you hold your sick child throughout the night, the sacrifice of your time as you call a fellow believer to encourage them in their faith, the shame you may encounter as you speak of Jesus to a friend, the early mornings as you go to work to provide for your family—every single one of these sacrifices, if it is done in faith for the glory of God, will sprout like a seed into a glorious plant in the new creation. Paul tells us this elsewhere in Galatians 6, “God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that he will also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption. But the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life.” You see, this actually goes in both directions. Laying down your life results in glory, but seeking your own selfish gain results in greater shame. Sowing to lies will result in something horrific. Sowing to greed will result in a selfishness worse than your worst nightmares. And I'm not talking just in this life. I'm talking a consistent life of giving yourself over to your own desires will lead in the resurrection to a corruption and a shame and a horror that is worse than the worst possible suffering you can imagine in this life. You see resurrected life's going in two directions? Sowing and reaping going in two directions? The one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life. And so Paul calls us in verse 58, but also you see it a little bit in verse 49, to bear the image of the heavenly man. Verse 49 is kind of interesting. In the ESV, he speaks about, “just as we've borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.” In the most ancient manuscripts and in several other translations, he says, “Let us therefore bear the image of the heavenly man.” That's a command. That's, that's now, because the great wonder and mystery of the gospel is that resurrected life is something that you can taste and experience even now in this life. There's an element of the nature of Christ's resurrected existence that He transmits to His people and transforms them with even now. That's why Paul tells us, “Go out and bear the image of the heavenly man right now.” That's what the Christian life is. Become who you are destined to become. Seek resurrection power from God that you might walk as a spiritual man, that you might pursue things that are incorruptible, imperishable, and immortal. But remember that as you grow even in your Christian life and in your experience of resurrection life, eternal life, which you can experience in part even now, even the small tastes that you receive of that glory, those moments in prayer or those moments as you engage with others where you see the spirit of God at work through you, or those moments when you might be worshiping together and you can feel the presence of the Lord, even those moments are something that will pale into insignificance when compared to the glory of the imperishable, immortal power and glory of the resurrected body and renewed soul we will receive when Jesus comes again. That is the Christian hope. That's what we live for. Let's pray.