We Will Feel Like Us Forever
What the Bible actually means by the resurrection of the body.
Part 2 of 4: What the Bible promises about the end of everything.
Maybe you’ve heard that quote, “We don’t have a soul. We are a soul. We happened to have a body.” That’s not how the Bible presents it. The body isn’t an add-on. We were made for bodies, and bodies we shall have. Our great hope is not that we will live in some eternal spiritual, body-less existence, but that we will be bodily resurrected. We will feel like us forever.
Between death and resurrection, the Bible speaks of an intermediate state in which we are apart from the body. In that state, we are also already in our eternal home—heaven or hell. The unbeliever, as the story of Lazarus and the rich man shows, is already in torment (Luke 16:19-31). The believer is with Christ (2 Cor. 5:8), as Jesus said to the believing thief on the cross (Luke 23:39-43).
But that bodiless state is not our final state. The resurrection of the body is.
The fullest treatment of the resurrection is 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul pushes back against those who deny bodily resurrection.
Paul’s argument is that Christ’s resurrection and ours are inseparable. Deny one, and you deny the other. If we aren’t raised, why was Jesus? He compares the resurrection body to a seed: the seed must die before it can rise, and what rises doesn’t look like what was planted, yet it is the same living thing, continuous with what came before. Paul says, “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom,” but that doesn’t mean we won’t have bodies; it means we, in our present frail condition, must be transformed to enter God’s glorified kingdom. The resurrection takes us from the seed form we have now to the tree form we need in the new creation.
The only model Paul can use is Jesus’s resurrection, which he calls the first fruits of our resurrection (1 Cor. 15:20). The first fruits are the first part of the harvest that guarantees the rest is coming. If Jesus was raised, we will be too. Our body will be like his. Real, touchable.
Jesus’s resurrection was the beginning of what is to come. As Tim Keller put it, “The resurrection means not merely that Christians have a hope for the future but that they have a hope that comes from the future.”
What will the glorified body be like? Scripture mostly answers in negatives—no corruption, no death, no tears. Whatever it is, it will exceed anything we can now imagine. Jesus’s resurrected body wasn’t a hologram. It was real flesh and blood. He could eat! He looked like himself, and so will we. We will be physical beings in a physical universe, like this one, but renewed.
Right now, our bodies are making their way toward the grave, but death is not the last note of the gospel song God sings over us. We will have life—life like we have now, but infinitely better.