A Different Body
In the first century, the Christians in Corinth had many of questions about what was going to happen to them when they died. They had been taught that Jesus was resurrected from the dead and that some day they would be resurrected as well. But that was not quite enough information for some of them; they wanted to know what kind of a body they would have in the resurrection. Truth be told, many Christians today want to know the same thing. Will our new bodies be floating balls of yellow light, see-through spirits with wings and halos, or some other kind of body?
In 1 Corinthians 15:35-37,44, the apostle Paul answered this question by using a seed. He said that our earthly bodies are similar to a seed. If we take a piece of corn and plant it in the ground, it appears (from a human standpoint) to “die.” Yet it really isn’t dead. It will “spring back to life” and produce a huge, green plant that has a very strong stalk that can reach a height of about 7 feet. The big corn stalk does not look anything like the little corn seed. In the same way, Paul said that the bodies we will have in the resurrection will be totally different from the bodies that we have now—just like the corn stalk is different from the corn seed.
But Paul went on to say that there is another way that our new, resurrected bodies will be different from the ones we have on this Earth. He said that our new bodies will be more glorious and more powerful, just like the little corn seed changes into a plant that is bigger and stronger.
Paul did not tell us what our resurrected bodies will look like; nor did he give us a Polaroid picture to examine. But he did use a seed to explain that God can do things that we do not always understand completely—like changing our weak, material bodies into powerful, spiritual bodies. In fact, Paul explained that our new bodies will be immortal, which means that they never will die. Let’s all be faithful Christians so that we can receive such a wonderful body someday.
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