4. But while our resurrection bodies will not be "flesh and blood," they will have "flesh and bones." This appears from what our Lord Himself says about His own resurrection body in Luke 24:39. Here we read that Jesus said: "See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye behold me having." As our resurrection bodies are to be transformed into the likeness of His, we also must have "flesh and bones" in our resurrection bodies. Some have fancied that they saw a contradiction between what our Lord says here and what Paul says in the passage quoted above (I Cor. 15:50, 51), but there is no contradiction. "Flesh" we shall have, but not "flesh and blood,"
i.e., not flesh, the animating principle of which is blood. The question arises, What takes the place of the blood in our resurrection bodies? The answer seems to be that in the present life, "blood is the life" of the natural body, but in the life to come our bodies are to be, as we are told elsewhere in this same chapter, "spiritual bodies," i.e., bodies, the animating principle of which is the Spirit of God, not our own blood. Our not having "blood" in our resurrection bodies involves many great and glorious possibilities, upon which we cannot dwell now.
5. In the fifth place (and closely connected with 3 and 4), our resurrection bodies will be incorruptible. We read in I Cor. 15:42: "So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption." The thought of this word "incorruption" is that the body is not subject to decay, it is imperishable. Our present bodies are decaying all the time. We are perishing every day and every minute. My present body is disintegrating while I talk to you. But the bodies that we shall receive in the resurrection will be absolutely free from the liability to corruption or decay. They cannot disintegrate or suffer decay or deterioration of any kind.
6. The next thing that we are taught about the resurrection body is that it is a glorious body. This comes out in the first part of the following verse, I Cor. 15:43, "It is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory." Some idea of the glory, the
glorious beauty, of that body is suggested by the representation of our glorified Lord that we have in Rev. 1:13-17: "And in the midst of the candlesticks one like unto the Son of man, clothed with a garment down to the foot and girt about the breasts with a golden girdle. And his head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow, and his eyes were as a flame of fire and his feet like unto burnished brass, as if it had been refined in a furnace, and his voice as the voice of many waters. And he had in his right hand seven stars: and out of his mouth proceeded a sharp two-edged sword: and his countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength. And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as one dead, and he laid his right hand upon me saying, Fear not; I am the first and the last." Our resurrection bodies will be like that.
7. Furthermore, our resurrection bodies will be powerful, or as we read in the last half of this same verse (1 Cor. 15:43), "It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power." Then all our weariness and weakness will be forever at an end. In our present bodies our bodies are oftentimes a hindrance to our highest aspirations, they thwart the carrying out of our loftiest purposes, we cannot put into execution our loftiest purposes, "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." But in our resurrection bodies the body will be able to accomplish all that the spirit purposes. The redeemed body will be a perfect counterpart of the
redeemed spirit that inhabits it. No deafness, dimsightedness nor blindness, no tired hands and feet, no maimed soldier boys coming home from the war.
8. It will be a heavenly body. This appears from the 47th to the 49th verses of this same chapter. "The first man is of (literally, out of) the earth, earthy: the second man is of (literally, out of) heaven: as is the earth, such are they also that are earthy: and as is the heavenly such are they also that are heavenly. And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly." The thought plainly is that our present bodies are of an earthly origin and an earthly character, but that the transformed body will be of a heavenly character. Paul explains it at length in 2 Cor. 5:1-4 where he says, "For we know that if the earthly house of our tabernacle be dissolved, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal, in the heavens. For verily in this (i.e., in this present earthly house, earthy body) we groan, longing to be clothed upon with our habitation which is from heaven (i.e., our heavenly body): if so be that being clothed we shall not be found naked. For indeed we that are in this tabernacle (i.e., in the present earthy body) groan, being burdened; not for that we would be unclothed, but that we would be clothed upon (i.e., with our heavenly body), that what is mortal may be swallowed up of life."
9. Our transformed bodies will be luminous,
shining, dazzling, bright like the sun. This is seen in many passages. For example, Matt. 13:43, "Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father." This is to be taken literally for it is in the interpretation of the parable and not in the parable. This suggests what we have already seen about the transfigured body of Jesus in Matt. 17:2, where we are told that "His face did shine as the sun, and his garments became white as the light." We have the same thought also in the Old Testament in Dan. 12:3, where we are told, "And they that are wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars forever and ever." They shall shine literally as well as figuratively. Some suggestion of what the luminous glory of our faces and forms in our resurrection bodies will be is seen in the light that Paul tells us that he saw beaming from the person of Jesus when the glorified Jesus met him on the Damascus road. In Paul's description of what he saw on that occasion, as given in Acts 26:12, 13, we read, "Whereupon as I journeyed to Damascus with the authority and commission of the chief priests, at midday, O king, I saw on the way a light from heaven, above the brightness of the sun, shining around about me and them that journeyed with me." The light that Saul saw, as is evident from the whole account, was the light that shone from the person of our glorified Lord,