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"How Are the Dead Raised Up? And With What Body Do They Come?"
1 Corinthians 15:35
In the last sermon in this series on great questions of the gospel age I want to consider a
question asked the apostle Paul by an anonymous man. The man said, "How are the dead raised
up, and with what body do they come?" (1 Cor. 15:34). The apostle compared death to sowing
grain and the resurrection as the plant that springs from the death of the grain.
This question is only one of many suggested by the subject of life after death. Some of the
questions I want to consider today are these: What is man? What happens to the spirit at death?
Is paradise the same thing as heaven? Will the body be raised? Will we know one another in
heaven? If at death, one's spirit either goes to paradise or the realm of the lost, why is it
necessary to have a judgment, and who will be judged at the judgment? I will consider as many
as time permits.
What Is Man?
Unless we know what man is, we are not in position to consider what happens when man dies.
Psalm 8:4 and Hebrews 2:6 both ask the question, "What is man, that thou are mindful of him?"
The Bible answers that question. Genesis 2:7, "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the
ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."
Ecclesiastes 12:7, "Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return
unto God who gave it." Now if that were all that the Bible teaches, we might conclude that man is
wholly mortal, but there are other vital passages on this theme. Job 32:8 states, "There is a spirit
in the midst of my body." The prophet Zechariah said in Zechariah 12:1, that "God formeth the
spirit of man within him."
Thus, man is a composite being. He is body and spirit The spirit is infused in his body by the
God of heaven himself. When the body and spirit are together, we call that life. When they are
separated, that is called death. Some of the greatest minds have pondered the question, "What
is life?" Even the biologist can scarcely give a rational definition, and the best I can give is this:
Life is the result of the spirit and body being together; death is the result of the spirit and the
body being separated. James 2:26 states that "The body without the spirit is dead." Thus, at
death, the body returns to its origin«the dust, while the spirit, the real, inner man, returns to its
origin, God.
However, keep in mind that the Bible said "the body without the spirit is dead," but it did not say
that the "spirit without the body is dead." As Longfellow said:
"Life is real, life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art, and to dust returneth,
Was not spoken of the soul."
Since death is the separation of the body and spirit, and at death the body is either buried, or
cremated, or in some way returned eventually to dust, it follows that the spirit does not go into the
grave. It is a source of tremendous comfort to know that all that is placed in the grave is merely
the body, the house, the old worn out shell, in which the person lived. The apostle Paul said in 2
Cor. 5:1, "For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a
building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." Thus, the body is simply
a tabernacle or tent in which we live for a brief time and then move out into eternal habitations.
But not only does the spirit, the soul, not go into the grave, it does not go into a purgatory.
During the Dark Ages, people believed that certain sinners, at death, passed into a place called
purgatory, where after a period of time, after they had been punished sufficiently, they might go
on into heaven. There is not the remotest hint of such a thing in the Scriptures. In fact, the very
idea is contrary to plain and simple statements in the Word of God.
I further state that the spirit does not go directly to heaven at death, regardless of how righteous,
nor directly to hell, regardless of how wicked the person may have been~that is, to one's eternal
state.