| Jesus and the End-Time The Conclusion of the End-Time The Resurrection |
Lo! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall 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 nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature 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."Our interpretation so far has pointed to a significant conclusion for the end-time. History is not going to run down like a clock, or explode like a balloon, or wear out like a machine; rather, it will be completed like a masterpiece. The end of history is not doom, but redemption; it will become what it was intended to be all along. But a foolish optimism will result if you separate faith in a positive end for history from the New Testament. The completion of God's masterpiece does not necessarily mean that from now on things are gong to get better and better. We have no guarantees against atomic war, or world famine, or total pollution of the environment. We have no guarantee that Western civilization will survive or that it will be able to muster the intelligence and moral energy needed to handle the ecological and social problems now confronting it. Things might get very bad indeed. No matter how bad things get, however, the world is not going to end because of them. History will end when Jesus comes again, and that moment is entirely at the discretion of God. Nothing must happen before he comes; neither do we know what will happen before he comes. Such events are not our concern. WE are concerned with what will happen when he comes. Our study has led us to this point. The end-time is named for the end, the conclusion; the significance of the conclusion lends significance to all that leads to it. Three events are included in the main event. These are the resurrection of the dead, the gathering of the elect, and the return of Jesus. One could as well say that the resurrection and the gathering are part of the return of Jesus, which is the main event' we separate them for purposes of description only. In the biblical accounts they are simultaneous events. SO as we deal with each of them in turn, we should guard against compartmentalizing them, as though the resurrection and the gathering of the elect had two entirely different meanings, or that either has significance apart from the return of Jesus. The subject of the resurrection occupied the entire fifteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians. It is a chapter of great depth. Resurrection is dealt with from many angles. In chapter three we saw how the Kingdom would be fulfilled when the risen Christ yields all things to his heavenly Father as we discussed verses 20-28. Now we are concerned not with the resurrection of Jesus, but with our own resurrection as it will occur when Jesus comes again. We will try to answer the basic question that burns brightly in the mind of every person interested in the end-time: What's going to happen? How does Paul answer that question? In the twinkling of an eye (technically, in the tiniest observable fraction of a second), three things will happen when we're raised from the dead. First, the trumpet will sound. We do not know what manner of instrument this is or what sound it will make. In the parallel passage we will discuss next, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, Paul calls it the trumpet of God. You cannot, obviously, buy it in a music store ("I want a trumpet of God, please"). What is important is not the sound it will make but its purpose. It is the last trumpet, God's signal for the close of the age. Yet it is a trumpet. It tells us something of how God signals the end of things. Contrast the trumpet of God with two modern expressions of the end of the world and you will see what the trumpet means. First, T.S. Eliot's conclusion to "The Hollow Men": This is the way the world ends,Next, Robert Frost's "Once by the Pacific." Frost stood and watched the waves breaking against the shore, and it seemed to him that the water was threatening the land: The shattered water made a misty dinFrost was thinking of more than water and land. He was thinking of history. It looked as if a night of dark intentThere is some difference between Eliot's whimper and God's trumpet. And God's command in the last day will not be Put out the light but Sound the trumpet! The call will not be "Taps" but "Reveille"; his purpose will be to signal the exciting beginning of the new age, not the exhausted end of the old one. The ultimate act of God in history is not death but resurrection. When the trumpet sounds, we will be prepared to greet the new day, not embalmed and put away permanently because the old day is over We do not know precisely what the trumpet is like, but we know what it is for. Then the dead will be raised imperishable. To be raised "imperishable" means to enter a completely different order of creation from that which we now experience. Life in this world is highly perishable, terribly fragile. No one really has a "right to life"; we all survive by a combination of providence, skill effort, and cunning. And even at that we fight a losing battle against the perishability of our bodies. Eventually, in this order of creation, death wins. But the ultimate act of God in history is not death; it is resurrection. We know that God can do it because he has already done it. The pattern of our imperishability is the risen Christ. His resurrection is the prototype of ours: Christ is the "first fruits" of those who have "fallen asleep" (1 Corinthians 15:20). The term "first-fruits" may not be meaningful in a twentieth-century urban society, but in first century Palestine, first-fruits meant the actual beginning of the harvest. First-fruits is more than blossoms with its promise of fruitage; it is more than green fruit with its assurance of a large crop; it was the actual beginning of the harvest itself with the certainty of much more of the same grain shortly to follow…That is to say: the resurrection body of Jesus was of the same order as the resurrection bodies of the saints at the end of the age.3The resurrection body of Jesus is our best source for understanding what it will mean for the dead to be raised imperishable. Even a cursory examination of the Gospel accounts of the risen Jesus shows how remarkable he was. He could touch others and be touched by them; he could eat; he could appear and disappear at will, yet he was not a ghost. As he himself said, "See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; handle me, and see' for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have" (Luke 24:39). We are given to understand that the risen body of Jesus is the very same body that was crucified and laid in the tomb, and yet it was not the same kind of body. (How is that for describing without explaining a mystery?) The risen Jesus belonged to a new creation. A distinction must be made between his resurrection and healing miracles involving freshly dead corpses--he little girl (Mark 5:35043), the young man (Luke 7:11-17), and even Lazarus (John 11:1-44). Those cases were the same in essence, though not in technique, as the almost routine resuscitations of clinically dead patients in modern coronary care units. As wonderful as these resuscitations are, if Paul were with us today he would not want us to think that he was talking about an advanced version of the same thing when he said that the dead will be raised imperishable. In the resurrection God does not need a freshly dead corpse. He does not even need a corpse. Most of the dead in the world are no longer corpses anyway-the bodies have long since gone back to the elements as they were designed to do. We are simply not told how God will remake us in the pattern of the risen Christ. We are only told that he will do it. …The resurrection of Jesus itself did not mean the revivification of a dead corpse; it meant the radical transformation of the body of Jesus from the world of nature to the world of God. Nature knows of no bodies like Jesus' resurrection body; it was utterly unique. History as no analogy for it…The resurrection of Jesus is the most decisive point at which the Age to Come broke into this age, in which the supernatural world of God intersected this world. 4And we shall be changed. The "we" Paul referred to are those who are alive at the close of the age; he called them "we" because he expected to be alive at the close of the age, as should every Christian with a sense of imminence about the return of Jesus. Nor is it incidental that this assertion is part of a discussion of resurrection, for the change that takes place here is how the living will share in the resurrection. Our dying bodies, instead of our dead ones, will be remade in the twinkling of an eye; then we will share in the new creation. As we have pointed out, the close of the age means the collapse of the physical universe; if we are going to survive it we are going to need bodies that can survive anything. Paul concluded his description of what will happen with what it means: "Death is swallowed up in victory." In the present age nothing can keep us alive, but when death is swallowed up, nothing will be able to kill us. We will be restored to Eden-as God made Adam in the beginning to live forever, so he will make us to live forever. As was said in the discussion of the fulfillment of the Kingdom-a subject closely related to this one-we will end where we began, with God. 1 T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men," in Interpreting Literature, third edition, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1965, pp. 351, 352. 2 Robert Frost, "Once by the Pacific," in Major American Writers, Volume 2, Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1952, pp.1632, 1633. 3 George Eldon Ladd, I Believe in the Resurrection of Jesus, Eerdman's, 1975, p. 123. 4 Ibid., p. 125 » Next Page — The Gathering of the Elect » Table of Contents » Home |