How Can Scattered Flesh Be Gathered Again?

But unbelievers cry out, “How can the flesh, which has rotted away and dissolved or turned to dust, and has sometimes even been swallowed by the sea and scattered by the waves, be gathered up again and made one again, and a man’s body be formed anew out of it?” Our first answer to them is in Paul’s words: “You fool! What you sow is not brought to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare grain of wheat or of some other seed; but God gives it a body as he pleases.” [a]

Did you not believe that what you see happen every year in the seeds you throw into the ground will come about in your flesh, which by the law of God is sown in the earth? Why, I ask, do you have so low an opinion of God’s power that you do not believe it possible for the scattered dust that made up each man’s flesh to be gathered again and restored to its own original structure? Will you refuse to admit it, when you see mortal skill search out veins of metal buried deep in the ground, and the experienced eye find gold where the inexperienced thinks there is nothing but earth? Why should we refuse to grant these things to him who made man, when the man he made can do so much? And when mortal skill discovers that gold has its own vein, and silver another, and that a very different vein of copper, and other distinct veins of iron and lead, lie hidden beneath what looks like earth, will divine power be thought unable to find and sort out the particles that belong to each man’s flesh, even though they seem to be scattered?