The Resurrection of This Flesh

But let us try to help those souls whose faith fails them because of reasons drawn from nature. If someone mixes different kinds of seed together and sows them in the ground without sorting them, will not the grain of each kind, wherever it was thrown, shoot up at the proper time according to its own nature, and reproduce its own form and its own body? In the same way the substance of each person’s flesh, though its particles have been scattered this way and that, has within it a principle that cannot die, since it is the flesh of an immortal soul. At the time which God in his good pleasure will appoint, its own particles will be gathered from the earth and drawn to it, and restored to the form which death had once dissolved. And so it will come about that each soul will have restored to it not a jumbled body or a stranger’s, but its own, the one it had when alive, so that the flesh, together with its own soul, may for the struggles of this present life either be crowned if it is undefiled or be punished if it is defiled. [a]

That is why our church, in teaching the faith, instead of “the resurrection of the flesh,” as the creed is handed down in other churches, carefully adds the word “this”: “the resurrection of this flesh.” “Of this” means, without doubt, of the person who is reciting the creed, who makes the sign of the cross on his forehead as he says the word. So each believer may know that his flesh, if he has kept it clean from sin, will be a vessel for honor, useful to the Lord, prepared for every good work; but that if it is defiled by sins, it will be a vessel of wrath, destined for destruction.

Now as to the glory of the resurrection, and the greatness of the promise by which God has bound himself: if anyone wishes to be more fully informed, he will find mention of them in almost all the books of Scripture. Simply to bring them to mind, we will mention a few passages from these here, and then bring to an end the work you have laid on me. The apostle Paul uses arguments like these in declaring that mortal flesh will rise again: “But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not risen. And if Christ has not risen, our preaching is empty and your faith is empty.” And a little after: “But now Christ has risen from the dead, the firstfruits of those who sleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead also came through a man. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then those who are Christ’s at his coming; then comes the end.” And afterward he adds, “Listen, I tell you a mystery: we will all rise, but we will not all be changed”; or, as other copies read, “We will all sleep, but we will not all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will rise incorruptible, and we will be changed.”

But whichever is the true text, he says when writing to the Thessalonians, “I do not want you to be ignorant, brothers, about those who are asleep, so that you may not grieve like the others who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, so also God will bring with him those who sleep through Jesus. “For this we say to you by the word of the Lord: that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will not go ahead of those who sleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, with the trumpet of God, and the dead who are in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet Christ in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.”