“The Scriptures tell us, “The first man, Adam, became a living person.” But the last Adam—that is, Christ—is a life-giving Spirit. What comes first is the natural body, then the spiritual body comes later. Adam, the first man, was made from the dust of the earth, while Christ, the second man, came from heaven. Earthly people are like the earthly man, and heavenly people are like the heavenly man. Just as we are now like the earthly man, we will someday be like the heavenly man.”
1 Corinthians 15:45-49 NLT
At first sight, these verses seem to be a bit confusing. But Paul was simply comparing two separate bodies, an earthly, physical body, of which we are all very acquainted, and the heavenly, spiritual body that we are yet to acquire. We know that the original body given to Adam was formed from “dust” – Genesis 2:7, “Then the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground. He breathed the breath of life into the man’s nostrils, and the man became a living person”. I imagine a sculptor forming a statue of a man from a lump of clay (a big lump!). We don’t have to look far to see statues in our churches and city environments. But only God can bring them to life with the “breath of life”. In the Valley of the Dry Bones in Ezekiel’s vision, he saw the bones rattling together and forming skeletons. “Then as I watched, muscles and flesh formed over the bones. Then skin formed to cover their bodies, but they still had no breath in them” (Ezekiel 37:8). In the next verse, we read, “[God] said to me, “Speak a prophetic message to the winds, son of man. Speak a prophetic message and say, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Come, O breath, from the four winds! Breathe into these dead bodies so they may live again’””. It is only God who can bring life to an inanimate object, life that is His to command.
“I am fearfully and wonderfully made“
It is interesting to ponder the progress being made by engineers and scientists in creating humanoid robots. They can produce objects that are superficial copies of human bodies, but without the extraordinary complexity of God’s creation that includes His breath. The devil cannot create anything, but one wonders if this is him trying his best. The first Adam had a physical body containing products of the earth on which he lived, but he, and we, are more than a bag of different chemicals, regardless of what the evolutionists tell us. As the psalmist David wrote, “I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Marvellous are Your works, And that my soul knows very well” (Psalm 139:14).
Paul wrote, “What comes first is the natural body, then the spiritual body comes later”. We will not receive our spiritual bodies until we have finished with our natural bodies. The old cartoonists sometimes depicted a person’s spirit leaving his body and floating off somewhere to do something in accordance with the storyline. But this doesn’t work because the two types of body, natural and spiritual, are formed in different places. The natural body is earthly, and the spiritual body is Heavenly. Consider two totally different universes, each made of totally incompatible materials. We only know about worldly matter, and we have senses that can detect it, analyse it and use it to continue our lives here on earth. An unbeliever will find the limits of his knowledge here because his natural mind will ignore any thoughts of there being a universe made of materials that don’t exist on earth. But God created human beings with an embryonic spiritual body inside, a body that will never be found with a surgeon’s knife. The inner spirit within all human beings manifests in vague stirrings that point to something or someone outside of themselves to whom they owe their gift of life. Our spirits empower our souls with emotions that form the essence of how human beings behave and respond to others. But there is no surprise about this to a believer in God, people like us, pilgrims who know that God created us and all that we are, body, soul and spirit.
One day, Paul wrote, our natural bodies will die, and then we will receive our spiritual bodies. It is then that we will become Heavenly bodies, just like Christ’s. Paul wrote, “heavenly people are like the heavenly man“. He also wrote in Philippians 3:21, “He will take our weak mortal bodies and change them into glorious bodies like his own, using the same power with which he will bring everything under his control”. Jesus is in Heaven just now, complete in His resurrected body. It is a spiritual body and we will be given a body just like His. We can’t ask for more!
Dear Heavenly Father. We don’t know exactly what we will be like in Heaven, but we do know that You desire the best for us. We worship You today. Amen.
Being a Pilgrim 