Did you notice that Jesus said these words to correct the Sadducees who did not believe that there is a resurrection of the dead?
Jesus said to them:
*And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God.“I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob”? He is not God of the dead, but of the living. *
So Jesus Himself indicates that in quoting these words He was addressing the question of the resurrection of the dead. He was saying in effect to the Sadducees, “Those who die will not remain dead, for God is the God of the living, not the dead. Dead people will be raised from death!”
Can’t help butting in here . . . well, I could, but you know . . . it’s hard for me when I’m excited about something. I did a commentary on 1 Corinthians once; just for myself, to help me think about it. And I found 15: 38-58 kind of challenging. Here it is, in case anyone wants to read it here rather than looking it up:
Maybe this all seems very plain to you all (and actually, it does to me, now, too), but at the time, it baffled me for some reason. Maybe because I’d been taught that the very same molecules that make up our physical bodies would be reassembled in our glorified bodies. That never made sense to me, since material substance gets shared around a lot, after all, and who gets first dibs on the atoms to make up the molecules? I think maybe this view was a bit too literal. But I digress.
So I asked God about this. He gave me a picture I’m not sure I can describe, but it amounted to a beautiful, glorious body growing out of the husk of the physical body. It was still a body, but so much more magnificent, amazing, expressive – oh, so much more EVERYTHING. Still a body, but what a body! The old body was just a seed.
Have you ever seen a pea seed? They’re all shriveled up and hard, dull colored, maybe even yellow. It doesn’t look like there’s any life there. If you planted it you’d be disappointed to see it rise again from the ground as itself. Yuck! That wasn’t what you wanted. No; the pea splits apart, the husk is discarded and the first “leaves” are the cotyledons, and are soon dropped as the tender green vine puts out leaves and tendrils and blossoms and fruit. That shriveled up seed has died in order to produce a beautiful, fruitful vine. Now the vine was in the seed all along, but the seed had to die to let it out. The seed has been reborn as its true self; the fruitful vine.
In a sense, the seed has already fallen to the ground and died for those of us who have given up our lives to live by Christ’s life, but of course the adoption; the redemption of our bodies (Ro 8) is still to come. Now the new life is on a spiritual plane, but the physical body must also be transformed by resurrection. When this transformation comes, the spiritual body will still BE a body. If we are to be like the heavenly Man (Christ), then I think it’s not unreasonable to look at His body after His resurrection.
Apparently, it wasn’t terribly odd looking, or at least, He could cause it to look “normal” in company. It was a real body. He told His disciples, “A spirit does not have flesh and bone as I have.” Of course, we know that He was and is a life-giving Spirit, but it seems that He was talking about another kind of spirit in this case. His followers were afraid, and He was assuring them He wasn’t a ghost.
He had a body that could be touched and fed and looked at, and that had the same physical characteristics that it had before it died. Nail marks, His face, wound in the side. They could recognize Him. I don’t think He would have made such a big deal about pointing all this out to them if it were nothing but an illusion or a temporary condition. He didn’t tell them, “Now I have a body like yours, but soon that will go away and I’ll be a spirit then.” And Paul didn’t point out that having a body like the heavenly Man would mean not really having a body as we think of a body. I believe it was that line of thought that he was disagreeing with.
So in my view, in one sense, we will not have the physical body made of dust, but the body we will have will have been inside that physical dust body all along, waiting for it to die so that it could be given life. The spiritual body is still a body; just so much better than the body of death. Resurrection isn’t some kind of phantasm in which we will become incorporeal spirits. We will just have a different kind of a body; a body which has put off corruptibility and mortality and been clothed with the incorruptible and immortal life of God.
Sorry for delay. Most ppl here and majority of Christianity believe the resurrection of the dead requires the same body we were buried in, aka our dust body. They use the example of Jesus, showing that he raised up in the same body he was buried with and retained even the scars of the resurrection ( some even say his face was mangled to unrecognization and is why Mary didn’t recognize him in the garden.) They propose that the resurrection of the dead is not of the dead, but of the dead body because of this. We are raised in an immortal dust body.
I disagree with this Egyptian (Babylonian, Roman, Pagan) theology.
I believe that we are raised but raised not in the body we died in which is made immortal, but a NEW body, a spiritual, immortal, supernatural body in which unites with the spirit that returned to God at our death making us a NEW Creation in Christ, not only a living Soul, but also a life-giving Spirit just like the second Adam. We are raised from the dead and given a NEW body.
The Scriptures concerning this are clear, but I find most Christians can’t understand despite its clarity.
But I digress.