The guys over at TeamPyro did a short and sweet series surrounding the phrase: “What the Bodily Resurrection of Jesus Means to Me”. I really enjoyed the personal nature of what they individually written, and have been blessed by it immensely. I guess that says something about my own character, since I at times find much more gleanings in a few instances of written text than in a novel seeking to expound the deepest of truths. I hope you would enjoy this collated post on the whole mini-series: HT
Phil Johnson:
But Christ was raised bodily, glorified so that His human frame was perfectly suited for both heaven and earth. His body could be seen, and touched (Luke 24:39; John 20:27; 1 John 1:1). He ate food (Luke 24:42-43) and walked and talked as He had before the crucifixion. At this very moment, he sits on the Father’s right hand in that same body—making intercession for the saints, including me.
. . . More amazing than all of that, I will one day have a body like His: able to traverse heaven and earth, immortal, yet familiar in its physical form. In fact, it will be this very body, thoroughly healed of all its infirmities and imperfections. That amazes me and thrills me at least as much as it shocked and offended those philosophers in Greece.
Read the whole: HT
Dan Phillips:
The bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ is the lynch-pin of everything I believe and hope, everything on which I build my life. No isolated event, it was framed by centuries of increasingly specific prophecy and types, capped with the indisputably miraculous life of Jesus Christ. It means what He said it would mean. It is the vindication of His claim to be the way, the truth and the life. It is how I know that I am forgiven, reconciled, counted righteous, and assured of Heaven through repentant faith alone. It is that without which there is nothing, to me.
Frank Turk:
I press on to make the resurrection my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. I don’t consider that I can take it by my own power. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. For me, His resurrection is hope for what I cannot do for myself, but which will bring me the greatest joy in spite of both my failings and my successes. That will be a great day.
And finally, the Weekly Dose of Spurgeon addressing the same phrase: HT
There are very few Christians who believe the resurrection of the dead. You may be surprised to hear that, but I should not wonder if I discovered that you yourself have doubts on the subject.
By the resurrection of the dead is meant something very different from the immortality of the soul: that, every Christian believes, and therein is only on a level with the heathen, who believes it too. The light of nature is sufficient to tell us that the soul is immortal, so that the infidel who doubts it is a worse fool even than a heathen, for he, before Revelation was given, had discovered it—there are some faint glimmerings in men of reason which teach that the soul is something so wonderful that it must endure for ever.
But the resurrection of the dead is quite another doctrine, dealing not with the soul, but with the body. The doctrine is that this actual body in which I now exist is to live with my soul; that not only is the “vital spark of heavenly flame” to burn in heaven, but the very censer in which the incense of my life doth smoke is holy unto the Lord, and is to be preserved for ever.
The spirit, every one confesses, is eternal; but how many there are who deny that the bodies of men will actually start up from their graves at the great day! Many of you believe you will have a body in heaven, but you think it will be an airy fantastic body, instead of believing that it will be a body like to this—flesh and blood (although not the same kind of flesh, for all flesh is not the same flesh), a solid, substantial body, even such as we have here.
And there are yet fewer of you who believe that the wicked will have bodies in hell; for it is gaining ground everywhere that there are to be no positive torments for the damned in hell to affect their bodies, but that it is to be metaphorical fire, metaphorical brimstone, metaphorical chains, metaphorical torture.
But if ye were Christians as ye profess to be, ye would believe that every mortal man who ever existed shall not only live by the immortality of his soul, but his body shall live again, that the very flesh in which he now walks the earth is as eternal as the soul, and shall exist for ever.
That is the peculiar doctrine of Christianity. The heathens never guessed or imagined such a thing; and consequently when Paul spoke of the resurrection of the dead, “Some mocked,” which proves that they understood him to speak of the resurrection of the body, for they would not have mocked had he only spoken of the immortality of the soul, that having been already proclaimed by Plato and Socrates, and received with reverence.
