The Resurrection of the Body
25 I know that my redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth. 26 And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; 27 I myself will see him with my own eyes—I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me! Job 19:25-27 NIV
Life After Death
One of the greatest honors I have in serving as a pastor is spending time with those who are close to death. For those who have faith in Christ, it is nothing short of miraculous how peace and hope prevail with each finite breath taken. Sometimes I’ll ask those under my spiritual care, “Where do you want to go in your new body?” Or “where will you take me in the new heavens and new earth?” I’ve heard some incredible responses to those questions. One dear brother said, “I want to go wherever Jesus is”. Others have mentioned visiting childhood hometowns from decades past. Still others speak of people they would like to visit in eternity, such as family, friends, and people mentioned in the Scriptures.
For some whom I’ve visited, they have had a more incorporeal hope. An idea of existing as a disembodied ghost-like figure in the life after. In these cases, there can be great encouragement and cause for joy as they consider the promise of the bodily resurrection. The great future hope we have for the next life is life. Not an ethereal, floaty, disembodied intangible existence. New bodies, experiencing a new life forever, never again to be corrupted through sin or under the curse.
Anthony Hoekema has a terrific few paragraphs about this bodily hope, and its paramount significance for the Christian future hope in his book The Bible and the Future. “The central message of scripture about the future of man is that of the resurrection of the body. At this point we see a radical divergence between the Christian view of man and the view common to Greek philosophy, particularly that of Plato. As we have seen, the Greeks had no room in their thinking for the resurrection of the body. The body was viewed as a tomb for the soul, and death was looked upon as a liberation from imprisonment. This understanding of man, however, is quite different from Scriptural teaching. According to the Scriptures, the body is no less real than the soul; God created man in his totality, as both body and soul. Nor is the body inferior to the soul, or nonessential to man's true existence; if this were so, the Second Person of the Trinity could never have assumed a genuine human nature with a genuine human body. Therefore, the future blessedness of the believer is not merely the continued existence of his soul, but includes as its richest aspect of the resurrection of his body. That resurrection will be for believers a transition to glory, in which our bodies shall become like the glorious body of Christ (Phil. 3:21). We conclude that the concept of the immortality of the soul is not a distinctively Christian doctrine. Rather, what is central in biblical eschatology is the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. If we wish to use the word immortality with reference to man, let us say that man, rather than his soul, is immortal. But man's body must undergo a transformation by means of resurrection before he can fully enjoy that immortality." (1)
For the man Job, his hope was not in an existence in some spiritual sense. With his own eyes, he would see God. The faith once delivered for all the saints has been one with a future hope of bodily resurrection.
Hoekema, Anthony A.. The Bible and the Future. United States: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994.