50I declare to you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. 51Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed— 52in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. 53For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. 54When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: "Death has been swallowed up in victory."
55"Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?" 56The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. 57But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
58Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.
Dig Deeper
As the battle raged on, suddenly Obi Wan Kenobi did something very strange in Star Wars: A New Hope; he raised his arms allowing Darth Vader to kill him. Why would he do that? Because in the world of Star Wars, once someone passes into the afterlife, they become even more powerful. Yet, the Star Wars conception of death is a sort of shadowy bodiless, ghost-like existence. It’s not quite death but it’s not quite life either. This is the sort of picture of life after death that was put forth by Plato and has been accepted by increasingly large portions of the Christian world since the 4th or 5th centuries. Yet this is not at all the sort of thing that Paul is teaching about in his longest passage on the resurrection. Paul believed in and taught bodily resurrection in a physical sense. He believed that in Jesus’ resurrection body, the world was given a glimpse into what resurrection looked like. Jesus was, after all, quite adamant that He was not a ghost; He had a physical body with flesh and bone (Luke 24:39).
Why then, does Paul say that flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God? Does Paul not know what he is talking about here? Is he contradicting what he has said before or what Jesus said? Does he suddenly no longer believe in the bodily resurrection of the saints? Of course the answer to all of these questions is ‘no’. When Paul uses the term ‘flesh and blood’, he isn’t speaking technically. He is using a common figure of speech for regular sinful humanity. Jesus made it clear that the resurrection body was a physical, material body. Paul’s point then, is that human beings must be transformed before they can inherit the Kingdom of God.
This is what he says in verses 51-52. Not everyone, he says, will have to die in order to undergo this transformation (a point of confusion for some because of all of the talk of transformation and which led, in part, to Paul’s discussion of this very topic in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18), but everyone will be transformed. It will happen in a flash, suddenly those dead in Christ will be raised to life in the age to come, while those still alive in Christ will be immediately transformed. In these two verses, Paul uses language similar to two other passages where he describes the moment of Christ’s return, Philippians 3:20-21 and 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17. In 1 Thessalonians 4:16 Paul says that the coming of Christ will be like a great trumpet call, signaling what was happening. There he uses a picture of Roman citizens running outside the city gates to meet the Emperor and then accompanying him back triumphantly into the city (meeting in the clouds is the language of God’s presence, not bodiless spirits floating off into the clouds where heaven is; it is the time when the King will return to reign over His restored creation). In Philippians 3:21, Paul says that when we are transformed, we will be transformed so that our lowly bodies will be like Jesus’ glorious resurrection body. It is at that moment when the perishable will transform into the imperishable. The mortal will be clothed with the immortal, but nowhere in site is the idea that we will have anything less than material, physical bodies.
It becomes clear that in Paul’s new creation theology, all those in Christ will be transformed to enjoy glorious, incorruptible, immortal, imperishable bodies just like Jesus had after His resurrection. There is no shadowy ghost-like, spirit existence that would make Plato proud to hear of. That would be a compromise with death. If the soul somehow continued on without a body, then death would still rule victorious over the body, with Christ merely redeeming part of the human being. No, says Paul, death has been completely swallowed up in victory. The pagan world looked at death and realized that it could do nothing about it, so they simply accepted it and try to make it palatable. Even in the Jewish worldview, the best that could be done was to believe that God would do something about it in the future. Paul’s message is quite radical from either of those options. He is saying that God has already done something about death. He has completely defeated death through the Messiah, and those who are in the Messiah are guaranteed to share in that victory when they too, one day, will be resurrected.
Paul now takes the tone of one who is taunting and mocking an opponent that has been rendered powerless. He teases death itself by quoting from Isaiah 25 and Hosea 13, passages which point to the victory of God over death. God has removed the sting of death, it’s power has been swallowed up. Paul isn’t merely prooftexting a couple of passages to make his point, he is emphasizing that, once again, this is what all of the Old Testament Scriptures pointed towards. God has gained the victory over sin and death through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Paul, though, after taunting death a bit, doesn’t stress that this is the glorious hope to which we should all cling, although he certainly feels that way. He says that knowledge of this should strengthen our resolve to labor in the Lord. The work that Christians do and the suffering that Christians endure is not in vain. There is a correspondence between what we do in this present age and what happens in the age to come. If God is going to resurrect us in the future age, then what we do now with our time and bodies matters. The resurrection is our future hope, but it is not just a future hope. We have access to the life of the age to come and should begin living it. Paul does not explain exactly how what we do in this age will be carried on into the age to come but we know that it will happen. This is why we do what we do now, in this age. The transformation of the mortal into the immortal, the perishable into the imperishable, and the corruptible into the incorruptible is our present and our future hope for those in Christ. Our job now is to begin to anticipate, as a community of believers, that life now in the present age. We are to show the rest of the world what it looks like to live by the values of God’s age to come. Some will embrace it, others will reject those values, but living by them now will not be in vain. It matters now and will matter even more in the resurrection.
Devotional Thought
Do you live as though you are motivated by the hope of resurrection? Do you truly live and work as though what you do in this age will be woven into the tapestry of God’s future age? For Paul, it was the present and future hope of the resurrection that motivated him not to sit back and relax, knowing that he would be okay after death. Rather it motivated him to work all the harder for the Kingdom of God. Get resolved to have the same kind of motivation and effort that Paul had.
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