1 Corinthians 15:44

THE FUTURE LIFE

‘It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.’

1 Corinthians 15:44

There is no more wonderful or impressive chapter in the Bible than this fifteenth chapter of the Epistle to the Corinthians, which deals with the transfiguration of this present life into its future state. Whenever we hear it read—as we often do on the saddest occasions of our lives—we are listening to the best explanation we shall ever get of the great change which will take place when we ourselves pass out of the present life.

I. In stating the fact of the future life St. Paul was not making a new statement, especially to the people of Greece. Their most ancient poets had written of a future life. They believed most thoroughly in a life beyond the grave. Man would continue to live—that was the idea—but only in some shadowy state, some pale reflection of the life on earth. And so this letter of St. Paul to these clever Corinthians, these men of universal intelligence, had a very special message. It was not to prove that the soul was indestructible, but to prove by the Resurrection of Christ what sort of life awaited man beyond the grave. The value of human personality is the basis of St. Paul’s letter. This conception had within the past thirty years undergone a tremendous change. There were, perhaps, 300 or 350 men still alive in Palestine who had actually listened to our Lord—had seen Him before He died, and seen Him and listened to Him again after He rose from the grave. Life was to them, indeed, a different, a far higher, thing. Christ had taught the extreme value of personality, and it was this fact which changed so completely and brightened so wonderfully the hope of immortality. It was, then, this wonderful new thought which led St. Paul to write as he did.

II. Our ideas of personality are so much bound up with the bodies that are so closely our own that we shrink from the idea of a purely spiritual existence.—It is so unintelligible; we have not the slightest idea what pure spirit is like. We may say truly, of course, that our bodies are not ourselves—that, indeed, every particle of the body we see and feel undergoes some complete chemical change in the course of seven or eight years, while we remain the same, we continue the same personality. We admit logically and easily that our individuality—that mysterious something within us which is not imperilled by such changes as loss of limb or the chemical renewal of the flesh—is our true soul. Yet, though the thought is quite logical, we cannot separate the body from the soul, we cannot imagine a pure spiritual existence. St. Paul, however, distinctly encourages us to believe that the future life will not be that mere abstraction from which we recoil, will not be a merely spiritual existence; but rather that the spirit will continue to have its body. We may be comforted by the hope that in the future life our friends, and we ourselves, shall possess some real distinction in form as well as in spirit. St. Paul speaks of another body, a spiritual body, yet a body bearing the closest relationship to the natural body. An analogy, he says, may be found in the growth of the seed—the seed which in its wonderful transformation to the flower loses none of its individuality, That suggests to us much that is comforting.

III. It suggests to us the comfort of recognition.—We shall not be lost to one another. The resurrection body will, we doubt not, in a way that we cannot yet conceive, present sufficient points of resemblance to the earthly body to make recognition possible. There is the consolation here that we all want—that we must have before we can ever take a calm view of death. All that is best in our life here has been sanctified by loving ties. Our spiritual growth has depended so largely on the way we have spent and used our life in the interests of others that we seem to demand the assurance that all this love will not be lost. Such an assurance is given us by St. Paul.

—Rev. W. M. Le Patourel.