We Shall Be Like Him
Death, according to the Bible, is not the end. When we die, life continues beyond the grave in a spiritual realm called “Sheol” in the Old Testament (Job 14:13; Ps. 16:10; 139:8) and “Hades” in the New Testament (Luke 16:23; Acts 2:27, 31; Rev. 1:18). Our spirits continue in this intermediary realm while our bodies return to the dust from which they came (Ecc. 12:7). Sadly, many Christians stop thinking about the afterlife here, as if God plans for us to remain in a ghostly, disembodied state for eternity. However, there’s more! When Christ returns, there will be a resurrection of the dead. All will rise—the righteous and the wicked—for judgment (John 5:28-29; Acts 24:15).
Of course, we'd all like to know about these resurrected bodies. What will they look like? Will we recognize one another? In what ways will they be different from our present bodies, and will they feel pain, hunger, pleasure, or fatigue? The Bible doesn't answer all our questions, but it does scatter out a few hints. For now, I will limit my thoughts to the nature of the resurrected bodies of the righteous. There is much to say about the resurrection of the wicked, but I will reserve those comments for another article at another time.
Let’s start with the idea that in the resurrection, we will be like Christ.
The apostle Paul wrote,
But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep….Thus it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust, and as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven. (1 Corinthians 15:20, 45-49)
In a much briefer passage, Paul says, “[Christ] will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself” (Phil. 3:21).
Here is how John put it:
Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure. (1 John 3:2-3)
Okay, so we will be like him. What does that mean? Here there is a divergence of opinions taking two basic interpretations. The first view assumes the promise points to Jesus’ body after his ascension. According to those who hold this position, Jesus was resurrected in a transitional body and appeared to his disciples in this condition before ascending to heaven and then, either during the ascension or afterwards, the glorification of his body was completed so that he could inhabit the heavenly realm. The second view, which I will argue, holds that the promise refers to Jesus’ post-resurrection body which appeared to his disciples during the forty days he was on earth after his resurrection, before he ascended. According to this view, Jesus ascended in that same body, and nothing has changed about it since. Therefore, the form sitting at the right hand of God is the same form that appeared to Mary Magdalene at the tomb and the disciples in the upper room. As we have seen, the New Testament writers believed our resurrected bodies will resemble his current condition. He is the “firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” If Jesus’ body was the same when he appeared to the disciples as it is now, we can look at the post-resurrection appearances in the gospel accounts and gather hints about our own resurrected bodies, although the information is incomplete and may not answer all our questions.
The issue is by no means settled, and it is with great caution that I approach the subject. The New Testament is not overly concerned with explaining every detail of the resurrected body to those who will one day inhabit it. It is more occupied with the task of instilling a hope in life after death and faith in the one who was first resurrected to life because all our hope is based on him. What follows are the conclusions drawn by a Bible student with limited understanding and many unanswered questions.
Those who deny that we can draw conclusions about our resurrected bodies through the post-resurrection accounts of Christ understand John's statement that “what we will be has not yet appeared” (1 John 3:2) to mean no eye has yet seen the resurrection body. That is certainly one way of looking at John's commentary, but the context seems to favor another interpretation. We are accustomed to the New Testament’s description of Jesus’ return as a parousia, translated “coming,” but John uses a rarer word here, the verb phaneroo, translated “appear.” So when he says, “what we will be has not yet appeared,” he's referring to the Second Coming. He is not arguing that we have never seen a resurrected body before, or that no account has ever been made of such a phenomenon. Rather, he reminds his readers that they are waiting for Jesus to appear and encouraging them to believe that when he does, they will rise in bodies like his.
Another concern surrounds Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians 15:50, part of a lengthy discussion about the nature of the resurrected body, where he reveals that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” Paul has been contrasting the earthly body with the heavenly body of the resurrection, which he calls a “spiritual body” (v. 44). No one can say exactly what a spiritual body is, but the statement in verse 50 does tell us what it isn’t—a form characterized by flesh and blood. Paul clarifies this claim, saying, “nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable” (v. 50). His point is that the resurrection body will have to be different from earthly bodies to inhabit the eternal realm. A perishable body—one characterized by flesh and blood—cannot dwell forever with God in heaven.
A word concerning linguistics may be helpful here. The New Testament was written in Koine Greek. Greek is a beautiful and precise language. It’s highly structured and easier to learn than English. It gives some concepts a wide array of expression. Take “love,” for example, which in English is limited to one word while Greek gives us no fewer than four. But Greek, like all tongues, has limitations, one being that it lacks a word denoting matter. Therefore, in order to call attention to physical or material objects, Greek speakers had to rely upon metaphor and symbolism, falling back on phrases like “flesh and blood.”[1]
Critics of the idea of a tangible resurrected body compare Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians 15:50 with Jesus’ words to his disciples in Luke 24:39: “See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Luke 24:39). He had just appeared out of thin air and stood among them while they were praying in an upper room in Jerusalem on the Sunday morning of his resurrection. Still doubtful and grieving, they at first thought they were seeing a ghost (v. 37, NIV). He reassured them that he was not an apparition, inviting them to touch him.[2] Observing their reluctance to accept the visual and tactile evidence before them (“they still disbelieved for joy,” v. 41), Jesus called for something to eat and consumed a piece of broiled fish (vv. 42-43). These words and demonstrations were given to the disciples to prove that the phenomenon they witnessed was Jesus in his body, not a vision, not a ghost—Jesus, their Savior who died on the cross just three days before.
Does Jesus’ “flesh and bones” claim force us to deduce he was in some transitional form during the forty days between his resurrection and ascension and that his body somehow spiritized on his way to heaven? I don’t think so. The Bible is very clear about the continuity of his resurrected form. First of all, the word “resurrection” implies a connection between what has died and been buried and that which has risen to life. If we will experience the afterlife in some airy, shapeless existence, why speak of resurrection? Why mention bodies? Yes, the resurrected body will be changed, but the change must not be so severe that it will no longer be “resurrected” nor a “body.” The Bible’s hopeful language limits how formless our future state might be.
Secondly, consider the angels’ message during Christ’s ascension. As the disciples gazed at his body when it was taken up, two men in white robes appeared and said, “…why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11). Granted, they could have been speaking of the manner of his return rather than the form in which he would appear, but would they have said he would return “in the same way” if his body had changed significantly from the one they watched ascend to heaven?
Furthermore, inspiration reveals that the Jesus who returned to glory exists in a different form than the one he possessed in his pre-fleshly state. In Philippians 2:6-7, Paul declares that Jesus, although he was in the “form of God[3]…made himself nothing,[4] taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” “Form” is as close as we can get in English to rendering the Greek word morphe, which expresses more than a shape or the appearance of something, as opposed to reality. If Paul meant Jesus merely looked like God or superficially became a human being, he would have used the word schema. He isn’t arguing that Jesus became human on the outside and remained God on the inside. He employs a term expressing “that which truly characterizes a given reality.” We would be wrong to draw the conclusion that he ceased being God upon becoming human. In his human form, he made numerous claims to divinity (John 8:58; Mark 2:5-12; Matt. 26:63-65). When Jesus was born in Bethlehem, he became human without shedding his divine nature. For thirty odd years he dwelled on earth in that form, and he remains in that form. Otherwise, Paul could not have said, “[T]here is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man (anthropos) Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5). The risen Christ who is seated at the right hand of God in heaven is both human and divine. This truth is essential to Christian faith. John demands absolute uniformity on this point, writing, “By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already” (1 John 4:2-3).[5] Furthermore, in his second epistle he asserts, “For many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh. Such a one is the deceiver and the antichrist” (2 John 7).[6]
That still leaves the apparent contradiction between Paul’s assertion that “flesh and blood” cannot inherit the kingdom of God” and Jesus’ statement that he was “flesh and bones.” A careful reader will notice that while these phrases are similar, they are not identical. Those arguing Jesus uttered these words while in a transitional state think it’s not important to make a distinction between “blood” and “bones.” However, there is reason to believe that Jesus purposely stayed away from the common “flesh and blood” metaphor for physical life and opted for a skeletal metaphor to explain to the disciples that the phenomenon before them was really their friend and not a ghost.
The Law of Moses claimed that biological life in animals and humans was represented by blood. After he emerged from the ark, Noah was told, “But you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood” (Gen. 9:4; cf. Acts 15:20, 29). Also, Leviticus 17:11 reads, “For the life of the flesh is in the blood” (cf. v. 14; Deut. 12:16, 23). That is why blood was required to atone for sin. “The wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23). Therefore, “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (Heb. 9:22). Jesus and his disciples would have been well aware of these concepts, not only because they were law-abiding Jews, but also because Jesus shed his blood on the cross to redeem the sins of humanity (1 Pet. 1:18-19). If Jesus had risen in a spiritual body not amenable to biological processes but rather animated by the Spirit, he might have purposely avoided a word so closely linked to the essence of mortal life on earth.
He did not, however, reach for an original or uncommon figure of speech. Both “flesh and blood” and “flesh and bones” occur frequently in Scripture. But they seem to have different connotations in their contexts. Most of the time, “flesh and blood” is used to distinguish physical life as opposed to the spirit. When Peter confessed that Jesus was the Son of God, the Lord commended him, saying, “flesh and blood has not revealed this to you” (Matt. 16:17). Also, John said those who became children of God through Christ “were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13). Wanting to describe the spiritual nature of Christian warfare, Paul wrote, “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:11).[7] The writer of Hebrews explains the incarnation, saying, “Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things…” (Heb. 2:14). In all four of these examples, the writers use “flesh and blood” as a metaphor for biological life and as a contrast to the spiritual realm.
On the other hand, “flesh and bones” most often indicates genetic kinship. After Adam named the animals, not finding a helper fit for him, God created Eve and presented her to the man, who then exclaimed, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh…” (Gen. 2:23). When Jacob found his uncle in Paddam-aram, Laban said, “Surely you are my bone and my flesh!” (Gen. 29:14). The illegitimate son of Gideon told the people of Shechem, “Remember also that I am your bone and your flesh” (Judges 9:2). At David's coronation at Hebron, Israel said, “Behold, we are your bone and flesh” (2 Sam. 5:1; 1 Chron. 11:1). Also, David reasoned with the elders of Judah, “You are my brothers; You are my bone and my flesh” (2 Sam. 19:12-13). The phrase is uncommon in the New Testament, Jesus’ post-resurrection claim being the only example. The only passage in which “flesh and bones” could parallel “flesh and blood” is in Satan’s statement concerning Job: “Stretch out your hand and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face” (Job 2:5). Jesus’ dialogue, expressed in language lacking words denoting matter and physical forms, reached for an expression that would not be confused with physical life driven by biological processes but one that could encompass a glorified, spiritual body like the one Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 15.
Therefore, the Lord's “flesh and bones” description in Luke 24:39 is not parallel to Paul's exclusion of the “flesh and blood” body in 1 Corinthians 15:50. With this problem settled, we return to the promises of a resurrection in which we shall be like him and find glimpses of the nature of the resurrection body in the post-resurrection accounts of Jesus. In that body, he broke laws that bind our present, perishable bodies. That body maintained the appearance of the Jesus the disciples knew before his death. It moved like him, spoke like him, and looked like him. It was not ghostly but touchable (Matt. 27:9; John 20:17, 27).[8] It bore the marks of crucifixion (Luke 24:40; John 20:27). It could change appearance (Luke 24:16, 31; John 20:14). It could vanish and reappear (Luke 24:31, 36; John 20:19, 26). And the last time it was seen, it was ascending into heaven (Mark 16:19; Luke 24:51; Acts 1:9). Combined with other passages, such as Paul's lengthy explanation in 1 Corinthians 15 and his shorter description in Philippians 3:21, Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances inform our hope by giving us a glimpse of the “eternal weight of glory” that awaits us (2 Cor. 4:17).
[1] For example, the word “physical” appears only once in the ESV, translated from sarx, which literally means “flesh” (Rom. 2:28). The word “material” is used in the sense of “that which is tangible” only twice, translated from a related adjective, which literally means “fleshy” (Rom. 15:27; 1 Cor. 9:11). In these passages, Paul contrasts financial support with spiritual blessings, a discussion ill-suited to the concept of literal flesh.
[2] A week later he would let Thomas the straggler feel the scars on his hands and side (John 20:27).
[3] “Being in very nature God” (NIV).
[4] Literally, “emptied himself” (heauton ekenosen).
[5] The perfect active participle “has come” denotes and action that began in the past and continues into the present (Simon J. Kistemaker, James, Epistles of John, Peter and Jude (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1996), 325).
[6] “The perfect tense, come (eleluthota) compared with the present tense in 2 John 7 (erchomenon), seems to emphasize that the flesh assumed by the Son of God in the incarnation has become his permanent possession” (John R.W. Stott, The Epistles of John (Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1960), 154).
[7] The four categories Paul uses to describe the Christians foes likely refer to spiritual forces of evil. Michael Heiser explains: “[Paul] understood and presumed the Deuteronomy 32 worldview: “rulers” (archontōn or archōn); “principalities” (archē); “powers”/“authorities” (exousia); “powers” (dynamis); “dominions”/“lords” (kyrios); “thrones” (thronos); “world rulers” (kosmokratōr). These lemmas have something in common—they were used both in the New Testament and other Greek literature to denote geographical domain authority. At times these terms are used of humans, but several instances demonstrate that Paul had spiritual beings in mind” (Michael S. Heiser, Angels: What the Bible Really Says About God’s Heavenly Host (Lexham Press. Kindle Edition), 128.
[8] Some argue that Christ’s body was intangible or off limits to human touch because he instructed Mary not to “cling” to him (John 20:17). But these instructions were given in his haste to notify all the disciples about his resurrection. After Mary notified the others, they “took hold of his feet” (Matthew 27:9), and he invited Thomas to touch the scars on his hands and side (John 20:27).
