Episode 4: Glorified Bodies

Erin Davis: There is a gravestone in London for a man named Solomon Peas. Here’s what it says:

Here lies the body of Solomon Peas
Under the grass and under the trees,
But Peas is not here,
Only the pod.
Peas shelled out and went to God. 

I suppose the reward for spending your whole life having to explain that, “Yes, my name actually is Peas . . .” is that you get to have a witty headstone. But is that really what’s going to happen to each of us when we leave these pods behind and go to God?

Understanding what will become of these bodies of ours is an important part of embracing an “Embodied” theology, and frankly, it’s where I’ve gotten it wrong for a really long time!

Shannan Painter: This is The Deep Well with Erin Davis. I’m Shannan Painter. So if our bodies are not just going to fall away and decay like a peapod, what is the biblical way to think of our bodies . . . and the future? Here’s Erin to help answer that question.

Erin: Again, I would point us back to the Garden. Remember in Genesis 3, Satan slithered in with lies on his tongue, and he told Adam and Eve, “You will not surely die!” if they disobeyed the commands of the God who loved them. 

It’s right there in Genesis 3:4: “But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not surely die.’” He was wrong. Adam and Eve experienced spiritual death. They were separated from God and from that shalom intimacy that He created them for. All of that was shattered, and physical death did follow.

I suppose Satan was right. They would not instantly die, but they did die. Genesis 5:5 tells us that Adam died when he was 930 years old. So, he didn’t die immediately when he ate the forbidden fruit. It was a slow death, but a death nonetheless.

Though our bodies were made to live forever, because of sin, they don’t any longer. Let’s look at one more passage of Paul’s, one more example of this treatise of the body that he gave us. This time from 2 Corinthians 5:1–10. It’s a long passage. It’s going to take me a minute to get through it. I would encourage you to grab your Bible and read along with me.

For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling, if indeed by putting it on we may not be found naked.

For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened—not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.” 

I have written next to that in my Bible, “I am being swallowed up by eternal life.”

He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee. So we are always of good courage. We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord,for we walk by faith, not by sight. Yes, we are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.

So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.

It’s true: your body is just a tent. And as is true with tents, it is not a suitable place for you to live forever. A point will come for each of us when our spirit is separated from the body. Paul told us that in verse 6. He said to be away from the body is to be at home with the Lord. There will be a separation that happens. 

Is that it? Our spirit goes to heaven and our body becomes worm food? If so, what are we going to be like in heaven? What are we going to be like on the new earth? Are we just going to be floating spirit blobs? 

Well, we need to think beyond our funeral. Because the Bible tells us that we won’t just die. We will be raised!! I’m going to give you three passages. I’ll read them to you: 1 Corinthians 15:51–52, 

Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.

What about Philippians 3:20–21: 

But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself. 

Look at Romans 8:22–23: 

For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.

The best tool in your toolkit for understanding God’s Word is good observation. So what do we know about resurrected bodies from the Word of God? Well, the Bible has given us some good leads. There’s Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha, who was raised from the dead, as described in John 11.

There’s Jairus’s twelve-year-old daughter. She was also raised from the dead; that’s described in Luke chapter 8. There’s the widow of Nain’s son who was raised from the dead at his own funeral! You know, that made a good story for a long time! That’s described in Luke chapter 7. 

And then there’s Jesus Himself, raised from the dead after being crucified, which is described in all four gospels . . . because it is the point! Think about what Jesus told His disciples in Luke 24:39 (this is after He resurrected).

He said, “See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself.” 

What did He want the disciples to use to recognize that it really was Him? His body. He said, 

“Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones [but] you see that I have.”

That makes me want to jump up on my chair and whoop! I’ve missed that forever!

Jesus goes to His disciples in His resurrected body and He says, “See, guys, I have hands—these are my hands! See, I have feet—these are my feet! And I’m not just a spirit, because a spirit doesn’t have flesh and bones. But look at me, guys, look at me!” Can’t you picture it!? “I have flesh and bones!” Now, Jesus’ resurrection caused quite a chain reaction!

Here’s Matthew chapter 27, verses 52 and 53: 

The tombs also were opened. And many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many.

Now it says, “they had fallen asleep.” They weren’t actually sleeping. That’s a euphemism used in Scripture for the fact that they were dead. They were buried. And they came out of their graves in bodies, and they walked around! 

The only explanation I can have for people not recognizing the truth of the resurrection is that they’re deceived. Because, guys, people came out of their graves and walked around, and people wrote about it. They could be seen!

The text says that they appeared to many. That means they could be seen with eyeballs. Lazarus walked! He walked right on out of that grave. Jairus’s daughter, she ate—as did Jesus. Let’s not miss the obvious as we’re making observation.

The only examples of resurrected bodies we have had bodies! And you, child of God, who have the great and precious promise of the resurrection, you will be raised with a glorified, sinless, perfected body!

Pastor Colin Smith taught this: “The redemption of the body is the hope in which you were saved. The great purpose of God is not to save a part of you—your soul—but the whole of you: body, soul—unity. Christ made you body and soul, and He will redeem you body and soul. He will do it in that order: soul now, body later. All that God has made is good, and all that God has made He will redeem. This is the beautiful big picture of Scripture.”

This is why the more we read it, the more we love it! This is why it never gets old, because it’s telling this story: God made everything. Everything God made is good. There was an enemy of the goodness of God, and he came in and he tried to destroy it. But God will redeem it, all of it!

There’s a garden in Genesis; there’s a garden in Revelation. We live in-between the two gardens. One is the place where the Fall happened, and the other is the place where the redemption will be complete. 

And so doesn’t it make sense that our bodies—which have felt the effect of the Fall so profoundly—will also experience the redemption? Wherever the idea that death means a forever separation from our bodies came from, it did not come from God’s Word.

Listen to the promise of Isaiah 26:19: “Your dead shall live . . .” And lest you think that’s strictly spiritual and that those of us who were dead in Christ will be raised, listen to the rest of the verse:

. . . their bodies shall rise. You who dwell in the dust [you’re dead, you’re buried!], awake and sing for joy. For your dew [the dew of death is what Isaiah is talking about here] is a dew of light, and the earth will give birth to the dead. 

Pshew! Perhaps part of the reason we struggle to grasp this is because we have only ever known bodies bent by sin.

I was at a funeral once for a young father, a friend of ours named Scott. And Scott was completely sold out for Jesus. He was busy building God’s kingdom. Then one terrible night he died in a motorcycle accident, leaving his wife widowed and his five children fatherless. 

During that funeral two men whose lives had been impacted by Scott walked down to the casket. They began to pray loudly that God would resurrect their friend. I had to look away. I was already crying. It was already hard to watch those five little blonde babies say good-bye to their daddy!

But I also felt like I was going to be overwhelmed by what I was watching happen. I realized I did not have enough faith to believe that God could do it. He didn’t. We put Scott’s body in the ground that day, and his wife and his children have had to learn to live without the man they loved.

But the resurrection is real! It’s not a fairy tale. It’s not fiction. It’s not pretend. It’s real! One day I will see Scott again—not as a dematerialized version of himself, but in a body that God made. We don’t “know” this. We “know” cancer, we know aches and pains, we know strep throat, we know death. We have buried many bodies, and we’ve never seen a single one raised.

But our bodies matter, and our embodied theology matters, because one day—and on the timeline of eternity, it won’t be long now—our resurrected Savior is going to give us resurrected bodies! I want to end this series with another epitaph. This one is Benjamin Franklin’s, and this one is a whole lot more biblical than that of Solomon Peas.

The Body
of
B. FRANKLIN,
Printer,

(Like the cover of an old book its contents torn out
And stript of its lettering and gilding)
Lies here food for worms;
Yet the work itself shall not be [wholly] lost,
For it will (as he believed) appear once more
In a new and more beautiful edition,
Corrected and amended by The Author.

Shannan: Wow, what a picture of eternity and the hope that we have for the future! Eternity will be exciting, full of wonders. That’s an example of what we like to say on this podcast: God’s Word is a deep well. You can drop your bucket and pull up truth every time! And that truth really is refreshing!

Erin: That’s so true! You can dig into your Bible through more teaching from the Revive Our Hearts podcast family when you listen to what I call, “the mother ship”—Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth.

Find out more about Revive Our Hearts and all the other offerings in the Revive Our Hearts podcast family when you visit ReviveOurHearts.com.

Erin Unscripted

Shannan: It’s time for a segment called Erin Unscripted, but really, we’re letting our audience do a lot of the talking. We recorded Erin’s teaching in front of an audience, and afterward we passed around a mic and asked, “How have others used their physical ability to serve you?”

Karen: Hi, I’m Karen. I would say one of the times that we were served well as a young couple was when we moved across the street from our pastor and his wife. They didn’t just preach or teach, but they came over and helped us rip up carpet and mow the yard. They babysat my kids, and they just served us while they were the hands and feet of Christ.

Erin: So good!

Kathy: Hi, I’m Kathy. I just was thinking about a lady from an exercise class, when I was about twenty-seven, who took me out to lunch. She asked me if I knew for sure I was going to heaven, and I said, “You can’t know that.”

She said, “Well, do you mind if I show you a verse in the Bible?” (This was a long time ago, and she didn’t have it on her phone.) She pulled a Bible out of her purse, and I was like, “That’s pretty committed.”

Anyway, she shared the gospel with me and it just sent me on a journey to go home, get a Bible, and see if it really said that. And then, after that conversation, she discipled me for like the next eight weeks. She came over to my house, and she had a folder. There weren’t all the discipleship materials, she had them on notebook paper. It just changed my life!

Erin: I love that!

Helen: I messed up my knee about four months ago playing pickleball for the first time (my name’s Helen). I called a friend of mine as soon as I got home who I knew had some crutches. She just dropped everything and came and sat and talked to me and, yeah, it was just really sweet.

I am just so thankful for the body of Christ, who when we do have something that’s hard, they show up!

Erin: Yeah, that’s good, really good.

Joyce: I am Joyce, and I have two daughters. One is four-and-a-half and the other one is three-and-a-half. The three-and-a-half year-old was born during COVID time, in February of 2020. At that time we didn’t know much about COVID, and so we had a one-year-old then and a newborn in the house, I was very isolated. Like most of us know what happened, and it was quite an experience.

But during that time there were quite a few women from our church who, even though they would not come in our house, they prepared meals, and they would send me a message and say, “Hey! There is food at your doorstep!” That was so, so, so touching for us, and it helped us get through that period of time!

From then on that is something that God has placed in my heart for new moms, and that’s something I tend to do for other moms.

Erin: Yes, beautiful.

Jo: Hi, my name is Jo, I normally don’t speak at big audiences, especially with women. I have a long past with my mom, and my relationship with women isn’t good. But I feel like I need to, because I’m at a good stage in my life. I’m in a season where I’m surrounded with good women. 

They keep giving me nice clothes and nice things to wear, seeing that I need it, and just loving me the right way, in a sisterly way. I don’t have kids. Even my heart, because of my past, sometimes I’m like, “No, why?” Because I feel like I’ve got to give something back. So all I have is, “Thank You, Jesus!” I feel like what you said really tied in to where I’m at in my season of my life.

Erin: Praise God. 

Shannan, thanks for being our cohost on this season of The Deep Well! I did want to mention Fit for the King again. It’s the ministry where you serve and the mission really is to help the Church be fit for the glory of God. Do you want to tell women where they can go to find out more information?

Shannan: You can go to Fit4TheKing.net. You can find out about what we do there and all the coaches we have as part of our team.

The Deep Well with Erin Davis is a production of the Revive Our Hearts podcast family, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ! 

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