What is the resurrection?

Question 3061.

Christianity stands or falls on bodily resurrection, and Paul says so without blinking: ‘if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins’ (1 Corinthians 15:17). Yet ask around, even in churches, and you will find remarkable confusion about what resurrection actually means. Is it the soul going to heaven? Becoming an angel? Some kind of spiritual survival beyond the grave?

It is none of those things. Resurrection is something far more concrete, far more physical, and far more wonderful, and getting it right changes how you face death itself. Let me define it carefully and then show you why it matters so much.

What the Word Actually Means

The New Testament word for resurrection is the Greek anastasis, built from ana, ‘up again’, and histemi, ‘to stand’. It means a standing up again of what had fallen. The word itself carries the doctrine: resurrection is not the survival of some part of you after death, nor a replacement of you by something else. It is the same person, standing up again, alive, embodied.

That sets it apart at once from the Greek philosophical idea of the immortality of the soul, in which the real self escapes the body at death like a bird from a cage. Plato would have found bodily resurrection distasteful; the body, to him, was the problem. The Bible disagrees from its first page. God made the material world and called it very good, made man as an embodied creature, and his saving purpose is not to rescue us out of bodies but to raise bodies from the dust glorified.

The Old Testament Foundation

Resurrection hope did not appear from nowhere in the New Testament. Job asked the oldest question, ‘If a man dies, shall he live again?’ (Job 14:14), and answered it in faith: ‘in my flesh I shall see God’ (Job 19:26). The psalmist trusted that God would not abandon his soul to Sheol (Psalm 16:10). Isaiah declared, ‘Your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise’ (Isaiah 26:19).

The clearest Old Testament statement comes in Daniel: ‘many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt’ (Daniel 12:2). Notice the physical language throughout: dust, bodies, awaking. By the first century the Pharisees firmly held bodily resurrection while the Sadducees denied it, and Jesus publicly sided with the doctrine and demolished its deniers from the Scriptures (Matthew 22:29-32). Martha could say of her dead brother, ‘I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day’ (John 11:24). The hope was ancient; what it awaited was a demonstration.

Jesus: the Bodily Resurrection in History

The demonstration came on the third day. The tomb was empty, and the risen Jesus went out of his way to prove that what stood before the disciples was a body, not a ghost: ‘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 ate broiled fish in front of them (Luke 24:42-43). He invited Thomas to put a finger in the nail marks (John 20:27).

Yet this was no mere resuscitation. Lazarus came back to mortal life and died again; Jesus rose beyond death’s reach, ‘the firstborn from the dead’ (Colossians 1:18). His risen body was recognisably his, scars included, yet transformed: he appeared among his disciples though the doors were locked, and death ‘no longer has dominion over him’ (Romans 6:9). I have set out the historical case for this event in my article on whether Jesus really rose; here my point is the nature of it. This is what bodily resurrection means: the same body, raised and glorified, never to die again.

Firstfruits: His Resurrection Guarantees Ours

Paul’s great resurrection chapter hangs on one agricultural word: ‘Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep’ (1 Corinthians 15:20). The firstfruits were the opening sheaf of the harvest, waved before the LORD as the pledge that the whole field would follow (Leviticus 23:10-11). Jesus’ bodily resurrection is not a one-off wonder; it is the first sheaf of a harvest that includes every believer.

That is why Paul calls him ‘the last Adam’ who became ‘a life-giving spirit’ (1 Corinthians 15:45). As the first Adam’s fall dragged his race into death, the last Adam’s rising carries his people into life. ‘For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive’ (1 Corinthians 15:22). Your resurrection, believer, is not a hope in the sense of a wish. It is a scheduled consequence of his.

What Will the Resurrection Body Be Like?

Paul answers the natural next question, ‘With what kind of body do they come?’ (1 Corinthians 15:35), with a seed picture. You bury an acorn and an oak stands up; continuity of identity, transformation of condition. The body is ‘sown perishable… raised imperishable; sown in dishonor… raised in glory; sown in weakness… raised in power; sown a natural body… raised a spiritual body’ (1 Corinthians 15:42-44). ‘Spiritual’ there does not mean immaterial; it means a real body fully empowered and governed by the Spirit.

Our best evidence remains Jesus himself, since ‘we shall be like him’ (1 John 3:2) and he ‘will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body’ (Philippians 3:21). Recognisable, touchable, able to eat, gloriously beyond ageing, sickness and death. I have explored the details in what our resurrection bodies will be like.

When: the Order of the Resurrections

Scripture does not teach one general simultaneous rising but a sequence: ‘each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ’ (1 Corinthians 15:23). For the church, that moment comes at the Rapture, when ‘the dead in Christ will rise first’ and living believers are caught up and changed ‘in the twinkling of an eye’ (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17; 1 Corinthians 15:51-52).

Old Testament saints and tribulation martyrs are raised to reign with the Lord at his return in glory, completing what Revelation calls the first resurrection (see my article on the first resurrection), while the unbelieving dead stand before the great white throne after the thousand years (Revelation 20:11-15). Bodily resurrection, in other words, awaits everyone; John 5:28-29 divides it into a resurrection of life and a resurrection of judgment. The question is not whether you will rise but to which of the two you will rise.

Not Angels, Not Ghosts, Not Recycled

Let me clear away the popular substitutes. We do not become angels; angels are a separate created order, and redeemed humanity will in fact judge angels (1 Corinthians 6:3). We are not reincarnated into other lives; ‘it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment’ (Hebrews 9:27). And the intermediate state, with the Lord now, though real and precious (2 Corinthians 5:8), is not the finish line; Paul calls it being ‘unclothed’ and longs for the day of being ‘further clothed’ (2 Corinthians 5:4).

The Christian hope is not escape from the body but redemption of it: ‘we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies’ (Romans 8:23). Any gospel that ends with disembodied souls in the clouds has stopped short of what God has actually promised.

Bodily Resurrection and Life Right Now

Doctrine this large cannot stay parked in the future tense, and Paul refuses to let it. His great resurrection chapter ends not with speculation but with a charge: ‘be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain’ (1 Corinthians 15:58). Because bodily resurrection is coming, nothing done in the body for the Lord is wasted. Every act of obedience, every kindness, every endurance is invested in a future that will actually arrive.

The doctrine also dignifies the body you live in today. Paul argues from bodily resurrection to bodily holiness: ‘God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power’, therefore the body is ‘for the Lord’ and not for immorality (1 Corinthians 6:13-14). Your body is not a disposable shell but a seed awaiting glory, and the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead already dwells in it (Romans 8:11). Christians care for the body, honour it, discipline it and offer it as a living sacrifice, precisely because God has announced his intention to raise it.

So, now what?

So what is the resurrection? It is God standing his people up again: the same you, raised, glorified, and beyond death forever, because the same happened to Jesus first and he is the firstfruits of the harvest. Death, for the believer, has been demoted from a wall to a doorway.

If you belong to Jesus, let this steady you at every graveside, including the thought of your own. And if you do not yet belong to him, remember that resurrection itself is not optional; only its destination is. ‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ he says. The wise response is to make sure he is yours before the standing-up day arrives.

But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.

1 Corinthians 15:20, ESV