What is the first resurrection?

Question 10097.

The first resurrection is named only once in Scripture, in Revelation 20, and yet it carries an enormous weight of meaning. John sees those who had been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus, says they came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years, and then adds, “This is the first resurrection.” A blessing follows immediately for everyone who shares in it.

What I want to show here is that the first resurrection is not a single moment but a category. It is the resurrection of the redeemed, unfolding in stages, in contrast with the raising of the unsaved dead that happens a thousand years later. Once you see it as a class rather than a calendar entry, several apparent difficulties disappear.

Where the phrase appears

The passage is Revelation 20:5-6: “The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended. This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is the one who shares in the first resurrection! Over such the second death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and they will reign with him for a thousand years.

Two groups are being contrasted. Those who come to life before the thousand years, and the rest of the dead who do not come to life until afterwards. The wording rules out the idea that everyone is raised at one general judgement, unless you are prepared to make a thousand years mean nothing at all.

The Greek word is anastasis, a standing up again, and John uses it of bodily resurrection throughout. This is not spiritual awakening or new birth, whatever some interpreters have suggested. Dead people stand up.

John also tells us who these particular people are. They had been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus and for the word of God, and had refused the mark of the Beast. So the group he sees is a specific one, the martyrs of the Tribulation, raised at the end of that period. That observation is what pushed me towards understanding the first resurrection as a category rather than a single event, since these cannot be the only people raised to reign.

Who is included in the first resurrection?

On my reading it includes every believer of every era. The Church is raised at the Rapture, when the dead in Christ rise first and living believers are changed. Old Testament saints are raised in connection with the Second Coming, as Daniel indicates when he says many who sleep in the dust shall awake, some to everlasting life. Tribulation martyrs are raised at the same point, which is the group John specifically sees.

So the first resurrection is a harvest gathered in more than one load. Paul supplies the ordering: Christ the firstfruits, then at His coming those who belong to Him (1 Corinthians 15:23). The firstfruits and the main harvest are separated by two thousand years and counting, which shows that resurrection in stages is already the biblical pattern.

The unifying factor is not the date but the destiny. Everyone in the first resurrection rises to life, to reward, to reign. Nobody in it faces the Great White Throne.

Jesus is the firstfruits

No account of the first resurrection is complete without saying that it begins with Jesus. He is the firstborn from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. Others were restored to life before Him, Lazarus among them, but they died again. Jesus rose to a life that death cannot touch, and that is a different order of event.

This matters because our resurrection is not a separate miracle bolted on at the end. It flows from His. Because I live, He said, you also will live. What our resurrection bodies will be like is answered by looking at His, which could be touched, could eat, and yet was no longer bound by the old limits.

Paul draws a practical conclusion from that priority which is worth having in front of you. Because Jesus rose, our labour in the Lord is not in vain (1 Corinthians 15:58). The resurrection is not simply a comfort for funerals. It is the reason ordinary faithfulness matters, since nothing done for Him disappears into the ground with us.

What the first resurrection secures

John names three benefits and they are worth taking slowly. Those in the first resurrection are blessed and holy. The second death has no power over them. And they serve as priests of God and of Christ, reigning with Him for a thousand years.

The second of those is the one to underline. The second death is the lake of fire, and John says it has no authority over these people. Not that they narrowly escape it, but that it has no jurisdiction. Whatever happens at the end of the millennium, they are not on trial.

Reigning is the third element, and Christians tend to skip past it. Scripture says we will have real responsibility in the millennial kingdom under Christ’s authority. The faithfulness you are practising in obscurity now is training for something.

Priesthood is the second element, and it is easy to skim. To be a priest is to have access to God and to bring others into it, and Revelation says this will be our permanent occupation rather than a temporary honour. Whatever else eternity holds, it is not idleness. Those raised in the first resurrection are given work worth doing, in the presence of the One they will serve.

Is the first resurrection literal?

Amillennial interpreters generally take the first resurrection as the new birth or as the soul’s entry into heaven at death, reserving the literal raising for the end. The difficulty is that the same verb governs both groups in the same sentence. If the first coming to life is spiritual, then the rest of the dead coming to life must be spiritual too, and the passage collapses.

Consistency is the issue. I read the first resurrection as bodily because John describes bodies and because he distinguishes it from a later raising of the same kind. That is also why I hold to a literal thousand years between them, a period repeated six times in the space of a few verses.

If those numbers and events are elastic, I am not sure what in Revelation would not be.

There is a further reason for reading the passage this way. John says the rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended, and the word until is doing real work. It presupposes that the second group eventually does come to life, which means both groups experience the same kind of event separated by a defined interval. Symbolic readings have to make the same verb mean two different things within a single sentence, and I have never seen that done convincingly.

The contrast with what follows

The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended. That sentence introduces the second resurrection, the raising of those who died without Jesus, for judgement at the Great White Throne. Two resurrections, two destinations, a thousand years apart.

Jesus said the same thing in John 5, speaking of an hour when all who are in the tombs will hear His voice and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgement. The resurrection of the just and the unjust is the same distinction under different names.

One further contrast is worth naming. The unsaved are raised to stand; the redeemed are raised to reign. The same power operates in both cases, and the same voice calls, yet the outcomes could not be further apart. The Great White Throne and the thrones of Revelation 20:4 are separated by a thousand years and by everything that matters.

So, now what?

Ask the only question that finally matters here. Which resurrection are you in? Not which view you hold, not how well you can chart the stages, but whether you belong to Jesus, because that is what determines which group you are raised with.

If you do belong to Him, let the blessing land. Blessed and holy is the one who shares in the first resurrection. Death is a defeated enemy for you, and the grave is a waiting room rather than a destination. Does the way you face your own mortality reflect that yet?

And let it change how you attend funerals. Christians grieve, and we should; Jesus wept at a grave He was about to open. But we do not grieve as those who have no hope, because the body in that coffin has an appointment. Have you ever stood at a graveside and actually believed that?

Blessed and holy is the one who shares in the first resurrection! Over such the second death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and they will reign with him for a thousand years.

Revelation 20:6 (ESV)