What is the resurrection of the just and unjust?

Question 10151.

Every human being who has ever lived will be raised from the dead, the just and unjust alike, and that is one of the least disputed teachings in the New Testament and one of the least discussed. Death is not the end of anyone’s story, whichever side of the line they are on.

What is often missed is that Scripture does not describe a single mass resurrection on one afternoon. It describes a structured sequence, and the gap between the two groups is measured in a thousand years.

What Jesus and Paul Said

Jesus put it plainly: “an hour is coming 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” (John 5:28-29). Two resurrections, two destinations, one voice calling both.

Paul says the same thing before Felix, declaring a hope in God that there will be a resurrection of both the just and unjust (Acts 24:15). He is standing in a Roman courtroom under accusation, and this is the belief he chooses to put on the record. The Greek word behind resurrection here is anastasis, a standing up again, and it always means bodily.

Daniel had said it centuries earlier: many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt. So the teaching about the just and unjust is not a late Christian development. It runs right through.

The Resurrection of the Just

Revelation 20 calls this the first resurrection and pronounces those who share in it blessed and holy, adding that over such the second death has no power. It is not a single moment but a category, gathered in stages.

Jesus Himself is the firstfruits. The church is raised at the rapture, when the dead in Christ rise first and living believers are caught up with them. Old Testament saints and those martyred during the tribulation are raised at the Second Coming, which is exactly where Revelation 20:4 places the tribulation martyrs, seated on thrones as the millennial reign begins.

The bodies raised are physical and transformed. Paul says the perishable puts on the imperishable, and John says that when He appears we shall be like Him. My article on what our resurrection bodies will be like goes into that, and the first resurrection takes up the sequence.

The Resurrection of the Unjust

The second group is raised at the end of the thousand years, and Revelation is explicit that the rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended. They are raised for the Great White Throne, where the books are opened and the book of life is consulted.

This is the point at which annihilationism runs into trouble. If the unsaved were simply extinguished at death, there would be no reason to raise them at all. You do not resurrect someone in order to abolish them. The resurrection of the unjust only makes sense if there is a conscious existence to follow, which is what Jesus taught in Matthew 25:46 using the same adjective for eternal punishment and eternal life.

I do not write that with any relish. But I would be failing you to soften what Jesus said plainly. See annihilationism for the fuller argument.

Two Resurrections, Not One

Some argue for a single general resurrection at the end of history, treating John 5 as describing one event with two outcomes. The wording certainly allows that reading on its own. Revelation 20 does not, because it puts a thousand years between the two groups in the plainest language available.

Nor is this the only place Scripture separates events that a casual reading might merge. Isaiah 61 pauses mid-sentence between the year of the Lord’s favour and the day of vengeance, and Jesus stopped reading at exactly that comma in the synagogue at Nazareth. Prophetic perspective often compresses distances the way a distant mountain range appears to be one ridge.

Why the Distinction Matters

If the just and unjust rose together in one undifferentiated event, the millennial reign would have nowhere to go, and the promises about Jesus reigning on David’s throne over a real earth would have to be spiritualised. The sequence in Revelation 20 is one of the load-bearing walls of premillennialism.

It matters pastorally too. The first resurrection is described as a blessing to be shared in, not a verdict to be feared. Believers are not waiting to discover which group they fall into. That was settled at the cross and received by faith.

Why Both the Just and Unjust Are Raised Bodily

It surprises people that the unsaved are raised at all. If the outcome is judgement, why give them bodies back?

The answer lies in what a human being is. Scripture does not treat us as souls temporarily inconvenienced by flesh. We are made spirit, soul and body, and death is the tearing apart of something God joined. A disembodied existence is described in the New Testament as being unclothed, and Paul says we do not wish to be unclothed but further clothed. Resurrection restores the whole person, and it does so for the just and unjust alike because both are human.

That has an implication people find hard, and I will not dodge it. Judgement is not the erasure of a person but the enduring consequence for a person who remains a person. Jesus spoke of body and soul together in that context, which is not language that suits extinction. The dignity of being made in God’s image is not withdrawn from anybody, and that is precisely what makes the subject so serious.

The Intermediate State

Between death and resurrection there is a conscious interval, and both groups experience it, though very differently.

For the believer, to be absent from the body is to be at home with the Lord. Paul says departing and being with Christ is far better, which is a strange thing to say about unconsciousness. Jesus told the dying thief that today he would be with Him in paradise (Luke 23:43), and today is not a word that tolerates a long sleep.

For the unbeliever, the picture in Luke 16 is of conscious awareness in Hades awaiting the final assize. So the distinction between the just and unjust does not begin at the resurrection. It begins at death and is made public later. My article on the intermediate state works through the evidence, and soul sleep deals with the alternative view.

Put the whole sequence together and the doctrine of the just and unjust becomes something you can actually hold in your head: conscious after death, raised bodily in due order, judged or rewarded, and then eternity.

Resurrection and the Christian Funeral

Nowhere does the doctrine of the just and unjust do more work than at a graveside, and nowhere is it more often blunted.

We have developed a habit in this country of speaking at funerals as though everyone drifts gently into a better place. It is meant kindly and it is not what Scripture says. The New Testament speaks of two destinies, and it speaks of resurrection rather than of a soul floating free of a body it never really needed.

So when I take a service for a believer, I say plainly that this body will rise. The one in the coffin. Not a replacement, and not a metaphor. Paul’s picture is a seed sown, and what comes up is continuous with what went in and gloriously different from it.

That is the hope of the just, and it is the reason Christians have always buried their dead with care rather than treating the body as packaging. The distinction between the just and unjust is not sharpened by our silence about it, only obscured.

Firstfruits and the Order of Rising

Paul gives the order plainly: Christ the firstfruits, then at His coming those who belong to Him, then comes the end.

Firstfruits is a harvest word and it settles the question of guarantee. The first sheaf brought into the temple was proof that the field would follow, and the resurrection of Jesus is not an isolated marvel but the opening of a sequence.

So the resurrection of the just is not a hope we entertain against the evidence. It rests on an event in history that a great many people saw and that turned a group of frightened disciples into men who would not stop talking about it under threat of death.

So, now what?

Two things follow, and they pull in opposite emotional directions, which is how Scripture usually leaves us.

The first is comfort. If you belong to Jesus, the grave is a waiting room and not a destination. I have stood at enough gravesides to know that this is not a theory but the only thing that holds a family together on the worst morning of their lives. The body that goes into the ground will come out of it.

The second is urgency. The same voice calls both groups, and everyone you know will hear it. That should make us kinder, bolder and rather less shy about the gospel than most of us usually are. Who around you has never once heard which resurrection they are heading for?

Having a hope in God, which these men themselves accept, that there will be a resurrection of both the just and the unjust.

Acts 24:15 (ESV)