Reading Time: 10 minutesQuestion 5100. The intermediate state is the condition of a human being between the moment of death and the resurrection of the body. It is one of those doctrines that hardly anyone can name and almost everyone has opinions about, usually absorbed from hymns, films and funerals rather than from Scripture. It matters more than…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10171. Daniel 12 contains the clearest statement about resurrection in the whole Old Testament, and it arrives at the end of the strangest chapter in the book. Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Two destinies, one…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10172. When are Old Testament saints resurrected? It sounds like a specialist question, and then you realise it is really a question about Abraham, Moses, David, Ruth and Daniel, and about whether the people whose stories formed our faith are raised with us or separately from us. My answer is that Old Testament saints…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10173. Tribulation saints are the believers who come to faith after the Church has been taken, during the seven year period of judgement that Scripture calls Daniel’s seventieth week. They are among the bravest people the Bible describes, and a great many of them will die for their faith. So when are they raised?…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10176. What kind of resurrection body will believers receive? Paul was asked a version of that question by the Corinthians in a slightly sneering tone, and rather than dismissing it he gave us the fullest chapter on the subject in the Bible. The answer he gives is neither a ghost nor a repaired version…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10177. Cremation and resurrection is a subject I am asked about far more often now than I was twenty years ago, usually by someone sitting in my study with a funeral to arrange and a worry they feel slightly foolish for having. Will it make any difference to the resurrection if there is no…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 5082. The phrase spiritual body has caused more confusion than almost any other in Paul, because English readers hear the word spiritual and think non-physical. That is precisely what Paul does not mean. If he had meant non-physical he would not have used the word body, and the entire argument of 1 Corinthians 15…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 5159. Bodily redemption is the hope Paul is straining towards in Romans 8:23, and I think it is one of the most neglected promises in the whole of Christian teaching. We speak a great deal about the saving of the soul. We say far less about what God intends to do with the ageing,…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 5174. Will you be the same person at the resurrection, or someone new wearing your name? It sounds like a philosopher’s question until you have stood at a graveside, and then it becomes the only question that matters. People do not ask whether their mother will exist in some general sense. They ask whether…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 5199. The final destiny of the human person is one of those questions that people think they have already answered until you press them on it. Ask a congregation where they are going and most will say heaven. Ask what they will be doing there and the answers thin out considerably. Ask whether they…