You 2.0

Three guys were drinking coffee together one morning, and the conversation took an uncharacteristically profound turn as one of them asked, “What do you want your family and friends to say when they’re standing around your casket someday?”  He then said, “As for me, I want them to say, ‘He taught me how live.  I’m a better person because of him.’”  The second guy said, “I want them to say, ‘I could always count on him.  He never let me down.’”  The third guy thought a while, then said, “I want them to say, ‘Hey, look!  He’s moving!’”

            I’m with that third guy.  Yet medical science and the Bible both tell me that I will die someday.  Our hope tells us that the third guy will get his wish…if he’s in Christ Jesus, his death is not final, and ours isn’t either.  Last week, we talked about how our ultimate hope isn't that our souls will go somewhere apart from our bodies; ultimately, it’s about being resurrected in a physical, bodily form to live on a New Earth.   I know one major question we all have is, “What sort of bodies will we have in Heaven?”  On one hand, this question betrays our vanity.  We live in a world where countless women would give anything to look like the airbrushed supermodels we see on a magazine cover, where men waste thousands of dollars on fitness equipment, in a vain hope they will magically look like the guy on the P90X commercial.  So when we ask questions about Heaven, some of it is rooted in a desire to look the way we’ve always wanted.  We want to believe that in Heaven, we’ll be able to eat chicken-fried bacon and Blue Bell without getting lovehandles.  But on a deeper level, it speaks to our desire for hope.  It is hard to hope in that which you cannot comprehend.  If God simply said, “Trust me on this one, you’ll have new bodies in Heaven, but I can’t give you any more details,” it would be hard to feel hopeful.  We’d still have questions, like, “Will I look like myself in Heaven?  Will I recognize my friends and loved ones?  What sorts of abilities will my new body have?  Will I still get sick, get hurt, get older, and die a second time?”  Fortunately, His Word has something to say about what our bodies will be like.

This Sunday, we'll look once again at 1 Corinthians 15, and see what sorts of bodies we can look forward to.