Friday 6th December
Read 1 Corinthians 15:50-53
“I declare to you, brothers and sisters, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. 51 Listen, I tell you a mystery: we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed – 52 in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. 53 For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality.” (NIVUK)
Paul hints at what has come to be called the ‘intermediate state’ in these final thoughts on resurrection. These days many Christians are of the view that the ‘intermediate state’ is actually our final heavenly home.
Yet Paul seems to suggest here that all who have faith in Jesus will be ‘changed’, transformed, not just those who ‘sleep’. For we need bodies fit for the new creation. A new creation that comes down out of heaven from God. A place where God’s will is done on earth as it is heaven.
Some will ‘sleep’ whilst waiting for the final trumpet to sound when God will wrap up the groaning creation and transform it also. Others will still be living when that occurs. It is a mystery when judgement will finally arrive and Jesus will return from heaven to earth.
It is also a mystery as to what happens whilst those who have died before us ‘sleep’, woken by the trumpet at the end. Some argue that it is a timeless, non-existence. Everything will seem to occur simultaneously for everyone. Others argue that it is an incorporeal rest in the presence of Jesus before all is completed.
In a sense it does not matter. We will all eventually find out one way or another. Paul’s point for the Corinthians is that everyone must be reclothed with bodies fit for the new creation. There can be no exceptions. Our hope is a transformed bodily hope and anything else is not the hope of the early church.
