If you will remain standing and take your Bibles and open it up, if you would, to First Corinthians, chapter 15. This is our fifth week of study in this chapter. First Corinthians, chapter 15, beginning in verse 35 to 49. This is the word of the Lord. But someone will ask, how are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come? You foolish person. What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of weed or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body. For not all flesh is the same, but there is one kind for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish. There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is of one kind, and the glory of the earthly is of another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars, for star differs from star in glory. And so is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable. What is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor. It is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness. It is raised in power. It is sown a natural body. It is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, the first man, Adam, became a living being. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not for the spiritual that is first, but the natural, and then the spiritual. The first man was from earth, a man of dust. The second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust. And as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven. This is God's word. Let us pray. Our Father in heaven, we thank you for this day and for the gift of your scripture and the gathering of your people. And now, Father, we ask that you stamp with your own seal of approval and blessing on the reading and the preaching of your infallible word. Amen. Please be seated. Well, if you've never been to Philadelphia, I encourage you to do so sometime in your life. The city center has an amazing display of historical points of interest that trace the birth of our nation. You can tour Independence Hall, see the Liberty Bell, spend time in the magnificent National Constitution Center, and walk around the Old Town City Center. all within a few minutes walking distance. One particular point of interest for me when I was last there was the grave of Benjamin Franklin, one of our nation's foremost founding fathers. He's buried in a lot, and in a small plot too for that matter, across the street from the Free Quaker Meeting House on Arch Street in the city center. There's a large marble slab over Franklin's grave and it's simple and it's brief. It reads Benjamin and Deborah Franklin 1790. His wife Deborah had died 25 years before Benjamin did and he was resolved to be buried with her. In fact, he had pondered it so many times that he had several possibilities and opportunities for his own epitaph. And as many of you know, Franklin did not profess to be a born-again Christian, but it seems that he must have been influenced many times by Paul's teachings of the resurrection of the body. And here's what he wrote as an example. And again, he wrote 20 or 30 of these things. Some of them as a joke, and many of them, though, in a serious manner. Here's an interesting one. Remember, he was a bookseller and printer. The body of Benjamin Franklin, printer, like the cover of an old book, its contents torn out and stripped of its lettering and gilding, lies here. Food for worms. But the work shall not be wholly lost, for it will, as he believed, appear once more in a new and more perfect edition. corrected and amended by the author. Franklin was one of those men who it seems was persistently being pursued by, well at least in his own mind, he was being pursued by the hounds of heaven. One of the targets of Christ's work of humbling the exalted and exalting the humble. A few weeks before his death at age 84, Benjamin Franklin summarized his religious beliefs and terms with which most any Christian could readily associate himself. And here's what he said in a letter he had sent to Ezra Stiles, a friend and the president of Yale College. This was sent a month before he did die. Quote, you desire to know something of my religion. It is the first time that I have been questioned upon it. But I cannot take your curiosity amiss and shall endeavor in a few words to gratify it. Here is my creed. I believe in one God, the creator of the universe, that governs by his providence, that he ought to be worshipped, that the most acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other children. That the soul of man is immortal and will be treated with justice in another life, respecting its conduct in this one." It sounds like Franklin had thought a lot about the basics of the faith, like points that we will be talking about today. So let's return to our scripture for this morning, our passage beginning in Verse 35 of 1 Corinthians 15. The first of four groupings of these verses reads this from verse 35 to 38. But someone will ask, how are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come? You foolish person. What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be. but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body. How can bodies that have been buried, drowned, cremated hundreds, even thousands of years ago, or even just yesterday, be reconstituted and raised? The question is not senseless. In fact, living in a materialistic age such as ours, where only what is perceived by our senses is believed to be real, it seems to be a natural question to ask. So when Paul says, you foolish person, he is not dismissing the problem so that it is not worthy of any thought. He will spend the next 13 verses trying to explain how all that happens. The fools, as he sees them, are those in the Corinthian congregation who are dismissing the idea of a resurrection. They are, like in our own times, using the difficulty of understanding how it could happen to ridicule the idea that it could even happen at all. Let me say that again. They are, like our own times, using the difficulty of understanding, and there are difficulties, aren't there? Difficulties of understanding how it could happen to ridicule the idea that it could even happen at all. That is foolish. Because it leads to the conclusion that only what our finite reason can fathom is true. And it denies the infinite power and capabilities of God and the absolute authority and control he has over all of his creation. Paul is teaching the Corinthians and us that God's creation, his temporal and eternal worlds are infinitely more wonderful and magnificent than we can appreciate or understand. And so in the following verses, Paul starts with the natural world that we do know. and then leads to a greater understanding of another world that we do not fully know. Paul says, what you sow does not come to life unless it dies. In other words, you can't provide for next year's harvest by taking this year's full-grown stalks and planting them in the ground. But once they have died, the seeds that they produce may be used. If we knew nothing about the annual cycle of seed time and harvest that the Lord has installed, it would seem ridiculous to take the seeds, the fruit of the plant, and bury them in the cold, dark earth. What was buried seems totally unconnected to what will appear. But as Jesus reminded us in John chapter 12 verse 24, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit. So death is the condition for rebirth, albeit in a totally different form from the original seed. Verse 37 says, And what you sow is not the body, That is to be but a bare kernel, perhaps of weed or some other grain. Well, that much we understand. It's obvious to any gardener or farmer. But what actually happens? That's the next verse. But God gives it a body as he has chosen and to each kind of seed its own body. Now, look, the plant that emerges is not completely separate from what was sown. It has a direct continuity with the seed that has died and been buried. You don't plant a grape seed and get a pear tree. Each individual specimen has its own distinctive body, but when that body is full grown, it would appear to bear no relationship at all to what was planted months earlier. Death is the gateway to life immortal. The earthly body will be sown like a seed and our flesh will decay. But just as the body is both different from the seed and also continuous with it, so the resurrection body will be completely new and yet totally connected to the seed which was sown. And now I read to you verses 39 to 41, our next group of verses. For not all flesh is the same, but there is one kind for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish. There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is of one kind, and the glory of the earthly is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, another glory of the stars, for stars differ from star in glory." Paul starts with the thought that not all flesh is the same. These verses expand on the idea that Paul has been presenting that our resurrection bodies will be different from our earthly bodies. And when we are presented with the vast differences of God's creation, we should not question His ability to create bodies that are different yet continuous. We marvel at the variety the Creator has made, not only of animate animals that are humans, but birds, fish, and to say nothing of the variety of plant life. And then there is the inanimate material, the planets, the moons, and the stars. Paul does not take the time to contrast and compare the varieties of all things like snowflakes, magnetic force, temperature, and things of the soul, like truth, beauty, and goodness. So varied and so complex, and yet the glory that Paul points out is that all of it, every molecule and atom of infinite variety is created and sustained by God Himself. Verses 42 through 44 say this, So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable. What is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor. It is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness. It is raised in power. It is sown a natural body. It is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. Here Paul returns to his particular point. So it is with the resurrection of the dead. Our resurrection bodies will be different from our present mortal bodies. The reason for that is that they need to be adapted to a different kind of existence. Paul's emphasis is on the superiority of that which is to come. And he will set out now to explain both more about the nature of the resurrection and also of motivating us to look forward to it. What is sown is perishable. What is raised is imperishable. Certainly, we all know that here today that we live in perishable bodies only. We are by nature subject to decay over time. Even after death, our bodies decay. The process is inevitable. But the body that will be raised has the very quality that could never be true of our earthly body. It is imperishable. A fundamentally different kind of glory, magnificent beyond our present comprehension. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. The word dishonor here means loss of rights, as in citizenship, as in the case of a stateless person who has no homeland. There is a sense in which all of our Christian experience is one of alienation, and expectation of our heavenly home. Paul will write later in Philippians 3, beginning in verse 20. But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself. Whatever accolades or glories this world can bestow upon Christians, they are all left in the grave. As Gerald Patton said, all glory is fleeting. It only lasts a lifetime. And it's the lifetime of the man of dust. They are buried with the body in the grave, all these things that we have achieved. with which there is nothing glorious. But we will be raised in glory with new bodies, and the prototype of these bodies will be the one that Jesus has now. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. Our bodies are frail and weak. Human life hangs on the thinnest of threads. We don't doubt that these days, do we? disease, old age, violence, accidents. Against these we remain powerless. But the resurrection body transcends all such limitations. And the last of these contrasts is this. It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. There is no doubt that in this world believers already begin to experience the blessings of the age to come through their union with Christ. But Paul's concern is to guard against a false spirituality that wants to pretend that all the blessings of the world to come are now available in the present. But the truth is that our pattern, our prototype, is Jesus. And he had to bear dishonor and shame at the hands of shameful and disreputable people Romans 8, beginning in verse 16, says this. The Spirit himself bears witness that our spirit, with our spirit, that we are children of God, and as children, then heirs. Heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ. Here's the proviso, here is the limitation, here is the completion. Provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. You see, we want every blessing and everything good for ourselves. But there's a string attached, we must be prepared, willing, able and committed to suffering as he suffered. A spiritual body. What is a spiritual body? It's not a spirit, but a body. A body like a spirit. Raised as a spiritual body, the word says. Paul says that this is a resurrected body existing in a different order. In a different order with the Lord. And with all the other spiritual bodies in the new heavens and the new earth. A body that is imperishable, glorious, powerful, and perfectly suited for the spiritual existence in heaven. The spiritual body is a human personhood which passes through death to the resurrection, which, like Jesus, will live forever, recognizable in its continuity with Jesus and yet transformed in a newness. And now the last five verses, verses 45 to 49. Thus it was written, the first man Adam became a living being, the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the natural, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust. The second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust. and as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven. Adam became the father of the human race, created for life in God's world. From him we inherited the same bodily characteristics and with them the same fallen sinful nature. In contrast, by a similar decisive act of God, the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. And as the head of a new humanity, Jesus Christ not only has life, but gives life, spiritual life, to the sons and daughters of Adam. Just as we have been born with the image of man of dust, through our physical birth and life in this world, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven, through our spiritual rebirth culminating in our resurrection bodies. Our earthly life lives, even at their best, and we are marked by our Adamic weakness, sin, impotence, and failure. But just as certain is the assurance that we are going to be transformed into the likeness of Christ when we are raised to eternal life. Each one of us will be an original, unique individual, and yet every believer will bear Christ's likeness fully, because we are fully in Christ. I have some thoughts now I want to pass on to you, some brief thoughts. The first item comes from the episode of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. in Luke chapter 24. You heard it many times from this pulpit. It just keeps getting more interesting all the time, and its secrets are yielded up to us on a sustained basis. Let me read just the part of the passage that I want to highlight this morning. It says, that very day, two of them, these two disciples, were going to a village named Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, and they were talking with each other about all of these things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing together, Jesus himself drew near and went with them. But their eyes were kept from recognizing him. And he said to them, What is this conversation that you are holding with each other as you walk? And they stood still, looking sad. Then one of them, named Cleopas, answered him, Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days? And he said to them, What things? And they said to him, Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, a man who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and rulers delivered him up to be condemned to death and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things happened. Some women of our company amazed us. They were at the tomb early in the morning, and when they did not find his body, they came back saying that they had even seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive. Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said, but him they did not see. And then skipping to verse 25, and he said to them, Oh, foolish ones and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken. Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory? Beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself. Well, I find this phrase, I've run over it 50 times at least. It says, Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory? I just passed over that. What does it mean to enter into his glory? John Gill, the commentator extraordinaire from the 18th century, defines it this way. To enter into his glory began at his resurrection from the dead. and is seen in his exaltation and cession at the right hand of God. Upon his ascension, he was received up to glory, entered into it, took possession of it, and is crowned with it, and which will still be more manifest when he shall come to judge the world in righteousness. when his saints also shall appear in glory with him, and shall be everlasting spectators of his glory. And indeed, his entrance into glory is not merely for himself, but in the name and behalf of all of them. And by a view of the glory that was to follow them, and which he and his people were to enjoy together, was he animated to endure them cheerfully and patiently, and this He is entered into, possesses and enjoys as the consequence and reward for his sufferings. That's what it means to enter into glory. Ponder that for a few minutes. My thought here is that if you are captivated by the man of dust, that in the end, that is all you will possess, is dust. But if you identify, if you enlist in the army of the man in heaven, your best days, our best days are still ahead and they still will never end for we too will have entered into his glory. The second point is this. Just this week, we saw a demonstration of things that we do not understand. The Juno space exploration vehicle entered into an orbit around the planet Jupiter. If you missed that, go back to your personal computer and go to the NASA website and see all the wonderful things that have been done. The rocket that sent the space vehicle from Earth to Jupiter was launched on August 5th, 2011. traveling toward Jupiter, which is located in our solar system roughly 540 million miles from Earth. Talk about accuracy. Traveling at an average speed of 23,610 miles per hour, the Juno spacecraft is the fastest human-made object ever. And it's been going that fast for almost five years. You know, it reminds me of our children in the back of the car. Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Only five years to go. Don't worry about it. Sit back and enjoy the ride. And the entry into a trajectory to be able to elliptically orbit around the giant planet has required, as I said, incredible precision. Now listen, I understand the words that I just said to you. But I don't understand how it's done. We have a lot of things in life like this. The resurrection is one of those things. But the fact that I do not understand how and what is being done to send a spacecraft to another planet does not mean that it is not real. And what Paul is teaching the Corinthians and us is that the other world that God has in store for us is every bit as real as the one that we occupy today. Now, the Juno spacecraft was, well, it's not all that was noteworthy this last week. Things that are difficult to understand. I don't understand how a person can knowingly and openly break the law and then have an officer of the justice system in our country decide not to recommend even an examination by a grand jury. And I do not understand how stone cold your heart has to be in order to perpetrate some of the incidents of violence we have seen on our television screens this week. The world we live in is in many ways still held in captivity by the first Adam, the man of dust, doing what is right in our own eyes. And if you live in dust, you will subsist and be satisfied in the dust and the grime of sin. But this I do understand, that our salvation and deliverance will come and must come from the man of heaven, not from each other. Only He can give us a new life, a new permanent life that exists not in the fallen, time-bound world of dust, but in the timeless reality of the resurrected man, the God-man of heaven. In conclusion, let me say this. In 1982, then Vice President George Bush represented the United States at the funeral of the former Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev. Bush was deeply moved by something that happened at the end of the funeral ceremony. It was a completely unscripted, unknown event. A silent protest carried out by Brezhnev's widow. She stood motionless by the coffin until seconds before it was to be closed. Then, just as the soldiers touched the lid to close it, Brezhnev's wife performed an act of great courage and hope, a gesture that must surely rank as a profound act of civil disobedience in that society. She reached down and made the sign of the cross on her husband's chest. There, in what could have been considered at the time a symbol of the citadel of secular atheistic power, the life of a man who had run it all, who had been in charge of it all, hoped that her husband was wrong. She hoped that there was another life and that that life was best represented by Jesus who died on a cross. And that that same Jesus might yet have mercy on her husband. But our case is different, isn't it? Jesus has promised, and he has shown us through his own resurrection, that he will have mercy upon us. Not because of who we are, but because of who he is, the resurrected Christ. Let us pray. Our Lord and our God, you have honored us by calling us through the proclamation of your gospel. Not by the human wisdom or reasoning that we have, but by your consummate power. Remind us that all that we are and will be is tied to the reality and the truth of the crucified and resurrected Jesus. Help us to run our race that is set before us, that we might somehow be able to claim the prize that is imperishable, our resurrection from the dead. Make us more like Jesus and give us courage for what you have set before us. Make us into the people and the church that you intend us to be. And be a sword in our shield. In the authority of Christ we pray. Amen.