Q3. Resurrection

[Krissi]

For most of my life, I have treated the "afterlife" as something that shouldn't be pondered because there was nothing I would be able to do about whatever happens after death anyway, and that by the time of my own death, my fate --good or bad -- would have been sealed.  In a way, I was right. Whatever will happen ... will happen. But as I age, and quite recently as I watched my father die, the question about what happens after death seems more pressing.

We all die. We all are resurrected. Some are resurrected to glory ... others to whatever God does with those who reject Him. This all happens when Christ returns. I'm not sure what happens  to those who die before Christ returns. Then there is some sort of judgment. God seems to group the dead into two cohorts with some enjoying an eternal good life and others either eternally punished or, as some say, eternally separated from God. Maybe God finds a way to "cure" the unjust so that they, too, can enjoy life with those who made the decisions for Christ while on earth.

Resurrection is bodily. We are given some sort of new physical body. We die and our earthly bodies are replaced with something different, which is still a body. That's all I can understand. As I watched my father take his last breath and as his earthly body weakened until breathing itself was impossible, I wondered about his breathing in the place where he would go. Do we breathe? Do we eat and drink? What sort of body do we get? I can't imagine anything other than an analog to the earthly bodies we have now, but our new bodies may be something very different. Also, we "rise" from the dead as if we go into the atmosphere. Most people think of heaven as "up" which may be why we rise. The tripartite universe has heaven up and hell down. This is myth, of course, but the fact that this idea is ubiquitous in most cultures gives me pause.

Too,the idea that the just and unjust are both resurrected and brought into a new way of eternally existing is difficult to understand. Why resurrect the unjust only to punish them later? I would think that God would just let them be eaten by worms instead of bringing them back to life only to increase their pain. I do not understand this. 

I do understand that as a member of the "just" cohort, I do not deserve to be considered just. God's pronouncement of my just-ness before Him is solely due to Christ's death on the cross. His perfection overwhelms my imperfection. His righteousness somehow denies God the opportunity to judge me as unjust, which I deserve. So much hangs on my intellectual/mental/intuitive acceptance of God's son as savior.

Resurrection isn't salvation but the condition that precedes salvation ... for Christians.