Westminster Catechism 1647
“The self-same bodies of the dead which were laid in the grave, being then again united to their souls forever, shall be raised up by the power of Christ.”
It is so important that all believers must believe in the self-same bodies in Heaven. Without this belief of self-same body that we will have in Heaven, then what Hope is there in the realization of ideals by man as a truly and fully human being in the original image of God and resurrect with Christ again ?
Otherwise, the Word of God will be wrong to say, “For me to live is Christ, to die is gain” and we are the most to be pitied for we have turned our back in enmity with the world.
Let’s trust God wholeheartedly for this Hope that Christ had been resurrected and we will do the same one day and that He had already gone ahead to prepare the mansions for us.
Following are the quotes from eminent theologians and pastors expressing the same belief :
J C Ryle
“The man who is about to sail for Australia or New Zealand as a settler, is naturally anxious to know something about his future home, its climate, its employments, its inhabitants, its ways, its customs. All these are subjects of deep interest to him. You are leaving the land of your nativity,you are going to spend the rest of your life in a new hemisphere. It would be strange indeed if you did not desire information about your new abode. Now surely, if we hope to dwell forever in that “better country, even a heavenly one” we ought to seek all the knowledge we can get about it. Before we go to our eternal home we should try to become acquainted with it.”
Randy Alcorn
“The empty tomb is the ultimate proof that Christ’s Resurrection body was the same body that died on the cross. If Resurrection meant the creation of a new body, Christ’s original body would have remained in the tomb….This, then, is the most basic truth about our resurrected bodies. They are the same bodies God created for us, but they will be raised to greater perfection than we’ve ever known…It is like the new upgrade of my word processing software. When I heard there was an upgrade available, I didn’t say, “I have no idea what it will be like.” I knew that for the most part it would be like the old program, only better. Sure, it has some new features that I didn’t expect, and I’m glad for them. But I certainly recognise it as the same program I’ve used for a decade.”
Hank Hanegraff
“There is a one-to-one correspondence between the body of Christ that died and the body that rose.”
John Piper
“Christianity is not a platonic religion that regards material things as mere shadow of reality, which will be sloughed off as soon as possible. Not the mere immortality of the soul, but rather the resurrection of the body and the renewal of all creation is the hope of the Christian faith.”
Bruce Milne
“The Jesus who says, “Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have,”… this is the Jesus who draws back the curtain on the heavenly life and shows us what it will be like: embodied !”
John Updike
“Make no mistake: if he rose at all it was as His body, if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle, the Church will fail. Let us not mock God with metaphor, analogy, sidestepping transcendence, making of the event as a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages; let us walk through the door.”
R A Torrey
“We will not be disembodied spirits in the world to come, but redeemed spirits, in redeemed bodies, in a redeemed universe. If we don’t get it right on the resurrection of the body, we’ll get nothing else right. It’s therefore critical that we not merely affirm the resurrection of the dead as a point of doctrine but that we understand the meaning of the resurrection we affirm.”
Martyn Lloyd Jones
“Everything will be glorified, even nature itself. And that seems to me to be the biblical teaching about the eternal state that what we call heaven is life in this perfect world as God intended humanity to live it. When he put Adam in Paradise at the beginning, Adam fell, and all fell with him, but men and women are meant to live in the body, and will live in a glorified body in a glorified world, and God will be with them.”
A A Hodge
“Heaven, as the eternal home of the divine Man and of all the redeemed members of the human race, must necessarily be thoroughly human in its structure, conditions, and activities. Its joys and activities must all be rational, moral, emotional, voluntary and active. There must be the exercise of all the faculties, the gratification of all tastes, the development of all talent capacities, the realization of all ideals. The reason, the intellectual curiosity, the imagination, the aesthetic instincts, the holy affections, the social affinities, the inexhaustible resources of strength and power native to the human sould must all find in heaven exercise and satisfaction. Then there must always be a goal of endeavour before us, ever future….Heaven will prove the consummate flower and fruit of the whole creation and of all the history of the universe.”
Albert Wolters
“God hangs on to his fallen original creation and salvages it. He refuses to abandon the work of His hands – in fact, he sacrifices His own Son to save His original project. Humankind, which has botched its original mandate and the whole creation along with it, is given another chance in Christ; we are reinstated as God’s managers on earth. The original good creation is to be restored.”
Paul Marshall
“This world is our home: we are made to live here. It has been devastated by sin, but God plans to put it right. hence, we look forward with joy to newly restored bodies and to living in a newly restored heaven and earth. We can love this world becasue it is God’s, and it will be healed, becoming at last what God intended from the beginning….Our destiny is an earthly one: a new earth, an earth redeemed and transfigured. An earth reunited with heaven, but an earth, nevertheless.”
David Lloyd George
“When I was a boy, the thought of Heaven used to frighten me more than the thought of Hell. I pictured Heaven as a place where time would be perpetual Sundays, with perpetual services from which there would be no escape.”
C S Lewis
“The hills and valleys of Heaven will be to those you now experience not as a copy is to the original, nor as a substitute is to the genuine article, but as the flower to the root, or the diamond to the coal.”
T S Eliot
“I had far rather walk, as I do, in daily terror of eternity, than feel that this was only a children’s game in which all the contestants would get equally worthless prizes in the end.”