First Series – Sermon Twelve
Original by George MacDonald
Paraphrase by Dale R. Howie
Indeed, a man’s body at death will seem no more to him than the changing of clothes. Like he is tossing aside his old garments at night, intending to put on new and better ones in the morning. This resurrection is the unveiling of the new body or lens through which the New Life is revealed!
“We are perhaps,” resumed Falconer, “too much in the habit of thinking of death as the culmination of disease. But I think rather of death as the first pulse of the new strength, shaking itself free from the old moldy remnants of earth, that it may begin the new life that grows out of the old. The caterpillar dies into the butterfly. Who knows, but that disease may be the coming of the keener life? And then disease may be the sign of the salvation of fire, of the agony of the greater life to lift us to itself?” (The Tutor’s First Love)
MacDonald lived in fragile health most of his life with tuberculosis and asthma. He may have felt that these twelve sermons at fifty were his final message to us. It would be a dozen years before series two would be published. This series is a complete thought in its progression. His gospel message is easy to see as his sermons unfold. A Kingdom of children mirroring Themselves in freedom and love. We being aided by Them in discovering the Treasure, Jesus, hidden in our humanity, ready to be revealed. Revealed in our journey of transformation from takers to givers through darkness and death. The necessary sufferings through which we “die into the butterfly”, culminating in our bodily resurrection, another in the process of our changes of form.
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…this continued with all seven of them, who died without children. Finally, the woman also died. So tell us, whose wife will she be in the resurrection? For all seven were married to her!”
Jesus replied, “Marriage is for people here on earth. But in the age to come, those worthy of being raised from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage. And they will never die again. In this respect they will be like angels. They are children of God and children of the resurrection.
But now, as to whether the dead will be raised—even Moses proved this when he wrote about the burning bush. Long after Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had died, he referred to the Lordas ‘the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ So he is the God of the living, not the dead, for they are all alive to him.
God of the Living
There is a recurring problem we have with Jesus’ teaching. He is too simple for us. We are busy discussing the design and “revelation” behind Solomon’s carved and gold-plated door while Jesus is speaking about the simple foundations of His Kingdom.
If you think He was having just a verbal argument with the Sadducees, think again! The Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection. He answered them, referring to His Father as “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ So he is the God of the living.” Not one Sadducee dared reply. Jesus was speaking of God’s reference to Himself in His first meeting with Moses. Your ancestors found Me faithful while they were alive. Listen to Me, and you will find Me trustworthy, even in death.
They could not reply. Because the Sadducees were trained theologians, they could see they were beyond logic and had a losing hand. Would God define Himself as the God of the dead? The dead who were alive once? But who He either could not or would not keep alive? “Trust me! I took care of your ancestors, even though they are all dead now. Worship and obey Me, and I will be good to you for seventy years or so. Then you, too, will die, and the world will keep going without you. And I will call Myself your God still.” No! This God is the God that changes not. Once God, always God. If once He had said to a man, “I am your God,” and that man died, then he died according to the creed of the Sadducees. Then we would be correct to say, “God is the God of the dead.”
So, based on the Sadducees’ beliefs, would He not be the God of the dead? If God was only faithful to them during their lifetime? What kind of a relationship could this ever-living, life-giving, and changeless God have with His creatures? Are we, then, not partakers of His life? Beings of whom death is the driving force of their being? Who are not worth their Maker keeping alive? Never!
To let His creatures die would be to change! Questioning, the very Trinity, ceasing to be what They are. If we are not worthy of keeping alive, His creation is not a “good” one! He is not so great after all, nor very divine. Only as divine as the weak thoughts of the dying have been able to imagine Him.
But, Jesus says, “All live in Him.” In Him, there is no death! You think of us far more than we think of you. If you were to forget us for a moment, we would be dead. What we call death is just an exterior form in our minds. It looks final, an awful end, a total change of being. To man, it seems unbelievable that anything else was possible.
God saw us before we were born, and He makes us beautifully unique. Man changing form, no longer visible to his friends, is no argument at all that He doesn’t see us any longer! This change seems incredible, so impressive, making the unseen life so uncertain to our imaginations. After all, resurrection life is not unreasonable to believe. Nor is it unreasonable to think that God still saw Abraham after Isaac could not, and Isaac after Jacob could not. God still seeing Jacob after the Sadducees doubted if there had ever been a Jacob at all. As if God remembers and carries them in His mind. As if, of those that God thinks and remembers lives. God takes to Himself the name “their” God. How crazy is this? The Living One cannot name Himself after the dead. The very being of God exists in the giving of Life! Therefore, they must be alive. If He remembers and speaks loving thoughts about them, would He not keep them alive “if” He could? If, He could not, how could He have created them in the first place? Can it be easier to create than to keep alive?
So, if we are alive to God, we are aware of Him. If we are aware of Him, we are awake to our own being. So, why resurrection? So that our relationship with others may be in a fresh and mutual revelation. So what does the resurrection of the body mean? In what type of body will we come? Indeed, a man’s body at death will seem no more to him than the changing of clothes. The old clothes he tosses aside at night, intending to put on new and better ones in the morning!
First, let’s consider the purpose of the body. It is the instrument of instruction, the lens that reveals the eternal image of God. It is how we relate, interact, and receive the revelation from nature, others, and God. The body is how we welcome all our lessons on passion, suffering, love, beauty, and science. Through the body, we are pointed both outward towards others and inward to our true selves. God found in these revelations!
Living here, we cannot learn all that we are meant to learn through the body. Man has so much more to discover. The brightest and most diligent of men have yet to scratch the surface in this life. Will all that is undiscovered be lost to the one who loved all of nature? Who looks to the spiritual body of which Paul spoke to be a more powerful means of revelation? The meek, who will have inherited the earth as Jesus had said. Who will find that everything is aglow with spiritual meaning? Who would care less for the loss of bodily pleasures? These would be least willing to live without a body. This channel of enlightenment lost; they would want another one!
All these insights would only mean a body was needed, not God’s resurrected one. Resurrection means so much more than just form. Our bodies not only provide revelation to us but us to others. Our thoughts, feelings, and imaginations need a body to express them. This unseen world within us is shared with our brothers and sisters. Our humanity hidden leaves us lonely!
The new body should be like the old one, renewed but recognizable as me. My humanity recreated with all its distinctiveness from others, more me than ever. The elements of my body that were non-essential, accidental, insignificant, and incomplete will have vanished. This body, seen by our loved ones, expressed in its fullness, will be our resurrected one. The same one regenerated, but not of the same dead matter. Our eyes see our loved ones, our hearts crying, “My special ones again!” Like our saying, “He is not himself today.” Or, “She seems more herself today.” She is more herself than she has been for a while.” Isn’t this when we smile and our hearts are encouraged? This image, our friends at their best, is most like resurrection.
Resurrection, how could we call it anything less! Oh, how the letter kills! “There are those feeling like dust, thinking they will rise as dirt. Doubting, they will see or know their loved ones again. People believing this is a resurrection? What! Will we come to love our neighbors and not know them after the resurrection? Better content to be unaware and know ourselves no longer. What! Will God’s love for families pass away on earth? Fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, wife and children vanish for all eternity? Far worse, will man’s love for them die as well? Will “God” be the only one left, and that be the end?”
No, the Trinity is forever unveiling and revealing life. They will raise you so that I can see you again. The temporary made permanent. My brotherhood is reaching out, the sisterhood holding on with love and truth. The me that knew and loved you before! The new relationship is as dear as the old. The new love is more motivated than ever. Changed, thank God, when mortality puts on immortality. Our friends become reborn, more authentic than before. More refined, the best version of themselves better than we glimpsed in our most beautiful moments before. Their true selves we saw through our imperfections and loved.
Jesus give us this resurrection! A body like your own transfigured one. Transform us so we can see, hear, and know as You do. Give us glorified bodies through which to reveal the exalted thoughts we now have. Our expression of You Father and Your Son Jesus! Finally, Lord Jesus, the obedient one, come! We will be One! One with You and every man and woman You created!
The simple truth is that God is far more a verb than a noun! We tend to love names, and there is something powerful to us about possessing something when it is a noun, “name it and claim it.” However, Jesus was always and only interested in verbs, actions that serve, help, care, lead, and love, etc.!
When God gave Moses “the divine name” in Exodus 3:14-15, it was written yhwh, which is unpronounceable. It is, in fact, a sound, the sound of inhaling “yh” and exhaling “wh.” It is breathing! It was derived from hayah – “to be”. This would make it a causative verb with the meaning “he causes to be” or “he will cause to be.” The vowels were added and thus can be pronounced as a name, Yahweh. Therefore, God is the God of the Living!
There is no “dead or death” noun in the “Divine Life” verb! We “live” forever, so we change “form”, that is, we transform, resurrect!
God knew us before we were born, so being born was a change of “form”. Come now, put the puzzle pieces together and see the “God of the Living!”
“I knew you before I formed you in your mother’s womb. Before you were born, I set you apart and appointed you as my prophet to the nations.” Jeremiah 1:5 NLT
“But even before I was born, God chose me and called me by his marvelous grace.” Paul – Galatians 1:15 NLT
It is the vehicle through which we move from alone to together, and join others in His Kingdom!
The end will be like the beginning. The unique, distinct, and individual natures of ourselves and others will reach their best expression in the resurrection.
Resurrection is but another step towards becoming what we are, our true selves!
Our transformation fulfills Jesus’ prayer that we be ONE!
yhwh – Introductory Blog
SIMPLE TRUTH
Your ancestors found Me faithful while they were alive. Listen to Me, and you will find Me trustworthy, even in death.
WE ALL LIVE IN HIM
But our Lord says, “All live unto him.” With Him death is not. Thy life sees our life, O Lord. All of whom all can be said, are present to thee. Thou thinkest about us, eternally more than we think about thee… If thou didst forget us for a moment then indeed death would be.
RESURRECTION LIFE
But if God could see us before we were, and make us after his ideal, that we shall have passed from the eyes of our friends can be no argument that he beholds us no longer.
The Living One cannot name himself after the dead; when the very Godhead lies in the giving of life. Therefore they must be alive.
PURPOSE OF THE BODY
It is the means of Revelation to us, the camera in which God’s eternal shows are set forth. It is by the body that we come into contact with Nature, with our fellow-men, with all their revelations of God to us. It is through the body that we receive all the lessons of passion, of suffering, of love, of beauty, of science. It is through the body that we are both trained outwards from ourselves, and driven inwards into our deepest selves to find God.
The thoughts, feelings, imaginations which arise in us, must have their garments of revelation whereby shall be made manifest the unseen world within us to our brothers and sisters around us; else is each left in human loneliness.
RECOGNIZED AS ME
Now, if this be one of the uses my body served on earth before, the new body must be like the old. Nay, it must be the same body, glorified as we are glorified, with all that was distinctive of each from his fellows more visible than ever before.
OUR TRUE SELVES
Shall we not feel that the nobler our friends are, the more they are themselves; that the more the idea of each is carried out in the perfection of beauty, the more like they are to what we thought them in our most exalted moods, to that which we saw in them in the rarest moments of profoundest communion, to that which we beheld through the veil of all their imperfections when we loved them the truest?
TRANSFORM US!
Transform us so we can see, hear, and know as You do.