Thoughts on the Resurrection.
By E. M. Crandall
“How are the dead raised up, and with what body do they come?”
1 Cor. xv, 35. THIS is a question frequently asked at the present day. And some answer that there is no resurrection of the body, but the spirit is freed from its clayey tenement and soars to regions far above the earth, to forever enjoy the bliss of those better climes. Others think that the body will be raised, and the spirit that has been enjoying the bliss of Heaven for hundreds of years, or the woes of the damned for the same length of time, will come back at the resurrection and inhabit the body again. Still another class think the identical body cannot be raised, for, say they, the dust of which the body is composed is diffused throughout the vegetable and animal creation, and such cannot see how it would be possible for God to gather the very identical dust again. But let us come to the apostle’s mode of deciding this question. In 1 Cor. xv, 36, he says, “That which thou sowest is not quickened except it die. And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or some other grain. But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body.” Verses 36–38. In this argument of Paul’s, he has taken a very simple and plain illustration: that of sowing grain. When we sow our grain, we do not sow that body that shall be, but simply the bare wheat,—the seed. When we come to reap, we do not expect to reap the wheat that we sowed, which has died and gone into the earth; but we expect to get the same in kind that we sowed. If we sow fife wheat, we expect to reap fife; if club, then club. So in the resurrection. I do not think it necessary that the identical dust that composes the body of man should be brought together again. All that seems to me necessary is, that the elements of which man is composed should be brought together in the same proportion as they were before dissolution. I think God records in “his Book of remembrance” the elements of which every individual is composed, and it seems to me that the psalmist David so understood, when he said, “Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect, and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.” Ps. cxxxix, 16. But in the resurrection I suppose there is an advance, for the apostle says, “It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.” Verse 4. I understand that the resurrected bodies will be immortal, not subject to decay,—therefore spiritual. E. M. CRANDALL.
Utica, Dane Co., Wis.