Resurrection of Believers.
JESUS did not lay aside our nature which He had assumed when His work of humiliation was completed; He did not leave the mortal part of it to rot in the tomb, or to be miraculously annihilated, and in a body of spirit ascend to God. No! He took our nature, soul and body, with Him, and wears the same human envelope of the Divinity on the throne of the universe that He did while suffering on the earth. Yes, the Son of God, in all His power and glory, is yet our Kinsman; bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh. In the language of an eloquent writer: “The Son of God still wears His human nature; He remembers His own conflicts, His own temptations, His own sorrows. He can be touched with the feelings of our infirmities. Beneath His crown of glory are the scars of the thorns. The hand that grasps His scepter bears the print of the nail. The feet at which all heaven is prostrate show the past torture on the cross. Nay, in His blessed heart, the spear has left its deep trace of insult.” But Jesus, in His resurrection, was a pattern after which His people will be raised. As He rose in His proper body, glorified, so will they rise in their proper bodies, glorified; as He ascended to heaven in the same body in which He rose, so likewise will they ascend to heaven in their bodies which will rise. Here are the teachings of the Scriptures as to the subject of the resurrection bodies of the saints. This is all we know, or can know, or need to know, concerning it. There are collateral arguments which we might bring from other sources, which might gratify our curiosity, but they would add nothing to our faith. The Bible stands alone, the infallible, authoritative, and all-sufficient word of God. And writing for Christians, for the instruction of their faith and the consolation of their hearts, on the subject of one of the most sublime facts of Revelation,—a fact to be realized solely by supernatural interposition,—we can not stop to answer the objections which a presumptuous philosophy might bring against it. The Bible alone reveals this truth. In all that it says concerning it, we are at liberty to inquire; but where that stops, we should stop, and not presume to elevate into coordinate rank with the volume from heaven the imaginings of our own minds, or the decisions of our own reason.—The Panoplist.