![]() ![]() ![]() The reason, of course, is evident in what he says next. Why did he say that? It is a normal question, almost everybody asks it, and yet Paul immediately brands it as a foolish question. Notice what he is saying: First, "To ask how this can be is a foolish question," he says. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body. And what you sow is not the body which is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. You foolish man! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. Well, Paul now answers these two questions the skeptics were asking, "How are the dead raised?" and, "With what kind of body do they come?" His answer to the first question is in Verses 36-38: Their question would be, "Which body is raised from the dead? Is it the 'cow' body you once had, or the 'gorilla' body you may have had, or the one you are walking around in now?" Reincarnation would, for them, pose an entirely different question concerning the resurrection of the body. The Oriental religions, on the other hand, were teaching that many bodies were needed in a process of salvation, that you return to earth many times. The body was a prison-house, they taught, where we are limited and restricted. The clear implication was, "It cannot be it is impossible." The Greeks, of course, were teaching that it was a good thing, an advantage, to lose the body. "How can it be?" That is what some of these Corinthians were asking. These questions always arise when unbelief faces this question of the resurrection of the dead. "What about those that are eaten by animals or by marine life? Those animals in turn have died their bodies have returned to ashes and they have been taken up as parts of plants or other animals. "How are you going to restore a body like that?" the skeptics would ask. His body was cremated and his ashes were taken and scattered by an airplane out over the Pacific Ocean. They say, for instance, "We can understand, perhaps, that a body that has been carefully embalmed and placed in a grave might possibly be brought back to life, but what about those that have been destroyed? What about all the people that have been cremated?" Of course, they amplify them by imposing various obstacles they see. "We do not understand how it can happen," they were saying, "therefore, we do not believe it will happen." So these questions were expressions of that unbelief.įor twenty centuries now the skeptics of all ages have asked these same questions. In Verse 12 of this chapter, Paul had already recognized that some among these Corinthians were saying that there is no resurrection from the dead. It is obvious that skepticism oozes from those questions. The Apostle Paul says,īut some one will ask, "How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?" (1 Corinthians 15:35 RSV) We have now come to what is, for many people, the key question of Chapter 15, the great resurrection chapter of First Corinthians. ![]()
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