The Christian’s Hope Isn’t Complete without a Bodily Resurrection

Hope in a Hard World

Believers need to have incredible hope in the hard world that we live in. And because of the Genesis 3 context, we are in a broken and fractured creation. We sense this inwardly with our sin. We sense this outwardly with temptations and snares. We notice the suffering and brokenness all around the world.

We need to be people of great hope in this broken world, and that means our hope shaped by the Scriptures must involve a resurrection concept. In a world full of broken bodies and suffering people, God is going to bring redemption and blessing to such a degree that resurrection from the dead is part of our consummation. The future will be bodily glory. Our future will be bodily life. And therefore, Christians have this kind of hope to help them persevere.

The apostle Paul teaches in 2 Corinthians 4:17 that our light and momentary afflictions are preparing for us an eternal glory that outweighs them. That’s an incredible statement from a man who suffered much. The apostle Paul was no stranger to suffering, and so by no means is he trying to minimize what we go through.

We look at those terms light and momentary; our afflictions don’t often feel that way. They may feel anything but light and anything but momentary. The apostle Paul is talking about our Christian hope of a bodily resurrection—not to minimize our suffering but to maximize our perspective.

Suffering has a way of causing our perspective to narrow to what we are currently feeling in our emotions, our hearts, the pain of our bodies. We need to fight for a perspective that transcends this mortal body that we have. For the apostle Paul, that involved fixing our eyes on what was unseen—the hope of a bodily deliverance from death and the glory that awaits us. What a great hope that is for us!

Mitchell L. Chase is the author of Resurrection Hope and the Death of Death.

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