Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 108:429 (Jan 1951)
Article: Part 2 Will We Have Bodies in Heaven?
Author: N. A. Woychuk

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BSac 108:429 (Jan 51) p. 98

Part 2
Will We Have Bodies in Heaven?

N. A. Woychuk

(Continued from the April-June Number, 1950)

{Editor’s note: The footnote in the original printed edition was numbered 4, but in this electronic edition is numbered 1.}

Yes, we believe in a life hereafter. But when the room is darkened, the white-capped nurse repeatedly takes the temperature of our loved one, and the baffled physician is compelled to announce that death is at hand—it is then that we despair because our loved one is no longer to be with us. We see death of course from the outside; none of us has ever seen death as it is to the person who has died. The body which has been the means of affection, expression and communication has ceased its functions, and with a sense of loss which is almost unbearable we have to recognize that our beloved is dead. Nevertheless this only means that we have ceased to have inter-communication of any kind with him or her. This one has passed on to a higher phase of mankind’s continuous life, if so be that our departed one was truly a Christian through faith in Jesus Christ.

Death, indeed, is the upspringing of the spirit from the body when through accident, disease or old age the body has become unfit longer to be the abode of the everlasting spirit. Death is the dropping of the body into the grave where it will mingle again with the dust of its origin, awaiting the resurrection day. We rightly say that the dead are the truly living. They lived while they died physically, and after they die they begin the next life and that to continue forever. In death, then, only the earthly life ceases for a time and the immortal life commences. Death for the Christian is necessary if the Lord tarry, only that he may pass from this temporal life into eternal glory where there is no more death. The words of Benjamin Franklin are very

BSac 108:429 (Jan 51) p. 99

appropriate here: “Life is a state of embryo, a preparation for life. A man is not completely born until he has passed through death.” And so—when death may come and bring to our hearts its separation from one we love in Christ, its loneliness, tears and sorrow—let us lift up our eyes unto God and rejoice for that individual that he or she has entered the fulness of life in heaven, and thither too we believers shall also soon hasten away.

But even with complete assurance of the life hereafter, we still have to see the bodies of loved ones crumble into death, and very naturally the question arises, Will the body be raised again? When confronted with such a question we desire something more than felicitous expressions and aesthetic fancies for comfort. The imaginations of poets, naturalists and philosophers combined ...

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