From Dust to Glory
1 Corinthians 15:35-49
Both the context of the error that had crept in to the Corinthian church and Paul’s seemingly biting response—‘You foolish person!’ (v. 36a)—suggest that this was not simply Paul showing insensitivity to a perfectly honest inquiry. The sense of the opening hypothetical, “But someone will ask,” is of a dishonest challenge.1 Matthew Henry sees the objection as twofold, involving a problem of power and a problem of identity. In other words: How can that happen? and What bodies?2 Far from being un-pastoral, the Apostle here reaches back to that same shepherd’s instinct to silence the wolf that Jesus showed to the Sadducees when they challenged Him about the resurrection: “Is this not the reason you are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God?” (Mk. 12:24) And he does so in three ways:
(i.) Two Analogies from Nature
(ii.) Four Contrasts between Old and New
(iii.) One Man, the Source of Glory
Doctrine. In the resurrection, grace perfects the nature of bodily existence.
Two Analogies from Nature
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736) famously argued that observation of the world itself reveals not only God’s existence, but His good and wise providential care in designing all things to come to an all-satisfying end. Such arguments, rooted in biblical passages like Psalm 19:1-6 and Romans 1:19-20, often include that, on the “micro level,” various systems and cycles of nature are patterned after the creation, fall, redemption, restoration.
C. S. Lewis goes as far as to call these patterns “miracles of the old creation,” so that, “the incarnate God does suddenly and locally something that God has done or will do in general. Each miracle writes for us in small letters something that God has already written, or will write, in letters almost too large to be noticed, across the whole canvas of Nature.”3
We are not unaware of the way in which the Enlightenment began to recast the Scriptures as a mere “republication” of the revelation already available in nature. But one should never let an error dictate the scope of the truth. Nature remains the property and the storyboard of God. This explains why Jesus was able to utilize so many aspects of nature to tell spiritual truths with His parables. And it explains Paul’s two analogies here. One analogy is between sowing and reaping in farming with death and rebirth on a grander scale; the other analogy is between what is sometimes called “the scale of being” and degrees of glory or splendor. It is true that God doesn’t need a scrap of nature, but our brains seem to.4
The first analogy comes from farming. Paul borrows from the Corinthians’ knowledge of sowing and reaping in the field. First you sow, then you harvest. Or as Jesus said similarly,
“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (Jn. 12:24-25).
So it is here—‘What you sow does not come to life unless it dies’ (v. 36b). The old man or woman in Adam must die.
But the analogy rises from mere death to answer the identity question. He continues,
“And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body” (vv. 37-38).
Notice that there is discontinuity and continuity in Paul’s mind. There is discontinuity because what you sow “is not the body that is to be.” Something about the bodies we will have will far transcend. But there is also continuity because, he says, “to each kind of seed its own body.” Another clue of this comes later in saying: ‘But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural, and then the spiritual’ (v. 46). The essential nature is not discarded in grace, but it is made what it was meant to be. The body that will be is patterned after a specific seed. It has a particular nature or individual identity consistent with the seed buried.
The Reformed scholastic, Wilhelmus à Brakel wrote that,
“all particles will return to their original substance to constitute the very same body with which the soul will be reunited. These will constitute the very same human being who previously existed.”5
The second analogy points to a hierarchy or scale of being, whether in the animal kingdom or in the heavenly bodies. The differences are mentioned as BODIES but also of GLORIES.
“For not all flesh is the same, but there is one kind for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish. There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is of one kind, and the glory of the earthly is of another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory” (vv. 39-41).
Calvin is quick to restrict Paul’s meaning here. We might think of the sermon of Jonathan Edwards, “Heaven: A World of Love,” in which one of the realities of the eternal state will be the diversity of glories among the saints. Calvin says of this concept, “A mistake, however, is commonly fallen into in the application; for it is supposed that Paul meant to say, that, after the resurrection, the saints will have different degrees of honor and glory. This, indeed, is perfectly true, and is proved by other declarations of Scripture; but it has nothing to do with Paul’s object.”6
That having been said, putting together bodies that differ and glories that differ, we arrive at the concept of glorified, or “heavenly,” bodies. This is all “heavenly bodies” means—not “non-bodies” but rather perfected bodies. Perfected human nature, so a perfected body-soul unity. The importance of this doctrine is further drawn out.
Four Contrasts between Old and New
This gets to the WHY question, which the objector may not even have in mind. But God’s word is never content merely to answer the questions that we have, but to lift our minds above to better questions.
“So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body” (vv. 42-44).
A seed and its natural offspring have continuity, as I said; but on the other hand, a seed doesn’t really look anything like the plant or the tree that sprouts forth. The finished product is in an obvious sense much more glorious. It’s the point! But God has so ordered the history of creation, fall, redemption, etc., in a way that the seed that must be used is, in a sense, the enemy of the life that will emerge. How can that be? In four ways the seed of death is exchanged for the blooming of life.
First, perishability is exchanged for imperishability. This is made clearer further down by Paul: ‘nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable’ (v. 50). This one is common sense—you can’t live in the place of everlasting life if you have a dying body. So, you won’t. Not if you are in Christ, the One who is the Life of the resurrection: “and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die” (Jn. 11:26). So this first of the four is easy.
Second, dishonor is exchanged for glory. This must include all that is shameful, and even the memory of the sins of the body. This is that SUCH WERE SOME OF YOU (cf. 1 Cor. 6:11). If you are crucified in Christ, what you have done in the body is dead and buried, and will not rise to condemn you on that Day.
Third, weakness is exchanged for power. This must include all of the diseases, the disorders, and the disfigurements of the present body.
Augustine considered the case of aborted babies, conjoined twins, and other deformities:
“But what is not yet complete shall be completed, just as what has been injured shall be renewed … We are not justified in affirming even of [monstrosities] … that they shall not rise again, nor that they shall rise again in their deformity, and not rather with an amended and perfected body.”7
Weakness includes suffering; but Paul says, “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Rom. 8:18).
Fourth, the natural is exchanged for the spiritual. Now “natural” is being used in its fallen sense, rather than its original. Calvin took this contrast to be “animal” versus “spiritual,” so that, while the soul quickens the body in this age, the Spirit will directly quicken the body in the age to come.8 In any case, it is important to remember that the analogies to nature are analogies and not alternatives to super nature. Even in verse 36, what the ESV renders as “come to life” is in the middle-passive in the Greek (ζωοποιεῖται), so that “is made alive” or “is given life” shows the better sense of divine agency even in these natural processes like seeds germinating.
One Man, the Source of Glory
We already have a model for the old and new man. Paul had already contrasted Adam and Christ back in verses 21-22 in order to show both how death had entered the world and how life had re-entered. He brings that contrast back, but it is not a contrast of equals.
“Thus it is written, ‘The first man Adam became a living being’; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit” (v. 45).
One of the ways that Christ is greater than Adam is that His life doesn’t just contain a natural seed of ours. His life is the life that keeps on giving. After all, He is the One who breathed life into Adam to begin with (cf. Gen. 2:7). Consider how in Revelation, we are told that the Lamb is the Light of the city (Rev. 21:23), so He is its Life. The restored Tree of Life is no more the ultimate source in the new heavens and new earth than it was in the Garden of Eden, but is rather its emblem.
Representation comes back in here: ‘The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust, and as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven’ (vv. 47-48). Adam and Christ are both treated as prototypes here, so that everyone in their race shares in their nature, either of dust or of glory. Thomas Watson wrote,
“Christ did not rise from the dead as a private person but as the public head of the church, and the head being raised, the rest of the body shall not always lie in the grave. Christ’s rising is a pledge of our resurrection, ‘Knowing that he which raised up the Lord Jesus, shall raise up us also by Jesus’ (2 Cor. iv 14).”9
Now combine this with the seed imagery. Yes, we will all one day die in the final sense, but for the Christian, such a dying to the old man is happening every day. You can see how Paul treats this seed-new-life unity as a present and building reality:
“So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Cor. 4:16-17).
Paul speaks of the image of God in these two senses as well: ‘Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven’ (v. 49). Ultimately, this is a “Christ is infinitely greater” argument, as the Giver of Life is greater by infinity than the receiver of life. So Paul says that we “have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator” (Col. 3:10). When Christian theologians speak of grace perfecting nature, we are not talking about a factory reset to Adam, the original image, but to the Lord of the whole “factory,” in whose image Adam was a faint reflection. Christ Himself is the essential and perfect Image.
PRACTICAL
Use 1. Correction. The basic difficulty here exists whether the body is buried or whether it has been cremated. The fact of decomposition remains. That gives us one more angle on the nature of the objection, as Garland commented,
“Many assume that the objectors cannot imagine how a new body, fit for the glorious spiritual experience of the next world, could arise from a carcass … Because the Corinthians could not fathom how this was possible, they had abandoned any trust that it was possible.”10
Now, that is certainly a possible interpretation. In any event, it reminds us that we can often lack hope in an element of the gospel that our minds have long since discarded or never had properly informed.
Use 2. Exhortation. Is the resurrection part of our good news? Or is it strange and unfamiliar to us? The resurrection was so odd of a concept to the Greeks that, when Paul preached it on Mars Hill, “Others said, ‘He seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities’—because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection’” (Acts 17:18). Make a study of the resurrection as a whole doctrine, and not only at this one time a year, but throughout. Ponder the words of this chapter, of Romans 8 where Paul also speaks of the revealing of the sons of God, and of John 11, where Jesus raises Lazarus so as to bring glory to Himself as this source of Life. Get to know it as good news, so that you can make it attractive to others.
Use 3. Consolation. If you were born with a deformity, or have been injured or disabled during the course of life, you need to know the good news that Jesus says, “Behold, I am making all things new” (Rev. 21:5). All things here really does mean ALL THINGS.
If you were born with a mind that seems cloudy and not able to know what you think you need to know in this world—today we call this neurodivergent because of how common such impairments have become—you need to know the good news that Jesus is making every mind new, and every mind perfect.
If you have bought into a lie about your identity and brought harm to yourself, then turn to Christ who really does not make mistakes in making all things new. But He will perfect that which He never made a mistake in in the first place. Only let that seed of trying to find an identity according to the culture of death and destruction, let it fall to the earth and die. TO ALL who are broken and weary, He says through His Apostle:
“If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you” (Rom. 8:11).
If Christ has defeated death, well, then He has defeated all of these smaller things that have been riding death around.
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1. cf. John Calvin, Commentaries, XX.II.46-47; N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 342.
2. cf. Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, 2275. The ancient commentator, Theodoret, seemed to think that the “how” question was not about causality, since the answer would have been obvious enough: God’s miraculous power. Rather, “‘in what manner’ or ‘in what way (exactly)?’” Roy E. Ciampa and Brian S. Rosner, The First Letter to the Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 799.
3. C. S. Lewis, Miracles (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 177.
4. Calvin remarks that, in spite of the supernatural outlook that Paul is calling forth, “He goes to work, however, in another way. For he shows, that the resurrection is so far from being against nature, that we have every day a clear illustration of it in the course of nature itself—in the growth of the fruits of the earth” (Commentaries, XX.II.47).
5. Wilhelmus à Brakel, The Christian’s Reasonable Service, Volume 4: Ethics and Eschatology (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 1995), 327.
6. Calvin, Commentaries, XX.II.49.
7. Augustine, Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love, 85, 87 (Chicago: Regency Gateway, 1961), 100, 102.
8. Calvin, Commentaries, XX.II.50.
9. Thomas Watson, A Body of Divinity (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2008), 306.
10. David E. Garland, 1 Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 726-27.
