I have been getting what feels like a revelation of truth over the past few months. I started this post a while ago, and the pieces are coming together.
1 Cor 15 paints a picture of what this world is all about. It’s about God the father and Jesus the word, co-laboring to create a bride for Jesus the Son. The goal is family. Quite simply, we were created to be the bride [I think this is a word for family] of Christ, but we go through a purification process where choice means love, and those who do not choose Him–and even the sin in each one of us–must first be destroyed before the Son can present his radiant bride to the father, and be assimilated with us into God himself. The story picks up here at the end of the process:
24 Then the end will come, when He [Jesus] hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. 25 For He [Jesus] must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. 26 The last enemy to be destroyed is death. 27 …… 28 When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to Him [Father God] who put everything under Him [Jesus], so that God may be all in all. [the end game being “God is one”–imagine that, the Jews have it right!]
Here we see the the flesh is merely the “seed” of the spirit.37 When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. 38 But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body. 39 Not all flesh is the same: People have one kind of flesh, animals have another, birds another and fish another. [Why can’t evolutionists see this?] 40 There are also heavenly bodies and there are earthly bodies; but the splendor of the heavenly [in the sky] bodies is one kind, and the splendor of the earthly bodies is another. 41 The sun has one kind of splendor, the moon another and the stars another; and star differs from star in splendor. [so there must be some correlation with all types of physical bodies to one in the spirit realm… we go back to the axiom that states “that which we see in the physical realm is merely a representation of what exists in the spiritual realm”.]
42 So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; 43 it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; 44 it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body….
If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. [if this applies to the moon, does it apply to the chair you are sitting in?]45 So it is written: “The first man Adam became a living being”[f]; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit.46 The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual.47 The first man was of the dust of the earth; the second man is of heaven.48 As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the heavenly man, so also are those who are of heaven. 49 And just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we[g] bear the image of the heavenly man. [once we are “born again”]
The plan for expansion of the Kingdom is super cool. Of course our Bible is focused on us as people, because that is what matters to us. With the mention of the stars, sun and moon, and seeds in the ground, it would be foolish to think that every physical object doesn’t have a spiritual counterpart… how else could rocks cry out our gush with water, or remember, hear or witness Joshua 24:27?
I think of Heaven as a place where everything is alive (living stones) and everything is in it’s most perfect form (spirit) with no sin, corruption or decay in the mix, because there will be no mix, it will all just be what it was originally intended to be… the expansion of Gods Kingdom!
Other related thoughts for other posts:
- Flesh before Spirit
- How can we all (human church) be the single bride of Christ?
- Building Blocks (back up with scripture)