Christians around the world are celebrating what is, perhaps,
the greatest event in human history – the resurrection of Jesus Christ. For
millennia we have believed that Christ was raised bodily, that the body He
inhabited while living was raised to perfection. In 1 Corinthians 15 v 35-54 we
find details of what His (and our) new body looked like, it is not the same,
and yet it is.
Sown perishable it is raised imperishable, it dies physical,
it is raised spiritual. Jesus’ body clearly had unearthly powers as we can see
from it popping in and out of locked rooms at will (John 20 v 19) and vanishing
before people’s eyes (Luke 24 v 31). But the Watchtower would have us believe
this was all a big con. They claim that Jesus was not raised bodily but as a
spirit, that Jehovah somehow dissolved His physical body into its constituent
atoms to hide it away.
They claim that Jesus only appeared to be in physical form
in order to convince His disciples that He had indeed been raised. They claim
that all the times He appeared to them He simply took on a physical body, often
a different one, which is why the disciples didn’t recognise Him (Luke 24 v 16,
John 20 v 14-15).
What evidence do they put forward for this notion? They
point to 1 Corinthians 15 v 44 where it talks of Jesus’ “spiritual body”,
and 1 Peter 3 v 18 where it says Jesus was made alive “in the Spirit”. They
show that spirit creatures can take on physical bodies, like the angels in Genesis
19 v 1-3, and that spirits are not confined by physical laws. They even claim
that Jesus took on a physical body with wound marks to convince Thomas that it
was really Him.
It appears that Jesus went to considerable lengths to trick
the disciples into believing He had risen bodily. Do we really think Jesus, the
perfect Son of God, would trick His disciples into believing something that
wasn’t true? Is this God’s greatest scam?
It is testament to the Watchtower’s psychological control
over its members that they believe this scam and don’t make the effort to
consider the full evidence. The fact that Jesus went to such lengths to show
His physical nature should convince them of its truth.
Jesus ate and drank numerous times after His resurrection (Luke
24 v 43, John 21 v 12-13, Acts 10 v 41) which is not something spirits need to
do. He specifically asked His disciples
to touch Him and see because “a spirit does not have flesh and bones”
(Luke 24 v 39).
Even before He died in John 2 v 19 Jesus spoke of how He was
to be raised where it, very specifically, tells us Jesus was talking of His
body that He was to raise, not His spirit. It even records that the disciples
remembered this statement after Jesus was resurrected.
Jesus’ body was raised “spiritual” not as a spirit. I like to think I am ‘spiritual,’ as
all Christians should be, but I am clearly not a spirit without a body (I know
that because this one aches a lot when I exercise!) He was raised “in the
spirit” not as a spirit, there’s a big difference.
The two disciples who met Jesus on the road to Emmaus were “kept”
from recognising Jesus not that He didn’t look like Jesus. It is understandable
that Mary didn’t recognise Jesus at first, she was distraught, weeping, and not
expecting to see Him, as well as it being dark (John 20 v 1). After Jesus called
her name, she turned again and immediately recognised Him. If He had been in a
different body that would not have happened.
One other piece of evidence, often overlooked, is the state
of the burial clothes in the tomb. In John 20 v 7 we are told that the cloth
that was around Jesus’ head was not lying with the other clothes but lying by
itself. If the body had simply been dematerialised, like the Watchtower claims,
then the head cloth would have been right above the other clothes.
I believe it is clear from an unbiased reading of the evidence
in scripture that we are to understand that Jesus was raised bodily, not simply
as a spirit. Agreed, what was raised was
different to what was sown, yet it was raised. To believe otherwise would
require us to accept that Jesus and the Father went to great lengths to scam
the disciples and the hundreds of others who saw Him (1 Corinthians 15 v 6).
No, this was no scam, this was real, the greatest event in human history.
Jesus was raised imperishable, as we will be. He was raised
to prove that we too can be raised back to life and be with Him forever. Jesus doesn’t
need to trick us, that’s not how He works, God cannot lie (Numbers 23 v 19, Titus
1 v2) nor can He deceive. If we believe He lied about this then what else did
He lie about, can we trust anything else He told us or did?
He can be trusted, He is risen, praise the Lord.
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