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| Of the New Spiritual Body into Which the Flesh of the Saints Shall Be Transformed.
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Chapter 21.—Of the New Spiritual
Body into Which the Flesh of the Saints Shall Be
Transformed.
Whatever, therefore, has been taken
from the body, either during life or after death shall be restored
to it, and, in conjunction with what has remained in the grave,
shall rise again, transformed from the oldness of the animal body
into the newness of the spiritual body, and clothed in incorruption
and immortality. But even though the body has been all quite
ground to powder by some severe accident, or by the ruthlessness of
enemies, and though it has been so diligently scattered to the
winds, or into the water, that there is no trace of it left, yet it
shall not be beyond the omnipotence of the Creator,—no, not a
hair of its head shall perish. The flesh shall then be spiritual,
and subject to the spirit, but still flesh, not spirit, as the
spirit itself, when subject to the flesh, was fleshly, but still
spirit and not flesh. And of this we have experimental proof in
the deformity of our penal condition. For those persons were
carnal, not in a fleshly, but in a spiritual way, to whom the
apostle said, “I could not speak to you as unto spiritual, but as
unto carnal.”1650
And a
man is in this life spiritual in such a way, that he is yet carnal
with respect to his body, and sees another law in his members
warring against the law of his mind; but even in his body he will
be spiritual when the same flesh shall have had that resurrection
of which these words speak, “It is sown an animal body, it shall
rise a spiritual body.”1651
But what this spiritual body
shall be and how great its grace, I fear it were but rash to
pronounce, seeing that we have as yet no experience of it.
Nevertheless, since it is fit that the joyfulness of our hope
should utter itself, and so show forth God’s praise, and since it
was from the profoundest sentiment of ardent and holy love that the
Psalmist cried, “O Lord, I have loved the beauty of Thy
house,”1652
we may,
with God’s help, speak of the gifts He lavishes on men, good and
bad alike, in this most wretched life, and may do our best to
conjecture the great glory of that state which we cannot worthily
speak of, because we have not yet experienced it. For I say
nothing of the time when God made man upright; I say nothing of the
happy life of “the man and his wife” in the fruitful garden,
since it was so short that none of their children experienced it:
I speak only of this life which we know, and in which we now are,
from the temptations of which we cannot escape so long as we are in
it, no matter what progress we make, for it is all temptation, and
I ask, Who can describe the tokens of God’s goodness that are
extended to the human race even in this life?E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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