Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 1 Corinthians · About this commentary
How Are the Dead Raised?
1 Corinthians 15:35-41
35 But someone will say, “How are the dead raised?” and, “With what kind of body do they come?” · WEB
The objection about the body is answered from a seed and from the variety of glories God has already made.
But someone will say, "How are the dead raised?" and, "With what kind of body do they come?" 1 Corinthians 15:35.
The real objection surfaces, and it is about the body. To a Greek mind, a raised corpse was not a hope but an absurdity — the point of dying was to be free of the body. Behind the question is the assumption that resurrection would mean the reassembly of the same decayed matter.
You foolish one, that which you yourself sow is not made alive unless it dies 1 Corinthians 15:36.
The answer begins with a farm. A seed put in the ground has to die to become anything, and the questioner already knows this and does it every season. The Lord had used the same figure of his own death John 12:24. Death is therefore not the contradiction of new life but its ordinary precondition.
That which you sow, you don't sow the body that will be, but a bare grain 1 Corinthians 15:37.
Here the objection is dismantled. Nobody looking at a wheat grain would predict the stalk, and nobody supposes the stalk is the grain reassembled. There is real continuity — wheat gives wheat — and no identity of substance. So the question with what kind of body is answered: not this one repaired, and not somebody else's.
But God gives it a body even as it pleased him, and to each seed a body of its own 1 Corinthians 15:38.
The agent is God, and the phrase as it pleased him is the same sovereign choice that placed the members in the body and distributed the gifts 1 Corinthians 12:11 1 Corinthians 12:18. And to each seed a body of its own preserves the individual: resurrection is not absorption into something general.
All flesh is not the same flesh, but there is one flesh of men, another flesh of animals, another of fish, and another of birds 1 Corinthians 15:39.
The second argument is from the range of what God has already made. If the objection is that a body could not be so different and still be a body, the creation is the refutation — God has made bodies for the land, the sea and the air, and their difference does not make any of them less real.
There are also celestial bodies and terrestrial bodies; but the glory of the celestial differs from that of the terrestrial. There is one glory of the sun, another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for one star differs from another star in glory 1 Corinthians 15:40–41.
The eye is lifted from the field to the sky, and the word introduced is glory — which is where the argument has been going. Sun, moon and stars differ, and even one star differs from another. A God whose existing creation contains that much graded splendor is not short of resources for the body he intends to give. And glory is the term the next paragraph will use of the resurrection itself 1 Corinthians 15:43: the question was what kind of body, and the answer being prepared is a better one.
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