The Believer's Final Bliss
Mike Abendroth
The
Believer's Final Bliss
The regeneration of man requires that old things must pass away and all things
become new.
By John Murray |
The state of final bliss is not one of abstract immortality. In a great
deal of non-Christian thought, there is a dualism which conceives of the human
body as exercising a degrading influence over the human spirit and the state of
bliss is thought to consist in the release of the spirit from the defiling
influence associated with bodily existence.
From the outset the Bible contradicts this dualism. "The Lord God formed
man from the dust of the ground" (Gen. 2:7). Dignity belongs to the human
body and man's spirit was not imprisoned in it. God created man very good and
man was body as well as spirit. The separation that takes place in death is not
the debt of nature nor the inevitable outcome of man's physical constitution
but the wages of sin. Death is abnormal because it is the curse of sin.
When redemption is brought to bear upon man, it is brought to bear upon him in
his totality. His body, no less than his spirit, is drawn within the scope of
that redemption. The normal and the natural, disrupted by sin, is restored and
the goal to be achieved in the consummation of redemption is not a blissful
state of the soul's immortality, but one in which death is swallowed up in
victory; the corruptible puts on incorruption and the mortal immortality.
This is why the Scripture lays such emphasis upon the resurrection of the body.
Our Lord intimated that the resurrection was guaranteed by the fact that God is
the God of his people and that he is not the God of the dead but of the living
(Matt. 22: 32). And Paul called the resurrection the redemption of the body and
accorded it no lower a designation than "the adoption" (Rom. 8:23).
The Identity of the Body
The resurrection of the body means resuscitation of what is laid in the tomb.
Unbelief recoils from such a notion. But resurrection cannot be construed
otherwise. The resurrection of believers is patterned after the resurrection of
Christ, and it was the body which had been laid in Joseph's tomb that rose on
the third day.
It was not a mere body that rose, but Jesus' body. More properly, Jesus rose as
to his body. Scripture takes pains to assure us that Jesus was buried. The
angel said to the women on the day of the Resurrection, "Come see the
place where he lay" and prefaced this by saying, "He is risen, as he
said" (Matt. 28:6). We are not allowed to think that our Lord was
disunited from his body when it was laid in the tomb. And the same is true with
believers. They go to the grave in respect of their bodies and from their
graves they will rise when the last trumpet sounds. There is therefore identity
and continuity between the body that returns to dust and the body that will be
raised incorruptible.
Resurrected Body
The body will indeed be raised "a Spiritual body;" a momentous change
will have been wrought. But "a Spiritual body" is not a body made of
spirit. That would be contradiction—a body made of spirit would, of course, be
no body at all. "A Spiritual body" is a body that is immortal and
incorruptible, not characterized by the mortality and infirmity of our present
bodies, a body transformed by the resurrection and adapted to the world of the
resurrection inaugurated by the resurrection of Christ as the firstfruits from
the dead.
This is what Paul means when he says, "flesh and blood cannot inherit the
kingdom of God" (1 Cor. 15:50). He is not denying the physical composition
of the resurrection body but asserting that the resurrected bodily entity will
not be subject to the frailty and corruptibility of the present age. The powers
of the age to come will be operative without restraint in the resurrection-the
body "is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption; it is sown in
dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in
power" (1 Cor. 15:42-43).
It is resurrection, therefore, that constitutes and inaugurates the believer's
final bliss. A notion of consummated bliss bereft of resurrection hope has no
affinity with the prospect which Christianity defines.
Christ is the first-begotten from the dead, the first fruits of those who have
fallen asleep. Christ's own resurrection is the prototype. Even now believers
are raised up with Christ in newness of life and mysteriously, though real,
they are made to sit with him in the heavenlies (cf. Eph. 2:6, Col. 3:1-3). But
believers are not yet glorified; it has not been manifested what they shall be.
The logic of their relation to the resurrection of Christ and to the
resurrected Lord is that in the manifestation of Christ's glory will be the
revelation of their glory. It is with Christ they will be glorified (Rom.
8:17).
"When Christ who is our life will be manifested, then shall ye also be
manifested with him in glory" (Col. 3:4). How beggarly is any concept of
final bliss that does not make the glory of Christ pre-eminent and paramount!
And how impoverished is the outlook that can tolerate the thought of bliss
apart from the exaltation of Christ in the resplendent glory of his future
manifestation! The pole star of the believer's expectation is "the
appearing of the glory of the great God and our Savior Christ Jesus." and,
necessarily, this is "the blessed hope" (Titus 2:13).
Glorification with Christ and the bliss it entails for the people of God must
not be isolated from the broader context of a renewed and reconstituted cosmos.
"The reaction itself will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into
the liberty of the glory of the children God" (Rom. 8:21). It is not
simply the human race that suffered the curse incident to sin. The ground was
cursed for man's sake and the creation was subjected to vanity. The crown of
God's creation fell from original integrity, and curse, bondage, and corruption
for the created order followed in the wake of man's apostasy. His environment
bespeaks the curse of sin. When redemption repairs man's ruin it must likewise
work its renovating effects in the whole creation. And with the consummation of
redemption this restitution will be as complete in its own sphere as man's
redemption will be in his. Nothing less could be implied in the liberty of the
glory of the children of God."
Renewed Creation
In the restitution of creation, the transformation will as radical as are the
changes embraced in the redemption of men. The regeneration of man requires a
new nation, old things must pass away and all things become new (cf. 2 Cor.
5:17; Gal. 6:15). In the realm cosmic renewal there must likewise be a new
heavens and new earth. And the process which effects this change is as
convulsive and cataclysmic as that "the evens shall pass away with a crash
and the elements being burned up shall be dissolved, and the earth and works
that are in it shall be disclosed" (2 Pet. 3:10). The present heavens and
earth are treasured for fire; they will perish and will be folded up as a
vesture (2 Pet. 3:7; Heb. 1:10-12). And the renewed creation will be a new
heavens and a new earth emancipated from every trace of the curse and
corruption of sin and pervaded by righteousness (2 Pet. 3:13).
The continuity which is exemplified in other phases of redemption must be
appreciated here also. Sometimes the thought of Christians has been that the
present heavens and earth will be annihilated. It is easy to understand how
this idea came to be entertained. Of the heavens and the earth, we read:
"They shall perish but thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as a
garment, and as a vesture shalt thou fold them up" (Heb. 1:11, 12). And
again: "The heavens shall pass away with a crash" (2 Pet. 3:10).
But we should not identify "perishing" with annihilation. The same
term is used of the old world when "being overflowed with water it
perished" (2 Pet. 3:6). Yet it was not annihilated. Furthermore, the
deliverance of creation from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the
glory of the children of God does not accord with the idea of annihilation.
The Image of Christ
Whatever may be the precise character of the process by which the present
heavens and earth will give place to the new heavens and new earth, it would be
waiving the biblical representations to suppose that the latter would have no
material constitution. We may not forget that the body of Christ's glory is a
physical body. And the glorified body of believers will be transformed into the
likeness of the body of Christ's glory (Phil. 3:21).
The final bliss of believers is that of resurrection glory. And to think of the
eternal state apart from the bodily and physical is to etherealize immortality
after the pattern of pagan thought. It is to paganize the Christian hope. The
disposition to etherealize the new heavens and the new earth is symptomatic of
the same direction of thought. We truly know but little of the consummated
order. But we are given sufficient data to know that the heaven of final bliss
is one that will bring to perfect fruition all the demands of the psychosomatic
nature with which God created man at the beginning and in which he will
reconstitute him after the image of the glorified Redeemer.
Glory of the Lord
And we are assured that the eternal habitation of the redeemed is one suited to
the psychosomatic integrity which finds its exemplar and prototype in the
glorified human nature of the Lord of glory. Man's whole being will be full to
capacity because the new heavens and the new earth will be constituted in
righteousness and nothing will inhibit the manifestation to them nor mar the
enjoyment by them of the glory of the Lord. The glory resplendent of the triune
God will be there, and the tabernacle of God will be with men and he will dwell
with them (Rev. 21:3).
This article originally appeared in the July 7, 1958, issue of Christianity
Today. At the time, John Murray taught systematic
theology at Westminster Theological Seminary, where he was one of the school's
founding professors. Murray died in 1975.
Thomas Watson, "[Jesus] alone is the Prince of Preachers. He alone is the best of expositors."