16. Resurrection to the imperishable life

From the sermon on April 19, 1978

We gather today to celebrate the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. Many people worship God now with the faith in which they would also be resurrected by the power of Jesus’ resurrection. Today, let us think about the resurrection through the words in the Bible.

People understand resurrection to mean “coming back to life after death.” But that is not the correct meaning of resurrection. Some people have given their testimony after being dead for several days after death. But this is not resurrection.

Resurrection means, “For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality,” as

in the Bible (1Cor. 15:53). If a man came back from death and then died again after several years, that is not resurrection. Resurrection is for something perishable to become imperishable.

Whenever I speak about the resurrection, they say that I preach heresy. Why did people say that? Because I talk about something that Christians have not known so far, people get me wrong. So I would like to discuss the words in the Bible to show that my explanation is true.

When Paul the apostle preached about resurrection, he said, “We will not all sleep but we will all be changed in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet” (1Cor. 15:51). ‘Sleeping’ refers to death. The changing will be in a flash.

We know that our Lord Jesus came to this world with fleshly body. He was born as a baby and he grew to be a boy, a young adult, and then a man thirty-three years of age when he was crucified on the cross. If he returned to his physical form after the crucifixion, he would be around two thousand years old today. If Jesus who died at thirty-three years old and returned to the physical world again, he