But some one will say, How are the dead raised? and with what body do they come?
The doubters at Corinth did not attack the resurrection directly; they raised a difficulty about it, asking how it could work and what the risen body would be like. Paul calls the questioner a fool — and then answers the question anyway, from a seed.
Commentators are careful here. The same question can come from honest wonder or from settled unbelief.
Let us not think it is necessarily a fool's question, to be silenced, when it rises to our lips without our meaning it: "With what kind of body do they come?" The apostle blames it only as the question of a sceptic, and we know that some of these Corinthians were sceptics. But he uses the chance to give an answer that meets other thoughts than these. It cannot be folly to pay attention to his answer.
The people asking it in Corinth thought a bodily resurrection was too crude. They dressed up their doubt as progress.
Some among the professed disciples at Corinth had intellectual doubts and difficulties about the resurrection of the body. It seems they considered it too crude and materialistic an idea, and they posed as pioneers of a more spiritual view of the subject. They were, in reality, fools.
The rebuke targets a method, not curiosity: rejecting what God has revealed because no one can explain how it works. William Kelly first asks the objector what he knows about the life inside a seed.
If he knows nothing about this even in the seed, is he in a position to object about the body? You can reason soundly from what you know, but not from what you do not know. If one rejects whatever is not understood, where is such unreasonable doubt to end? Not only is all spiritual being swept away, but one must begin by denying the existence of oneself and every other being.
Paul answers the first half of the question with a buried seed. Death does not block resurrection; it comes first.
Death, therefore, was no barrier to the resurrection — of course not its cause, but the thing that comes before it. There may be change, as shown afterwards, but no resurrection unless death comes first. There is dissolution in death, but not annihilation. There is disorganisation in death before another mode of being. But the seed dies as a seed so that it can pass into a plant.
For a sincere heart, the difficulty ends the moment God comes into it. The seed also carries a second lesson: what comes up is still itself.
Still, Paul goes on to point to what God does in nature with seed buried in the earth. That is enough to teach an ordinary mind. In its rising, after death, He gives it a body as it pleases Him; but note, "to each of the seeds its own body" (v. 38) — not a body of a completely different kind. Identity is retained. "God" is the sufficient answer for a simple and sincere soul, though this may not be enough for a "fool."
Later in the chapter Paul answers the second half of the question with four short contrasts. Every one of them keeps the same subject: the same body.
The body that is sown in the grave carries the marks of corruption, dishonour, weakness, and soulishness — the word "natural" is more literally "soulish", fitted for the animal soul rather than the spirit. It is raised in incorruption, glory, power, and a spiritual body rather than a soulish one. The identity is preserved, as witnessed by the words, repeated four times, "It is sown … it is raised." But the condition it is found in is completely different in kind. This answers the question, "With what kind of body do they come?"
The word "spiritual" can sound like it means thin, vague, or without substance.
A spiritual body, or a body of glory, is a body, and a body is substance, and spirit is not substance. It means that we shall have bodies suited to the Glory, in contrast to our present bodies which are suited to the earth, or natural life... The contrast is not between what is material and what is unsubstantial, but between what is natural and what is spiritual.
This body is not a repair of the old one. It goes beyond anything the first man had.
The "spiritual body" is therefore not merely in contrast with the body stamped with mortality and corruption. It is a body in contrast also with Adam's, when he came fresh with vigour and beauty from under the creating hand of God. Even then, Adam was "from the earth, a man of dust"; in resurrection we put on "the image of the man of heaven"... It is no restoration of the old creation that has passed away: it is a new creation.
- Motive — The same words can come from honest wonder or from unbelief. Paul rebukes the sceptic, but he still answers for everyone else.
- Method — Objecting to what you cannot explain is not reason but folly. The doubter cannot explain a seed either.
- Seed — Death is not the barrier to resurrection. It is the step before it: the body breaks down, but it is not destroyed.
- Identity — God gives each seed its own body. What is sown is what rises, but in a completely different condition.
- Body — "Spiritual" does not mean immaterial. It means a real body suited to glory, beyond even Adam's before the fall — a new creation, not a repair.
Fool; what *thou* sowest is not quickened unless it die.
Someone at Corinth has just asked Paul how the dead are raised, and what sort of body they will have. His first answer is not an argument. It is a rebuke, followed by something every farmer knows: a seed only lives by dying first.
The apostle does not treat the question as honest curiosity.
The one who raises such questions proves that he is a fool. He measures the all-powerful and all-wise God by human limitations, and he rejects everything that he cannot explain.
These people prided themselves on being clever, which made the rebuke sting.
"You foolish person!" he says. "What you sow does not come to life unless it dies." So the strongest possible censure falls on these Corinthians. And it falls in the very matter they prided themselves on. Human reasoning is poor indeed outside its own sphere.
The verse sets an order that cannot be reversed.
"You foolish person! What you" (not God merely, but the feeble objector) "sow does not come to life unless it dies." Death, therefore, was no barrier to the resurrection — of course not its cause, but the thing that comes before it. There may be change, as shown afterwards, but no resurrection unless death comes first. There is dissolution in death, but not annihilation. There is disorganisation in death before another mode of being.
Here the word "dies" describes something that does not stop existing. That is the whole force of the picture.
You put seed into the ground, and in the language of Scripture, it does not come to life unless it dies. Does the living germ become extinct to produce the harvest? Where would the harvest be if it did? Yet Scripture speaks of this twice over as "death." Think about it a little, and the likeness to the death of man is nearer than it seems. Part of the seed falls away as waste and decays. The germ inside leaves its tent behind. Far from dying out in the process, it springs up into the plant.
This also answers the second question: what body will the dead have? What comes up is not a copy of what went down.
Here the same comparison appears, but with a different application. Someone sows a seed in the earth. It keeps its identity, yet it comes up with a very different body. The acorn is buried, but the oak springs up. Every seed has what we may call its own special resurrection body in which it comes forth. The bearing of this on the point before us is plain. The dead body of the believer goes into the grave. At the resurrection it will come up very different, yet it keeps its identity.
The apostle points the objector to his own actions. He sows; he does not give the life.
They sowed nothing but bare grain, whether wheat or something else. But they knew quite well that the grain would not stay grain. It would soon be clothed with a body very different from the one it had when sown in the earth. God gave it the body He had willed for it, and to every seed its own kind of body. So what was sown kept its individuality all through, despite its breaking down. God has stamped things everywhere with His own stamp of resurrection. Things are in His hand. You may call the process natural because you are so familiar with it. It takes place under your eyes all the time. All the same, God is working in it and through it.
The illustration was not new. Jesus had already used the buried grain of Himself.
Nature itself gives us a striking comparison here, one our Lord Himself had already used. He said, "unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit." By that He was pointing to His own death and resurrection.
- Sown in folly. Unbelief asks "how?" and gets a rebuke back. It measures an all-powerful God by human limits, and it throws out whatever it cannot explain.
- Sown in death. Death does not block resurrection; it comes just before it. Dying breaks the body down, but it never ends it, and it never causes the life that follows.
- Sown, not extinguished. The buried seed shows what death means: the outer husk decays, the life within moves on and springs up.
- Sown as itself. Identity survives the grave. The acorn goes into the ground and the oak rises, and God gives every seed its own body.
- Sown by Christ first. The grain falls into the earth, dies, and bears much fruit. That was the Lord's picture of His own death and resurrection, and the same picture explains ours.