I Corinthians 15:35-42
Still on the subject of Resurrection, Paul now discusses different kinds of bodies:
But someone may ask, 'How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?'
Here is an argument raised against Resurrection, assuming that what we see we have now will be the same when we are raised.
How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.
It is silly to make such an assumption. Even what is planted will only grow after it is buried.
When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps wheat or something else.
Taking farming as an example, the farmer plants a seed in the ground, to grow wheat or some other crop.
But God gives it a body as He has determined, and to each kind of seed He gives its own body (or form).
When God created the Earth He set forth the laws of biology, with the DNA and all the inheritable traits we know about now, that everything reproduces after its own kind (Genesis 1:24): Apple trees will not produce peaches, wheat will not produce corn, and a dog won't have kittens.
All flesh is not the same:
All the material bodies God designed for all the different species are all different.
Men have one kind of flesh,
All men, of every race, are all descended from one man, Adam, and can produce children.
Animals have another,
We cannot naturally produce a human/animal hybrid.
Birds another, and fish another.
Men, animals, birds and fish are all incapable of producing any kind of hybrid at all, each kind reproduces only after its own kind. This is how God planned it all out, and it works.
When scientists today artificially insert animal genes into plant genomes, the product is not good or healthy, and animals won't eat it; if they do, they grow grotesque tumors and die.
There are also heavenly bodies and there are earthly bodies;
We only are familiar with our earthly bodies, as we are of the Earth. But we know Heaven exists, and Angels don't have earthly bodies. We now know that they must have heavenly bodies.
But the splendor of the heavenly bodies is one kind, and the splendor of the earthly bodies is another.
God has put His beauty into all of His creation. Even on Earth, the different geographical regions each have a different beauty: The Arctic and the Desert; the mountains and the rainforest; the seashore and the fruited plain; and everywhere else on Earth, each with its own beauty. And people are beautiful, too.
The Sun has one kind of splendor, the Moon another, and the stars another; and star differs from star in splendor.
Even in Space, every object is different from every other object. And we even know now that other planets in our own and in other solar systems are all different in their elemental make-up, with different elements in different proportions, all different from one another. No one has found another Earth anywhere that is suitable for our Human life except the one where God put us. Our bodies are made of this Earth, in the same elemental make-up in the same proportions of this Earth, and these bodies belong here.
So will it be with the Resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable.
God is consistent. The body we have now is subject to death and destruction, and cannot last forever. The body we will be raised with will not be vulnerable to any of the maladies we suffer today, it will be indestructible.
So all the bodies, all the forms God made, are suitable for the environments in which He put them; and since He plans to take us out of this environment into another, He will also change these bodies into forms that are suited to the Heavenly realms we will live in forever.
God always does everything well.
Even so, come, Lord Jesus!
