The Resurrection of the Dead

• One of the reasons we are to be sanctified is because we are preparing to inhabit our new resurrection bodies.
• Suffering with Christ precedes being glorified together with Him.
• If there were no resurrection of the dead it would make no sense to give up this life here.
• We do all that we do because of the hope of the resurrection.
• Suffering for Christ doesn’t make sense if there is no resurrection of the dead.
• This life is not all there is!
• Those who dive into sin are either ignorant to God or they have rejected the provision God has for us in Christ Jesus. 
• Christians live in hope of the resurrection.
• Believers in Christ can look forward to having a new body.
• All the dead are going to be raised but only those who are in Christ can look forward to, or have hope in that resurrection.  All those who are without Christ will not look forward but rather it will be a point of dread and a torment to them.
• The resurrection of the dead has already commenced in Jesus’ resurrection.
• To be ignorant of the resurrection of the dead is to have no hope in this life.
• Believers cannot live without hope.
• Living for pleasure is really just a cover for those who are filled with despair because of sin.  
• We are living in Hope, not in fear of the end days and the Day of Judgment.
• Hope is the key to living correctly.
• It is an entirely other matter to be confronting unbelief from those within the Church.  Such a situation requires a more “head on” sort of an approach seeing that this is a serious matter and must be quickly dealt with.
• There are some questions that are asked in unbelief and are meant to trick, these should not be answered as though they were asked in sincerity. 
• There are some truths not open to interpretation, these must just be believed, period. 
• Jesus expected His disciples to believe.
• Understanding is traced to the heart.  If the heart is right, the mind will follow.
• We are limited only by our affections and wants.
• Some people do not understand because they do not want to understand.
• Nature has the fingerprints of God all over it.
• Even people that do not know the bible should be able to look at the creation and determine that there is a God.
• If God can turn a caterpillar into a butterfly then surely He can make us into new creations as well.
• If Mother Nature is powerful and mysterious then what does that teach us about her creator?
• When it is pitted against it, nature is not in our control.  What does that tell us about the power of the one who created all things? 
• When a farmer sows a seed he does so in expectation of receiving a harvest.  Similarly, the body that dies and is buried is buried in hope of the resurrection.
• This mortal body is not going to be resurrected still having all of its weaknesses.
• God has already determined what our new bodies will be, but He knows what we will be and He has told us that we will be like Christ Jesus.
• Whatever God gives us will perfectly satisfy the longing and desires that the Spirit gives us.
• Man was made with a body and God means to redeem our body, He has secured for us a new resurrection Body, unlike the one we have now, this one will be perfectly suited to heavenly habitation. 
• In Christ we become a whole new kind of person.
• Our bodies are not just for looks, they are for utility.
• Right now we are frustrated by having a new spirit in an old body, but the new bodies we hope for will be perfectly suited to dwelling in heavenly places and to doing the work we will be given to do.  
  --Jason Hutchcraft – “The Resurrection of the Dead”

The Necessity of Suffering for the Saint

 

The Necessity of Suffering for the Saint

By Fred O. Blakely

It is disgusting to hear breezy, but superficial, preachers proclaiming abundance of everything and freedom from all sickness and pain for all who have enough faith in God. Such a message has a compelling appeal to the flesh a6nd the carnal mind, and today ensnares many. It represents, however, “a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death” (Prov. 14:12). The expectation of utopian existence in the flesh produced by this kind of doctrine cannot but result in acute disappointment and frustration in the faith life, which can ensue in actual shipwreck of the faith itself. 

It is a gross fallacy to assert or imply that all suffering is caused by personal sin. It is true that in a given case, this may be so; but it would take a person endued with special revelation from God to identify that case. Lacking such enduement, we should refrain from assuming it. Actually, the exact opposite of the charge of sin has been demonstrated to be the true situation in renowned instances of affliction. 

The experience of Job is the classic example of this. His calamitous miseries did not come upon him for anything wrong that he had done. In fact, he is presented to us be Scripture as “perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil” (Job 1:1). Yet it pleased the Lord to permit Satan to bruise him severely.

Because he was sinful? No! To demonstrate in the Patriarch the complete sufficiency of Divine grace, and so to glorify God. It was the same with the blind man whose sight Jesus restored, recorded in John 9:1-7. The nosy disciples asked the Lord, “Who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind” (v. 2). That was the dogma of affliction-because-of-sin raising its presumptuous head. Christ crushed it with His unequivocal answer: “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him” (v. 3). 

It must be recognized that suffering---in whatever way God may choose for us---is the normal, not the abnormal, lot of His saints. We are expressly told that we have been “called” and appointed thereunto (I Pet. 2:21; cf. Acts 14:22; I Th. 3:3; II Tim. 2:11-12). Our Lord Himself was made perfect by “the things which He suffered” (Heb. 5:8-10), and we are to be perfected in the same way. It is written, “He that hath suffered in the flesh hath ceased from sin” (I Pet. 4:1). In view of the good purpose served by our suffering “according to the will of God” (I Pet. 4:19), we should be able to say with Paul, “Most gladly will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me” (II Cor. 12:7-10).

“There is something about suffering of any kind that brings the world and the flesh into its proper perspective. Suffering makes us understand things as they really are. By suffering we see the worthlessness of all the passing vanities of earth, and by it we are weaned away from the vain deceits that concern a purely physical world. Suffering thus tends to cause us to be done with the transient affairs of this present age and inspires us to anchor all our hopes ‘within the veil, whither the Forerunner is for us entered, even Jesus . . .” (Heb. 6:19-20).”