Philippians 3:21 Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like to his glorious body… St. Paul had been speaking of some whose interests were centred in earthly things. Of them he says that their end is destruction, etc. And in contrast with this way of passing life he describes the life of Christ's true servants. Their citizenship is in heaven. They are in the position of emigrants for whom the friendly government of a colony should provide, before their arrival at their destined country, a home and a rest. Heaven, then, as being already their country, naturally occupies a first place in their thoughts; but they cannot set foot in it until a great change has passed over them. It is upon this change, and upon the person of Him who is to effect it, that their eyes are naturally and constantly fixed while the present scene lasts. I. THE NATURE OF THE CHANGE referred to. 1. The human body in its present stage of existence. "Our body of humiliation." The human frame appeared to the Greek artist the most beautiful thing in nature. It was the form which seemed to the Greeks most nearly to unveil the Divine beauty to the eye of sense. How impossible to imagine the phrase of the apostle upon the lips of the men who decorated the Parthenon! It implies that the man who uses it has seen deeper and higher than the realm of sense. The Greek knew only this visible world, and he made the most of it. The Hebrew had had a revelation of a higher beauty; and when men have come into contact with the Eternal, they sit lightly to the things of time. The Greek was occupied with the matchless outline of the human form. The Hebrew could not forget that his bodily eye rested after all on a perishable mass of animated clay (Isaiah 40:6-7; Psalm 90:5-6; Job 14:1-2; James 4:14). 2. Not that the phrase implies any one-sided depreciation of the body such as we meet with in heathen ascetics. Christianity on this subject keeps strictly a middle way between two opposite errors. On the one hand, the body has seemed to some to be man's all in all. just as it has to some of our modern materialists; and then it has been supposed that life either ceased altogether with death, or was, after death, so attenuated down into a purely shadowy existence as to lose all the importance which belongs to reality. And, on the other hand, the body has been treated as a mere incumbrance, having no true inherent relation to the complete life of man — the soul's prison house — the degrading fetter which binds noble spirits down to the soil of earth — the mere instrument of a being who is complete without it, and who is never free, never himself, till he is delivered from it. And the effect, the moral effect, of the first of these opinions is certainly, upon the whole, to encourage unbounded sensual indulgence, and, of the second, to encourage suicide, since, if the alliance between soul and body is so disadvantageous and so unnatural, the sooner it is put an end to the better. 3. Between these opposite exaggerations revelation holds on a middle course. Death is the disturbance of that union of soul and body which constitutes man; and this irregular interruption of the true life of man ends at the resurrection, when man re-enters upon the normal conditions of his complete being. 4. And yet, masterful as the body is, it is not the governing element in human nature. Man is something higher, nobler, than the animal form with which he is so intimately identified. Man lives on the frontier of two vast mysterious worlds — the world of pure spirit and the world of animal existence. Our nature as a whole, has been ennobled as well as invigorated by the Son of God. He has taken body and soul alike, and joined it by an indissoluble union to His own eternal person. His body exists at the right hand of God, and thereby it confers a patent of nobility of which our race can never be deprived. And yet, while this life lasts, how great is the interval between our condition and His! How unlike to ours is the body of glory which rose from the tomb in its indescribable beauty, in its freedom of movement, in its inaccessibility to decay, in its spirituality of texture! 5. "His glorious body!" Christ's greatest gift is yet to come. We shall die as do the creatures around us; whether by violence or by slow decay. But He will gather up what death has left, and will transfigure it with the splendours of a new life (1 Corinthians 15:42-44). II. THE GROUND OF THE GREAT CHRISTIAN EXPECTATION OF A GLORIFIED BODY IN A FUTURE LIFE. How shall we get it? "According to the working whereby He is able even to subdue all things unto Himself." 1. Everything of course depends on that. St. Paul had no doubt that Jesus Christ, crucified some thirty years before, was living and reigning and had actual jurisdiction over all things in heaven and earth. 2. It seems very strange to many that the elements of the human frame resolved into dust many centuries ago should be recollected and endowed with a new and more glorious life. What has become of the particles; they have passed through animals and vegetables, and by this time are scattered in a thousand directions. How are they to be rescued from this oft repeated appropriation. It is an astonishing exertion of superhuman power which is under consideration, but it is not more than any reasonable believer in God would assent to upon sufficient evidence of His declared will. No man can believe in God, without believing in an act of power, compared with which the resurrection of the dead is a trivial incident. To believe in God is to believe in the original creation of all things out of nothing, and creation is, after all, the great miracle. And the man who believes it will not question God's Word merely because the results to which it is pledged are what we call miraculous. By the very act of believing in God he believes in an initial miracle, compared with which all that can possibly follow is insignificant. III. SUCH A FAITH AS THIS IN THE RESURRECTION MUST HAVE GREAT CONSEQUENCES. 1. If we parted company with the body at death for good and all, it would not matter much what was done with this perishing husk. But if this body of humiliation has before it a splendid destiny, then we shall treat it in life and in death as princes are treated who live in expectation of a throne — with all the care and honour that its prospects demand. And hence, after death, respect for the human body is a natural result of Christian belief in the resurrection. Just as the body of the Lord Jesus was carefully wrapped in fine linen and laid in a tomb until the morn of Easter, so, ever since, the bodies of departed Christian believers have been looked upon with eyes conveying something of the faith, something of the love, of Nicodemus and Joseph. We know that they, too, will rise. We know that we are not handling a lump of decaying matter which has lost its interest forever, and which will presently be resolved into its chemical constituents to be recombined no more. It lies before us, there in very truth, a body of humiliation. But one day — we are certain of it — it is to be fashioned like the glorious body of the ascended Son of God, and we treat it accordingly. 2. Much more important is our duty to the body during life. (1) Guard it. You who are well off do what you can for the bodies of the poor. They, too, will rise. Let us all keep our bodies in temperance and chastity, from all that would bar entrance to the presence of Christ. Every man that hath the resurrection hope in him purifieth himself as Christ is pure. Do not forget how this sinful body may even here be made clean by Christ's body, just as the soul may be washed with His most precious blood. (2) Train it, not as a mere beautiful human frame, but as a future partaker in those scenes of transcendent joy and worship which are described in the Apocalypse. "Present your bodies," says the apostle, "a living sacrifice" — in works certainly, and in that best of all kinds of work — in worship. Worship, including bodily reverence, as well as spiritual communion, is a direct preparation for heaven. The body, which never bends here before the Being of beings, is not likely to be joined to a spirit that has really learnt to hold communion with the Holy and the Infinite. In such matters as this Christian instinct is far better than argument. When eternity is once treated by a man as a practical reality, he is likely very soon to make up his mind how to bear himself among the things of time. (Canon Liddon.) Parallel Verses KJV: Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself. |
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