The Resurrection of the Dead

Sheol. The grave. The pit. Hades. What do all these have in common?

They’re the same thing. At least, in the Bible they are.

The Hebrew word sheol, ubiquitous in the Old Testament, is translated in various Bible passages and translations as “the grave” or “the pit”, and in others left as is. The Alexandrian Jews who translated the Old Testament into Greek around 200 BC (the Septuagint), seeing what they considered an equivalent concept in Greek thought, used the Greek word Hades to translate the Hebrew word.

Hades was thought by the Greeks to be the location of the underworld for all the dead, good and evil alike; the earliest conception of the underworld was that it was a place not of torture or delight, but of bland oblivion. This, indeed, was the conception of Sheol throughout the Old Testament; in fact, the word “sleep” is used to describe the Sheol experience. Neither the righteous nor the unrighteous relished the thoughts of going to Sheol. It is unclear if the early Hebrews truly thought there was an otherworldly holding ground or if they were using a metaphor to describe post-mortem nothingness: non-existence is a lofty concept, and it is much easier for the human mind to speak of a dead soul existing somewhere else, even without a developed belief in an after-life. Yet the existence of a holding place for the souls of the departed was bolstered in Scriptures such as Daniel 12:2, which promised to surrender its sleeping prisoners at the time of the Promised One. This is the most clear indication that anyone living in Old Testament times was expecting what is known in later Jewish thought and in the New Testament as “The Resurrection of the Dead”. It was partly because this doctrine was not as well-established in the Tanakh as we tend to think it was that the Sadducees scoffed at the concept (Matt 22).

The Resurrection of the Dead mentioned in 1 Thessalonians 4, 1 Corinthians 15, Revelation 20, etc. are the fulfillments of Daniel’s prophecy of the emptying of Sheol. Daniel 12 and Matthew 25 (the “Sheep and the Goats” parable) teach that the souls of the departed were to be brought to life and judged, each according to his deeds.

Paul shows the dead being resurrected and the living changed at the time the trumpet sounds and Jesus returns (1 Thess 4). Typical dispensational and other futurist dogma has our physical corpses rising and being replaced by new, not wholly spiritual bodies. Paul, however, was quite clear on what he thought of that in 1 Cor 15:35-44, which concludes,

So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. (NIV)

What could Paul have said differently if he wanted to convince us that the Resurrection was to be spiritual and not physical?

Some argue that since Jesus was raised physically and He was the first fruit of the Resurrection (1 Cor 15:20), then the fruit that follows must be in the form of physical resurrection. Yet this is a false, albeit understandable, conclusion. Christ’s physical resurrection served as an observable confirmation of the unobservable spiritual reality of His spiritual resurrection; the spiritual aspect of His resurrection was sure what was unprecedented and unique, since many physical bodies had been resurrected before Christ’s resurrection. The Resurrection of the Dead was the spirit’s quickening and subsequent transformation to immortality (or “incorruptibility”, see 1 Cor 15:53,54).

If, as preterists contend, the coming of the Son of Man in clouds of glory was apocalyptic imagery for the judgment of the Old Covenant system and apostate Israel, then the Resurrection of the Dead has already occurred (or rather, been occurring). It is all tied in together.

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