35 But someone will say, “How are the dead raised? And with what kind of body do they come?” 1 Corinthians 15:35 (LSB)
I am posting this in light of two things. Just a few days ago we celebrated Memorial Day and my family and I went to Purcell, Oklahoma Hillside Cemetery to decorate the graves of my grandparents on both sides of my family and the graves of my mother and father. My grandfather Ratliff was born in 1877 and was a settler in Oklahoma as it was opened up during the land runs in the 1880’s. Of course it was his father, Robert Ratliff, who was in charge of that, but I was born in 1951 long after all of those events and so the man I knew as my grandfather was a very old man highly revered by everyone and I was a bit intimidated by….
He was Baptist minister and evangelist. My grandmother Ratliff was a Choctaw. That is where I get my Native American blood lines. The U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs has assigned me a percentage of Indian blood and the Choctaw Nation has registered me as a member of the Tribe. The second part of why I am posting this is that I have had two Cataract Surgeries over the last two months. The V.A. did the left eye at the end of April and they did the right eye today. So, I am typing this with a patch over my right eye. When I move it aside to see if I can see anything, it is mostly blur and haze. Please pray that God will heal it. My left eye is nearly healed up. I can see with it clearly and everything is very sharp. I pray that the right eye heals the same way. Our bodies in this life are temporal. My Dad died in 2010 at the age of 86. My mother died in 2018 at the age of 92. Both of them had massive health issues and needed Assisted Living right up to the end. One of my prayers every morning to start my day is for my Lord to come and take me to my Blessed Hope. Why will that be so blessed?
Eternity is the true reality, not this physical life in the temporal. At the heart of our Christian faith is our blessed hope of a bodily resurrection. Many mistakenly believe that all Christians who die are given their eternal body right then, but the Bible is clear that our eternal bodies are resurrected by God from our physical bodies that we have now. There will be an interim between our death and the resurrection before we are given our Resurrection Bodies, but this post is about what will be after our Lord returns in victory and glory.