The Resurrection of the Body and the Life Everlasting
A sermon on eschatological mythbusting and the permission to live.
Last weekend at Soul Revival Church, I had the privilege of wrapping up our series on The Apostle’s Creed with a sermon on the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.
Kicking off with a brief look at the #RaptureTok phenomenon, we continued to bust some other myths about the end times and our future hope, including:
That humans are primarily souls trapped in fleshly bodies,
That we are destined to float around on clouds for eternity, and
That we’re all just passing through.1
Instead, through reading together 1 Corinthians 15 and Romans 8, we can rightly affirm that our hope for the future includes a physical (though resurrected) body, living on a physical (though liberated) creation, and that this hope gives us the “permission to live” now; loving God, loving others, and loving God’s world.
I was particularly indebted to Karl Barth’s little commentary on the Creed2 and this week bounced off this quote of how we ought to live in light of the future hope we have.
“We are able to have no fear. We are enabled not to lose courage. We have permission to live. We shall go on our way. One day it will be death, the end, as they say. But this end is not the end. And all the horrors of this earthly ending cannot convince us that life is in vain and that we live a lost life.”
You can watch or listen to the full sermon in the links below.
With apologies to Larry Norman.
Technically Barth is commentating on John Calvin’s catechism which is a commentary on The Apostle’s Creed. It’s like an ogre, it’s got layers.