Dr. Ed Young - A Super Body in a Super World

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TOPICS: Afterlife

What kind of bodies will we have in heaven? What will heaven be like? What will you look like? What will I look like? And we'll immediately go to the prototype of the kind of bodies we'll have and that's a resurrected body of Jesus Christ. We see that supernatural body that he had but yet the physical body that he had. We know he would eat, he prepared a fire. He could be touched. We know he communicated with people, and we see the reality there of the resurrected Lord.

Now, you look at the 11 appearances of Jesus in the 40 days of his resurrected life on this earth and three of them, he was not immediately recognized. The open tomb there Mary Magdalene, she didn't recognize Jesus until he said, "Mary". Then he looked up, and she looked up, and there was recognition. Why didn't she recognize him at first? The first simple reason is a cultured Godly woman would never look in the face of a strange man in a public place but when he said, "Mary," there was recognition. On the road to Emmaus, he was walking along there with these two men who were discouraged, saying the Messiah they thought really was the Messiah and Jesus opened the Scriptures and began to exegete prophecy Old Testament with these two individuals.

By the way, if there's one time I would love to been present, it'd been right there. Man, just think about walking in the resurrected Lord. He's opening in the Old Testament showing you what this is about, who's it about, the prophecy. What a magnificent moment, but they didn't recognize him. The end of the day perhaps, they invite him going to their home and they recognize him when he did something. He broke the bread and they said, "It is the Lord," and then he was gone.

So, first of all, he was recognized by a voice, Mary Magdalene, and then recognized by what he did, the breaking of bread. It is the Lord. And then on the Sea of Galilee, the apostles were fishing. Jesus on the bank, he prepared a charcoal fire, he was cooking some fish. He went on edge he said, "Guys, have you caught anything"? They said, "No". He said, "Well, throw out on this side of the boat," and they did and they had a large, large harvest of fish. By the way, the Bible tells us the exact number of fish that they caught. And then one of the apostles said, "It is the Lord". He was recognized because they followed the advice that he gave.

You see, Jesus comes and gives recognition to us through many ways as he did there in his first appearances in his resurrected body. His body was human but yet it was spiritual. He could appear, he could disappear, he could go through walls but yet when you look at the body and see that is the prototype, the type of body that you will have and I will have when we graduate from this earth and go to heaven. Now, is there any hint, is there any shadow in your life and in my life that, you know, we may already have tasted something of the heavenly atmosphere already in this life prior to our death?

Let me tell you something, your face and my face, it's a window to our soul. We see young people in this church, Keith and I talk about this fairly regularly, and we ask about that young person's who was brought up in our church. We say, "Well, how is Bill doing"? They say, "You know, we haven't seen Bill lately". "What's happened"? "Well, Bill is running around with a new crowd or Bill is this". And we say, "Well, what about Bill"? And they say, "The light has gone off in his eyes". The eyes are a dead give away, it's a window to our heart and our lifestyles and when you see that dullness begin to appear, that deadness begin to appear, that coldness begin to appear but by the same token when you see a young person who falls in love, boy, a light comes on.

You see a child that in a moment ecstasy that light, in other words, your face and my face is a dead give away so many times as to where we are with God and where we are with Christ in this world. It's almost a pre-resurrection scene and picture, your face. Everybody here, you're responsible for your face, your eyes, a window to our heart and our soul and where we are. Our resurrection bodies will be the only prototype we have is a resurrected body of Jesus Christ. But then we've gotta ask some questions about this body. How old will you be in heaven? Will it be the age which you died? Will the baby be a baby and a senior citizen be a senior citizen? How old will you be?

Well, Saint Augustine said we'd all be 30 years old. Thomas Aquinas said we'd all be 33 because that was the age in which Jesus died. I don't think either one of them knew what they were talking about. Let me tell ya how old you'll be in heaven. Somebody asked me, "How old are you"? I say, "I'm 41". Somebody asks how old I tell them, "You know, I'm 73". I'll tell others, "You know, I'm 12". Why do you have to give the top number, would somebody tell me that? We're all of these ages and in heaven, they'll be a child within us. Thank God. There'll be maturity within us. There'll be all of those ages within you and within me.

In heaven we'll be ageless and that's part of the thrilling aspect of heaven. In heaven, we'll always be older and our children and our parents will always be older than us, but age becomes a nonexistence reality because we will be living in timelessness. And we'll talk about that later in our study of heaven, of eternity and what it means to be beyond time. But we understand in heaven you'll be the exact right age you'll need to be to accomplish that supernatural task that God will have for every one of his children in heaven, many, many, tasks that we will have. How old will we be in heaven? One question people ask.

Another question, what will we look like in heaven? Will be all of us be Ken and Barbie? Will we all have sculptured bodies and look like Ms. Universe? How boring that will be. Let me tell you what we're gonna look like in heaven. You're gonna look like the best self that you can imagine. You'll be complete, and full, and whole, and God is gonna take care of that. And some of us are gonna look so good we're not gonna recognize each other until there's other moments of recognition. It is not a universality in heaven, but there's a great variety in heaven and all of us will come to the maximum fullness where our appearance will be obvious to God and obvious to others.

In fact, there will be a glow to you and me in heaven that is hard to explain and we can't even articulate it in this life. Then somebody asked, "Well, will I have five senses in heaven"? And the answer is yes, we'll have all five senses but we'll have more senses than just five. And the five senses we have, what about the sense of hearing? My goodness, we hear something beautiful like the soloists and the choir today. Just think if our hearing was just, maximized what we hear. We'd hear the chorus of angels. We would hear beyond our capacity. It would go on and on. Imagine to see, we see something beautiful. Imagine the sense of sight is intensified in density, and in scope, and understanding, and in beauty. Imagine to smell, we could smell wonderful fragrances that we never smelled before. To taste, you think pecan pie and ice cream is good in heaven, our taste will just explode.

You see, we take everything here is just a beginning, a sample of what we're gonna realize in fullness to heaven. And we'll have more than five senses. Everybody here has more than five senses right now, we don't realize it. We have a sense of balance to various degrees, all of us do. You don't think about that. We have a sense of presence around us, even though we do not see a sense of presence. We have an understanding of where our arms and our bodies are without even thinking about it. We have a sense of time. We don't put that in the equation. We have a sense of pain. And imagine there are hundred or two hundred more senses that we'll have in heaven as we're exploded in the reality in our resurrected body. Just imagine that.

You say, "Well, explain some of those". How would you explain to somebody who's never heard what it means to hear? Try that. They've never heard anything. You try to explain to him, you know, try to explain to somebody who's never seen what it means to see. We see these studies with Helen Keller and other personalities, it's hard, how can we understand today the other senses we'll have available to us in our supernatural resurrected bodies? So, the prototype is Jesus. We think and there we are, we move. We're supernatural bodies, that's what we have to picture in heaven. We'll say, "Where do you get all of this stuff"?

Listen, listen, look in 1 Corinthians 15, just a few verses. It says it clearly. "It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body, supernatural body. If there's a natural body, there's also a spiritual body. The first man is from earth, earthy, the second man is from heaven. As the earthy, so also are those who are earthy," that's us, "and as in heavenly, so also those who are heavenly just as we have borne the image of earthy, we'll also bear the image of heavenly". We have our earth bodies, we have our supernatural, heavenly bodies. Those who are in Christ. What a day of rejoicing that will be.

Now, let me say this in a memorable way, does anybody in here think 19... well, let's just pick a year, 1939 and the name Billy Batson. Does anybody know how that name came into a degree of prominence in 1939? Captain Marvel, all he had to say was Billy Batson said, "Shazam". You thought that was only Gomer Pyle, didn't you? Shazam and all of a sudden, he's Captain Marvel and he has wisdom, he has speed, he can fly. He's got supernatural speed. Let me say very reverently to you, very reverently in another realm exactly when we're in Christ and breath leaves our body and we receive a supernatural body with power, eternity with existence, it's almost like shazam, shazam, the Bible teaches.

Now, now we got a problem. Here we are, breath has left this body, shazam, we have a supernatural body, the lack of which is a resurrected body of Jesus Christ and we see there's identity, there's recognition, et cetera, et cetera, and an exposition, an explosion of our gifts and now, where are we going to live? Man, I've got this supernatural body, where will that body live throughout all eternity? This is the wonderful thing, it will live in a new heaven and a new earth. It'll live right here in this domain except the earth will go back to a pristine kind of existence. Now, let's get some absolutes built down, some biblical absolutes that you need to know.

Look on your screen, look at them, "God made Adam and Eve to be spiritual and physical and they were not human until they were both," record that. "God often took on human form in the Old Testament times. He was likely in human form as he walked in Eden. God took on a human body becoming a man in Christ, not just temporarily but forever". Listen to that, God took on a human form in Jesus Christ, second person of trinity. He became a human, a man, not just temporarily, but get this, forever. Remember we said he'll be with us in Christ? Isn't that something?

"God raised Christ in human body with physical properties, a body that walked, talked, ate, could be touched. He explicitly stated he wasn't a ghost. God made mankind in his image because humans are physical beings, though God is Spirit. There must be something about our human bodies that reflects God's identity. Certainly there's nothing about our bodies that repulses God who created humanity as a crowning achievement. God's Holy Spirit indwells human bodies and calls them his holy temples. God will raise people with eternal," listen to this, "physical, spiritual, bodies that come down to inhabit the new earth with them".

Look, heaven is not out there in another cosmos, another galaxy, or up there over there. Heaven will be here, a new heaven and a new earth. Now, we're not gonna deal with, don't ask me after the service, the little interim period that some talk about between death, and eternity, and our supernatural bodies in a supernatural new heaven and the earth because that will come when Jesus comes and brings down the curtain of history and some would talk about purgatory. But we're gonna wait for that sequencing. Okay, would you do that? But in the meantime, on this earth there's a lot of groaning going on. Did you know this earth groans? It really does. Do you know there's groaning in you and me? What is that groaning? The earth and human beings, humanity fell in the Garden of Eden, that is the great sin.

That is in chapter 3. All of sudden, Adam and Eve who had open hands and bent knees before God, now they chose their hands and they straighten out their knees because they said, "I want to be a God. I want to run my own life". That is the ultimate basic sin that all of us are caught up in and that's the basic sin of Adam and Eve. Closed hands, unbent knee. I'm gonna make my choices of what I eat, where I go, how I live, and determine the destiny of my life. That is a fallenness and when man fell, closed his hands, unbent knees, the whole creation fell. We live in a world that is under the curse of God and we live in a human life under the curse of God. And we see what happens to this curse, how is it removed and that comes to what Jesus Christ did on the cross. And you see evidence of the removal of that curse, where? In the scars of Jesus.

Here you have the apostles and they look at Jesus, they thought they won a presidential campaign and Jesus was gonna be elected president, but once he was captured and once they saw those nails nailed in his hand, they said, "Look, it's not gonna happen". But little did they know, those nails that left the scars did not mean the end, but it meant the beginning of the eternal salvation, the eternal salvation. And so, here we go the groaning. I want you to read, not in the New American Standard, the King James, I want you to read Peterson's translation of this passage in Romans chapter 8, tremendous.

"This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It's adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike 'What's next, Papa?' God's Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are. We know who he is, we know what we are: Father and children. And we know we are going to get what's coming to us," listen, "an unbelievable inheritance"!

Look at the rest of it. And that's why I don't think there's any comparison between the present hard times and the coming good times. The creative world itself can hardly wait for what's coming next, that's the groaning. Everything in creation is being more or less held back. "God reins it in until both creation and all the creatures are ready and can be released at the same moment into the glorious times ahead. Meantime, the joyful anticipation deepens," the anticipation of the supernatural body in a supernatural world.

Everybody will become everything that God built into you and built into me to become. We'll be able to accomplish in heaven everything that we did not accomplish on this earth and so many thing we didn't have time to accomplish, we didn't have opportunity to accomplish, and because of things that happened in our background, we were unable to accomplish them. Understand this, only those things that have died in you and in me will ever be resurrected. Only there has to be a death that could be resurrection.

What does that mean? My mother, God-fearing woman, stern, tough, disciplinarian, trouble loving openly and genuinely even myself as her son. In the process I have looked back and in my study at home, I have a picture of my mom there. And I look at her and I say, "Mom, boy, now in heaven, boy, you have killed those things that limited you loving, limited you in this life". See, my mother was a very manipulative person. You say, "Well, why in the world? Why was she like that"? Because she was one of... she had four sisters and four older sisters, she was the baby.

When my grandfather died early on a little farm, my grandmother took those four daughters, moved to Laurel, Mississippi and those five daughters and four of them would go to work doing all kinds of things. My grandmother sewed. They lived very, very, very modestly. My mother went to school so as the youngest child, she had to manipulate her older sisters to get clothes, to get means so she would have things. And so she got in the business of manipulation early in her life and she carried that all the way through so there was that lack of genuineness. And I look at my mother's picture and said, "Mom, in heaven now, isn't it grateful that manipulation has died? Isn't it grateful now in heaven you can love freely. Isn't it grateful in heaven, you won't be limited with poverty and things that you did not have and things you could not do? Now you'll be able to spread your wings".

You look at those who've gone ahead of you, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, friends and you say, "Boy, boy, what they could have been, what they should have been, what might have happened". In heaven, we will become and achieve all these things because all of that which limited us will be dead and it will be resurrected again along with our bodies as we live in a resurrected body in a resurrected world. That is heaven. Boy, if we could see all those who graduated before us.

Say, "Will there be any children in heaven"? Absolutely, what would heaven be without kids? What about the little baby that never really saw life, wouldn't it be thrilling to see that baby grow up in a perfect earth, in a super environment? Boy, that would be something to behold, wouldn't it? So, I'm saying, God in his equalizing, but God in his infinite wisdom will see that heaven is all and more than anything we could ever dream. Eye has not seen, ear has not heard, neither is the heart of man what God has prepared for those who end up in love with him. That's heaven.

Who invented pleasure? Who invented laughter? Who invented love? Who invented fun? Who invented friendship? Who invented celebration? Who invented dancing, and shouting, and praising. And who put all... somebody has the idea that when you talk about heaven, the pastor has to have a stained-glassed voice. "I'll tell you..." Man, heaven we know as we have been known. Heaven will be a time of celebration and I'm sure those who are in Christ who've gone ahead of us they said, "Oh, if they could see me now".

C.S. Lewis preached a great sermon on heaven. He called it the weight of glory and in this sermon, he said, "If we'd see just ordinary folks in heaven today, they'd have such a weight of glory, and a glow on them, and a radiance on them, we would bow down and worship". We'd bow down and worship. Oh listen, all we have to do, those tight hands, open them up. Those unbent knees, just bend them. And all of a sudden in your life now and forever, there will be that shazam. Say it with me, "Shazam". Oh, if we could see ourselves then, what a day, what a moment, what a celebration. It is heaven.