Shabbat shalom kol beit Yisra'el and Mishpachah - may "the grace that comes through our Master Yah'shua the Messiah (Jesus Christ), the ahavah (love) that is of Elohim (God) the Father, and the fellowship that is ours in the Ruach haQodesh (Holy Spirit) be with you all!" (2 Cor.13:14, J.B.Phillips).

In a week's time the Omer Count will be over and we will gather to celebrate Shavu'ot or the Feast of Weeks, better know as 'Pentecost'. I always have a certain amount of anticipation as each annual festival rolls around but I am particularly intrigued by Shavu'ot because it lies precisely mid-way between the spring and autumn (fall) festivals. It represents a great hinge of change upon which great doors can swing.

Last week we had a long discussion on humility and although today is not Yom haBikkurim (Day of Firstfruits) at which we remember, discuss and celebrate this subject, I have been led by the Ruach (Spirit) to talk to you about the hope of the resurrection.

You may perhaps be curious as to how I was led to this subject right now, though I'll admit I was not at first sure that this is what Yahweh wanted me to talk about, and I had another topic which I know needs to be shared sometime too. The reason I want to talk to you about the resurrection today was initialised by an experience I had on the 30 June at 5.45 in the morning. I had a close brush with death.

No, I didn't die, at least not permanently (obviously, since I am talking to you today), nor did I have a near death experience wherein someone dies, goes off into the spiritual world, and then returns to their body which then comes back to life. The technical term for this is thaumaturgy and there are many stories over the centuries of those who have died, their body has been pronounced dead and they were even being prepared for burial in some cases, and they physically revived. I have never had an experience like that though I have had an out-of-body experience, when I was a young boy, and my spirit left my body to move around after I had passed out from a severe loss of blood. You can read more about that in my life story, A Glimpse into Heaven afterwards if you're interested.

No, what happened a week ago, unlike my out-of-body experience, was really scary. As you know I have been very ill, and have been getting progressively worse, and I'll admit there have been moments when I have wondered whether I would make it or not. What happened was that I awoke, my heart stopped for maybe no more than three seconds, and I experienced death in the sense that I could actually touch and feel it. My spirit, was of course, alive and I was watching this in vision, for right in front of me - literally right up in my face - was this thick, thick black cloud, in which was not a single particle of light. It was unlike anything in this physical realm. I touched it, 'died' for about three seconds as I said, and then pulled back out of it in absolute horror. So I can truthfully say that I have encountered death, even if only for a few seconds.

That kind of experience sobers you up. It reminds you of just how tenuous physical life is and how quickly it can be ended. We do not know when Yahweh will take us home but we should never be so vainly confident that we can leave our life issues unresolved, or postpone repentance for sin for any safe length of time. When you are young you think you will live forever, but even the young are taken home sometimes. Today is the mandated day of repentance, not tomorrow, because we none of us know what we will be given tomorrow.

Many, many years ago Yahweh told me I would die when I was 60 but as is so often the case, as one gets absorbed in the busyness of life, one forgets these things. In fact, I probably would have forgotten it altogether had not one of my sons called me to find out if I was still alive. I am reminded of the time, just before I contracted my first marriage, when Yahweh spoke directly to me - audibly - and said that the marriage would last seven years. I was shocked at the time, rather incredulous, and thought nothing more of it what with all the excitement of getting married, but true to His Word to me, the marriage ended on the very day I contracted it seven years later. Not until near the end did He remind me of the prophecy and I became aware that the time was fast approaching. I would never wish to relive those days again.

If you are wondering why I am standing here speaking to you today, four years after I was told my life would be forfeit, and why I am not decomposing in a grave or floating around as ash somewhere, then I have to say that it is only by the grace of Yahweh that I am still alive. My life has been intense to be sure and it has sometimes felt that I have crammed two lives into one because so much has happened. Maintaining a full-time job, pastoring a congregation, running an international ministry, and raising a large family, with enemies seeking to destroy both myself and this work at sundry times, has burned me out, and I know very well my health is the way it is because of these things. I know I live on borrowed time, and am paying the price for burning my candle at both ends. Yet here I stand today, totally and completely aware, as at no other time before, that it is the resurrection power of my Messiah who keeps me alive. I am accutely conscious of it. The encounter with the death cloud was a reminder that I am now entirely dependent on Him for the continuation of my walk in this world.

I have come to understand that Yahweh has permitted this to teach me some salient lessons about total dependency on Him and striving more diligently in overcoming the disposition to sin. You could say in the latter regard I am a little stubborn and doubtless a number of voices here would not protest that. We must, like Ezekiel, learn to be stubborn in the face of untruth and evil, but any other kind of stubbornness is to truly walk around in, and be impeded by, fetters of the flesh's own making. I would also suggest that learning obedience is perhaps the hardest mitzvah (commandment) of them all.

It has not been easy living in so much pain and with so much sleeplessness but I can truthfully say that a new light is beginning to dawn on me, ever so slowly but strongly, that gives me cause to start rejoicing, however cautiously, that I now live only because He lives in me - and I mean that literally, and physically, though of course the spiritual resurrection chayim (life), which brings about regeneration of mind and heart, is the more important of the two in this life.

As I mentioned earlier, I have had one major out-of-body experience which saved me from being ensnared in my early Christian walk by those churches that preach the false doctrine of soul-sleeping - the Jehovah's Witnesses, Armstrongites, Christadelphians, Seventh-Day Adventists, Messianics and several others. It's one of those things I 'know' from experience, rather than having to simply exercise faith in a doctrine - I know, existentially, that we have a personal, invisible and immaterial spirit that is apart from both the physical body and the animating power of the Ruach haQodesh (Holy Spirit). And yet - and this is the exciting thing - what I most look forward to, is not a heavenly world as a disembodied spirit (though that too holds tremendous fascination, being as it is a sphere of rest and joy, and most importantly the place where Messiah lives), but this world as a resurrected physical being when Yah'shua the Messiah (Jesus) rules for a thousand years, if I am found worthy to inherit that world.

The physical resurrection is unique amongst religious teachings inasmuch as only in Yahwehism - the religion of the Tanakh or Old Testament - and the Besorah (Gospel) of Yah'shua the Messiah (Jesus Christ) in the Messianic Scriptures (New Testament) - is it actually professed. The ancient world was adamant that dead people to not rise again and the ancient Israelites did not believe that anyone had ever done so, or, indeed, that anyone would do so in advance of the General Resurrection at the end of the eons or ages.

Indeed the patriarch Job, in what may be the oldest Bible book, was able to declare from firsthand knowledge and experience:

"I know that my Redeemer lives,
and that in the end He will stand upon the earth.
And after my skin has been destroyed,
yet in my flesh I will see Elohim (God);
I myself will see Him
with my own eyes - I, and not another.
How my heart yearns within me!"
(Job 19:25-27, NIV)

But no one, including Job, had any idea that any resurrecting would take place before the consummation of history. Nevertheless, Job's testimony is powerful.

As far as the ancient pagan world was concerned, death was a one-way ticket to the underworld. It was regarded as all-powerful and inescapable. No one, they believed, could ever break its power. And after my encounter a week ago, I can perfectly understand why they would conclude that, the permanance of death notwithstanding from the perspective of the living. My own parents are dead, my father a very long time ago, my mother more recently, yet it seems, as the years roll by, that their absence is more and more 'permanent'. Time plays many tricks on you. As you look at the ancient pagan world, you come across those like Homer who wanted a new body, but knew they could not have one, and Plato who didn't want one because they thought being a disembodied spirit was so much better.

And, unfortunately, the majority of Christians think along Platonic lines. For them the final and ultimate hope is a non-physical 'heaven'. That is what 'life after death' means to most believers - ask anyone at a funeral. And yet in both Hebrew and Greek, the word 'resurrection' never means that in Scripture. The Bible consistently views resurrection as a new bodily life, one which is immortal. Yes, the Bible speaks of an interim 'spiritual' life where the disembodied spirits of men and women wait - in either Paradise or Hell - for that even more blessed time when we get our physical bodies back again, only in an even more superior form.

The biblical view of 'resurrection' is therefore to be properly viewed as not somewhere that you're going to 'go' to but something that is going to 'happen' to the physical bodies we now have. Yes, the earliest believers have debated whether this would be with our existing bones or whether a completely new set of bones would be made, but they were at least all agreed that resurrection was absolutely physical.

The ancient world, as ours, has always known about ghosts, spirits, visions, hallucinations and such things, and these are not denied but there has been an abysmal ignorance of the importance of these physical bodies which we have been given here and now. These ancient pagans had words equivalent to, or like, 'resurrection' but what it meant was that the dead would continue as disembodied spirits. And sadly far too many Christians continue to view 'resurrection' in exactly these same self terms, as the immediate 'life after death' as spirits. The vision of a physical resurrection has been lost to most calling themselves believers in the Master Yah'shua the Messiah (Jesus Christ).

Now it's true that the pagans believed that this 'spiritual resurrection' could, and did' lead to 'divinisation', but there was no sense of this being in any sense 'raised from the dead' in any physical way. Even more radical pagans, like today's atheists and indeed, surprisingly, the Sadducee sect of Yah'shua's (Jesus') day, were even mroe radical and claimed that all life in any form became extinct after death. One such ancient adherent of this doctrine was Philo. But most believers in Yah'shua's (Jesus') day believed, along with the Pharisees, that Yahweh would take care of the disembodied spirits after death until, at the Last Day, He would give His people new bodies at the time when He judged and remade the world. That was what Martha, the sister of Lazarus and Mary, assumed Yah'shua (Jesus) was talking about in their conversation beside the tomb of Lazarus. "I know he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day", she said (Jn.11:24, NRSV). That's what 'resurrection' meant to her and what it means to us.

Yah'shua (Jesus) reinforced this position throughout His ministry, though He did redefine the current belief to include the idea of the "Kingdom of Elohim (God)" or the "Kingdom of Heaven" [1] which He used to explain how Yahweh's sovereign rule was, at that very time, breaking in, even though it didn't look anything like what contemporaries had imagined. But He hardly ever redefined the notion of 'resurrection' that was commonly understood at the time.

Only once when the Sadducees tried to trick Him and make the resurrection look silly did Yah'shua (Jesus) speak of the resurrection as a complete event in the future, when all the righteous would be raised: for then He intimated that in this resurrected state certain things would be different, specifically, that no new marriages would be contracted. Only on one other occasion did He go further than the common teaching of the day when He declared:

"Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the Kingdom of their Father" (Mt.13:43, NRSV).

In other words, resurrected bodies will have a glory that our mortal bodies do not. And Paul takes this one stage further by saying that those who thus shine like the sun will be those of the First Resurrection, those who live in the Millennium, unlike other believers who are raised in the Second Resurrection after the Millennium, whose resurrection glory will only be like that of the moon (1 Cor.15:41ff.). The same thought is spoken by Daniel who said:

"Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting (eonian, age-long) chayim (life), and some to shame and everlasting (eonian, age-long) contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the heavens, and those whom lead many to righteousness like the stars forever and ever" (Dan.12:2-3, NRSV).

When Yah'shua (Jesus) was executed, nobody had any idea - believers and unbelievers alike - that He would be physically back, there and then, in a resurrected form. They were of the mindset that they would see Him only in the far distant future at the end of the age, long after they were dead. Thus the talmidim (disciples) said among themselves:

"We had hoped that He was the One who would redeem Israel" (Lk.24:21, NRSV).

Ah, how many of us, I wonder, have had such tunnel vision and concluded all was lost because we were not viewing things rightly. All of us. For the talmidim (disciples), the crucifixion and death of their Messiah had initially meant that the Kingdom had not come because they fundamentally misunderstood what that Kingdom was. So all their hopes crumbled into ashes and all they could do was to think how they might salvage their lives and start all over again. The best they could be thankful for was that they were still alive. But that would all change overnight once they acquired a right perspective of events and met the resurrected Messiah for themselves!

The great hope of the early believers was in the future physical resurrection. 'Life after death' was never the main thing for them as it is for most Christians today. You'll not find them speaking much of 'going to heaven when they died' when they evangelised but of physical resurrection on this planet. Yes, 'heaven', or 'paradise' as they called it, was important to them but it was never the main hope. 'Heaven' or 'Paradise' was only ever something temporary. As N.T.Wright observes:

"When Yah'shua (Jesus) tells the brigand that he will join Him in Paradise that very day, 'Paradise' clearly cannot be their ultimate destination, as Luke's next chapter makes clear. 'Paradise' is, rather, the blissful garden where Elohim's (God's) people rest prior to the resurrection. When Yah'shua (Jesus) declared that there are many dwelling-places ('rooms', 'mansions' - Jn.14:2) in His Father's house, the word for 'dwelling-place' is moné, which denotes a temporary lodging" [2].

In other words, 'heaven' or 'paradise' is being likened by Yah'shua (Jesus) to a traveler's lodge:

"When Paul says that his desire is 'to depart and be with Messiah, which is far better', he is indeed thinking of a blissful life with his Lord immediately after death, but this is only the prelude to the resurrection itself" [3].

Thus the talmidim (disciples) clearly held a two-step belief about the future, beginning with death, and whatever lies immediately beyond; and then, secondly and finally, a new bodily existence in a new remade world. Of course, those who are alive when Yah'shua (Jesus) returns and are transformed in the 'twinkling of an eye', being resurrected on the spot, will skip the first of those two states, for there will be no need of a moné or a temporary resting place, for their lives will be immediately launched into the Millennial Kingdom! Indeed, their great blessing is that they will never have to taste death at all! No death cloud for them, which is not an easy transition for anyone.

I had thought to historically trace how Christians changed their hope from the resurrection to 'heaven' over the centuries but I think you get the idea. You see, we can enjoy resurrection chayim (life) in the here-and-now but there is nothing comparible to the heavenly stop-over that we can duplicate here except, perhaps, by properly observing the Sabbath inwardly and outwardly. Perhaps I have an extra reason for seeking resurrection chayim (life) because now I must absolutely rely on it and on Yahweh's grace in prolonging my days until my work is done. May He so do to you also. May you all be blessed in Yah'shua's (Jesus') Name. Amen.

Endnotes

[1] See, for example, The Kingdom of Elohim (God) in the Gospel of Mark
[2] Tom Wright, Surprised by Hope (SPCK, London: 2011), p.52