The Lord of the Body

October 3, 2014

Our citizenship is registered in heaven, from which we await a Saviour—the Lord, Jesus the Messiah—who will reorder the body of our humiliation, in correspondence to the body of His glory, according to the working of His power by which He is able to subject all things to Himself.” [Phi 3:20–21]

The power that transforms the body of our humiliation is the same power by which Jesus subjects all things to Himself. Put another way: the resurrection is a function of the Lordship of the Messiah. He is “Lord of the body” not only in the sense of a mastery that has authority over our sexual behaviour for instance (cf 1 Cor 6:13), but in the sense that He has mastery over the body’s very constitution, and can and will change it to correspond to His own resurrection glory.

Seen in this light, denial of the bodily resurrection is a denial of the Lordship of Jesus.