Behold, I shew you a mystery: we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. 1 Corinthians 15:51
As I stood and watched with other family members while my father’s casket was lowered into the ground at the Bell Gift Cemetery in West New Annan, my mind went back to a ceremony many years earlier in a cemetery at The Falls. As a lad of ten, it was my first funeral, and I was grieving for my beloved grandfather, who had suddenly gone Home. In the bitter cold of that early January day, so cold that Wally Hunt was unable to bring his bugle to sound the final note of the Last Post, the casket slowly lowered into the earth. Memories of that day came back to me as we buried my grandfather’s eldest son, and I wondered how many years would pass before my father’s eldest son would be interred in the same way. And yet, all three of us lived, and live, in the hope that we might not die.
The funerals for my grandfather and, many years later, for my father, were among the largest the community had ever seen. And yet, those two men never lived in the prospect of a large funeral. They were always looking for the Lord Jesus to come to the air and call them home. Today, I am looking for the same. I have no interest in a large funeral, but I have a deep interest in the Rapture. The prospect of falling asleep, as the Bible sometimes refers to physical death, is overshadowed by the glorious hope that the Lord could return to take us with Him today. And as I feel the ravages of time tearing down my mortal frame, I am very much interested in the prospect of being changed.
We don’t know what our changed bodies will be like, because we seek to make comparisons with the body that we have been using here on earth. We appreciate that we will no longer experience pain, death, sorrow, or anxiety of any kind. But those are just small adjustments compared to the overall change that will fit us for that celestial realm. Our bodies will no longer be limited by earthly forces such as gravity, time, and space. Nor will we need to breath oxygen, circulate blood, or process food, at least not the way we do now. But there is one change that I am sure we are all so glad will occur: the absence of sin.
Our bodies now are dying because of sin. And only death will end that cycle. But when we are changed into the glorious likeness of our Lord and Saviour, we will no longer be prone to sin nor will we ever experience again the dread of death. This is hard to imagine. I can not grasp the concept of being in a body that is no longer prone to long for the world’s dainties, or having a mind never again distracted by the world’s clamour.
The change that will come with the Rapture is a wonderful thing to anticipate, even if we are unable to understand it yet. – Jim MacIntosh