We recently received a response to our podcast about what happens when we die. The reader asked a good question that we share with you here along with our answer.
Bodies coming out of graves
The podcast episode on death was really great and informative! It confirmed a lot of what the Lord showed me in His word as I was leaving Adventism.
I do have a few questions: what should we think of the first and second resurrections? Adventists love to speak about this distinction. It was drilled into my head growing up that the righteous dead would rise first, and the unrighteous dead would rise second. From what I remember, Adventists use Revelation to back up this idea. I know that the Bible talks about resurrection, but now with the understanding that I am in the presence of the Lord after death, I’m not sure what to think about it or what place it has.
I do remember those photos of the bodies coming out of the graves. Is that imagery completely false?
Resurrection is not connected to the grave
The Bible does speak of two resurrections, one for the righteous and one for the wicked. It’s important, first of all, to understand that the resurrection is necessary because we are not fully human without our bodies. When we die our spirits go to be with the Lord—and that means the “essential us” goes to Him. Our bodies are our tents, and they decay. Nevertheless, we need bodies in order to be human, and we are promised that we will be eternally living humans when we trust Jesus. His own resurrection shows us what we can expect.
Second, the righteous dead and the wicked dead are resurrected at different times. Jesus Himself first spoke of these resurrections, but the distinction in timing was made more clear in the book of Revelation.
Here’s what Jesus said in John 5:27–29:
And he has given him authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of Man. Do not marvel at this, for an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment.
Jesus does not talk about how much time elapses between these two resurrections, but He does call them different resurrections. One is “the resurrection of life,” and the other is “the resurrection of judgment”.
There is also a hint that the righteous and the wicked dead are resurrected at different times in 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17. This passage also suggests that the Adventist pictures of people standing in graves is completely made up. Here’s what Paul says:
For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. Therefore encourage one another with these words (1 Thessalonians 4:16–18).
Here Paul says that when the Lord returns for us, the dead in Christ will rise first. In the context of the passage, the word “first” relates to what comes next in the sequence. In other words, first the dead in Christ will rise, and THEN we who remain will be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord. There is no hint of graves opening and people coming up. When Jesus was raised, no one saw him standing in the tomb or even leaving it. The first eyewitnesses saw Him walking and whole, already resurrected. When the earthquake occurred at the time of the resurrection, there is no account of the Roman guards seeing Him. There are only accounts of an angel sitting by the tomb, and of Jesus Himself walking up to Mary Magdalene and Mary, Jesus’ mother (Mt. 28:1–10) and of His appearing hours later to His disciples . In other words, there is no hint that when people come to life, they stand in their graves. Their resurrection bodies are not connected to the grave!
1 Thessalonians says God brings with Jesus those who have fallen asleep, and then the dead in Christ are resurrected, and then the living are caught up in the clouds with them. From this passage it appears that the actual joining of body and spirit is not connected with the grave in any sense. It seems to occur in an instant and not in the grave.
Another important point in the 1 Thessalonians passage is that there is no mention of the wicked being raised. The dead in Christ are raised, then the living are caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. So this passage clarifies some detail about the first resurrection—that of the righteous—and makes no mention of the second resurrection being connected in any sense with the Lord’s taking us to meet Him.
More detail
Revelation 20 give much more detail. After Satan is bound and thrown into the abyss, those who died for the sake of Jesus and for the word of God are raised. There is some ambiguity here because Revelation does not mention the righteous dead from the OT specifically, but the fact that there are two distinctly different resurrections is clear. So the righteous dead are raised and reign with Christ for a thousand years. This reign is the millennium, and it is on earth. The context of Revelation 20 cannot be understood any other way. Verse 6 even says those who are raised in the first resurrection are not in any way in danger of the second death. Here are verses 4–6:
Then I saw thrones, and seated on them were those to whom the authority to judge was committed. Also I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus and for the word of God, and those who had not worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years. The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended. This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is the one who shares in the first resurrection! Over such the second death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and they will reign with him for a thousand years.
Notice that this passage states that the righteous dead’s rising is the first resurrection, but the rest of the dead don’t come to life until after the millennium.
Verses seven to 10 then describe a great battle at the end of the millennium which will culminate with the devil’s being thrown into the lake of fire where the false prophet and the beast were thrown before the millennium occurred (Rev. 19:17–21).
After the conclusion of that great Armageddon, the Great White Throne appears, and the earth and the sky flee away from the presence of God on the great white throne. It is at this time that the rest of the dead come to life. Notice that at this second resurrection at the great white throne, judgment occurs. The great white throne resurrection is for judgment. The first resurrection is for the saints’ ruling and sharing their inheritance in the kingdom with the Lord Jesus.
For the righteous, judgment occurred at the cross. Jesus took the judgment of God’s wrath and died in the place of those who trust Him and His finished work. Jesus said that those who believe do not come into judgment but pass out of death into life (Jn. 5:24). For those who die not believing, they are raised for judgment at the Great White Throne. Jesus’ substitutionary death will not cover them.
Now, there are obviously details that Scripture does not reveal. We can’t answer all questions about this subject. In fact, there are different understandings within Christianity about the nature of the kingdom in Revelation 20. Importantly, however, the details of eschatology and the sequence of end-time events is NOT a central component of Christianity as it was in Adventism. We can have true Christian fellowship with other believers if they hold to the centrality of the finished work of Jesus on the cross, the Trinity, and the inerrancy and sufficiency of Scripture. We know that Jesus is coming again and glorifying believers to spend eternity with Him, but the sequence and timing of end-time events is not what determines orthodox Christianity.
It is clear, though, that there is a resurrection for LIFE and a resurrection for JUDGMENT, as Jesus said. It is also clear that the difference between the two is whether or not the people BELIEVED. The Bible does seem to indicate that there will be different “degrees” of punishment in the Lake of Fire, just as there will be different rewards for the saints, depending upon their works while in the flesh (2 Cor. 5:10), but eternal life is entirely based upon belief and trust in the finished work of Jesus’ life, death, burial, and resurrection according to Scripture (see also John 3:18).
While there are some unanswered questions, the Bible does teach that there are two resurrections, and we who trust Jesus will be part of the first one if Jesus does not return in our lifetimes. †
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I’m sorry I can’t agree with several major aspects of this article. I’ll begin with the last one: In an all-too-familiar Adventist-like expectation, an impressive conditional sentence is presented: “[I]f Jesus does not return in our lifetimes.” I have a very big problem with that specific expectation. Am I supposed to be a better Christian if I uphold the notion that, somehow, the Parousia is oh-so-near in my old age, or so very near for ever and ever? Am I supposed to believe that Jesus Christ, or an apostle or an angel predicted that the Parousia would occur sometime during my specific generation or at least sometime in the 21st or 22nd centuries? Why should I believe that? Doesn’t the entire New Testament show the imminence of the Parousia in the lifetime of the first generation of Christians? Is there one valid reason why passages like Matthew 10:23 shouldn’t be taken at face value? Unless we are prepared to insist that Jesus wasn’t even addressing his apostles (but someone else who would live at least a couple of millennia afterwards), or that Israel doesn’t mean Israel or that some of his apostles may still be alive nowadays on this earth, or that, Heaven forbid, Jesus didn’t really know what he was talking about, it seems to me that passage clearly shows (and it isn’t the only one, not by far) the Parousia was scheduled to occur not later than a few decades after Jesus’ ministry. This is a fatal blow for the entire Adventist expectation of an increasingly and perpetually imminent “second coming,” which is nothing short of the hoax of the centuries.
Now, let’s briefly consider the resurrections of Revelation. Chapter 11 graphically describes the resurrection of the “two witnesses.” Oddly enough that is usually explained away, not exclusively by Adventists, as being some ludicrous symbolism for the Bible Societies or some other inane excuse. What to say, then, about the resurrections of chapter 20? Perhaps the first thing we should emphasize is the fact that Revelation speaks of the “first resurrection,” but there’s no resurrection called “second”. Likewise, there’s a “second death,” but nothing is said about a “first” one. And there’s a sentence linking the first resurrection and the second death: The second death has no power over those who partake of the first resurrection (verse 6). Does that mean that “the rest of the dead” of verse 5 (i.e., not the beheaded martyrs of verse 4) are the wicked, as Adventists claim? I don’t think Revelation teaches that. If that group is to be construed as including “the dead, great and small, standing before the throne” that are “judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books” (verse 12), I am inclined to believe that there’s an element of hope and glorification for at least many of them, since the only ones hurled into the lake of fire are those “not found written in the book of life” (verse 15). If this is so, Revelation 20 is simply teaching that the first resurrection would consist of the then-imminent glorification of martyrs of 6:10ff and the two witnesses of chapter 11, and that it would be followed, at the end of a one-thousand year period (a possible allusion of Virgil’s Aeneid, as the time after which a soul revives), by the resurrection of “the rest of the dead,” presumably Old Testament and Gentile saints of previous eras.