Paul and Jesus

The next step in Paul’s sequence is justification. Those that God has known, chosen, and called, who respond to the Announcement, are justified by grace. They are forgiven their sins and they receive this unmerited pardon through their faith that Jesus has died for their sins and has been raised from the dead for their justification. Paul expresses it like this: “Righteousness will be reckoned to us who believe in him that raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was put to death for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (Romans 4:24–25). Here we see clearly that Paul specifies that justification depends not only on the death of Jesus for sins, but also his resurrection from the dead.

As we have seen, for Paul, Jesus’ resurrection from the dead is not the resuscitation of his physical body, buried in a tomb, but his transformation to a life-giving Spirit-being, with a glorious spiritual body. It is this glorified heavenly Christ that Paul claims to have “seen,” and it is Jesus’ transformation, from a “man of dust” to a “man of heaven,” that guarantees the final step of salvation, the glorification of an entire new family of heavenly beings. Those who are known, chosen, called, and justified will finally be glorified.

When and how the final step of glorification takes place is fortunately a subject that Paul addresses in some detail in several places in his letters. Paul believes that he is living at the end of the age, very near the time when Christ will return from heaven. He expects to live to see Jesus appear visibly in the clouds, in the lower atmosphere, at which point he expects that he and the other chosen ones, including those who have died, will be instantly reclothed in their glorious new spiritual bodies. They will literally rise up into the air to meet him. He describes the scene in detail to the Thessalonians:

For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, shall not go ahead of those who have fallen asleep [i.e., died]. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, 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, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord. (1 Thessalonians 4:15–17)⁶

Paul says he received this scenario “by the word of the Lord,” which means it was part of the revelation he claims to have received directly from Jesus. What he doesn’t explain in this text, but elaborates fully elsewhere, is that the living and the dead will experience, simultaneously, a transforming immortalization with a glorious new spiritual body. He writes the Philippians:

But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will change our body of humiliation to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself. (Philippians 3:20–21)

This change is what Paul means when he says the chosen group is destined to “share the image of the likeness” of God’s Son (Romans 8:29). It can only be done by Christ, who has been given this unique creative power in his new role as vice-regent over the entire universe. Paul specifically tells the Corinthians that this transformation process is the mystery. He is again describing what will happen when Jesus appears in the clouds of heaven:

Behold! I tell you a mystery! We shall not all sleep [i.e., die before Jesus appears], but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the blink of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we [the living] will be changed. For this perishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality. (1 Corinthians 15:51–53)

Paul’s designation of Jesus as the “firstborn of many brothers” should not be taken as a reference to male gender (Romans 8:29). In Hebrew thinking the male phrase “sons of Israel,” like our English word “mankind,” often means the “children of Israel,” which is generic and includes men and women. In the same way Paul refers at one point to the cosmic revealing of the “sons of God,” referring to the glorification of this new God-family, but a few lines later he refers to them as the “children of God,” using generic language (Romans 8:19, 21). A more proper translation might be “offspring.” The author of the gospel of Luke has apparently picked up a bit of this from Paul when he explains Jesus’ teaching about the resurrection as involving neither male or female, but nonetheless “Sons of God, being sons of the resurrection” (Luke 20:34–36).⁷