We Believe: We Look for the Resurrection of the Dead
Every Sunday, Christians rise to confess the faith once delivered: “We believe in one God… We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ… We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.” The Nicene Creed moves with a steady rhythm of affirmations, statements about what God has done in history, and what he has promised to do for the world.
Then, near the end, the Creed shifts. We conclude not with another assertion, but with a tone of expectation. Now we proclaim what “we look for,” and the first thing out of our mouths is, “the resurrection of the dead.” This is not a throwaway line, nor a poetic way of saying “life after death.” From an outsider perspective, it may even seem downright creepy, but here we name the Christian hope in its most concrete and demanding form.
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The Resurrection is What We’re Looking For
At first glance, this final article of the Creed may sound redundant. Earlier, we confessed that Christ “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.” Why circle back around to this event?
- We already know that Jesus is coming to judge.
- We already know that this judgment includes both the living and the dead (Acts 10:42; 2 Timothy 4:1).
- What remains is the how.
How will Christ judge such a mixed multitude on that day? By what means will the dead stand before him at all? The Creed supplies the answer: Resurrection. A dramatic show of defiance to the powers of death.
Taking Death’s Curse Seriously
Do not treat death lightly, sentimentally, or evasively. Scripture speaks of it with sobering clarity. Death is “the wages of sin” (Romans 6:23), the consequence of humanity’s rebellion against God. In Adam, all sinned, and all died (Romans 5:12). This corruption is not merely external. It reaches into the marrow of our bones. “None is righteous, no, not one” (Romans 3:10–12).
Death is also an ending. It marks the collapse of the life God designed for humanity to enjoy in the garden, where embodied life and communion with God were not yet divided. Sin introduced the first ending, and with it a long chain of grief-filled conclusions. Human life, once meant to flourish without interruption, is now filled with strife and bounded by tragic finalities (Genesis 3:19). This state of affairs can not, will not remain. Christians may rightly celebrate the lives of the faithful departed, but we must not pretend that death itself is benign. Grief is not a failure of faith. It is an honest response to an enemy Scripture names plainly. “The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26).
Who Are the Dead?
When Christ returns to judge the living and the dead, “the dead” will include a staggering variety of people.
- The faithful departed.
- The unfaithful departed.
- The saints we admire.
- The enemies who wounded us.
- Our parents, spouses, children, and friends.
And, should the Lord tarry, the dead will include us. Saint Paul tells us that “the dead in Christ will rise first” (1 Thessalonians 4:16). So we might do well to discuss what this “rising” truly involves.
What We Mean by Resurrection
Resurrection was a disputed doctrine even in Jesus’ own day. The Sadducees denied it outright and tried to embarrass him on the subject, prompting Jesus’ rebuke: “You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God” (Matthew 22:29). He reminds them that God identified himself to Moses as “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob,” concluding, “He is not God of the dead, but of the living” (Matthew 22:32). Resurrection, then, is not a metaphor. It is a claim about God’s power to restore embodied life.
Not Like Lazarus
The raising of Lazarus offers a sign of something “like” what we mean. When Jesus arrives at the tomb, Lazarus has been dead for four days. Martha protests, “Lord, by this time there will be an odor” (John 11:39). The King James Version is more blunt, “He stinketh.”
We are told that “Jesus wept” (John 11:35), a genuine expression of grief before death’s cruelty. Yet he does not leave his friend in the grave. At his command, Lazarus emerges alive—and yet Lazarus would die again. His restoration was real, but temporary. He raised back into mortal life, not through it. His resurrection was a signpost, not the destination.
Christ the Firstfruits
The true pattern of resurrection is found in Christ himself.
If the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.
1 Corinthians 15:16-17
However, Christ arose.
In fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.
1 Corinthians 15:20
The metaphor matters. Firstfruits are not an exception. They are the beginning of the harvest. As death came through Adam, resurrection comes through Christ (1 Corinthians 15:21-22). Christ rises first. Then, at his coming, those who belong to him are raised for the harvest. The resurrection we celebrate on Easter was not an isolated miracle. It set in motion the work of renewal that Christ will complete on his second coming.
Our Resurrected Bodies: Raised Imperishable
Many in the ancient world found bodily resurrection implausible or offensive. Matter was often regarded as a hindrance to spiritual life. N.T. Wright confronts this idea in his book Surprised by Hope:
The roots of the misunderstanding go very deep, not least into the residual Platonism that has infected whole swaths of Christian thinking and has misled people into supposing that Christians are meant to devalue this present world and our present bodies and regard them as shabby or shameful.
N.T. Wright, Suprised By Hope, pg. 17
Saint Paul addresses the nature of the resurrected body in this way:
“What you sow does not come to life unless it dies” (1 Corinthians 15:36). The body that is buried is perishable, weak, and mortal. The body that is raised is imperishable, powerful, and immortal (1 Corinthians 15:42–44).
This is not the abandonment of the body, for as St. Paul later states, “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 15:50); he immediately adds that we are discarding embodiment. Instead, “we shall all be changed” (1 Corinthians 15:51) rather than being “resurrected” to an immaterial Platonic spirit, or to the moldering shells that were buried in our graves. God does not forget the bodies he has made but will instead honor them with a new kind of life. Not every atom is restored, but everything necessary for our true identity will be preserved. Resurrection affirms continuity with transformation.
This Embodied Life
If the embodied life we live now is vindicated, first by Christ’s incarnation and second by his resurrection, then so too are the embodied callings God has given us. While we wait between the Ascension of our Lord and the general resurrection of the dead, what we do with our bodies truly matters.
This means that embodied life in all its dimensions is caught up in redemption. Domestic life, political life, economic life, and the labor demanded of Adam after the fall are not set aside as spiritually irrelevant. They are the very arenas in which Christian obedience is worked out.
The gospel calls Christians, therefore, to live as citizens of the kingdom over which Christ now reigns, even as we seek the good and the just ordering of the earthly kingdoms in which God has providentially placed us. The way we raise our families matters. The way we order our common life matters. We must not allow ourselves to be shamed by a thin and misguided pietism that treats material concerns as distractions from true spirituality. Scripture does not call us to retreat from embodied responsibility, but to inhabit it faithfully, in hope of the resurrection that is to come.
Resurrection to Life or to Judgment
The resurrection is universal. Its outcome is not. When Christ returns, our renewed bodies will be filled with potential, either for everlasting joy or everlasting loss. We will look upon the Judge and see either the beloved Lord we followed or the King we refused. Those who are in Christ need not fear that day.
As N. T. Wright observes,
No: justification by faith is what happens in the present time, anticipating the verdict of the future day when God judges the world. It is God’s advance declaration that when someone believes the gospel, that person is already a member of his family no matter who their parents were, that their sins are forgiven because of Jesus’s death, and that on the future day, as Paul says, “there is now no condemnation” (Romans 8:1).
N.T. Wright, Surprised By Home, pg. 139
Comfort One Another with These Words
Saint Paul ends his message on resurrection to the Thessalonians not with speculation, but with consolation.
The dead in Christ will rise first… and so we will always be with the Lord. Therefore, encourage one another with these words.
Thessalonians 4:16–18
In that same spirit, I hope that this teaching will console you, and when you recite the Nicene Creed this Sunday, I pray you’ll remember what it is we truly “look for:”
- Not escape from the world, but its renewal.
- Not disembodied survival, but resurrected life.
- Not denial of death, but its defeat.
Most importantly, we look for the return of Christ, who makes all this possible. We do not know when the angel’s trumpet will sound, but we will be caught up in the air to greet him.
Image: Resurrection of the Righteous and Coronation of the Virgin by Francesco Bassano the Younger, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Digitally edited by Jacob Davis.
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