The Expositor's Bible: The First Epistle to the CorinthiansDods, Marcus
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The First Epistle to the Corinthians
Dods, Marcus
Bible. Corinthians, 1st -- Commentaries
But the most comprehensive contrast between the two bodies is
expressed in the words, "It is sown a natural body; it is raised a
spiritual body." A natural body is that which is animated by a human
life and is fitted for this world. "The first man Adam was made a
living soul," or, as we should more naturally say, an animal. He was
made with a capacity for living; and because he was to live upon
earth, he had a body in which this life or soul was lodged. The
natural body is the body we receive at birth, and which is suited for
its own requirements of maintaining itself in life in this world into
which we are born. The soul, or animal life, of man is higher than
that of the other animals, it has richer endowments and capacities,
but it is also in many respects similar. Many men are quite content
with the merely animal life which this world upholds and furnishes.
They find enough to satisfy them in its pleasures, its work, its
affairs, its friendships; and for all these the natural body is
sufficient. The thoughtful man cannot indeed but look forward and ask
himself what is to become of this body. If he turns to Scripture for
light, he will probably be struck with the fact that it sheds no light
whatever on the future of the natural body. Those who are in Christ
enter into possession of a spiritual body, but there is no hint of any
more perfect body being prepared for those who are not in Christ.
The spiritual body, which is reserved for spiritual men, is a body in
which the upholding life is spiritual. The natural life of man both
forms to a human shape and upholds the natural body; the spiritual
body is similarly maintained by what is spiritual in man. It is the
soul, or natural life, of man which gives the body its appetites and
maintains it in efficiency; remove this soul, and the body is mere
dead matter. In like manner it is the spirit which maintains the
spiritual body; and by the spirit is meant that in man which can
delight in God and in goodness. The body we now have is miserable and
useless or happy and serviceable in proportion to its animal vitality,
in proportion to its power to assimilate to itself the nutriment this
physical world supplies. The spiritual body will be healthy or sickly
in proportion to the spiritual vitality that animates it; that is to
say, in proportion to the power of the individual spirit to delight in
God and find its life in Him and in what He lives for.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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