The First Resurrection Explained

Before the architecture and the structure can be surveyed, the thing itself must be defined. What is the first resurrection? Five statements of its nature, each anchored to the text, fix the definition.

IT IS BODILY

The first resurrection is not the survival of the soul, the immortality of influence, or a metaphor of renewal. It is the standing up of bodies out of graves.

The proof-texts admit no other reading. The graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose (Matthew 27:52) — sōmata, bodies. Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body (Philippians 3:21). He shall quicken your mortal bodies (Romans 8:11) — the mortal thing itself, not a substitute for it. And the pattern of the whole is the risen Christ, who said handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have (Luke 24:39).

Job fixed the nature of it in the oldest book of the canon: yet in my flesh shall I see God: whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another (Job 19:26-27). The same I, the same eyes. Identity persists; a copy is not a resurrection.

IT IS SELECTIVE

The first resurrection does not raise all the dead. It raises a defined company out from among the rest, and every text that touches it carries the partitive mark.

The dead in Christ shall rise first (1 Thessalonians 4:16) — in Christ is the boundary of the company. They that are Christ's at his coming (1 Corinthians 15:23). They which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead (Luke 20:35). The resurrection of the just (Luke 14:14). And the exclusion is stated as plainly as the inclusion: the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished (Revelation 20:5).

IT IS PRIOR

First — prōtē — is a word of sequence, and the sequence is a thousand years long. The first resurrection is separated from the second by the entire Millennium, so that the two can never be confused, conflated, or collapsed. God has interposed ten centuries between a rising unto life and a rising unto judgment precisely so that no theology could merge them without doing violence to a number.

IT IS A REVERSAL AND A REWARD

Every member of the first resurrection rises into vindication. The company of Revelation 20:4 is composed of the enthroned, the beheaded, and the refusers of the mark — the world's losers, by the world's ledger — and they live and reign with Christ a thousand years over the order that condemned them. The first resurrection is heaven's appellate ruling on every unjust verdict ever rendered against the saints, as the resurrection of Christ was the reversal of the Sanhedrin's.

And it carries wages. Thou shalt be recompensed at the resurrection of the just (Luke 14:14). Kingdom accounting settles at the first resurrection; it is a payday as well as a morning.

IT IS IRREVERSIBLE

Neither can they die any more (Luke 20:36). Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him (Romans 6:9) — and the members share the immunity of the Head: on such the second death hath no power (Revelation 20:6).