 You're listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit nakedbiblepodcast.com and click on the support link in the upper right-hand corner. If you're new to the podcast and Dr. Heiser's approach to the Bible, click on newstarthere at nakedbiblepodcast.com. Welcome to the Naked Bible Podcast, episode 88. What is the spirit of your body? Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 15. I'm your layman, Trace Strickland. He's the scholar, Dr. Michael Heiser. Hey, Mike, how you doing this week? Very good. Very good. Did you have a good week? I did, and you? Busy. Yeah, good week. Just a lot to do, as usual, but that's a good thing, so I can't complain about it. I'm never bored. What's the spirit of your body, Paul's talking about? Yeah, this is kind of an odd sort of topic. I think people will find it interesting because of its connections back into the Old Testament. When we think of spiritual body, we probably think of something like a disembodied spirit form, even though I use the word disembodied there, but when we see the word spirit or spirit body or spiritual body, we don't think of something corporeal like you could touch, but that's actually what Paul is getting at. We're going to go through a lot of source references for this topic because there are roots to this in both the Old Testament, again, to create that Jewish context, that Israelite Hebrew Bible context for this, and then also in Paul's own day on the Gentile side, the Greco-Roman side, there is actually a considerable amount of literature in terms of ancient texts, where writers talk about, for lack of a better way of putting it, what the gods are made of, because they appear in bodily form and have really cool hair or really big muscles or whatever it is, but they're made of something. A lot of their terminology overlaps with what Paul is using, but again, within the biblical context, what Paul is saying is very consistent with something specific in the Old Testament that's kind of cool and I think has some real theological significance to it. So let's just jump into it to sort of set up the topic in Paul's day, Gentiles, again, Greco-Roman culture there, and Jews both believe that gods had bodies. Now, we've talked about this a lot before, again, unseen realm, talk a little bit about it. I've given other lectures alluded to things in podcast episodes about the fact that, hey, even the God of the Old Testament is embodied in certain passages. So that wasn't a new concept, not strange at all to their ear, but when ancient people are thinking of that, they're not thinking of bodies made of flesh and blood. They're also not thinking that the gods were just only spirits. They were certainly spirit beings, but when they interacted with people on earth, they took form, they took physical form. It wasn't flesh and blood, it was something else. They were made of something superior to flesh and blood, had different properties to it. So both Gentiles and Jews had, again, these conceptual categories for embodied deities, divine beings that were also corporeal in some sense, or could do that at will. That was just, again, one of their attributes, one of their properties. Paul's teaching in 1 Corinthians 15 and a few other places points, again, to his belief. It draws on his belief about embodied deity. Let's just put it that way. But it does more than that. It also points to his belief that Christians would one day share that stuff that gods are made of. They would share that corporeal form that Yahweh took upon himself back in Genesis 18 or Ezekiel 1, or God has depicted as a man. We're going to be looking at Ezekiel 1 more closely. That Christians would have that. And that stuff is also the stuff that Christ's resurrection body was made of. So at some point, Christians are going to put on that stuff, that that is what we're going to be. They would have the same sort of body. So in other words, in the resurrection, the resurrection, the final day, the final form of the kingdom. It's not just going to be a bunch of spirits floating around or anything like that. There's going to be, again, glorified believers who are going to have bodies that share the same stuff as the resurrected Christ's body, and even as of God himself, when God chose to be embodied in the Old Testament. It would be incorruptible, but it would be corporeal in some sense as well. Now, at times during the episode, I'll try to remember to telegraph this specifically, I'm going to be quoting from what I think is probably the best book on this subject. It's a recent scholarly work. The dissertation is not available, or else I would have included it in the Bibliography, the Divine Council Bibliography. That is not available in PDF, so we really only have the book, and the book's expensive. The book is called, it's by a guy named M. David Litwa, that's L-I-T-W-A, and the book is called We Are Being Transformed. The subtitle is Deification in Paul's Soteriology. And for those not familiar with the term soteriology, that's Paul's Doctrine of Salvation. So the Doctrine of Salvation goes from conversion all the way up to glorification in traditional theology classes. And so Litwa's book is, again, about the whole, not the whole scope, but specifically the deification element, the glorification element. And he has a full chapter on the bodies of gods in both Jewish texts, Greco-Roman texts. And he has a few other chapters that sort of build off that one. So he probably devotes 50, 60, 70 pages to this spiritual body concept, which is more than I've seen anyone else do. And again, this was published in 2012, so it's very current with the literature as well. So I would recommend it. Again, it's pricey, and I don't really have a way to get you the dissertation that this was based on. Let me just take a look here, because I think it is actually the published version of a dissertation. Well, it's actually, it's just a monograph. So it's something he's been working on for a while. So that would explain why it's not the dissertation database. But again, if you want the book, you're going to have to get the book. And it's the best thing on the topic, but it's pricey. Again, I'll be honest with you. So let's talk a little bit about Paul in context, and we'll begin with the Greco-Roman idea that's sort of the Gentile context. Then I'm going to start there and then go to the Old Testament, Israelite thinking on this. Again, in antiquity, in the Greco-Roman religions, Greco-Roman thinking that their gods would have bodies would not have been an unusual thought. It's something they would have been accustomed to. There are a number of passages that really almost any deity figure you could pluck out of Greco-Roman classical material is going to have some sort of physical description. Aphrodite, for instance, is said to have been born from the immortal flesh or skin of Uranus. Uranus is the Greek word for the heavens, heavenly one. Again, it's a deity name in Hesiod, in his Theogony and other Greek literature, but Aphrodite is born from this immortal flesh, quote unquote, immortal flesh. Gods could get wounded. They couldn't did bleed if they were in battle or wounded, but their blood wasn't blood, it wasn't human blood. It was something called Ikor, which was described as immortal blood. Again, it's something different. Gods just have these physical properties. They could be depicted, again, in physical form often were, and that was because they were thought to actually have some sort of embodiment, some sort of corporeality, particularly, and especially when they were interacting in human affairs with humans, with people. Now, on the Israelite side, again, we've talked about this at length, the idea of divine embodiment. I've referenced, for instance, Benjamin Somer's book called The Bodies of God, where this is the book that I think is especially important because he shows that in Israelite thinking and in wider ancient Near Eastern thinking, the gods could exist in more than one form simultaneously. This is Benjamin Somer. He teaches the Jewish Theological Seminary. He's a Jew, and he'll say things directly explicitly in his book like, hey, that Christian idea of a trinity. Yeah, the Hebrew Bible can certainly accommodate that. Frankly, the wider ancient Near Eastern world knows of this concept as well. Now, the words Somer will use to describe it is what we would call in Christian theology, modalism, which isn't really what, it's not fully what Trinitarianism is about. But again, we can excuse Somer for that because he's a Jew, and these are the words he prefers to use. But the idea that the gods could, again, be embodied, Somer's big on that. He has lots of evidence for it, both in the Hebrew Bible and outside the ancient Near Eastern religions. And the gods who are embodied can be simultaneously embodied somewhere else as someone else or something else, simultaneous to this other thing over here. Again, it's more awkward to put it that way, but that's more in keeping with what we think about as Christians as Orthodox Trinitarianism. But Somer's book is very useful for that. Now, Somer, and again, Litwah, the book that we're referencing mostly today, sort of zero in at certain points on Ezekiel chapter one. So that's where we're going to go. If you're following along, you could go to Ezekiel one, and specifically, let's start in verse 22. And of course, this is the famous, you know, weird cherubim thrown vision that Ezekiel has at the beginning of the book. And part of it reads like this, this is beginning in verse 22, over the heads of the living creatures. Of course, the living creatures we find out from chapter 10 are cherubim, the four cherubim with the faces and all that. Over the heads of the living creatures, there was the likeness of an expanse shining like awe-inspiring crystals spread out above their heads. And under the expanse, their wings were stretched out straight, one toward another. Each creature had two wings covering its body. And when they went, they heard the sound of their wings like the sound of many waters, like the sound of the Almighty, a sound of the tumult, like the sound of an army. When they stood still, they let down their wings. In verse 25, and there came a voice from above the expanse, over their heads, when they stood still, they let down their wings. And above the expanse, over their heads, there was the likeness of a throne. In appearance like sapphire and seated above the likeness of a throne was a likeness with a human appearance, the form of a man. And upward, from what they had, from what had the appearance of his waist, I saw as it were gleaming metal, like the appearance of fire enclosed all around. Downward, from what had the appearance of his waist was the appearance of fire, and there was brightness all around him. Like the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud in the day of the rain, so was the appearance of the brightness all around. I catch this line, such was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. Okay, that's from Ezekiel 1. Now this glory idea is important, because if you followed what I just read there, Ezekiel calls the figure, the human figure seated on the throne, he calls him the glory of the Lord. And Ezekiel actually uses that phrase, glory of the Lord, and also uses glory of the God of Israel in Ezekiel 9.3. So the glory, the glory is not just a cloud in the Old Testament. That's how we think of it. We think of the glory cloud, the Shekinah glory cloud. That is not always the way the glory of the Lord is described. Sometimes the glory of the Lord is a man, is a human figure, human form. Right here in Ezekiel 1, then of course there's other places too. So the glory is a human figure seated on the throne. The glory has form. It's not just a light, and it's not just a formless spirit. It has form. Ezekiel can tell looking at it that it's a man. It has human bodily features. Okay? Now, to make the point in a different way, if you go to Ezekiel 10.20 and compare that with Ezekiel 1.22 and 28, in Ezekiel 1, the passage we just read, the cherubim are under the quote, glory of the Lord. If you go to Ezekiel 10.20, the cherubim are said to be under the God of Israel. So again, the glory and the God of Israel are the same, and they have bodily form there in body. So the glory isn't just light. It's not just a cloud. In the Old Testament, the glory of the Lord can speak of a bodily form. And that's going to be backdrop to what Paul talks about, because Paul is not going to just use the phrase spiritual body. He's also going to use phrases like heavenly man. And he's also going to use the word glory to describe this body in his own writings. So there's going to be a lot of Old Testament precedent for what we talk about in terms of what Paul was thinking here. There's also, again, broader Greco-Roman Gentile precedent for this as well, that gods can indeed have corporeal form. They can have bodily form and actually be bodily. They are made of stuff when they interact with people. So that's, again, the setup. Now, I want to go to Litwa's book here specifically on page 126. And I'm going to read an excerpt here about some of the passages that Paul, where Paul actually references the glory. Now, in light of what I just talked about, in light of what we just explained, I think you're going to find some familiar passages from Paul that sort of take on new meaning. If you pardon the pun, they take on a different shape. You know, just listen to what Litwa says here. He says, turning to Paul, we note the close relationship between Yahweh's glory, his glory body, and the kind of body Paul attributes to Christ. According to Paul, Christ has, quote, a body of glory, soma tas dogzis in Philippians 321. So he actually says Christ has a body of glory. The glory here is probably a genitive of content or definition. In other words, the body constituted by glory, the body that is made up of glory. This is the body which Christ gained in his resurrection when he was raised by the, quote, glory of the Father. Again, Paul actually says that in Romans 6. Romans 6 verse 4, we have this phrase, okay, that he was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father. Accordingly, in 1 Corinthians, Christ is called, I'm reading Litwa again here, Christ is called the Lord of glory. When believers, quote, behold the glory of the Lord in 2 Corinthians 318, they appear to be beholding Christ himself, who is the image of God. 2 Corinthians 4, 4, Colossians 1, 15. Now, this is me now. Now, we've talked about divine imaging a lot being functional, but we've also talked about both in Unseen Realm and again, other podcasts and whatnot, lectures I've given, that humans not only were created as the image to be the representation of God, but humans actually are sort of the stand-in. They are to understand why I use this term. They are the idol of Yahweh. They are the physical representation as well of the God of Israel. This is why in Old Testament theology idolatry was forbidden. God says, don't make an image of anything that you see in heaven and earth and all that, because I'm different from everything else. I'm unlike everything else. Well, that was part of the issue. We brought this up a few places in Leviticus too. Part of the rationale to not allowing an image to be created to worship is that only Yahweh himself deserves worship, but part of the rationale is that we already have an image of God. We already have something physical that represents God, and that's humanity. It's us. This idea harkens back to Christ. Not only was Christ the perfect representative of God, he also is the representation of God in the most literal sense possible in New Testament theology. Why? Because of the incarnation. When Paul, again, returning back to Litwa, we have, when believers behold the glory of the Lord, 2 Corinthians 3, 18, they appear to be beholding Christ himself, who is the image of God. If Moses could not see the face of God, again, that's for that famous passage, Christians can see the glory of God in the face of Christ. Paul actually uses that phrase too. In 2 Corinthians, again, 4, we have here the reference to the light of the Gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. That's verse 4. Then in verse 6, for God said, let light shine out of darkness. The God who said, let light shine out of darkness has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Now, of course, in Hebrew, the face is panim. It refers to the presence, being in the presence of someone else, not necessarily the thing that is supported by your neck and all that kind of stuff. It's not necessarily to be over-literalized anatomically. The idea is the word was made flesh. God was made flesh. He lived and walked here on the earth, and it was Jesus Christ. You have beheld the glory of God when you looked at this person. It's not that in terms of visible attractiveness or anything like that. The idea is that God was embodied, and in this case, it was even more than the embodiment that we know from the Old Testament. In this case, we have incarnation. After the resurrection, we still have God embodied. The nature of the body is different. Again, it's this corporeal stuff that transcends human flesh and blood. It's something, but it's different. It's corporeal, but it has different properties. What Lit was saying here, I'll just finish with this one sentence he has. This sort of language indicates that Paul understood the glory language of Exodus and Ezekiel to refer to a visible, luminous, divine corporeality, and attributed this corporeality to Christ, who exists. Now, he's going to quote in Philippians 2.6, who exists, quote, in the form of God. Again, very familiar passages there using glory and form and even face and presence, but again, we tend to abstract these things only. It's not that they don't have a higher, more abstract meaning conceptually because they do, but what Lit was arguing for based upon the Old Testament, again, where the glory has bodily form, bodily form, anthropomorphic bodily form. He's saying his argument is, look, when we read these passages in the New Testament, we need to be thinking not only of the abstract concepts they convey, but that God came to man corporeally. Whatever that was, whatever that stuff was, it was different from and transcendent from and superior to the form we have now. It's this post-resurrection stuff, post-resurrection corporeality embodiment, and that is what we are going to inherit. Lit was argument is, in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul is saying, that stuff, we are going to inherit that. That is the kind of body that we are going to have. Now, again, there's more to this as you can well imagine. If I go over to, let's say, just another section here in Lit, page 127, he writes, if glory is a way of referring to Christ's divine corporeality, how is it related to Christ as, quote, there's another description of Jesus, quote, the life-giving Numa, or the life-making Numa, the life-giving spirit. That's also a reference to Jesus. And by the way, there are New Testament scholars that love to take this verse and deny the bodily resurrection. That would be totally contrary to the ancient mind. What we have here is we have the embodied Jesus post-resurrection. It's not just a spirit. It's not like the Gnostics were saying, the spirit of the Logos is floating around up there and this guy's still on the cross. That isn't it. It's not just spirit. It's not formless spirit in mind. It's flesh transcendent. It's flesh made into something superior to normal flesh. Anyway, Litva writes, if glory is a way of referring to Christ's divine corporeality, how is it related to Christ as the life-making Numa? Numa is the word for spirit, the life-giving spirit. Should we also conceive of the pneumatic Christ, the spirit Christ, so to speak, in corporeal terms? Litva says, there's some reason to think that this life-making spirit is a reference to Christ's physical constitution. This is because those conformed to the pneumatic Christ, and he's quoting here 1 Corinthians 1549. I want to pick up that verse here, so let me go to 1 Corinthians 15 and read that to you so you know where it's coming from. 1 Corinthians 1549. Let's go back up to 48. 47. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust. The second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust. And as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. Verse 49, just as we have born, we have carried the image of the man of dust. This is what we're carrying around. We shall also bear the image of the man of heaven. Okay, so what Lit was saying is, you know, this whole thing about Jesus having become a life-giving spirit, a life-giving enuma, elsewhere, the same person at the same time, again, in post-resurrection, is referred to again as something that has human bodily form. So his argument is there's some reason to think that the life-giving enuma is a reference to Christ's physical constitution. This is because those conformed to the pneumatic Christ are said to inherit a pneumatic body. And he quotes references there, 1 Corinthians 1544, which says, talking about the body we have now being sown in dishonor, it's going to be raised in glory, it's sown in weakness, it's going to be raised in power, verse 44. Our body is now our sown in natural body, but it is raised as a spiritual body. So it's not a spiritual spirit. Okay, it's a spiritual body. And of course, this is the focus point of our whole episode here. And Litwa says, it appears then that Christians become like Christ by conforming to his heavenly body. So in other words, becoming like Christ in an eschatological sense is not just, oh, someday when we're in heaven, we won't sin anymore. You know, we won't react negatively, we won't have an impulse of rebellion. You know, and by the way, this is the answer for, hey, you know, if, you know, how about in all these angels, you know, they had free will and they were by, they came to earth and they were, hey, they were angels, but yet they sinned, you know, and like, you know, we're going to, we're going to inherit all that. So like in heaven, you know, are we going to sin? You know, no, the answer is no, because we are going to be conformed. We're going to be imprints. We're going to be, again, to use a dumb word, clones. We're going to be made of that stuff that Jesus is made of and not only made of that, but also this idea of being conformed to the image. We're going to become so like him that we behave and react like him. Okay, we are, we are Christians in the truest sense that we are little Christs. Okay, and it's not that we have the same nature. It's not that we're eternal beings. We're not. We were created. It's not that we are, we are fully what God is or even fully what Christ is. The idea is that we will be so like him. We will be so conformed to the image that not only does it refer to inner impulses and again, these abstract ideas we won't sin, but what, what, you know, let was argument what Paul is saying is that, look, all this language about being conformed to Christ, you have to include in it that we are conformed to his heavenly body as well. And he goes on, he says, this is explicitly stated in Philippians 321, quote, he will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to his body of glory. And again, look, look at the words. The glory in the Old Testament in certain texts has bodily human form. So I'm going to read that again. Philippians 321, he will, you know, God will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to his body of glory. Litwa says, what we learn in 1st Corinthians 1545 is that Christ's body is not only a body of glory, but also a body of Numa. So this idea of a spirit body is not a spirit spirit. It's not formless. It's not energy. It's not light. It actually is some corporeal stuff like Jesus had post resurrection. Again, it's a hard concept for us to wrap our minds around. But what the argument is here is that don't be misled by the terminology spirit body, as though it lacks definite form and shape and constitution. Again, what Paul is getting at, based upon, again, the embodiment language for the glory of God back in the Old Testament is that we're going to have bodies. But our bodies are going to be like the way God was embodied, whatever that stuff was, and the way Christ was embodied after the resurrection, whatever that stuff was. It's corporeal, but it's not what we have now. It's different. It's superior. It's transcendent. It has a whole set of different properties as opposed to what we have now. We're going to put off what we have now, the body of the dust that returns to dust that is corruptible, and we're going to put on this new body and this different kind of flesh. To summarize where we are at to this point, think about the chain of thought here. Paul talks about the resurrected Christ being a life-giving spirit. But he also talks about Christ having a heavenly body, and he also talks about him having or being the glory, having a body of glory, like the glory of the Lord. All of these terms, again, are complementary. They are synonymous in that respect. Paul is using different terms, not to describe different bodies that Jesus, like a change of clothes, you know, Jesus, you know, he wears this one one day and that one another day. No. All of these phrases are describing essentially the same thing. It is a post-resurrection corporeality. That's what it is. So the believer, again, the believer's conformity to the image of the heavenly man, to use Paul's terminology, who is Numa and who also is glory, that our conformity that involves receiving and becoming the same kind of body. And again, that's made explicit in Philippians 321. So if we take, again, Philippians 321 at face value, what it says is that Christ's resurrection body is, again, this glorious body that we saw back in the Old Testament. That's what that stuff is. And that's what we're going to inherit. So we can't think of Numa just as formless spirit. Now, the Corinthians, of course, and other people asked, well, can we talk about what sort of nature of stuff that that is? And we get that obviously in 1 Corinthians 15, throughout the whole passage, beginning in 35, Paul writes, but someone will ask, how are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come? You foolish persons, Paul says. What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or some other grain, in Paul using an agrarian analogy. But God gives it a body as he has chosen and to each kind of seed its own body for not all flesh is the same. But there's one kind for humans, another for animals, another for birds, another for fish. So Paul's saying, look, you know, lots of things are embodied, you know, but there's different kinds of embodiment, human, humanity, animal kingdom, you know, plants, all this kind of stuff. It's not just, again, invisible, formless spirit. Things are embodied. Verse 40, there are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, Paul says, but the glory of the heavenly is of one kind and the glory of the earthly is another. There is one glory, the sun, another glory, the moon, another glory, the stars, for star differs from star in glory. So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable. What we have now, what God's given to us now is perishable, but what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor. It is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness. It is raised in power. It is sown in natural body, but it is raised in a spiritual body or a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there's also a spiritual body. It's just a different kind of embodiment is what he's saying. You don't go from a body to a non-body when you're in heaven. You go from one kind of embodiment to another kind of embodiment is what Paul is saying. So even spirit beings who are, you know, dead now have some kind of embodiment. And this is the way that believers, dead believers or even dead unbelievers are described. They're described in embodiment terms. Transfiguration, the three inner circle disciples see Moses and Elijah. Okay, well, how do they know they are? They're not spirits. They're not just wisps of smoke or something. They have embodiment. They're different kinds of embodiment. As Paul's point here in 1 Corinthians 15, you keep going, thus it is written, the first man Adam became a living being. The last Adam became a life-giving Numa, a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the natural. And then the spiritual. You get the natural body first, and you get the spiritual body. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust. The second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust. And as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of man of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven. We're going to trade in one form of embodiment for another form of embodiment. Again, it's tough for us to wrap our minds around that, but this is actually what Paul's saying. So I want to look at another thing I think that has here is helpful. Just to summarize things. He says, Paul characterizes the pneumatic body, this is page 129, by incorruptibility, glory, and power. It's 1 Corinthians 15, 42, and 43. All of these are divine qualities. It is also conformed to Christ, who is both a life-making spirit, and he's also from heaven. The nature of the spirit body is heavenly. In verse 48, it is not Paul adds made up of flesh and blood. I mean, Paul actually said it's not made of flesh and blood. The constituents of the present bodily life. Okay, that's verses 48 and 50. This remark is especially striking. It has troubled many a church father, oh, Litwa says. Most ancients admitted that all bodily life on earth is constituted by flesh, by which it was meant not only skin, but bones, arteries, muscle, nerves, and all the various tissues and organs that make life possible on this planet. Flesh is the stuff of terrestrial life. Mortals are those that have blood in their veins, and this blood is conceived of as being produced by their eating of green. That was a quote from another scholar summarizing this back to Litwa. He says, to exist in a body without flesh is not to be human in the way the ancients normally conceived of. In other words, the ancients were so tied into this thinking that if you had a discussion with them about disembodiment, there's no embodiment at all. Again, you're just a wisp of something or a light rays or something. They would say, well, you're no longer human then. You can't be human. You have to have some kind of embodiment, whether it's the embodiment of this terrestrial life or some other embodiment. Humans have to have bodies no matter where they are. What stage of life or death? You just have to have embodiment again. It's something we often don't really think about those things, at least consciously. But if you think about the way you think about departed loved ones, if they're with the Lord, you think about them as they look. You think about them doing things. You think about them interacting with the Lord or with other people who've gone on before them. All of that takes a body. We're part of this thinking, even though we don't really sit down and mull it over. But when we think about these things, we actually still do think of them in embodiment terms. That's Litva's point. It's Paul's point. This is the way it is. It's the way we think. It's the way it is. It's the way all the ancients thought. Again, Paul's just borrowing this language and, of course, upping the ante when he links it back to the glory, the embodied glory that God had in that corporeal form. Again, these are hard things to, again, wrap our minds around. But they are actually kind of important for understanding what Paul is trying to process, what Paul is thinking. Litva adds, to continue, if the pneumatic body is a body made up of Pneuma, question arises, well, what in the physics of Paul's day was that? What was Pneuma? Again, he goes back into the Stoic philosophers. There were long discussions of what this stuff was made of. In other words, how do we describe this stuff? How is it different from the flesh that normal humans have? He goes through a whole listing of references and whatnot to people like Cicero who were talking about what this was. There was a lot of speculation naturally about it, but the larger point is that Paul, again, is going to be familiar with a lot of this vocabulary, a lot of this, again, sort of thinking. Now, to take it back in a Jewish direction, another little excerpt here from Litva, he writes, Stoic beliefs seem to have found their way into first century Judaism. According to Essene belief, as it was reported by Josephus, souls emanate from the finest ethers. This is the quote, when released from the flesh, these ether souls are thus naturally born upward. When counseling his comrades, Josephus apparently reports his own view about souls. They are immortal, and they can be called a portion of God. In other words, they share in this corporeality. In a speech of Titus, which likely presents Josephus' own views, the historian asks, for what brave man knows not that souls released from the flesh by the sword on the battlefield are hospitably welcomed by that purest of elements, the ether, and placed among the stars. Again, in this star language, I don't want to rabbit trail too much, but this thing about, and we even read it in Paul, when he talks about the glory of the sun, the glory of the stars, being different than other glories and other bodies. If you remember, back to the interview with David Burnett, this is part of glorification thinking more broadly in the Jewish world that the descendants of Abraham, that's believers in New Testament language, according to Galatians 3. If you're Christ, you're Abraham's seed, believers will become like the stars. That doesn't mean we turn into a rock and we float around and twinkle. What that actually means, again, if you tie that to Paul's language here in 1 Corinthians, and Paul brings it up again, he actually references the glory of the stars in verse 41. What it means is, we become divine. It's deification language, it's divinization language, it's glorification language. Whatever term you like, scholars use them all. It's theosis. It's becoming divine. And what that means in turn is that we get new embodiment. And that embodiment is the stuff of which the gods are made, or the stuff that God was made of when he interacts with humans. Again, this glory body that we see referenced in Ezekiel 1 and in Exodus. Hey, the angel of the Lord, that was Yahweh embodied. That guy was made of something. That's the idea. Whatever he was made of, that's what the guy sitting on the throne in Ezekiel 1, that's what he was made of, and that's what Jesus' resurrection body was made of. And that's what we will be made of. Again, you have to follow the logic chain, connecting all these ideas and all these passages again to get this flavor of divinization when it comes to Paul's, quote, spirit body talk. Again, it doesn't really, we can't, our propensity here because we're moderns as well. Hey, I'd like a DNA sample. I want to know how many chromosomes that has. I want to know what the genetic material looks like, what the gene sequences are, and all that kind of stuff. Again, these are modern scientific concepts that nobody is aware of and nobody's thinking about when they write this stuff. What they're able to communicate is the notion that after death, especially again as believers, but after death, we don't just sort of become electricity. We don't just sort of become formless, substance-less entities. We are embodied in a new way and the people living in Jesus' day who actually saw and touched his resurrected body know that our future embodiment is going to be physical and corporeal and whatever that body was, that's the one we're going to get. That much they could communicate and that again was not a revolutionary idea in principle. Again, Paul ups the ante like biblical writers do so often. They'll take something that is conceptually familiar to their readers, both Jew and Gentile in this case. If they're Jews, again, the startling part is that he links it back to the glory, the embodied glory, and he links that to Jesus. It's another one of these backdoor references, backdoor reminders that, hey, Jesus was Yahweh here in human form, incarnation. In fact, he still is because now he has the same kind of embodiment. There's still this connection so that hasn't been lost. Again, they're able to communicate these sorts of ideas, but it's really apples and oranges thinking for us to want a genetic sequencing. I bring that up because I get these questions about the sons of God and embodiment and Genesis 6 and all this sort of stuff. Well, how does that work? The answer is I don't know how it works and nobody else does either. The sub-answer to that is we're never told. What we are told is that the Nephilim and their descendants, the Anakim and their Ephraim, they're described as men. Why? Because that's what they look like. They're embodied. What else would you call them? You wouldn't call them plants. You wouldn't call them trees. You wouldn't call them filling the blank with an animal. They are human in form. They are embodied. They are corporeal. In their case, of course, they could die. They're actually closer to that kind of embodiment that is totally human than something like the post-resurrection appearance or what awaits the destiny of the believer. I don't know how it all works. All I can do is take the language that they describe that they use and say, well, here's why they would have used that term. Hey, don't forget, in Genesis 19, angels, Genesis 19-1, the two visitors to Simon and More are specifically called angels. They're also described as men in the same chapter. Why? Well, that's what they look like. Does that mean they're just human? Are they more than human? Are they like a different I don't know. They're angels. They're embodied. You have, again, offspring of the sons of God. They're divine beings, but they're also embodied. They're offspring. They're human, but they seem to be a little bit more, a little bit different than human. Well, I want the genetic sequence for that. We can trace the genetic code. Scripture knows nothing of this language, nothing of these concepts, nothing of this talk. Again, when it comes to the whole Nephilim bloodline thing, look, the point of having the Nephilim stories end with the line of Goliath. The messaging there is that this line is dead. It's gone. It's died out. It's not here anymore, because the cities of the Philistines was where the remnants of the Anakim flood after the conquest were told that, and then the story picks up with Goliath and his brothers, and they all die. They are all wiped out, mission accomplished, finally, during the time of David. So, to take 21st century technology and, again, try to analyze things there, that is not the message given to us in the text. The text does not inform us that there's, quote, unquote, genetic material floating around in our genes that are from the Nephilim. It knows nothing of that at all. So, that can't be intentionally telegraphed in the Bible. All that we're given is the language of embodiment, pure and simple, both in terms of the dark side, in terms of, again, the resurrection body, in terms of the bodies, we'll get just, that's where the scriptural road ends. We will be embodied. It'll be different than what we have now. In fact, it will be the body a body like Jesus had. So, the short answer is, what is the spiritual body? What is celestial flesh? What is this? It's the body Jesus had. What that means is it's being made of the same stuff as that body. I can't give you the genetic sequence. I can't talk in DNA terms about it, because the Scripture doesn't, as well. Just know that it speaks of embodiment and being conformed to the image of Christ for Paul. I think this is another big takeaway here, is that it's not just our character, it's not just our internal disposition, again, being what Jesus was, so that we don't rebel, we don't sin. And all that's true, but it's more than that. Being conformed to the image of Christ is language designed to inform us that you're going to get that body. You're going to get a body just like he had after the resurrection. So, in every way, you will be conformed to what he is in every way. You will have his inner disposition, you will have his body. You will be so like him that you will be again fit for this kind of existence in the presence of God in the afterlife. And again, we don't have to worry about all of these problems, both in terms of spiritual problems and in terms of the problems associated with the body of dust. We don't have to worry about either side of this in the afterlife in glory. Mike, as long as I don't have to do cardio, I'm good. You won't have to get your blood moving because you won't have any of that. Looking forward to that. It's the perfect prescription for laziness, is that what you're talking about? Yeah. All right, Mike. Well, that was a good one. I enjoyed that one. Well, good. Did you want to mention, we're going to switch gears here, did you want to mention about your Michigan trip that's coming up here? Yeah. Yeah, just a reminder to podcast listeners again that I will be in Hazel Park, Michigan from, I'm speaking on Saturday the 5th, the 5th of March in Hazel Park, Michigan, and also on the following Sunday morning as well. I'll be doing part of the service, or I guess I'll be the speaker in the service on the 6th. If you want to know what the location is, what the church is, you got to go to the website, just go to drmsh.com slash events or in the dropdown menu, the speaking schedule at the about tab, it'll drop down to speaking schedule. You can find the information there, but that is Hazel Park, Michigan. That's a suburb, I'm told, very part of the surroundings of Detroit. If you're in the area, try to make it over to one of those two things. I can tell you right now on the Sunday event, I'll probably have to leave right after the service to go catch a plane, but on Saturday, Saturday is a lot more flexible. If you can make either one, add that to your calendar and then introduce yourself. Mike, can you give us a preview of next week's topic, heavenly tablets? Boy, I don't want to get into too many specifics, but we're going to be discussing tablets and books, which ties into this idea of having a record by which individuals are judged. Again, all the familiar kinds of motifs that we're associated with that. Again, what I'm going to do next week is I'm going to go through again the second temple Jewish tradition, where it has its antecedents and where it's picked up in the New Testament to get a fuller picture of what would have been in the mind of the New Testament writers when they are talking about that sort of stuff. Again, there's a backstory to all of it. It's not just something that John made up when he was writing in the book of Revelation, for instance. It has a backstory. Then subsequent to that, the next one, we'll just go two episodes deep here. We're going to be talking about something related, but the whole phrase, the lake of fire prepared for the devil and his angels. Again, what the backdrop is to that. Not surprisingly, and some listeners probably already sense this, that it has something to do with the watchers in the abyss who were imprisoned after the Genesis 6 event, the whole Enochian way of laying that out, which of course, again, has deep Mesopotamian roots because if you've read Unseen Realm, you know that the offenders there, the Apkala, of course, became part of the underworld. But all of that stuff, again, all of that stuff contributes to or is lurking in the background of John's statement about the lake of fire being created for the devil and his angels. Those are the next two episodes, so it's sort of eschatological stuff without doing sort of the traditional end times eschatology thing, even though we'll be touching on some of that. But some of the more particular stuff about judgment and whatnot. Sounds good. Is there anything else you'd like to add? No, I think that's it. I just want to thank everybody for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. Thanks for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit www.nakedbibleblog.com. To learn more about Dr. Heizer's other websites and blogs, go to www.brmsh.com.