The degrees of happiness and glory that we shall enjoy in heaven will be in proportion to the measure of love and grace that we have when we enter eternal life. These, in turn, depend on the gift of God’s grace and our cooperation with it throughout our lives on earth. As we cooperate with God’s grace through deeds of love, we grow in divine life and the capacity to live that divine life in eternity.
In eternal life our body and soul will be brought to full perfection and, while remaining essentially the same body and soul we now possess, will be glorified in a way that we cannot fully grasp in this life. All vulnerability and imperfection will be removed, and each will have its own unique beauty and glory.
In his epistle to the Corinthians, Saint Paul describes the qualities of the body that will rise from the grave when Christ comes again:
What is sown in the earth is subject to decay, what rises is incorruptible. What is sown is ignoble, what rises is glorious. Weakness is sown, strength rises up. A natural body is put down and a spiritual body comes up. If there is a natural body, be sure there is also a spiritual body…The dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. This corruptible body must be clothed with incorruptibility, this mortal body with immortality. When the corruptible frame takes on incorruptibility and the mortal immortality, then will the saying of Scripture be fulfilled: “Death is swallowed up in victory."
In Christ,
Rev. Jeffery A. Fasching
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