The Completion of the New Covenant: Christ’s First and Second Coming – Part One

First Corinthians 15:20–58. There are two comings of Christ to establish the new covenant. Both comings could be described as the coming of the redeemer to raise up the human race from where it has fallen. As the book of Hebrews says, Christ came the first time “at the end of the age to put away sin.” Some day he will come again “to save those who are eagerly waiting for him” (Hebrews 9:26–28). Each of his comings is a salvation and a redemption, a freeing from bondage and oppression. Each of his comings is a raising up of the human race and a giving of life.

What Christians will be given after the Second Coming is the same reality that they have after the first coming: justification, union with God, holiness, victory, and freedom. The pardon or freedom from condemnation we receive now is the same one we will have at the last day. We will be found “in him” with a righteousness or justification that comes through faith in him (Philippians 3:9). The new life we have now is the same life we will have at the last day. 

“When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.”

Colossians 3:4 

“We know that when he appears, we shall be like him.” 

1 John 3:2

Yet, as we have also seen, the life we will have after Christ’s Second Coming will not be simply the same as before. We already have the new covenant life, but we do not yet have it in its full extent. Here, due to fallenness and spiritual warfare, we toil and suffer for the kingdom. But at the Second Coming, everything will be different. The fullest New Testament presentation of the difference is in First Corinthians 15.

In that text, Paul is dealing with an opinion of some in the Corinthian church. They said there was no resurrection of the dead – such a thing was impossible. Paul’s response was that of course there is a resurrection of the dead. We know that Christ has been raised from the dead. That is central to the Gospel message that we have received. Many in fact have seen the risen Christ and talked with him. If Christ, who died for us, has been raised, there has to be a resurrection from the dead. Dead human beings can be raised to life, as we have seen happen with Christ.

Paul concludes his discussion of Christ’s Resurrection by saying to the Corinthian believers,

“If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most to be pitied.”

1 Corinthians 15:19

He was speaking about the Apostles, who had staked everything on the Resurrection of Christ, but what he says also applies to all Christians. As good as the Christian life here and now is, there is something much better to come, and those who have suffered for Christ and his work, especially those persecuted and martyred, will receive a blessing that will make up for all the earthly suffering.

Paul then goes on to give an overall picture of God’s plan and how the resurrection of the dead fits into that:

“… first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet [Psalm 110:1]. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.… When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things under him, that God may be everything to every one.”

1 Corinthians 15:20–28

As we have seen, the first human being, Adam, failed the test of obedience to God, and the result was death, the mortality of the whole human race. But Christ, the Son of God, became a human being, suffered, died, and rose in obedience to his Father, so that all those who believe in him might have eternal life. He is the first fruitsof the redeemed human race given as an offering to God, like the first sheaf, the beginning of the grain harvest at the feast of Pentecost. The full harvest, all the redeemed, will be given when he comes again.

What Christ made possible by his death and Resurrection and the establishment of the new covenant will be brought to completion after he comes again. At the end, Christ will destroy every rule and every authority and power, that is, the kingdom of Satan and his spiritual armies. When this fallen world accepts Christ’s authority, he will be able to deliver his kingdom to God the Father, with all rebellion and disobedience put away. God will then rule completely, being everything to every one.

Paul then responds to the underlying question: How are the dead raised? What kind of body will they have? He begins by using an analogy. We are familiar with seeds – hard, dry, and for all practical purposes dead, unable to move. A seed is buried like a dead body, but at a certain point something affects it, and it begins to grow into a plant. The plant does not look like the seed at all, but it is nonetheless the same being. Paul could have given the example of the caterpillar and the butterfly. The caterpillar goes into a cocoon and is inert, for all practical purposes dead. Then at a certain point it comes out and when it does, its body is dramatically different from the one it had before, yet it is the same being.

Paul’s conclusion is that there are various kinds of bodies and some are greater than others in “glory,” that is, ability to function and act effectively. Therefore, there can be a resurrected body that is immortal, and consequently different from the one we now have. But furthermore, a body that seems dead has within it the ability to change, to metamorphose, into another kind of body. Just because human beings are now dead, unable to move or change, does not mean they have to remain that way forever. Paul then moves on to say,

“So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, 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 a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual which is first but the physical, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven. I tell you this, brethren: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.” 

1 Corinthians 15:42–50

The analogy of the seed allows us to see what happens in the resurrection of the dead. Dead human beings do not just get brought back to life or resuscitated. Rather they are transformed or metamorphosed into human beings with a different sort of body. It is a body that is imperishable, more glorious, more powerful, and more spiritualized. As a result, they can live forever. 

But how does this come about? Paul’s account goes back to the situation at the beginning of the human race. As we saw, we are the descendants of Adam, and we inherited from him a human nature that was mortal and had to die. We also saw that Christ is the new Adam, the last Adam, or, as we might restate it, the Adam for the last times or the Adam who is in himself the completion or final version of the human race. Christians are joined to him, are incorporated into him, and so take on his nature or image. We have already to some extent taken on his image as a result of becoming a Christian and entering the new covenant. Now the change that was produced in the inner human being will reach to our body, the outer human being (2 Corinthians 4:16; RSV: inner and outer nature). Just as he is now glorified in body, so will we be.

Our bodies will become spiritualized, not in the sense that we will become immaterial. There are no such things as immaterial bodies. Rather, the Spirit of God who now dwells in new covenant people will renew their bodies as well, so that they can function in a more spiritually capable way. As Paul puts it in his Letter to the Romans:

“If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit which dwells in you.”

Romans 8:11

We now have bodies that are merely physical. They are put together in the way the bodies of all the descendants of Adam are. In the resurrection of the dead, the Spirit who is already in those who belong to Christ will transform them and give them a new life. The resurrected Christ became a life-giving spirit and has already given us spiritual life, but then he will extend that life so it transforms our bodies as well.

There are some Christian teachers who take the view that the work of Christ restores us to the condition of Adam and Eve when they were created – human beings as God meant human beings to be. Paul, however, seems to be saying the work of Christ does that and more. It brings us to a more glorious, spiritual state than Adam and Eve had attained before the Fall, the state to which God had intended to bring the human race even from the very beginning.

Paul then gives another principle: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. By flesh and blood he probably is not referring to our human nature, but to our human nature as we now are in this fallen world. In our current state we could not survive in the full kingdom of God, the glorious heavenly kingdom. We need to be given an imperishable nature before we can be in such a glorious environment and survive.

Behind this is a truth we are all familiar with. If we take a seed from a cherry tree and plant it in Florida instead of Michigan, it may sprout but it will soon die. But how can this be when there is so much more warmth and light in Florida? The answer is simply that the cherry tree is not fitted for that climate any more than orange trees are fitted for Michigan. The cherry tree cannot take the Florida climate. In a similar way, our current bodies cannot take the climate of heaven. To live “in heaven,” we need to be metamorphosed or transfigured as Christ was so that we have glorified or spiritualized bodies.

In the process of getting married among Jews at the time of Christ, there were two chief steps. The first was “betrothal,” the solemn agreement or contract that the man and woman would be husband and wife. At this point, the two were married. Mary, for instance, was Joseph’s betrothed, but therefore his wife, his woman, and they could not be separated without a divorce, even though the marriage had not been consummated (Mt 1:18–25). The Jewish betrothal was not the same as our engagement, which is simply the promise to enter into marriage.

The second step occurred when the man “took” his woman, his bride, and they began to live together. This was described as the wedding or the marriage. The bride was supposed to be ceremonially purified beforehand and fittingly clothed; there was a feast to celebrate the event; and they became “one flesh” in sexual intercourse. The equivalent of betrothal in modern Western marriage occurs during the marriage ceremony when the couple commit themselves to one another, and the equivalent of the Jewish wedding occurs in the same ceremony when the bridegroom takes the bride from her family so he can bring her to his house where they then live together. The Jewish marriage in scriptural times contained only the second element of the modern Western marriage.

In the Old Testament, marriage was used as an analogical description or image to speak about the relationship of God and his people (e.g., Isaiah 54; 62; Jeremiah 3; 31; Ezekiel 16; 23) and, in the new covenant, of the Son of God and his people. The Church was betrothed to Christ after his First Coming and so married to him in the sense of being covenanted or committed to him (e.g., 2 Corinthians 11:2). But then, when he comes again to “take” his bride, there will be a marriage feast, and they will be fully united. It is this that the last chapters of Revelation describe.

The marriage of Christ was an analogical description or image, then, of Christ being united with his people. The bride was a corporate people, even at the point of betrothal (cf. 2 Corinthians 11:2). It is true that individual Christians need to convert and be baptized and at that point they too are united with Christ, but this happens in becoming part of his people. Almost always in Scripture, maybe always, the bride or the wife of God or Christ is a corporate body, not an individual—the people of Israel or the Christian church. This continues to be true in Revelation. The bride is the new Jerusalem, a city.

For contemporary readers, there is a more serious challenge to understanding the meaning of the marriage of Christ in the book of Revelation. Here it is clearly an image and is sometimes misinterpreted or over-interpreted. We live in a time when Christianity is being heavily influenced by a romantic and erotic culture. As a result, the marriage imagery is romanticized and often eroticized by many Christians. God (Jesus), they say referring to this image, is so much in love with people that he longs to unite each individual to himself.

But such an interpretation does not fit with the marriage image in Revelation. The bride of Christ in Revelation is a city, not an attractive young woman, or even an individual Christian. The bride is a city – men, women, and children, young and old alike, living together in the same place, surrounded by walls and gates (that is, bristling with fortifications) and clothed in righteous deeds (Revelation 19:8) – and now united to Christ. The special exegetical discussion that follows here discusses the marriage analogy more fully.

There is also a very important point about the use of the marriage analogy in Revelation that is often missed in the romantic interpretation of the image. The marriage of the lamb is yet to come and is an image of Christ bringing his people into a full relationship with himself. True, he had a relationship with them before, a covenant relationship. But the full relationship, the one that everything before was aiming at, will come when he takes his bride at the Second Coming. Then he will be fully united to his people. The meaning of this relationship is unfolded in the vision that follows the proclamation in Revelation 21:1–5.

Paul then concludes his presentation of the resurrection of the dead by describing the moment of great change:

“Lo! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:

‘Death is swallowed up in victory’ [Isaiah 25:8].
‘O death, where is your victory?
‘O death, where is your sting?’ [Hosea 13:14].

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” 

1 Corinthians 15:51–57

At the end of human history as we know it, the last trumpet will sound. This is the trumpet that announces the final judgment of God, the action by which he will change the human race for the better. He will do this by abolishing death, the death that was the lawful sentence on the human race because of the sin of Adam, repeated by his descendants, the human sin that stung and still stings human beings to death. Some new covenant people will not have died to this earthly life, but all of them, dead and living alike, will be transformed. They will be given a transformed human nature, one that can endure the climate of heaven, and that will allow them to live eternally.

The Second Coming of Christ, then, will begin the age to come, a new era, the last stage of God’s plan. It will inaugurate a new world, a world that will function in a very different way from the one we now experience. This we will now look at.

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This article, The Completion of the New Covenant: Christ’s First and Second Coming – Part 1, © 2017 by Stephen B. Clark is excerpted from Reading the Old Testament in the Light of the New: The Stages of God’s Plan, Chapter 11, published by Emmaus Road Publishing, Steubenville, Ohio, USA.

• The Completion of the New Covenant: Christ’s First & Second Coming – Part 1
• The Vision of the Completion of the New Covenant – Part 2
•  The Beginning and the End – Part 3

Top image credit: Christ transfigured in glory with Moses and Elijah, painting by Raphael, 1550, in the Vatican Museums, image from Wikipedia.org, in the Public Domain.