THE KING’S BUSINESS
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cried and “With what manner of body do they come?” “Thou foolish one (thou one without reason), that which thou thyself sowest is not quickened except it die.” In other words Paul’s answer is, “Your own experience ought to throw light upon that. You count yourself a reasoner, but you are displaying your own lack of reason. (Every rationalist and boastful skeptic is constantly doing the same.) You yourself are sowing seeds and they are dying in the ground, disintegrating and their particles going no one knows whither. Yet this death so far from being a hindrance to bod ily resurrection is the necessary prerequisite to resurrection. The seed can’t rise into a plant except it first dies as a seed (cf. John 12:24). You sow a naked grain of wheat; God clothes it with a new body as beautiful green wheat, then the ripening stalk and then the full waving heads of grain. You see resurrection out of death, constantly. So will it be with your body, a naked grain is sown, God will clothe it with a new and better body, a more beauti- ful body.” Paul tells us further that God forms this new hody “as it pleases Him,” that is, as it suits His infinite wisdom and love. What a beautiful body then, it will be, for God is a God of beauty. It is man’s folly and sin that has brought in deform ity and ugliness. — — O--------- A n A la b aste r Box S EVERAL years ago, I daily met a dea con of a certain church. One day h.e said to me : “A curious thing is occurring in our church ; we have found a $5 gold piece in the collection each Sunday for some time past. The curiosity of the dea cons has been aroused and we have set a watch to 'find out who it is that does this unusual thing.” Sometime afterward he told me they had discovered the identity of the giver. His name was a surprise to me, for he was a rather elderly man in ordinary circum stances, earning a salary. “When we charged him with it,” said my friend, “he ‘seemed somewhat abashed and said, T am
nothing very advanced or new *about it. It is as old as the corrupt party in the church in Corinth. Paul says further, that they should also, as a result of waking out of the drunken stupor of this false doc trine, keep from sinning. Paul gives his reason for his exhortation, namely, “Some have no knowledge of God.” The Greek word translated “no knowledge” (R. V.) is “agnosia” the root from which our term “agnostic” is derived. It means literally want of knowledge or ignorance. This ignorance of God was wilful and habitual,- just as most of our modern “agnosticism” is (John 7:17; 1 Peter 2:15). It was a “shame” to the Corinthian saints who boasted so much of their knowledge, that they should have among them those who had such absolute want of knowledge of God as to deny the resurrection of the dead (Matt. 20:29, see context. Acts 26:8). In all ages there are those who when $ome wondrous purpose of God is declared to them immediately wish to ask the phil osophy of it, "How will God do it?” The truly wise man recognizes that God is infi nite and that he, himself, is finite and that therefore God may have a thousand ways of doing a thing'when he cannot see one. The truly wise man never asks the “how” or “why” either of what God does or what God says He will do( He simply believes God’s own word (cf. Ez. 37:3) and lets it rest there. He is indeed a foolish man (no matter how wise he may dream he is) who measures God’s power by his own petty- intelligence and who will not believe what he cannot explain (Matt. 22:29-; 19:26). Many today will not believe in the resur rection of the body because they cannot understand how it can be that after the particles that now constitute the body, have been dissolved and gone, it may be into plant or tree or other bodies or gases, the body can be regathered and rise again. There were those 1800 or more years ago in Corinth who reasoned in precisely the same way. "How are the dead raised,” , they Monday, December 3 1 . 1 Corinthians 1 5 : 35 - 38 .
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