As believers, we do not possess the life that Jesus got when God raised him from among the dead as an inherent quality any more than we possess God’s righteousness as a property in our own nature. Just as in the midst of our sinfulness, we are righteous, so in the midst of our self-evident mortality, we are going to get the life God gave to Jesus. In
John 5:26, Jesus was “to have” that life that God has within himself, Jesus never had that kind of life before, he was to have it. In
1 John 1:1-5, Jesus indeed got that life, his disciples testify he got that life he was telling them he was going to get. As a result of our being sealed in Christ, we are what we are not. In ourselves, we are not righteous and not immortal, but in Christ, we are both righteous and immortal. The fact that the living saints will meet with Christ at the same time as the sleeping saints indicates that the latter have not yet been united with Christ in heaven. Paul was not concerned about a ‘state’ which exists between death and resurrection, but for a relationship that exists between the believer and Christ through death. This relationship of being with Christ is not interrupted by death, because the believer who sleeps in Christ has no awareness of the passing of time. Paul did not think the question of the status of the person between death and resurrection was a question that needed to be considered. The reason is that for Paul, those who die in Christ, their relationship with Christ is one of immediacy, because they have no awareness of the passing of time between their death and resurrection. Paul explains that both the sleeping and living believers will be united with Christ, not at death, but at his coming for his body of believers in this age of Grace. Paul never alluded to the conscious survival of the soul and its reattachment to the body at the resurrection, that is a notion totally foreign to Paul and to Scripture as a whole.
God’s Reconciliation of Man, read more about it at
http://godsreconciliation.blogspot.com/
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