If you’ve never heard of this concept before of the resurrection, it can be a little startling. We don’t become ghosts when we die means there’s very few people in heaven right now. So far it’s only Enoch, Moses, Elijah and a small handful of others who rose with Jesus the day He did. Enoch and Elijah were taken to heaven without having to die and Moses was resurrected. Jude 9 speaks of it and of course Moses and Elijah were both with Jesus when He was transfigured. The others were given a special resurrection early to illustrate what Jesus will do for His people when He returns again. Matthew 27:52, 53 speak of them.

The resurrection can be illustrated by a scene from the 1998 movie version of “Lost in Space” starring Matt LeBlanc of TV’s “Friends”. In this one particular scene the family is being attacked by spider-like alien creatures. They barely get back to their own ship alive leaving the robot to continue fending these creatures off. Then when the robot is overwhelmed Will, the youngest boy, steps into a special holographic chamber and takes direct control of the robot because he can fight the aliens better than the robot can. After a certain point though, things are still going badly. So before the ‘spiders’ destroy the robot, the boy downloads all the robot’s software onto a disc and later builds a new robot. He then inserts the disc and reloads everything the old robot once had.

You and I are in a battle here on earth with an alien force out to destroy us. That force is Satan and his angels. They are doing everything they can to lead us into temptation and get us to cut ourselves off from God. They are constantly on the attack and they never give up. What Jesus did in living a perfect life was to defeat satin by being tempted the same way we are and never giving in. Now that He is in heaven, if we will surrender ourselves to Him, it’s like Jesus lives out that life in us again. We are not robots in that we have free choice. However, we have inherited weaknesses and tendencies toward sin. It is easier for us to give in than to stand firm. Only through God’s power in our lives can we have hope.

There comes a time though when every one of us will die. What Jesus does then is ‘downloads our minds’ essentially. On the day Jesus returns again He will use the same power He did when He originally created this world to recreate new bodies for his friends. Then He will ‘reload their minds’ into those bodies. Again however, this is only for those who have surrendered to Him and are His faithful followers. There’s two resurrections, one to take His friends to heaven and one to rid the universe of those who hate truth and goodness. They’re brought back to life only for a short time to show them all how much God did try to save them.

This explains why there is so much multi-level prophecy in the Bible. From any one person’s point of view, they face death, go into their graves, and come up on the other side not knowing anything about the time that passed in between. Remember to them it’s like being asleep. So in any one generation when God spoke through a prophet and gave a promise of reward to the faithful or punishment to the unfaithful, though they were going to receive whichever reward at the end of history; from their point of view that end would be as soon as they died. The prophecies were worded in such a way as to appeal to the needs of the immediate generation receiving them and also appeal to the later generations who would be influenced in their respective times by the current generation’s actions as world history rolled on.