Featured Job's Resurrection Verse: Job 19:25-26

Job's Resurrection Verse
What does Job actually "know" here?
It is different from what many today say He knows.
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"For I know that my redeemer lives, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God:"
Job 19:25-26



This is the version often quoted. But already we have an unfortunate problem. This rendition has several problems. Mainly, for my purpose here, two problems:

1. There are no "worms". The King James Version added that in their attempt to be helpful.

2. More importantly, the "see[ing] God" does not come "in" the flesh, but "from" the flesh. In other words, Job is not voicing a confidence that he will, in some future time, have a fleshly body with which he will see God. He is saying that even after his body will be destroyed he will still - afterward - see God. The destruction of his body will have no bearing on his assurance of seeing God. And this interpretation I didn't get from my fellow Preterists. I knew about it long before. Consider these mainline sources:

"And after my skin, thus torn to pieces,
And without my flesh shall I behold Eloah,"

"Therefore by far the majority of modern expositors have decided that Job does not indeed here avow the hope of the resurrection, but the hope of a future spiritual beholding of God, and therefore of a future life;" - Keil & Deilitsch

“After they shall have destroyed my skin, this shall happen - that I will see God.” - Gesenius

"The literal meaning is, “from, or out of, my flesh shall I see God.” It does not mean in his flesh, which would have been expressed by the preposition ב (b) - but there is the notion that from or out of his flesh he would see him;"

It cannot be proved that this refers to the resurrection of that body, and indeed the natural interpretation is against it.
- Barnes

"And after this skin of mine is destroyed I will yet, without flesh, see God." - Luther (translated from the German)

Both of these points I went in greater detail because they help do away with core objections against the Preterist understanding of both human nature and of the resurrection.

Our blessed hope does not include eternal life in physical bodies, however glorified. We will have perfect spiritual existence,individual and corporate. This is neither (as I have been accused) gnosticism or Eastern pantheistic oversoul existence. It is plainly what the Bible teaches. To get to the proof of this - and it admittedly is a slow and painstaking process - one must first deal with each and every passage that seems to teach otherwise. These two verses in Job are prime candidates, seeing that they are often quoted to teach what they pointedly do not teach.

Just for the record. Preterists like myself...
do believe in Christ's literal death on the cross,
do believe in his literal and bodily resurrection,
and that he presented a literal body as proof to his disciples,
also that He rose again in a literal body.

I often run into this misunderstanding concerning what Preterists believe and needed to set this straight. To deny those points is to be beyond the pale of orthodoxy. Scripture provides abundant proof for all of these.

One thing that Scripture does not teach is that Christ will return physically. Of course, I believe that He had already returned (but that has been covered in other articles). The issue here is how He appeared.

He has/had no need to return in a physical body. Consider this: The reason why Jesus went through the whole spectrum of physical experience - incarnation, perfect life, suffering, death on the cross, resurrection, ascension - was so that He would "fulfill all righteousness". All the bases have been touched (if I am allowed to use a mere baseball metaphor for this awesome doctrine).

There is no similar requirements concerning His coming again, or concerning His judgment. Likewise there is no similar requirement that we live on forever in limited physical bodies. The only reason that it seems to be a requirement - and a cardinal doctrine to boot - is because of all that tradition we have inherited over the centuries, not the Bible.

As always, however, we need to always distinguish between what Scripture teaches and what tradition has taught us that Scripture teaches.

 

I imagine my beliefs on this topic are the same as yours except that our resurrection will not be physical, but spiritual. But "spiritual" does not imply vague, unreal, gnostic, or neo-Platonic. It is very much real. We will always be individuals. We will always have personality.

We both agree that Christ existed non-physically throughout eternity past. He did not need a physical body, of course. Likewise, there is no need for us to have physical bodies. Neither is there any passage that teaches that.

If God has from eternity past until the Incarnation existed purely as spirit, and the Father and Holy Spirit are still entirely spirit (though Preterists would say Christ is too) why do some view it as cultic or gnostic for us to be the same way?

If the Trinity, eternally self-communicating and self-loving (as John Owen writes in his Christologia) was already perfect how can this perfection be "improved" by a change of essence of one of them? How can perfection be improved? If there is room for improvement that implies that what God was before was not perfect.

 

Last item first. Unless you can point me to an online source for Wright it ain't going to happen. Hard copy is hard to get here in China. Besides, much more important is what scripture teaches on this subject. In lieu of Wright's book perhaps you can summarize his scriptural rebuttal of my supposed gnosticism.

 

This just seems to me an attempt at guilt by association. Or perhaps I am just not clear in how I wrote.

I am not concerned about incidental similarities between Preterism and gnosticism - and that is what they are, as far as I understand gnosticism- but what the Bible teaches.

Your first sentence shows me that you are pouring a foreign meaning into my words. I don't even know what you mean by "divine/sacred space and the metaphysical world". Perhaps you can enlighten me.

And your last sentence is totally wrong. I was not influenced by neo-platonists. I was just reading the Bible and playing closer attention to passages that have always puzzled me. I love it when people pretend to know what my influences are. Should I play this same game with you?

 

So then you would have Christ - as part of His glorification - forever humbled to suit your theology?

 

Perhaps this Scripture comes to mind:

"And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was." - John 17:5

 

Thanks. I will read it.

 

I am not denying this general influence. But I was speaking of those influences that led me to preterism. It was not those influences, but just a determination of finding out how the scriptural dots connected.

Your earlier comments re my influences seemed clearly to have these specific influences in mind, not general ones common to all of Christendom or, even, Christianity.

 

Do you not see something jarring in Christ's glorification while still being humiliated? I say this in reference to your earlier comment concerning an ongoing Incarnation that would also necessarily be eternally "humbling".

 

I would say it comes to mind because we have been conditioned to think of the passage that way when in fact context and cross-reference point to a different application altogether. Because (like I wrote earlier) the majority of Bible readers under-estimate the Jewishness of the Bible they overlook the (relatively) more immediate application of this passage in Ezekiel.

If I have time later I hope to write on this very topic. But the outside world is asserting itself once again.