"The corpse that's planted is no beauty, but when it's raised, it's glorious. Put in the ground weak, it comes up powerful. The seed sown is natural; the seed grown is supernatural—same seed, same body, but what a difference from when it goes down in physical mortality to when it is raised up in spiritual immortality!" 1 Corinthians 15:43-44 (MSG)
Author CS Lewis wrote ( I am paraphrasing from memory) that each person you ever meet is destined by God either to be such a glorious creature that, were you to see him now as he one day will be, you would be tempted to worship him. . . . . or to be such a horror that, were you to see him now as he one day will be, you would shrink from him in utter revulsion.
Such is the destiny of every human depending on whether the offer of God’s Grace is accepted or rejected.
Each of us is destined to be someone so magnificent and glorious that our minds cannot imagine it. Yet if any exercises his freedom to reject this intended future, then the picture of the future is something like the life of the subhuman creatures remaining on earth in the Will Smith movie, I Am Legend.
The destiny of every believer is to live in an eternal future, in an eternally resurrected body, on an eternally restored and renewed earth for the purpose of living in exquisite joy in wonderful relationship with others and God and in partnership with God in the ongoing creativity of the universe.
As a believer this destiny, your destiny is secure and how you handle your life today determines to what degree you will experience the joys and privileges of the next.
And, as a believer, your responsibility now is to lead others toward the destiny which God has for them and away from the destiny that awaits them if they choose to reject the offer of God’s Grace.
This has to be why God arranged it so that butterflys arise from caterpillars . . . from pretty ugly to incredible beauty. We are probably as incapable of imagining the new us in the future as is a caterpillar of imagining a butterfly!
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