1 Corinthians 15:50 Commentary and Bible Study

‘Now this I say, brethren [people of God], flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.’ Now, ‘flesh and blood’ here is used not to suggest that the resurrection body will have no fleshly appearance, or won’t be composed of anything tangible and material, but it is an expression used in the New Testament to denote the mortal, fallible, decaying body, adapted to earth. He puts it both ways: flesh and blood which ends with death and is laid in the grave cannot inherit the kingdom of God. Neither can corruption inherit incorruption. Of course not, when you look at it like that. They are too different; the one cannot exist with the other. Hence the need for the power of God to not only raise us from the dead, but to give us quite different bodies to those we had on earth. Our present mortal bodies are completely unsuited to heaven. We look to God, to provide us with new bodies according to his perfect wisdom, his gifts to us as a habitation for our eternal souls. We trust him to fashion those bodies with features which ‘eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man’ (1 Corinthians 2:9). ‘Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is’ (1 John 3:2).The verse is full of glorious words. ‘Inherit’: as by right; you inherit something by right. And if Christ has borne our sin away; if he suffered in our place; and we have owned him, and embraced him, then, remarkable as the language is, we are given graciously a right to heaven and eternity and a resurrection body. But we can’t inherit that inheritance in this present body.It is a kingdom that we inherit. The words lurking in this verse, ‘I do not merely inherit a vast estate, and a wonderful future; I inherit a place in the royal family of heaven. I become, as it were, royalty. Of course, I do not become God; there will be nothing divine in me. But I am counted a child of God, a prince, a princess in heaven, in glory. ‘But flesh and blood cannot inherit [that] kingdom’. It couldn’t survive; it would be destroyed. It is under the curse; it is deteriorating. It has got to be totally transformed and changed.‘Neither doth corruption inherit incorruption.’ It is so emphatic. You have got a ‘cannot’; you have got a ‘neither doth’. ‘It cannot, it does not’, Paul would say in modern language. They are incompatible. The present body, designed and adapted for earth, is totally unable to exist in eternal glory, and anyway, it is destroyed by death and it decomposes. There has to be the most radical and extraordinary change.