Resurrection Hope Is More Prevalent in the Old Testament Than It May First Seem
Take and Eat and Live Forever
In the beginning, God made embodied image bearers. From the ground he made Adam, and from Adam he made Eve (Gen. 2:7, 21–22). This first couple didn’t exist before their physical forms. God breathed life into their bodies, and these bodies—like everything else God had made—were good (Gen. 1:31).1
Adam and Eve lived in the abundance of God’s blessing. Sources of food were plentiful, and the couple could fulfill the divine commission to be fruitful, multiply, and exercise dominion over God’s creation (Gen. 1:28). They would be God’s viceregents, representing the King of creation as his agents, his royal ambassadors. Their physical bodies were integral to how they would rule and fulfill their commission.
But the bodies of God’s image bearers were not immortal. He had warned Adam about eating from the forbidden tree: “In the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:17). In those words, the notion of death occurs for the first time in Scripture. God is the God of life, and his ways are the ways of life; therefore, to reject God and his ways is to embrace death.
Resurrection Hope and the Death of Death
Mitchell L. Chase
Mitchell L. Chase traces the theme of resurrection hope throughout Scripture, explaining how an understanding of resurrection is essential to faith now, in addition to a longing for what is to come.
Another special tree was in the garden of Eden: the tree of life (Gen. 2:9). This tree represented more than sustenance. The fruit of this tree enabled one to live forever. We know this because of God’s words when he expelled the rebellious image bearers from Eden: “lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever” (Gen. 3:22). Adam and Eve left the garden in their perishable bodies, and they would experience what God promised:
for you are dust,
and to dust you shall return. (Gen. 3:19)
The tree of life held out the hope of physical immortality, which was something Adam and Eve didn’t have but were made for.2 The problem of sin corrupts God’s good design, so they died outside of Eden. Barred from access to that tree, their bodies eventually returned to the dust. The question for sinners, then, is this: will the perishable ever put on imperishable, so that the hope of immortal bodily life might be attained after all?
In the fullness of God’s word, resurrection life is how sinners will experience the fruit from that Edenic tree. The hope of immortal bodily life was not lost forever.3
The Forces of Death
When you think of death, do you think exclusively about the stopping of the heart and breath? The ending of breath and heartbeats is most surely death, but in the Bible death is more than this. The forces of death are visible and active in this fallen world.
We should allow the Bible’s depictions of death to influence how we think about the problem of death in this world. Interpreters may not see how resurrection hope is present in some passages if they haven’t noticed how death is present in other passages.
The outworking of death takes manifold forms. Whatever inhibits, harms, or destroys life is a kind of death.4 When the biblical authors tell of God’s power that restores, frees, heals, or raises, you are reading about the power of life overcoming the forces of death.5The reason resurrection hope is more prevalent in Scripture than it may first seem is because the promises and actions of the God of life pervade the testimony of the biblical authors.
Death Through Exile
Although God warned that eating from the forbidden tree would bring death (Gen. 2:17), Adam and Eve did not immediately die physically. But their disobedience corrupted their relationship with God (Gen. 3:7–13). Sin brought alienation and shame. The blessings of marriage and childbearing would be affected (Gen. 3:16), and the privilege of labor and vocation would be affected as well (Gen. 3:17–19).
We shouldn’t read God’s warning in Genesis 2:17 as a threat unfulfilled. Adam and Eve sinned and fell short of the glory of God. There is more to dying than physical death. Eden was the realm of God’s presence and bountiful provision; it was the realm of life. Exile from Eden meant separation from where God had placed them. Since God barred reentry to the garden and access to the tree of life, their exile was a kind of death. The separation from sacred space meant a move away from life.6
In union with the redeeming King, we have come alive out of the deadness of our trespasses.
When we see a reversal of this direction, when a figure moves from the realm of death into sacred space, we are watching the power of life at work. The exile of Adam—and thus of all people—from sacred space leads to this question: will the God of life bring his people out of the realm of the dead? Returning from exile, moving from death to life, would be resurrection.7
The Taking of Enoch
Outside Eden, the generations die. The widespread reality of death is clear in the genealogy of Genesis 5. The rhythm of death is in verse after verse. The pattern consists of a person’s name, a descendant, the total years of life, and then the report that “he died.” The repetition builds such an expectation of death that the words about Enoch jolt the reader: “Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him” (Gen. 5:24).
The taking of Enoch did not involve death. Since the onset of human death in a post-Genesis-3 world, every person had died. Then suddenly and mysteriously, Enoch was taken after walking with God for hundreds of years. Enoch did not return to the dust from which he had come. Instead, God delivered him from death. This rapturous report is a light of hope against the dark backdrop of the dead.
If God could deliver someone before death, could he deliver someone after death? If the God of life could disrupt the rhythm of death that permeated the generations in Genesis 5, what else could he do? The example of Enoch isn’t meant to provide any guarantee that the faithful will be delivered before earthly death, but his example does show that God is greater than death. Death wasn’t so invincible after all. Its claim on sinners could be overruled.
Decreation and Recreation of the Earth
The genealogy of Genesis 5 ends with the family of Noah (Gen. 5:32). And it is during the days of Noah that the effects of sin reach a horrific scale and scope. God announces judgment (Gen. 6:13). The deluge on the earth in Genesis 6–7 is a watery death for creation, yet creation emerges from judgment in Genesis 8.
The words decreation and recreation can be used to interpret God’s judgment in light of the imagery in Genesis 1. God brought land from the waters and then later filled that land with animals and people (Gen. 1:9–10, 24–31). When God covered people, animals, and land with the floodwaters, the reader is to picture a decreation.
God remembered Noah and the ark’s other occupants (Gen. 8:1). His wind blew over the earth, and the waters subsided.8 Land appeared once more, and the ark emptied to fill the land. God brought life through death, deliverance through judgment.
The association of the deluge with death and resurrection is confirmed by later Scripture. Peter says baptism corresponds to the deliverance of people through the waters of judgment (1 Pet. 3:20–21). Baptism is a new covenant ordinance that pictures death to sin and new life in Christ (Rom. 6:3–4). In union with the redeeming King, we have come alive out of the deadness of our trespasses (Eph. 2:4–6).
The imagery of recreation in Genesis 8 does not suggest a return to a pre-fall state. But the episode of the deluge does confirm for readers that God is serious about sin, he is a righteous Judge, and the wicked will not endure forever in their rebellion. The return of Christ will mean a new heavens and new earth (2 Pet. 3:8–13; Rev. 21:1–5). Making all things new will be, on a cosmic scale, resurrecting creation to a glorified and everlasting state.
Notes:
- According to Kelly Kapic, “Unlike Plato’s philosophy, the biblical presentation frames original human goodness within bodily existence, not apart from it. Our physicality was not a problem to be overcome but a gift essential to our existence. . . . Put differently, communion with God and others was always meant to take place in and through the body, not apart from it. This was our created state; this will be our ultimate hope” (Embodied Hope: A Theological Meditation on Pain and Suffering [Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2017], 46).
- Bruce Waltke says, “This highest potency of life was available in the garden and . . . will be experienced consummately in the resurrection of our bodies” (An Old Testament Theology: An Exegetical, Canonical, and Thematic Approach [Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2007], 257).
- L. Michael Morales writes, “The end of redemption is not to live a bodiless, ethereal existence in the afterlife of heaven but rather to be raised up in glory with a real, new-creation body for a life of unending joy with God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” (Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption [Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2020], 3)
- Morales says, “The path of exile through Eden’s gates was, therefore, a path from life to death, from light to darkness, from harmony to dysfunction and strife, from health to sickness, from security to violence, from compassion to inhumanity, from wholeness to brokenness, from peace with God to enmity—from a life of friendship with God to alienation” (Exodus Old and New, 9).
- Jon Levenson explains, “Death and life in the Hebrew Bible are often best seen as relational events and are for the selfsame reason inseparable from the personal circumstances of those described as living or as dead. To be alive in this frequent biblical sense of the word inevitably entailed more than merely existing in a certain physical state. It also entailed having one’s being within a flourishing and continuing kin group that dwelt in a productive and secure association with its land. Conversely, to be widowed, bereaved of children, or in exile was necessarily to experience death. Indeed, each of these states (even death) and others (notably, health or illness) could serve as a synecdoche for the condition brought about by any of the others” (Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006], 154–55).
- This concept would be applied later to the tabernacle in the middle of Israel’s encampment and also to the nation of Israel going into Babylonian captivity during their exile.
- According to Morales, “Separated from Yahweh God, the fountain of life and being, humanity’s condition is one of death. As such, the return to God—the exodus—can only be life from the dead, deliverance from death” (Exodus Old and New, 7).
- The word wind in Gen. 8:1 can be translated “Spirit.” Language about the Spirit over the waters is another link to creation (see 1:2).
This article is adapted from Resurrection Hope and the Death of Death by Mitchell L. Chase.
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