Luke 24:39 “Behold My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself. Handle Me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see I have.”
Jesus taught us in the above passage of scripture, that a spirit does not have flesh and bones. In other words a spirit does not have a physical body that can be handled. And so we see that the saints do not have physical bodies in heaven, for they do not yet have their resurrected bodies and they are there in spirit only. The spirit of man does not require physical nourishment in the form of edible food, for if they did then it would be necessary to feed our spirits with that food here on earth. And so we see that the saints in heaven do not eat any physical foods. In fact they do not even eat the fruit of the tree of life which is a physical fruit. We know that the fruit from the tree of life is physical, because Adam and Eve could have eaten that fruit in the Garden of Eden if God had not removed them from the Garden (Genesis 3:22). And so the saints will only partake of that fruit once they receive their resurrected bodies. Spirits do not require physical homes to dwell in, for the bible refers to our earthly bodies as the current home that our spirits dwell in, and it refers to our new resurrected bodies as the eternal homes that our spirits will dwell in (2 Corinthians 5:1). Spirits also never sleep. Even while we are alive on the earth our spirits never sleep, for it is our physical bodies and our physical brains that require sleep, not our spirits. As an aside, our resurrected bodies will also not require any sleep, for scripture teaches us that there is no night in the New Jerusalem where we will dwell for all eternity. The reason that there is no night there is because the saints will not require any sleep. Even though angels have celestial bodies they too never sleep, for the scriptures tell us that the four Cherubim angels that stand around God’s throne never rest (Revelation 4:8). I said all that to give you an idea of what heaven is like for the saints that are currently there. They do not have any physical needs such as we understand here on earth and the reason for that is because they do not have physical bodies.
1 Corinthians 15:44 “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body.”
In the above passage of scripture the Holy Spirit through the apostle Paul speaks of spiritual bodies and He speaks of natural bodies. The natural body, as referred to in this passage is the physical body that each one of us currently resides in on the earth (both saved and unsaved). The spiritual body that Paul refers to in the same passage refers to the resurrected body that all believers will receive from the Lord Jesus on that day. As we will see in the next section, our Lord Jesus is the first to have a resurrected body.
1 Corinthians 15:40 “There are also celestial bodies and terrestrial bodies; but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another.”
In this section we are discussing the saints in heaven and not the angels, for although angels are also spirits, they live in tangible bodies which Paul refers to as celestial bodies in the above passage of scripture. The terrestrial bodies that Paul refers to in this passage are the bodies of men on the earth.
Michael E.B. Maher
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