Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

But your dead will live, Lord;
    their bodies will rise—
let those who dwell in the dust
    wake up and shout for joy—
your dew is like the dew of the morning;
    the earth will give birth to her dead.

• Isaiah 26:19

When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.

• Mark 12:25

When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.

• Luke 20:37

For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first.

• 1 Thessalonians 4:16

The hand of the Lord was on me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?”
I said, “Sovereign Lord, you alone know.”
Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.’”
So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them.
Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live.’” So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet—a vast army.
Then he said to me: “Son of man, these bones are the people of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off. Therefore prophesy and say to them: ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: My people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel. Then you, my people, will know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and bring you up from them. I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land. Then you will know that I the Lord have spoken, and I have done it, declares the Lord.’”

• Ezekiel 37:1-14

I rarely argued with my wife, but then again, she usually asked me what I wanted.  When it came to our final resting place, she made the edict, “We will be cremated.”  I told my son as we were going to the National Cemetery that when we were married, I carried her across the threshold.  She made it hard for me in that she had added a few pounds – nervous eating leading up to the wedding.  I have written about it before that she was a flight risk.  But then, here I had carried her ashes across the threshold as we left the church.  And somehow, her ashes weighed a fraction of what she had weighed in life, but at that moment it seemed heavier.

When our friends heard about her decision, they said that God could not resurrect our bodies if they were nothing but a few ashes.  Really?!  Almighty God, who created the heavens, and the earth cannot reconstruct our bodies from the ashes?  What about people buried in caskets?  Those bodies decay over time.  The valley of dry bones in the Ezekiel prophecy had nothing but dried bones.  Yet, the bones reconnected.  Then flesh was added.  Then breath was added.  With ashes you just have one more step.

Somewhere in storage, I have a book by Dr. Samuel Glasstone, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons.  Dr. Glasstone was a pioneer in the field of nuclear engineering and one of Dr. Glasstone’s former assistants gave me a copy of the book when I took a nuclear engineering class from him.  I learned a lot that semester.  But in the book, Dr. Glasstone went to Nagasaki and Hiroshima.  In one breathtaking photograph, Dr. Glasstone took a picture of a shadow on a sidewalk.  When the nuclear blast occurred, the man and woman were walking along the sidewalk.  The only thing left of them was the shadow.

You may scoff, but what the tremendous heat of the blast caused was that it vaporized every molecule in the bodies of those two people.  But it also damaged the surface of the sidewalk.  Concrete is 10% cement, 20% air and water, 30% sand, and 40% gravel, according to concretesupplyco.com.  But that is only what is delivered.  As concrete cures, it continues to absorb water.  The wetter the concrete, the stronger the concrete, but it takes longer to cure.  So, the sidewalk gave up some of that water to the intense heat of the blast, everywhere except the area that for an instant was in the shade of the people who were walking.  Thus, their shadow remained, but the ash of their bodies was drawn into the mushroom cloud and distributed around the globe, at least across the Pacific Ocean.

If that couple were believers, God could reconstruct their bodies from the initial materials.  One molecule at a time.  God is infinite.  God is all powerful.

And to the person that said that if God could do it, which he doubted, would we not come back with a dark complexion, you know, like ashes?  Are we really going there?  Nope.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.