In creating humans with a soul, God literally placed a bodily shape inside each one of us, meaning there’s a person inside of our body.
As Paul writes in II Corinthians 12: 2-3: “I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven. And I knew such a man, (whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;)”
Jordan explains, “If this guy’s caught up in the third heaven and Paul says, ‘I can’t tell if he’s still in his body or not,’ then when he wasn’t in his body he must have still looked like he was.
“He said, ‘By looking at this guy I can’t tell whether he’s dead or alive. He’s up in the third heaven, though.’ So what’s up in the third heaven is his soul. But what did he look like? Paul didn’t say, ‘Well, he died but I don’t know who he is up there.’ When out of the body he looked just like he looked in the body.
“Some people wrongly have the idea that when we get our glorified body in heaven we’re all going to be carbon copies of one another, but Paul makes clear in I Corinthians 15: 35-38 that the resurrected body bears our distinct identities.
“Paul says, 'But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body.’
“Because we’ll have our own personal body with its own personal appearance, we’re not just conscious of being in someone else’s presence, we can put a name to them and a face.
“Not only will we recognize and know those we’ve personally met in our lifetime, but we’ll be familiar with people we’ve never come face to face with.
“In Matthew 17, Peter instinctively knows who Moses and Elijah are even though there were no introductions given. While Peter had studied about the two men, and was taught things about them, he couldn’t have known what they looked like since they lived centuries before he did.
"While Luke 16:25 reveals we’ll have memory in heaven, remembering incidents and things that happened on earth, we’re not going to have any bad memories surrounding people we encounter in heaven.
“You’ll say, ‘Hey, there’s Brother Rick,’ and all you’ll remember is Jesus Christ in Brother Rick and not all that was ‘I, not Christ’; that will all be gone.
“In our relationships with one another today, the key is to have Jesus Christ living in us so that when we meet up there we’ll have something to remember.
“Paul urges in Romans 6:11 to ‘yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead,’ meaning the resurrection life we’ll have for eternity is the life we are to have live in us right now.
“The key is to let our resurrection lives be in effect today so that when we get out there in our resurrection body, the life we then live will already be familiar to us.
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