It is fitting that reward or punishment should be the portion of the same souls and bodies that have been faithful or unfaithful.  Christ rose in the same body as He had before His death, and so shall we.  How this is to be accomplished we cannot tell, but with God all things are possible, and faith rests with confidence in His power and in His Word.  “We wait for a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ:  who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory."[229] While the body is the same as that in which the soul tabernacled, it will undergo transformation.  Christ will renew the bodily as well as the spiritual nature of His people.  Every part of their being will be transformed, and their bodies, like Christ’s, will be spiritual bodies.  We are to be sanctified wholly; our whole spirit and soul and body preserved blameless unto His coming.[230] In this present life the body builds up a character which it will retain throughout eternity.  Every act we do affects it, not for the time only, but for ever.  The lost soul will assume the polluted body, and while it may shrink in horror from the union, will find no way of escape.  “He that is filthy, let him be filthy still:  and he that is holy, let him be holy still."[231] “Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap,"[232] and the harvest will abide with him for ever.

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ARTICLE 12

And the Life Everlasting

The great truth affirmed in the concluding article of the Creed is the Life Everlasting:  “The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life."[233] This life will be the portion of all who are acquitted in the day of judgment, and they will then enter upon new experiences.  Death and hell shall be cast into the lake of fire, and the redeemed, no longer subject to imperfection, decay, or death, shall be raised to the right hand of the Father, where there is fulness of joy; to partake of those pleasures for evermore which have been purchased for them by the blood of the Lamb.

It is interesting to note the gradual development of this doctrine, which was first fully expressed by Him who brought life and immortality to light.  We have the statement of the writer to the Hebrews that the faith of Old Testament saints had in view the continuance of life after death in “a better country, that is, an heavenly.”  Whether this faith grasped the doctrine of bodily resurrection, in addition to that of the immortality of the soul, we are not told.  It is remarkable that throughout the books of Moses there is an absence of reference to the future life as a motive to holy living.  Prosperity and adversity in this life are set forth as the reward or punishment of conduct, leading to the inference, either that retribution in the future life was not revealed, or that it exercised little practical influence.  As time passed the doctrine