Nor is it strange, since we read, “The body is for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.”  “Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you?”

To rise from the dead seems to have been something more to Paul than going to heaven, or than being in heaven.  He knew that he was to spend the interval between death and the resurrection in heaven; but beyond even this, he had a joy which he felt was essential to the completeness of the heavenly state.

See the proof of this in the following words:  “If by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead.”

Since he was destined, like all of Adam’s race, to come forth from his grave, he needed to make no effort whatever merely to rise from the dead; that was inevitable, and irrespective of character.  Besides, he represents this object for which he strove as something which required effort, which cannot be said of merely rising from the grave.

Paul had been permitted to know, by personal observation, what the rising from the dead implies.  Caught up into Paradise, we may suppose that he had seen the patriarch Enoch, and the prophet Elijah, with their glorified bodies; the presence of which in heaven, we may imagine, has ever served to enhance the happiness of that world, by holding forth, before the eyes of the redeemed, the sign and pledge of their future experience when they shall receive their bodies.  For it is not presumptuous to suppose that the sight of Enoch and Elijah has been, and will be, till the last trumpet sounds, a source of joyful expectation to the inhabitants of heaven, leading them to anticipate the final day with intense interest, as the time when they will be invested, like those honored saints, with all the capacities of their completed nature, which nature, while the body lies buried, is in a dissevered state.  If Paul, when in heaven, saw and felt the power of this expectation in the minds of glorified saints, no wonder that the resurrection of the body seemed to him, ever after, to be the crown of Christian expectation and hope.

More than all, he had seen the man Christ Jesus, in his glorified body; who on earth had said, “I am the resurrection and the life”—­himself an illustration of it, whom alone the grave has yielded up to die no more.  He is, therefore, to saints in heaven, a far more interesting object than Enoch and Elijah, who never died.  “For now is Christ risen from the dead, and is become the first fruits of them that slept.”  This sight, of Christ in heaven, must have had unutterable interest for Paul, from the assurance that Christ will “change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body;” for “we know that when he shall appear,” Paul himself tells us, “we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.”  This knowledge, obtained in the heavenly world, may have led the apostle to think of the resurrection as the crown of all his expectations and hopes.