If we only look to the Bible as our source of understanding, we may miss many things about the reality of God’s creation. Theologians have looked at passages like Romans 1 where it says the glory of God is revealed in nature, and parsed out what is now known as general and special revelation. General revelation refers those instances in reality that point to God having a hand in making creation. Special revelation refers to the particulars related to attaining right relationship to God through the work of Jesus Christ. Special revelation is first initiated by God revealing his law to Moses on Sinai. It then follows the development of the nation of Israel with the priesthood and rise of prophets. Finally, it is culminated by the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
If we were to only focus on special revelation, we will miss much about the work and character of God. General revelation can show us many things about our creator, Lord, and Father. One particular aspect worth noting is the reality of resurrection that is build into our world.
Resurrection of Jesus
The resurrection of Jesus is, without a doubt, the core of the Gospel. As N. T. Wright noted during a debate a few years back in response to 200 years of medical proof that the dead don’t come back to life, “People have been dying and staying dead for a lot longer than 200 years.”
In Jesus’ day, people knew when you died, you didn’t come back from the dead. That is what made Jesus’ resurrection so astounding. He physically returned from the dead, with a human body. It wasn’t a symbolic or merely spiritual resurrection. It was a physical resurrection. But any close observation in nature would reveal, in a general way, that resurrection was built into our world from the beginning. That is the reason why so many pagan mythologies developed an element of resurrection on their own. They saw the signs around them–the signs evident in general revelation.
Resurrection in Nature
When we look at nature, we find several instances where things die (or at least appear to die) and come back. Nearly all of them are directly related to the changing of the seasons. Let’s look at how plant life and animal life show the presence of resurrection in nature.
Plant Life
Plant life is the major basis for the concept of resurrection. Classical mythology incorporates this observation into the belief system of the ancient Greeks. In the Greek world, they noticed the changing of the seasons and set out to explain what was happening in terms of the experiences of the gods.
The Greeks would observe that plants would undergo a cycle of living and dying each year. In the spring and summer, the plants would be vibrant, colorful, and lush. In the winter, all the vibrancy would fade away, leaving only remnants of branches, twigs, and trunks devoid of any plant life.
The Greeks surmised that their deities were undergoing some experience. They developed the myth of Demeter and Penelope. According to the story, Demeter was the goddess of plant life and the harvest. It was her job to ensure the evergreen presence of all plants.
Due to Penelope’s abduction by Hades, Demeter went into mourning and refused to let plant life thrive. Soon Zeus and the other deities intervened and struck a bargain. Hades would get Penelope for a period of time each year. Demeter would get Penelope the rest of the year.
Every time Penelope went to Hades, Demeter mourned, bringing winter. When Penelope returned, she would rejoice and bring fruitful seasons for the plants.
What this myth tells us is that humans, in their own understanding, were able to take the observable realities of general revelation and conclude a cycle of death and resurrection. Things die in one season, and resurrect, or come to life in the next season.
This realization developed across cultures. Even the Egyptians had a resurrection deity in Isis and Osiris. It was a similar conclusion made by a different people group based on what they observed in nature.
Animal Life
Animal life also reflects the concept of death and resurrection. This happens through what we call hibernation. Like the plants that go dormant and lose all their leaves in the winter, so some animals go dormant and remain inactive through winter. This is noticeable particularly in regions further away from the equator.
The best example of hibernation is with bears. They eat very fatty foods to store up enough energy to get them through the famine of hibernation and disappear for several months. In the spring, they reappear and begin living and hunting again.
The Resurrection
This all points to one phenomenal fact. From the beginning of creation, God built the concept of resurrection into our ecosystem. Planetary rotations, lunar tides, shifting seasons, they all play a part in the life cycle of earth. That life cycle is observed by people, which leads them to conclude resurrection.
Even Jesus uses natural means to describe the concept of resurrection. In John, when the disciples tell Jesus the Greeks want to speak with him, he gives them a seemingly unrelated explanation about agriculture. “Unless a seed falls to the ground and dies, it cannot bear fruit.”
The planting of seeds to reap a harvest of grain or fruit is the most one-to-one correlation Jesus uses to explain his coming resurrection.
This disciples didn’t get it at the time. But soon they saw what Jesus was talking about. Seeds have been buried in the ground to bear fruit for as long as mankind can remember. It has always been that way. As such, from the beginning of time, the elements of resurrection have been printed on our world, visible in the form of general revelation, for all who would observe.
In the end, to complete the analogy, seeds that fall to the ground don’t just produce a bunch of other seeds. They produce an entire life-form. An acorn falls to the ground and produces an oak tree. An oak tree looks nothing like the acorn it came from, but all the components for an oak tree are contained within the acorn.
Likewise, our physical bodes are in a particular form. When we are buried and rise again, it won’t be the same. Will there by a physical resurrection? Yes. Will we have physical bodies? Yes. However, we will be different. When Jesus resurrected, the two men on the way to Emmaus didn’t recognize him. Neither did the women who came to Jesus’ tomb. They thought he was a gardener at first. Like the core essence of the acorn is in the oak tree, so the core essence of Jesus is in his resurrected body. So when we turn our attention to our resurrection following Jesus’ second coming, we have a prototype in Jesus. We will have a physical body that contains what is essentially us. However, our resurrected bodies will be somewhat different from the bodies we die in.
What are your thoughts about resurrection in nature? How has this post challenged your way of thinking? Let us know in the comments below.