Our Eternal Destiny: What Is Resurrected Life?

Text: 1 Corinthians 15:35-49, 1 Corinthians 13:8-12

If you’ve ever stared at the giant map in the mall, you’re familiar with the red dot. Like a North Star for shoppers, the red dot shows you where you are in relation to the retail world orbiting around you. It has a singular, important message to deliver to cartographically-challenged shoppers like myself: you are here.

The red dot is not the destination. No one wants to stay at the red dot, but we need to know where we are in order to figure out how to get where we’re going. The same principle applies to our eternal destiny.

If that word “destiny” just caused a switch in your brain to flip to off, flip it back on. Like so many of God’s ideas, the concept of destiny has become distorted.

Forrest Gump said it this way: “I do not know if we each have a destiny, or if we are all just floating around accidental-like on the breeze.” But destiny is not some cosmic tailwind that keeps us from floating willy-nilly. It’s not what we’d see if we could look into a crystal ball. It’s not a future sprinkled with moondust by a fairy godmother.

Our destiny is simply our destination.

When we think of eternal life, we can’t help but see it through the lens of the temporal (1 Corinthians 15:35). We ask questions like:

Am I going to look like this in heaven?
Will people still be married to their spouses?
Will children still know their parents?
Will my pets be in heaven too?

It’s hard to wrap our flesh-covered minds around eternity. Since we don’t know exactly what life will be like there, we tend to fixate on what life is like here. We park at the red dot, to which Paul’s response is, Don’t be foolish! Where you are now is not where you’re headed (1 Corinthians 15:36-37, my paraphrase). Instead of being the final destination, our current circumstances work like the red dot to orient us toward our destiny. Paul breaks it down for us in verses 42-44.

Our red dot is corruption, but that’s not where we’re heading.
Our destiny is to be raised in bodies that can never decay (1 Corinthians 15:42).

Our red dot is dishonor, but that’s not where we’re heading.
Our destiny is to be given “the unfading crown of glory” (1 Corinthians 15:43, 1 Peter 5:4).

Our red dot is weakness, but that’s not where we’re heading.
Our destiny is to experience the same resurrection power that raised Christ from the grave (1 Corinthians 15:43, Philippians 3:10).

Our red dot is a natural body, but that’s not where we are heading.
Our destiny is to spend eternity in a spiritual body, finally set free from the limits and decay our bodies know this side of eternity (1 Corinthians 15:44).

What a hopeful truth! The red dot isn’t the finish line—it’s just the beginning. All of the things that scream, “You are here!” at us today, are reminders that we are destined to end up somewhere unfathomably better.

The bodies we’re in now will someday be laid in the ground. But six feet under is not our destiny. God’s Word invites us to lift our eyes and look ahead because where we are now is not where we’re going!

“For now we see indistinctly, as in a mirror,
but then face to face.
Now I know in part,
but then I will know fully,
as I am fully known.”
-1 Corinthians 13:12

Erin Davis is a popular author, blogger, and speaker who loves to see women of all ages run to the deep well of God’s Word. When she’s not writing, you can find Erin chasing chickens and children on her small farm in the Midwest.