Yes Robert, I have opinions on all those questions.
I love to talk about the stuff of eternity, also, even if it is just
speculation. (Rather different from the speculation involved in the stock market, but speculation nonetheless)
First off, since the bodies people get in heaven are immortal, they would have to be better than these bodies.
Since a body is useless without a mind, we will have minds - but isn't the mind considered to be something apart from the body? Loosely speaking, we associate the mind with the brain. Funny as it sounds, I'm not sure if we will have brains (at least, what we are familiar with as brains in these mortal bodies) - but since it says in the Bible that all who go to be with Jesus in heaven will be like Jesus and since Jesus definitely has a mind, we will have minds.
Concerning "age" of the bodies - the Bible says that "time will be no more" so age will be a concept we leave behind, relevant only to this present kind of existance.
A fascinating book that sheds a little light on what to expect with regard to qualities of spiritual mind and body is the account Dr. George Ritchie relates of what he remembers of an "out of body" experience. He was in the U.S. Army during WWII. Got double pneumonia and from the time he was discovered without signs of life until he came back to life, the Army records show as about 6 minutes.
The book is still in print and the title is "Return from Tomorrow."
He was supposed to enter an accelerated medical school, so he could serve as an army doctor, but came down with pneumonia at the camp in Texas. He tells about meeting Jesus while he was "out of his (mortal) body" and tells what he saw and how he moved around. One of the first things he saw after he met Jesus was his whole life, from birth up until the time he died in the infirmary. He said he could see everything, all at the same time, as real as if it was happening. So it sounds to me like our spiritual minds will be capable of doing a lot more information processing/multi-tasking (to use computer analogy).
Mr. Ritchie went on to become a medical doctor and then because of the experience he had had, he went on to become a psychiatrist. He says that he knows that the experience was no illusion.
Before he met Jesus, he was trying to pull back the blanket that was covering his corpse, so he could get back in to his body, but his hands couldn't grip the blanket - they just passed through it.
After he met Jesus, and Jesus had taken him a few places and showed him a few things, he didn't want to go back into his earthly body - his new existance was a lot more enjoyable. But it wasn't his time to die...
If you get hold of a copy of that book and read it, let me know what you think. I've shared it with a lot of people and everyone I've shared it with has passed it along to a few others.
I was cautiously skeptical of the book before I began reading it, but I've read through the Bible a few times and the New Testament quite a few times and I found nothing in Ritchies account that contradicted anything in the Bible. |
