The raising of our outward man and the clothing of it with eternal life is not a preparation for judgment; rather, it is the execution of the sentence of judgment. We have been judged, and our sentence is to be made immortal and to be forever with King Jesus Christ as He governs the creation of God.

Toward the end of his life, the Apostle Paul was seeking to attain the resurrection from the dead.

How does one attain the resurrection of the dead?

The context of this verse is that of pressing toward a mark. The mark is the attainment of that for which we have been grasped. Each saint has been predestined for a specific station in the Kingdom of God. His task in life is to attain that for which he has been predestined; not to carve out a destiny according to his own impulses and desires but to enter the rest of God, into the perfect creation already finished in the mind of God.

As the saint becomes willing and able to enter what God has planned for him from the beginning, he finds righteousness, peace, joy—the fulfillment of all he is meant to be and to do. Only then is he ready to receive immortality in his body.

Part of the context of Philippians 3:11 is knowing Christ, knowing the power of His resurrection, knowing the fellowship of His sufferings.

Was Paul speaking, in Philippians 3:11, of attaining a resurrection of his inner man, of his outward man, or of both? He was speaking of both, for we find a few verses later:

Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself. (Philippians 3:21)

The kind of resurrection experienced by the outward man depends directly on the state of being of the inner man.

Since the glorified human personality consists of the inner man dwelling in a glorified outward man (an outward man in the image and of the Nature and Substance of Christ), it follows that in order for the personality to abide in peace and harmony the inner man will have had to be changed from Adam to the life-giving spirit, to the image and Substance of the Lord from Heaven. Otherwise the inner man and the glorified outward man would be incompatible.

It is not possible that God will place a glorified outward man on an immature, disobedient, self-seeking, soulish inner man. It is the hope of many Christians that God will transform the inner man and clothe the transformed inner man with a glorified outward man. This indeed is true, being scriptural and logical.

Error enters with the belief that the inner man will be transformed at the coming of the Lord, along with the outward man. There is a scriptural basis for an instantaneous transformation of the outward man at the coming of the Lord; however, there is no scriptural basis for an instantaneous transformation of the moral character of the inner man at the coming of the Lord or at any other time, except as we have patiently followed the Lord in cross-carrying obedience.

To be continued.