John Wesley's sermon "On the Resurrection of the Dead" explores this idea. He discusses how, despite bodies being scattered—whether buried, burned, or lost in the ocean—God's power can restore them at the resurrection. Wesley emphasizes that no matter how fragmented a body becomes, it will be reassembled in its original form.
The question is, Does God use a man's fragments to reassemble the original form, or does He create a new body out of nothing? Or, perhaps God will form our glorified bodies out of random dust?
I believe it to be the latter for the reasons I gave--elements in the world of deceased persons have come to be used by more than one person. They cannot be reassembled using the same elements!
There is no set of elements that belong exclusively to a single deceased person! For "dust" to "awaken" we would have to mean something metaphorical, and not literal. For "dust to awaken" God could simply assemble a new set of "dust" to form a new man.
This is not an issue of "faith" for me. It takes more of the wrong kind of faith to believe people are assembled from their original elements than to believe what the Bible teaches, that we are resurrected unto *brand new glorified bodies!*
I don't want to believe in irrational faith. I want to believe what the Bible teaches--not man's twisted conception of what it teaches based on a false sense of the word "resurrection." "Coming out of graves" is a metaphorical statement. So is "sleeping in death."
This belief aligns with 1 Corinthians 15:35, where Paul addresses doubts about resurrection, affirming that God can raise the dead in ways beyond human understanding.
That wasn't Paul's point. People have trouble believing God is going to give people new bodies period. It doesn't have anything to do with what material He makes the new bodies out of. If God created the world to start with there is no trouble in believing He assembles people who have died out of nothing.
The real problem is, people don't believe God created the world. Or, they believe He is indifferent to human death--nothing is going to change the world the way it is now.
The earthquake at the time of Jesus' crucifixion is described in Matthew 27:51: "At that moment the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth quaked, and the rocks were split." Additionally, Matthew 27:52-53 mentions that after the earthquake, many saints were resurrected and appeared to people in Jerusalem. This moment foreshadowed the power of Christ’s resurrection and the promise of eternal life.
This resurrection was an OT resurrection--not a glorification event. When Jesus rose from the dead, he was healed just as his friend Lazarus was healed.
But he wasn't finished. He told Mary not to restrain him because his job was not finished. He had to return to heaven to be glorified. This is a much better form of resurrection than mere healing!
The saints who came out of their tombs at the time of Jesus' cross were obviously people who had died fairly recently, or at least were still in their tombs. They were healed, and not yet glorified.
We do not know what happened to them after that. We know how Jesus departed. So perhaps they departed in the same way that He did. We do know that He ate fish to show he had an actual body.
Those who were raised from the dead had to die again, just as Lazarus had to, or as any of those who died in the OT era, who were healed, and then had to die again.
When you arise in your mortal body you must die again. When you arise in a healed sinful body you must die again.
But when we rise in glorified bodies, we will be sinless and will never die again. That's the difference.
And I believe this will require a new creation beyond that which was created in the creation of the world. Or, God will assemble dust randomly to form new glorified humans, just as he made Adam in the beginning from the dust, though he was not assembled from a specific set of dust.
