One Day of Resurrection, and a System That Needs Billions (2 of 2)

The other branch answers John 6 directly. Don Preston lists the six "last day" texts in John (6:39, 6:40, 6:44, 6:54, 11:24 and 12:48), says the last day is the day of the resurrection, the time for the fulfillment of 1 Corinthians 15, and says that resurrection fulfills God's promises to Old Covenant Israel.⁹⁸ Another writer who dates the resurrection to AD 70, Alex Polyak, gives the date plainly: the believers Jesus means are the righteous remnant of Israel in his day, raised "on the last day (of the Old Covenant age)," which ended with the temple's fall in AD 70.⁹⁹ That is a clear answer, and it has a price. Jesus does not say a remnant. He says "everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him" will be raised at the last day (John 6:40, NET), and in the same chapter he says he will "raise them all up at the last day" of everyone the Father has given him (John 6:39, NET). Polyak's answer keeps the word "everyone" and takes away everyone after AD 70. Martha uses the same phrase before the cross: "I know that he will come back to life again in the resurrection at the last day" (John 11:24, NET). Jesus answers, "I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live even if he dies" (John 11:25, NET). A full preterist can read that as a correction of her hope. It can as easily be read as a widening of it, since he does not tell her she has the day wrong. The text allows both readings.

Paul's own description of what comes before the resurrection body points the other way:

"For in this earthly house we groan, because we desire to put on our heavenly dwelling, if indeed, after we have put on our heavenly house, we will not be found naked. For we groan while we are in this tent, since we are weighed down, because we do not want to be unclothed, but clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life."⁵⁸

— 2 Corinthians 5:2-4 (NET)

His word is "unclothed," a state he does not want, set against being "clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life." On the at-death picture there is no unclothed interval to groan about, since the new body arrives as the old one is laid down. Paul describes an interval, and he describes waiting. A full preterist will answer that Paul was describing the situation before AD 70, when the dead waited. The answer is available, and it is the answer that carries the whole system: whatever Paul describes as still ahead is moved to a moment already past.

One suggestive observation belongs at the end, labeled as suggestive and not as proof. Two thousand years of deathbed testimony and devotional writing across every Christian tradition is a real, if imperfect, record of how believers have described nearness to death, and what it tends to describe is closer to Paul's waiting than to a completed body already received. No single citation carries that. It is a pointer, not a premise. The footing of this seam is the text: one coming, one last day, one event with everyone together, and an at-death resurrection that none of those texts describes.