1 Corinthians 15:38

With this bareness of the grain deposited in the earth, the apostle contrasts God's creative power, which quickly invests the seed with the covering, the body assigned to its kind, by making the plant sprout which is to serve as its organ. By saying: as it hath pleased Him, and not: as it pleases Him, Paul certainly refers to the law of vegetation established by God for every plant at the time of creation. This Divine volition remains in the bosom of changing nature; it controls beforehand the result of the sower's action. It is obvious how false it is to allege that Scripture knows nothing of the constancy of the laws of nature. The author who wrote, Genesis 1:11, in speaking of plants of all sorts: “bearing fruit after their kind,” already understood this fundamental fact.

Thus the hundred thousand species of plants of which the vegetable kingdom is composed are all organized in such a way that to this infinite variety of seeds there corresponds an exactly similar variety of vegetable organisms. The article τό, the, before ἴδιον is to be rejected. In these last words: “ A body of its own,” there is implicitly contained the answer to the second question of 1 Corinthians 15:35: With what body? The God who took care at the creation to furnish every seed with a body of its own, will know how to give to the energy hidden in our terrestrial body the new organ it will need when this vital principle shall be set free by death from the temporary wrapping in which it is now hidden. And to satisfy the inquirer who put the questions of 1 Corinthians 15:35, on the subject of the new organ which is to replace our earthly body, and to prevent his imagining that God might be at a loss to produce a body entirely different from the present, the apostle invites him to cast a glance over the infinite diversity of the organisms which form the visible universe: 1 Corinthians 15:39-41. The variety of vegetable organisms bears on form only, not on substance; it would not therefore of itself authorize the conclusion which the apostle wishes to establish, namely, the possibility of a new body, substantially different from our present body. Hence it is that he instances in the totality of nature differences still more profound than he had pointed out between the various kinds of plants.