A reader asked me this question:
Since there will be a New Heaven and New Earth, and feasts, what is meant by “doing away with stomach and food” in 1 Corinthians 6:12-13?
In context, the Apostle Paul is warning us not to let bodily appetites rule us, because the body is for the Lord, not for sin. He is not claiming that resurrected people will never eat on the New Earth.
Paul is confronting the misuse of the body and rejecting the idea that “all things are lawful” means we may become enslaved to any appetite. Charles Spurgeon put it this way: “I will not be brought under the power of any,” because our bodies belong to God and will be raised by His power.
As I explain in Heaven, “Food is for the stomach, and the stomach is for food” describes the temporary relationship between our present bodies and food. When this old body dies, that relationship ends.
In the present Heaven, before the resurrection, it’s not clear whether we will eat or have a stomach. But Paul is not teaching that our resurrected bodies on the New Earth will lack stomachs or that we will never enjoy food. The eternal Heaven is centered on a resurrected earth, where resurrected people will live in actual bodies, and Scripture’s language about feasts and eating should not automatically be reduced to metaphor. Jesus says this to His disciples regarding their place in the new kingdom: “that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Luke 22:30).
Augustine points to Christ eating and drinking after His resurrection as evidence that a spiritual body is still a real body. So, it seems that our glorified bodies will still be able to enjoy food, and we will have resurrected taste buds. Afterall, God created food for pleasure as well as nourishment. (See Will We Eat Good Food in Heaven? How Will It Taste?)
The resurrected Jesus invited His disciples, “Come and have breakfast.” He prepared His disciples a meal and then ate bread and fish with them (John 21:4-14). He proved that resurrection bodies are capable of eating food, real food. Christ could have abstained from eating. The fact that He didn’t is a powerful statement about the nature of His resurrection body, and by implication, ours, since Christ “will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body” (Philippians 3:21). R. C. Sproul wrote that “whatever His body is composed of we will have too in our own resurrected bodies.”
My guess is that it will in fact be necessary for us to eat and drink on the New Earth as it was necessary for Adam and Eve to eat and drink. Not only because it is what will make eating and drinking satisfying, but also because while we will cease to be fallen, we will never cease to be finite. The promise is not that we will have no sensation of hunger or thirst, but that we will never go hungry or go thirsty because there will always be enough to satisfy us (Revelation 7:16).
God does not despise the body or the pleasures He created. He created hunger and thirst, and He intends them to be satisfied, not simply obliterated. On the New Earth, no appetite will be frustrated, corrupting, or controlling. Whether our resurrected bodies will digest and eliminate food exactly as they do now, we do not know—but no aspect of God-created physiology should be viewed as inherently bad.
So “doing away with stomach and food” means doing away with the present body’s vulnerability to sin, as well as to hunger, decay, and death. It does not overturn the promise of resurrection, feasts, and embodied joy. Whatever form eating takes in the world to come, it will be free from necessity, excess, sickness, and sin—and fully consistent with the goodness of God’s restored creation.
