Orson Pratt, in a sermon dated March 9, 1851, delivered on board the Ellen Maria and recorded by George D. Watt said the following about resurrected bodies not having blood, but instead, being “spiritual” (to borrow from 1 Cor 15:44):
When you come up from your graves
[you will] have no blood, [for] blood if natural life. As to immortality, what
[will] supply the place of blood, which is necessary now, to sustain the
natural life? If it were not for the blood that circulated in the veins, our
bodies could not survive. But the very thing that preserves us in life for a
few years here is very thing that tends eventually to death: blood tends to
mortality, to change the system, to bring disease, and death, and sickness, and
pain, and sorrow. What [will] supply the place of this? Ezekiel has told us, in
the 37 chapter, he had a view of resurrection. He says [that] the hand of the Lord
was upon him, and carried him out in the spirit, [and] set him down in the
midst of valley full of bones. The Lord asked him a very curious question: son
of man, can these bones live? Well, to all natural appearance, if he had been a
person not having faith in God, he would have said, No, [they are] dry [bones].
[He was] ignorant upon the subject. Hence, he says: O Lord God, thou knowest.
Then says the Lord: Prophesy, son of man; say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear
the word of the Lord, Thus saith the Lord, and he prophesied, and as he
prophesied, there was a noise, and shaking bones came to itself, bone. Flesh,
and sinews came upon [them] and skin covered them above, [but there was] no breath
in them. Then the lord told Ezekiel to prophecy again to the winds. So he
prophesied, and breath entered into them. And here, then is life: they lived,
[and] stood upon their, feet an exceeding great array. . . .The Lord, in order
to explain this greater matter to them, says: O my people, I will open your
graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you to the land
of Israel, bone to bone, skin cover [flesh and sinews]. [In all/Know of?] this
the immortal spirit [will be] enabled, [and] after he rises up in that manner,
they are brought unto the land of Israel. (Liverpool to Great Lake City: The
1851 Journal of Missionary George D. Watt, ed. LaJean Purcell Carruth and
Ronald G. Watt [Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 2022], 149, 150)
