Since I’m working my way through I Corinthians 15, and since tomorrow is Palm Sunday, and Easter next, I want to share my thoughts on the event that, completely in every way, changed everything. The following is from verses 12-22
Paul has established the essence of the gospel in a short creed he received not long after his conversion, that Christ died for our sins, was buried, and raised on the third day, all according to the Scriptures. The gospel is rooted not only in historical events, but in those events predicted in the history of Israel found in the Jewish Scriptures. The apostles of course got this from Jesus who told them after his resurrection that the whole Old Testament is about him, and from Acts through Revelation they consistently teach and preach him as the fulfillment of Israel’s history. They did not make this up, as skeptics and critics insist they did. Indeed, without the gospel the Old Testament and Israel’s history doesn’t make any sense at all! And without the Old Testament and Israel’s history the gospel doesn’t make any sense at all either!
We come now to yet another issue in the dysfunctional Corinthian church, which is why Paul is addressing it here:
12 But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?
Where in the world would they have gotten the idea that Christianity only has relevance for this life? Probably because most of them were ex-Pagans, and an afterlife was not a widely held belief among them, as it was with Jews. Paul says if there is no resurrection of the dead, “then not even Christ has been raised.” If the latter in fact happened, which in fact it did (over 500 eyewitnesses, the apostles and Paul among them), then at the end of time the dead will be raised too. Paul makes a bold claim that non-Christians throughout history refuse to take seriously:
14 And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.
The word for useless in Greek, kenos-κενός, makes Christianity a stark either/or proposition. Without an actual, physical, historical resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead, our faith is properly, empty, void; hence, worthless (“null”), amounting to zero (of no value, profit). If he did it is everything. As C.S. Lewis said, Christianity is either all important, or of no importance at all. What it cannot be is of moderate importance.
For several hundred years, and still today, critical scholars and liberals of various stripes have claimed you can still have Christianity even if there was no resurrection. The only reason a person can think such a thing is that their assumptions make them blind to the text. Their anti-supernatural bias forces them to think that the apostles and earliest disciples were either deluded or liars, but liars don’t die for what they know to be a lie. So the only real option they have is that there was a mass delusion, that they thought they saw and experienced Jesus alive after he was dead and buried, but, wink, wink, we know that’s just not possible. But we know no such thing! In fact, the only plausible and reasonable explanation for the textual, historical, and archaeological evidence is that Jesus of Nazareth came back to life after he was crucified, dead, and buried, as the creed says, and witnessed by many alive again! Here, from the Apostle Paul, a Jew and once a persecutor of Christians, is the bottom line:
19 If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.
As I’ve continually taught my children over the years, there is only one reason we believe in Christianity, and one reason only: it’s true! If it isn’t, we are living and dying for a lie. If it didn’t happen, we’re pathetic. But 2,000 years of history says it did, and we are not!
So Paul’s argument continues, asserting that Jesus in fact did rise from the dead, and therefore he is “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” He is the first, and we will follow in like manner. That is hard, if not impossible, for me to fathom. I will one day be a material but immortal creature whose body will be like Jesus’ body after he rose from the dead. I will just have to take Paul at his word. Living this life in a frail fallen body among other people with frail fallen bodies, all of us slowly rotting, makes our one day resurrection incredibly credible. It’s a wonderful unfathomable hope for God’s people.
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