Series: The Resurrection of the Dead (1 Corinthians 15)

The Hope of the Resurrection (1 of 2)

1 Corinthians 15.20-34

People have always been curious about what happens after we die. When you look at history it becomes clear that men have overwhelmingly believed that death is not the end of our existence. It was not until modern times that the belief in some kind of spiritual world was called into question by large numbers of people. The ancient peoples believed in an invisible world of spirits, gods, and the departed dead. Furthermore, many of the ancients believed that this life was in some way a preparation of the soul for entering that afterlife and that what a person did while in the body would have some impact on the soul when it departed from this world to the world of the dead. Many of the ancient mythologies, like the famous Egyptian Book of the Dead, taught that people should be moral and virtuous as a way of insuring and earning a good afterlife instead of having to pay for wicked deeds done while in the body. The burial of the body was usually seen as the final preparation for a soul to cross over into the spiritual world of the dead. Great civilizations, like Egypt, have built tombs for their dead which were really elaborate preparations for the after-life.

Like the Egyptians the Greeks also believed that a person’s death was not the end. The Greeks believed in the immortality of the soul, though the underworld of departed spirits, or Hades, was not exactly what we would call heaven. But the Greeks viewed the body as a kind of prison for the immortal soul. The soul was what really mattered, not the body, which would be left behind in death.

It is important to understand that the Jews did not think this way. They were different in so many ways from the ancient pagans and their view of what happens after death is a good example of this difference. The Old Testament says very little about what happens to a departed soul after death. The Jews believed that God would eventually raise His people from the dead bodily at the end of time before the Day of Judgment. This may have been based largely on what is stated by the Prophet Daniel:

“And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt” (Daniel 12:2 ESV)

Note how the rising of the dead is connected to the Judgment and the separation of the people. When we come to New Testament times and the ministry of Jesus, a belief in the resurrection of the dead was well-established in the minds of the Jewish people, though not all believed it. Remember that the Pharisees believed in the Resurrection of the dead but the Sadducees did not. This fact was seen in how the Sadducees tried to test Jesus with a question about the resurrection, but their question was based on ignorance and unbelief (See Matt. 22.23-33). When Jesus went to Mary and Martha after their brother Lazarus had died, it was Martha who expressed her belief in the Resurrection of the Dead at the end of time (See John 11.24). Martha expected to see her brother again, but not as soon as Jesus intended for her to see him!

In the book of Acts the preaching of the resurrection of Jesus was top priority for the Apostles. The early Christians were preaching that Jesus had already been raised from the dead and that the end of time had actually already begun to unfold. They were proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection from the dead (Acts 4.2), which brought the condemnation of the Jewish leaders. The Apostles were preaching that the resurrection of the dead had already begun in Jesus. Jesus was God’s Agent (Christ) to usher in the Kingdom Age. Many of the Jews believed in the coming resurrection of the dead. But to say that it had already begun in Jesus was an offensive thing to many of them. Jesus was the stumbling stone. The Jews may have believed in resurrection, but not through Jesus.

But when Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, began to preach to the Greeks, there was another problem. The Greeks did not believe in the resurrection at all. The stumbling point for them was that a resurrection had occurred. This was vividly illustrated by the reaction of the philosophers on Mars Hill to Paul’s preaching of the resurrection (See Acts 17.32). But Paul preached it anyway and did so when he came to Corinth and established the Church there.

Some of those who had heard Paul preach the resurrection and had become a part of the Church still did not believe that the dead could be raised. This is the issue Paul has to address. What are the implications of rejecting the resurrection?

The main point that Paul is making here is that the Christian faith rises or falls on the resurrection of Jesus. If Jesus has not been raised then the Gospel is a fraud and Christians have no hope.

Now Paul has established this point. And he can now move on to actually talk about the resurrection of the dead and what it means to have this hope. What kind of hope do Christians have because of the resurrection of Christ? That is Paul’s main concern in this next section.

Christ the First-fruits of the Dead

One of the amazing things about the Apostle’s writing and doctrine is their absolute confidence. They proclaim their message with conviction and surety without any hint of doubt. There is nothing in the New Testament that sounds like philosophical speculation. The writers of the New Testament did not search for the truth, they proclaimed it in Jesus and the resurrection. Even when speaking of future events there is nothing but confidence. When Paul writes the Corinthians about the resurrection of the dead, he does not sound like someone who is guessing, questioning, or speculating about what might happen or what the future might turn out to be.

In our philosophical, scientific, skeptical Age this kind of certainty not only sounds strange, it may be condemned as arrogant, religious dogma. In our modern age the idea that we should accept the word of someone else as truth without any reservation not only sounds foolish, it is usually thought of as dangerous. And predicting the future with any degree of certainty has proven to be a very risky occupation that seldom pays off. We would love to be able to know the future. But we are very suspicious of anyone who claims to have perfect information. The best response could be “wait and see.”

However, there is a whole industry that is based on predicting the future: gambling. People will wager large sums of money on the future turning out a certain way. In a very real sense every living person is betting their life every day and then hoping that the future turns out the way that they envision. And many are disappointed when wrong.

But when Paul speaks about the future resurrection of the dead he is not pulling a white rabbit out of his hat and just coming up with some random philosophical theories. Paul’s reasoning is based solidly on something that had already taken place: the resurrection of Christ. The future is here in the resurrection of Christ. The fact of His resurrection in the past points to a known and certain future. Paul began this section by reminding the Corinthians of the fact of the resurrection of Christ (vs. 1-11). Without the resurrection of Christ there is no hope of any further resurrections from the dead.

But, Paul says again, Christ has been raised. We can now begin to build our hope for the future on this fact. But for Paul the resurrection of Christ points to something else. His resurrection is just the first. Paul uses the image of first-fruits, which is something the Jewish mind would have been familiar with because of the Law. Israel was commanded to celebrate the first gatherings of the harvest each year by bringing some of this initial harvest as an offering to the Lord. The first-fruits of the harvest was a reminder that God had been working and providing and that there was even more to come in the future. An initial harvest was just the promise of more to come in the future. And that is the idea in the resurrection of Christ. Christ is the first-fruit of the harvest of the dead. That first-fruit belongs to the Lord and Christ has gone back to heaven to be with the Father. But there is an even greater harvest coming.

This hope is what enabled Paul and the early Christians to begin speaking of the dead as having fallen asleep. When we fall asleep we do so temporarily. When we fall asleep at night it is in hope of waking up in the morning. The same is true for the sleep of death. Those who die are really only falling asleep and will awake one day. (This image of falling asleep is referring to the body, not to the soul. There are those who have misunderstood this and concocted a doctrine called soul-sleeping, which completely misses the beautiful imagery and the hope of the resurrection of the body that is bound up in the term “fallen asleep.”)

His Resurrection is the Foundation

Sometimes when there is a medical advancement we hear about some person who actually survived a serious illness because of this new treatment. What is the result of this news? It gives everyone else hope that they might also survive that illness! Until the new treatment actually works in real life, we might welcome the possibility of a cure, but have no concrete hope that it will work on a real person. We can think of the resurrection of Christ as a concrete example that God’s “cure” for death will actually work! Christ’s resurrection is the proof that everyone else has the hope of coming back from the dead.

If Christ had not been raised then the idea of a resurrection would be interesting speculation only. But now a person who died has been raised from the dead by the power of God. If it happened to Jesus, who is a member of the human race and actually died, then it could happen to the rest of us! That is the idea Paul is expounding here to the Corinthians. If Christ has been raised then there is hope for the rest of us who die to also be raised. But if Christ was not really raised then there is no reason to have any hope of coming back from death. And so we see why it was such a serious error for some of the Corinthians, or anyone today for that matter, to reject the bodily resurrection of Christ. Without resurrection there is no Gospel and there is no hope for humanity. Death is the final Victor in that case. If Christ is still in the tomb then death was more powerful than He and there would be no reason to believe that He is the Son of God. He was declared with power to be the Son of God by His resurrection (See Rom. 1.4). But if He were not raised, then that would mean that God has not been able or willing to produce a remedy for death. Remember that God Himself is the one who imposed the sentence of death on creation because of man’s sin. If Christ was not raised then He could not be God’s remedy for sin and death, which means we have no remedy, at least not yet. Are we still waiting for God to act? We are still waiting for salvation if Christ was not raised. But the Gospel affirms that Christ HAS been raised. Salvation from God has appeared in the resurrection of Jesus!

But the resurrection of Christ is not the end of the matter. He is merely the first of many more who will rise from the dead.

Why does the Gospel proclaim the resurrection of the body? Why not affirm, like the ancient pagans, the immortality of the soul? Is not the soul the highest and purest part of us? Many Christians today are more Greek than Christian in their thinking. The doctrine of the resurrection of the dead is not preached or appreciated today because most people do not connect this to what the Bible teaches about Creation. God is not opposed to the material, He created it. And God has promised to redeem creation (See Rom. 8.18-25). The idea that the material is inherently evil and the spiritual or immaterial is good has robbed the Church of understanding the Gospel and salvation. To be sure, the Creation is currently under a curse and our bodies are subject to decay and death. There is going to have to be a change. The world in this present form is going to pass away. Our bodies cannot inherit the eternal Kingdom in their present corruptible state. But the future does include a New Creation, a new heavens and earth, and new, glorified bodies.

That is the Gospel and we know it is true because Christ’s body was raised from the dead. If Christ’s body is still in the tomb then there is no reason for us to have any hope at all.

Adam and Christ

Now someone may ask why the future resurrection of the dead has begun in Jesus. Why did God do it that way? If God were going to raise all of the dead at the end, then why not just do that and do it instantaneously? Why raise just one man from the dead to begin with and then wait to raise the rest of the dead? That is an important question and Paul anticipates it and provides an answer to it here. To anyone who knows the Biblical story the answer becomes rather obvious. We must ask ourselves where death came from in the first place. Who was responsible? It was a single man! (Actually a man and his wife, but together they are called “Adam.”) Death entered the world and spread through the human race because of a single man, who was also the progenitor of the human race. Now it happened that way for a reason because it teaches us about another man who was to come and the nature of salvation.

Again we have to deal with the fact that what the Bible teaches contradicts how modern people think. (Actually the Gospel has always come against the wisdom of the world!) Modern people tend to think of themselves as isolated individuals who are responsible for no one but themselves and who answer to no one but themselves. This kind of individualism is not only a somewhat recent development in the history of human thought, being mostly a product of the Enlightenment in Western Europe and America, but even today it is not necessarily the only way of viewing human life. Most of the Eastern cultures and those cultures that we cannot call “modern” do not think of themselves as isolated individuals but as part of a larger family or society.

I think this is a much more Biblical way of thinking, though these cultures are not necessarily taking that way of thinking directly from the pages of Scripture. Rather than thinking of ourselves individually we must begin to think of the human race as a giant, extended family.

We are all familiar with the image of a family tree. It is useful to think of the human race as a giant family tree. But at the root is Adam. And whatever is true of the root will be taken throughout the rest of the tree eventually. That is what happened to the human family when Adam sinned and death entered the human race.

When taking the macro-view of the human race there are only two individuals who really matter. These two men are federal heads. That is, they represent many other people, just as the politicians we elect and put in office represent many other people beyond themselves. The president may be a single person, but he or she represents an entire nation. That is federal headship. It is a concept we are very familiar with in everyday life. Since we can’t be everywhere at once and do everything we need to do, we often have people who represent us and who do things for us. These people do what we would do for ourselves if we could. (Obviously that is how it would work in a perfect world. In the real world those who represent us often make mistakes or because of selfish motives do not always do what we want them to do.) Now this analogy of a federal head seems to break down at this point. If Adam was our representative, how did he do what we wanted him to do? We didn’t want Adam to sin and wreck the world! The concept of “original sin” gives many people problems. How can I be guilty for what someone else did? That does not seem fair.

But what we have to understand is that Adam WAS a good representative for the rest of the human race. That is, he did exactly what we would have done if we could have been there ourselves.

Adam chose to sin against a clear commandment of God. And that is what we would have done too. How do I know that? Simple. Every single person has actually done the very same thing, multiple times! “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” So, we all died in Adam because Adam did what we all would have done and we all do what Adam did. We are one with Father Adam.

If that were the end of the story of the human race that would mean that we would all die in our sins, just like Adam did. But that is not the end of the story because God sent another Man, another Adam. Paul develops all of this in his letter to the Romans, which is a rather complex argument (Rom. 5.12-21). Essentially Paul develops a comparison/contrast between Adam and Christ. Adam is the father of a race of men who are subject to the effects of sin and death. Christ is the progenitor of a New Humanity. Where Adam failed Christ succeeded.

Adam died, but Christ was raised from the dead. If you are human you have already shared in the nature of Adam and you were in solidarity with him. But Christ has come to give us a second option. We die in Adam, but we can live in Christ. By becoming united with Christ we can share in all of the benefits of His righteous life, which includes His resurrection power over death. (Some have used this doctrine to support Universalism, or the teaching that everyone will automatically be saved. But even a casual reading of Romans reveals that it is only those who identify with Christ who will benefit from His life and not the whole race. In other words, we have to voluntarily resign from our membership in the human race, or Adam’s family, and join Christ’s family, if we want to live.)

The Dead Raised for the Judgment

We should make it clear here that what Paul is teaching is that the resurrection of Christ has secured the resurrection of all the dead, not just those who are in Christ. Not all who are raised from the dead on the last day will enter into eternal life with Christ, but they will be raised nevertheless. This is something that Jesus Himself taught (See John 5.28-29).

There will be one resurrection of all the dead at the end of time. But some of the dead will rise to eternal life with Christ while some of the dead will rise to be condemned. The implications of this teaching are profound. The major implication of the resurrection of the dead is that each and every person is going to be judged. (There are those who teach that only unbelievers will be judged, but this is a misunderstanding of the word “judge.” They equate “judge” with “condemn” which is only one of the two possible outcomes of judgement.) This means that what we do in the body in this life is going to come back upon us (See 2 Cor. 5.10). Everyone is sowing something and is eventually going to have to reap it (See Gal. 6.7-8). This means that our lives now matter for eternity. Our eternal fate is being sealed now and will only be cemented when the resurrection takes place. The resurrection will finish the salvation of the righteous and it will cement the eternal condemnation of the wicked.

The resurrection of the body will not change the state of a person’s soul or character. Those who are unholy will still be unholy at the resurrection of the dead. The only thing that will change is the body. Right now the wicked have an unholy spirit in a corruptible body that they have used throughout their lives to satisfy their own base desires. But the resurrection body will not be capable of fulfilling those desires and the world in which those desires were fulfilled will also be destroyed.

The condemned will spend eternity in bodies that cannot die but without the ability to satisfy any of their desires or take comfort in any of the things that they have loved. That is the torment of Hell. On the other hand, the righteous now have a redeemed spirit in an unredeemed body. This causes them to groan and long for full redemption, which is the redemption of the body (See Rom. 8.23). In other words, the Redeemed will have a body that will perfectly match the nature and desires of the New Creation that we have become in Christ. All of the frustrations of a corruptible and sinful body will be gone and that will mean eternal glory for the Redeemed. The righteous will be liberated to be everything they were recreated to be in Christ when they receive that resurrection body. The Creation will also be liberated from bondage to serve the holy desires of the Sons of God (Rom. 8.21). So this life is really just the front porch of eternity and everyone is preparing for the Resurrection Day, even if they are not aware of this fact.

But the fact of the Resurrection of the Dead should cause everyone to be sober about life and careful about how we live and the decisions we make. Not only should we repent of sinful deeds we do in our bodies, but we should also be careful about the affections and attachments we make in our hearts. Those who love the world and the things in the world will be eternally disappointed when those things pass away along with the fulfillment of those lusts (See 1 John 2.15-17). (The Resurrection of the Dead is the basis for the doctrine of Hell and eternal punishment and will be discussed in another article in this series.)

At His Coming

The timing and order of all these events are important the Apostle Paul. How will all of these things happen? What will it look like? Paul has a pastor’s heart. He is not writing to satisfy an academic interest in this subject. I feel that many people who study Eschatology do so with a kind of carnal curiosity that is divorced from faith and foreign to the authors of the New Testament. If we are asking the wrong questions we will never get the right answers. Paul is not trying to predict WHEN the End will come. That is impossible to know. Each and every generation needs to live as if Christ could come any day and be prepared to meet Him. But faith does not think in terms of times and dates (Acts 1.7). It is the eternal purpose of God that matters and we believe that He will finish what He started, no matter how long it takes in terms of days, years, seasons and epochs.

The issue Paul is dealing with is the comfort of the Saints in the face of death. This is a practical issue. How should believers think about death? How should we respond to our own death and the death of our brethren? Unless the Lord comes again we will all die. Those in Corinth who rejected the resurrection were without any hope. Those who died were lost forever, as far as we know. The only people who had any hope would be those alive when Jesus comes. That was the very issue Paul was dealing with in the Thessalonian Church. Would those who have died miss the coming of the Lord? No! There would be a resurrection of the dead when Christ comes again. And then all of us will be caught up together to meet the Lord (See 1 Thess. 4.13-18). This was written to comfort the Saints. Christ has been raised and He will come again.

When He does He will bring with Him those who have departed and they will rise from the dead first. The emphasis here is on the fate of those in Christ. They will not be lost and miss the coming of the Lord.

We should notice that when Paul comforts Christians he points them to the coming of the Lord. Christians are waiting and hoping for a Person, not just an event. To be sure, when Jesus comes there will be some important events that will take place!

The resurrection of the dead is the main event that will happen when He comes. But the resurrection will not happen until Christ comes. Jesus is the Resurrection and the Life (John 11.25). It is disturbing that the Church today seems to be more interested in the events of the End Times than in the coming of Her Lord and Savior.

The goal of our faith is to see Christ and to be with Him. That is our blessed hope. There is no hope apart from Christ. Everything else that will happen at the End is secondary to Christ coming for His Bride. Being afraid of the End Times is especially inappropriate. All of these things were written to give us good hope and comfort. To be afraid is to either be ignorant or unbelieving. If Christ has defeated death then there is no other enemy we should fear. Jesus is going to take care of His people when He comes, just as He has taken care of us in this world. He has saved us and He WILL save us. We must trust Him to do this.

There is a connection, theologically speaking, between Christ’s resurrection and His Second Coming. The resurrection is a little preview of coming attractions. The future is here and we are living in it, getting ready for it, preparing for that great Day. Nothing else really matters. Everything we do should be connected in some way to what will happen when Jesus comes again and our eternal life with Him.