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.
