Dear friends,
This week we start a 4-week series on one of the pivotal chapters in the Bible: 1 Corinthians 15. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is not an afterthought of the gospel. It is not a tidying up of the events of Jesus’ death at Calvary. The resurrection is the gospel; it is foundational to the Christian understanding of Jesus’ mission and the world’s future.
In this episode of Two Ways News we look at the first 11 verses which are on the truth of the gospel. As we recall the message that was preached, in the coming weeks we will see the significance of doubting the resurrection as well as the marvellous implications of our confidence in Christ’s resurrection.
Yours,
Phillip
Phillip Jensen: 1 Corinthians 15 is a fantastic chapter. But because it has 58 verses, we’re not going to go through the whole thing in one hit; that wouldn’t do it justice, even apart from its length. We’re planning to look at it over the next 4 weeks, because you can divide it up easily enough into 4 parts. This is of course the great chapter on the resurrection.
Peter Jensen: This chapter arises from yet another misunderstanding by the Corinthians over whether the resurrection from the dead is the best way to describe life after death, or whether it’s just the spirit that lives on. So Paul lays the foundation in the first 12 verses by talking about the gospel he has received, in which they ostensibly believed. And then he comes to questioning their belief. If they believe in the resurrection of Jesus, how come they don’t believe in the resurrection of everybody? They don’t understand. Then in the next section, he talks to them about the resurrection of the dead, the necessity of it, and then the resurrection of the body. Finally, the end of the chapter is full of wonderful victory. The last verse, of course, is an exhortation to us as we are living between the first and second coming of Jesus.
So today, we ought to look at the first section and the last section. I’m a great believer in this; I like reading the last bit of a book first to see if I want to read the rest of it. But here, the first bit is about laying the foundation of the gospel, while the last bit tells us what the consequences of the gospel are. So they tie the whole passage together. Then over the next few weeks, we’ll look at the middle of the chapter.
Phillip: Alright. What is the whole chapter about?
Peter: The key question is raised in 15:12, “Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?” This verse raises the question: can they truly be Christians if they don’t believe in the resurrection of the dead?
Phillip: Did they believe in the afterlife?
Peter: Undoubtedly. But to them, was there a bodily resurrection, or was the spirit released from the body and sent into the afterlife? The Apostle is saying here that the Christian gospel is about the bodily resurrection of the dead. This takes us back to the doctrine of creation, where God declares all things good. In God’s good world, is the body good?
Phillip: There were all kinds of questions floating around the ancient world in this regard. We know about the Jews and the Pharisees and the Sadducees, for instance. The Sadducees didn’t believe in the resurrection, whereas the Pharisees did. There were some Greeks, like the Epicureans, who didn’t believe in the afterlife. But by and large, Greek philosophy was much more caught up with an afterlife that was spiritual. Leaving aside Epicureans and people like that, what do you think was their view about bodies, spirits, life, and death?
Peter: They had very negative views about the body, and with good reason. In their experience, as with the experience of so many human beings, the body was a liability. They suffered from sickness, disfigurement, and disability without any real hope of fixing the problem. There was no useful dentistry back then. If you’ve ever had a tooth that’s giving you a lot of trouble, you know what pain is. The body is this wretched thing that your spirit is trapped in, and so heaven would be about getting rid of the body.
There are also the desires and passions which enslave us: the desire to have food all the time, and the sexual desires that obsess us. The body seems like a punishment for the real person inside us: the spirit or the soul. We have a longing to be free of the body, and so in the ancient world a pure soul would float high above the moon. Then there were the impure souls—and interestingly, people who were crucified came into this category. Those who were evil or who died violently became spirits here on earth, haunting and interfering with people. So the afterlife was spiritual, and the idea of existing bodily after death was ridiculous.
So you have this longing to be free, and it’s not desirable for God to resurrect a person. Upon hearing the gospel, the anti-Christian philosopher Celsus said that the resurrection, the hope of the Christian, is “the hope of worms,” a filthy, obstinate, and impossible thing which God will not and cannot do. In a world which said that sort of thing, how would you like to be going around preaching a saviour who died on the cross and then was bodily resurrected?
Phillip: When Paul preached it in Athens, some mocked. The idea of the resurrection of the dead was unimaginable.
Peter: So we often hear, and Paul refers to the way in which the message of Christ being crucified was regarded as foolishness to the Greeks and impossible to the Jews. But it was the work of God.
Phillip: Referring now to 15:12, “Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?” Were the Corinthians saying that Jesus hadn’t risen from the dead, or that there is no final resurrection? Were they denying the day of the resurrection that the Pharisees and the Old Testament pointed to, when all would rise from the dead?
Peter: It’s impossible to say for sure, but I believe that somehow, they’ve accepted the idea of the resurrection of Jesus, but it hasn’t flowed over to an understanding of the resurrection of all, which is a terribly inconsistent belief. It could be held by people who are Christians if they don’t know better, but I think they’ve now committed themselves to a non-Christian belief system. So they’re on the path to being unbelievers at this point, but that’s my reading of it.
Phillip: 1 Corinthians 15:1–11
Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain.
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed.
It’s a great passage which goes back to the basics, to the great news of the gospel. A man has risen from the dead—and not just a man, but Christ himself. So Paul’s job was to be the herald. He went around proclaiming the news, and the listeners received the message. They had been made to stand in Christ, because they were saved by this message. This proclamation of the fact that Jesus rose from the dead saved them, but they now had to hold fast to the word, because if you don’t hold fast to this word, then hearing it and receiving it will not save you. You’ll receive it and believe in vain. So if they’ve received this message and seen the salvation that it brings, why would they change? Why do people who have embraced Christianity, and embraced the risen Jesus, change in their belief? I think it’s due to temptations, perhaps to avoid ridicule and persecution.
It can be tempting to fit with the accepted truths of our surrounding culture. But to change threatens their very salvation. For if you do not stand firm in this, then your belief is all in vain. It’s of no purpose at all. So the change that is happening or threatening to happen in Corinth is one that involves the truth or falsehood of Christianity itself. That makes a big difference.
Peter: It’s not so remote from us. Famously, there was a bishop in England in the 1980s who declared that he believed in the existence of Jesus, but he thought the bones and body of Jesus were still lying there in the grave—that the resurrection was simply a symbol of the victory of Christ. He was like the Corinthians, but why was he saying such a thing? Without knowing the gentleman in question, I believe that he was trying to speak the truth of Christianity in a culturally appropriate form. But what we’ve got to see here is that when Christianity began, it was absolutely counter-cultural. It wasn’t a philosophy, but a news report. You heralded it as an event that had taken place. You couldn’t say, “The event that you report is only a way of saying that Jesus was still alive in our memory,” or something like that. If you were to take that line, then Christianity would have been torpedoed, gone, forgotten.
Phillip: I once went out with my wife to listen to a lecturer, and he said that he was against the resurrection of the flesh; he was assured that if we went to the right tomb, we would find the body. In other words, he denied the bodily resurrection of Jesus. But he very strongly believed in the presence of Jesus’ spirit in the Lord’s Supper.
Peter: What do you think made him deny the physical resurrection of Jesus?
Phillip: I think he didn’t believe in the miraculous; he was a materialist. I think he believed that dead men cannot be raised, that God could not raise a man from the dead. Yet he did believe that there is a spiritual world that we can engage in through the liturgy of the Lord’s Supper. In his view, the spirit of what Jesus taught and how he lived impacted the disciples, and they tried to express that ongoing presence of Jesus in their life by talking about the resurrection of the body. No-one would have thought that they actually meant that; they just felt the presence of Jesus in their lives after he had been crucified.
Peter: So the surrounding materialist culture of our time shaped his response.
Phillip: And the academic one as well. If you give pride of place to the university that is now established in terms of secularism, then you study religion not because it is true, but as a phenomenon. You can then have many qualifications in academic theology, but it’s established by an institution that in its very nature denies the reality of it. But it’s conforming to the culture.
Peter: So how is the ordinary person going to be so shaped by culture as to, almost without knowing it, abandon the truths of the gospel?
Phillip: It’s got to do with the elite: those who lead the culture and who have control of the educational media process of distributing information. If you live in a culture which continually decries the possibility of a resurrection and an incarnation—at school, at university, in the newspapers, in television, in podcasts—especially by those who are seemingly knowledgeable leaders, then it’s embarrassing to believe something so crude as Jesus’ body being raised from the dead.
Peter: It’s a subject which we must return to, because you may never have gone to university but still be a victim of the culture, hearing its voice more strongly than you do the voice of God in scripture.
Phillip: Yes, you don’t hear it in university, but that’s where the teachers and journalists are trained.
Peter: Returning to the text, 1 Corinthians 15:3–5
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.
That is to say, he received the gospel. It wasn’t invented by Paul. He always acknowledges that he received the news that Christ is the promised Messiah; that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures; that Christ is the promised one in the sacred scriptures, which were written before he came; and that the human problem is not fundamentally moral, as though by being a good person you can satisfy God, but that we are sinners. We have offended God and continue to offend God. That’s where our problem is. It’s not in the fact that you have a body—in fact, having a body is part of God’s good creation. The problem is with the attitude we have now towards God and his law.
So Christ died for our sins in accordance with the promises of the scriptures, and therefore he died, he was buried, and he was raised again. The very thing so offensive to the culture was seen by witnesses. He goes on to describe the witnesses: he appeared to Cephas and then to the Twelve, and then he appeared to more than 500 brothers at one time. He says that most of the witnesses were still alive, so the Corinthians could go and ask them. What I love about the gospel accounts, by the way, is that several times the doubts of the apostles are recorded. Even in Matthew 28, with the final words of Jesus before he ascends into heaven, they see him. “But some doubted,” it says.
Phillip: I think that’s a genius part of God’s inspired scripture. Here are the original, authorised witnesses, and the last great event of revelation of the resurrected body—and we read, “But some doubted.” There’s no way a fiction writer would write that in, unless he was a really clever liar. It just speaks of truth.
Peter: Thomas is a great witness to the resurrection, I would say. According to the scriptures, part of the reason for believing in Jesus is because of the eyewitnesses. But it is also because it fits so beautifully into the promises of God in the already existing scriptures. When you hear about Jesus and see what he did and said, you can see the fulfilment of the Old Testament as clearly as anything. It fits into the very history that God has unfolded from the beginning, and that he intends to keep going to the end of time. All this is nonsense in our culture, because we are, according to culture, not sinners at all. We are good people who sometimes sin. Even in much Christian and academic theology, Christ didn’t really die for our sins. He died as an example, for instance, but you can’t say he died as our substitute on the cross, because that’s offensive.
Phillip: That is one of the big problems of our culture and society. It’s funny how you keep saying this statement, “In accordance with the scriptures.” That’s because what you’ve said about how the promises of the scriptures point to the resurrection is true, as is what you’re saying about the witnesses. But these things are also giving you the meaning. Christ died on the cross—that’s a fact. But what is the meaning of this fact? The meaning is given according to the scriptures. So we don’t interpret the scriptures; we read the scriptures, but the scriptures give us the meaning and interpretation. Likewise, the prophets didn’t write their own ideas, but gave the interpretation of God’s ideas to the events.
“Jesus died,” is a fact; “for our sins,” is the interpretation. That’s the context of the facts, and the prophetic explanation of the facts helps us understand our sins. So preaching Jesus’ death never gets anywhere for people who do not understand sin, punishment, judgement, and death as the consequence.
With this in mind, the Old Testament context is essential for an understanding of the gospel, and the resurrection is the same. The tomb was empty, he appeared, he made it clear he wasn’t a ghost, he sat and ate fish with them, and so forth—those are all facts. But the resurrection does not make sense without the Scripture explanation. In the parable of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16:19–31, Abraham speaks to the rich man who is suffering in Hades. The rich man begs for Abraham to send the poor man back from the dead to warn his brothers of this terrible place. And Abraham says in Luke 16:31, “If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.” The Mosaic prophetic teachings of the scriptures help us to understand what the resurrection is about. In the light of that, you understand why Jesus rose from the dead.
As for the historical witnesses, Paul himself is an extraordinary witness. He tried to persecute Christianity out of existence, yet he turned around and changed his whole worldview. Paul meeting the risen Jesus was the great conversion experience in the history of Christianity. The resurrection doesn’t work as a myth, because it’s not what the Old Testament taught. In trying to stay friends with our culture and our materialist friends, we may be tempted to downplay the resurrection by finding some mythological explanation. But it just doesn’t work.
Peter: No, and Paul is uncompromising in saying that it doesn’t work to these Corinthians, who were doing exactly the same thing in their time and culture. So he says to them, as this section concludes in 15:11, “Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed.”
In other words, he is saying, “When you became Christians, you Corinthians accepted the gospel of the death for sin and the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ according to the scriptures. That is what you were baptised into. Now are you going to continue to stand on that, or are you going to compromise and change the gospel to suit the age in which you’re living to make it more comfortable to be a Christian?” Because at that moment, the apostle Paul and others were suffering terrible persecution for giving the news. His challenge to them, as he says in 15:12 and so forth, is exactly the same challenge that we face living in a world which doesn’t believe in the gospel, and where we find it so easy to compromise by changing the gospel to suit the culture. We find it so easy, but he says to us, “Are you going to stand on what you believe or not?”
Phillip: Yes, the Corinthians are just re-expressing it in more socially acceptable fashions, which in fact is the denial of the reality. Either Jesus physically rose from the dead because he died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, or Christianity is false.
Peter: And so he goes on. In 15:1-11, the gospel is true. In 15:12-35, you cannot reinterpret it. In 15:36-49, he talks of the nature of the resurrection body. But before we get to those, next week we’re going to turn to 15:50-58, God’s victory and its consequences.
Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Links & Recommendations
For more on this topic, check out this talk given at St Andrew’s Cathedral called The Gospel First Preached.
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