Dear friends,
Last week, we started our series in the Resurrection Chapter, 1 Corinthians 15. Naturally, we started at the beginning, but today, we are jumping to the end. For the Resurrection is the end to which the world is heading, and we don’t want to wait until after the doubter’s arguments before hearing the great proclamation of the victory of the risen Lord Jesus.
Don’t forget to mention this podcast to your friends—it is provided free of charge by the generosity of others.
Yours,
Phillip
Phillip Jensen: In this week’s episode, we are discussing the wonderful chapter of 1 Corinthians 15. Peter, you wanted to go to the end of the chapter before looking at the middle. So how about you read 15:50–58 for us?
Peter Jensen: 1 Corinthians 15:50–58
I tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:
“Death is swallowed up in victory.”
“O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?”
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.
Phillip: Why do you want to go to the end first?
Peter: We want to know where we’re going with this passage, to know what the stakes are. Afterwards, we’ll go back to the middle of 1 Corinthians 15 and see why it’s the case, what the resurrection body means, and the other points made in this great chapter.
Phillip: Death and resurrection is not what our culture likes to talk about, although we still have public holidays for Easter and Christmas, because our government will keep on giving us those holidays for their commercial values and interests. Yet it is a bit strange. I mentioned last week the Sydney Morning Herald, which always has an editorial on Christmas and Easter. But as the years roll on, less and less of their editorial is actually about Jesus, his birth at Christmas, or his resurrection. In fact, some of the editorials are almost perverse in their ability to write about the season without any reference to Jesus himself at all, let alone the very fact that he died for our sins and rose again.
There’s no other story which is so overwhelmingly against our sense of autonomy—our sense of godlessness, so to speak—in this world. But the autonomy we have is not just against God; over time, living a life of autonomy inevitably is going to lead us to a society of individuals, and individualism is going to lead us to aloneness, and you’re never quite as alone as facing death. It’s fascinating how when people want to write about a good death, they write, “He died with his family gathered around the bed.” In contrast, the image of a horrible death is one of people being found alone. But we’re not willing to discuss death very much. People avoid thinking of it as much as possible. I remember our dear friend John Chapman who used to say that in the middle of a dinner party, he’d say to the hostess, “Have you ever considered your death? Have you been thinking about it recently?” It stopped the conversation.
I’ve reached the age and stage of reading obituaries. Interestingly, they too have dropped in prominence inside newspapers; they’re not done nearly as much as they used to be. But I read one just the other day about a man whom I’ll call Jack. Jack had 2 stated aims in life: to avoid the certainties of death and taxes. His quest for the latter led him to live in Guernsey; his quest for the former was focused around his desire to discover the magic pill that would cure his Parkinson’s, a disease that ailed him for the last decade of his life. Alas, certainties are certainties for a reason. Vale Jack, a full life well-lived. We cannot avoid death, but he lived his life to do so. It’s nonsense, isn’t it? And they could see that it was nonsense in the obituary because, well, it was his obituary.
Peter: Yes, there are a number of reasons why our thinking about death has largely disappeared. Though I can’t remember what it was called, I remember reading a book which gave the following reasons:
We don’t personally kill our food anymore.
We don’t see or experience death regularly as our ancestors did all the time (I think I was in my 40s before I ever saw a dead body).
We live for a very long time compared to our ancestors.
Our bodily health is far better than it was for our ancestors.
Our leisure time is large, and our capacity for entertainment likewise, which takes our minds away from the end.
When we go to a funeral these days, they are usually without bodies, and they verge on entertainment, but they do little for grief.
Phillip: That’s an interesting set of factors which you’ve mentioned. In our lifetime, the average life expectancy in Australia has increased by 10 years, so old people are less obvious in society around us. We also don’t walk through cemeteries to enter church as we used to, though there’s a church at Randwick with a cemetery right at the front door. You can’t get into that building without walking through the reminder of death, whereas we usually have it all removed from us.
Peter: Indeed. We’ve replaced it, but now we don’t have purpose and meaning because we have no goal. Instead, we have a widely noted anxiety, fear, and dread of death, which of course is a subject that’s out of bounds. We’re not allowed to talk about it. But if we did, we would discover that our experience of dread is a fear of the unknown, our present grief over loss, and our anxiety about the possibility (though some of us may regard it as remote) that justice lies beyond death, as the Bible says it does.
Phillip: There’s a glamorisation of death, though, in the promotion of euthanasia. They call it ‘Voluntary Assisted Dying’, and we’re being told over and over how wonderful it is. There is this argument that people protest too much in what they’re saying. Death is discussed in terms of the theatre of the absurd. Death can be made fun of. But picking up observations like that of Ecclesiastes, one of the problems with death is that it creates meaninglessness and purposelessness. Because if we all wind up in exactly the same way in the same place, then what is life about? What were my achievements all for?
Churches place big signs around the walls commemorating people who in previous generations, served the congregation, as Sunday school teachers or church wardens, for instance. We do not remember them, which is why the memorials are put up.
Peter: The memory of people soon lapses. Even the most famous people are forgotten. How many people do we remember who lived in the 19th or 18th centuries? In the end, we don’t remember even the most prominent and famous people, because death brings end.
Phillip: Though I’ve seen written on gravestones, “Always remembered.” They are remembered by God, but not by the people who were left, because they too will die and their memory will go.
Peter: What a contrast between what we’re discussing and what this passage talks about! One is filled with hope; the other is hopeless. I think eulogies are the closest we can get to saying ‘heaven.’ It’s like we are resurrecting the dead person by talking about them in that way, or building a verbal statue to them.
So what is the truth that the Bible confronts us with? That is justice, the hidden sting of death. All of us, Christian or not, long for justice. We deliver it constantly in our moralistic criticism of others. We appeal to a standard outside ourselves, which other people are meant to understand as well.
Phillip: Yes, and this is especially true with the worst criminals. “Death is too good for them,” we say. “It wasn’t fair that Pol Pot died. He never faced justice.” Or “Some of the people in the Nuremberg trials took suicide pills, and so they didn’t actually face the justice of being executed.”
Peter: As I say, a eulogy is, in a sense, a preempting of judgement done through speaking well of the deceased.
Phillip: Eulogies really are silly. When I was an assistant minister at Manly, we conducted many funerals. There would be eulogies during the service, where people would say wonderful things about the deceased, then we’d get into the cars to go to the gravesite. I learned that in the car directly behind the hearse, no one said anything. A couple of cars further back, people would reinforce the eulogies. In the cars that were even further back, people would scorn everything that had been said in the eulogy, and they would tell you what the person was really like. The further back you got in the procession, the more you heard the dirt. So the eulogies were wishful thinking about people’s lives. It was very sad. In fact, the word ‘eulogy’ itself means ‘to speak well.’ And at the person’s death, you may as well speak well of them; there’s no point in speaking ill. But the trouble is that at death, the ill that you’ve done is being faced.
Peter: Yes, the sting of death is sin. What makes death so horrible is the fact that you die always as a sinner, and sin leads to judgement. Death is God’s judgement and leads to God’s judgement. After death comes judgement, as Hebrews reminds us.
Phillip: I always remember that Jesus knew he was going to raise Lazarus from the dead. But when he went to the grave of Lazarus, we read in John 11:35, “Jesus wept.” Death itself is a horrific thing because it’s the victory of sin. It’s the victory of Satan over us. It’s not just that death is the wage of sin; the sting of death is sin. Because in death, the condemnation of the law on sinners finds its fulfilment. We face judgement in death because death is our judgement—but in fact, there’s judgement beyond death. It’s what anxious people facing death really think about sometimes.
Peter: I’ll never forget a lady saying to me in her final hours, “Peter, I have done so much wrong.” It was something that she hadn’t given much thought to until that moment, and understandably so. It’s no accident that the Apostle in 15:26 calls death “The last enemy.”
But 15:50–58 seems strange, because it gives us hope. “For the trumpet will sound,” it says. In other words, “We don’t think death is the end.” Is it just a mere delusion, a hopefulness that it may be so?
Phillip: No, because the resurrection of Jesus is the great evidence of the resurrection starting, and what we are seeing here is a great victory call at the end of the chapter. So let’s move to the more positive thing that the gospel actually gives to us. The trumpet call will herald the arrival of the King of Kings, the Kingdom of God, and he shall reign forever and ever.
I’m not ready for it at the moment; my flesh and blood, my perishable, mortal, old, sinful body is falling apart. But then there’ll be this transformation. The dead will live, but not like I am living at the moment in my perishability, in my mortality, my sagging, bagging, wrinkling, balding body. We’ll be raised to an imperishable life, death and sin will be swallowed up, and we will be living in the way that is fit for God’s future. Our bodies, not just our spirits, will be transformed into this resurrected state: glorified in the likeness of Jesus, imperishable.
We’ll all be resurrected, but not all of us will be saved. Some will be resurrected for judgement and condemnation, and others for salvation. But for now, what does that mean for us?
Peter: One of the marvellous and extraordinary things about the New Testament is the way in which it introduces us to the idea of the end having arrived. The resurrection of Jesus isn’t merely one of the great miracles; it is the beginning of the end. He is the firstfruits of those who fall asleep. His resurrection is going to be the resurrection of all in due course. But the end has already occurred in the first resurrection of Jesus. We’re living between the first and second coming of Jesus. We’ve been living in the Last Days since Jesus left, and it’s this age in which the new life has come.
It’s interesting that in Colossians 3, the Apostle tells us that we have been resurrected. Spiritually, we are now alive with Christ in the heavenly places. In other words, your resurrection is so certain that the essence of it has occurred. He’s using that phraseology there at the very beginning of chapter 3: We have eternal life, but we will have eternal life. We are the children of God; we will be the children of God. We have been resurrected; we will be resurrected. It’s that sort of interesting language of the New Testament that fills our hearts with hope because we can see these things have begun already. We are standing between the first and the second resurrection, and now looking forward to our own resurrection. If we die, we go to be with Christ, but we’re waiting for the resurrection. I think that’s the best way of putting it.
Phillip: Colossians 3 says that our raised life at the moment is a hidden life. But when Christ appears, we will appear with him in glory. So I’m not going to heaven when I die; I’m in heaven already. But when Christ appears, I will be seen as a heavenly citizen. That’s going to take a transformation of my body.
Peter: It is. In the meantime, how do we live in this time? The Apostle says, 15:58, “Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.” So make no compromise with the world. That is, if you think that the cultural challenge is overwhelming, and it seems hard to be a Christian today, just think how impossible it was for the apostles to preach a crucified Saviour. It’s a ridiculous gospel. They would say, “And he was raised from the dead,” and the audience would roar with laughter at such a suggestion. That’s the gospel they preached back then. But this counter-cultural message which they preached has changed the world. We’re constantly being pressed to get around the Word, to change it, to ignore it. Don’t compromise. The hope we have is built upon the truth we have, and in the meantime, abound in the works of the Lord, especially in commending Christ.
Phillip: When we come to Ecclesiastes, we read that life is really meaningless. Because if death is the end and there’s no other meaning, then there is nothing. But we have this great resurrection promise that lives on its certainty.
On the ABC, our national broadcaster, there was a television show called Q&A. One time, there was a Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney, and so the host asked, “What’s the most dangerous idea that you would ever want?” A Christian man, Peter Hitchens, happened to be on the show that night, and he said, “The most dangerous idea in human history and philosophy remains the belief that Jesus Christ was the Son of God who rose from the dead, and that’s the most dangerous idea you will ever encounter.” The host found this really difficult, because the other dangerous ideas spoken about were radical ideas of social engineering. But just talking about the resurrection didn’t seem to fit with the question. So the host said, “We can’t leave it there. Why is that dangerous?” This shows that he hadn’t understood the resurrection, because Peter Hitchens replied, “Well, I can’t really leave it there, because it alters the whole of human behaviour and all our responsibility. It turns the universe from a meaningless chaos into a designed place in which there is justice and there is hope, and therefore we all have a duty to discover the nature of that justice and work towards that hope. It alters us all. If we reject it, it alters us as well. It’s incredibly dangerous. It’s why so many people turn against it.”
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 on 1 Corinthians 15 entitled Our Victory.
Freely available, supported by generosity.
If you enjoy Two Ways News, why not lend us a hand? Consider joining our Supporters Club—friends who make it possible for us to keep producing this article/podcast.
To join the Supporters Club, follow the link below to the ‘subscribe’ page. You’ll see that there’s:
a number of ‘paid options’. To join the Supporters Club take out one of the paid ‘subscription plans’ and know we are deeply grateful for your support!
also the free option (on the far right hand side)
