This transcript of a sermon on 1 Corinthians 15:12-57 has been edited for ease of reading.
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Please take your Bibles now and turn with me to the book of 1 Corinthians, Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth, Paul’s great passage, great defense of not only Jesus’ resurrection, but our resurrection. And this week we will consider those last two phrases of the Apostle’s Creed: we believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.
It’s always bittersweet to come to the end of a series. I do always look forward to moving on to the next series, but at the same time I’m saddened to be leaving the current series because I’ve learned so much even through this. But I know this has been a good series for me and hopefully for you as well as we’ve discussed what it is that we believe looking at the Apostle’s Creed.
Hopefully you can use these as a resource as well for your own life and also as you’re talking to others about what it is that we believe as the church. All these sermons are available to listen to on the website. If you do, great. If you don’t, that’s fine also, but they’re there if you need them as a resource.
So today we will consider these words from First Corinthians chapter 15 and we’re actually going to begin in verse 12 rather than in verse 15. This is the word of the Lord.
“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? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised.
And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised.
For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile. You are still in your sins.
Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men. But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.
For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in his own turn, Christ the firstfruits, then when he comes, those who belong to him.
Then the end will come when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed all dominion, authority, and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death, for he has put everything under his feet.
Now when it says that everything has been put under him, it is clear that this does not include God himself who put everything under Christ. When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all. Now if there is no resurrection, what will those do who are baptized for the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized for them? Just as an aside, since I’m not going to deal with that particular verse throughout the sermon, that he’s dealing with a false theology that had crept up within the church of Corinth there.
Basically what he’s saying is you don’t believe in the resurrection, so why baptize people in the wrong way like you’re doing. So back to verse 30. And as for us, why do we endanger ourselves every hour? I die every day.
I mean that, brothers, just as surely as I glory over you in Christ Jesus our Lord. If I fought wild beasts in Ephesus for merely human reasons, what have I gained? If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. Do not be misled.
Bad company corrupts good character. Come back to your senses as you ought and stop sinning, for there are some who are ignorant of God. I say this to your shame.
But someone may ask, how are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come? How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body.
All flesh is not the same. Men have one kind of flesh, animals have another, birds another, and fish another. There are also heavenly bodies and there are earthly bodies, but the splendor of the heavenly bodies is one kind, and the splendor of the earthly bodies is another.
The sun has one kind of splendor, the moon another, and the stars another, and stars differ from stars in splendor. So it will be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable.
It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.
If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. So it is written, the first man, Adam, became a living being, the last Adam, a life-giving spirit. The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual.
The first man was of the dust of the earth, the second man from heaven. As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth. And as is the man from heaven, so also are those who are of heaven.
And just as we have borne the likeness of the earthly man, so shall we bear the likeness of the man from heaven. I declare to you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Listen, I tell you a mystery.
We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality.
When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true. Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, he gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Let’s pray. To the great God above, we thank you for these glorious promises that there is a resurrection from the dead, and there is life everlasting.
Lord, may we be gripped by the glory of these truths, and may we pursue a life of holiness and service, knowing that one day you will make all things new. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
INTRODUCTION
We need to talk. It’s a scary or maybe an exciting phrase to hear when you’re in a conversation with somebody. I remember one time as Michelle and I were discussing whether or not I was going to go to seminary.
We were headed out to dinner one evening. I was putting roadblocks up to seminary. I was putting roadblocks up to any type of change, which we desperately needed in my career situation at the time.
But we were on our way out to dinner, and I had thrown out all my excuses as to why I shouldn’t be going to seminary. And as we pulled up to where we were going to eat, Michelle put her hand on my arm and she looked at me and she said, “Before we go in, we need to talk.” It’s a little scary right there.
Sometimes it might be a better situation where you’ve been working toward a promotion and your boss calls you into his or her office and says, “Hey, we need to talk.”
We need to talk is one of those phrases that typically just grips us. But there’s one moment in our life that each of us fears that phrase. And it’s that moment when we’re sitting with a doctor and the doctor says, “We need to talk.”
You may be too young to think that death will ever touch you, or you may be older and in denial. But there is a moment when each of us will hear that phrase, we need to talk. And what we will talk about is death. Death, unfortunately, is a harsh reality in our world. And yet it is one that we do our best to ignore as a culture and sometimes even as a church.
Death reminds us that sin still reigns. Death reminds us that we are limited in the time that we have. But the truth is the Christian should not look at death with fear.
In 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14, Paul says this,
“Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep or to grieve like the rest of men who have no hope. We believe that Jesus died and rose again. So we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.”
Christians should be able to face the thought of death, whether it’s near to them or whether it’s far to them. And if we’re honest with ourselves, we don’t know whether it’s near or far from us; that is in God’s hands. But Christians should be able to face their own death and the death of others who are in Christ with hope and sometimes with joy.
The two truths that we are going to look at today, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting are the foundation of the hope and the joy that we should have as we contemplate our own death and the death of those that we love. The truth of the resurrection, the truth of life everlasting should calm our fears, but it should also motivate us in our life of service, in our pursuit of holiness. And so today we will look at these two glorious truths, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.
THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY
First, the resurrection of the body, that long passage that I read from first Corinthians 15 is usually a passage that I reserve for every third or fourth Resurrection Sunday. Paul opens the passage, opens chapter 15 of first Corinthians with this defense of Jesus’ resurrection. It’s the most important thing he says that he could preach, that Jesus died for our sins, that he was truly dead and that he rose again from the dead.
But the bulk of chapter 15 is not merely the glorious truth of Jesus’ resurrection. He is also defending the glorious truth of our resurrection. He has this back and forth throughout the chapter that if Jesus was not raised, then we won’t be raised. But if we’re not going to be raised, then Jesus wasn’t raised either.
It is so important for the Christian in their daily life to have a firm grasp on the truth that we will be bodily raised.
What did Jesus tell us about our Christian life? He told us that the Christian life, the life following Jesus is a daily taking up of our own cross and dying to ourselves.
We identify ourselves oftentimes with the sins that we harbor. We may not call ourselves an angry Christian. We may not call ourselves a lustful Christian, but we excuse those parts of our lives where we have made our identity our sin.
And it is scary, brothers and sisters, to think “Who am I without that sin?” The person who struggles with chronic pain, they go to their doctor and their doctor prescribes for them a new medication that the doctor is sure will finally take care of that pain, will finally take care of that problem. But there’s fear in that. What if it doesn’t work? What if it does work? What if suddenly I am free from this pain that over the years I have coped with, I have dealt with? It has become part of who I am. What happens if I have to set it aside and that is not part of me anymore?
We do the same thing with sin, brothers and sisters. The drug addict looks at their life and says, “Who am I without this little extra help?” The lustful Christian looks at their life and says, “Who am I without my pornography? What if I have to take the extra effort to work to develop a real relationship with another human being rather than the false one that’s on my computer screen?” We must put to death sin in our lives. And the thing that gives us hope in the midst of putting sin to death is the glorious truth that resurrection life is ours today.
We will be resurrected in bodies that glorify God. And so we pursue putting ourselves to death now because we have the glorious hope of the resurrection of Jesus. We put those sins to death. We die to our own pride. We die to our own selfishness. We die to our own controlling or at least trying to control every moment, every aspect of our life.
And we can die to those sins. We can let go of those things and give them to God. Because we have the hope of the resurrection in our lives, just as Jesus took up his cross, died for our sins and was raised to new life.
Our passage from 1st Corinthians focuses on the truth of our resurrection. It reminds us that we are the most to be pitied if the resurrection is not true. Why put sin to death if this is all there is? Paul even says if this is all there is, if we are born, we live and we die and then there’s nothing else, Paul says, you know what? Go do whatever you want to do.
“Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die and it doesn’t matter.” But it does matter, brothers and sisters, because there is more beyond this. We are not the most to be pitied because Jesus has secured our resurrection life.
Going on in the passage in 1st Corinthians, he tells us to long for the glorious end that awaits and he describes our resurrection bodies. Do you long for the day when Jesus returns? I mean, do you truly desire? We close our services every week with, “He who testifies to these things says, yes, I am coming soon. Amen, come Lord Jesus.”
Do you long for the resurrected body that is promised to you through the resurrection of Jesus Christ? It should change how you live. It should change how you move in this world. It should change how you interact with this world, which we’ll talk about here in a few moments.
But do we truly want Jesus to come back and do we truly understand that the truth that he is coming back with our resurrection bodies can fuel us for the ministry of the gospel? Earlier in the book of 1st Corinthians, in 1st Corinthians one through three, Paul talks about the truth of the gospel and he says the truth of the gospel offends people, but we can move forward with that truth of the gospel.
Even though we know that people will be offended by the gospel, we can move forward knowing that it is hope, knowing that it is glory, knowing that it is joy for people to hear that news and to respond to it. We should long for the resurrection as we seek to serve God in holiness.
1st Corinthians 15:35-42, Paul goes on to call us to live in the hope of a peculiar glory. He describes the body that will be raised. He says what was dishonorable and perishable will be sown and the honorable and imperishable will be harvested.
What will our glorified resurrected bodies be like? Will it just be this body with a patch here and there to kind of fix some of the major problems? I hope not. Because even the minor problems are annoying at times. It is a completely different body.
I thought about oranges as I was preparing this. He talks about seeds being planted, and if you open up an orange and you pull out the seeds and once they dry out a little bit, they’re just kind of wrinkly and small and ugly looking. But if you plant an orange seed in the ground and you care for it, that orange tree will spring up and will grow.
And after a period of time, once it comes to maturity, it will get these white blossoms on them in February which are, oh, if you’ve never smelled actual orange blossoms, brothers and sisters, it’s one of the most beautiful aromas in the world. And then several months after that, the fruit is there, the sweetness of an orange right off the tree.
It’s the same thing that was in the seed, but it’s more glorious. It is more majestic. It has far more power and far more life in it. And that’s the picture that Paul gives us of our resurrection body.
We are planted as seeds that must die to produce something far more honorable, something far more immortal. We look to the life of Jesus. We look to the resurrection of Jesus as described for us in the Gospels. And that is our hope, brothers and sisters. They recognized him, but he was different. He was different enough that Mary did not recognize him in the garden and the disciples on the road to Emmaus were like, who is this stranger that doesn’t know what’s going on? And yet when his power, when his glory, when his voice was revealed, they knew who it was.
I was talking with one of our dear sisters in Christ this week, and she wanted to know, “Will I recognize my loved ones in heaven?” Brothers and sisters, most likely we will. Jesus’ disciples recognized him, but he was different. He was more powerful.
He was more glorified. And that is the resurrection hope that we have. And that’s why we can deal with the hardships of our own bodies, because we know that a more glorious, more powerful, more immortal body awaits us.
And then 1 Corinthians 15:50:58 reminds us that the truth, the glory of the resurrection removes from you and I the sting and the victory of death. It seems like sin and death still reign, but the scriptures are clear, brothers and sisters, that Jesus has defeated sin and death.
We still see their still see their grasp, their grip on humanity. We are awaiting the final defeat of sin and death. But that defeat is assured the resurrection. Our future resurrection shows that sin and death have been defeated.
When the call to carry your cross, when the call to die to yourself on a daily basis, brings fear, brings hardship, we banish that fear with the knowledge that whatever is within us that is dishonorable and perishable, that it has been done away with. And our ultimate end is a perfected, glorious, physical existence in the new heavens and the new earth. So when you’re called to confess your sins to God, when you’re called to go to others and to be accountable to them for your life, for your holiness, we can do so in confidence, knowing that life is ours.
THE LIFE EVERLASTING
The hard work of opening ourselves to the call to live holy lives is empowered by the resurrection hope. We not only believe in the resurrection of the body, but we believe in life everlasting also. Life everlasting, I think if we’re honest with ourselves, is something that we might say that we long for, but in the back of our minds we’re still kind of going, “Man, life is hard now, life is kind of boring right now. And do I just want to live today forever into eternity?”
Well, it’s because we misunderstand what Jesus means by eternal life. Yes, it’s physical. Yes, it is a resurrected life, but it is marked by several things that are different than it is now.
The first thing in Isaiah chapter 35:8-10, Isaiah says:
“And a highway will be there, it will be called the way of holiness. The unclean will not journey on it, it will be for those who walk in that way. Wicked fools will not go about on it. No lion will be there, nor any ferocious beast get up on it, nor will any ferocious beast get up on it. They will not be found there, but only the redeemed will walk there, and the ransomed of the Lord will return. They will enter Zion with singing, everlasting joy will crown their heads, gladness and joy will overtake them, and sorrow and sighing will flee away.”
This is one of those passages that just grips me every time I read it. It’s talking about the people of God in the redeemed heavens, in the redeemed earth, where all of creation has been made new, and they are traveling toward the city of God, to fellowship and to live with God forever. And that eternal life, that road that they are on, is no longer marked by sin and temptation.
One of my biggest longings when I thought about the new heavens and the new earth was, “God, will you take sin away from me?” And I still desire that God would take sin away from me. But brothers and sisters, I desire just as much, if not more, that he would take temptation away from me. Oh, that I never have to worry about being tempted to sin again.
And the eternal life that we profess is marked by that glorious truth. Not only will sin not be there, but the things that tempt us will be taken away. Satan will not be there, will no longer prowl like a lion, seeking to devour whom he will. And so life everlasting is marked by a lack of temptation, a lack of sin.
The eternal life or life everlasting is also marked by the promises that we read earlier in Revelation chapter 21. All those glorious promises, we typically only read them at funerals, but we need to be reminded of them on a regular basis.
“He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain for the old order of things has passed away.”
What brings you pain now? Whether it’s physical pain, whether it’s emotional pain, whether it’s just the pain of struggling with your own sin in this life.
Can you imagine a life where those pains no longer plague you? Can you imagine a life where you see the healing of hurts and you see the glory of God in your earthly pains and you weep with joy, seeing God’s hand in those times of your life where you didn’t realize he was there and God lovingly comes and wipes those tears away and stores them up for his glory.
Brothers and sisters, the eternal life will be marked by the fulfillment of these promises, but the most important thing that the eternal life will be marked by is the joy of knowing that you and I dwell in the fullness of God’s presence forever. It says here:
“Now the dwelling of God is with men and he will live with them. They will be his people and God himself will be with him and be their God.
The Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit will dwell face to face with his people. I think one of the clearest pictures of this comes in Revelation 19 where it talks about the wedding feast of the lamb.
We’re having our pancake supper later tonight and you know, feasts and suppers and fellowship meals like that are more than just sitting down and filling our stomachs with food. That’s a great part of it, don’t get me wrong, but it’s so much more than that. Our feasts, in Jewish thought, a feast was more than just a meal, it was a time of joy, joy surrounding fellowship of like-minded individuals.
And brothers and sisters, our joy will be immeasurable because the people whom we will be fellowshipping with will be the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Yes, we will each be there together, but we will have direct access to the Triune God, the fullness of his glory without being consumed by his holiness because of our sin. We will spend eternity in the rapture of joy that comes from knowing that we will dwell with him and he will be our God and we will be his people.
CONCLUSION
Life eternal belongs to you and me right now. If we are in Christ, if you are a child of God, you can have the hope that Paul talks about in the face of death in 1 Thessalonians 4 because the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting is yours. I am astounded every time I see it, but a dear brother or sister facing the end of their life with a smile on their face because they know the glorious truth that they are about to meet their savior and they are tasting the joy already.
I cannot leave us though without one more warning. If we read the scriptures, eternal life does not only await the children of God. Eternal life awaits those who reject God in this life as well.
Passages like Matthew 25:31-46 remind us that the eternal life for those people will be an eternal life of judgment. If you do not put your hope in the righteousness of Christ, you are liable to judgment. If you hope in your own righteousness and your own righteousness alone, your hope will fail you.
This is not told in the scriptures, and I do not say this in order to scare or to manipulate you, but so that you might know that the penalty for rejecting the good news that Jesus saves is an eternal life of wailing and gnashing of teeth in that great fire. The last verse we read, the end of that glorious passage in Revelation 21, says:
“But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars, their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.”
I exhort you, I encourage you, brothers and sisters, if you do not know the hope of resurrection life and life everlasting, make sure you do before you leave. Are you living in the hope of the resurrection or are you relying upon your own righteousness?
To the brothers and sisters in Christ, to the children of God, know that the hard work of living in this world, the hard work of putting sin to death, the hard work of taking up your cross and dying to yourself every day is worth it because we believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.
Let’s pray. Father God above, may we be changed. May we be gripped. May we have the joy of knowing the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.
I pray this in Jesus’ precious name, amen.
I think it is fitting that today our blessing come from Revelation chapter 21. And so as you go this week, leave this with this blessing from God.
“To the thirsty, I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life. To those who are victorious will inherit all this and I will be their God and they will be my children. The grace of the Lord Jesus be with God’s people.”
He who testifies to these things says, yes, I am coming soon.
Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.
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