The Bible Study Hour

Dr. James Boice: Death will come to all of us. It is the real and greatest enemy we'll ever face. But for the believer, it's not the end of the story.

Mark Daniels: Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. While in Paul's day, the discussion raged about the type of resurrected body we'll have and even if we'll have a physical body, Paul addressed the greater reality. Our last enemy, death, will be destroyed, for death has been swallowed up in victory. Join Dr. Boice as he continues his study of Christ's resurrection and our own resurrection as well, the triumph that awaits the believer.

Dr. James Boice: In the 22nd chapter of Matthew and also in Luke's Gospel, there's a story about the Sadducees coming to test the Lord Jesus Christ on the subject of the resurrection. It was one of a number of tests. Everyone was trying to get him somehow. They had asked him about the law, what was the first and greatest commandment; that was an old one they battered around a lot. They thought we'd see if he had anything new to say, and he did very well in his answer. And there was a question about taxes, and they thought they might catch him on that, and he did very well in that, too.

And then the Sadducees came, and they had this question about the resurrection. The background for it, of course, is that they didn't believe in the resurrection. They were the modernists of the day, of which there are many in their time and ours. And they thought they would just try one on him that would show how foolish this is, and if he held to the resurrection, they'd show how foolish he was.

So they said there was a certain man who married a wife and then died. And in accordance with the Jewish laws of Levirate marriage, it was proper for the man's brother, next in line, to marry her and try to raise up children in order that the line of inheritance might not fade away. But this man died without having any children either, as the first one had also died. And then the third one married her again in accordance with the law, and the fourth and the fifth; there were seven brothers like that. And they all were married to this woman, and then they all died. And then last of all, the woman died. So they said, "Now, could you tell us, in the resurrection, whose wife is she going to be?" Presumably, if one of them had had children by her, they would say, "Well, she's the wife of that man." But since every case was equal, they thought they had him. It just didn't make sense to talk about a resurrection.

And you may recall that our Lord responded to them on two levels. He told them first of all that they were making a great error, and that was for two reasons. First of all, he said, "You don't know the scriptures." And then secondly, "You're ignorant of the power of God." They didn't know the scriptures because, according to our Lord's understanding of the teaching of the scriptures, in heaven, there's not to be marriage or giving in marriage. So the whole question having to do with marriage was a moot one when you're talking of the life to come.

And then they were ignorant of the power of God because their chief problem was not this matter of marriage in the next world, but the matter of the resurrection itself. And our Lord's point was that God, for whom all things are possible, is certainly able to bring about a physical resurrection of human bodies.

That sort of reply comes to mind as we come to this latter portion of 1 Corinthians 15 that deals with the resurrection because, in the verse that begins this section, verse 35 of that chapter, you have two questions which are more or less parallel to the questions dealing with those areas to which our Lord responded. "Someone may ask," Paul says, "How are the dead raised?" That has to do with the power and with what kind of body will they come. It's not an absolute parallel, but it's a close one.

And what our Lord said in reference to the Pharisees, in a certain way, applies to this matter here. People who are questioning the resurrection do so for one of those two reasons. Either they're ignorant of the scriptures, which is to say they're just confused about things. They're asking questions about things they don't fully understand, and if they'd read the scriptures, there would be a perfectly adequate explanation of that that they fail to understand. Or, which is the more serious question, they simply doubt the power of God. And what Paul is doing in this chapter for the benefit of the Christians at Corinth, and of course for ourselves as well, is dealing with the problems on each of those levels.

It's interesting that we still have that with us today because modernism is nothing old or nothing new; it's simply a frame of mind which is basically disbelief. And just as it was present in Christ's day in the form of the Sadducees, so we have it today. It is unfortunate that it sometimes appears in lofty places.

If you have been following the newspaper reports and perhaps the television reports the last week or so, you'll know that a number of the British evangelicals are up in arms because the Church of England recently ordained and consecrated as a bishop a man who openly doubted the Virgin Birth of Christ and the resurrection. He said it just should be taken in a mythological sense and in no sense literal. The installation and ordination in York Cathedral was protested by evangelicals outside and by one man who objected in the middle of the ceremony, a conservative Anglican vicar. They escorted him out, which shows the degree to which plurality is tolerated in that church. And that seemed at all events to be the end of it.

But the reason this made such an interesting bit of news for the television, especially, is that three days later, lightning struck the church and it caught on fire. The evangelicals, no doubt, were seeing a connection between the two events. Church officials were saying the real miracle was that the whole thing didn't burn down, and that may well be true. My wife told me there was one thing I was not to say tonight, and so I won't say it, but I'll tell you what it was that I was going to say. I was thinking, "It's not nice to fool mother nature." That problem, I'm saying, is still with us, and the origins of it were back in Jesus' day and at the time of Paul as well.

Now, Paul deals primarily with this matter of the resurrection body, that is the nature of the kind of body that we're going to have in the resurrection because presumably, that was the chief question in the minds of the Greek people here to whom he was writing. I've already spoken about that at some length, saying how this difficulty with the resurrection grew naturally out of Greek philosophical thought. Every culture has its own way of thinking about ultimate things, not always articulately. Sometimes people in a culture simply absorb a certain set of values and assumptions and, without thinking in a very careful way about it, nevertheless have them.

But for whatever degree this existed, the Greeks basically, in their philosophy, had a great difference between mind and matter. In the sense that in Greek thought, everything that was of the spirit or the mind was good and that which is of matter is evil. They would have said the problem with us is not that we are sinful human beings, which is to say our mind and our spirits are corrupt, which is what Christianity teaches and the Old Testament as well. They would say the problem with us is that we have bodies and our bodies tend to drag us down. There is within us that which aspires to go upward to God, and that's the mind and the spirit, but we're held down in this body of our flesh. And all our evil desires, all those bad things that we do and dispositions that we have, come not because there's anything wrong with our minds or spirits, but because we are mind-body beings and our bodies are prone to evil.

So the Greek thought the way to be saved was to escape the body. In this life, you can't do that except by philosophy, so salvation became a mental thing. It became something that happened by the way in which you thought. The Stoics, in particular, said regardless of what happens to you, no matter how you suffer, you simply have to rise above it. You have to say, "Well, what's important to me is the mind and the spirit. And so even if I'm in chains, even if I'm suffering, even if very horrible things happen to me physically, this really doesn't tie me down because salvation is what I think and not what I experience in a physical way." And it followed from that, as you can well understand, that you couldn't have anything like the incarnation, which is at the essence of Christianity, namely that God, who is spirit, became man, taking upon himself a human body, because that would be the equivalent of saying that God became sinful.

So you couldn't have that, and this particular kind of philosophy introduced one of the first heresies into the church, which said that Jesus wasn't really a human being, but he only appeared to be. That the divine spirit of Christ came upon a human being and, according to some teaching, left him just before the crucifixion. That was one particular heresy. The other, of course, had to do with the resurrection. Because you see, if salvation is basically escaping from the body, then why would you ever want a resurrection? To have a resurrection would say, "Well, we would just be bringing our sinful bodies with us into heaven." What you wanted to do was get rid of them, if anything. And so when the Christians came preaching the resurrection of the body, there was that natural tendency in the thinking and conscience of the Greek people to disagree with it.

Now, in the first half of this letter, Paul has answered that in terms of history. Paul wants to teach about the factual nature of the resurrection and its importance, and he's done that. He's explained that this is in the nature of the Gospel, which is not something that somebody thought up, something that the apostles invented, but it's something that grows out of history. Whether you like it or not, whether it fits your philosophy or not, Jesus came, Jesus died, and Jesus rose again.

You can dismiss it all. You can say it didn't happen, "I don't believe that." But if you're willing to accept the testimony of the eyewitnesses and, by the grace of God, come within the framework of the Christian worldview, you have to acknowledge that that happened. And then regardless of what your cultural background is, that sort of thing has to change because it has to be conformed eventually to the reality of the facts which have to do with the resurrection. Paul spells that all out in the first half of this chapter.

But you see, at this point, he might still be speaking to people who, because of what he's said and because of the witness of the Holy Spirit in their own hearts, acknowledge that that is true. That indeed, there has to be a resurrection because Jesus rose from the dead and we're united to Jesus, and if he rose, we must rise also. But who nevertheless still had a question about this resurrection body. Because, as Paul says a little later, how is it possible a Greek would argue that this which is material can inherit the immaterial? Everybody acknowledges that God is spirit and that the realm of heaven has to be a realm of spirituality, not materiality. Well, then how can it be?

You talk about a resurrection, but wouldn't it be the case that if our bodies, just as we have them, were suddenly raised again from the dead and taken into heaven, that all you would have would be a heaven that was actually just Earth somewhere else? And that would hardly be heaven. You see, that's a very legitimate kind of question to be asking, especially by someone who is not deeply informed with the teaching of scripture.

And so that's what Paul is answering here. And what he says essentially is that while it is true that there is a genuine resurrection and that our bodies are raised, it is nevertheless also true that our bodies are changed, so that the bodies we have now are not the bodies that we're going to have in the resurrection. There's continuity, but it's not the same thing. And in proof of that, he begins to distinguish between different kinds of bodies.

He gives a number of examples here. He talks about sowing the seed in the ground and how it grows up to be something quite different from what you put in the ground. There's continuity there. The flower comes from the seed, the wheat comes from the seed that you planted, and so on. But what comes up is different. There's a change. He gives that example. And then he talks of different kinds of flesh, flesh of animals and birds and fish, and he says you acknowledge in your own common experience that all flesh is not the same. And then he goes a step further and he contrasts heavenly bodies with earthly bodies, and he says you acknowledge a difference there. And of course, that is true. And then he talks about the sun and the moon and the stars, and he says they differ from one another. And his argument, you see, is simply: what is so incredible then in thinking about a resurrection body that differs substantially from the bodies we have now?

You see, if at that point somebody had said to Paul, "Yes, but we still don't understand it. We don't see any resurrection bodies, and we don't really know what we're talking about when we talk about a resurrection body. There's much we don't understand." Paul would undoubtedly have said, "Yes, and there's much that I don't understand, too." We know there is a resurrection body because Jesus rose from the dead. We know that it wasn't like the body that he had before the resurrection because apparently, it could come and go at will. And it would seem, on one occasion at least, that it passed through closed doors, and yet it was a physical body. Jesus offered to have Thomas touch him and see that it was really him and put his fingers into the holes in his hands and thrust his hand into the wound in Christ's side, and so forth. A real body, yet different. And yet, Paul would be the first to say he didn't fully understand it.

And it's at that point that the first matter of those two issues that Jesus Christ brought up comes in. They didn't understand because they didn't understand the scriptures, and the scriptures involve the kind of teaching that Paul has given here. And if at that point you still don't understand it, Paul says, "Well, it's simply because we know so little about the power of God." We might not understand how God does it, but we know from history and the example of Jesus Christ that God does. And therefore, it's not an irrational thing for Christians simply to take their stand upon that and say, "What I lack in understanding now, God in his own time will certainly provide."

Now, somewhere along the line in this last portion of 1 Corinthians 15, Paul passes from what is essentially an argument about the nature of the resurrection body to a statement of the victory that is ours because of the resurrection. I say somewhere along the line because it's a bit difficult to make a clear distinction. I suppose it's mostly between verses 49 and 50, but those sections overlap.

What Paul really is doing here is saying that this is not an irrelevant matter to talk about the fact of the resurrection and the importance of the resurrection and the nature of the resurrection body. Not irrelevant in the sense that, well, it refers to theology or refers to something that happened in the case of Jesus Christ but has no bearing with us, at least not now and certainly not until the time of our own resurrection, assuming there even is one. Paul is saying, "Oh, no. You see, the fact that we are to be raised means that we're to be victorious, and that enemy over which we're to be victorious is the greatest of all enemies and the last enemy that shall be destroyed, namely death."

I once did a study of what Paul had to say about death in this chapter, and I found it interesting that he mentions death even more than he mentions the resurrection. The word "death" or "dying" or "dead" occurs 25 times in the chapter, and the word "resurrection" or "raised" or anything related to that occurs 24 times, just about equal, but actually, the words for death occur more. And of course, there are other terms that are related to it that increase those totals even more.

That's interesting because when you talk about a victory, the greatness of your victory depends upon the greatness of your enemy. If you have a great armada and somebody with an army of 53 people comes against you and you crush the 53 people, it's not a very great victory. Why, of course you should be able to do that. But if you have a great enemy that comes against you and there's a victory, well then, that's a great victory. And that's what Paul is saying here. Death is really an enemy, and a great enemy at that.

There's sometimes been a tendency in religious thinking to minimize death and evil and sin and other unpleasant things. There's a sect of Christianity, which really isn't Christianity at all, Christian Science, that makes a major point of that, simply denying the reality of anything bad. All a figment of our imagination, according to Christian Science. Whether you think of death or evil or suffering or hunger or anything bad you can think of, it's just all in your mind, and of course you have to get rid of that thing in your thinking, and that's what Christian Science talks about.

But you have the same kind of thing in a different way in some branches of the evangelical church. There's a tendency in some branches of the church either not to talk about bad things or, in a sort of super-pietistic kind of way, to assume that it's always transcended with the blessings of the Gospel. Well, there's a certain sense in which evil is transcended by the blessings of the Gospel. Christians have been able to go through very difficult things and be triumphant because of their faith in Christ, but the fact that they were victorious in those things didn't make the things themselves any less evil.

And you don't really gain anything by denying the reality of evil. Some people think, well, it preserves the honor of God because if you admit evil, then you have to admit that God somehow let evil get into the world, and that tarnishes his reputation. Well, God doesn't seem too bothered by that himself. There's even a verse in Isaiah where he says, "I am the Lord. I create good and I create evil." Now, that has to be taken in a certain sense, of course, but God is not afraid to acknowledge that. He says, "These things come and I know it, and not only do I permit them, I even bring them into the lives of my people to accomplish certain things." So God isn't embarrassed by it and neither should we be.

You see, the Christian way is not to deny the reality of the evil, but to point to the victory which we have over the evil through Jesus Christ. There's a certain sense in which the flow of this chapter is seen between verse 26, about the middle of the chapter, and verse 54 toward the end. Verse 26 says, "The last enemy to be destroyed is death." That acknowledges that death is an enemy, and a real enemy at that. And then the verse that comes at the end says, "Death has been swallowed up in victory."

This, of course, is through the work of Jesus Christ. It's through Christ that we have the victory. Verse 57 develops that theme. "Thanks be to God. He gives us the victory through the Lord Jesus Christ." And how so? We have the victory through the Lord Jesus Christ because by grace, we're united to him. And so when he rose, we rise in him, just as when he died, we died in him, his death atoning for our sin.

I don't know if you ever noticed this, but when Hollywood makes movies that have to do with the life of Christ, they're often very good up to the point of the resurrection. When they show the mob crying out before Pilate's judgment hall, "Crucify him! Crucify him!", that always carries conviction. You can see that happening today. And when the time for the execution itself comes and they begin to drive the nails through the hands of Christ, well, that's convincing. I saw a film on television not long ago; it was very real indeed. It was so real it was hurting to watch. Oh, they're all right in terms of the mob rule and the trial and the crucifixion and the final cry, "My God, my God! Into thy hands I commend my spirit." Up to that point, everything is all right.

And then there comes the burial, followed by the resurrection. And it's often the case in these films that when the resurrection comes, you can barely discover Jesus Christ at all. I saw one of these films when the resurrection came and the disciples were there, and they began to rush around in the early morning of what we call Easter Sunday morning and the joy of the resurrection, but where was Jesus? I don't know why they were rushing around. And finally, toward the end, there was sort of a mystical, cloudy head up there in the sky kind of floating away somewhere. Well, I'll tell you, if I had been there, that wouldn't have convinced me, and I don't think it would have convinced Thomas or Peter or John or any of the others either. Oh, no. You see, it was a real death, but it was followed by a real resurrection. And when Jesus stood before them and he said, "Touch me and see that it's me," they didn't have any questions whatsoever that the one who stood before them was the same one who had died.

I find it interesting that sometimes even secular writers, or those at least who have a secular reputation, can say this well. One of them is John Updike, who has put it down, I think, in memorable language in a poem about Easter called "Seven Stanzas at Easter." Updike really says this graphically, and I want to share it with you. He writes this:

"Make no mistake: if he rose at all it was as his body; if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers, each soft spring recurrent; it was not as his spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the eleven apostles; it was as his flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes, the same valved heart that, pierced, died, withered, paused, and then regathered out of his Father's might new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor, analogy, side-stepping transcendence; making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the fake credulity of earlier ages.

Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache, not a stone in a story, but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of time will eclipse for each of us the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb, make it a real angel, weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen, spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance."

That's what Paul is talking about in 1 Corinthians 15. Paul is saying this doctrine of the resurrection, which we preach, is not mythology. This doctrine of the resurrection is not a story that somebody made up to illustrate some profound but hard-to-grasp spiritual truth. No, he says, this is something that happened, and the fact that it happened makes all the difference in the world. And Christians who are confronted with Christ are therefore confronted not simply with a Christ idea, but with the living Lord of history, the one who at a definite point in history came to this Earth to die for our salvation and did die, and then with the same body in which he died rose again from the dead and appeared to his disciples and ascended to heaven and in which one day in his own time he will come again to judge the quick and the dead.

When Paul gets to the end of this chapter, he has a great conclusion, and the conclusion has weight only if the resurrection is as real as that. When Paul gets to the end, he says, "Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain." If there's no real resurrection, our labor in the Lord might well be in vain: that which endures for a moment but then passes and is forgotten forever. But if Jesus rose, then the same Jesus who rose will return to reward those who trust in him, and he will raise them from the dead to be with him forevermore. And so what we have done for Christ really will last.

We sing in one of our hymns these words:

"His oath, his covenant, his blood

support me in the whelming flood;

when all around my soul gives way,

he then is all my hope and stay.

On Christ, the solid rock, I stand;

all other ground is sinking sand."

Paul says, "My dear brothers and sisters, therefore, because of the resurrection, make sure you stand." Let us pray.

Our Father, we thank you for the teaching of the scripture clearly on such a great topic. We confess that because we hear this so often within the fellowship and teaching of the church, there are times in which we take it almost as a given, not something to really be thought about and to make a difference in our lives. Forgive us for that. And grant, our Father, that as we believe these things, we might also by your grace begin to live them, and live them in such a way that it will be evident to those about us that we really have our eye on a life to come and a hope which goes beyond the grave. And so, our Father, do in us that which will last not only for this life but also for all eternity. For we pray in Jesus' blessed name. Amen.

Mark Daniels: You're listening to the Bible Study Hour, featuring the teaching of Dr. James Boice. Being made alive in Christ makes a world of difference in our assumptions about reality and the direction our lives should take. It's a connection that brings spiritual life into our broken world and into our broken souls and has great implications for everyday living. Find out more in a free CD entitled "Alive in Christ" by pastor and author Phil Ryken. This free CD offer is our way of saying thank you for listening. Simply call 1-800-488-1888 and we'll be pleased to send you a copy of "Alive in Christ." That number again is 1-800-488-1888.

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I'm Mark Daniels. The Apostle Paul's monumental letter to the Corinthians ends in a very practical way with principles for giving but also with direction concerning his colleagues and his final instructions for the brethren to love one another. Join Dr. James Boice as he continues his study of this New Testament letter and Paul's final instructions to a church near and dear to his heart. That's next time on the Bible Study Hour, preparing you to think and act biblically.