The Bible Study Hour

Mark Daniels: As we carry on in our study of 1 Corinthians, we find the Apostle Paul continuing to address the heresy of disbelief or misbelief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, the core foundation of our faith. Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically.

In the 15th chapter of 1 Corinthians, the Apostle Paul now turns to the serious consequences, the dangers of disbelief in the truth of the Lord's resurrection from the dead, and how that disbelief tarnishes the very foundations of our faith. Join Dr. Boice as he explores the after-effects of the heretical belief that only the spirit of Christ rose on that fateful morning in the garden.

Dr. James Boice: We've been studying 1 Corinthians together for a number of months, and our study has taken us into the 15th chapter, which, as you well know, is the great chapter in the New Testament on the resurrection. Now, we looked at the first 11 verses of this chapter last Sunday evening, and we saw that Paul was dealing with a situation in Corinth on this subject not unlike the problems he's mentioned earlier in the letter. Simply, there were people here who apparently didn't believe in the resurrection.

We can't tell exactly from these verses whether they discounted the resurrection of Christ as well—probably not, from the way he argued—but they were certainly willing to discount the resurrection of believers. We don't know again exactly who these people were that were creating the problem, but it's not too difficult to figure out the nature of the objection. The Greek had an idea in philosophy that everything that was of the spirit or of the mind was good and everything that was material or of the flesh was bad.

And salvation for the Greek was essentially a philosophical thing; you escaped the ties of the flesh which are evil by means of your mind. So salvation became an intellectual thing. This apparently had carried over into the Corinthian church and would probably have expressed itself in this way. People who were formed by this Greek philosophical tradition would have said, "Well, you have to understand that that gospel that's being preached by Paul and people like him is just something that has come out of a Jewish environment.

The Jewish people think that way, but that really isn't the way things are. Matter is evil, and if matter is evil, you can't really have hope in a genuine bodily resurrection. Why, that would be the equivalent of saying that we are going to take our sinful nature into heaven with us, so that can't be. And what we have to look for is not a bodily resurrection, but a spiritual one. We have to look to the freeing of our minds and spirits through Christianity."

And Paul's begun to deal with that, and we already saw in the first 11 verses how he did. He began by reminding them what they'd been taught. He's really saying, in effect, this Christianity that's been presented to you is not something which you are to filter through your philosophical system and say, "Well, this part of Christianity works because it agrees with our philosophy and this part of Christianity doesn't work because it doesn't agree with our philosophy."

This is the gospel that God himself has made known and has made known from the beginning. So that even though I am an apostle—Paul speaking now—even though I am an apostle and have the right to claim that God has spoken to me directly and that what I say is the direct revelation from him, even though I'm an apostle and could say that, I want to remind you of the fact that what I preached was not something I made up or something I got on my own.

Rather, the gospel I preached was only that which I had first of all received from others. This is what was preached from the very beginning. And so you're not being asked to believe something novel or even something which is Jewish as opposed to being Greek; you are simply being asked to believe that which is the truth. How that the Lord Jesus Christ was crucified for our sins according to the Scriptures, and how he was buried, and how he was raised again on the third day according to the Scriptures.

And how this was witnessed by many people from his own time and even up to 500 of the brethren at one time, and most of those are still living. So if you have any question, you simply have to go and talk to those who were eyewitnesses of the resurrected Christ. And moreover, he has said, as he develops that, this is not only the gospel which I received and passed on, but this is also the gospel which you received. This, I suppose, is something that he was emphasizing because he has it at the beginning of this section and he has it at the end.

In verse one, he says, "I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, on which you have taken your stand." And you come to the end of the section, verse 11: "So whether then it was I or they, this is what we preach and this is what you have believed." So the very first thing he does in this chapter in dealing with this problem is to remind them of what the gospel is. Now, we're looking at verse 12 and following tonight.

And here's a section in which he—well, if we were talking about it in terms of the emotional flow of the chapter, we would have to say this is the downside of the problem. He's already talked positively about the Christian gospel; he says it concerns Christ's death for our sins, his burial and his resurrection, all according to the Scriptures, all substantiated by witnesses. Now he's going to treat the other side and he's going to say, "Well, what are the consequences going to be if you deny the resurrection?"

And so he's going to talk about that. The flow of this chapter goes back and forth in that way. Having done that, he speaks positively then again of how the resurrection fits into the whole scope of God's activity in history. And when he finishes that, then he goes back to the negative again and he brings in this unusual thing, at least unusual for us, about the baptism of the dead. But it's plus and minus, plus and minus, and so on, which is a kind of argument that the Apostle Paul uses other places as well; it's most characteristic.

And he's going to say, "Here are people in your midst who are saying that there is no resurrection. That is, bodies don't rise, and on the basis of their philosophy." Now he's going to ask, "What are the consequences of that?" And here you're tempted to go along with that kind of thinking because it seems to fit in with your philosophical thinking, your background, the kind of things your scholars have said to you in the past. What I want you to do is think clearly about it, because if it is true that the dead do not rise, then a number of very unfortunate consequences follow.

As I read these verses, verses 12 through 19, I find that every verse except verse 16 has a consequence in it, and verse 16 is simply a repetition of a consequence that came earlier. So every single verse talks about something that is bad if you deny the resurrection. So let's look at the first, starting with verse 13. "If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised." There's where he starts, because the first great problem if you're going to deny the resurrection in general is that in order to be consistent, you have to deny the resurrection of Jesus as well.

Now, it may well be that in the church of Corinth, those who were denying the resurrection hadn't quite come to the point of saying that. I said a moment ago that as we read this, we sense that probably that wasn't the case, because if it was, Paul wouldn't have made this particular point. He wouldn't have had to say, "Look, if you deny the resurrection in general, it means that you're going to have to deny the resurrection of Jesus in particular," because if they were already denying the resurrection of Jesus in particular, he would have passed on to another consequence and not have mentioned that one.

So probably you have a situation in the church where they wanted to say, "We mustn't think of all Christians being raised from the dead, but it doesn't mean that there wasn't something special that was involved in the case of Jesus Christ." I say they probably hadn't quite come logically to that point. But if they hadn't come to that point by the moment in history at which the Apostle Paul writes this, they would certainly have come to it later. And in point of fact, many did, because the kind of thing Paul is saying is inescapable: if there aren't resurrections, then Jesus didn't rise.

"Well," you say, "Jesus was God, he was exceptional." Yes, but you see, we're not talking about the resurrection of his godhead; we're talking about the resurrection of his body. And that's the issue: do bodies rise? They didn't deny a resurrection of the spirit; it's: do bodies rise? And so he's saying if you deny one, you have to deny the other. The second consequence is in verse 14, and this is the emptiness or meaninglessness of the Christian proclamation. "If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith."

Now, a little later on, he's going to talk about their faith being futile, and some translations say useless there also, but it's two different words in Greek. The word that he uses here that the New International Version translated as useless is the word *kenē*. People who know Greek and know something of the importance of some of these terms will know that that is the word that has been used for what is called the *kenosis* theory of the incarnation. It means an emptying. It's based on Philippians 2, where it's said that Jesus emptied himself, counting equality with God not a thing to be retained at all costs, but he emptied himself and became like us, a man, and died on the cross and so on.

There's a whole debate in theology about what that emptying consists of. But the point here, of course, is that Paul is using that in precisely the same way. He's saying, "You see, if there aren't any resurrections and Jesus isn't raised, and if Jesus isn't raised, well then that just empties our faith of all its substance. Oh, we can go around preaching different things. We can preach morality, and we can preach about God, and we can preach about meaning in the flow of history, but if you take the resurrection out of it, it just vitiates it all.

Because in Christianity, we're dealing not chiefly with a philosophy—the men that taught in Greece before Paul came had philosophies—he says we're not talking about that; we're talking about God's intervention in history in a supernatural way which has an impact on each one of us. And if there's no resurrection, Jesus isn't raised, and if Jesus isn't raised, then this preaching that we're going about doing is emptied of all its content and all its real meaning." I wish liberal men who go around preaching, though they don't believe in the supernatural, would listen to Paul at this point.

Because Paul's consistent and they're not. We have a lot of men in the pulpits who don't believe in anything supernatural and certainly do not believe in the resurrection, and yet they go right on preaching. And of course, that's one reason why their churches are so bad, why nothing happens, why people aren't converted. Oh, they become clubs where people of the same socio-economic level can sort of pat one another on the back and look askance if anybody that doesn't quite fit comes in, but nothing of any real spiritual note is happening.

No wonder, because the vicarious atonement—Christ's death on the cross for our sins—and his resurrection which followed upon it are the heart of the gospel. And if you take one of that out, you probably take out the other as well. There's a third consequence: not only if there's no resurrection is Christ not raised and is our preaching empty, he says in verse 15, "We who are apostles are found to be false witnesses." Now, what's a false witness? A false witness is a liar. And Paul is saying in slightly nicer language, "That's what we are if there's no such thing as a resurrection."

Why is that? Well, he's not talking just about Christians at this point witnessing to their faith in the resurrection. He very intentionally brings in the word "apostle." Because the qualifications for an apostle were two: number one, that he had seen the risen Lord, and number two, that the risen Lord had commissioned him to be an apostle. Now, in the case of the early disciples, of course, they had been with the Lord during the three years of his public ministry and then he had appeared to them afterwards.

In Paul's case, he had not been among that band of disciples, but Jesus had appeared to him on the road to Damascus. And there were people who said, "Well, Paul's no true apostle because he wasn't there among that original group." And Paul had to defend his apostleship, and that's how we know what the qualifications were, because when Paul defends his apostleship, he says, "Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen the Lord? Has he not called me to be an apostle?" You see, he spells that sort of thing out.

And so that's why he talks about apostles here. He's saying, "We apostles are found to be liars because we are the chosen witnesses to the factuality of Christ's resurrection. We are the ones who are going around the Roman world saying Jesus is risen and we have seen him." He says to these people to whom he had preached and who had responded to his preaching, who he said have believed what we taught—he says to them, "Understand what you're saying now. If you follow the philosophical mood of your day and deny the resurrection, just understand that you're saying that those of us who are apostles and came to you with this gospel were lying.

Because if there is no resurrection, Jesus is not raised, and we did not see him in his resurrected form. And so when we come saying that we did, we're lying to you. Do you really want to go to that conclusion?" He talks in the next verse, verse 17, about the futility of their faith. Now, this is something else. He's not talking here about the emptiness of their faith; he used that word when he was talking about his preaching and faith earlier. Here he's talking about the futility—that is, it doesn't work.

And it's clear what he has in mind, because when he talks about it saying, "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile," he adds the little phrase, "and you are still in your sins." You see, that's what he has in mind at that point. He says if Jesus isn't raised, then your sin has not been forgiven. Now we say, "How so?" Well, for this reason: Jesus Christ when he lived here in the days of his flesh prophesied that he was going to die for our sin as the sin-bearer, the innocent Lamb of God, and that God in evidence of that, three days later, would raise him from the dead.

This is why Paul can say, as he does toward the end of the fourth chapter of Romans, that Jesus was crucified for our sin and raised again for our justification. The resurrection was proof that God accepted his atonement. You see, he could have claimed it, but if he had died and never come back, we could have said, "Well, we don't know, maybe he did, maybe he didn't." Furthermore, if you think through that carefully, Jesus had said that God was going to raise him from the dead. After three days, the Father was going to raise him from the dead.

Now, if he said that and it didn't happen, he was mistaken. That means that he was not the perfect sacrifice. So when he died on the cross, he wasn't dying for our sin because he was a sinner; he had to die for his own sin. And that means that if he was dying for his own sin and was not dying for our sin, then our sin is still on us and not punished in Christ and we are still in our sins. See how Paul is building this? He's saying, "Look, sometimes Christians think in a muddled way and they say, 'Well, you know, we want to hold to the big central core of the thing, but it doesn't make any difference whether you hold to such things as miracles over here or a literal resurrection off in the future somewhere.

What matters is whether we get on with things well in the present.'" Paul says it does not work that way in Christianity. Furthermore, it's what you would expect if God is perfect; you'd expect his salvation to be perfect. Each part fits together nicely; we don't always understand how, but it does. So he says you're in great danger when you begin to weed one thing out, even one little thing that you think, "Well, it just isn't necessary to believe on that in our time."

Well, he says you do that and look what happens: pretty soon you don't even have an atonement, and if you don't have an atonement, it's obvious that you don't have any Christianity. He says something else in verse 18: he says, "Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost." He said, "I've been talking about you now being lost in sin; how about those who died in this faith already and have gone on to the other world, whatever it may be?" If they were believing in something that wasn't true and there is no literal resurrection and Christ didn't rise, and therefore Christ who promised that he rose didn't actually pay the price for our sin, he didn't pay the price for their sin either.

And all of those who have gone before have perished. And then he comes to his last point and he says, "Yes, and we also are miserable even in this life because this path that we're called upon to tread is not always a pleasant one. Because we're following Christ, we set our value in things to come and not on this earth, and instead of piling up treasures here, we say, 'Well, we'd rather pile up treasures in heaven.'" But if there's no resurrection, there's no heaven and all of that is worthless, and we're to be pitied for following such a ridiculous superstition.

Now we come to verse 20 and he says with a smile on his face, "But isn't it good that that isn't the way it really is? You see, if there weren't any resurrection, all these terrible things follow. But," says Paul, "Christ really is raised from the dead, and the very fact that he is raised from the dead is the proof that we ourselves will be raised because we're joined to him in saving faith." This is a section of the chapter in which Paul puts this thing in a cosmic perspective. He's talking about Christ's resurrection and our resurrection, and as we look at that within the framework of history—at least from the perspective in which he was writing—he's talking about a relatively small span of years.

There's the Lord Jesus Christ who died and rose again in what I believe was AD 30, and here's Paul writing somewhat later in the 50s to these Christians in Corinth, just a small span of years. And there would be a tendency, I suppose, on the part of some people to say, "Well, this is nice, but it's just a little incidental phenomena of history." Paul says, "No, no, this fits into the scope of it all. Because, you see, he takes us on the one hand back to Adam and the fact that we fell in Adam and were united to Adam in the fall, God counting our sin along with Adam's sin.

And then he comes to the present and he says just as God judged us sinners in the fall of Adam, letting him be the corporate representative of the race, so has God done the same thing in Christ for those who are united to him by saving faith. And then he goes ahead to the future and he says, 'Oh yes, and that isn't even the end of it, because the time is coming when Christ, who is going to be victor over all, will subdue that last enemy, which is death; death will reign no more, and then Christ at the very end as the Son will submit everything to the Father and God the Father will be all in all.'"

You see, it's not some small thing that we're talking about. It's not something that's irrelevant to us or the flow of history just because within our immediate timeframe we're born, we believe, we die, and we don't see resurrections. Oh no, says Paul, the essence of it is the resurrection because we're united to Jesus with our whole being—body, soul, and spirit—and one day even death itself is going to be destroyed and we're going to be part of the victory as we stand with Christ in our resurrection bodies. He talks about a particular problem in verse 29, and this is this thing of the baptism for the dead.

All sorts of peculiar interpretations of this. Some of them are wrong, some of them are possibly right; let me just suggest a few of them. The problem with this phrase, of course, is that it doesn't occur anywhere else, and Paul is probably referring to something that they did, but he doesn't explain what it is. They knew and Paul knew, but we don't know. And some have said, "Well, whatever it was, it must have been wrong and Paul doesn't endorse it, he just says, 'Why are you doing it if there's no point to it, if there's no resurrection?'"

I think that is perhaps a most inadequate approach of all; let me suggest a few of them. Some have taken this in a very literal way. They've said being baptized for the dead means being baptized for people who have died in order that they might be saved by your being baptized for them. Back in the ancient church, there were people who said this; Cerinthus was one, Marcion, the well-known heretic, was another. In our own time, we have a whole cult that does it; it's the Mormons. Mormons baptize for the dead. And some people who are very pious Mormons are baptized for a lot of dead.

I read an example of that some time ago of a woman who had gone out to Salt Lake City to the temple and there had been baptized for 30,000 dead people. Well, the problem with that, you see, is that it imparts a mystical property to baptism. It's saying the salvation is by the performance of a rite. You go through the rite and do the thing, you're saved. Faith evaporates; it doesn't make any difference at all. But nevertheless, this is what the Mormons have done, and there are some, there were some in the church who took it in this way.

Fortunately, in Christianity, it's been repudiated. We have lots of heresies today, but praise the Lord, this is not one of them. There's a second explanation and it goes like this: it has nothing to do with salvation, but rather when a new believer is baptized, which is to say he makes public identification of himself with Jesus Christ, he thereby takes the place or fills up the ranks of Christians, taking the place of somebody who has died before him. This is the way Harry Ironside understood the passage, and he had an interesting story that he used to explain how it happened.

There had been a much-venerated saint in their congregation in Chicago who had died. He had lived an exemplary life, had been a great blessing to the church, he had witnessed to his family, but there were some who had not come to Christ. And yet when the funeral was held, most of these relatives, including some of the children who hadn't believed, were there and they had the service. And when they came to the end of the service when, as they practiced the funeral service, they were about to close the casket, the family was invited to take a last look at the face of the one who had died.

Ironside intervened and said, "I really feel constrained before we close this casket to pause a minute and just say this: we have lost a pillar in the church, and I know there are people here who have not come to Christ. I'm wondering if among this gathering there is anybody who would like to step forward and make profession of faith in Christ and so indicate his or her willingness, if God would so bless, to take the place of this one that we've lost here in these days." And he gave a gospel invitation, and one of the relatives, a son, came forward and confessed Christ and said God prospering him, he would like to try to begin to fill the shoes of his father who had lived in such an exemplary way for God.

And then that Sunday, this man was baptized publicly and this was made known to the congregation. So Ironside took that story and said, "Well, that's what it is, you see. When we're baptized, we fill up the ranks in the church, taking the place of the honored dead." There's another explanation, I mention it just briefly. Some have said that it has to do with our being baptized for Christ who has died, that is, in honor of Christ who has died. The problem with that is that Christ is singular and the terminology of this particular portion of 1 Corinthians 15 is plural; he's talking about numerous people, and that doesn't seem to fit.

I think, in my own opinion, that what Paul is speaking of here is not so much the rite of baptism, but that which lies behind baptism as its primary meaning. I've said before when we've talked about baptism that what's involved isn't so much the mode of baptism, whether you're immersed in water, whether you're sprinkled in water, but the fact that by that public rite, you are identified in an open, public way with Jesus Christ. I think that's the basic meaning of the word *baptizō* anyway. *Baptō* means to dip, but *baptizō* means to identify.

And if that's the case, what Paul is saying here, I think, is: what is our use of being identified with Christ as dead men? That is, those who have heard his call, who have picked up their cross and have started on the way to Golgotha after him. Because he says that's what we do; I profess I die daily. That's what it means to be a Christian. It means to be a marked man or to be a marked woman. What's the use of doing that? Why should we stick our neck out and say, "I want to be Christ's man, I want to be Christ's woman," if the dead rise not?

Why, if there's no resurrection, that's crazy. Let's spend life for what we can get out of it; let's live, drink, and be merry, because tomorrow we're going to die, and death lasts a long, long time. Let's get what we can now. But of course, you understand that Paul isn't recommending that. Paul is saying, "No, no, there is a resurrection. Christ has been raised, and Christ being raised is the firstfruits of those that slept. He first and then all who are united to him in saving faith will follow.

So we don't look forward to an empty zero at the time of our death. We don't even look forward to a meaningless some kind of vague existence, some philosophical continuation of the mind in some Nirvana state." No, no, he said, "We look forward to God's continuing with us as he began with us—a personality, individuality, possessing body, soul, and spirit, changed of course, yes, because we're going to be lifted up and made like Jesus Christ, including being made like him in his resurrection body. But nevertheless, that's our destiny, that's a personal and that's a very glorious thing."

I wonder as I talk about this if there are people who have listened to these claims of Christianity and have said, "Well, you know, I can understand what you're talking about, but it really isn't my faith, at least it's not my faith yet. I've heard these things, but Christ is not my Savior, and I'm really not united to him in a way which will result in his own time in a resurrection." That may well be the case; I hope it is, because the church and its services should be a service where many come, people from all walks of life and all kinds of experience.

And if that's your case, I want to say that the gospel invitation is always open, and you don't have to wait for a special rite, you don't have to be baptized, you don't have to wait for a special opportunity to join the church. You don't even have to wait for an invitation other than that which Jesus himself gives. He said, "Come unto me, all you that labor and are heavy laden." And if you'll come, all he asks is that you acknowledge that you're a sinner and that you're serious about following him.

And you'll find that as you're joined to him in that kind of supernatural belief—because it comes from God if you've got to that point—if you're united to him, then that union which God himself makes between you and Jesus Christ is an unbreakable thing. God never begins a thing and then changes his mind later. But he unites you to Christ and you may go through a lifetime and not understand things real well, though you should, and you may even be in the situation of some of these Corinthians who are muddled in their spiritual thinking.

But in the final analysis, it doesn't matter, because what matters is not that you know all about God, but that God knows all about you and has done what is necessary for your salvation. And so if you haven't done that, I give you that invitation, that opportunity now, which at the same time is also the command of God and the command of Jesus Christ: that you turn from your sin and that you turn to him, and find these marvelous truths that really are the essence of the meaning of history and the meaning of personal existence, that you might find that these great truths are yours as well. Let us pray.

Our Father, we ask you to bless these verses that we've studied and what has been said about them to our hearts. We know that we can talk about your truth, but only you can implant truth in the heart because you made the heart. And we would ask that you would do that and do it in a powerful and personal way to many people. And grant that being united to Christ, they might find, as so many millions before them have found, that old things are indeed passed away and they become new creatures. And these may be precious moments for many, for Christ's sake. We pray in his name. Amen.

Mark Daniels: You're listening to the Bible Study Hour, featuring the teaching of Dr. James Boice. The truth of the gospel is often assumed but rarely understood in its fullness. What was Abraham's understanding of the gospel and what was the difference between his faith and the Christian faith today? Find out more in our giveaway CD entitled "The Christian Faith." It's another message by Dr. Boice. This free CD offer is our way of saying thanks for listening. Call us at 1-800-488-1888. We'd be happy to send you a copy of "The Christian Faith." That number again is 1-800-488-1888.

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We all love how Dr. Boice's sermons always put life in a biblical perspective. It's often impossible, though, to include every biblical reference and detail in a 26-minute broadcast. You can purchase complete preached messages at reformedresources.org. I'm Mark Daniels. Thanks for joining me today. The fact that Christians will be raised from the grave means that in the end, we will be victorious over our greatest enemy: death. What kind of resurrected bodies will we have when we're raised is of less importance. Join Dr. James Boice as he explores the arguments concerning our resurrected bodies and points us to the real issue at hand. That's next time on the Bible Study Hour, preparing you to think and act biblically.