"So also, it is written, 'the first man, Adam, became a living soul; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit"! (I Corinthians 15:45)
Last week, we continued our study on what many consider the most important chapter in all the Bible (I Corinthians 15), because it sums up, simply and clearly, the "good news" of the gospel of Jesus Christ, by which one might (and must!) believe and be saved--and answers the most important question everyone at some point in his or her life asks: "What happens when I die?"
The apostle Paul claimed in I Corinthians 15:3 that he was "delivering to the Corinthians (and thereby to the whole world) a message 'of first importance, that He had received from God,' that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures"! This is the message of the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ that he preached to the Corinthians, which they "received, in which they stood, and by which they were saved, if (he said) they held fast to what he preached"! The same message he would later declare (in II Corinthians 5:21), "that God (the Father) had made Him (Jesus Christ, the Son) who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him!" And later to the Romans (in Romans 10:9) that if one "confesses with the mouth and believes in his heart that God has raised Him from the dead, he would be saved"! The same basic message that John wrote about (in John 3:16) that "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him would not perish but have everlasting life"! This, the inspired message revealed by God to the writers of the Bible upon which, and about which, and for which all the sacred Scripture, the entire Bible, was written!
And yet some of the Corinthians still apparently didn't believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ! And while others believed in the resurrection of Christ, they didn't believe in the coming resurrection of their own bodies, or of other believers one day! And so Paul wrote the book of I Cornthians, and specifically I Corinthians 15, not only to set the record straight about the gospel message of salvation through Christ alone, but to give explicit and convincing evidence that would stand up in any civil court hearing, and through the test of time, about the bodily resurrection of Christ, the reality as well of the bodily resurrection of believers one day--and the consequences for everyone of us if Christ didn't in fact rise from the dead! And here's what he wrote: "If the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised, and if Christ hasn't been raised, your faith is worthless, and you are still in your sins! And those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished! And if we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of all men most to be pitied!" Wow!
But he goes on to declare, with triumphant eloquence and unabashed affirmation (in verse 20): "But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the first-fruits of those who are asleep! For since by a man (Adam) came death, by a man (Christ) also came the resurrection of the dead! For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive! But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, after that those who are Christ's at His coming"!
And so Paul declared that He's coming again! In I Thessalonians 4:16-17, he wrote that there's coming a day "when Christ will descend from heaven with a shout, with a voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ shall rise first! Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we shall always be with the Lord! Therefore comfort one another with these words!" Paul also goes on to write about the coming millennial reign of Christ upon the earth! "For He must reign," he writes in verse 25, until He has put all His enemies under His feet! And he declares that the last enemy to be destroyed is death itself!" Wow!
Hallelujah! Christ is risen! And because He lives we too shall live! It's the foundation of our Christian faith and the basis for our hope and conviction that we too will rise bodily some day! MacArthur writes that "the ultimate act of salvation is the raising of those at the last day who are in Christ"!
It's no wonder that the apostle Paul closed this portion of his text, in verse 34, by "casting shame" on the Corinthians, and by extension, on us too, for not sharing more deliberately, and more freely, with those who have no knowledge of God, and His Word, the glorious message of the gospel of Christ, and of the reality of the bodily resurrection of both believers and unbelievers on that day to come--with believers destined for eternal bliss in heaven and unbelievers for damnation and eternal separation from God! Jesus Himself said, in John 5:28, "Do not marvel at this; for an hour is coming, in which all who are in the tombs will hear His voice, and will come forth, those who did the good deeds to a resurrection of life, those who committed the evil deeds to a resurrection of judgment"!
Erich Sauer was quoted as saying that "the graveyards of man will become seed plots of the resurrection; and the cemeteries of the people of God become, through the heavenly dew, the resurrection fields of the promised perfcction! Spurgeon called it "God's acres"!
Romans 8:22-23 says, "For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now. And not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first-fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body"!
And that sets the scene and the tone, for our lesson last night on I Corinthians 15:34-49, where the apostle Paul begins by addressing two follow-on questions raised by the Corinthians, and a likely mystery for us as well: "How are the dead raised? And with what kind of body do they come?"
MacArthur notes that these questions might have been raised in sarcasm and with a great deal of skepticism by the Corinthians who found it hard to imagine how "a rotted, decayed, corrupted bunch of whatever could ever all come together again from the grave, and be re-assempled"! And so they asked, in effect, "You mean God is going to go through all the debris scattered all over the earth and sort out what goes where?" When someone dies, his or her body decomposes and no one could possibly put it back together again, one would naturally think! The Corinthians were living in the midst of the Hellenistic culture which didn't have a good view of the body to begin with. "Hellenistic dualism," notes Constable, taught that the body was "only husk of the real person that dwelled in it, and that the more a person could live without it the better"! And that kind of thinking must have influenced the thinking of the Corinthians!
So how did the apostle Paul respond (in verse 36)? "You fool! That which you sow does not come to life unless it dies, and that which you sow, you do not sow the body which is to be, but a bare grain, perhaps of wheat or of something else!" And so he goes on to illustrate the reality of the resurrection with a lesson from nature, comparing a grain of seed that must first be planted into the ground and decompose and die before producing a unique life of its own (a tree or a stalk of grain)! A diferent form and yet, in some sense, still connected to the seed! "God gives it a body just as He wished, and to each of the seeds a body of its own," Paul says in verse 38! (MacArthur reasons that the Corinthians "shouldn't have any more of a problem with the resurrection concept than they had with the concept of a harvest!")
Paul goes on, in verses 39-41, to describe the diversity and uniqueness of God's awesome creation! "All flesh is not the same flesh, but there is one flesh of men, and another flesh of beasts, and another flesh of birds and another of fish. There are also heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one, and the glory of the earthly is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differ from star in glory!" Wow!
And so, just as there are vastly different bodies and forms in God's created universe which are suited for all kinds of existence in this life, so God can (and will!) design a unique and different body perfect for resurrection life! And the "glory" of the resurrected body will be infinitely beyond anything we can conceive of in the earthly body! Paul writes, in verses 42-44, that "it is sown a perishable body (but) raised an imperishable body; sown in dishonor (but) raised in glory; sown in weakness (but raised in power; sown a natural body (but) raised a spiritual body; and so if there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body"!
And so Paul shows how the resurrection of believers is not simply a resuscitation of dead bodies but a powerful, supernatural re-creation of new glorified bodies! Constable writes that "these verses help us understand that it is not the body that goes into the ground that is raised from the dead but an entirely new type of body," and so he concludes that "it doesn't matter what condition the body is in at death--whether lying peacefully in a coffin, or buried at sea, torn to pieces as a result of a tragic accident, or cremated! The Lord will raise it up as a new body! Just as every seed having it own body! Unique and different, but recognizable! Just like the resurrected body of Christ!
Jesus, in fact, used the same analogy of the harvest when He told His disciples (in John 12:23-24) that "the hour had come for the Son of Man to be glorified"! "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit"! Some kind of transformation took place when Jesus died and was resurrected, giving us some insight into what our own resurrected bodies will be like on that "great day coming bye and bye"! In His resurrected body, Jesus could appear and disappear! He could walk through walls; transport Himself from one place to another just by a thought! Eat fish and honeycomb; sit down with His diciples and show them the scars in His hand; speak and be understood! He was who He was, and yet in a glorified state! And Acts 1 tells of how He "presented Himself alive after His suffering to the apostles He had chosen by many convincing proofs, appearing to them over a period of forty days, speaking of things concerning the kingdom of God...and then being lifted up and recieved by a cloud and out of their sight"! Then, having "two men in white clothing" standing by them and saying, "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into the sky? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven will come in just the same way as you have watched Him go into heaven"!
And finally, in verses 45-49, the apostle Paul answers the question raised by the Corinthians more specifically about "what kind of body" by noting that the resurrection body of Jesus is the prototype for the believer! Beginning with a quote from Genesis 2:7, ""The first man, Adam, became a living soul; the last Adam became a life-giving Spirit!" Through the first Adam we received our natural bodies, but through the last Adam (Christ) we will receive our spiritual bodies in resurrection! Adam's body was the prototype of the natural, Christ the body of the resurrection. We will bear the image of His body fit for heaven as we have born the image of Adam's body on earth!
I Peter 1:3-5 says, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again for a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to obtain an inheritance which is imperishable and undefiled and will not fade away, reserved in heaven for you!" Wow!
Paul writes in Philippians 3:8-11 and 20-21, "...I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith, that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death in order that I may attain to the resurrection of the dead!...For our citizenship is in heaven from which also we eagerly wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ; who will transform the body of our humbe state into conformity with the body of His glosry, by the exeretion of the power that He has even to subject all things to Himself!"
I John 3:2-3 says, "Beloved, now are we the children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we shall be, but we know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him as He is! Everyone who hgas this hope fixed on Him purifies himself, just as He is pure!"
And Matthew 13:43 adds: "Then the righteous will shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears to hear, let him hear!"
D.L. Moody wrote this: "Thank God, we are to gain by death! We are to have something that death canot touch; when this earthly body is raised, all the imperfections will ve gone; Jacob will leave his lameness; Paul will have no thorn in the flesh; we shall enter a life that deserves the name of life, happy, glorious, incorruptible, "fashioned like unto His glorious body," everything that hinders the spiritual life left behind! We are exiles now, but then we who are faithful shall stand before the throne of God, joint heirs with Christ, kings and priests, citizens of that heavenly country!" Wow!
Christ is risen! Hallelujah! And "we shall behold Him, we shall behold Him, face to face, in all of His glory...!"
Lowell
Last week, we continued our study on what many consider the most important chapter in all the Bible (I Corinthians 15), because it sums up, simply and clearly, the "good news" of the gospel of Jesus Christ, by which one might (and must!) believe and be saved--and answers the most important question everyone at some point in his or her life asks: "What happens when I die?"
The apostle Paul claimed in I Corinthians 15:3 that he was "delivering to the Corinthians (and thereby to the whole world) a message 'of first importance, that He had received from God,' that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures"! This is the message of the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ that he preached to the Corinthians, which they "received, in which they stood, and by which they were saved, if (he said) they held fast to what he preached"! The same message he would later declare (in II Corinthians 5:21), "that God (the Father) had made Him (Jesus Christ, the Son) who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him!" And later to the Romans (in Romans 10:9) that if one "confesses with the mouth and believes in his heart that God has raised Him from the dead, he would be saved"! The same basic message that John wrote about (in John 3:16) that "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him would not perish but have everlasting life"! This, the inspired message revealed by God to the writers of the Bible upon which, and about which, and for which all the sacred Scripture, the entire Bible, was written!
And yet some of the Corinthians still apparently didn't believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ! And while others believed in the resurrection of Christ, they didn't believe in the coming resurrection of their own bodies, or of other believers one day! And so Paul wrote the book of I Cornthians, and specifically I Corinthians 15, not only to set the record straight about the gospel message of salvation through Christ alone, but to give explicit and convincing evidence that would stand up in any civil court hearing, and through the test of time, about the bodily resurrection of Christ, the reality as well of the bodily resurrection of believers one day--and the consequences for everyone of us if Christ didn't in fact rise from the dead! And here's what he wrote: "If the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised, and if Christ hasn't been raised, your faith is worthless, and you are still in your sins! And those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished! And if we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of all men most to be pitied!" Wow!
But he goes on to declare, with triumphant eloquence and unabashed affirmation (in verse 20): "But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the first-fruits of those who are asleep! For since by a man (Adam) came death, by a man (Christ) also came the resurrection of the dead! For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive! But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, after that those who are Christ's at His coming"!
And so Paul declared that He's coming again! In I Thessalonians 4:16-17, he wrote that there's coming a day "when Christ will descend from heaven with a shout, with a voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ shall rise first! Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we shall always be with the Lord! Therefore comfort one another with these words!" Paul also goes on to write about the coming millennial reign of Christ upon the earth! "For He must reign," he writes in verse 25, until He has put all His enemies under His feet! And he declares that the last enemy to be destroyed is death itself!" Wow!
Hallelujah! Christ is risen! And because He lives we too shall live! It's the foundation of our Christian faith and the basis for our hope and conviction that we too will rise bodily some day! MacArthur writes that "the ultimate act of salvation is the raising of those at the last day who are in Christ"!
It's no wonder that the apostle Paul closed this portion of his text, in verse 34, by "casting shame" on the Corinthians, and by extension, on us too, for not sharing more deliberately, and more freely, with those who have no knowledge of God, and His Word, the glorious message of the gospel of Christ, and of the reality of the bodily resurrection of both believers and unbelievers on that day to come--with believers destined for eternal bliss in heaven and unbelievers for damnation and eternal separation from God! Jesus Himself said, in John 5:28, "Do not marvel at this; for an hour is coming, in which all who are in the tombs will hear His voice, and will come forth, those who did the good deeds to a resurrection of life, those who committed the evil deeds to a resurrection of judgment"!
Erich Sauer was quoted as saying that "the graveyards of man will become seed plots of the resurrection; and the cemeteries of the people of God become, through the heavenly dew, the resurrection fields of the promised perfcction! Spurgeon called it "God's acres"!
Romans 8:22-23 says, "For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now. And not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first-fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body"!
And that sets the scene and the tone, for our lesson last night on I Corinthians 15:34-49, where the apostle Paul begins by addressing two follow-on questions raised by the Corinthians, and a likely mystery for us as well: "How are the dead raised? And with what kind of body do they come?"
MacArthur notes that these questions might have been raised in sarcasm and with a great deal of skepticism by the Corinthians who found it hard to imagine how "a rotted, decayed, corrupted bunch of whatever could ever all come together again from the grave, and be re-assempled"! And so they asked, in effect, "You mean God is going to go through all the debris scattered all over the earth and sort out what goes where?" When someone dies, his or her body decomposes and no one could possibly put it back together again, one would naturally think! The Corinthians were living in the midst of the Hellenistic culture which didn't have a good view of the body to begin with. "Hellenistic dualism," notes Constable, taught that the body was "only husk of the real person that dwelled in it, and that the more a person could live without it the better"! And that kind of thinking must have influenced the thinking of the Corinthians!
So how did the apostle Paul respond (in verse 36)? "You fool! That which you sow does not come to life unless it dies, and that which you sow, you do not sow the body which is to be, but a bare grain, perhaps of wheat or of something else!" And so he goes on to illustrate the reality of the resurrection with a lesson from nature, comparing a grain of seed that must first be planted into the ground and decompose and die before producing a unique life of its own (a tree or a stalk of grain)! A diferent form and yet, in some sense, still connected to the seed! "God gives it a body just as He wished, and to each of the seeds a body of its own," Paul says in verse 38! (MacArthur reasons that the Corinthians "shouldn't have any more of a problem with the resurrection concept than they had with the concept of a harvest!")
Paul goes on, in verses 39-41, to describe the diversity and uniqueness of God's awesome creation! "All flesh is not the same flesh, but there is one flesh of men, and another flesh of beasts, and another flesh of birds and another of fish. There are also heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one, and the glory of the earthly is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differ from star in glory!" Wow!
And so, just as there are vastly different bodies and forms in God's created universe which are suited for all kinds of existence in this life, so God can (and will!) design a unique and different body perfect for resurrection life! And the "glory" of the resurrected body will be infinitely beyond anything we can conceive of in the earthly body! Paul writes, in verses 42-44, that "it is sown a perishable body (but) raised an imperishable body; sown in dishonor (but) raised in glory; sown in weakness (but raised in power; sown a natural body (but) raised a spiritual body; and so if there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body"!
And so Paul shows how the resurrection of believers is not simply a resuscitation of dead bodies but a powerful, supernatural re-creation of new glorified bodies! Constable writes that "these verses help us understand that it is not the body that goes into the ground that is raised from the dead but an entirely new type of body," and so he concludes that "it doesn't matter what condition the body is in at death--whether lying peacefully in a coffin, or buried at sea, torn to pieces as a result of a tragic accident, or cremated! The Lord will raise it up as a new body! Just as every seed having it own body! Unique and different, but recognizable! Just like the resurrected body of Christ!
Jesus, in fact, used the same analogy of the harvest when He told His disciples (in John 12:23-24) that "the hour had come for the Son of Man to be glorified"! "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit"! Some kind of transformation took place when Jesus died and was resurrected, giving us some insight into what our own resurrected bodies will be like on that "great day coming bye and bye"! In His resurrected body, Jesus could appear and disappear! He could walk through walls; transport Himself from one place to another just by a thought! Eat fish and honeycomb; sit down with His diciples and show them the scars in His hand; speak and be understood! He was who He was, and yet in a glorified state! And Acts 1 tells of how He "presented Himself alive after His suffering to the apostles He had chosen by many convincing proofs, appearing to them over a period of forty days, speaking of things concerning the kingdom of God...and then being lifted up and recieved by a cloud and out of their sight"! Then, having "two men in white clothing" standing by them and saying, "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into the sky? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven will come in just the same way as you have watched Him go into heaven"!
And finally, in verses 45-49, the apostle Paul answers the question raised by the Corinthians more specifically about "what kind of body" by noting that the resurrection body of Jesus is the prototype for the believer! Beginning with a quote from Genesis 2:7, ""The first man, Adam, became a living soul; the last Adam became a life-giving Spirit!" Through the first Adam we received our natural bodies, but through the last Adam (Christ) we will receive our spiritual bodies in resurrection! Adam's body was the prototype of the natural, Christ the body of the resurrection. We will bear the image of His body fit for heaven as we have born the image of Adam's body on earth!
I Peter 1:3-5 says, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again for a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to obtain an inheritance which is imperishable and undefiled and will not fade away, reserved in heaven for you!" Wow!
Paul writes in Philippians 3:8-11 and 20-21, "...I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith, that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death in order that I may attain to the resurrection of the dead!...For our citizenship is in heaven from which also we eagerly wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ; who will transform the body of our humbe state into conformity with the body of His glosry, by the exeretion of the power that He has even to subject all things to Himself!"
I John 3:2-3 says, "Beloved, now are we the children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we shall be, but we know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him as He is! Everyone who hgas this hope fixed on Him purifies himself, just as He is pure!"
And Matthew 13:43 adds: "Then the righteous will shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears to hear, let him hear!"
D.L. Moody wrote this: "Thank God, we are to gain by death! We are to have something that death canot touch; when this earthly body is raised, all the imperfections will ve gone; Jacob will leave his lameness; Paul will have no thorn in the flesh; we shall enter a life that deserves the name of life, happy, glorious, incorruptible, "fashioned like unto His glorious body," everything that hinders the spiritual life left behind! We are exiles now, but then we who are faithful shall stand before the throne of God, joint heirs with Christ, kings and priests, citizens of that heavenly country!" Wow!
Christ is risen! Hallelujah! And "we shall behold Him, we shall behold Him, face to face, in all of His glory...!"
Lowell
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