1 Corinthians 15

Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preach to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand.

By this gospel, you are saved if you hold firmly to the word I preach to you.

Otherwise, you have believed in vain.

For what I received, I pass on to you as of first importance.

That Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures.

But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the first fruits 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 turn Christ, the first fruits.

Then when he comes those who belong to him, then the end will come when he hands over the kingdom of God to 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.

If I fought wild beasts in Ephesians with no more than human hopes, what have I gained?

If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink.

For tomorrow we die.

Amen.

Lord, thank you for your word.

And as we now look into it, we ask that you would speak to us by your spirit.

We surrender our hearts and our minds to you.

Speak, Lord, we pray.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

You may be seated.

You may be seated.

And I'm gonna make my way up here to the stage.

So we have been going through the book of Luke.

Robert, could you hand me that stand right there?

We've been going through Luke and we finished last week, which was a feed in and of itself.

14 weeks.

Uh-oh.

14 weeks.

14 months, rather, in the book of Luke.

That's great.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate it.

In um next week.

Next week we're going to begin.

We are going to begin the book of Ezra.

And we're going to spend eight weeks going through the book of Ezra.

Ezra is an old testament book.

Up until this point in our church history, we have been going through New Testament books.

We've gone through Philippians and Luke.

And then we're going to do eight weeks in Ezra.

So I want to encourage you to stick that out.

One of the things that we've been talking about as we have gone through Luke is that the Old Testament is important.

The Old Testament is so important to us as we understand who Jesus is.

And so I hope that you'll be with us.

It's going to get into a little bit of history of Israel.

It's going to be a good eight weeks.

And then from there, once we get into the summer, we will be looking at Acts and then 1 Corinthians is the plan through the rest of the year.

So we've got some great material ahead of us that I'm excited to get into.

Okay, but you have 1 Corinthians 15 in front of you.

I want to tell you a little bit about Corinth before we get into this text.

About 15 years after Jesus was raised, there was a man named Paul who had been named Saul, and he was radically converted from Judaism to Christianity.

But as you understand Judaism, Judaism into Christianity is not a big switch other than it's just Judaism fulfilled.

Jesus fulfilled Judaism.

And it took a little while for Paul to get this.

In fact, God had to knock Paul off of his horse to understand that Jesus is the Messiah that all Jews were waiting for.

So once Paul became a Christian, he also became a missionary and he traveled all over what we would call southern Europe.

He went into Turkey and he planted and helped start a number of churches.

He was also persecuted, beat up.

He moved from Turkey into Macedonia, which is the movement from Asia into Europe.

And he plants churches along all across where Philippi is, then Berea, Athens, and then what we have on our map here, which is Corinth.

That's the red dot.

And Paul gets to Corinth about 15 years after the resurrection of Christ, and he starts a whole, not just the church in Corinth, but this is the Aegean region.

He starts churches, a network of churches across the Aegean peninsula.

The main chief city was Corinth.

Now, if you're interested in that, you can go to Acts 18 and read the whole account of how those churches were started.

It's a beautiful story and it's fascinating to see how the whole thing unfolded.

But I want you to have this image in your head because Paul is writing this letter, what we call 1 Corinthians.

It's the first letter that he writes to them.

He's writing it from across the water, the Adriatic Sea, or the Aegean Sea, rather.

He's over in Ephesus, and he's writing this letter back to the church in Corinth.

Now, the back part of your Bible, and if you're new to Scripture, where's my Bible?

Okay, right here.

At the back of the Bible, after you go through Acts, you start getting into Romans and 1 Corinthians and what we call epistles.

Epistles is a word for letter.

These are all letters that are being written to various churches or individuals.

And it's Paul the Apostle that writes the first set of letters that we have, right?

Then you have another set of letters that are called the general epistles.

Those are written by Peter, John, and the brothers of Jesus, James and Jude, right?

So that's that's kind of the contents of your New Testament.

You have the historical account of Jesus, Acts is the historical account of what happened for the 60 years after Jesus is raised from the dead and ascends to heaven.

And then we have all these letters.

And the letters are key.

So 1 Corinthians, the first letter to go to Corinth, was taken and it was circulated and then copied and held on to and treasured by the early church and was considered scripture.

It was what we say canonized.

Now, every letter that is written has an occasion.

It has something that it's being written for, right?

There's a reason why the letter needed to be written.

And so if you study these letters, one of the things that you begin to see is, oh, this is what must be going on in that city.

It needed this letter to be written for this reason.

And Corinth was a mess, right?

It was a young church.

It had all kinds of problems going on inside of it.

And one of the problems that it had was that the people in the church were denying, they were denying the resurrection.

So in our text, in verse 12, chapter 15, verse 12, I think I have this here, it says this.

So Paul writing to this church that he's separated from, he's aware that there are some in this church who are saying there is no resurrection.

Now, it's important to understand that this is the idea that he is addressing.

So this morning, the way that we're going to study this is we're going to just go verse by verse.

We're going to start with the first four verses and we're going to unpack it.

Let's look first at verses one through three.

He says, This, now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand.

By this gospel you are saved if you hold firmly to the word I preach to you.

Otherwise you have believed in vain.

For what I received, I passed on to you as of first importance, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.

Let's stop there for a second.

Those are the first three verses.

What word do you see repeated in the in the text quite a bit?

Gospel, right?

Now, we in our culture, if you're going to like sort your music and find a genre of music in iTunes or Spotify, you have the contemporary Christian and gospel genre.

That's not what he's talking about here, right?

That's not the gospel he's talking about.

What Paul is referring to is the message of good news that he brought to this church.

The word gospel, it means good news.

It means good news.

And so Paul is saying to this church, you will recall the gospel that I brought to you.

It's the common ground that we have.

You see, Paul's working with this church through a series of problems, not just this one.

And what they believe, what they hold to as truth, is really, really important.

And so he says to them, This is what you um, what I preach to you.

It's the message that you received.

Do you see?

He says to them, This is what you take, this gospel is what you take a stand for.

This gospel is what has saved you.

He says to them that the message of the gospel was given to them, it was preached to them, and it was of first importance, or it was a priority, right?

All these characteristics, this church is interacting with the gospel, and it's playing a significant role.

So obviously the question is, what?

What is the gospel?

What is its substance?

And that's what we find in verse three and four.

He says, for what I received, I passed on to you as of first importance, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures.

So we have these three parts that are composed that make up the gospel, right?

That Christ died for our sins, he was buried, and that he rose again on the third day.

That's the common ground.

That is the common ground that this church has believed.

And it's this Easter morning that we're focused on number three, that he rose again on the third day.

Now, Paul, as if we were to go on into up through verse 12, you would see that Paul talks about the resurrection of Jesus as an objective fact, as a historic objective fact.

Now, you may not come from a church background.

You may feel somewhat cynical about this idea that a person came to the earth, claimed to be God, died on a cross, and after three days was physically raised from the dead.

Now that doesn't happen every day, does it?

So your cynicism is based upon your experience, right?

That that doesn't, that's not what now you know that that's what Christians believe.

But is it a well-founded belief?

Let me quickly just make the case for you.

First of all, we know from our study in Luke that the tomb was empty.

The tomb was empty.

It was a verifiable fact.

In fact, some guards that were Romans were paid off to say the body had been stolen.

But in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul says that there are hundreds of people that saw Christ after the cross, raised from the dead.

So, as one writer says, if we had an empty tomb, but no witnesses of the risen Christ, the logical conclusion would be that Christ's body was stolen.

If we had Christ's body in the tomb, but hundreds of witnesses to Ora's Christ, we would call it mass hallucination.

But if we have an empty tomb and we have hundreds of eyewitness accounts, which at the writing of this letter, these recipients could easily go and verify.

And so, Paul, while we take this as an argument for the resurrection, really what Paul is doing is he's arguing for the historic reliability of the resurrection because this group of people were rejecting their own resurrection.

You see, they believed the gospel.

And the third part of the gospel is that Christ was raised.

They agree with that.

But what they're questioning and not so sure about is their own resurrection, the fact that they themselves would be raised from the dead.

Let's um go to verse 20.

And I want to give you this quote first, because this is really what is going on with this church.

Paul takes up what for him are two contradictory positions on their part belief in Christ's resurrection and denial of their own.

And he sets out to demonstrate their logical and therefore absurd consequences.

The fact that there is a resurrection, that Christ was raised and now we are raised, has meaning for us as individuals.

In verse verses twenty through twenty-two, it says this Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep, for since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead also through a man, for as in him, as in Adam all died, so in Christ all will be made alive.

You see, Paul is saying that the resurrection of Jesus was only the beginning of the harvest.

The resurrection of Jesus is the first fruit of the harvest.

Now, in about a month from now, strawberries are going to ripen on the vine.

Now, it's some sick part of my past that I like to go and pick strawberries.

At twice the price, you can get them from Costco.

I don't know, some of my family did it as kids.

So we will go next month and we will go and pick strawberries.

And it's the harvest time.

And Paul is saying that Christ, when he was raised from the dead, it was the first fruits of this overall harvest of people being resurrected.

Well, who else is being resurrected?

It's those who have fallen asleep.

Now, I know you may have fallen asleep already in this sermon, but that's not what he's talking about, right?

No, he is talking about, he is talking about those that have died.

Those that have died.

Now, we're we're only 15 years beyond the cross, okay?

So imagine catching up with new Christian ideas.

Paul is writing this, when he's writing this, the church is beginning to understand death a little bit better.

The theology, the teaching on the resurrection was becoming more comprehensive as the church matured.

Now, this is important.

Up to this point in the church's history, as a baby church, their hope was what we called the parousia, the return of Christ to the earth.

Many Christians were thinking that Jesus just went away for a second.

Remember, he goes up into heaven.

He said, Watch and wait for me to return.

So they're thinking that they're not even factoring in death a whole lot.

They're thinking Jesus is going to be right back.

They think they won't die.

Christ will return and he'll establish his kingdom and all of these things will unfold.

But over the course of 15 years, people begin to die that have come to Christ.

They're followers of Jesus.

And these questions arise.

We see this in the church in Thessalonica, right?

The church in Thessalonica, they begin to question what do we, what do what has happened to those that have fallen asleep?

Because Jesus' teaching about when he comes back is pretty clear.

But what about those people that miss Jesus coming back by dying?

What about Stephen, the martyr?

What about James who was beheaded?

What about grandpa, grandma that passed away?

What is it, what is the right thing for us to believe about death?

And so what Paul says here is helping them fill in those questions.

And he's saying that Jesus was raised from the dead first, but that there are those who have followed Christ and fallen asleep that will also be raised.

And then he lays out this logical progression, starting in verse 21.

Since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man.

What's he talking about?

He's talking about Adam, right?

How did death come into the world?

The Bible teaches that people die because mankind rebelled against God.

Humanity rebelled against God, and the first rebellion was in Adam, right?

Adam disobeyed God's command, don't eat the fruit.

He said, In the day you eat it, you will surely die.

He ate it, and death came into the whole world.

We talked about this for Good Friday.

But Paul is saying that, look, in the same way that death came into the world through a man, resurrection comes into the world through a man.

Here's what's crazy: how universal is death?

Does it just happen, you know, one out of ten, you know, happen?

No.

Death happens often, right?

It is universal.

You cannot escape death.

And yet the offer, the the um the proposition of death is made um as it is universal.

The offer of life is also made universal to humanity through Jesus Christ.

Because Jesus was raised from the dead, there is now this ability for life to be given to those who are in him.

Let's continue into verse 23 through 26, because I is I want you to see how Paul's laying out the logic here.

Verse 23, but each in turn Christ, the first fruits, then when he comes, those who belong to him.

Then the end will come when he hands over the kingdom of God, the Father, after he destroyed king 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.

So he is laying out the agenda here of God.

Do you see there's an orderness?

He says, uh, because he's he's just said, look, Jesus was raised, that's the beginning.

Then Jesus ushers in resurrection life for his followers.

But again, you and I should challenge this.

It's like, wait a second, people are still dead.

Like, we buried grandma and grandpa, and and they're still in their tomb.

So how does this work?

And Paul says there's an orderedness to it.

It's first Christ, then uh each in his turn, when he comes, those who belong to him, then the end will come.

He hands, then he begins to talk about this bigger picture, the bigger context of Christ, Christ being um uh reigning and ruling, taking dominion over, he lists them out here dominion, authority, and power, and the last enemy that's to be destroyed is death.

Then he hands over the kingdom to God the Father.

So when we talk about resurrection, we're talking about something in the context of a grand plan of God.

It was God's plan that his son would rise from the dead as the first fruits of the grave, and then you and I as belonging to him, that we would be raised.

But that's not the end of the story.

He is uh defeating dominions, authorities, and powers.

That's speaking both of human leadership and spiritual authority, demonic powers, right?

Jesus is reigning, putting everything, and the final enemy to be destroyed is death.

Then Jesus takes it all as a done deal.

The job has been accomplished, then he hands the kingdom over to God.

Now the next text is this parenthetical note.

Verse 27.

For he has put everything under his feet.

Now, when he 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.

So everything is under the Son, but not the Father.

Does that make sense?

Right?

Because God is He is doing this.

Uh basically the order of the Trinity, the leadership structure of the Trinity remains intact.

The Son has been given this work to do, and then he hands it back over to the Father.

It's a beautiful picture.

And then verse 29 through 32.

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?

And as for us, why do we endanger ourselves every hour?

I face death every day.

Yes, just as surely as I boast about you in Christ Jesus our Lord, if I fought wild beasts in Ephesus with no more than human hopes, what have I gained if the dead are not raised?

Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.

Okay.

So what in the world is going on in verse 29?

Now, if there is no resurrection, what will those do who are baptized for the dead?

What's the baptism of the dead?

This is an enigma.

There is no good interpretation of this.

We do not know what this church is doing, baptizing people for the dead.

This is not found anywhere else in the New Testament.

It was not taught by Jesus, it wasn't practiced by Jesus, but it was being done in this church.

So we do not know why this was going on.

But we do know this, that Paul is saying that this activity that was being done is utterly in vain if there's no resurrection, right?

Because the dead are dead.

There's nothing for, there's no benefit for them.

Now, I don't, we we do not practice this at all, but the logic flows and it flows right into verse 30.

And as for us, why do we endanger ourselves every hour?

This is kind of where we're gonna close out this morning.

The reality of the resurrection for your life and for Paul's life, it was a factor that caused him to say, I'm not gonna live a normal life, right?

This is the normal life.

Eat, drink, for tomorrow we die.

That's the normal life, right?

And Paul says, I'm not doing that life.

Instead, what I'm doing is I am living a life where I am endangering, we are endangering ourselves every hour.

He says, I face, I face death daily.

I die daily.

He talks about some of these examples.

Ephesus, fighting off the beasts.

There's if you if you go through the story of Paul's life, one of the things that we see over and over again is that he was a risk taker for the gospel.

And so the way that this speaks to us this morning is that you and I, you and I are called to live a life that is not normal, right?

We're called to live a life that factors in the reality of the resurrection.

If there's no resurrection and this is the life that you live, you would live a particular way.

But because we believe that we will be raised with Christ, we do things differently.

We do things differently.

You and I have believed this gospel message.

I'm trusting this morning that you have.

If you haven't yet um placed yourself, there's this language that he uses.

Um if we go back a couple of verses, I want to show you this phrase.

Do you see what it says here?

Those who belong to him.

The question that we want to ask ourselves right off the bat when we go to church is do we belong to him?

He made you, but you're made and living when you're born in a state of rebellion, right?

In Adam, you're living at odds with God.

That's not a problem because of what Jesus did.

He came and died for your sins so that you're not punished.

You don't have to be punished for being at odds with him.

You can choose to belong to him.

But if you've never made that decision, today is your day to decide that you're going to follow Jesus, that you're going to surrender your life to him, that you're going to believe the gospel as Paul says this church did.

But for those of us who do belong to Christ, are you in a rut?

Are you doing a normal life?

Are we doing life as normal?

Or does our life evidence the resurrection power of God?

Paul allowed, Paul allowed the hope of the resurrection to influence his decisions.

And the prayer that I have for you and for me is that we, as his beloved saints, that we would do our life in light of the resurrection.

We've talked about this, and we'll talk about it someday again when we go into 2 Corinthians, but God allows for us to suffer.

Maybe you're this this morning, you're going through something that's difficult.

The Bible teaches that God allows us to suffer because He wants to demonstrate the resurrection power in our life.

He wants to bring you back to life.

Maybe you're suffering from just a bout of depression or anxiety or it's an illness, you know, or it's a relationship.

All of those things, God is able to work in them and bring about his resurrection power.

That's his offer for you this morning.

We're going to take the communion elements together.

We're going to take communion together.

And so what I'd like to do is we're going to receive those elements.

So if you want to come forward, take the bread and the cup, you can stand.

The communion elements is where we remember, we remember this work, right?

So it goes, it's basically a physical sign to us of what Jesus did.

Right?

So as you take the bread, take it back to your seat, hold the elements, and we will take it together.

But when you take the bread, the bread is what Jesus said.

This is my body that's broken for you.

We're 2,000 years removed from the work of the cross.

But he's allowed us to do this ritual where we take the bread, where we take the cup, and um we're recalling in our minds the sacrifice that Jesus made.

Jesus instituted the cup and the bread at the Passover, right before his death, and he knew he was going to the cross.

He knew that he was going to suffer for your sake and for my sake.

He knew that this was going to take place.

We were the ones that were supposed to be bruised.

We were the ones that were supposed to be beaten, right?

We were the ones that were supposed to suffer.

And yet Jesus did it on our behalf so that we could have our sins taken away.

And so in a moment, as we take the elements together, we're we are doing three things, right?

We want to repent in our hearts of sin.

So if there's anything that's that's there in your hearts that you just need to confess, maybe there's something that happened this week where you just need to get it right before the Lord.

That's the first thing.

We want to confess our sins.

We want to repent to the Lord.

We want to remember, we just want to recall in our minds the image of the cross, of his body being broken, like his blood being poured out for us, right?

And then we also, we also want to um rejoice.

That's the third thing that we do.

We rejoice in his accomplished work on our behalf.

All right.

I'll give you just one more second to grab grab the elements.

Thank you.

Anybody else?

Let's hold up the bread.

Let's take and eat.

And the cup.

Hold up the cup.

Jesus said, This is my blood.

The blood of the new covenant, which is shed for you.

Do it in remembrance of me.

Let's take the cup.

God, we thank you this morning for suffering on our behalf, being raised to new life.

Lord, that we are a part of that harvest.

We're an alive people.

Oh Lord, let that life be evident in us.

Make your life known in and through us, Lord.

Let it be a real thing, we pray.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.