The centrality of the resurrection

1 Corinthians 15:12-19

Now if Christ is preached, that has been raised from the dead, how do some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead not even Christ has been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, your faith is also in vain.  More over we are even found to be false witnesses of God, because we testified against God that He raised Christ, whom he did not raise, if in fact the dead are not raised.  For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised;  and if Chist has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins.  Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.  If we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of all men most to be pitied.  

 Easter was just this Sunday, the day of the resurrection of Christ. The resurrection which is much denied in today's world even by so called Christians.  Or Socinians to be more accurate.  These embrace supposed human wisdom and deny the necessity of believing any part of the Apostle's Creed.  Instead the ideas are important, the morality is important and if man can't reason it, well then it can't be true.  These liberal and postmodern churches see no need for doctrine especially as timeless.  Whose doctrines of course fall on themselves as an interesting doctrine on doctrine that reflects only the time.  

One 19^th century adherent named W.Robertson Smith when accused of denying Christ’s divinity went so far as even to claim such as “to never have denied the divinity of any man”.  If you’re beliefs are wholly other than that before you they are of a different character you can’t claim them as your own.  To have changed and deviated from what that faith has historically been you are no longer that thing.  Instead you have become something else entirely having stepped out of the tradition of those who came before you.

  Theological Liberalism and unbelievers alike deny the resurrection.  Evey once in a while something gets published saying something like "Jesus had a wife" or we "found his tomb with him in it".  Inevitably it ends up being another man with the then common name Jesus. Many never seem to think of that until it gets in print and makes them money and gives them a name.  When inevitably disproven it is almost never loudly recanted but quietly redacted.  For many it simply can't be true, because it is not how we want God to be.  Today there very much is an air of "scientific superiority" more accurately known as chronological snobbery.  The logic goes, since we don't see miracles every day they can't have happened.

Paul was speaking to those in Corinth about false teachers who said they knew Christ as well.  Their disapproval of the resurrection was a horrible mistake to make.  The resurrection was as much under attack then as it is today.  There are two ways the resurrection is denied.  Either there is no life after death (as certain Jews believed and some do today) or the body itself would not be resurrected (as the Platonists believed and many still do).

For Jewish groups like the Saducees this life was all there is.  There was nothing after death, not in spirit or body since the Old Testament was largely absent of such things.  Likewise the idea of a resurrection to Platonists is absurd for different reasons.  The body was evil, so who want to be resurrected in it?  When the prison of the body was escaped why would you want to go back into that prison?  Though it looks different it looks the same for the same heart of doubt and trust in man's "wisdom" is at work.  This is why Paul was mocked after his address on Mars Hill in Athens and likely one reason immorality flourished since the body was viewed as of no consequence.

Acts 13:32

Now when they head of the resurrection of the dead some began to sneer, but others said, “We shall hear you ^[k]again concerning this.”

No doubt there were many reasons the resurrection would be denied by both Jew and Gentile.  Then and today there are false teachers and false apostles who accost this central doctrine.

Death is a harrowing doorway we all must walk through.  It is impossible to go through this life in the world today and not see or experience it.  Our culture and time is very humanistic, a world very centered on man and post-enlightenment rationalism.  Which is irrational to think man is the measure of the universe.  We today are very overly focusing on what we can do and the world of our sense.  I've seen tragic hopelessness that comes from the inevitability and finality of death with no resurrection that this produces.  Eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die is how those consistent with this belief live.

1 Corinthians 15

 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.”^[a]

Often when asked what happens after death I would hear some heresy if anything spiritual at all. 

There is also increase in people saying there is nothing after death.  Often the answer is simply 

nothing at least for the body.  I remember as a child growing up seeing death.  The neighborhood cat 

that went prowling would attack varioius small animals.  One time we found a rabbit that had been 

killed and I looked it.  It was lacking visible wounds wondering why it wouldn't and couldn't move. 

 Its body looked fine but there was no life in it.  Another time we found a bird with it's head torn off. 

 that was more obvious.  Sad as those experiences were those were but animals.  What of people?

You can't live too long and not have someone you knew or were close to die.  I've been to three 

funerals and lost my grandmother.  She was cremated and I never got to say goodbye or see her one 

last time.  The thought of her or any of those people being gone and not just existing in another way but ceasing to exist is deeply disturbing.

The we are all simply material and death is just a stopping of our electrical impulses deeply troubles 

us.  But without God what is bigger than death? Without God what hope is there?  Yet many today 

who claim Christ deny his resurrection work and in so doing deny him.  You might as well eat drink 

and be merry for tomorrow you die.  For what else would there be?  Without the resurrection death 

would reign as king and nothing would be of eternal value.  For all the answers our secular 

humanism  gives it can't explain why we yearn for eternity.  At best it would be some cruel trick, a 

lie created by evolution or random chance.  The bible provides a far bette answer.  We are wired this 
way the same  way we are wired to desire food and water.  There really is something more and life eternal and we are made with that knowledge

Church history is very useful in guiding us to know true teaching.  The Apostles creed, speaks of the necessity of the resurrection and its key role in identifying who is a Christian.  Then and today the resurrection has been a hard doctrine to swallow because we don’t see dead bodies suddenly gain life.  I’ve heard and seen many people joke about “Zombie Jesus day”.  As if he’s as a zombie, some horrid abomination and profaning of the Gospel resurrection.  Zombie films are totally different.  They are oddly a bizarre resurrection.  They die, rise again to life and feed on the living converting (if you will) others to death and having no soul of their own.  Christ Died for us rose again and speaks of us needing to feast on him to live.  He gives life to draw others to him and renews the body and soul.   He is not “zombie Jesus”.  The explanation for the joke is that it is laughably absurd to some people that anyone could come back from the dead. 

Whether people deny Christ’s resurrection, either because people believe the body is evil and the spirit good or as we do today believe we are only matter.  Further put with our over scientism “we don’t see it happen every day it can’t happen”.  But a miracle is a miracle because it doesn’t happen every day in nature otherwise we might simply call it a common or a typical.

If there is the supernatural and a divine agent in the natural world of course he could do such things.  It would not be a violation of the laws of nature but simply natural.  A miracle is God breaking into the world to exercise his power and authority to accomplish his purpose.  It sounded equally absurd to the Greeks of Paul’s day not because of some naturalism.  The idea of a resurrection of the body was absurd and undesirable. 

Paul was speaking to those in Corinth about false teachers who said they knew Christ.  Their denial of the resurrection is a horrible mistake to make.  The resurrection was as much under attack then as it is today.  In Paul's day it was more likely Proto-Gnostic and Platonic.  The idea of a resurrection to a Platonist is absurd since the body itself was seen as evil.

So who would want to be resurrected and placed back in?  You just escaped and you would go back into prison?  The body was evil and a cage.  Spirit was good so dying would set you free.  What need would Jesus have to put his spirit back in the body and give it life?  Though it looks different the same heart of doubt and trust in man's "wisdom" is at work.  It would have been pointless and absurd to the Gnostic and this belief has persisted.  I spoke to an unknowing Gnostic once who said we have "new bodies" not of flesh but spiritual.  She cited Paul in a translation to support a belief identical to those who opposed him.

1 Corinthians 15:50

⁵⁰ I declare to you, brothers and sisters, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.

Context is key and she without it she fell into a false belief.  In Greek the word that was used was sarks (σαρξ), flesh (as in a nature).  Soma (σωμα) is the term used for body elsewhere and never of the sinful nature. The Greek points to something within the fleshly nature as corrupt.  The problem then is something that is not the body itself but attached to the body like a leech.  Paul is showing something is wrong with creation that needs redemption and restoration.  It is this nature that Paul focus’ on, and the reality that a person’s birth doesn’t earn salvation. Christ is in his body for eternity lest we say that he will lose the incarnation.  If we were to gain new (spirit) not renewed bodies Thomas would not have been able to put his hands in Christ’s wounds.

  Paul affirms the goodness of the body as well in the work of Christ. God made both body and soul, and so Christ took on flesh to become a man, that the whole of man might be saved. If the body were evil God would not take it on himself.  If the body were not made new, the whole of man would be left tainted.  God had to come down in the body, born of a virgin and do it himself for no mere man could overcome death.  If death still reigned over the body it would never be defeated.  The curse of sin would still and forever be supreme over mankind.   Mankind very much is not a spirit with a body; we are spirit and a body not just one or the other. To redeem man therefore he had to become and resurrect as one completely.  Only then would he conquer what we could not in his death and resurrection.  He paid the price of our sin in his death and overcame it in his resurrection.

I don’t think those animals will resurrect one day.  If animals do I will have an awkward time with many delicious animals I was previously acquainted.  But you and I will.  I know you and I if we pass before Christ returns will resurrect on the Day of Judgment. It’s a matter of which resurrection.  Either you will come to a resurrection in Christ and life or one unto eternal death.  Even the atheist and the skeptic know the importance of this and we can see it in the questions we all ask.  We ask about life after death, purpose here, and to ask these is not taught.

 There is something deep inside every person that longs for eternity.  We are unsettled by the so called fact of materialism that when we die there is nothing.  So we try to make the most out of what short lives we have.  If death was but natural and we were built for a short life why do we ask and desire a life after death?  If such were true our desires and longings would be just a cruel trick of fate and evolution.  Pure chance, even our recognition of such things would be equally suspect for all would be nothing.  What we all experience is that we were made for eternity. Why? God wants us to know him and the resurrection is very much a part of the center of having relationship with God. 

If Christ was not raised, your faith is nothing.  For you have not this victory over death now or ever.  In this age where man is the center of all understanding miracles and the divine are denied, even in so called churches.  According to many Churches that have lost their way “the idea of the resurrection is what’s important.” What is really the central to the “idea” is that it actually happened.  The idea is that it was real and is real and as an empty notion it is not a hope.

 If Christ was not raised, neither will we be.  Christianity is not just a spiritual sense of the morality or idea of death being defeated or Christianity is fruitless.  If we believe Christ did not conquer the grave Paul is right in saying that we are indeed most to be pitied.   Without the reality of that hope is an empty, foolish delusion.  It becomes a sick escapist fantasy which death would abruptly end.   Still under death, we would have no forgiveness without his resurrection.  His resurrection affirms his sinlessness and that death therefore has no claim to him.  It very really did happen and there were witnesses to it. In any court of law it helps to have a witness, two is better, 12 would be great, and hundreds would be outstanding. 

Hundreds saw Jesus after his resurrection.  That many witnesses grew to include Paul who had been persecuting Christ before he encountered him on the road to Damascus.   The body indeed disappeared from the tomb and many saw him after he died, with the wounds in his physical body, a body with which he even ate.  Christ was no spirit or group illusion. Christ very much did die and was raised again, and that is remarkable, joyous and very REAL thing.

We proclaim it in sacraments such as Baptism which shows a death, and a resurrection (Romans 6:4).  If Christ did not die and be resurrected neither can you die to yourself and find new life in him.  I’m Presbyterian, and when we baptize we don’t keep pouring the water on you forever.  I’ve been in a few Baptist churches and they don’t just hold the baptized under water (I hope not).  Baptists don’t stand there and say “now think about the idea of coming out, think about how great that would be.”  Believing the idea is what’s important is likewise as foolish.

 Instead you get pulled out and dried off, to show the resurrection and our new life in Christ. What good is it to be baptized proclaiming newness in life and victory over death in the name of someone who is still dead and still under deaths tyranny?  This modern Jesus who lost is a hippy teacher who was a liar and a lunatic and who was not really lord.  He is not Jesus but a caricature. There is no renewal and life without the resurrection. The resurrection is paramount.  Death is Christ’s enemy and the last to be put under foot, subdued forever. 

1 Corinthians 15:25-26

²⁵ For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. ²⁶ The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

One day the horrid aberration death will be totally destroyed.  Christ’s victory is our victory as well.   The deniers would be right if it were a miracle of but a man.  Resurrection is impossible, for you and me in this world by our own strength.  It is only reasonable if Christ were just a man we wouldn't be here today for there would be no church.  Such a church would be a monument to mass delusion.  But Christ, coeternal and equal within the triune God, raised himself up just as he gave up his own spirit on the cross. 

John 10:17
For this reason the father loves me, because I lay down my life so that I may take it up again.\

That’s the whole point.  He was no ordinary man, but God and man fully.   This is all the testimony of the early Church, which the Apostle’s creed articulates so beautifully.  In Christ because of Christ’s work, which he did for us he was not just resurrected for his own sake but ours, can we be one day resurrected to life everlasting.  The truth of our loving God, who for us and our salvation took on flesh that sin and death may be conquered in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ.  He died and rose to newness of life joined to him we do also.  This is what the apostles taught and bore witness to and the Church does to this day.  In the reality of the resurrection we can look forward to the new heavens and the new earth.  Sin and death will pass away, for Christ has conquered.

The Apostles Creed

1. I believe in God the Father, Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth:
2. And in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, our Lord:
3. Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary:
4. Suffered under Pontius Pilate; was crucified, dead and buried: He descended into hell:
5. The third day he rose again from the dead:
6. He ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty:
7. From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead:
8. I believe in the Holy Ghost:
9. I believe in the holy catholic church: the communion of saints:
10. The forgiveness of sins:
1l. The resurrection of the body:

12. And the life everlasting. Amen.

Lee Strobel's study on the evidence of the resurrection