BIBLE MESSAGES ON EASTER
Bob Marcaurelle
freesermons@homeorchurchbiblestudy.com
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Annual Sermons Volume 1
IF CHRIST BE NOT RISEN (1 Cor. 15:12-29)
Before the Bishop James Pike met his untimely death in the Palestinian desert he wrote a blasphemous book, “But This I Do Not Believe.” Each sermon was a denial of a major doctrine of the Christian faith. One doctrine the Bishop could not believe was the resurrection of the believer’s body at the Second Coming.
Harry Emerson Fosdick, the spokesman of modern Liberalism often said he believed in the survival of personality and in the immortality of the soul but he could not believe in the resurrection of the body. A Sunday School teacher once told me that one phrase in the Apostle’s Creed he could never repeat or believe was “the resurrection of the dead.”
This was the problem at Corinth. Some could not believe in the resurrection of the death. They were not denying Christ’s resurrection but ours. When we die, our bodies go to the grave, but our spirits go at once to live in conscious fellowship with Jesus Christ. Paul said that to be absent from the body was to be present with Jesus (2 Cor. 5:8). Jesus told the thief on the cross, “Today, you will be with me in Paradise” (Lk. 23:43). That very day their bodies were taken down and placed in the earth to decay. But their spirits were in Paradise, in heaven. The Book of First Peter (3:18) says that while our Lord’s body was in the grave, He went in the spirit and preached to the spirits in prison, those who had disobeyed Noah. Three days later however, His Spirit was clothed with His body. And for us, it may be three thousand years, but we shall have the same experience. We shall return with Jesus (1 Th. 3:13), and our bodies will rise up from the grave and be changed (1 Cor. 15:42-45), and shall clothe our spirits throughout eternity.
I can understand how devout Christians find this difficult to believe. I know that when a person is buried at sea and the fish eat his body that when those fish are eaten, his particles can be in another human being. I know we will not have the exact same body because flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God (1 Cor. 15:50).
But when a thing is difficult, this does not mean it should be denied. We must learn to believe what God says and let Him take care of the details. Sad indeed is the fact that some cannot understand or explain it. Paul, in these verses, shows the awful implications of such doubts. Question marks, like vultures, circled over the church at Corinth and threatened to rob Christianity of its meaning. Paul’s basic remark is that if we are not going to really rise from death bodily, then Jesus did not rise bodily.
He says this three times, “Now if Christ is preached as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?” (V. 12). “But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised” (v. 13). “For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised” (v. 16).
Thus if you deny that we will have a bodily resurrection at the last day you really deny that our Lord was resurrected. And denying this you tear the very heart out of the Christian faith. Without the resurrection of Jesus there is no faith worth believing (14-16) and no salvation worth receiving (17-19).
I. NO FAITH WORTH BELIEVING (15:14-16)
First of all, Paul says, if Christ did not rise then there is no message to preach in our churches and there is nothing worthwhile for you to believe. He says our preaching is vain and our faith is vain.
1. No Faith in God’s Love.
If Jesus Christ did not rise from the grave then we have absolutely no basis for the belief that a God of love is in control. The events on Mount Calvary are a horrible snapshot in a moment of time that reveal the terrible kind of world in which we live. There we have injustice and cowardice and cruelty and hate and pain and bloodshed and greed and murder. And the haunting question is – Is this all there is to life?
Does evil always win? That lovely body, bruised, beaten, shamed and bleeding – is it only to be food for the worms? Is Satan the ruler of this world? Or is God? Our reply is the empty tomb. Our reply is the risen Lord. Our reply is the new age to come when the resurrected saints of God will live forever in the new heaven and the new earth. This is why Easter gives meaning to Christmas.
There is something unreal about Christmas. The cradle of Bethlehem annually sits in a world of greed, hate, war and impurity while we sing of “peace on earth.” But we are not sentimental dreamers. That baby grew, died, rose again and reigns at the right hand of God and will return one day to set this evil world afire and tread the wicked in the winepress of His wrath.
He who was crucified will summon every man before His Judgment Bar and every man will receive His due reward. But all of this we know because He rose! Because He rose we know that evil will never have the last word and that we can believe in the love and power of God.
Life is more than hospital wards and nursing homes and twisted limbs and funerals and tears. This life is the prelude to a better day. A little boy was looking at a picture of the crucifixion in a store window. A man walked up and the little boy said, “Mister, that’s Jesus on that cross. Those are Roman soldiers at his feet. That woman crying is his mother.” The man asked, “Where did you learn all that?” “In Sunday School,” he replied. Then the man turned and walked away. The little boy noticing that he had left, ran after him yelling, “Wait a minute, mister. That’s not the whole story. There is more. He rose from the dead.”
2. No Faith in God’s Word.
If Jesus Christ is not risen then you can have no faith in this book. It is a colossal lie from cover to cover. If Christ did not rise then we have no Bible to guide us to heaven. Jesus is a liar! Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are all liars. Paul and Peter are liars! Why? Because they all preached the resurrection. Whoever denies the resurrection, either of Christ or of men, denies the Word of God.
A hundred scriptures affirm it. And when anyone denies the Word of God there is nothing left to preach and nothing left to believe. Doubters cast themselves adrift on a sea of speculation and pessimism. If you deny one doctrine then you might as well deny them all. You who deny hell, how do you know there is a heaven? You who deny the deity of Jesus, how do you know He ever lived? You who deny he worked miracles, how do you know He died on the cross?
II. NO SALVATION WORTH RECEIVING (15:17-19)
But Paul goes further. He says that if we do not believe in the resurrection then there is no salvation worth receiving.
“If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If for this life only, we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men, most to be pitied” (17-19).
We are not saved by a corpse but by the living Lord who is as much alive today as when He walked this earth two thousand years ago. Salvation involved three things – deliverance from sin’s guilt (forgiveness); from its power (the new birth); and from its penalty (the right to go to heaven). And all three are vain dreams if Jesus did not rise. There is no forgiveness for any of us if Jesus did nor rise. We are still in the guilt of our sins and face nothing but the awful prospect of judgment.
Paul’s favorite word for the removal of sin’s guilt is “justification.” It means to be declared innocent at the Judgment Bar of God. It means that we who have sinned can stand in His presence completely forgiven, completely reconciled, completely restored. It means that God accepts us as His children. That is justification. And Paul says that Jesus “was put to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification” (Rom. 4:25).
Jesus Christ was beaten and shamed and crucified to make payment for your sins and mine. Our sentence has not been removed, it has been placed on Jesus, our substitute. He bore our sins in His body. The Lord laid on Him the iniquity of us all. When we stand before God we can rest in the fact that our sentence has already been paid by Jesus. Our punishment has already been borne by Jesus. Our hell has already been endured by Jesus.
But that great atoning, substitutionary death is worthless without the resurrection. He was raised for our justification. The resurrection is a sign that God in heaven accepted the sacrifice of Jesus on our behalf. The resurrection of Jesus was an act of God. And by it He tells us that the death of this One was no ordinary death.
This was far more than one more human being going the way of all flesh. Paul says in Romans 1:4 that Jesus was declared to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead. The cross and Good Friday say to us that the ransom has been paid. The sacrifice has been paid. The sacrifice has been offered. The Lamb has been slain. The punishment has been borne. But the empty tomb and Easter tell us that the ransom, the sacrifice, the Lamb, and the punishment have been accepted by God on our behalf.
The resurrection is absolutely essential for our forgiveness also because it allowed Christ to enter heaven where even now He offers the value of His sacrifice on our behalf. He entered into heaven as our living High Priest.
In the Old Testament, on the Day of Atonement, the high priest would slay the animal at the altar and then he would carry the blood into the holy place and sprinkle it on the mercy seat. All of this, ordained as it was, of God, pointed to our Lord who suffered in the outer court but who also passed into heaven to present His righteousness before God for our justification.
Hebrews 9:11-12 says, “But when Christ appeared as a high priest ... he entered once for all into the Holy Place, not through the blood of goats and calves but through his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption.”
The idea is not that Christ took His blood to heaven’s altar (RSV) but that He took Himself as the once dead but now living, accepted sacrifice for the sin of man. And so now as we look back across the years at Mount Calvary, we look at it in light of the empty tomb.
The empty tomb declares that it was no ordinary death. It was the substitutionary death of the Son of God for you and me. It declares that the One who died there is right now in heaven, standing at the right hand of God the Father, in our behalf. In Him, by Him, through Him we are forgiven.
There is no new birth without the resurrection. There is no deliverance from sin’s power, no new creation in Christ. The Bible says in I Peter 1:3, “By His great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” Our new life within did not rise from our appreciation of what Jesus did on the cross. It was implanted in us by the living Christ. He is the vine and we are the branches and from Him flows our eternal life.
A missionary to Turkey asked the people, “If I were lost and came to a fork in the road and found two men, one alive and one a corpse, which should I ask for directions?” Of course, they all replied, “The one who is alive.” “Why then,” he went on, “would you go to Mohammed who is dead, when you can go to Christ who is alive?” Our salvation, our guidance, our new nature comes from the Christ who is alive.
There is no heaven without the resurrection. The third great blessing of salvation is deliverance from sin’s penalty. To be saved means to have our names recorded in the Lamb’s Book of Life, to have a home waiting for us on the other side. But, if Christ did not rise, and we do not rise then all of this is empty talk. It is the dream of fools. Paul says,
“If Christ has not been raised ... then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most to be pitied” (1 Cor. 15:17, 18-19).
And this despair was the hallmark of the ancient world. Theocritus wrote, “There is hope for those who are alive. But for the dead there is no hope. Catullus wrote, “When once our brief light sets, there is one perpetual night through which we must sleep.” If Christ is not risen and Easter is a myth then look long and hard and lovingly into the casket because that is the last glimpse you will ever get of the face of the one you love. That precious body, that beautiful countinance, that lovely expression will perish! It shall go back to the ground from whence it came - dust to dust - never to rise again.
There is the fruition of doubt! There is the awful cost of turning away from the Word of God! I am not surprised that when Bishop Pike’s son committed suicide that the Bishop ran to the occult word and made pathetic attempts to communicate with his dead son. Without the Rock of Ages one will clutch at any straw, however flimsy or however filthy. I am not surprised that he wandered into that desert to die. With no hope, no assurance, no belief in the Word of God, all we can do is die in our own tears.
