The Resurrection: The Gospel Series

Background and context from my passage: Some of the Corinthian believers had concluded that there was no future resurrection of the dead and this was influencing the faith of the rest of the church. As Paul said earlier about the acceptance of the members of the church who were practicing fornication openly and blatantly, "A little leaven leavens the whole lump" (1 Cor 5:6). Paul may have heard about this via the letter or report that had come to him that caused him to address the other topics in this letter.

Paul's response comes in three parts:

He first reestablishes their commonly held ground, that Christ was raised from the dead (15:1-11).

He contrasts the contradiction of Christ's resurrection and the denial of the resurrection of believers (15:12-34).

He does this by asking, "What if the dead rise not?"

That would mean that Christ is not raised (15:12-19). If Christ is not raised then everything else about the Christian faith is a lie.

Since Christ has been raised then the inevitable corollary is the resurrection of believers (15:20-28).

It's absurd to live the way Christians if the resurrection is not true (15:29-34). Paul disagreed with the song "I Choose to Be A Christian."

He explains the mystery of how (the form) the dead are raised (15:35-58).

It sounded repugnant to their Greek sensibilities for a "corpse" to get back up and be resuscitated. Paul will explain that resurrection is more than resuscitation. There is both continuity and discontinuity between the present state and the resurrected state of believers.

The Corinthians had received the baptism of the Spirit and had so many profound spiritual experiences that they were arguing with Paul about what it meant to be "spiritual." They thought they had everything that there was to receive from God and that they did not need their body and would one day just completely discard it and go on into being pure spirit. They may have had the idea that the body was an inferior creation and so the idea of it being raised was horrible. The Greeks thought that to leave the body was to leave a prisonhouse. They probably spiritualized the idea of resurrection including the bodily resurrection of Jesus.

The Jewish believers, except those heavily influenced by the Sadducean sect, would have seen their future hope as connected to the resurrection of the dead, but the Gentiles came from a different cultural milieu. They could easily spiritualize it all. They also anticipated Jesus's Second Coming and saw no need for resurrection. They would be alive when Jesus came. Paul is going to correct their bad theology and show how a proper understanding of the resurrection of the dead should cause us to live correctly and have hope and encouragement (1 Corinthians, Gordon Fee, NICNT).

Exposition of Text:

1. The Basis - The Resurrection of Christ

1 Moreover, brethren, I declare to you the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received and in which you stand, 2 by which also you are saved, if you hold fast that word which I preached to you—unless you believed in vain.

"Received" is a technical term from Paul's Jewish heritage. The Hebrew words qibbel/masar: "Moses 'received' the Law from Sanai and 'committed' it to Joshua, and Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the Prophets; and the Prophets 'committed' it to the men of the Great Synagogue." (Fee, p. 607 n. 87).

Here we see salvation in three tenses. We are saved at the new birth, we are being saved as we participate in the process of sanctification, and we will ultimately be saved at the resurrection.

3 For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures,

The combination in the creed of "buried" and "raised on the third day" emphasizes the resurrection of a corpse, not a "spiritual" renewal of life after death. The resurrection of Jesus was corporeal and genuine.

The "for..." is almost identical to what he says earlier in 11:23. It goes back to the very beginning of things.

The Atonement is the only way to reach God for both Jews and Gentiles and the resurrection is the reason for believing in the Deity of Jesus.

This is what is received and passed on! It is vital. You cannot have Christianity without miracles. Every miracle in some way foreshadows or echoes what C. S. Lewis calls the Grand Miracle, the Incarnation. All miracles flow from this one miracle. The Incarnation includes the Divine condescension and descent and the ascent. The gospel includes the death, burial, and resurrection. It is not multiple choice.

"First of all": These are the "bare bones" of the gospel. It sounds a lot like the words of Jesus at the end of the Gospel of Luke and Luke's record of Paul's words in Acts: