Sermon Transcript
This is 1 Corinthians 15. For I delivered to you as first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the 12. Then he appeared to more than 500 brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?
But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.
But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. I tell you Brothers, flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold, I tell you a mystery: we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality.
When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written, death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?
At Easter, we celebrate the most unique event that has ever happened in the history of the world: the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. There is no comparable event either before or since. Because Jesus’ resurrection was not simply a dead person coming back to life, as unusual as that would be. Dead people being revived occasionally happens. Obviously it’s rare.
People are shocked whenever it occurs. But those instances are not utterly unique and unparalleled like Jesus’ resurrection is. Someone is declared clinically dead, no heartbeat, maybe no brain activity for several minutes if not longer, and then suddenly, spontaneously, their system reboots and they come back to life. Some of those people go on to write books telling us what heaven is like, to which the skeptics jump in and say they didn’t go to heaven, it was just lack of oxygen to the brain which sent each into an extreme survival mode, and some of its functions, which are normally separate, are now no longer separate, so they couldn’t discern dreams from reality. They saw tunnels, they saw bright lights, but they didn’t go to heaven.
Who knows? But those kinds of occurrences are documented in legit medical journals. Fun fact, they have happened at least 38 times since 1970. 1982, which averages out to a little less than once per year for the last 42 years. So-called dead people coming back to life.
The record, since I know you were wondering, for the length of time that someone was clinically dead and was then resuscitated was 17 hours. 17 hours. It happened in May 2008 to Velma Thomas of West Virginia. She was declared dead, woke back up 17 hours later. Amazing.
I’m sure her family rejoiced, probably burst into tears over the wonder of it, then went straight to therapy to process what had happened. I’m sure her doctors were intrigued. They, you know, wrote about it. Incredible story. But I’m also sure 2,000 years from now, a third of the world will not hold services every May in Velma’s honor celebrating her return to life.
There will be no one teaching others how her resuscitation gives us hope, or that her waking up means there must be more to existence than the physical universe that we can touch and measure. No one’s going to say about Velma in 2,000 years. No one’s even saying that about her now.
But they said it about Jesus. They said it immediately after His resurrection, and we still say it today. There’s something about Jesus’ resurrection that makes it totally unique, that stirs hope in people and has for millennia that compels people to fall down and worship him. People saw something in Jesus’ resurrection they had not seen before that was much different than a mere resuscitation. Because like us, the contemporaries of Jesus had also seen dead people revive.
Didn’t happen all the time, just like it doesn’t happen all the time today. It was certainly special whenever dead. In the Bible, Lazarus is probably the most famous instance. In his case, he’d been dead a couple days, and then Jesus brings him back to life. Jesus did something similar with Jairus’ daughter.
This little girl had passed away. Everyone was mourning. Jesus goes in, holds her hand, speaks with her, says, my child, wake up. And she did. Her parents were astonished.
They were grateful, but it didn’t mark some turning point in the history of the world. Even the Apostle Paul resuscitated a guy who fell asleep while Paul was preaching. Paul preached too long, so this guy decides he’s going to take a nap. Unfortunately for the guy, he was sitting next to an open window on a second story. He falls out and dies.
Paul goes down, revives him, and then keeps preaching. So people in biblical times, like us, had seen resuscitations. But also like us, it never crossed anyone’s mind to worship the revived person as God, or to believe this one person coming back to life means a different future for themselves and everyone else. But with Jesus, that’s exactly what they believed. And they were so sure about it that they were willing to endure extreme persecution, sometimes execution, execution because of their testimony that Jesus was alive and now everything is different.
So why? What’s the deal with Jesus’ resurrection? Today we’re studying a passage out of an ancient letter written by one of the earliest followers of Jesus. It was written by Paul. That’s the same guy who preached too long and someone fell asleep and died.
It’s that guy. He explains what early Christians believed about the resurrection in a letter to a group of Christians that lived in Corinth. So as we study this passage, we will see the reality of the resurrection, the significance of the resurrection— why it’s different than mere resuscitations— and then the necessity of the resurrection. So reality, significance, and necessity. So first, the reality of the resurrection, is it is not a legend.
This time of year especially, we might hear something like, the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection were only added to the Jesus story centuries later. Something like, the historical Jesus, He was an incredible teacher. He brought new ideas to the world, like love your enemies. Nobody had said that before, and people so cherished these teachings, they passed them on, and later on other Other people thought the teachings were so precious that they wanted, you know, to give them some juice, so they added these fantastical accounts of miracles, added specifically the story of him raising from the dead. In other words, the claim is people only started believing in the resurrection after Jesus had passed into legend.
We might hear that this time of year. Some of you may even believe that. It’s a nice story. It developed over a long period of time. People said one thing, then they added another, kind of like where did the Easter Bunny come from?
Well, it’s just one thing added onto another. Now we have this whole dogma around it. Jesus’ resurrection is kind of like that. But texts like the one that we just read are one of the reasons we know for sure those claims are not true. Texts like this show, as certain as we can be about ancient history, texts like this show that people very close to the time period of when Jesus reportedly resurrected, that contemporaries of Jesus believed that it happened.
So way before Jesus could have passed into legend, during the lifetimes of the people who saw the events, Christian communities believed it happened. This letter from Paul to the Corinthians itself was written within about 20 years of Jesus’ resurrection. That date, by the way, is widely agreed upon by scholars, whether they are Christian or not. If you didn’t know, there are all kinds of people who study the Bible because it is a fascinating piece of ancient literature, even if it’s nothing else. So scholars of all stripes research who wrote what parts of it, why they wrote it, when they wrote it.
And scholars don’t agree on everything, not even close. But they do agree that Paul wrote this letter, and he wrote it within 20 years after Jesus rose from the dead. They calculate those dates by what is said in the What isn’t said in the letter? What are the earliest copies of the letter we have? Where did we find those copies?
They track very small variants that are in the text. So this copy of the letter uses the word he. This other copy of the letter uses the word they. Extremely small variations, but because of them, they can track where different versions of the letter traveled. So they trace circulation patterns.
They can determine chronological order. Like this variant must have started at this point this time, so this other version that doesn’t have the variant must have been an earlier copy. They consider who else was talking about the letter, because very early on people started writing commentaries on the Gospels and Paul’s letters, and we have those early commentaries. So ancient people discussed what did Paul mean when he said Christ is the first fruits, which is a phrase in our passage today, and we’ll talk about it a little later. Just like they did, people debated the meaning of different verses just like we do today, and they wrote it down.
And scholars pretty obviously understand people couldn’t have discussed and debated by what Paul meant by a certain phrase until after he wrote it. Paul’s letters would have to be written before commentaries on Paul’s letters were written. So researchers put all those clues together, they trace back to when they think it was written, and again, They don’t agree when everything was written, but they do agree, and they have penned this letter from Paul to the Corinthians within 20 years of Jesus’ reported resurrection. And in terms of ancient writings, that’s very close to the events themselves. For comparison, much of what we take as fact about Julius Caesar— not all of it, but 2 of the most important sources, guys by the name of Suetonius and Plutarch.
Side note, if you’re expecting a baby, those are some great names. Suetonius and Plutarch. But these guys, 2 of our most important ancient sources on Caesar’s life, they write, they write a little more than a century after Caesar. And the earliest copies of those, what we have of what those guys said, are several centuries later. So within 20 years, pretty great in terms of ancient terms.
But not only that, we know because of what Paul includes in this passage that Christian communities already believed in the resurrection before Paul wrote this letter. We know that because Paul includes in verses 3 and 4 an early, maybe the earliest creed of Christianity. We know it was a creed, or we think we do, because Uh, we— it looks like Paul borrowed it from some other source that already existed because of how it was written. It has a cadence like a jingle so that you can remember it easily. That’s the point of a creed.
It’s spoken in a way that it’s easy to pick up. In English, not so jingly, it says Jesus died for our sins according to the scriptures. He was buried. He was raised on the 3rd day. He appeared to Cephas and the 12.
Not very jingly in English, but in the original language, one commentator noted it would have sounded more like, Christ died for our sins and was buried. He rose from the dead and was seen. Christ died for our sins and was buried. He rose from the dead and was seen. Christ died for our sins and was buried.
He rose from the dead and was seen. Hear it? It has a cadence. They wrote it that way so they could easily transmit it others, others could easily remember it and then pass it on again. That’s what creeds were supposed to do.
We still do those kind of things today if we want to remember certain facts. Like my son, he’s in 5th grade. He just learned about the mathematical constant pi. Since many of you are engineers, I’m sure most of you know pi is 3.14. I knew you knew it.
But you also know its decimal value goes on forever and ever and ever with repeating, right? So the 5th graders, I think just for fun, started learning a jingle, a creed, to remember many digits of pi. It goes, 3.14159, this is pi, followed by 2653889, da-da-da-da-da.
My son sings it around the house.
He knows pi to like 100 digits, or he did a few weeks ago, because they put it to a cadence, right? I even know the first part of it without even trying just because I’ve overheard him say it so many times, right? So early Christians, before, before Paul wrote to the Corinthians, they had a jingle. It was a creed with a cadence. Christ died for our sins and was buried.
He rose from the dead and was seen. And Paul incorporates that creed into his letter. He says, I remind you what was passed on to you of first importance. And then he writes the creed, which means it existed earlier than Paul’s letter. And it existed early enough before Paul wrote his letter that it was able to spread around to different Christian communities so that the Corinthians already knew it when Paul wrote within 20 years of the resurrection, which indicates there were people who believed Jesus rose from the dead extremely close to the event itself.
Way before Jesus could have been able to pass into legend, they believed He rose from the dead. It’s why Paul can say in this passage, many of the people who saw the resurrected Jesus are still alive themselves. He’s saying, you can go talk to them. I’ll give you their names. Check it out.
This is actually how ancient reporters would cite their sources. It was a primitive peer review process. It’s why Now in the Gospels, you’ll find all these little details that from our perspective have zero relevance to the story. Like Matthew, Mark, and Luke all record the name of the man who helped Jesus carry his cross, Simon of Cyrene. Why include his name?
His name is not essential to the plot. Comparable fiction of the day would not have included Simon’s name unless he became a major character later, which he does Simon of Cyrene never shows up again. Mark even includes Simon of Cyrene as the father, father of Alexander and Rufus. Who cares, Mark? Alexander and Rufus never show up again.
Why tell us those names? Why does it matter? It’s because that is how reporters cited their sources in those days. The idea is the reader could go find Simon and Alexander and Rufus, probably in Cyrene, and ask them about it. They were citing their sources, which shows us— those small details show us these accounts were not written as fiction.
Today we write fiction that way. We call it actually modern realistic fiction because we invented it in modern times. Novels today might give you all kinds of details about the shopkeeper who the main character sees one time and then never sees again. But not then. No one wrote fiction that way then.
And no one even started writing that fiction that way until much, much later, 1700s, 1800s, way more than 1,000 years later for sure. It didn’t exist then as a genre. So the Gospels were not written as fiction. They were written as a news report. C.S.
Lewis, who taught ancient literature and English literature at Oxford and Cambridge, he said of the Gospel accounts, if someone tells me something in a Gospel is legend or romance, I want to know how many legends and romances he has read. Because I have been reading poems, romances, vision literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. And he teaches them at world-class universities. And he says, I know not one of them is like this, meaning the Gospels and other accounts of Jesus.
Of this account of Jesus, there are only 2 possible views, he says. Either it is reportage, a news report, or else some unknown writer without predecessor or successors. No one was writing like this before or after. Some unknown author suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern novelistic realistic narrative and did it, and then it wasn’t repeated again until much later. If the Gospels are untrue, it must be a narrative of that kind, he says.
The point is that people who wrote it down, the people who saw it happen, the people who reported it, they thought it happened. They wrote it down in the reporting style of the day as really happening. They did not write it down as you would write down legends. And they wrote it down while people who saw the events were still alive. I know that doesn’t prove Jesus rose from the dead, but what it does prove beyond a shadow of a doubt is people didn’t only start believing Jesus rose from the dead after He passed into legend.
We know that for sure. People contemporary to Jesus believed He rose from the dead because of what they saw and what they experienced. It’s not a legend. Now second, the significance of the resurrection, why it’s different than mere resuscitations. I’ll give you 2 observations.
First, its inconceivability, and then second, it a new type of life. So first, it’s total inconceivability. Like we said, yes, similar to us, ancient people had seen clinically dead people resuscitate before their eyes. And as strange and as novel as those things were, it was still in their wildest conceptions of the world. They were always surprised about it when it happened, but they had heard of it happening, just like we have heard of it happening, but they had not, and we have never, seen someone die like Jesus died and then come back.
The type of death He experienced put His resurrection beyond even their wildest conceptions of the world. If you remember, even before Jesus was crucified, He was scourged, whipped, probably with a cat-of-nine-tails tearing flesh from His body. Then He was nailed like a piece of meat to dry on a cross, and the Romans had perfected the torture of crucifixion. It was meant to be, and it was a spectacle of what would happen to anyone who defied Rome, of the empire’s ability to decimate any whiff of opposition. The whole point of crucifixion is that the person would die in a humiliating, public, dehumanizing way where every shred of your dignity was torn away.
But not only was Jesus scourged and crucified, remember, while He was on the cross, He was speared in His side. Blood gushed out. So if He weren’t already dead by that point, which He was, then He bled out. There’s no possibility of coming back for that. Even if He’s rushed to a modern ER, He’s dead on arrival.
If we had seen it, even if we had heard about fringe cases of resuscitation, we would have known no one can be resuscitated from something like that. And if somehow, by some chance, someone were revived after something like that, that person would have had a lifelong disability, need physical therapy, skin grafts probably, not walking around totally fine 3 days later like Jesus was. For example, there actually is one record of one guy, one time surviving Roman crucifixion. Ancient history doesn’t really take that seriously, because if you only have one record of one thing one time, it’s— they’re like, we need more data points than that. But there’s one record of one guy one time.
But there is no record of that guy being scourged beforehand, or speared like Jesus was. And of course, more importantly, that guy was not totally fine 3 days later.
The fact that Jesus was restored to perfect health and even beyond that within 3 days— inconceivable is too weak of a word. It was beyond their most fringe, wildest dreams. Like we’ve talked about before on previous Easter services, when people started seeing him walking around perfectly fine after He resurrected. They couldn’t believe it right away. They even had angels show up and tell them, this is really happening, guys.
And they looked at the angels and they thought, that can’t be right. This is— it’s impossible that He would be alive. But yet, there He was, alive, doing great. And they realized if Jesus had the power to come back from something like that, if He had the power to lay down his life and pick it up again like he said he would from something like that. This is significant.
And what else is there to do but fall down and worship him? It’s the inconceivability of his resurrection. But the second reason it’s significant was the type of life Jesus had after he rose from the dead. Jesus rose to imperishable life. He rose to an entirely new type type of living.
For contrast, when Jesus revived Lazarus from the dead— great, incredible, miraculous— but Lazarus would eventually die again. Essentially, his old life was just extended, but similar to Velma Thomas over there in West Virginia, it’s not a new type of life. But when Jesus rose from the dead, he rose in a way that he would never die again. He rose to imperishable life. And eventually the people who saw him wrapped their minds around this is what has happened.
Paul writes in the passage that we’re studying today about the perishable putting on the imperishable, the mortal putting on the immortal, and that transition from one to the other, from the mortal to the immortal, that is so drastic Paul compares it to a seed that is planted in the ground, and then that seed sprouts to a new kind of life. His metaphor of the seed and the sprouting plant is verses 35 to 49, though we didn’t read it beforehand. You can read it later. But Paul reasons the seed that is put in the ground and the plant that is— that sprouts, those are related in some way. He didn’t know all the botany, but he knew they are totally different.
And you can figure out if you are looking at a seed or if you are looking at a sprout. You can tell the difference. And Paul says that is the way it is with the resurrection. One kind of body went into the grave, the perishable, immor— the perishable mortal body. Another kind of body came out of the grave, the imperishable immortal body.
They are They were as different but as related as a seed is from a sprout. And the people who saw Jesus eventually realized this is not just a resuscitation. This is a totally new kind of life. Particularly, the Jewish people of the day realized eventually what they were looking at. The Jewish people of the day, or more precisely, certain sects of the Jewish people of the day, believed there would be such a resurrection at the end of time, that people would be raised from their graves, from the dust of the earth, to imperishable life.
They believed that because it’s what one of their prophets Daniel wrote. Daniel wrote— this is Daniel 12:1-3— at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone whose name shall be found written in the book. And many of those who sleep in earth. They’ve died. They’ve been buried.
They shall awake, some to everlasting life, some to shame and everlasting contempt. There are 2 types of eternity, even with a resurrected body. And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above, and those who turn many to righteousness like the stars, forever and ever. Daniel foresaw there would be not just a coming back of to life, but a resurrected everlasting life. And when they saw Jesus, they realized this is it.
If it had— if it had just been a resuscitation to the same old life, they wouldn’t have lost their minds over it like they did. And it took them a while to conceive what was happening because they had been taught the resurrection will be everyone all at once at the end of time. That’s what Daniel seems to say. And Jesus, of course, is just one guy, and it’s not the end of time yet. It never occurred to them that the resurrection could start like this, but here He was.
They couldn’t ignore it. He has this new life in Him. So they had to change their understanding of the world. And if we had seen them, if we had seen Him, we would have realized this isn’t just a This is something totally new. This is a new kind of life.
Daniel was right. Like, this is happening. I can’t believe it, but it’s real. He’s standing there in front of me, and this is worth telling others about. It’s not just a dead guy coming back to life.
It’s a dead guy coming back to a totally new kind of life. Something has begun, and I want to be part of it.
Which leads to our last point, the necessity of the resurrection. First century Christians understood Jesus’ resurrection to be substitutionary and representative. It wasn’t just that Jesus died and rose again. It was that Jesus died and rose again for them, on their behalf. Verse 3 from our passage today, He died for our sins and rose again.
Or from another letter Paul wrote to the church Church in Rome. He says, if we are united with him in his death, then we will be united with him in his resurrection. In other words, Jesus is our champion. He’s our representative. He’s our stand-in.
He’s our substitute. He fought the battle that we lost, but he wins for us. He faces the consequence of our sin. He suffers on our behalf. He was crushed for our iniquities.
As our substitute, he pays the penalty we owe for our sin. Christ stands behalf, receives the judgment we deserve. He’s our representative in death. But if we are united with Him in His death, if we’ve bound our lives up with His, if we’ve received Him as our representative, then He’s also our representative in new life. Meaning, as He rose, as He didn’t stay in the grave, as He had new life after judgment, judgment, so also will we.
We will, like Jesus, shine like the stars in the sky. We will be brilliantly rewarded with the same imperishable life that Christ won for us on our behalf. The new life that Christ put on when he defeated death, it is ours. It has begun in us. We have the power of the resurrection in us.
It has started, but it is also not complete. Daniel’s prophecy is still out there in the future. There is a time when all those in the dust of the earth shall awake. Paul goes into more detail of what Daniel was talking about. Paul says resurrections happen in a certain sequence.
Christ is first. He is the first fruits. I said we discussed that. This is a largely agricultural society, and when you plant crops, some of them are ready before the rest of them ready, and the crops that are ready first are called the firstfruits. So, Christ raises first to the imperishable, immortal life.
Then later, still yet to happen, when Christ appears, Paul says all of us who belong to Him will rise as He rose to the imperishable, immortal life, and death will be dead forever. The end of our story is a sunrise, not a sunset. The end of our story is a hello, not a goodbye. In the end, resurrection wins. Life wins.
Jesus wins. Because Jesus, our champion, our representative, swallows up mortality with immortality. He swallows up death in victory. The final chapter of the book is victory, not death. And if you have put your faith in Jesus to rescue you from the consequences of your sin, you, like him, will rise.
You will be healed. You will be new. You will shine like the stars above, and you will be forevermore.
If you have never put your faith in him, there is no better time to do so than when we celebrate his resurrection. So tell him, I want to be united with in Your death, and united with You in Your resurrection. I want to be Yours. I want to be with You forevermore.
Let’s pray. Father, thank You for Jesus.
Thank You that this is an event in history that we can wrap our faith around.
That the resurrection is not a philosophical concept. It is not a metaphor. It is something real that happened, that you began a new type of life as Jesus resurrected. Lord, I pray that we would be united with him, that every person here would say, take the penalty of my sin. I want to unite with you in your death.
That I may be united with You in Your resurrection. And may us hope with joy, Lord, of the future that You are bringing of new life forevermore with You where we will shine like the stars above, praising You for what You have done. We pray all those things in Jesus’ name, amen.
