Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of 1 Corinthians 15:20

But now is Christ risen from the dead, [and] become the firstfruits of them that slept.

20. But now is Christ risen from the dead ] St Paul considers it needless to argue the point further. He appeals not so much to the reason on points like this (see ch. 1Co 2:14) it is likely to deceive us as to the moral instincts of every human being. Of course a man has power to stifle them, but they tell him plainly enough that love of purity and truth, desire of immortality, belief in the love and justice of God, are no vain dreams, as they would be if the ‘wise man died as the fool’ (Ecc 2:16). Accordingly, the Apostle now ( 1Co 15:20-28) proceeds to unfold the laws of God’s spiritual kingdom as facts which cannot be gainsaid. He may appeal (as in 1Co 15:29-32) to his own practice and that of others as a confirmation of what he says. But from henceforth he speaks with authority. He wastes no more time in discussion.

and become the firstfruits of them that slept ] The firstfruits (Lev 23:10) were the first ripe corn, under the Law, solemnly offered to God, a fit type of Him Who first presented our ripened humanity before the Throne of God, an earnest of the mighty harvest hereafter to be gathered.

Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

But now is Christ risen … – This language is the bursting forth of a full heart and of overpowering conviction. It would seem as if Paul were impatient of the slow process of argument; weary of meeting objections, and of stating the consequences of a denial of the doctrine; and longing to give utterance to what he knew, that Christ was risen from the dead. That was a point on which he was certain. He had seen him after he was risen; and he could no more doubt this fact than he could any other which he had witnessed with his own eyes. He makes, therefore, this strong affirmation; and in doing it, he at the same time affirms that the dead will also rise, since he had shown 1Co 15:12-18 that all the objection to the doctrine of the resurrection was removed by the fact that Christ had risen, and had shown that his resurrection involved the certainty that his people also would rise. There is special force in the word now in this verse. The meaning may be thus expressed: I have showed the consequences which would follow from the supposition that Christ was not raised up. I have shown how it would destroy all our hopes, plunge us into grief, annihilate our faith, make our preaching vain, and involve us in the belief that our pious friends have perished, and that we are yet in our sins. I have shown how it would produce the deepest disappointment and misery. But all this was mere supposition. There is no reason to apprehend any such consequences, or to be thus alarmed. Christ is risen. Of that there is no doubt. That is not to be called in question. It is established by irrefragable testimony; and consequently our hopes are not vain, our faith is not useless, our pious friends have not perished, and we shall not be disappointed.

And become the first-fruits – The word rendered first-fruits ( aparche) occurs in the New Testament in the following places; Rom 8:23 (see the note on this place); Rom 11:16; Rom 16:5; 1Co 15:20, 1Co 15:23; 1Co 16:15; Jam 1:18; Rev 14:4. It occurs often in the Septuagint as the translations of cheleb, fat, or fatness Num 18:12, Num 18:29-30, Num 18:32; as the translation of maasrah, the tenth or the tithe Deu 12:6; of awon, iniquity Num 18:1; of re’shiyt, the beginning, the commencement, the first (Exo 23:19; Lev 23:1; Num 15:18-19, etc.): of t^eruwmah, oblation, offering; lifting up; of that which is lifted up or waved as the first sheaf of the harvest, etc. Exo 25:2-3; Exo 35:5; Num 5:9; Num 18:8, etc. The first-fruits, or the first sheaf of ripe grain was required to be offered to the Lord, and was waved before him by the priest, as expressing the sense of gratitude by the husbandman, and his recognition of the fact that God had a right to all that he had; Lev 23:10-14. The word, therefore, comes to have two:

1. That which is first, the beginning, or that which has the priority of time; and,
2. That which is apart and portion of the whole which is to follow, and which is the earnest or pledge of that; as the first sheaf of ripe grain was not only the first in order of time, but was the earnest or pledge of the entire harvest which was soon to succeed.

In allusion to this, Paul uses the word here. It was not merely or mainly that Christ was the first in order of time that rose from the dead, for Lazarus and the widows son had been raised before him; but it was that he was chief in regard to the dignity, value, and importance of his rising; he was connected with all that should rise, as the first sheaf of the harvest was with the crop; he was a part of the mighty harvest of the resurrection, and his rising was a portion of that great rising, as the sheaf was a portion of the harvest itself; and he was so connected with them all, and their rising so depended on his, that his resurrection was a demonstration that they would rise. It may also be implied here, as Grotius and Schoettgen have remarked, that he is the first of those who were raised so as not to die again; and that, therefore, those raised by Elisha and by the Saviour himself do not come into the account. They all died again; but the Saviour will not die, nor will those whom he will raise up in the resurrection die any more. He is, therefore, the first of those that thus rise, and a portion of that great host which shall be raised to die no more. May there not be another idea? The first sheaf of the harvest was consecrated to God, and then all the harvest was regarded as consecrated to him. May it not be implied that, by the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, all those of whom he speaks are regarded as sacred to God, and as consecrated and accepted by the resurrection and acceptance of him who was the first-fruits?

Of them that slept – Of the pious dead; see the note on 1Co 15:6.

Fuente: Albert Barnes’ Notes on the Bible

1Co 15:20

But now is Christ risen from the dead first-fruits of them that slept.

The resurrection of Christ

I. The resurrection of Christ as an historic fact. If Socrates died of the fatal hemlock in an Athenian prison; if Caesar died upon the Roman senate-floor, stricken down by the daggers of assassins; then Christ, our Redeemer, not only died on Golgotha, but on the third day rose again, leading captivity captive. This miracle of the resurrection, as Neander has remarked, is not of the class designed for the conviction of unbelievers. It was rather, in the first instance, for such as already believed in Christ, and now needed only that their faith should be sealed and confirmed.

II. The resurrection of Christ in its relation to previous economies. There were two of these economics, and under each of them a miracle bearing some resemblance to the resurrection of Christ. Under the first, or patriarchal economy, there was the miracle of Enochs translation. Under the second, or Jewish economy, there was the miracle of Elijahs being taken up into heaven in a chariot of fire. Precisely what befel these men, it is impossible to say. But so much at least is certain, that these translations were not resurrections: for the men did not die. The fact proclaimed, and the doctrine illustrated by their departure, was simply the continued existence of the soul in a higher realm; in a word, the immortality of the soul, and not the resurrection of the body. So, also, of the resurrections which occurred under the Jewish economy. Elijah, it is true, restored again to life the widows son at Zarephath; Elisha, the son of the Shunemite; and even Elishas bones quickened the corpse which touched them. But these persons, thus recalled to life, all died again. Like the translations already spoken of, they attested rather the presence of a soul in man, destined to survive the striking of its tent of flesh. They attested the reality of a world of spirits, not so far removed but that those who had passed behind its curtain might be summoned back. That the body, reduced to ashes, should rise again, never more to be subject to decay, had only been proclaimed, not proved. The resurrection of Christ was, therefore, a new phenomenon. He was literally the first-fruits of them that slept; rising as none had ever risen before.

III. The resurrection of Christ in its relation to ourselves. (R. D. Hitchcock, D.D.)

Christ the first fruits

We might take occasion hence to consider the great fact–Christ is risen, the symbolical figure by which that fact might be illustrated–the first-fruits–and the favour which follows–the resurrection of the pious dead. Refer to Lev 23:10, etc. The first-fruits were a typical representation of Christ presented to God after His resurrection.

1. The first-fruits were of the same nature as the after fruits. Let this remind us that Christ is of the same nature as His people. He took a real human nature, that in that nature He might sanctify us, as the harvest was sanctified by offering the first-fruits to God. For both He that sanctifieth, and they who are sanctified, are all of one; for which cause He is not ashamed to call them brethren. Had Christ died and risen in a different nature from ours, it would not have been conquering death for us. We could have derived no benefit or consolation from it. The Man Christ; that Man whom He hath ordained; a Man approved of God; in all things made like unto His brethren. He had real flesh. He felt hunger, thirst, and weariness, which a mere spirit could not; and He had a real human soul, which could rejoice, grieve, be amazed, and angry. Being a Man, His resurrection to immortal life is the first-fruits of the human race from the grave.

2. The first-fruits were of superior excellence, being the best–most early ripe, and therefore stronger and more vigorous. Let this remind us of the excellency of Christs human nature. He transcends all His brethren. He is without sin, and so excels in perfect purity. His soul had no base passions, His will no rebellion, His understanding was not obscured by mistakes, errors, or prejudices; His body was not influenced by bad habits, nor led astray by sensual appetites. Nor was He only free from sin; there were all the excellences which are comprised in perfection itself. He was, of all the sons of men, the first ripe for heaven–His ripeness was perfect, rich, delightful holiness and love.

3. As the first-fruits, being first ripe, were of superior excellence, and so were a shadow of Christ, so they were to be first gathered in. And thus they resembled Christ as the first born from the dead, the first of all those who rose from the grave to immortality. It was fit that the Captain should lead the way to the soldiers, that the Conqueror of death should be the first to take possession of life, that He who was first in the perfection of holiness and grace should be first in the perfect possession of life and glory.

4. As the first-fruits were gathered on the morrow after the Sabbath, it is remarkable that our Lord rose, as the first-fruits of them that slept, on the morrow after the Sabbath.

5. The sheaf of first-fruits was lifted up by the priest, and waved to and fro in the air, as an offering presented to the Lord. Christ, as a Priest, presented Himself as the First-fruits to God. The sheaf was waved, to be accepted:for Israel, and Christ presents Himself to God that we may be accepted before Him. As the first-fruits were presented to God, so our risen Lord rose to Him. In that He died, He died unto sin once; but in that He liveth, He liveth unto God.

6. The corn of the first-fruits was threshed out and winnowed, and the pure corn was pounded, roasted, and, together with the oil and frankincense, was waved before God. Then part of it was made an offering by fire and the rest was the priests. When Christ arose, He left all that was mean, humiliating, and mortal, left our sins, with His grave-clothes, in the sepulchre, as new corn separated from chaff. And the oil and frankincense may remind us of the oil of gladness with which the risen Saviour was anointed above His fellows, and the sweet frankincense of His intercession, which is sweet to God; and He offers Himself to God in flames of love, as the first-fruits, with oil and frankincense, was offered on the altar (a handful of them). The rest was for the priests, intimating that Christ, as raised from the dead, is the sweet and pure food of faith to which the spiritual priesthood are entitled. On earth and in heaven, Christ is immortal Bread, living Bread, and souls feast on Him and live and grow.

7. The first-fruits sanctified the whole crop. It might then be gathered in, but not before. Christ the first fruits being raised, such is the power of His resurrection, that the saints through Him have right to rise to a blessed immortality. But for that, they that are fallen asleep in Christ had perished. But by His resurrection they are sanctified for life and glory.

8. The first-fruits being accepted of the Lord for Israel, not only sanctified the harvest, but were a pledge that the harvest should follow. He is called the First-fruits, to convey the idea that the rest must come after. This is the doctrine and argument of this whole chapter. The favour pledged to the Church by the resurrection of Christ is the resurrection of all her members in the last day to fellowship with Christ in life, glory, and a blessed immortality. That state to which He arose, do they arise to also in their measure and order. As a prelude to this, some arose alter His resurrection. This shows that the resurrection of Christ has a retrospective influence, and sheds the dew of heaven on the graves of all who died in faith from the beginning.

As He died for the sins under the first testament, so shall the ancient believers arise by virtue of His resurrection. It has also a prospective influence on the believing multitudes yet unborn.

1. The same power is employed in raising Christ and His people. The exceeding greatness of His mighty power, which He wrought in Christ when He raised Him from the dead. The utmost ability in man cannot re-kindle the vital spark. As no creature was employed to awaken Christ, so none shall quicken them. Here Omnipotence will work without means, and the heavenly house will be a house not made with hands.

2. As it was the same Christ and the same body that arose, so the very bodies which fall asleep in Christ will again awake. The harvest will resemble the first-fruits in this also. It may not be every particle. This mortal shall put, on immortality.

3. The same Spirit that quickened Christ will quicken us. It is spoken of as a privilege to be quickened by the Spirit (Rom 8:1-39.). The wicked may be raised by mere power, the saints by a holy and gracious influence. The Holy Spirit will then put forth His influence in its fullest display of power, sweetness, and glory like the influences of the spring on the vegetable world.

4. The whole Trinity concurred in Christs, and shall also in our resurrection.

5. Sin lay on Christ before His death; and there was still some portion of the curse on Him while He lay in His grave. But He arose free from the burden. Saints have to contend with sin while in the body; but they will rise free and pure.

6. Christ wept in His last sufferings. He rose to weep no more. So from the eyes of risen Saints God shall wipe away all tears. It is a resurrection to joy.

7. Christ; rose with His human soul full of love to His people, and they shall rise in the perfection of attachment to all who love the Lord. All envy, hatred, and alienation–all discord, strife, and evil surmisings will be destroyed for ever.

8. Christ rose with a body fit for heaven; and so shall they. Raised in power, spirituality, and glory, all marks of their fallen and degraded estate shall disappear. Their bodies shall be fashioned like unto Christs glorious body. Contemplate, then, the end of the world as the Redeemers harvest. See the angels gathering the sheaves into the garner after the first-fruits. (The Evangelist.)

The Resurrection

I. The fact of the Resurrection.

1. This event is indisputable.

(1) Heaven attested it (see Mat 28:2; Luk 24:2; Luk 24:4-7).

(2) Earth also bare her testimony (Mat 28:2; Mat 27:52-53).

(3) Enemies who were obliged to acknowledge that the body was no longer in the sepulchre, and could only produce the testimony of sleeping witnesses against it.

2. The agency by which it was effected.

(1) Infidels perceive that the Christian system is signed and sealed by a miracle that requires one of the mightiest displays of omnipotence; they cannot affirm that God has affixed the broad seal of heavens approbation to a lie. Since, then, it is so manifest that God alone could effect it, they do not presume, like the magicians of Pharaoh, to stretch forth the hand in bold and impious imitation.

(2) We often find it ascribed to God without any distinction of persons (Act 2:23-24; Act 3:13-15). At other times, however, it is referred to the Father (Rom 6:4); at others to the Son (Joh 2:19; Joh 2:21); at others to the Spirit (Rom 8:11).

3. Its necessity. It was necessary–

(1) Because Christ had Himself made His resurrection a test of His claims (Mat 12:1-50).

(2) Without it credence must be withheld from the teachings of His apostles (1Co 15:14).

(3) That He might make efficacious intercession for His people, and secure to them all the blessings of the everlasting covenant (Rom 5:10; Heb 7:24-25). Remember you have not a dead Saviour, but one who has triumphed over death and all your foes. When Suwarrow, the Russian general, was being borne wounded from the battle-field, his soldiers, discouraged by the disappearance of their beloved commander, fell into confusion and fled; when the hardy veteran perceived it he leapt from his litter, mounted his horse, bleeding as he was, and exclaiming, My children, I am still alive, rallied them, and led them back to victory! And shall not the discouraged Christian rouse every energy anew, when he hears Jesus, the great Captain of his salvation, exclaim, I am He that liveth, and was dead, and, behold I am alive for evermore.

II. The relationship which, by virtue of His resurrection, is formed between Christ and His people–that which exists between the first-fruits and the entire harvest. Christ the first-fruits, His people the plentitude of the ingathering. Hence we learn that the resurrection of Christ is inseparable from that of His people. Christ cannot be complete without His people. He is the Vine, but where were the perfection of the vine without the branches? He is the Head, but where were the perfection of the head without the members? Where shall we find completeness, perfection, beauty, in the Husband without the bride, in the Foundation without the superstructure, in the First-fruits without the fulness of the ingathering? Notice–

1. That Christ is the first-fruits of the Resurrection of His believing people only. It is true that by His power all shall rise again. But it is with believers only that this relationship will be recognised. The term employed is, them that slept, which evidently refers to the children of God (1Co 15:18). As He was the first-fruits of them that slept on the resurrection morning (Mat 27:53), so also them which sleep in Jesus to the end of time, will God bring with Him. But ere you can fall asleep in Jesus, you must live a life of holiness in Jesus. If you go down to the grave with a heart unrenewed, you will rise again, indeed; but it will be to the resurrection of damnation.

2. The order of the Resurrection. The righteous and the wicked will simultaneously rise from their graves. One common resurrection will precede one common judgment (Joh 5:28-29; Mat 25:31-34; Mat 25:41-46; 2Th 1:7-10; Revelaiton 20:12, 13).

3. The nature of the change which will pass on the bodies of the saints. It will be a change from all that is earthly and gross and vile to that which is heavenly and holy and refined (1Co 15:35, etc.). By what mode this marvellous change shall be effected we know not. It is enough for us to know that our present vile and wasting body shall undergo a great and ennobling change, divesting it of all that is gross and fading, and clothing it in a robe of brilliance and majesty which shall make it shine as the brightness of the firmament, as the stars for ever and ever.

Conclusion: The subject affords ground of consolation–

1. For those who are suffering from bereavement.

2. To those whose lot is sickness and poverty in this vale of tears. (J. Gaskin, M.A.)

The certainty and joy of the Resurrection

The apostle has been contemplating the dismal consequences which would arise if we only had a dead Christ. Then he turns away from that dreary picture, and with a change of key, from the wailing minors of the preceding verses, he breaks into this burst of triumph.

I. The certainty of Christs resurrection. Now is Christ risen. The way to prove a fact is by the evidence of witnesses. I, therefore, protest against confusing the issues which is popular nowadays, when we are told that miracle is impossible, and therefore there has been no Resurrection, or that death is the end of human existence, and that therefore there has been no Resurrection. The men who argue thus are no more logical than the reasoner who, when told that facts were against him, with sublime confidence in his own infallibility, said, So much the worse for the facts. Let us deal with evidence, and not with theory.

1. In this chapter we have a record of the resurrection of Christ, older than, and altogether independent of, the Gospels; that this Epistle is one of the four undisputed Epistles of the apostle; that, therefore, this chapter, written at the latest, some twenty-seven years after the Crucifixion, carries us up very close to that went; that it shows that the Resurrection was believed all over the Church, and therefore must have then been long believed; that it enables us to trace the same belief among the Churches at the time of Pauls conversion, some five or six years after the Crucifixion, and that so we have absolutely contemporaneous testimony. This is not a case in which a belief slowly and gradually grew up.

2. And the witnesses are reliable and competent. It would be an anomaly, far greater than the Resurrection, to believe that these people were conspirators in a lie, and that the fairest morality and the noblest consecration grew up out of a fraud. But the apostle avers that that is the only tenable alternative. If Christ be not risen, then are we men who are lying to please God. The fashionable modern theory, that it was hallucination is preposterous. Hallucinations that five hundred people at once shared; that lasted all through long talks, spread at intervals over more than a month; that included eating, drinking, the clasp of the hand, and the feeling of the breath; that culminated in the fancy that a gathered multitude of them saw Him going up into heaven! The hallucination is on the other side, I think.

3. Another valuable way of establishing facts is to point to others which indispensably require them for their explanation. I do not understand how it was possible for the Church to exist for a week after the Crucifixion, unless Jesus Christ rose again. How came it that these people, with their Master taken away, and their bond of union removed, and all their hopes crushed, did not say, We have made a mistake, let us take to our fishing again, and try and forget our bright illusions. That is what John the Baptists followers did when he died. Why did not Christs do the same? Because Christ rose again and re-knit them together. Christianity with a dead Christ, and a Church gathered round a grave from which the stone has not been rolled away, is more unbelievable than the miracle, for it is an absurdity.

4. Then there is another thing. Suppose, after the execution of Charles I, a pretender had sprung up and said, I am the king! the way to end that would have been for the Puritan leaders to have taken people to Westminster Abbey, and said, Look! there is the coffin, there is the body, is that the king or is it not? Jesus Christ was said to have risen again. The rulers could have put an end to the nonsense in two minutes, if it had been nonsense, by the simple process of saying, Go and look at the tomb and you will see Him there. But this question has never been answered, and never will be, What became of that sacred corpse if Christ did not rise again from the dead? The clumsy lie, that the disciples had stolen away the body, was the acknowledgment that the grave was empty. If the grave were empty, either His servants were impostors, which we have seen is incredible, or the Christ was risen again.

II. The triumph in the certitude of that resurrection. The apostle has been speaking about the consequences which would follow from the fact that Christ was not raised. If we take these and reverse them, we understand this great burst of triumph from the apostles lips.

1. The risen Christ gives us a complete gospel. A dead Christ annihilates it. If Christ be not risen, our preaching is vain, i.e., empty–a blown bladder; nothing in it but wind. Strike the Resurrection out, and what have you left? Some beautiful bits of moral teaching, a lovely life, marred by tremendous mistakes about Himself and His relation to men and to God; but you have got nothing left that is worth calling a gospel.

2. A living Christ gives faith something to lay hold of. A dead Christ makes our faith vain, i.e., of none effect or powerless.

(1) The risen Christ gives something for faith to lay hold of. Who can trust a dead Christ, or a human Christ? It is only when we recognise Him as declared to be the Son of God, and that by the Resurrection, that our faith has anything round which it can twine, and to which it can cleave.

(2) If Christ be dead our faith, if it could exist, would be as devoid of effect as it would be empty of substance. It would be like an infant seeking nourishment at a dead mothers breast, or men trying to kindle their torches at an extinguished lamp. It would fail to bring deliverance from sin.

3. The risen Christ gives us the certitude of our Resurrection. Many men talked about a western continent, but Colunbus went there and came back again, and that ended doubt. Many men before, and apart from Jesus, have cherished thoughts of an immortal life, but He has been there and returned. And that only puts the doctrine of immortality upon an irrefragable foundation.

Conclusion: If you will let Him, He will make you partakers of His own immortal life.

1. The first-fruits of them that slept is the pledge and the prophecy of all the waving abundance of golden grain that shall be gathered into the great husbandmans barns. The apostle goes on to represent the resurrection of them that are Christs as a consequence of their union to Jesus. He has conquered for us all.

2. There are two resurrections; one, that of Christs servants; one, that of others. They are not the same in principle–and, alas! they are awfully different in issue. Some shall awake to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. (A. Maclaren, D.D.)

The law of the resurrection

1. Our common ideas and fears of death are more Pagan than Christian. Death to many men is the blank wall around life beyond which they look or plan for nothing. But physical death does not hold the first place in the economy of redemption. The Bible assigns it a subordinate place. Sin, indeed, entailed the certainty of death for man; but Adam was not commanded by the Lord to live every day a slave bound under the fear of death. Man is to work out his time here, and to pass through death, as born under the higher law of the Spirit, and with the possibility of eternal life always before him. And in the New Testament the chief use made of the fact of death is as a metaphor. Sin is death; the maid whom the people, thought dead Christ said sleepeth. The importance of natural death falls into the background, and the new birth of the Spirit comes into the foreground.

2. The Christian doctrine of the Resurrection is a stumbling-block to faith because of this exaggerated estimate of death. We speak as though death were the ultimate law of life, and thus we have to smuggle in our hope of the resurrection as a miraculous exception. Exactly the opposite is true. Life is the law of nature, and death a natural means to more life and better. The resurrection of Jesus was not the great exception to natural law; it is an exemplification of the higher, universal law of life. In the opinion of the apostle the resurrection of Jesus was no more out of the Divine order of things than the first-fruits of the summer are exceptions to the general law which in the autumn shall show its universal power in every harvest-field.

3. The resurrection of Jesus is the great miracle of history, the corner-stone of the evidences of supernatural religion. But the miracle was not the fact itself, but in that He was raised before the last great day, and that He should be seen by men in His intermediate state between earth and heaven. And the God of the living had His own sufficient reason for making this one exception. It was partly for our sakes, that the world might believe. Was it not due also to the person of Jesus that He should not wait with all the saints for the day of final redemption? The miraculous thus in Jesus resurrection pertains to the manner and time of it rather than to the essential fact of it. It was an exceptional fruit appearing before the harvest, which is the end of the world. If you should see a tree blossom, and the next morning find the fruit already ripe, you would say, That is extraordinary! It is not indeed contrary to the nature of the tree that fruit should ripen, yet contrary to all our experience of growth that the fruit should ripen in a day. And it would not be impossible to conceive a quickening of natures forces which might cause a plant to break into fruitfulness contrary to our experience of its usual times and seasons. Somewhat so is Jesus resurrection a first-fruit of the tree of life; not in itself contrary to the law of life, but in its manner and time out of the common order.

I. There is no little Scriptural evidence for the belief that the resurrection of Jesus, although exceptional in time and manner, is an instance of a general law of resurrection.

1. This was Jesus teaching,. He answered the Sadducees by asserting that the dead shall be raised, but He placed the fact of the Resurrection upon the fundamental principle that life, not death, is Gods first law. The highest law of human nature according to Christ is that it should live unto God; if there is to be eternal death, that death must come in as the exception, as the falling back of a soul from the kind of life for which it was created to the lower powers of corruption. It is born for freedom and life in constant relation to the living God; if it is to perish it can only be by making itself, through some inner falsehood, subject to corruption.

2. The Lords own resurrection is set forth as an event which could not possibly have failed to occur (Act 2:24; Act 2:27). How can holiness see corruption? how can life itself be given over to death? Impossible! It would have been a miracle had not Jesus risen from the dead–a miracle without reason, a miracle against the living God, had He not risen from the dead–the first-fruits of this power and order of Divine life in the creation.

3. The same truth comes out grandly in the apostolic gospel of the Resurrection. What is this wonderful chapter but a setting forth of the glorious law of the resurrection? First the historical fact that Jesus was seen after His death is solemnly attested; then Jesus resurrection is declared to be the first-fruits of the whole harvest of life which is to follow; and then this process of the resurrection is shown to be in the largest and profoundest sense natural. It is a spiritual outgrowth from this body of death.

(1) The nature of the resurrection is in accordance with law. If there is a natural body there is also a spiritual body–the latter is just as much in the Divine order of things as is the former–the creation is made and constituted for the higher spiritual body as much as for the lower natural body.

(2) Its method is in accordance with law. First the God-given seed, then its quickening in the earth, then its springing up out of its earthliness into its own element, and its being clothed upon with its own proper form and texture, as God gives to each seed a body of its own.

(3) Its whole process is in accordance with law (1Co 15:46-47). The apostle was not standing dazed before a miracle. He has caught a glimpse into the first principles of life which go deeper than death. He has learned that the resurrection is the promised fulfilment of the laws of life which have been with God from before the foundation of the world. The stars which differ in glory are no more miracles in the sky than is the resurrection of the dead to the apostle who had seen the risen Lord. The sun and the moon are no more exceptions to the ancient order of the heavens than the souls of men raised from the dead, and clothed upon with the shining glory of the celestial, are out of the Divine order and harmony to the eye of the apostle who has seen the risen Lord.

II. The Biblical teaching of the resurrection is that it is in accordance with law. Why should it seem otherwise to us?

1. Why should we regard it as a thing incredible that God should raise the dead? Is there anything which we have seen upon this earth which contradicts the spiritual law of our full redemption? Apparent con.tradictions to this gospel there are, but not one which is real. On the other hand, there are positive facts arranging themselves now in lengthening lines, over which we look straight out into the unseen and the eternal. As I cannot think of a star except as I think of it as in the sky, so I cannot think of this visible sphere of things or nature except as existing in some invisible realm and larger presence. And particularly in confirmation of this Scriptural faith in the Divine orderliness of the resurrection and eternal life, let me now merely suggest these considerations.

(1) We do know this, that death is not the only law of nature; there is also the law of life.

(2) It is a fact that of the two laws life, not death, is the higher and prevailing power so far as we can see. The earth was dead, so they tell us, ages ago. Now how this earth lives!

(3) Even here, where death reigns, life has been growing higher, more complex, more capable of larger correspondences with things. Between the lowest living thing and the brain of man there is a difference of life wide as the distance between the earth and the heavens. Plainly, then, without any doubt, life is something stronger thus far upon this earth than death. Notwithstanding death, life grows to be more and richer.

2. But this is not all. What is death, so far as we can see? Here is a minute living thing in a glass of water. You turn the water out. That living particle is now mere dust upon the glass. Dead–that is, it is no longer moving in an element corresponding to its capacity of vital movements. Death, then, is simply some wrong or imperfect adjustment of life to external conditions. But death may be partial, then, not entire. A part of the body may be dead. A man may be dead in some relations, and still live in others. There is a sense in which we die daily. Life is the principle, the force, the law; death the limitation, the accident, the partial negation of Gods great affirmation of life in things. Now see where this thought leads.

(1) Death is the sundering of certain relations of life towards outward things.

(2) Therefore, when the body finally is wholly dead and buried, when all these physical relations are wholly broken off, so much of life is certainly gone, but nothing else in a man, if there is anything more of him, is dead. You may catch me if you can find me, said Socrates, as he let his body go. And the Scripture says, God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.

3. This view of the partial and negative power and function of death opens up a further rational possibility of life. We have only to suppose a living soul in perfect adjustment to God, and all Gods laws of things, to conceive of a being possessing eternal life. This is life eternal that they might know Thee, etc. In such perfect adjustment of being to God and His laws the finite spirit would exist in its final spiritual embodiment. Eternal life would be the perfect harmony of the inward and outward conditions–the final union of the spirit of the just made perfect with God and His universe. Conclusion: If these things be so it follows that our true life consists in our coming at once into the right correspondence with that which is the real and eternal element of life–with God and His righteousness. We are made to live in perfect harmony with all good, beautiful, and true things, or in communion with God. The only thing to be feared is spiritual death. That is non-adjustment of our hearts to God. There is one thing which I cannot but fear, and that is the loss of ones own soul. And I am afraid of the death which I see already going beyond the physical man, benumbing the conscience, and chilling the very souls of men. He that hath the Son hath life; he that hath not the Son of God hath not life. (Newman Smyth, D.D.)

The resurrection of Christ

Contemplate this as–

I. An established fact. It is established–

1. On the testimony of the most competent witnesses–those who had a thorough knowledge of the facts, and such an invincible love for truth as would render it impossible for them to misrepresent them.

2. On the very existence of Christendom. What gave birth to Christendom? The gospel; and the truth of the gospel rests on the resurrection of Christ.

3. On the consciousness of genuine disciples. Such consciousness attests that they are not in their sins, and they feel that this deliverance came from the gospel.

II. A significant fact. The reference here is to the first-fruits of the harvest (see Lev 23:12-19). Those first-fruits were both an earnest and a sample of the full harvest at hand. Hence Christs resurrection was regarded–

1. As a pledge of the resurrection. As He rose so will all rise.

2. As a pattern. The sheaf waved before the Lord was a specimen or sample of what remained in the field to be gathered in. Our vile bodies shall be fashioned and made like unto His glorious body (1Co 15:21-22).

III. An influential fact. Between the influence of Adam and that of Christ on the race there is–

1. A resemblance. The resemblance is in its extensibility. Though Adams influence upon the race is more extensive at present than that of Christ, it is not more extensible. It has in it the power of extending over the whole race down through all times, and it will do so.

2. A contrast. The influence of the one is destructive, the influence of the other quickening. If by death here bodily death is meant, then the idea is that Christ will quicken to life all that have died. But what does it mean to be in Adam and in Christ. In the sense of character. All men live in the characters of others; children in the character of their parents, pupils in their masters, the present generation in the preceding. The characters of the men of past ages constitute the moral atmosphere of existing men. In Adams character–the character of selfishness, carnality, unbelief–all unregenerate men live to-day, his principles pulsate in all hearts. In the character of Christ, in His self-sacrificing love, spotless purity, and godly devotion, all the godly live to-day. Now those who live in the character of Adam must die, not merely in the sense of the dissolution of the soul from the body, but in the more awful sense of the dissolution of the soul from God; whereas those who live in the character of Christ live by a vital connection with the Eternal Fountain of all life. (D. Thomas, D.D.)

Christs resurrection

I. Our Lords resurrection from the dead is the pledge and earnest of all Christian hope.

1. That it should be the corner-stone of Christian doctrine strikes at the root of all religious theories which ignore the miraculous in Christianity. The story of Christ begins and closes with the supernatural–the incarnation and the resurrection.

2. It is constantly represented as the supreme fact in Christianity.

(1) Christ often foretells it as such (Mat 17:9; Mar 8:31; Luk 9:22; Mat 12:40; Joh 2:19; Joh 11:25, etc.). He thus committed Himself to a test by which His claims might be proved, or the reverse.

(a) If He did not rise men would know He was a self-deceiver, if not an impostor.

(b) As the Holy Son of God He could not remain in the power of death, which is a penalty for sin.

(c) As such, moreover, He might give Himself up to death for a time, to secure a great end in the economy of salvation, but He must have life, indestructible, in Himself–must rise.

(2) The apostles made it the supreme fact in their preaching (Act 4:2; Act 1:22; Act 4:33; Act 23:6; Rom 4:1; Rom 6:5; Php 3:10; 1Pe 1:3; 1Pe 3:21).

3. It was established by evidence which admitted no question in the mind of St. Paul, long the bitter opponent of Christianity (1Co 15:5-8).

II. Why so much stress is laid on the resurrection of Christ.

1. It was the confirmation of all His promises as the founder of a new religion.

(1) Had He lain in the grave the proof to which He appealed, of being sent to save men, would have been wanting.

(2) His resurrection was a confirmation of His claims by the Eternal Father.

(a) Of His claims to be an atoning sacrifice for sin. Of His being, in reality, the Son of God. Declared to be the Son of God, with power, etc.

(b) Of His having entered into His glory at the head of the new spiritual kingdom He had founded.

(3) In the presence of His resurrection all doubts vanish from the minds of the apostles as to His being able to save to the uttermost all who come to God through Him (1Co 15:14; 1Co 15:17-19; cf. Rom 8:34).

(4) But, now that He is risen, all is bright with a glorious hope. He was raised for our justification, having obtained eternal redemption for us. We have an advocate with the Father. He ever liveth to make intercession for us.

2. It was the pledge of our own resurrection and future happiness. The words spoken over the tomb of Lazarus come back with awful power from the heavens now Christ is risen I am the resurrection and the life. Those, also, spoken to His disciples–Because I live ye shall live also.

(1) In Him humanity conquered death. The destiny of man linked with Him. He is the first-fruits the streamer that heralds the day. The bud of spring that foretells the glory of June.

(2) He has thus brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. The contrast between the darkness of the future before Christ and its holy radiance since. Caesar demanding that Cataline should be spared since death ended existence. Cicero bewailing his daughters death without a ray of hope beyond earth.

(3) Christs resurrection has begotten us again to a lively hope. It has attracted us to the eternal world as the home of our Elder Brother.

3. It is the constraining impulse to a holy life.

(1) To be like Christ the ideal of His followers, since He showed us the path by which alone we can gain a happy immortality. Gratitude and love draws out the heart to an absolute devotion to His service, that service being a holy life. As He has risen, so we are constrained to seek a spiritual resurrection from our old selves to newness of life, to be like Him, and hereafter rejoin Him.

(2) His resurrection has secured us heavenly grace to assist us on this course (Act 2:23 : Joh 16:7).

(3) The resurrection of Christ is a pledge of the future triumph of His kingdom. All power given Him in heaven and on earth. He must reign. (Cunningham Geikie, D.D.)

The resurrection: Christ the first-fruits

I. The pictures here given of the death of the saints.

1. As a sleep. Not that the soul sleeps, but the body in its lonely bed of earth, beneath the coverlet of grass, with the cold clay for its pillow.

(1) With sleep we associate the ideas–

(a) Rest. On yonder couch, however hard, the labourer shakes off his toil, the merchant his care, the thinker his difficulties, and the sufferer his pains. Sleep makes each night a Sabbath for the day. So is it with the body while it sleeps in the tomb. The weary are at rest; the servant is as much at ease as his lord.

(b) Forgetfulness. The soul forgets not, and we have no reason to believe that the glorified are ignorant of what is going on below. But what do their bodies know? Take up the skull, see if there be memory there. See where once the heart was if there be any emotion there. Gather the bones, see if they are still obedient to muscles which could be moved at will as passing events might affect the mind.

(c) Benefit. In the old tradition Medet, the enchantress, cast the limbs of old men into her cauldron that they might come forth young again. Sleep does all this in its fashion. The righteous are put into their graves all weary and worn, but such they will not rise.

(2) The sleep of death is not–

(a) A dreamy slumber. The involuntary action of the mind prevents us at times from taking rest in sleep. But not so with the dear departed. In that sleep of death no dreams can come.

(b) A hopeless sleep. We have seen persons sleep who have been long emaciated by sickness, when we have said, That eye will never open again; he will sleep himself into eternity. But it is not so here. They sleep a healthy sleep–they sleep to wake, and not to die the second death; go wake in joyous fellowship when the Redeemer stands in the latter day upon the earth.

(3) Ought not this view of death to prevent our looking upon it in so repulsive a light? Did you ever feel horror at a sleeping child or husband or wife? And do not wish the departed back again. Would you wake your friend who has fallen asleep after excruciating pain?

2. As a sowing. The mould has been ploughed, and the husbandman scatters his seeds. They fall into the earth, the clods are raked over them, and they disappear. So it is with us. We call Death a reaper–I call him a sower. He takes these bodies and sows us broadcast in the ground. And if this is so let us have done with all faithless sorrow. The granary is empty, says the farmer. Yes, but he does not sigh over it; for the seed is put into the ground in order that the granary may be filled again. Our family circle has been broken, say you. Yes, but only broken that it may be re-formed. The stars are setting here to rise in other skies to set no more.

II. The connection between the resurrection of Christ and that of believers. Some take very great delight in the hope that they may be alive and remain at the coming of Christ, but not to die would be to lose the great privilege of relationship with Christ as the first-fruits. The allusion is to the Jewish feast, when the first sheaf was brought out from the harvest as a token of the whole, and first of all heaved upward as a heave-offering, and then waived to and fro as a waive-offering, being thus dedicated to God in testimony of the gratitude for the harvest. The Passover was celebrated first, then came a Sabbath-day, then after that came the feast of first-fruits. So Christ died on the Passover day, the next day was the Sabbatic rest. Christs body therefore tarried in the grave; then early in the morning of the first day, the feast of the first-fruits, Christ rose. Christ was the first that rose–

1. In order of time. All who were raised before died again, and, with the exception of Lazarus, none were ever buried. Christ was the first who really rose no more to die. He leads the vanguard through the dark defile, and His brow first salutes the light of heaven, We admire the man who discovers a new country. Christ is the first who returned from the jaws of death to tell of immortality and light.

2. In point of cause; for as He comes back from the grave He brings all His followers behind Him in one glorious train. We read of Hercules descending into Hades and bringing up his friend. Verily went Christ thither, and He gave no sop to Cerberus, but cut off his head.

3. In point of pledge. The first-fruits were a pledge of the harvest.

4. As the representative of the whole. When the first-fruit sheaf had been waved before God it was considered that all the harvest had been brought into the sanctuary. So when Christ rose He consecrated the whole harvest. All the righteous dead were virtually risen in Him.

III. The influence of this doctrine.

1. Let us look well to the holiness of our bodies. Know ye not that your bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost? Now if our eyes look upon vanity we have defiled the windows of Gods house; if our tongues speak evil we have desecrated its gates. Let us see to it that our feet carry us nowhere but where our Master can go with us, and that our hands be outstretched for naught but that which is pure and lovely.

2. Are we among those for whom Christ stands as first-fruits? (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Christ the first-fruits

All shall rise at the last day, and be clothed with their bodies again. But will all that rise enter into Christs joy? Only if they rise after His likeness. The crop from which the first-fruits were picked was not all of the same quality. There may have been wild grapes and fruit of brambles amid the crop of the vineyard, and there may have been tares and thistles among the crop of corn. These would be cast into the fire, and none but what are of the same kind as the first-fruits, grapes and corn, laid up in store. So it will be at the resurrection harvest. None but such as are like to Christ, the first-fruits, will be admitted into the kingdom of heaven. There is, therefore, much to warn us here. That which goes into the ground as seed of bramble or thistle will rise bromide or thistle, so he that goes into the grave a child of wrath will rise a child of wrath. Note–

I. That which is the grand property of everything that bears fruit, growth. As all men bear fruit of some kind, they are growing up from something and to something.

1. What, then, is the seed in our hearts from which we are growing? Is it the good seed of the Word of God? It is easy to determine. The manner of the plants growth declares its seed.

(1) Is there in the heart–

(a) A spreading forth of the love of God?

(b) A continual rise, as if of lively sap, of the sense of the mercies in Christ, of the experience of the earnest of His promises, of the motions of the Holy Spirit, of the promptings of good thoughts, godly meditations, heavenly affections?

(c) The shooting upwards of the stem of the seeking of God, the believing in Christ, the hoping of the good things to come, the raising of the desires?

(d) The shooting downward of a good hold of faith, of a rooting in love, of a seeking of spiritual nourishment?

(e) Shooting sideways into branches of love toward the brethren, of exercise in good works, of example to edification? Who can doubt the seed of such a plant?

(2) But, on the contrary, if the heart–

(a) Rise and swell with the motions of ungodliness.

(b) Shooting upward in rebellion against God.

(c) Shoot downward in carnal desires, earthly affections, devilish inclinations.

(d) Shoot sideways in carelessness of living, bad example, indifference to Gods honour and glory–who does not know that it is the bad seed sown by the devil in the heart of man when he was asleep in the unwatchfulness of this world?

And who is not certain of the nature of its fruit, that it will be a poisonous berry, to the shame and scandal of the vineyard and field of God in which he has been suffered to grow up?

2. What is the fruit to which we are growing. There can be no doubt of a plant bearing its natural fruit, but there may be a doubt of its bearing fruit at all. But we hardly ever see worthless plants disabled from bearing fruit. Who ever saw the thistle blighted? It is the valuable fruits that are so uncertain, and the more precious they are so much the more tender they are, and require greater care to bring them to perfection, for they are not in their natural climate. And is the sinful world the natural climate for the precious fruits of holiness? No; all ungodliness thrives in it, blossoms without fail and in all abundance, and brings forth fruit most plentifully. But how different is it with the plant which comes up in the heart from the seed of the Word of God. The heat of temptation, the cold of indifference, the blight of unbelief, the floods of ungodliness, are all against it, and it requires to be nursed carefully, watched continually.

II. On our growth, whether for good or for evil fruit, depends our place on the day of the harvest of which Christ is the first-fruits. Our characters are decided for holy or unholy when we go into the grave; our place is decided, for happiness or misery, on the day that we rise out of it. It is astonishing how watchful some men are in keeping out such thoughts; it would be well if others would be as watchful in keeping them in. A person may indeed look forward to a happy resurrection without attaining it, because he may delude himself with false hopes; but no one will ever attain a happy resurrection without looking forward to it. (R. W. Evans, D.D.)

Fuente: Biblical Illustrator Edited by Joseph S. Exell

Verse 20. But now is Christ risen] On the contrary, Christ is raised from the dead, and is become the first fruits of them that slept. His resurrection has been demonstrated, and our resurrection necessarily follows; as sure as the first fruits are the proof that there is a harvest, so surely the resurrection of Christ is a proof of ours. The Judaizing teacher at Corinth would feel the force of this observation much sooner than we can, who are not much acquainted with Jewish customs. “Although,” says Dr. Lightfoot, “the resurrection of Christ, compared with some first fruits, has very good harmony with them; yet especially it agrees with the offering of the sheaf, commonly called omer, not only as the thing itself, but also as to the circumstances of the time. For first there was the passover, and the day following was a Sabbatic day, and on the day following that the first fruits were offered. So Christ, our passover, was crucified: the day following his crucifixion was the Sabbath, and the day following that, He, the first fruits of them that slept, rose again. All who died before Christ, and were raised again to life, died afterwards; but Christ is the first fruits of all who shall be raised from the dead to die no more.”

Fuente: Adam Clarke’s Commentary and Critical Notes on the Bible

The apostle returneth to his former argument, to discourse concerning the resurrection of Christ, who is by him called the

first-fruits of them that slept; not of all that shall rise, (as some think), for it will be hard to prove, that any benefit of Christs death or resurrection, after this life, belongs to wicked men: nor is it usual for the penmen of holy writ to express the death of unbelievers under the gentle notion of a sleep; and, Col 1:18, Christ is called the first-born from the dead, as he is the Head of the church. It is rather spoken with reference to believers; the resurrection of wicked men, flowing rather from Gods providence, in order to the manifestation of his justice in the last judgment, than from the mediation of Christ. But here a question ariseth: How Christ is said to be the first-fruits of those that sleep, whenas we read of divers in Scripture that were raised from the dead before Christ was so raised?

Answer.

1. Christ was the first that rose again by his own power and virtue.

2. He was the first who rose again, and died no more.

3. He was the first in respect of dignity.

4. He was the first-fruits of them that sleep, by his resurrection making a way for the resurrection of others, even of all such as were members of him; as the offering of the first-fruits, under the law, sanctified the whole crop.

Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole

20. nowas the case really is.

and becomeomitted inthe oldest manuscripts.

the first-fruitstheearnest or pledge, that the whole resurrection harvest will follow,so that our faith is not vain, nor our hope limited to this life. Thetime of writing this Epistle was probably about the Passover (1Co5:7); the day after the Passover sabbath was that for offeringthe first-fruits (Lev 23:10;Lev 23:11), and the same was theday of Christ’s resurrection: whence appears the appropriateness ofthe image.

Fuente: Jamieson, Fausset and Brown’s Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible

But now is Christ risen from the dead,…. As was before proved by ocular testimonies, and before preached and asserted; and now reassumed and concluded, from the glaring contradictions, and dreadful absurdities that follow the denial of it:

and became the firstfruits of them that slept; who were already fallen asleep; respecting chiefly the saints that died before the resurrection of Christ; and if Christ was the firstfruit of them, there is no difficulty of conceiving how he is the firstfruits of those that die since. The allusion is to the firstfruits of the earth, which were offered to the Lord: and especially to the sheaf of the firstfruits, which was waved by the priest before him, De 26:2 and to which Christ, in his resurrection from the dead, is here compared. The firstfruits were what first sprung out of the earth, were soonest ripe, and were first reaped and gathered in, and then offered unto the Lord; so Christ first rose from the dead, and ascended to heaven, and presented himself to God; as the representative of his people; for though there were others that were raised before him, as the widow of Sarepta’s son by Elijah, the Shunammite’s son by Elisha, and the man that touched the prophet’s bones when put into his grave, and Jairus’s daughter, the widow of Naam’s son, and Lazarus by Christ; yet as these did not rise by their own power, so only to a mortal life: but Christ, as he raised himself by his own power, so he rose again to an immortal life, and was the first that ever did so; he was the first to whom God showed, and who first trod this path of life. The firstfruits were the best, what was then ripest, and so most valuable; Christ is the first, and rose the first in dignity, as well as in time; he rose as the head of the body, as the firstborn, the beginning, that in all things he might have, and appear to have, as he ought to have, the pre-eminence. The firstfruits sanctified the rest of the harvest, represented the whole, gave right to the ingathering of it, and ensured it; Christ by lying in the grave, and rising out of it, sanctified it for his people, and in his resurrection represented them; they rose with him, and in him; and their resurrection is secured by his; because he lives, they shall live also. The firstfruits were only such, and all this to the fruits of the earth, that were of the same kind with them, not to tares and chaff, to briers and thorns; so Christ, in rising from the dead, is only the firstfruits of the saints; of such as are the fruits of his death and of his grace, who have the fruits of his Spirit in them, and are filled with the fruits of righteousness by him; just as he is the firstborn from the dead, with respect to the many brethren, whom he stands in the relation of a firstborn: once more, as the allusion is particularly to the sheaf of the firstfruits, it is to be observed, that that was waved before the Lord, the morrow after the sabbath, Le 23:11 which, as the Jews f interpret, was the morrow after the first good day, or festival of the passover; the passover was on the fourteenth day of the month; the festival, or Chagiga, on the fifteenth, and which, in the year that Christ suffered, was a sabbath day also; and the morrow after that, the sheaf of the firstfruits was waved; now Christ suffered on the passover, rested in the grave on the seventh day sabbath, and on the morrow after that, rose from the dead, the very day that the first fruits were offered to the Lord: so that the allusion and phrase are very appropriately used by the apostle.

f Targum & Jarchi in Lev. xxiii. 11.

Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible

The Resurrection of Christ; The Resurrection of Saints.

A. D. 57.

      20 But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept.   21 For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead.   22 For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.   23 But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming.   24 Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power.   25 For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet.   26 The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.   27 For he hath put all things under his feet. But when he saith all things are put under him, it is manifest that he is excepted, which did put all things under him.   28 And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all.   29 Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? why are they then baptized for the dead?   30 And why stand we in jeopardy every hour?   31 I protest by your rejoicing which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die daily.   32 If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not? let us eat and drink; for to morrow we die.   33 Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners.   34 Awake to righteousness, and sin not; for some have not the knowledge of God: I speak this to your shame.

      In this passage the apostle establishes the truth of the resurrection of the dead, the holy dead, the dead in Christ,

      I. On the resurrection of Christ. 1. Because he is indeed the first-fruits of those that slept, v. 20. He has truly risen himself, and he has risen in this very quality and character, as the first-fruits of those who sleep in him. As he has assuredly risen, so in his resurrection there is as much an earnest given that the dead in him shall rise as there was that the Jewish harvest in general should be accepted and blessed by the offering and acceptance of the first-fruits. The whole lump was made holy by the consecration of the first-fruits (Rom. xi. 16), and the whole body of Christ, all that are by faith united to him, are by his resurrection assured of their own. As he has risen, they shall rise; just as the lump is holy because the first fruits are so. He has not risen merely for himself, but as head of the body, the church; and those that sleep in him God will bring with him, 1 Thess. iv. 14. Note, Christ’s resurrection is a pledge and earnest of ours, if we are true believers in him; because he has risen, we shall rise. We are a part of the consecrated lump, and shall partake of the acceptance and favour vouchsafed the first-fruits. This is the first argument used by the apostle in confirmation of the truth; and it is, 2. Illustrated by a parallel between the first and second Adam. For, since by man came death, it was every way proper that by man should come deliverance from it, or, which is all one, a resurrection, v. 21. And so, as in Adam all die, in Christ shall all be made alive; as through the sin of the first Adam all men became mortal, because all derived from him the same sinful nature, so through the merit and resurrection of Christ shall all who are made to partake of the Spirit, and the spiritual nature, revive, and become immortal. All who die die through the sin of Adam; all who are raised, in the sense of the apostle, rise through the merit and power of Christ. But the meaning is not that, as all men died in Adam, so all men, without exception, shall be made alive in Christ; for the scope of the apostle’s argument restrains the general meaning. Christ rose as the first-fruits; therefore those that are Christ’s (v. 23) shall rise too. Hence it will not follow that all men without exception shall rise too; but it will fitly follow that all who thus rise, rise in virtue of Christ’s resurrection, and so that their revival is owing to the man Christ Jesus, as the mortality of all mankind was owing to the first man; and so, as by man came death, by man came deliverance. Thus it seemed fit to the divine wisdom that, as the first Adam ruined his posterity by sin, the second Adam should raise his seed to a glorious immortality. 3. Before he leaves the argument he states that there will be an order observed in their resurrection. What that precisely will be we are nowhere told, but in the general only here that there will be order observed. Possibly those may rise first who have held the highest rank, and done the most eminent service, or suffered the most grievous evils, or cruel deaths, for Christ’s sake. It is only here said that the first-fruits are supposed to rise first, and afterwards all who are Christ’s, when he shall come again. Not that Christ’s resurrection must in fact go before the resurrection of any of his, but it must be laid as the foundation: as it was not necessary that those who lived remote from Jerusalem must go thither and offer the first-fruits before they could account the lump holy, yet they must be set apart for this purpose, till they could be offered, which might be done at any time from pentecost till the feast of dedication. See Bishop Patrick on Num. xxiv. 2. The offering of the first-fruits was what made the lump holy; and the lump was made holy by this offering, though it was not made before the harvest was gathered in, so it were set apart for that end, and duly offered afterwards. So Christ’s resurrection must, in order of nature, precede that of his saints, though some of these might rise in order of time before him. It is because he has risen that they rise. Note, Those that are Christ’s must rise, because of their relation to him.

      II. He argues from the continuance of the mediatorial kingdom till all Christ’s enemies are destroyed, the last of which is death, v. 24-26. He has risen, and, upon his resurrection, was invested with sovereign empire, had all power in heaven and earth put into his hands (Matt. xxviii. 18), had a name given him above every name, that every knee might bow to him, and every tongue confess him Lord. Phil. ii. 9-11. And the administration of this kingdom must continue in his hands till all opposing power, and rule, and authority, be put down (v. 24), till all enemies are put under his feet (v. 25), and till the last enemy is destroyed, which is death, v. 26.

      1. This argument implies in it all these particulars:– (1.) That our Saviour rose from the dead to have all power put into his hands, and have and administer a kingdom, as Mediator: For this end he died, and rose, and revived, that he might be Lord both of the dead and living, Rom. xiv. 9. (2.) That this mediatorial kingdom is to have an end, at least as far as it is concerned in bringing his people safely to glory, and subduing all his and their enemies: Then cometh the end, v. 24. (3.) That it is not to have an end till all opposing power be put down, and all enemies brought to his feet, 1Co 15:24; 1Co 15:25. (4.) That, among other enemies, death must be destroyed (v. 26) or abolished; its powers over its members must be disannulled. Thus far the apostle is express; but he leaves us to make the inference that therefore the saints must rise, else death and the grave would have power over them, nor would our Saviour’s kingly power prevail against the last enemy of his people and annul its power. When saints shall live again, and die no more, then, and not till then, will death be abolished, which must be brought about before our Saviour’s mediatorial kingdom is delivered up, which yet must be in due time. The saints therefore shall live again and die no more. This is the scope of the argument; but,

      2. The apostle drops several hints in the course of it which it will be proper to notice: as, (1.) That our Saviour, as man and mediator between God and man, has a delegated royalty, a kingdom given: All things are put under him, he excepted that did put all things under him, v. 27. As man, all his authority must be delegated. And, though his mediation supposes his divine nature, yet as Mediator he does not so explicitly sustain the character of God, but a middle person between God and man, partaking of both natures, human and divine, as he was to reconcile both parties, God and man, and receiving commission and authority from God the Father to act in this office. The Father appears, in this whole dispensation, in the majesty and with the authority of God: the Son, made man, appears as the minister of the Father, though he is God as well as the Father. Nor is this passage to be understood of the eternal dominion over all his creatures which belongs to him as God, but of a kingdom committed to him as Mediator and God-man, and that chiefly after his resurrection, when, having overcome, he sat down with his Father on his throne, Rev. iii. 21. Then was the prediction verified, I have set my king upon my holy hill of Zion (Ps. ii. 6), placed him on his throne. This is meant by the phrase so frequent in the writings of the New Testament, of sitting at the right hand of God (Mar 16:19; Rom 8:34; Col 3:1, c.), on the right hand of power (Mar 14:62Luk 22:69), on the right hand of the throne of God (Heb. xii. 2), on the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens, Heb. viii. 1. Sitting down in this seat is taking upon him the exercise of his mediatorial power and royalty, which was done upon his ascension into heaven, Mark xvi. 19. And it is spoken of in scripture as a recompence made him for his deep humiliation and self-abasement, in becoming man, and dying for man the accursed death of the cross, Phil. ii. 6-12. Upon his ascension, he was made head over all things to the church, had power given him to govern and protect it against all its enemies, and in the end destroy them and complete the salvation of all that believe in him. This is not a power appertaining to Godhead as such; it is not original and unlimited power, but power given and limited to special purposes. And though he who has it is God, yet, inasmuch as he is somewhat else besides God, and in this whole dispensation acts not as God, but as Mediator, not as the offended Majesty, but as one interposing in favour of his offending creatures, and this by virtue of his consent and commission who acts and appears always in that character, he may properly be said to have this power given him; he may reign as God, with power unlimited, and yet may reign as Mediator, with a power delegated, and limited to these particular purposes. (2.) That this delegated royalty must at length be delivered up to the Father, from whom it was received (v. 24); for it is a power received for particular ends and purposes, a power to govern and protect his church till all the members of it be gathered in, and the enemies of it for ever subdued and destroyed (1Co 15:25; 1Co 15:26), and when these ends shall be obtained the power and authority will not need to be continued. The Redeemer must reign till his enemies be destroyed, and the salvation of his church and people accomplished; and, when this end is attained, then will he deliver up the power which he had only for this purpose, though he may continue to reign over his glorified church and body in heaven; and in this sense it may notwithstanding be said that he shall reign for ever and ever (Rev. xi. 15), that he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever, and of his kingdom there shall be no end (Luke i. 33), that his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, Dan. vii. 14. See also Mich. iv. 7. (3.) The Redeemer shall certainly reign till the last enemy of his people be destroyed, till death itself be abolished, till his saints revive and recover perfect life, never to be in fear and danger of dying any more. He shall have all power in heaven and earth till then–he who loved us, and gave himself for us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood–he who is so nearly related to us, and so much concerned for us. What support should this be to his saints in every hour of distress and temptation! He is alive who was dead, and liveth for ever, and doth reign, and will continue to reign, till the redemption of his people be completed, and the utter ruin of their enemies effected. (4.) When this is done, and all things are put under his feet, then shall the Son become subject to him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all, v. 28. The meaning of this I take to be that then the man Christ Jesus, who hath appeared in so much majesty during the whole administration of his kingdom, shall appear upon giving it up to be a subject of the Father. Things are in scripture many times said to be when they are manifested and made to appear; and this delivering up of the kingdom will make it manifest that he who appeared in the majesty of the sovereign king was, during this administration, a subject of God. The glorified humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ, with all the dignity and power conferred on it, was no more than a glorious creature. This will appear when the kingdom shall be delivered up; and it will appear to the divine glory, that God may be all in all, that the accomplishment of our salvation may appear altogether divine, and God alone may have the honour of it. Note, Though the human nature must be employed in the work of our redemption, yet God was all in all in it. It was the Lord’s doing and should be marvellous in our eyes.

      III. He argues for the resurrection, from the case of those who were baptized for the dead (v. 29): What shall those do who are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? Why are they baptized for the dead? What shall they do if the dead rise not? What have they done? How vain a thing hath their baptism been! Must they stand by it, or renounce it? why are they baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not? hyper ton nekron. But what is this baptism for the dead? It is necessary to be known, that the apostle’s argument may be understood; whether it be only argumentum ad hominem, or ad rem; that is, whether it conclude for the thing in dispute universally, or only against the particular persons who were baptized for the dead. But who shall interpret this very obscure passage, which, though it consists of no more than three words, besides the articles, has had more than three times three senses put on it by interpreters? It is not agreed what is meant by baptism, whether it is to be taken in a proper or figurative sense, and, if in a proper sense, whether it is to be understood or Christian baptism properly so called, or some other ablution. And as little is it agreed who are the dead, or in what sense the preposition hyper is to be taken. Some understand the dead of our Saviour himself; vide Whitby in loc. Why are persons baptized in the name of a dead Saviour, a Saviour who remains among the dead, if the dead rise not? But it is, I believe, and instance perfectly singular for hoi nekroi to mean no more than one dead person; it is a signification which the words have nowhere else. And the hoi baptizomenoi (the baptized) seem plainly to mean some particular persons, not Christians in general, which yet must be the signification if the hoi nekroi (the dead) be understood of our Saviour. Some understand the passage of the martyrs: Why do they suffer martyrdom for their religion? This is sometimes called the baptism of blood by ancients, and, by our Saviour himself, baptism indefinitely, Mat 20:22; Luk 12:50. But in what sense can those who die martyrs for their religion be said to be baptized (that is, die martyrs) for the dead? Some understand it of a custom that was observed, as some of the ancients tell us, among many who professed the Christian name in the first ages, of baptizing some in the name and stead of catechumens dying without baptism. But this savoured of such superstition that, if the custom had prevailed in the church so soon, the apostle would hardly have mentioned it without signifying a dislike of it. Some understand it of baptizing over the dead, which was a custom, they tell us, that early obtained; and this to testify their hope of the resurrection. This sense is pertinent to the apostle’s argument, but it appears not that any such practice was in use in the apostle’s time. Others understand it of those who have been baptized for the sake, or on occasion, of the martyrs, that is, the constancy with which they died for their religion. Some were doubtless converted to Christianity by observing this: and it would have been a vain thing for persons to have become Christians upon this motive, if the martyrs, by losing their lives for religion, became utterly extinct, and were to live no more. But the church at Corinth had not, in all probability, suffered much persecution at this time, or seem many instances of martyrdom among them, nor had many converts been made by the constancy and firmness which the martyrs discovered. Not to observe that hoi nekroi seems to be too general an expression to mean only the martyred dead. It is as easy an explication of the phrase as any I have met with, and as pertinent to the argument, to suppose the hoi nekroi to mean some among the Corinthians, who had been taken off by the hand of God. We read that many were sickly among them, and many slept (ch. xi. 30), because of their disorderly behaviour at the Lord’s table. These executions might terrify some into Christianity; as the miraculous earthquake did the jailer, Act 16:29; Act 16:30, c. Persons baptized on such an occasion might be properly said to be baptized for the dead, that is, on their account. And the hoi baptizomenoi (the baptized) and the hoi nekroi (the dead) answer to one another and upon this supposition the Corinthians could not mistake the apostle’s meaning. “Now,” says he, “what shall they do, and why were they baptized, if the dead rise not? You have a general persuasion that these men have done right, and acted wisely, and as they ought, on this occasion; but why, if the dead rise not, seeing they may perhaps hasten their death, by provoking a jealous God, and have no hopes beyond it?” But whether this be the meaning, or whatever else be, doubtless the apostle’s argument was good and intelligible to the Corinthians. And his next is as plain to us.

      IV. He argues from the absurdity of his own conduct and that of other Christians upon this supposition,

      1. It would be a foolish thing for them to run so many hazards (v. 30): “Why stand we in jeopardy every hour? Why do we expose ourselves to continual peril–we Christians, especially we apostles?” Every one knows that it was dangerous being a Christian, and much more a preacher and an apostle, at that time. “Now,” says the apostle, “what fools are we to run these hazards, if we have no better hopes beyond death, if when we die we die wholly, and revive no more!” Note, Christianity were a foolish profession if it proposed no hopes beyond this life, at least in such hazardous times as attended the first profession of it; it required men to risk all the blessings and comforts of this life, and to face and endure all the evils of it, without any future prospects. And is this a character of his religion fit for a Christian to endure? And must he not fix this character on it if he give up his future hopes, and deny the resurrection of the dead? This argument the apostle brings home to himself: “I protest,” says he, “by your rejoicing in Jesus Christ, by all the comforts of Christianity, and all the peculiar succours and supports of our holy faith, that I die daily,” v. 31. He was in continual danger of death, and carried his life, as we say, in his hand. And why should he thus expose himself, if he had no hopes after life? To live in daily view and expectation of death, and yet have no prospect beyond it, must be very heartless and uncomfortable, and his case, upon this account, a very melancholy one. He had need be very well assured of the resurrection of the dead, or he was guilty of extreme weakness, in hazarding all that was dear to him in this world, and his life into the bargain. He had encountered very great difficulties and fierce enemies; he had fought with beasts at Ephesus (v. 32), and was in danger of being pulled to pieces by an enraged multitude, stirred up by Demetrius and the other craftsmen (Acts xix. 24, c.), though some understand this literally of Paul’s being exposed to fight with wild beasts in the amphitheatre, at a Roman show in that city. And Nicephorus tells a formal story to this purport, and of the miraculous complaisance of the lions to him when they came near him. But so remarkable a trial and circumstance of his life, methinks, would not have been passed over by Luke, and much less by himself, when he gives us so large and particular a detail of his sufferings, 2 Cor. xi. 24, ad fin. When he mentioned that he was five times scourged of the Jews, thrice beaten with rods, once stoned, thrice shipwrecked, it is strange that he should not have said that he was once exposed to fight with the beasts. I take it, therefore, that this fighting with beasts is a figurative expression, that the beasts intended were men of a fierce and ferine disposition, and that this refers to the passage above cited. “Now,” says he, “what advantage have I from such contests, if the dead rise not? Why should I die daily, expose myself daily to the danger of dying by violent hands, if the dead rise not? And if post mortem nihil—if I am to perish by death, and expect nothing after it, could any thing be more weak?” Was Paul so senseless? Had he given the Corinthians any ground to entertain such a thought of him? If he had not been well assured that death would have been to his advantage, would he, in this stupid manner, have thrown away his life? Could any thing but the sure hopes of a better life after death have extinguished the love of life in him to this degree? “What advantageth it me, if the dead rise not? What can I propose to myself?” Note, It is very lawful and fit for a Christian to propose advantage to himself by his fidelity to God. Thus did Paul. Thus did our blessed Lord himself, Heb. xii. 2. And thus we are bidden to do after his example, and have our fruit to holiness, that our end may be everlasting life. This is the very end of our faith, even the salvation of our souls (1 Pet. i. 9), not only what it will issue in, but what we should aim at.

      2. It would be a much wiser thing to take the comforts of this life: Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die (&lti>v. 32); let us turn epicures. Thus this sentence means in the prophet, Isa. xxii. 13. Let us even live like beasts, if we must die like them. This would be a wiser course, if there were no resurrection, no after-life or state, than to abandon all the pleasures of life, and offer and expose ourselves to all the miseries of life, and live in continual peril of perishing by savage rage and cruelty. This passage also plainly implies, as I have hinted above, that those who denied the resurrection among the Corinthians were perfect Sadducees, of whose principles we have this account in the holy writings, that they say, There is no resurrection, neither angel nor spirit (Acts xxiii. 8), that is, “Man is all body, there is nothing in him to survive the body, nor will that, when once he is dead, ever revive again.” Such Sadducees were the men against whom the apostle argued; otherwise his arguments had no force in them; for, though the body should never revive, yet, as long as the mind survived it, he might have much advantage from all the hazards he ran for Christ’s sake. Nay, it is certain that the mind is to be the principal seat and subject of the heavenly glory and happiness. But, if there were no hopes after death, would not every wise man prefer an easy comfortable life before such a wretched one as the apostle led; nay, and endeavour to enjoy the comforts of life as fast as possible, because the continuance of it is short? Note, Nothing but the hopes of better things hereafter can enable a man to forego all the comforts and pleasures here, and embrace poverty, contempt, misery, and death. Thus did the apostles and primitive Christians; but how wretched was their case, and how foolish their conduct, if they deceived themselves, and abused the world with vain and false hopes!

      V. The apostle closes his argument with a caution, exhortation, and reproof. 1. A caution against the dangerous conversation of bad men, men of loose lives and principles: Be not deceived, says he; evil communications corrupt good manners, v. 33. Possibly, some of those who said that there was no resurrection of the dead were men of loose lives, and endeavoured to countenance their vicious practices by so corrupt a principle; and had that speech often in their mouths Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die. Now, the apostle grants that their talk was to the purpose if there was no future state. But, having confuted their principle, he now warns the Corinthians how dangerous such men’s conversation must prove. He tells them that they would probably be corrupted by them, and fall in with their course of life, if they gave into their evil principles. Note, Bad company and conversation are likely to make bad men. Those who would keep their innocence must keep good company. Error and vice are infectious: and, if we would avoid the contagion, we must keep clear of those who have taken it. He that walketh with wise men shall be wise; but a companion of fools shall be destroyed, Prov. xiii. 20. 2. Here is an exhortation to break off their sins, and rouse themselves, and lead a more holy and righteous life (v. 34): Awake to righteousness, or awake righteously, eknepsate dikaios, and sin not, or sin no more. “Rouse yourselves, break off your sins by repentance: renounce and forsake every evil way, correct whatever is amiss, and do not, by sloth and stupidity, be led away into such conversation and principles as will sap your Christian hopes, and corrupt your practice.” The disbelief of a future state destroys all virtue and piety. But the best improvement to be made of the truth is to cease from sin, and set ourselves to the business of religion, and that in good earnest. If there will be a resurrection and a future life, we should live and act as those who believe it, and should not give into such senseless and sottish notions as will debauch our morals, and render us loose and sensual in our lives. 3. Here is a reproof, and a sharp one, to some at least among them: Some of you have not the knowledge of God; I speak this to your shame. Note, It is a shame in Christians not to have the knowledge of God. The Christian religion gives the best information that can be had about God, his nature, and grace, and government. Those who profess this religion reproach themselves, by remaining without the knowledge of God; for it must be owing to their own sloth, and slight of God, that they are ignorant of him. And is it not a horrid shame for a Christian to slight God, and be so wretchedly ignorant in matters that so nearly and highly concern him? Note, also, It must be ignorance of God that leads men into the disbelief of a resurrection and future life. Those who know God know that he will not abandon his faithful servants, nor leave them exposed to such hardships and sufferings without any recompence or reward. They know he is not unfaithful nor unkind, to forget their labour and patience, their faithful services and cheerful sufferings, or let their labour be in vain. But I am apt to think that the expression has a much stronger meaning; that there were atheistical people among them who hardly owned a God, or one who had any concern with or took cognizance of human affairs. These were indeed a scandal and shame to any Christian church. Note, Real atheism lies at the bottom of men’s disbelief of a future state. Those who own a God and a providence, and observe how unequal the distributions of the present life are, and how frequently the best men fare worst, can hardly doubt an after state, where every thing will be set to rights.

Fuente: Matthew Henry’s Whole Bible Commentary

But now ( ). Emphatic form of with – added (cf. 12:18). It is the logical triumph of Paul after the reductio ad impossibile (Findlay) of the preceding argument.

The first-fruits (). Old word from , to offer firstlings or first-fruits. In LXX for first-fruits. In papyri for legacy-duty, entrance-fee, and also first-fruits as here. See also verse 1Cor 15:23; 1Cor 16:15; Rom 8:23, etc. Christ is “first-born from the dead” (Col 1:18). Others raised from the dead died again, but not so Jesus.

That sleep ( ). Perfect middle participle as in Mt 27:52 which see. Beautiful picture of death from which word () comes our .

Fuente: Robertson’s Word Pictures in the New Testament

The first – fruits [] . See on Jas 1:18. Omit become.

Compare Col 1:18, and see on Rev 1:5.

Fuente: Vincent’s Word Studies in the New Testament

ORDER OF THE RESURRECTION (Forlorn Hope of Heathen Religions)

1) “But now is Christ risen from the dead,” (nuni de egegertai ek nekron) “But now and henceforth forevermore, in time and eternity, has Christ been raised from among dead bodies.” The testamentary and experimental reality of the resurrection of Christ has now been established by Paul and he proceeds to declare to affirm the resurrection of all Christians.

2) “And become the firstfruits of them that slept.” (aparche ton kekoimemenon) -(as) firstfruit of the ones having fallen asleep, in death.” Christ arose not for an hermitage alone in glory, but as a firstfruit out of the resurrection harvest, a progressive raising of the righteous dead, 1Th 4:14-18; Rev 20:1-6. This perhaps refers to the first harvest sheaf, Lev 23:10; Mat 13:39; Rev 14:13-20; by Him shalI all of His own be brought to Him, in His order of the harvest.

Fuente: Garner-Howes Baptist Commentary

20. But now hath Christ risen. Having shown what dreadful confusion as to everything would follow, if we were to deny that the dead rise again, he now again assumes as certain, what he had sufficiently established previously — that Christ has risen; and he adds that he is the first-fruits, (48) by a similitude taken, as it appears, from the ancient ritual of the law. For as in the first-fruits the produce of the entire year was consecrated, so the power of Christ’s resurrection is extended to all of us — unless you prefer to take it in a more simple way — that in him the first fruit of the resurrection was gathered. I rather prefer, however, to understand the statement in this sense — that the rest of the dead will follow him, as the entire harvest does the first-fruits; (49) and this is confirmed by the succeeding statement.

(48) “Although the resurrection of Christ, compared with first-fruits of any kind, has very good harmony with them, yet it more especially agrees with the offering of the sheaf, commonly called עומר, omer, not only as the thing itself, but also as to the circumstances of the time. For first there was the passover, and the day following was a sabbatic day, and on the day following that, the first-fruits were offered. So Christ, our passover, was crucified: the day following his crucifixion was the Sabbath, and the day following that, he, the first-fruits of them that slept, rose again, All who died before Christ, and were raised again to life, died afterwards; but Christ is the first-fruits of all who shall be raised from the dead to die no more.” — Lightfoot. — Ed.

(49) “The first-fruits were by the command of God presented to him at a stated season, not only as a token of the gratitude of the Israelites for his bounty, but as an earnest of the approaching harvest. In this sense he is called the first-fruits of the dead. He was the first in order of time, for although some were restored to life by the Prophets, and by himself during his personal ministry, none came out of their graves to return to them no more till after his resurrection; and as he was the first in respect of time, so he was the first in order of succession; all the saints following him as the harvest followed the presentation of the first-fruits of the temple. The interval is long, and the dreary sterility of the grave might justify the thought, that the seed committed to it has perished for ever. But our hope rests upon his power, which can make the wilderness blossom as the rose; and we wait till heavenly influences descend as the dew of herbs, when the barren soil shall display all the luxuriance of vegetation, and death itself shall teem with life.” — Dick’s Theology, volume 4 — Ed.

Fuente: Calvin’s Complete Commentary

CRITICAL NOTES

1Co. 15:20. Hath.Emphasis here, not on now or Christ. Over against their doubts, and speculations, and impossibilities, Paul sets the one conclusive fact. Firstfruits.Read in the light of Rom. 11:16; Jas. 1:18; Rev. 14:4; Mat. 27:52-53. With a variant figure the thought is in Col. 1:18; Rev. 1:5.

1Co. 15:20-23. By man by man.Resurrection actually comes by man; we may almost say must so come, and so He became man. He the Judge also because the Son of Man (Joh. 5:27). All All.How wide is the second all? Is the verse to read,

(1) All (men) (we believers) all? Not exegetically very natural. Is it

(2) (We believers) all (we believers) all? True; but the first member of the sentence is narrower than the fact, and scarcely worthy of the race-wide view here taken of the two Adams and their connected posterities. Urged, from Augustine downwards, that Pauls argument throughout has only those in Christ in view [true]; that the Resurrection existence of these out of Him is never called life [true]; also that 1Co. 15:23 limits the argument to believers. The Greek fathers [Ellicott] read 1Co. 15:22 of physical quickening, and make the verse,

(3) All (men) all (men); and bring in the limitation of the scope at 1Co. 15:23. [One obvious qualification of all die is found in 1Th. 4:17.] [The great resurrection chapter is, as it were, an expansion of the Lords own word, Because I live, ye shall live also (Pope).] See Homiletic Analysis. The resurrection of the unsaved is asserted, on the highest authority, in Joh. 5:28-29.

1Co. 15:23. Order.Quite another detail as to order in the Resurrection is revealed in 1Th. 4:16-17 : first then. Order here is troop. The race defiles before us, an army in three divisions: First DivisionThe Lord (Heb. 12:2); Second DivisionThe Church of the Redeemed, some following Him already nearly two millenniums in the rear; Third DivisionThe rest of mankind (Evans). At His coming.Note the (exegetical) comma. See Appended Note.

1Co. 15:24. The end.Derived perhaps from Christs words, reported in Mat. 24:13. What [this] may signify cannot be determined; alii alia; in all likelihood the end is its own [and only] interpreter. So, wisely, Evans, who adds, with most: It seems probable that the kingship will be handed over by the Incarnate Son to Him who is God and Father; but the kingdom of His own founding, in its contents of citizens, Php. 3:10, will continue; so that His kingdom shall have no end (Dan. 7:13-14). The only expression about which there may reasonably be some doubt is kingdom. That it is more inclusive than the regnum grati in its ordinary acceptance, and that it may have some reference to the millennial kingdom, is probably to be inferred from the wide horizon of this holy revelation. This kingdom the Eternal Son delivers up to the Eternal Father, not as though He were Himself thereby divested of the kingdom, but as a sharer in it for evermore. (Ellicott.) Then viz. when,. (or, again) when. All the consecrated words re the Second Advent are found in 2Th. 1:7; 2Th. 2:17 : Parousia, Epiphany, Apocalypse. The kingdom.Rev. 19:15-16. Put down., abolished, as in 2Ti. 1:10 (A.V.). Not total destruction, but absolute subjugation. Favourite word of Pauls; nine times in this Epistle, with various shades of the one meaning: to reduce to such practical unimportance, or non-importance, that it may be left out of the account altogether. Rule, authority, power.Abstract, for personal concretes, as in Eph. 1:21; Eph. 3:10; Eph. 6:13; Col. 1:16; Rom. 8:38. He.Viz. Christ.

1Co. 15:25. He He.Christ the Father (1Co. 15:27, end).

1Co. 15:26.Observe the present tense of a dateless event that is, as it were, seen to be happening.

1Co. 15:27.Combine in exposition Psa. 2:6-9; Psa. 8:6; (Heb. 2:8); Psa. 110:1.; (Heb. 1:13); Mat. 22:44; Act. 2:34-35; (Psa. 45:6). Observe the margin, shall have said,a solemn announcement to the listening world, by God Himself, parallel to that of Pa. 1Co. 2:7-8, the decree of the Sons investiture with His mediatorial royalty.

1Co. 15:28. All in all.Cf. Col. 3:11, an anticipatory, suggestive fulfilment of the idea.

1Co. 15:29.Very obscure to us; obviously well known to, and understood by, the Corinthians. An ad homines argument entirely. Q.d. You deny or question the resurrection; I take you, then, on the ground of your own practice: why, then, do you baptize? etc. There is some patristic tradition, but of uncertain value even to the Fathers who report it, of a practice of baptizing a representative of a man who, as yet only a catechumen, had died without baptism, lest he should for want of it be lost. [Some say putting the living man under the bed, and letting him give answers to the usual questions, addressed to the corpse!] A question is raised whether this very expression of Pauls did not in some cases occasion such a practice. [Certainly no fair homiletic use is to be made of these words in any sense of appealing to the survivors in a Church to come forward and seek a new baptism of the Spirit, that they may fill the place, and do the work, of some who have died.]

1Co. 15:30.Another ad hominem (or ab homine) argument, but this time of abiding, real value. We.Primarily the apostles (2Co. 1:8-10; 2Co. 4:10, etc.); but all Christians, sooner or later, had a taste of peril.

1Co. 15:31. Your rejoicing.As text. Q.d. I say emphatically, brethrenand to you of whom I so constantly make my boast, should I be likely to say anything but what is the simple fact? You will believe meI die daily.

1Co. 15:32. After the manner of men.I.e. With no better hopes or prospect of the future, than natural men, and men without even the Gospel revelation, have when they endure risk, and face conflict and danger. The converse case is put in 1Co. 15:58, Wherefore, i.e. Seeing you have such hopes, etc. Fought with beasts.Cf. the unrecorded, perhaps identical, peril of 2Co. 1:8. All one word in Greek; no specialising of literal beasts, such as the English suggests: I was like a beast-fighting gladiator in an amphitheatre. [Precisely similar idealising of the fact in Psa. 22:11-13. Also, Ignatius writes of his guards (leopards, he calls them): All the way from Syria to Rome (on his way to martyrdom) did I beast-fight by land and sea.] Observe the varying connection by punctuation in A.V. and; either good, A.V. better. Quotation from Isa. 22:13, of Jerusalem profligacy when Sennacherib was at hand.

1Co. 15:33.Perhaps the fall into immorality in the Church at Corinth had been facilitated by a weakened faith in the Resurrection.

1Co. 15:34. Arouse yourselves, as if from the sleep after the orgies of Isa. 22:13, and show yourselves, and bear yourselves, righteously. Well expounded by 1Th. 5:2-8. I speak this, in order to your shaming. (So 1Co. 6:5.)

HOMILETIC ANALYSIS.1Co. 15:20-34

The Divine Goal of Creation History.

I. Contrasts.This section divides at 1Co. 15:29. In the one half and in the other we are at two levels, in two worlds. [Cf. Raphaels Transfiguration, where literal truth is sacrificed to the higher truth of the nearness and close relation between the upper, mountain-top world of calm, light, heaven, glory, and the lower world of scoffing Pharisees, bewildered disciples, and demon-possessed humanity.] In 1Co. 15:20-28 we are amongst the most sublime disclosures of all the Christian Scripturesdisclosures which with their very excess of glory almost cease to disclose anything. They are sublime almost to being obscure. The horizon is so bright, and the facts are so far away and so low down towards it, that we can scarcely make out anything. We hear such words as 1Co. 15:28; we repeat the words; but we can scarcely do more than let our hearts ponder, and reverently and soberly imagine; we can make nothing precise. Paul is borne up and along in soaring flights of confident strength, where we can hardly follow, even with our eyes. On the other hand, in 1Co. 15:29-34, we are on a very earthly level indeed. There is mystery here, but only such as wraps around an obscure, superstitious practice of a few half Christianised Corinthians. The rest is plain enough! A Paul in the midst of men who are like the very beasts of the amphitheatre. Corinthians sinking into a drunken sleep of unrighteousness, from which he seeks to awaken them to righteousness, or, at the least, to shame. [Such revelations to be first given to the world in a letter to such Christians! Kind to the unthankful and to the evil indeed (Luk. 6:35).] So near, also, are the two worlds always. The evil closely enfolds the holy. Or is it the holy which enfolds the evil? The salt isjust where it is wantedin the midst of what but for it would be corruption. We live in both worlds. In the seclusion of the mountain-top sometimes; oftener at the mountain-foot amongst the enemies and the demons, or in the arena amongst the beasts. Happy if the memories of the upper level are our strength down on the lower. Happy if such truths as are in 1Co. 15:20-28 may keep our souls from the infection of evil communications, or from the sleep of the intoxication of scepticism or sin. So, again, are the two worlds near together, the two levels not very remote, in the inner life of the soul. Glorious revelations; miserable superstitions. Soaring hopes of victories; battles for very life with the beast within our nature. Standing by the side of our Lord, with our foot placed where His has first been, on the neck of some foe of our souls Life; sinking into the perilous, criminal sloth or torpor induced by an atmosphere of evil communications. And thus we knit together the two ends of the paragraph. Now is Christ risen. Spite of all the theorisers and speculators and keen creators of insuperable difficulties, the fact is sure. Paul stands by the slothful, sleeping, drunken-souled Corinthians, and shouts his cry into the drowsy ear: Christ is risen! Do ye arise; awake; shake off your sleep; arouse yourselves and be righteous! Righteous! Why you are past shaming. You have not the knowledge of God. I.e. they are back again in, and of, the world which knew not God (1Co. 1:21). If Regeneration was an upward development, there has now been Degeneration; these men who knew God were only a variation wrought and sustained by Grace. They have now sinned against grace; in them nature has reverted to type. You have not the knowledge of God. [Observe the close connection between unrighteousness and the loss of the knowledge of God. Cf. Rom. 1:18-23.]

II. Christ.Like the Russians and Greeks on Easter morning, Paul is ready to go up and down, saying with a holy cheerfulness of salutation to every fellow-Christian, Brother, now is Christ risen! This is a perpetual Easter-morning age for the Church of the Risen Christ. Every Christian may look every other in the face with the glad cry, He is risen. But why should not He be simply treated as an isolated case? Why should we not believe in His rising, whilst disbelieving or doubting any other, or our own?

1. Because He is another AdamThe race is not made up of aggregated units. There is a solidarity in the history and fortunes of mankind. Contrast the angels. So far as we know, they are each one an independent creation; probably they have been contemporaries in age from the first; each living a natural life complete within itself, dependent only upon God. But any one generation of mankind owes life to the preceding, and these to another preceding them, and so on till Adam [= Adam + Eve] is reached. The angels are an aggregate of individuals only. Each might stand or fall alone. The human race is a unity; it is a tree, where branch springs out of branch in periodic succession. [It is a Vine, a wild vine.] The old theologians called this a federal principle. There is a law of dealing with great Unities in Gods administration of His rule over our race. Abraham means for some purposes Abraham and his descendants; Christ means Christ and His people; Adam stood for himself and mankind. And so the authorised, official, inspired, prophetic exposition of history here given makes it clear that the human race may be summarised in two Adams. Or, to change the aspect of the truth, without affecting its substance, there are two Mankinds, each with its Adam, each with its close-knit unity and continuity of life, each with its solidarity of history and fortunes. But the link which forms the unity is in the one case a physical derivation and succession, in the other a spiritual unity and succession. [A real sense in which the Christians of any one age are the descendants of, and owe their life to, those of the next, and all, preceding.] The first, dying Adam involved a race of natural descendants in his deathin all its senses. The Risen Adam includes in His resurrection victory another race in whom His Spirit is the link of continuous, corporate life, quickening even their mortal bodies. No man stands or falls alone; isolation, independence, is not the law of the history of Humanity. The Christ did not die or rise alone; that is not the law of the new Humanity, of which he is the new Adam. To change the figure again,

2. Because He is the Firstfruits of the harvest of rising humanity.Sown through long ages, in all nooks and corners of earths field. The field is full of its human seed. The seed is waiting for the touch of the Eternal Springtide. The call of Spring yearly awakens sleeping Nature into bud, and flower, and fruit, and harvest. That other Spring shall come with a trumpet call,

[Tuba mirum spargens sonum,

Per sepulchra regionum],

and every buried seed shall start forth into perfect and eternally mature life. The firstfruits says that there is a harvest behind; it promises a harvest; it pledges a harvest; it samples the following harvest; the offering of the firstfruits consecrates the coming harvest. [As in another application, the firstfruits of the week, the Sunday, is no quittance paid to God that then we may claim and use the six remaining for ourselves, as if our own. The firstfruits of the week thus given to Him acknowledge that all the days are His, all to be spent as He will approve, whilst He lends us six and keeps only one exclusively for Himself.]

3. Captain of a host.

(1) Heb. 2:10 [which is in closest connection with the quotation here given of Psa. 8:6] makes the perfection of our Captain to lie just here, that He is not isolated as He leads the host, but has been partaker with them of flesh and blood and sufferings. Else would they who follow look forward where their Chief precedes them with a feeling that the Captain knew nothing of the life of the common soldier, that He alone of all the great sacramental host had never known the fighting and the roughing of their lot. Here the partaking looks forward into the future. The great host defiles in glorious resurrection review; each company and rank passes in its order before the throne of God. (See the review illustration followed somewhat further in the Homiletic Analysis of whole chapter.)

(2) If no resurrection, it has been seen (1Co. 15:16-19) that, hoping to be partakers with Christ, we wake up to find ourselves partakers of nothing! No. Now is Christ risen, and we are partakers of His victory. Our resurrection is part of our victory. We rise, that so in that fact the finishing stroke may be given to the dominion of death over our redeemed human nature. A mortal body was the last fetter of death, the last token of our sometime bondage. We rise, that so the last fetter may be stricken off. No part of our nature, spirit, soul, body, that is not delivered. It is part of His victory. We now dare, every one of us, to put our foot on the neck of Goliath, when our David has first brought him down, and planted His victorious foot upon our foe and His. This particular victory is part of a larger victory, by which is regained a lost lordship belonging to mankind. In Psa. 8:6 the opened eye of the prophet sees into the heart of thingsinto the inner secret of the order of Creation as it existed in the mind of the Creator. The geological history of the earth leads up to an earth fitted to be mans home. A palontological history can be made out, whether it be an ideal sequence only, or an historical and physical one, leading up to man. And when the home was ready, and the tenant was ready, the investiture of occupancy ran, Let them have dominion, etc. (Gen. 1:8). Thus he who was the goal of all the earliest history, the climax (and indeed the summation) of all the series of animate creaturely structures, the crown of creation, was also its King. [Perhaps also its High Priest, voicing the praise, the thanksgiving, the prayers, of the mute, unintelligent creation, which found in Him a brain and a heart and a voice.] Yet even this royalty is not the thought of God in its furthest reach. We speak of ascending from this to a higher. Yet it would be the truer order to work backwards and downwards, from the higher to this; as God did. We ascend from the earliest creature-life to man, the ruler of all; nor do we stop there, but go forward and upward to the Son of Man. But though we reverently so shape our thought, God began there, began with Him. He is the mediation between God and the creature, between Spirit and Matter. He is the Link. In Him all things were created. Mans original royalty was but the adumbration of His. As the lower creatures had shadowed Man forth, so did he shadow the Son forth. After all, he was not the last link, but the last but one, in the chain which led up from some quasi-eozoic form to the Incarnate Son. [The Gospel is Creations order over again. All things mans. Man is Christs. Christ is Gods.] But sin entered. Creations course had so far gone true and straight to man; now, when it should have gone true and straight through him to God, it swerved aside and was sinfully deflected. The race missed its mark. The race no longer rose to the Son; the Sons garment of royalty no longer descended on man. But, ever since, slowly, piecemeal, has the lost dominion, the forfeited position, been recovered by all those who are in the Second Adam. The first note of the recovered victory is in the Protevangelion (Gen. 3:15); fulfilled most gloriously in the Wilderness and the Garden and at Calvary, no doubt; yet even there only anticipating the last crowning triumph of a long series of triumphs for our Captain. And with a heel sore wounded, very often does each Christian soldier step upon his foe and go on to conquer, with the heartening word ringing in his ears, God shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly (Rom. 16:20). There is an enemy within him, whose dominion is broken [in closest connection with his Lords resurrection once more (Rom. 6:10-11)]: Sin shall not have dominion over you (ib. 1Co. 15:14). The very world with all its trials, difficulties, opposition, is a subject thing to them who are in the Man Who has never lost, who has more abundantly fulfilled, the Royalty of Man. In jeopardy every hour; dying daily, yet all things work together for good to men. The world is under their feet. [Nor need there be hesitation in seeing more than merely the relics of the original dominion, but a real mediatorially-recovered dominion, in the growing mastery wielded by man over the physical forces of the natural world, subjecting all to his daily service. Certainly in the power of Christ over even His pre-resurrection body, making it vanish from amongst His foes or walk upon the waters,a power which was once even communicated to Peter,we get a little opening, giving us largest views into a world of vast, dim possibilities of the power of mans spirit, itself enfranchised from the dominion of sin, over even the material world.] There is a last enemy for him, as for the race,Death. Death is his (1Co. 3:22) already; it comes to him conquered by his Captain, and made to run on his Captains errand, and bear his Captains summons to him to a more glorious life. He is delivered from the bondage to its fear: the fear is put under his feet; when at last he meets it, he finds that he has but to deal with a stingless serpent, on whose head he can put his foot boldly. He is meeting nothing but the Shadow of a great Name, the Shadow of a great Dread, a thing whose substantial power is abolished, destroyed. And this detailed victory of His dying people, in succession, is part of His own (cf. Luk. 10:18), which by-and-by shall be consummated in one grand public demonstration of His triumph, in the day when even the very bodies of His people have deaths yoke struck off and death itself underfoot. All things under His feet.

III. Consummation.What is this end and the subjection of even the Son Himself? Answer as one did who was asked, What is heaven like? I will tell you when we meet there.

APPENDED NOTES

1Co. 15:23-24. The coming; the end.This coming of Christ is not, merely or exclusively, to establish His kingdom, but to judge the quick and the dead (compare 1Th. 2:19; 1Th. 3:13; 1Th. 4:15; 1Th. 5:23, al.). Whether any, and, if any, what interval is to be supposed to exist between this coming and the end of the following versein fact, between then and thenthe sober interpreter cannot presume even to attempt to indicate. This only may be said, that the language seems to imply a kind of interval; but that there is nothing in the particles or in the passage to warrant our conceiving it to be longer than would include the subjugation of every foe and every power of evil, and all that may be immediately associated with the mighty end which is specified in the succeeding verse. It must be carefully remembered that the Apostle is here dealing with a single subject, the resurrection of the dead, and not with the connected details of eschatology. These must be gathered from other passages and other portions of Scripture. The great difficulty in Christian eschatology is the exact position which all that is specified in Rev. 20:4 is to be supposed to hold in the sequences of the unfolding future. Perhaps all that can be safely said is, that neither here nor in 1Th. 4:16 does the Apostle preclude the conception of a resurrection of the just (compare Luk. 14:14)possibly gradual; that in some passages (consider Rom. 11:12-15) he does seem to have looked for a flowering time of the Church prior to the close of human history; and that here he distinctly implies a closing conflict with all the powers of evil (compare Rev. 20:7; Rev. 20:15) immediately prior to the end. That the millennial binding of Satan is to be dated from the death and resurrection of our Lord has been recently urged, but to the detriment, as it would seem, of the distinctive idea of the millennium.Bishop Ellicott.

1Co. 15:23. His coming.Parousia, indicating that when He comes He will always be present; the time of His absence will have passed away for ever. His presence, which will then be so different from what it is now that the change from the one to the other is no less than a coming again.Pope.

1Co. 15:24. The end.There will be an end and beginning of the Redeemers Kingdom, as it is a kingdom of grace translated into glory.

I. The mediatorial economy will cease in its relation to the Triune God; the redemptional Trinity which introduced the economy of subordination in the Two Persons will be again the absolute Trinity. The Son Incarnate will cease to mediate; as Incarnate He will be for ever subordinate, but there will be nothing to declare His subordination: no mediatorial rule over enemies, no mediatorial service or worship of His people. The Triune God will be seen by all mankind in the face of Jesus Christ, and the mediation of grace will become the mediation of glory. The Intercessor will pray for us no more, but will reveal the Father openly for ever. The prayer of our Lord (Joh. 17:21) will then have been fulfilled, one in Us. Man taken up into the Us of the Triune God will need a mediator no more.

II. The kingdom will cease because its ends will have been attained. Then cometh the end to the Father as the Representative of the Trinity; when He shall have put down. The process of His victories is declared in the Apocalypse: first and last, the Anti-Christ, which is a spirit of infidelity, Against Christ, having many forms, such as the Beast and the Man of Sin, and also a final personal manifestation; every description of heathenism to the ends of the earth; the corruption of Christianity, exhibited in Babylon and the Second Beast and the Harlot; and finally Death, the last enemy that shall be destroyed. In all these conflicts the Church is the fellowship of companions in tribulation, etc. (Rev. 1:9). We are one with our Lord, and He is one with us, in this progressive warfare and final victory. It is as Head over all things to the Church that the Redeemer exercises now and will end then His rule; nor is any other supression of authority alluded to than that which opposed the designs of His mediatorial kingdom. Moreover, there is nothing said of the destruction, only of the putting down of all hostile authority and power.

III. The kingdom will have a new beginning: new as the kingdom of the new heavens, etc. The Spirit of Christ will be the immanent bond between Him and us, between us and the Holy Trinity (1Co. 6:17). The Incarnate Person will then be glorified as never before; His personality as Divine will be no more veiled or obscured by any humiliation, nor will it be intermittently revealed. God shall be all in all, first in the Holy Trinity and then through Christ in us.Pope, Compend. of Theology, iii. 425, 426.

1Co. 15:27. He hath put all things under His feet.It has often been asked whether David, in ascribing such dignity as he here does to man, was speaking of man in his present condition, degraded from his supremacy by the fall, or of man as originally made in the image of God and gifted with dominion over the lower creation. Now the language of the Psalm certainly points to the present. There is no trait in it of any difference between mans original destiny and his present condition, between the ideal and the actual. Man is king of this lower world; though, because he has cast off his allegiance to the King of kings, his own subjects have renounced their allegiance to him, so that he rules by force, or manifold arts, rather than by right acknowledged and respected. But were there any higher thoughts in Davids mind? Was he thinking of man as redeemed and restored in the second Adam to his rightful supremacy? We, who read these words in the light of the Incarnation, may see in them a significance which to his own mind they would hardly have possessed. Twice in the New Testament passages of this Psalm are applied to Christ: once by St. Paul rather in the way of allusion than of direct quotation (1Co. 15:27), where he teaches that what was said by David of man is in its truest and highest sense applicable to Christ as the Great Head of Mankind; and, again, by the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews (1Co. 2:6-9), who, arguing that the words [of our verse] have not yet been literally fulfilled of man, declares that their proper fulfilment is to be seen only in Jesus crowned with glory and honour. He does not say that the Psalm is a direct prophecy of Christ; but he shows that mans destiny as depicted in the Psalm is not and cannot be accomplished out of Christ. He is the true Lord of all. In Him man recovers his rightful lordship, and shall really be in the new world of Redemption what now he is very imperfectly, Gods vicegerent ruling a subject creation in peace and harmony and love.Perowne, Psalms, Psalms 8.

[Much also of the following passage is illustrative of 1Co. 15:27 :] The use made of this Psalm in the Epistle to the Hebrews proceeds on the understanding that it describes ideal humanity. Where, then, says the writer of the Epistle, shall we look for the realisation of that ideal? Do not the grand words sound liker irony than truth? Is this poor creature that crawls about the world, its slave, discrowned and sure to die, the Man whom the Psalmist saw? No. Then was the fair vision a baseless fabric, and is there nothing to be looked for but a dreary continuance of such abortions dragging out their futile being through hopeless generations? No; the promise shall be fulfilled for humanity, because it has been fulfilled in one man, the Man Christ Jesus. He is the realised ideal, and in Him is a life which will be communicated to all who trust and obey Him, and they, too, will become all that God meant man to be. The Psalm was not intended as a prophecy, but every clear vision of Gods purpose is a prophecy, for none of His purposes remain unfulfilled. It was not intended as a picture of the Christ, but it is so; for He and He alone is the Man who answers to that fair Divine Ideal, and He will make all His people partakers of His royalty and perfect Manhood.Maclaren, Psalms, Expositors Bible.

Who does not know how the tone of evil has communicated itself? Worldly minds, irreverent minds, licentious minds, leaven Society. You cannot be long with persons who by innuendo, double meaning, or lax language show an acquaintance with evil, without feeling in some degree assimilated to them, nor can you easily retain enthusiasm for right amongst those who detract and scoff at goodness. None but Christ could remain with the impenitent and be untainted.Robertson, Expos. Lectures, on 1Co. 5:6.

SEPARATE HOMILIES

1Co. 15:33. Evil communications corrupt good manners.

I.

1. Hasty, crude thinking would say: But that is not Scripture, though it is in Scripture. That is a verse from a heathen poet; not an inspired saying at all. [As might similarly be said of the letter of Claudius Lysias (Act. 23:26-30).] But wherever an architect gets his materials, from whatever quarry he gets a stone, and whatever therefore be its varying quality or character, if he puts it into his building, he makes it his own. It becomes part of his embodiment of his design and idea. He is responsible for its selection and presence and use. He is the author of the whole structure and of every part of it, whether he obtained the constituent parts ready made to his hand and purpose, or had to find them in the rough and fashion them himself. This sentence, like the pillars of St. Sophia at Constantinople, the spoils of many more ancient temples, is fetched from another earlier building, where it had its fitness and its strength. This is a stone from a heathen quarry. But the wise builder, Paul, working at the growing, and nearly completed, structure of Revelation, under the direction of its Divine Architect works it into the fabric, and when it is once there the Directing Mind is responsible for it; He has made it His own; it serves His purpose of conveying with authority His mind and will to men. [No knowledgenot even of heathen proverbscomes amiss to a Christian teacher; everything may be made available. All the quarries, all the kingdoms, of the earth belong to our Christ. He will guide His servants how wisely to lay toll on them all!]

2. Whatever be its origin, the saying is truth. He who said it formulated the bitter experience of many a benevolent social reformer, of many a parent filled with the sorrow of hopes for his children blighted into worse than failure, of many an amiable theorist starting with some natural goodness of human nature, only to find that his theory is no cadre into which he can fit all the facts. [Take only a limited amount of mental luggage; pack away into the portmanteau of your theory just a few selected factsjust those you needand you may walk away comfortably, triumphantly, in your path of hope and endeavour. But] take entire, universal human nature; take entire, universal experiment and its results; and human nature is not to be trusted to love and follow and struggle for Good. It may approve it, applaud it, love it with a very platonic sort of devotion; but it is divided against itself, and what seems, unhappily, the stronger part gravitates too easily toward evil. There is not even an even balance; the scale turning for evil is loaded.

3. Classical literature has its many familiar confessions of the innate downward drag of human nature. Indeed, never had every experiment that man could suggest for mans elevation been more exhaustively tried, and with larger advantage of conditions for the experiment, than in Grecian and Roman society in the centuries just before Christ. Philosophy, art, government, material refinement, and cultured civilisation, had practically done all that has ever been possible to do; later ages scarcely do more than go the round of the old experiment; man had done his best for man; and the universal consent of those who know best the age of the world into which God thrust the leaven of the Gospel of Christ is that never was the failure more complete, never were the worlds manners more utterly and hopelessly corrupt. Every man who repeats the experiment upon himself comes at last to the same result, and to the same sorrowful confession (his pride may not always suffer him to make the avowal aloud), that man unaided by grace cannot keep man pure. He finds that human nature in itself has its affinities, toward evil, not good, nor God; that it has a ready assimilative power for evil; that the evil leaven soon enters, and spreads widely, whilst Gods leaven of a new life is slowly admitted, and finds resistance more probable than reception and assimilation. The dyers hand is subdued to what it works in.

4. Yet no man very readily believes in the affinity of human nature for, and its inclination toward, evil; in himself, at any rate. Or if he half admit this, he will not consent to count himself in peril. His unformulated, unspoken thought is that he, at all events, is independent of the influences of his surroundings; he can stand firm; he can keep himself from corruption. From gross and open acts of evil he perhaps may; force of character and of will, pride, shame, self-interest, and the like, may enable him to keep free from, or to break off, acts and open habits. But sin is deeper seated in his nature; its presence is more subtle in its diffusion; the susceptibility is throughout. The graver danger is from subtle and pervasive evil; sin is most dangerous where it is only an influence, an environment, always present, unceasing in its deleterious power. It is most perilous as an atmosphere producing a languor, a torpor toward good, and predisposing the enfeebled spiritual life to receive the infection of disease. It is oftener a poison in the cup than an open wound in the battle. It speaks fair, smooth things, when its communications are most full of corruption and deadly mischief. Man will not believe it of Man; the parent will not believe it of the nice child; the man will not believe it of himself, spite of many a sharp, disappointing, disheartening lesson. Paul says, Be not deceived. All the marvellous, fairytale records of modern science as to the assimilative powers of living things in the presence of any particular environment, have their analogies in the facts of the spiritual realm. As the surroundings suchnaturally, and but for the grace of Godis the man. As the man thinketh in his heart so is he, no doubt. The root of all evil character is ultimately within. But it may be held in check by a holy environment. Holy communicationsespecially between the soul and its Savioursanctify evil manners into good. But more commonly, and with greater facility, evil communications corrupt, etc. Let no man flatter himself that he shall be any exception. The best weapon of the adversary is the deceitfulness of sin (Heb. 3:13). Therefore

II. Mind what company you keep

1. No doubt the grace of God can keep Obadiah in a court where Jezebel is queen, and in a place where a Nero follows a Tiberius, a Caligula, a Claudius, saints may be found. But even these need to be on their strictest guard. The very physician who goes into the midst of spiritual disease needs to have a care of his own health. Only One Physician had absolute immunity from danger. [All who do rescue work should keep within a full spiritual vigour, a heart that hates even the garment spotted by the flesh (Jud. 1:23).] A Christian in worldly or distinctly evil company is a red-hot ball of iron in the midst of blocks of ice. No doubt he may melt them; there is grave danger lest they chill him.

2. For the average Christian; worldliness is a more real peril than open, shocking, repellent wickedness. It is also the more ordinary liability. The surface discrepancy between Christian and non-Christian is not perhaps great; non-Christian life is in many ways affected, shaped, restrained, by the moral standard obtaining, in a general way, in a Christian land. But there is a deep chasm of separation in all their underlying principles. The counsel of the non-godly can never coincide with the law of the Lord (Psalms 1) which is in the heart of the Christian man. Their lives may overlap, but they revolve in different circles, struck from distinct centres.

3. E.g. the whole standard according to which persons, motives, conduct, are habitually discussed and estimated in the home, is according to man, not according to God. God is not in all their thoughts; they may formulate no system of morals and philosophy, but their ethics of business and their view of life in the daily talk at the table and around the fire are practically without God. The interests consulted for, and by which are regulated the planning and execution of their life-work, lie within the narrow range of the horizon of the earthly life; they know, and care to know, nothing of the readjustment of values and proportions which is inevitable as soon as life is seen running on in unbroken continuity into an eternal duration. E.g. in the education of their children, or their placing out in life, in their marriages, the soul and its interests have no consideration given to them; society interests, good prospects, natural congeniality and affectionhowever high and worthy the type of these may beare all. The Christian visitor in such a home is struck, not so much by what is said or done, but rather by what he misses from the customary talk and action and judgments of the family. They are on another, a lower, plane; they are in in closest daily association with him; but they and he live in different worlds of thought and feeling and judgment.

4. He may endure as seeing Him Who is invisible (Heb. 11:27). If he begin each day by getting into very real rapport with the Unseen, and if, by often intercourse with it during the progress of the hours, he keep his windows open towards itkeep the eyesight of his soul keen and clear to see ithe may pass through unharmed. But the danger for the young, of half-formed principles, or of no definite principles whatever, is that their world should contract to the narrow limits of that of those around them; that their eye should lose its keenness of vision, or that the worlds smoke and mists should besmirch their windows until they cannot see out into the Infinite, nor can the world of the Infinities, the Eternities, the Divinities, reach through to them. The danger is that the standard of judgment, the scales by which they weigh persons, character, motives, aims, should receiveby slight, but continually repeated contacts and impressionsan unhappy, ungodly adjustment. It is natural, and far easier, by little and little to fall into worldling ways of thinking and speaking and action, more than the Christian man is aware; until one day some sudden arrest of circumstance, or some more glaring, startling discrepancy between the worldly and the godly habit and standard, pulls him up, and reveals to him how far he has travelled, and how widely he has diverged from the love of the law of God and of the ethics of the Gospel of Christ. To the Christian man, who of necessity must spend much of his time with the people of the world, the text comes as a warning lest his spirit catch the infection of their spirit, lest with a fatal plasticity his conscience take their impress and mould. He must keep the resilience, the resistant power, the rigidity, which comes of indwelling grace. Be not deceived; do not be liberal, broad, till you become a true worldling in temper and spirit and habit and judgment. Evil communicationsnot least the daily talk (); which goes on around you, in the office, in the street, in the housecorrupt good manners! (See Appended Note from Robertson.)

III. Mind what books yon read, and what literature.

1. In a word, mind the mental companionships you form, or allow to yourself. Openly vicious literature will scarcely come in the way of the bulk of decent, ordinary English people. If it did, the first dose would probably create nausea and moral revulsionthough, unhappily, even this may pass away with use. Here again the peril is rather from the literature which the Christian instinct does not so much condemn for what is present as for what is missing. The literature of the world, at its best, says in its heart, No God.
2. The Puritan code and the practice of the men and women of all the Churches which felt, and still feel, the impress of the Evangelical revival of the eighteenth century, were strict, narrowfor themselves and for those whose opinions and habits they could controlin the range of literature they permitted for ordinary reading. They found that to glorify their God below and find their way to heaven [by no means forgetting that, whilst the living stream is making its pure, bright way to the Ocean, it needs to be, and cannot help being, a joy and a blessing to all the dwellers along its banks and course] needed all their best energies and all the help they could obtain. At their best, the novel, the play, most of the poetry, of their day demanded the time and gave no help. Their intensely serious view of life was the basis of adjustment for all their standard of permission and perusal. The very newspaper was often looked at askance. The reaction is upon us, in our time, and is carrying Christian people quite far enough in the direction of freedom. All the fields of literature are not full of food-bearing, health-producing growth; yet the tendency is to throw them open to the free range of even the youngest, most inexperienced readers. And without keeping up the old strictness of prohibition, the Christian readers of to-day need to hear, Be not deceived, evil communications, etc.
3. In fiction, for example, the social code, the valuation of men and character, is seldom that of the New Testament; in some, widely read and favourably reviewed, it is hardly Ten Commandment morality. The masters of fiction, or the great playwrights, are not found working on distinctively Christian lines; they never have done. The relations between man and woman in (say) a masterpiece of art like Middlemarch are not according to Christs law. Vanity Fair is drawn by one who is himself a stall-holder in the Fairso far as its code for character shows. The Christian of strong, spiritual instincts, in whom is answered the prayer of Php. 1:9-11, is not at home in his mental company, as he reads. He is in continual mental and heart protest against what they say and do, and still more against their principles of action and judgment. And the danger is analogous to that of actually living in such an atmosphere and such company; the danger of adjustment little by little, of assimilation by almost imperceptible degreesonly recognisable in their total resultto the standards and practice and heart of those around him. [Some (poets) will tune their harps to sensual pleasures, and by the enchantment of their genius will well-nigh commend their unholy themes to the imagination of saints (Edward Irving, Div. Oracles, Oration I.).]

4. Most of the reviewing press, most of the influential literary judgment, is at its best non-Christian in its motives and its standards of appeal. The younger, the unstable, the ill-instructed Christian reader needs be on his guard, lest he be deceived; lest he be swept away by the strong set of the prevalent current into habits of judgment and esteem which would not be those of life in Christ. Beauty, masterly workmanship, in art or poetry must not excuse or glorify moral evil. To a Christian instinct art cannot be non-moral; as a fact, it is not. The master-workman of the modern world, Goethe, is a great heathen. Shakespeare, colossal in his power, embodies, like his mistress Elizabeth [see Green, History of the English People, ii. 499, a brilliant, fanciful, unscrupulous child of earth and of the Renaissance], the spirit and code, not of the Reformation, but of the Renaissance, in his attitude towards the moralities; it needs a strong, clear, healthy, spiritual tone to read him without some moral soil, and even some of the insensible mental adjustment which is the great peril. The young heart needs to read with Pauls caution even in the ears, Evil communications, etc. Breadth, liberality, which cultivates toleration, indifference to all such aspects of literature, and appreciates and approves all equally if only power be there,these belong to a life which lives and moves in another world than that which is circumscribed by the sacred limit: in Christ. The man in Christ needs in even his mental companionships to be on his strictest guard when he passes into the world beyond. It is apt to be corrupt and corrupting. [Similarly the evolutionary exposition of the facts of the natural world has so got possession of the press, emphemeral and more permanent alike; has so got current in the speech and thought of the leaders of the mind of the world to-day; has so boldly been carried through as a working explanation of the facts dealt with in mental and moral science; that it is difficult not to escape the infection of what, in its extremest interpreters, is a materialism without a God; difficult to come back to, and keep, ones position at the Great Teachers feet, making His words, My Father worketh hitherto, the key to ones interpretation and system of Nature. Facts are welcome, whoever discovers, reports, systematises them. The interpretation of the facts needs watching lest it corrupt the habitual, instinctive thought of the heart, which like Christ sees a world whose laws are simply Gods rules for His own ordinary, orderly action and government; whose Force is ultimately will forcethat of His will; a world full of a personal God.]

Fuente: The Preacher’s Complete Homiletical Commentary Edited by Joseph S. Exell

(20) But now . . .From the hopeless and ghastly conclusion in which the hypothetical propositions of the previous verse would logically land us, the Apostle turns, with the consciousness of truth, to the hopeful faith to which a belief in the resurrection leads. It cannot be so. Now is Christ risen from the dead. And that is no isolated fact. As the firstfruits were typical of the whole harvest (Lev. 23:10-11), so is Christ. He rose, not to the exclusion but to the inclusion of all Humanity. If St. Paul wrote this Epistle about the time of Passover (see Introduction, and 1Co. 5:6; 1Co. 16:8), the fact that the Paschal Sabbath was immediately followed by the day of offering of firstfruits may have suggested this thought.

Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)

3. Reaffirmation of Christ’s resurrection, and statement of the place of the resurrection in the divine system, 20-28.

This sublime passage, preceded by 2Th 1:10, and followed by 1Co 15:51-57 of this chapter, forms a part of what we may call the Apocalypse of St. Paul. It differs from that of St. John as being briefer and more literal; and, because it is more literal, John is to be explained by Paul rather than Paul by John.

Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

20. But now After all these denials.

Is Christ risen Reaffirmed with sublime emphasis.

Firstfruits According to the Mosaic ritual the first product of the year from field, vineyard, etc., was sacred, and offered unto God. So Christ, as the first raised from the dead to die no more, was the firstfruits of the universal resurrection. Others, like Lazarus and the son of the widow of Nain, were raised from death; and that raising is called, in verb form, a resurrection; but they were raised in mortal body to die again. Their raising was no part of the organic universal resurrection. Christ was the first who went from the tomb to heaven.

Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Christ’s Death And Resurrection Has Cancelled Out Adam’s Failure So That Triumph Is Assured (15:20-28)

‘But now has Christ been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those that are asleep.’

Having established his position Paul announces his conclusion triumphantly. ‘Now has Christ been raised from the dead.’ He has risen and He is the firstfruits of those who sleep, those who are dead in Christ. That is why they only sleep and will one day wake to eternal life beyond the grave. The firstfruits were the first growth that announced that the harvest was coming, and Christ’s resurrection is the guarantee of the full-scale resurrection of all God’s people.

So the resurrection of Christ is not only a glory in itself, it is the precursor of all that inevitably follows. Once Christ has risen the rest is guaranteed. He is the firstfruits. the final resurrection and triumph is the harvest that is sure to follow, until God is all in all.

Fuente: Commentary Series on the Bible by Peter Pett

A victorious line of argument:

v. 20. But now is Christ risen from the dead and become the First-fruits of them that slept.

v. 21. For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead.

v. 22. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.

v. 23. But every man in his own order: Christ the First-fruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at His coming.

v. 24. Then cometh the end, when He shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when He shall have put down all rule and all authority and power.

v. 25. For He must reign till He hath put all enemies under His feet.

v. 26. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.

v. 27. For He hath put all things under His feet. But when He saith, All things are put under Him, it is manifest that He is excepted which did put all things under Him.

v. 28. And when all things shall be subdued unto Him, then shall the Son also Himself be subject unto Him that put all things under Him, that God may be all in all.

In contrast with the deplorable results which would follow from the supposition as held by the ignorant deniers of the resurrection of the body, Paul now triumphantly sets before his readers the fact of the resurrection and its glorious consequences. If Christ had not risen, all the disastrous events must have followed as a matter of course. But as matters now stand, if we look at the situation as it really exists: Christ has been raised from the dead as a First-fruit of them that sleep. The fact of His resurrection is beyond doubt and dispute, is, in fact, not called into question even by those Corinthian Christians that hold a wrong view with regard to this doctrine. And thereby Christ is set forth before us as the First-fruits, the first offering, of the new harvest, Lev 23:10, a sign and token that the entire harvest is sanctified to the Lord. He was the first dead person to lay aside all mortality and to assume a spiritual body which would not be subject to death in all eternity. And so they that fell asleep in Christ in the hope of eternal life will also arise from the dead; the first harvest-sheaf will be followed by all the other sheaves; the bodies of all the believers will lay aside mortality; consecrated to God as they are, they will become partakers of that same spirituality, Col 1:18; Rev 1:5.

The apostle explains how this result has been brought about: For since through a man is death, also through a man is resurrection of the dead. A man, Adam, was the means, the instrument, by which death entered into the world. He ate of the forbidden fruit and thus caused the curse of God to take effect; he subjected mankind to physical death. On the other hand, through man also is the resurrection of the dead; Jesus, true man, by His resurrection has broken the ban of death, has become the first one of a new mankind over which death has no more power, Rom 6:9. For just as in the Adam, in that one man representing the entire world of men, all men die, so also in the Christ, in the promised Messiah, all will be made alive. As death in all cases is grounded in Adam, so life in all cases is grounded in Christ. As in Adam all die that pertain to Adam, that are sinful human beings, so in Christ all will be made alive that are Christ’s by faith in Him.

The nature of the resurrection will be the same, but there will be a distinction of order or rank: But each in his own rank, in his proper order Christ the First-fruits, then those that belong to Christ, at His coming. This statement is intended to remove an objection which men might make by pointing to the fact that the believers in Christ are lying in their graves by the side of those that were subject to death on account of the curse which came upon the world in Adam. Paul simply says that the Lord is observing a due order according to His plan. Christ, as the First-fruits, has entered into the fullness of life, has in His human nature assumed immortality, an incorruptible body. And those that belong to Christ by faith will enter into that same glorious state when He returns on the last great day.

When Christ thus comes, then is the end; His return for the final judgment means the conclusion of the world’s history, when He delivers up the kingdom to His God and Father, when He has put down and abolished every rule and every authority and every power. Christ is now the King in the Kingdom of Power and in the Kingdom of Grace. And He is performing the duties of this office continually; He is adding further souls to His Kingdom of Grace, He is making intercession for those that have been admitted under His rule by faith. This work of mercy continues to the last day, when the history of this present world will come to an end, when the last elect will be added to the number fixed by the Lord. By that time also He will abolish all the forces of evil that oppose His work of grace, no matter how firmly fixed their rule, no matter how extensive their authority, no matter how great their power seems to be at the present time. And then Christ will lay at His Father’s feet the kingdom; that will be the end of the Kingdom of Grace, since the Church Militant on that day will be changed to the Church Triumphant, and the Kingdom of Glory will have its beginning. This is no ceasing of Christ’s rule, but the inauguration of God’s eternal kingdom; as the victorious Prince of Life He lays the spoils, the power and reign of all His enemies, at the feet of the Father, and then proceeds with the Father, in perfect unity of essence, to reign to all eternity. So far as the present world, the present period of time, is concerned, Christ must needs reign until He has placed all His enemies underneath His feet, Psa 110:1. Satan, the arch-enemy of Christ, and all the powers allied with him in opposition to God, must be brought to the most perfect subjection, to the deepest humiliation. The last enemy that shall be rendered absolutely powerless, whose rule shall be taken from him, is death: death is the last enemy to meet his doom. When the resurrection is complete on the last day, the power of death will be forever annulled, there will no longer be such a thing as dying or as being dead; Satan’s last bulwark will be destroyed after he has given up his arms. It is a shout of victory which the apostle here utters as he reaches the climax of this passage.

The unlimited dominion which will belong to Christ by the removal of all His enemies is finally pictured: For “all things He put underneath His feet. ” But when He says, “All things are subjected,” obviously with the exception of Him that put all things in subjection to Him, when all things will have been made subject to Him, then also the Son Himself will subject Himself to Him (the Father) that has subjected all things to Him (the Son), that God may be all in all. The apostle here applies the words of Psa 8:6 to Jesus, the Man above all men. See Eph 1:22. God gave to Christ, according to His human nature, power and dominion over all things, subjected everything to His will. So absolute and all-encompassing is this “all” that only the Father Himself is excepted, since His is the unlimited supremacy. And incidentally the Son will then subject Himself to the Father, not as subordinated to Him in essence, but in the free submission of love. In all the works of His office as Redeemer, He was loyal to His Father in perfect obedience, and now the Son, in His Sonship, subjects Himself to His Father, as Father, that God may be all, the one object of praise, glory, and adoration, in all, the believers giving Him the joyful reverence of their blessedness, and the unbelievers and all other creatures bowing before Him as the supreme Lord. Mark: These words in no way teach the inferiority of the Son to the Father in essence: on the contrary, the absolute unity in the distinction of persons stands out all the more clearly and conspicuously. Whatsoever glory the Son has gained is devoted to the glory and power of the Father, who, in turn, glorifies the Son. See 1Co 3:22; 1Co 11:3.

Fuente: The Popular Commentary on the Bible by Kretzmann

1Co 15:20. But now is Christ risen, &c. It is a great mistake to imagine that the Apostle is employed throughout this chapter in proving a resurrection: the proof lies in a very narrow compass, chiefly from 1Co 15:12-19 and almost all the rest of the chapter is taken up in illustrating, vindicating, or applying it. The proof is, indeed, very short, but most solid and convincing;that which arose from Christ’s resurrection. Now that not only proved a resurrection to be in fact possible, but, which was much more, as it proved Christ to be a divine teacher, it proved the doctrine of a general resurrection, which he so expressly taught. It was natural too for so good a man as St. Paul to insist on the sad consequences which would follow, with respect to himself and his brethren, from giving up so glorious a hope; and the cordial manner in which he speaks of this, is a noble internal argument, which every reader of sensibility must feel. Instead ofbecome the first fruits of them that slept, some render the passagethe first fruits of them that are fallen asleep. The first fruits was a small part, first taken and offered to God, and which sanctified the whole mass that was to follow. See on 1Co 15:18.

Fuente: Commentary on the Holy Bible by Thomas Coke

1Co 15:20 . No, we Christians are not in this unhappy condition; Christ is risen, (guarantee) , Theodoret. Several interpreters (Flatt, comp. Calvin on 1Co 15:29 ) have wrongly regarded 1Co 15:20-28 as an episode. See on 1Co 15:29 .

] jam vero, but now, as the case really stands . Comp. 1Co 13:13 , 1Co 14:6 , al.

.] as first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep , predicative more precise definition to , inasmuch as He is risen from the dead. Comp. as regards used of persons , 1Co 16:15 ; Rom 16:5 ; Jas 1:18 ; Plutarch, Thes . 16. The meaning is: “Christ is risen, so that thereby He has made the holy beginning of the general resurrection of those who have fallen asleep” (comp. 1Co 15:23 ; Col 1:18 ; Rev 1:5 ; Clement, Cor. 1Co 1:24 ). Whether in connection with Paul was thinking precisely of a definite offering of first-fruits as the concrete foil to his conception (comp. Rom 11:16 ), in particular of the sheaves of the Paschal feast, Lev 23:10 (Bengel, Osiander, and others), must, since he indicates nothing more minutely, remain undecided. The genitive is partitive . See on Rom 8:23 .

That by . we are to understand believers , is to be inferred both from the word itself, which in the New Testament is always used only of the death of the saints, and also from the fellowship with Christ denoted by . And in truth what is conceived of is the totality of departed believers, including, therefore, those too who shall still fall asleep up to the Parousia, and then belong also to the (the sleeping); see 1Co 15:23 . This does not exclude the fact that Christ is the raiser of the dead also for the unbelieving ; He is not, however, their ; but see on 1Co 15:22 . That those, moreover, who were raised before Christ and by Christ Himself (as Lazarus), also those raised by apostles, do not make the . untrue, is clear from the consideration that no one previously was raised to immortal life (to ); while Enoch and Elias (Gen 5:24 ; 2Ki 2:11 ) did not die at all. Christ thus remains , Act 26:23 . But the allows us to look from the dawn of the eschatological order of salvation, as having taken place already, to the certainty of its future completion. Luthardt says well: “The risen Christ is the beginning of the history of the end.”

Fuente: Heinrich August Wilhelm Meyer’s New Testament Commentary

(20) But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept. (21) For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. (22) For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. (23) But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming.

The Apostle having refuted all that the mistaken views of men would have formed to themselves, on the presumption that there was no resurrection, now comes to his favorite topic, to show the blessedness which ariseth, it, the unanswerable conviction that there is. And, he proceeds to make it appear, and more or less, from this place to the close of the chapter, he dwells with rapture in the contemplation, that, in the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, the Church not only behold him as risen, but in that glorious capacity, as the Head and forerunner of every individual of his people. For, saith Paul, he is become the first fruits of them that slept. As the first sheaf in the field, in the reaping season, soonest ripe, soonest gathered, and first brought in, is but the pledge and earnest of all that is to follow; so Christ the first in resurrection, for it behoved him in all things to have the preeminence, Col 1:18 ) is but as that pure corn of wheat which fell into the ground, which by dying, bringeth forth much fruit. See Joh 12:24 and Commentary.

I beg the Reader to admire with me the unanswerable and striking allusion, which Paul makes, by way of illustrating the doctrine of death and the resurrection, in the case of the two Adams. One involving the whole generation in death, by sin, the other including by regeneration all his in life. By man came death, by man came life. In Adam all die, in Christ shall all be made alive. And the reasoning is unanswerable. There is a vast propriety in it.; For if I, a poor sinner, am involved in sin, and all the consequences of sin, by reason of my being born from the seed and race of Adam; so by a parity of reason, it is but just, that I should be included in righteousness, even the righteousness of our Lord Jesus Christ, in being born of his seed, and being descended from Him. And so I am, if I can prove my relationship to the one, as I do to the other. And here lies the great point of decision. Now I, and every sinner, most fully prove, that we are of the Adam-race of sin, being evidently born of his corrupt stock, sinning, as he sinned, and feeling the consequence of it, as he felt. The question is, can I prove that I am of the seed of Christ, in being new-born in Christ, and made the child of God by adoption and grace? This is the ground of the Apostle’s reasoning, and most answerable it is in proof. For, as I never should have been involved, either in the sin or condemnation of Adam, had I not been proved to have been his by generation; so, by the like proof, unless I have testimony that I am Christ’s by regeneration, I cannot lay claim to all the blessed consequences which result wholly from this source, . Let the Apostle’s words be weighed in this standard, and the judgment must be without error. As in Adam all die, in Christ shall all be made alive.

Fuente: Hawker’s Poor Man’s Commentary (Old and New Testaments)

20 But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept.

Ver. 20. The firstfruits, &c. ] As in the firstfruits offered to God, the Jews were assured of God’s blessing on the whole harvest; so by the resurrection of Christ, our resurrection is insured.

Christ is risen ] This was wont to be the form of salutation among Christians of old, Christus resurrexit, Christ is risen from the dead.

Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)

20 28 .] Reassertion of the truth that Christ IS RISEN from the dead, and prophetic exposition of the consequences of that great event .

Fuente: Henry Alford’s Greek Testament

20. ] , ‘as matters now stand:’ see reff. [and note.]

. . .] ( as ) (the) first-fruit of them that sleep (anarthrous, because categorematical). For the construction Meyer compares Eur. Or. 1098: , . The sense is, ‘Christ, in rising from the dead, is but the firstling or earnest of the resurrection of the whole number of those that sleep.’ There does not appear to be any intended reference to the legal ordinance of the first-fruits ( Lev 23:10-11 ): but however general the application of the analogy may be, it can hardly fail to have been suggested to the mind of a Jew by the Levitical ordinances, especially as our Lord rose on the very morrow after the Paschal Sabbath, when (l. c.) the first-fruits were offered.

, from the logical connexion, should mean, not the dead in Christ , but all the dead ; see next verse: but it is the Christian dead who are before the Apostle’s mind, when he calls our risen Lord .

Fuente: Henry Alford’s Greek Testament

1Co 15:20-28 . 52. THE FIRSTFRUIT OF THE RESURRECTION AND THE HARVEST. Paul has proved the actuality of Christ’s personal resurrection by the abundant and truthful testimony to the fact (1Co 15:5-15 ), and by the experimental reality of its effects (1Co 15:17 ). In 1Co 15:20 a he therefore amrms it unconditionally, having overthrown the contrary assertion that “there is no resurrection of the dead.” But Christ never stands alone; He forms “a body” with “many members” (1Co 12:12 ); He is “firstborn among many brothers” (Rom 8:29 , Col 1:18 , Joh 15:5 , etc.). His rising shows that bodily resurrection is possible; nay, it is inevitable for those who are in Him ( 1Co 15:18 ; 1Co 15:20 b , 1Co 15:23 ). In truth, the universal redemption of Christ’s people from the grave is indispensable for the realisation of human destiny and for the assured triumph of God’s kingdom (1Co 15:24-28 ). The Ap. thus advances from the experimental ( 51) to the theological proof of his theorem, much as in Rom 5:1-21 .

Fuente: The Expositors Greek Testament by Robertson

1Co 15:20 . ( cf. 1Co 12:18 ) marks the logical point P. has reached by the reductio ad impossibile of the negative proposition attacked in 1Co 15:12 . Christ has been raised; therefore there is a resurrection of the dead (1Co 15:12-18 ): “now” the ground is cleared and the foundation laid for the declaration that the Christian dead shall rise in Him “Christ has been raised from the dead, a firstfruit of them that have fallen asleep ”; He has risen in this character and purpose, “not to remain alone in his estate of glory”(Gd [2335] ). (pf. of abiding state: cf. Joh 11:11 f., Mat 27:52 ) = , and (Col 1:18 , Rev 1:5 ). Cm [2336] and Bg [2337] are surely right in seeing here an allusion to the first harvest-sheaf ( , Lev 23:10 : cf. in this connexion Mat 13:39 ff. with Joh 5:28 f. and Rev 14:14 ff.) of the Passover, which was presented in the Sanctuary on the 16th Nisan, probably the day of the resurrection of Jesus; this allusion is in the Easter strain of 1Co 5:6 ff. (see notes). The first ripe sheaf is an earnest and sample of the harvest, consecrated to God and laid up With Him ( cf. Rom 6:10 f.) in anticipation of the rest. The Resurrection has begun.

[2335] F. Godet’s Commentaire sur la prem. p. aux Corinthiens (Eng. Trans.).

[2336] John Chrysostom’s Homili ( 407).

[2337] Bengel’s Gnomon Novi Testamenti.

Fuente: The Expositors Greek Testament by Robertson

1 Corinthians

THE DEATH OF DEATH

THE CERTAINTY AND JOY OF THE RESURRECTION

1Co 15:20 .

The Apostle has been contemplating the long train of dismal consequences which he sees would arise if we only had a dead Christ. He thinks that he, the Apostle, would have nothing to preach, and we, nothing to believe. He thinks that all hope of deliverance from sin would fade away. He thinks that the one fact which gives assurance of immortality having vanished, the dead who had nurtured the assurance have perished. And he thinks that if things were so, then Christian men, who had believed a false gospel, and nourished an empty faith, and died clinging to a baseless hope, were far more to be pitied than men who had had less splendid dreams and less utter illusions.

Then, with a swift revulsion of feeling, he turns away from that dreary picture, and with a change of key, which the dullest ear can appreciate, from the wailing minors of the preceding verses, he breaks into this burst of triumph. ‘Now’-things being as they are, for it is the logical ‘now,’ and not the temporal one-things being as they are, ‘Christ is risen from the dead, and that as the first fruits of them that slept.’

Part of the ceremonial of the Passover was the presentation in the Temple of a barley sheaf, the first of the harvest, waved before the Lord in dedication to Him, and in sign of thankful confidence that all the fields would be reaped and their blessing gathered. There may be some allusion to that ceremony, which coincided in time with the Resurrection of our Lord, in the words here, which regard that one solitary Resurrection as the early ripe and early reaped sheaf, the pledge and the prophecy of the whole ingathering.

Now there seem to me, in these words, to ring out mainly two things-an expression of absolute certainty in the fact, and an expression of unbounded triumph in the certainty of the fact.

And if we look at these two things, I think we shall get the main thoughts that the Apostle would impress upon our minds.

I. The certainty of Christ’s Resurrection.

‘Now is Christ risen,’ says he, defying, as it were, doubt and negation, and basing himself upon the firm assurance which he possesses of that historical fact. ‘Ah!’ you say, ‘seeing is believing; and he had evidence such as we can never have.’ Well! let us see. Is it possible for us, nineteen centuries nearly after that day, to catch some echo of this assured confidence, and in the face of modern doubts and disbeliefs, to reiterate with as unfaltering assurance as that with which they came from his glowing lips, the great words of my text? Can we, logically and reasonably, as men who are guided by evidence and not by feeling, stand up before the world, and take for ours the ancient confession: ‘I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried. The third day He rose again from the dead’ ? I think we can.

The way to prove a fact is by the evidence of witnesses. You cannot argue that it would be very convenient, if such and such a thing should be true; that great moral effects would follow if we believed it was true, and so on. The way to do is to put people who have seen it into the witness-box, and to make sure that their evidence is worth accepting.

And at the beginning of my remarks I wish to protest, in a sentence, against confusing the issues about this question of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ in that fashion which is popular nowadays, when we are told that miracle is impossible, and therefore there has been no Resurrection, or that death is the end of human existence, and that therefore there has been no Resurrection. That is not the way to go about ascertaining the truth as to asserted facts. Let us hear the evidence. The men who brush aside the testimony of the New Testament writers, in obedience to a theory, either about the impossibility of the supernatural, or about the fatal and final issues of human death, are victims of prejudice, in the strictest meaning of the word; and are no more logical than the well-known and proverbial reasoner who, when told that facts were against him, with sublime confidence in his own infallibility, is reported to have said, ‘So much the worse for the facts.’ Let us deal with evidence, and not with theory, when we are talking about alleged facts of history.

So then, let me remind you that, in this chapter from which my text is taken, we have a record of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, older than, and altogether independent of, the records contained in the gospels, which are all subsequent in date to it; that this Epistle to the Corinthians is one of the four undisputed Epistles of the Apostle, which not the most advanced school of modern criticism has a word to say against; that, therefore, this chapter, written, at the latest, some seven and twenty years after the date of the Crucifixion, carries us up very close to that event; that it shows that the Resurrection was universally believed all over the Church, and therefore must have then been long believed; that it enables us to trace the same belief as universal, and in undisputed possession of the field among the churches, at the time of Paul’s conversion, which cannot be put down at much more than five or six years after the Crucifixion, and that so we are standing in the presence of absolutely contemporaneous testimony. This is not a case in which a belief slowly and gradually grew up. Whether we accept the evidence or not, we are bound to admit that it is strictly contemporaneous testimony to the fact of Christ’s Resurrection.

And the witnesses are reliable and competent, as well as contemporaneous. The old belief that their testimony was imposture is dead long ago; as, indeed, how could it live? It would be an anomaly, far greater than the Resurrection, to believe that these people, Mary, Peter, John, Paul, and all the rest of them, were conspirators in a lie, and that the fairest system of morality and the noblest consecration that the world has ever seen, grew up out of a fraud, like flowers upon a dunghill. That theory will not hold water; and even those who will not accept the testimony have long since confessed that it will not. But the Apostle, in my context, seems to think that that is the only tenable alternative to the other theory that the witnesses were veracious, and I am disposed to believe that he is right. He says, ‘If Christ be not risen, then, are we’ the utterly impossible thing of ‘false witnesses to God,’ devout perjurers, as the phrase might be paraphrased: men who are lying to please God. If Christ be not risen, they have sworn to a thing that they know to be untrue, in order to advance His cause and His kingdom. If that theory be not accepted, there is no other about these men and their message that will hold water for a minute, except the admission of its truth.

The fashionable modern one, that it was hallucination, is preposterous. Hallucinations that five hundred people at once shared! Hallucinations that lasted all through long talks, spread at intervals over more than a month! Hallucinations that included eating and drinking, speech and answer; the clasp of the hand and the feeling of the breath! Hallucinations that brought instruction! Hallucinations that culminated in the fancy that a gathered multitude of them saw Him going up into heaven! The hallucination is on the other side, I think. They have got the saddle on the wrong horse when they talk about the Apostolic witnesses being the victims of hallucination. It is the people who believe it possible that they should be who are so. The old argument against miracles used to say that it is more consonant with experience that testimony should be false, than that a miracle should be true. I venture to say it is a much greater strain on a man’s credulity, to believe that such evidence is false than that such a miracle, so attested, is true. And I, for my part, venture to think that the reasonable men are the men who listen to these eye-witnesses when they say, ‘We saw Him rise’; and echo back in answer the triumphant certitude, ‘Christ is risen indeed!’

There is another consideration that I might put briefly. A very valuable way of establishing facts is to point to the existence of other facts, which indispensably require the previous ones for their explanation. Let me give you an illustration of what I mean. I believe in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, amongst other reasons, because I do not understand how it was possible for the Church to exist for a week after the Crucifixion, unless Jesus Christ rose again. Why was it that they did not all scatter? Why was it that the spirit of despondency and the tendency to separation, which were beginning to creep over them when they were saying: ‘Ah! it is all up! We trusted that this had been He,’ did not go on to their natural issue? How came it that these people, with their Master taken away from the midst of them, and the bond of union between them removed, and all their hopes crushed did not say: ‘We have made a mistake, let us go back to Gennesareth and take to our fishing again, and try and forget our bright illusions’ ? That is what John the Baptist’s followers did when he died. Why did not Christ’s do the same? Because Christ rose again and re-knit them together. When the Shepherd was smitten, the flock would have been scattered, and never drawn together any more, unless there had been just such a thing as the Resurrection asserts there was, to reunite the dispersed and to encourage the depressed. And so I say, Christianity with a dead Christ, and a Church gathered round a grave from which the stone has not been rolled away, is more unbelievable than the miracle, for it is an absurdity.

Then there is another thing that I would say in a word. Let me put an illustration to explain what I mean. Suppose, after the execution of King Charles I., in some corner of the country a Pretender had sprung up and said, ‘I am the King!’ the way to end that would have been for the Puritan leaders to have taken people to St. George’s Chapel, and said, ‘Look! there is the coffin, there is the body, is that the king, or is it not?’ Jesus Christ was said to have risen again, within a week of the time of His death. The rulers of the nation had the grave, the watch, the stone, the seal. They could have put an end to the pestilent nonsense in two minutes, if it had been nonsense, by the simple process of saying, ‘Go and look at the tomb, and you will see Him there.’ But this question has never been answered, and never will be-What became of that sacred corpse if Jesus Christ did not rise again from the dead? The clumsy lie that the rulers told, that the disciples had stolen away the body, was only their acknowledgment that the grave was empty. If the grave were empty, either His servants were impostors, which we have seen it is incredible that they were, or the Christ was risen again.

And so, dear brethren, for many other reasons besides this handful that I have ventured to gather and put before you, and in spite of the prejudices of modern theories, I lift up here once more, with unfaltering certitude, the glad message which I beseech you to accept: ‘Christ is risen, the first fruits of them that slept.’

II. So much, then, for the first point in this passage. A word or two about the second-the triumph in the certitude of that Resurrection.

As I remarked at a previous point of this discourse, the Apostle has been speaking about the consequences which would follow from the fact that Christ was not raised. If we take all these consequences and reverse them, we get the glad issues of His Resurrection, and understand why it was that this great burst of triumph comes from the Apostle’s lips. And though I must necessarily treat this part of my subject very inadequately, let me try to gather together the various points on which, as I think, our Easter gladness ought to be built.

First, then, I say, the risen Christ gives us a complete Gospel. A dead Christ annihilates the Gospel. ‘If Christ be not risen,’ says the Apostle, ‘our preaching,’ by which he means not the act but the substance of his preaching, ‘is vain.’ Or, as the word might be more accurately rendered, ‘empty.’ There is nothing in it; no contents. It is a blown bladder; nothing in it but wind.

What was Paul’s ‘preaching’ ? It all turned upon these points-that Jesus Christ was the Son of God; that He was Incarnate in the flesh for us men; that He died on the Cross for our offences; that He was raised again, and had ascended into Heaven, ruling the world and breathing His presence into believing hearts; and that He would come again to be our Judge. These were the elements of what Paul called ‘his Gospel.’ He faces the supposition of a dead Christ, and he says, ‘It is all gone! It is all vanished into thin air. I have nothing to preach if I have not a Cross to preach which is man’s deliverance from sin, because on it the Son of God hath died, and I only know that Jesus Christ’s sacrifice is accepted and sufficient, because I have it attested to me in His rising again from the dead.’

Dear brethren, on the fact of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is suspended everything which makes the Gospel a gospel. Strike that out, and what have you left? Some beautiful bits of moral teaching, a lovely life, marred by tremendous mistakes about Himself and His own importance and His relation to men and to God; but you have got nothing left that is worth calling a gospel. You have the cross rising there, gaunt, black, solitary; but, unless on the other side of the river you have the Resurrection, no bridge will ever be thrown across the black gulf, and the Cross remains ‘dead, being alone.’ You must have a Resurrection to explain the Cross, and then the Life and the Death tower up into the manifestation of God in the flesh and the propitiation for our sins. Without it we have nothing to preach which is worth calling a gospel.

Again, a living Christ gives faith something to lay hold of. The Apostle here in the context twice says, according to the Authorised Version, that a dead Christ makes our faith ‘vain.’ But he really uses two different words, the former of which is applied to ‘preaching,’ and means literally ‘empty,’ while the latter means ‘of none effect’ or ‘powerless.’ So there are two ideas suggested here which I can only touch with the lightest hand.

The risen Christ puts some contents, so to speak, into my faith; He gives me something for it to lay hold of.

Who can trust a dead Christ, or who can trust a human Christ? That would be as much a blasphemy as trusting any other man. It is only when we recognise Him as declared to be the Son of God, and that by the Resurrection from the dead, that our faith has anything round which it can twine, and to which it can cleave. That living Saviour will stretch out His hand to us if we look to Him, and if I put my poor, trembling little hand up towards Him, He will bend to me and clasp it. You cannot exercise faith unless you have a risen Saviour, and unless you exercise faith in Him your lives are marred and sad.

Again, if Christ be dead, our faith, if it could exist, would be as devoid of effect as it would be empty of substance. For such a faith would be like an infant seeking nourishment at a dead mother’s breast, or men trying to kindle their torches at an extinguished lamp. And chiefly would it fail to bring the first blessing which the believing soul receives through and from a risen Christ, namely, deliverance from sin. If He whom we believed to be our sacrifice by His death and our sanctification by His life has not risen, then, as we have seen, all which makes His death other than a martyr’s vanishes, and with it vanish forgiveness and purifying. Only when we recognise that in His Cross explained by His Resurrection, we have redemption through His blood, even the forgiveness of sins, and by the communication of the risen life from the risen Lord possess that new nature which sets us free from the dominion of our evil, is faith operative in setting us free from our sins.

So, dear friends, the risen Christ gives us something for faith to lay hold of, and will make it the hand by which we grasp His strong hand, which lifts us ‘out of the horrible pit and the miry clay, and sets our feet upon a rock.’ But if He lie dead in the grave your faith is vain, because it grasps nothing but a shadow; and it is vain as being purposeless; you are yet in your sins.

The last thought is that the risen Christ gives us the certitude of our Resurrection. I do not for a moment mean to say that, apart from the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the thought, be it a wish or a dread, of immortality, has not been found in men, but there is all the difference in the world between forebodings, aspirations, wishes it were so, fears that it might be so, and the calm certitude that it is so. Many men talked about a western continent, but Columbus went there and came back again, and that ended doubt. Many men before, and apart from Jesus, have cherished thoughts of an immortal life beyond the grave, but He has been there and returned. And that, and, as I believe, that only puts the doctrine of immortality upon an irrefragable foundation; and we can say, ‘Now, I know that there is that land beyond.’ They tell us that death ends everything. Modern materialism, in all its forms, asserts that it is the extinction of the personality. Jesus Christ died, and went through it, and came out of it the same, and I will trust Him. Brethren, the set of opinion amongst the educated and cultured classes in England, and all over Europe, at this moment, proves to anybody who has eyes to see, that for this generation, rejection of immortality will follow certainly on the rejection of Jesus Christ. And for England to-day, as for Greece when Paul sent his letter to Corinth, the one light of certitude in the great darkness is the fact that Jesus Christ hath died, and is risen again.

If you will let Him, He will make you partakers of His own immortal life. ‘The first fruits of them that slept’ is the pledge and the prophecy of all the waving abundance of golden grain that shall be gathered into the great husbandman’s barns. The Apostle goes on to represent the resurrection of ‘them that are Christ’s’ as a consequence of their union to Jesus. He has conquered for us all. He has entered the prison-house and come forth bearing its iron gates on His shoulders, and henceforth it is not possible that we should be holden of it. There are two resurrections-one, that of Christ’s servants, one that of others. They are not the same in principle-and, alas, they are awfully different in issue. ‘Some shall wake to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.’

Let me beseech you to make Jesus Christ the life of your dead souls, by humble, penitent trust in Him. And then, in due time, He will be the life of your transformed bodies, changing these into the likeness of the body of His glory, ‘according to the working whereby He is able even to subdue all things unto Himself.’

Fuente: Expositions Of Holy Scripture by Alexander MacLaren

NASB (UPDATED) TEXT: 1Co 15:20-28

20But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who are asleep. 21For since by a man came death, by a man also came the resurrection of the dead. 22For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive. 23But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, after that those who are Christ’s at His coming, 24then comes the end, when He hands over the kingdom to the God and Father, when He has abolished all rule and all authority and power. 25For He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet. 26The last enemy that will be abolished is death. 27For He has put all things in subjection under His feet. But when He says, “All things are put in subjection,” it is evident that He is excepted who put all things in subjection to Him. 28When all things are subjected to Him, then the Son Himself also will be subjected to the One who subjected all things to Him, so that God may be all in all.

1Co 15:20 “But” What an important contrast!

“Christ has been raised” This chapter has often been called “the Resurrection Chapter.” Both the resurrection of Christ and of His followers is the recurrent theme. The certainty and lasting results of this can be seen in the verb egeir, which means to awaken, to raise up:

1Co 15:12, perfect passive indicative

1Co 15:13, perfect passive indicative

1Co 15:14, perfect passive indicative

1Co 15:15, aorist active indicative (twice)

1Co 15:16, perfect passive indicative

1Co 15:16, perfect passive indicative

1Co 15:17, perfect passive indicative

1Co 15:20, perfect passive indicative

1Co 15:32, perfect passive indicative

1Co 15:35, perfect passive indicative

1Co 15:42, perfect passive indicative

1Co 15:43, perfect passive indicative

1Co 15:44, perfect passive indicative

1Co 15:52, future passive indicative

Notice the consistent passive voice. The Triune God raises the dead. The perfect tense speaks of Jesus’ past resurrection, which becomes a state of being. Believers share the reality of His resurrection and by faith, the assurance of theirs!

“those who are asleep” This is a perfect middle participle (cf. Mat 27:52), which was a Hebrew idiom for death.

“first fruits” This OT annual sacrificial ritual is discussed in Lev 23:10 ff. The first fruits in the OT were ripened sheaves of the barley harvest waved before the Lord in the Temple the day after the High Holy Sabbath of Passover Week, which would be Resurrection Sunday. They were given to show God’s ownership of the entire crop. This is an OT type for the promise of the resurrection of all of Christ’s followers! Paul uses this term again in 1Co 16:15 to describe the first believers in Achaia. He also uses it in Rom 8:23 describing believers as receiving the Spirit, but anxiously waiting for the resurrection. Jesus is the first to be resurrected (cf. Col 1:18), but in due time all of His followers will experience the same. In a spiritual sense we already have resurrection life (cf. Eph 2:5-6).

SPECIAL TOPIC: FIRSTBORN

1Co 15:21-22 This is the Adam-Christ typology that will be followed up in 1Co 15:45-48 (cf. Rom 5:12-21; Php 2:6-11). In Adam all humanity has been affected by sin (i.e., death). In Christ, potentially all humanity can be affected by grace.

These ambiguous verses, along with Rom 5:18-19, have caused some theologians to assert an eventual salvation for all humans. Others have seen it as referring to the resurrection of both the saved and the lost (cf. Dan 12:2). In Adam all die; in Jesus all will be raised (i.e., some to reward, some to judgment). It seems obvious to me that Paul’s writings, taken in context, demand a repentant faith response to be saved!

1Co 15:23-25 Some theologians assert that these verses confirm a pre-millennial concept of eschatology. However, this text is not a discussion of the millennium, but the resurrection. Death was defeated at the empty tomb, not a future temporal reign. We must be careful of our theological agendas driving the interpretation of a context. Paul never discusses a millennium, even in his discussion of the rapture (cf. 1Th 4:13-18) nor of the Antichrist (cf. 2 Thessalonians 2). Neither did Jesus ever discuss a millennium, even in His eschatological discourses (cf. Matthew 24; Mark 13; Luke 21). There are several good books that give a summary of each current millennial position and that let the other positions point out the strengths and weaknesses of each.

1. Robert G. Clouse (ed.), The Meaning of the Millennium, Four Views

2. C. Marvin Pate (ed.), Four Views on the Book of Revelation

3. Darrell L. Boch (ed.), Three Views on the Millennium and Beyond

See my comments at Revelation, chapter 20, online at www.freebiblecommentary.org

1Co 15:23 “His coming” See Special Topic below.

SPECIAL TOPIC: NT TERMS FOR CHRIST’S RETURN

1Co 15:24 “the kingdom” It is surprising how often this concept is used by Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels. It is the subject of His first sermon and last sermon as well as the thrust of most parables. It is surprisingly used only twice in John’s Gospel. It is the reign of God in believing human’s hearts now that will one day be consummated over all the earth (see Special Topic at 1Co 4:20).

It is used by Jesus as the current presence of the kingdom of God in and through His own personal presence and teaching (cf. Mat 3:2; Mat 4:17; Mat 10:7; Mat 11:12; Mat 12:28; Mar 1:15; Luk 9:9; Luk 9:11; Luk 11:20; Luk 21:31-32). However, it is also linked to a future glorious consummation at His return (cf. Mat 6:10; Mat 16:28; Mat 26:64). It is “the already/not yet” eschatological tension of the Gospels!

The specific reference to “the kingdom” is relatively rare in Paul’s writings.

Romans – Rom 14:17

1 Corinthians – 1Co 4:20; 1Co 6:9; 1Co 15:24; 1Co 15:50

Galatians – Gal 5:21

Ephesians – Eph 5:5

Colossians – Col 1:13; Col 4:11

1 Thessalonians – 1Th 2:12

2 Thessalonians – 2th 4:1,18

“when He has abolished all rule and all authority and power” This refers to the angelic powers (eons in Gnostic thought) of this current evil age (cf. Rom 8:38; Eph 1:21; Eph 3:10; Eph 6:12; Col 1:16; Col 2:10; Col 2:15). This abolishment apparently occurs

1. theologically at the cross and resurrection

2. temporally at Christ’s return

If this is true, then 1Th 4:13-18 is the closest parallel in Paul’s writings. Notice that after the rapture, believers are with the Lord forever (cf. 1Th 4:17), which is the eternal kingdom of the Father (cf. Dan 7:13-14).

For “rule” see Special Topic below.

SPECIAL TOPIC: ARCH

For “authority” see Special Topic following.

SPECIAL TOPIC: AUTHORITY (EXOUSIA)

This context may refer to the Gnostic eons. See Special Topic following.

SPECIAL TOPIC: ANGELS IN PAUL’S WRITINGS

1Co 15:25 “He has put all His enemies under His feet” This is an OT idiom of complete victory (cf. Psa 8:6; Psa 110:1). In the OT the enemies were the surrounding pagan nations, but in the NT they are the angelic, spiritual powers hostile to God and His Christ. These evil powers influence humans to disbelief and rebellion. Jesus has fully defeated these powers by the cross and His resurrection. The final resurrection of all believers will mark the consummation of this victory!

There are two interesting books that try to define exactly what these “power(s)” refer to.

1. Hendricus Berkhof, Christ and the Powers

2. Oscar Cullmann, Christ and Time

1Co 15:26 “The last enemy that will be abolished is death” This means “made null and void.” Death is defeated (cf. 2Ti 1:10; Rev 21:4). Death was not the will of God for mankind, but a result of the Fall (i.e., Genesis 3). The curse will be removed (cf. Rev 21:3) as it is now defeated.

For the term “abolished” in 1Co 15:24; 1Co 15:26 see Special Topic: Katarge at 1Co 1:28.

1Co 15:27-28 The pronoun antecedents are ambiguous. Obviously this refers to an inner relationship within the Godhead (cf. 1Co 3:23; 1Co 11:3). Christ, the Son, is subordinate (but not unequal, cf. Col 3:11) to the Father in His redemptive function within time (cf. Rom 11:33-36).

1Co 15:27 This is a quote from Psa 8:6 with an added allusion to Psa 110:1. For “subjection” see note at 1Co 16:16 and Special Topic at 2Co 9:13.

1Co 15:28 “when all things are subject to Him” When does this occur? This is the question! There are obvious time indicators throughout this paragraph.

1. after that (epeita), 1Co 15:23

2. then (eita), 1Co 15:24

3. when (hotav, twice), 1Co 15:24

4. until (achri), 1Co 15:25

5. when (hostan), 1Co 15:27

6. when (hostan), 1Co 15:28

Does this refer to

1. Jesus’ death and resurrection

2. Jesus’ ascension

3. Jesus’ return/rapture

4. some aspect of the millennium

There is an obvious time sequence, but Paul is too ambiguous for any interpreter to declare with certainty. Often our presuppositions and systematic theologies shape this passage into any desired shape!

Fuente: You Can Understand the Bible: Study Guide Commentary Series by Bob Utley

is, &c. = Christ has been raised. From 1Co 15:20 to 1Co 15:28 is a digression. Figure of speech Parembole. App-6.

and become. All the texts omit.

firstfruits. Greek. aparche. See Rom 8:23, and compare notes on Joh 20:1, Joh 20:17.

them, &c. = those who have fallen asleep. See 1Co 15:6.

Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics

20-28.] Reassertion of the truth that Christ IS RISEN from the dead,-and prophetic exposition of the consequences of that great event.

Fuente: The Greek Testament

1Co 15:20. , now) Paul declares, that his preaching is not in vain, that their faith is not worthless, that their sins are taken away, that the dead in Christ are not annihilated, that the hope of Christians does not terminate with this life.-, the first fruit) viz. or being. The mention of the first fruits admirably agrees with the time of the passover, at which, as we have observed above, this epistle was written; nay more, with the very day of Christs resurrection, which was likewise the day after the Sabbath, Lev 23:10-11.

Fuente: Gnomon of the New Testament

1Co 15:20

1Co 15:20

But now hath Christ been raised from the dead,-None really denied the resurrection of Christ, but how meaningless and fruitless his resurrection would be without the resurrection of others. His resurrection is not a solitary occurrence affecting only himself. [It is the resurrection of the head of a new humanity and pledge, therefore, of the resurrection of all the dead.]

the firstfruits of them that are asleep.-First fruits denotes the beginning of anything, regarded as a pledge of the rest; and so Christs resurrection is the beginning, and the pledge of all the rest. [There is marked suggestiveness in the term first fruits. It is taken from the ancient ceremony in Israel of waving the sheaf of first fruits of the ripening grain before the Lord. (Lev 23:9-11). The sheaf was at once the pledge and the sample of the entire harvest; it was a part of the harvest to be gathered. Christ is the first fruits of all the sleeping saints in his resurrection. As certainly as he is risen, so certainly shall they rise, for he is the pledge and assured part of their resurrection. Our faith in the resurrection rests on the proved fact of Christs resurrection.]

Fuente: Old and New Testaments Restoration Commentary

The Resurrection from the Dead

But now hath Christ been raised from the dead, the first-fruits of them, that are asleep.1Co 15:20.

1. Do we recognize the immense debt which we owe to the great Apostle of the Gentiles? We base our hopes for time and eternity on the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Well, it was St. Paul who was the first to pierce beneath their surface and seize their hidden meaning and power. The Twelve, in their early preaching days, were staggered by the death, and only half understood the resurrection. They had to sit at St. Pauls feet before their Messianic hopes broadened out into the eternal Gospel.

2. The Apostle has been contemplating the long train of dismal consequences which he sees would arise if we had only a dead Christ. He thinks that he, the Apostle, would have nothing to preach, and we nothing to believe. He thinks that all hope of deliverance from sin would fade away. He thinks that, the one fact which gives assurance of immortality having vanished, the dead who had nurtured the assurance have perished. And he thinks that if things were so, then Christian men, who had believed a false gospel, and nourished an empty faith, and died clinging to a baseless hope, were far more to be pitied than men who had had less splendid dreams and less utter illusions.

Then, with a swift revulsion of feeling, he turns away from that dreary picture, and with a change of key, which the dullest ear can appreciate, from the wailing minors of the preceding verses, he breaks into this burst of triumph. Nowthings being as they are, for it is the logical now, and not the temporal oneChrist is risen from the dead, and that as the first-fruits of them that slept.

3. What a shout of joy there is in that word now with which the Apostle opens out into his glorious theme of the Resurrection. It has been struggling to get out, through discords and obscuring passages of controversial doubt. This great theme of the Apostolic Gospel had been dragged down by the cries of those who say there is no resurrection of the dead; down deeper into the sombre depths of a false witness to God, of a tragic mistake in estimating evidence; down into a gloom, where the holy dead lie only as so many perished lives, crushed by sin, and a challenge to despair. We hardly trace a note of the first inspiration in the dismal discord of broken hopes and fooled expectations: If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. But it is at this point that the resurrection theme bursts out, rising above and upon the shifting discords, and opening up out of the passages which ended only in woe. Now hath Christ been raised from the dead, the first-fruits of them that are asleep. Christian preaching was not a proclamation of meaningless and empty platitudes, not a principle incapable of producing any good results; Gods messengers were not false witnesses; the Christian dead were not perished; Christian life was not a hollow sham, a cunningly devised fable. All was safe all was bright; the brighter because the very discordance of the doubt could only open out into this: Christ was risen, His people should also rise.

The subject is the Resurrection of Christ as the pledge of our Resurrection. Take it in three parts

I.The Possibility of the Resurrection.

II.The Power of the Resurrection.

III.The Promise of the Resurrection.

I

The Possibility of the Resurrection

1. The Christian doctrine of the Resurrection is a stumbling-block to faith because we have allowed ourselves to exalt and to exaggerate death to a degree altogether beyond reason and Scripture. We speak, that is to say, and mourn, as though death were the last law of life, as though death were the ultimate fact of our experience, and then we have to smuggle in our hope of the resurrection as a miraculous exception to this universal power of death. Exactly the opposite is true. Life is the law of nature, and death a natural means to more life and better. Death is the lower fact, and life the higher. Or more specifically, the resurrection of Jesus is not the great exception to natural law; it is an exemplification of the higher, universal law of life.

The earth was dead, so they tell us, ages ago. But now how this earth lives! There is hardly a cliff too barren for nature not to hang some blooming thing upon it; and the old earth teems with life. Furthermore, even here, where death reigns, life has been growing higher, more complex, more capable of larger correspondences with things. Between the lowest living thing and the brain of man there is a difference of life wide as the distance between the earth and the heavens. That first infinitesimal point of life has no world with which to establish relations larger than the microscopic field in which we have looked and discovered it, but we have already established relations of thought and knowledge with the farthest stars. Plainly then, without any doubt, life is something stronger thus far upon this earth than death. Notwithstanding death, life grows to be more and richer.

What is death, so far as we can see what it is? Here is a minute living thing in a glass of water. You turn the water out. That living particle is now mere dust upon the glass. Dead,that is, it is no longer moving in an element corresponding to its capacity of vital movements. What is death then? A living thing is no longer in harmony with its surroundings. It is thrown out of its own proper correspondence with things; it is dead. So death is a relative thing. It is simply some wrong or imperfect adjustment of life to external conditions. But death may be partial, then, not entire. A part of the body may be dead. A man may be dead in some relations, and still live in others. There is a sense in which we die daily. Parts of us are thrown out of vital relations. The body may begin to die long before it is dead. Death is but a relative, negative thing. Life is the principle, the force, the law; death the limitation, the accident, the partial negation of Gods great affirmation of life in things.

The weakest point in the historical acceptation of the Fall certainly is its theory of death; for if death in the case of man be a penal punishment for breaking the Divine law, how happens it that this penalty should lay low not only the guilty party, which is the proper nature of all penalties, but should travel with an indiscriminate sweep over the whole length and breadth of the creation? Death is not a horror but a universal phenomenon; all things die just as certainly as they are born. Flowers die; quadrupeds die; birds die; fishes diefishes! there they lie enswathed by millions in some mud-beds of the primeval slime, thousands of thousands of years possibly before the appearance of the unfeathered biped on this terrestrial stage, scarcely with any presentiment of Adams first sin. The ecclesiastical theory of death, therefore, plainly breaks down, by the logical defect of explaining only a small number of the facts. Had it been otherwise,had man been the only creature that knew death,the theory might have some plausible ground on which to stand. But a more fundamental objection remains. Death is an evil, but to whom?to the creature who dies, and to all who have special cause to lament its loss; but is it an evil to the universe? to this earth?manifestly not; for if all the people that have been born on the earth from Adam until now had lived and not known death, where would the room have been for them? Re-juvenescence is one of the grandest and most sublime facts in the divine constitution of things: so that young persons may constantly appear on what to them is a new and therefore a stimulating scene, old persons must depart and make room.1 [Note: John Stuart Blackie, Notes of a Life, 270.]

As to death, any one who understands Nature at all thinks nothing of it. Her whole concern is perpetually to produce nourishment for all her offspring. We go that others may comeand better, if we rear them in the right way. In talking of these deep things, men too often make the error of imagining that the world was made for themselves.2 [Note: George Meredith.]

2. Physical death is not made the important thing in our Bibles. Physical death does not hold the first place in the economy of redemption. The Bible assigns a subordinate place to our King of Terrors. The Book of Genesis, it is true, invests natural death with certain punitive fears; but it does not elevate death to the rank of the supreme and final transaction between man and his Maker. Adam was not commanded by the Lord to live every day as though it were his last, himself a slave bound under the fear of death; he was commanded to go and work in the sweat of his brow, but with a promise of God in his heart. Man is to work out his time here, and to pass through death, as a being born under the higher law of the spirit, and with the possibility of eternal life always before him.

And in the New Testament the chief use made of the fact of death is as a metaphor. Jesus makes a metaphor of what we call death. To Him sin is death; the maid whom the people thought dead, He said, was asleep. The crisis of a souls history is not, in the Bible, the death of the body. The fact of physical death and resurrection is used as the symbol of the greater change of a soul from sin to life.

It is comparatively easy to set our teeth and face the inevitable with a grin; but the highest bravery is to hide our anguish with a smile. I do think I make a decently good Stoic, but confess that in times like this Christians have the pull. Nevertheless, I have often thought of the words, I am not in the least afraid to die, and wondered if, when my time should come, I would be able to say them. But now I know that I can, and this even in the bitterness of feeling that ones work is prematurely cut short.1 [Note: George John Romanes, Life and Letters, 317.]

If we Christians believe the smallest fraction of what we pretend to believe, there is but little to mourn over in death. I know not when or how that veiled messenger may come to me, but this I do know, that it can come only at the bidding of my Father. I know its mission can be nothing more than the unclothing of this poor weak body of my humiliation to clothe me with the body of His glory. Death is not only an exodus, it is also an entrance; while we stand by the bedside and say, He is gone, they on the other side are welcoming him with unspeakable joy.2 [Note: Quintin Hogg, 308.]

3. The only thing to be feared is spiritual death. That is non-adjustment of our hearts to God. The soul out of harmony with love and truth may become as dead as the animalcule left dry upon the edge of the empty glass. To attempt to live as an immortal soul without love, and not as in Gods presence, is to dream of living in a vacuum. The true life is to know God. Even now they are most alive who have in pure and loving thoughts the largest relationship to all good. The wages of sin is deathdeath creeping into the heart; death clouding the eye of the intellect; death, as Jesus said, destroying the soul in Gehenna.

Dante saw some souls in hell whose bodies were still alive on earth,their friends in Florence and Lucca had not the faintest idea that these men, seemingly a part of everyday life, were, all the time, dead souls. There is hardly a more terrible idea in all that terrible book, and yet it is a possibility in our own daily lifethis atrophy of the spiritual nature, corresponding to the atrophy of the poetical nature which Darwin noted in himself as due to his own neglect. Clifford, in A Likely Story, forcibly depicts a soul awaking in the next world to find that through this unconscious starvation, there was no longer anything in him to correspond with God.1 [Note: L. H. M. Soulsby, Stray Thoughts for Girls, 160.]

They pass me by like shadows, crowds on crowds,

Dim ghosts of men, that hover to and fro,

Hugging their bodies round them like thin shrouds

Wherein their souls were buried long ago:

They trampled on their youth, and faith, and love,

They cast their hope of human-kind away.

With Heavens clear messages they madly strove,

And conquered,and their spirits turned to clay:

Lo! how they wander round the world, their grave,

Whose ever-gaping maw by such is fed,

Gibbering at riving men, and idly rave,

We, only, truly live, but ye are dead.

Alas! poor fools, the anointed eye may trace

A dead souls epitaph in every face!2 [Note: Lowell, The Street.]

4. The resurrection of Jesus was in accordance with the higher, universal law of life. Death is for life, not life for death, in the ultimate constitution of this universe. The resurrection of Jesus is an instance of the general law that life is lord of death. His resurrection, as our text puts it, is the first-fruits of them that sleep. In the opinion of the Apostle the resurrection of Jesus was no more out of the Divine order of things, no more contrary to the ultimate law of nature, than the first-fruits of the summer are exceptions to the general law of life which in the autumn shall show its universal power in every harvest field.

5. This was Jesus teaching concerning the resurrection. He answered the Sadducees of His generation not merely by asserting His knowledge that the dead shall be raised; He placed the fact of the resurrection upon the fundamental principle that life, not death, is Gods first law. But that the dead are raised, even Moses shewed, in the place concerning the Bush, when he calleth the Lord the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now he is not the God of the dead, but of the living: for all live unto him.

6. This, then, is clearly and unmistakably the Biblical teaching of the resurrection. It is in accordance with law. It is in the Divine order of the creation. Why should it seem otherwise to us? Why should we regard it as a thing incredible that God should raise the dead? Partly because in our pagan philosophies we have exaggerated the place and importance of death in the world; partly, also, because we have fallen into gross and carnal imaginations of the resurrection and eternal life, which would be violations of natural law most difficult to conceive. But, planting the standard of our faith firmly upon this high Biblical doctrine of the resurrection as the final fulfilment of the law of life, let us survey the field of nature and see whether we have learned anything to make it a thing incredible that God should raise the dead.

7. Our Lords own resurrection is set forth as an event which could not possibly have failed to occur. We say Jesus resurrection was a miracle, that is, contrary to what might have been expecteda great exception to the law of death. But that is not the way the Scriptures put it. They say, Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God whom God raised up, having loosed the pangs of death: because it was not possible that he should be holden of it. Moreover my flesh also shall dwell in hope: because thou wilt not leave my soul in Hades, neither wilt thou give thy Holy One to see corruption. It would be impossible for death to hold a principle of life like the Spirit of that Man of Nazareth. It would be a violation of all law should the Holy One be given over to corruption. There is something inherently inconceivable and impossible in such a thought. How can Holiness see corruption? how can life itself be given over to death? Impossible! It would have been a miracle, had Jesus not risen from the dead. It would have been a violation of the inmost principle of the creation, had the mere dust of this earth held Him as its own for ever. It would have been a miracle without reason, a miracle not against the ordinary course of nature merely, but against God,the living God,had He not risen from the dead, the first-fruits of this power and order of Divine life in the creation.

Dean Bradley, in his Easter Day sermon at Westminster Abbey, put his finger on the very centre of the contrast between ancient and modern feeling concerning Easter, when he said that while it was the crucifixion of Christ that was to the Jews a stumbling-block and to the Greeks foolishness in the great day when Christianity first came into the world, it is no longer the Crucifixion but the Resurrectionwhich to both Jews and Greeks, though a great marvel, was a marvel which attracted rather than repelled themthat seems to modern pride and scepticism a stumbling-block and foolishness. We feel no difficulty where the early believers felt most difficulty, in accepting the tremendous humiliation and sorrow and shame of the cross. On the contrary, as Dean Bradley told his hearers, the story of the Man of Sorrows is wholly credited by the sceptical world of to-day, and is accepted even with eager reverence and gratitude. It is the suffering, the forgiveness, the resignation, the peace, the calm, the fortitude, the sympathy, the Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children, the Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do, the Peace I leave with you; my peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth, give I unto youlet not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid, in which we all believeeven sceptics and those who are more than sceptics, who assert positively that miracles do not happen. The shame does not humiliate us; we can see through it to the infinitely greater glory behind; whereas the Jews found it a sore stumbling-block to their pride of race, and the Greeks looked down upon it as radically inconsistent with that intellectual caste to which they ascribed the sole possession of the good and beautiful in all its perfection. To them the asserted resurrection seemed that which alone gave a glimmer of probability to the bold assertion that God had manifested Himself in human nature only to die upon the cross, and submit to the jeers and scoffs of Jewish and Roman ridicule. To us there seems something intrinsically convincing in the assertion that this great death was died, that that majestic calm and that magnanimous sympathy prevailed even over the torture of the cross; we come to our difficulties only when we come to the assertion that He who died that supernatural death really lived again to be recognized by those who saw Him die and heard Him foretell their own discomfiture and dispersion. The early disciples found it all but impossible to believe that a Divine nature could go through physical and moral humiliation. Our difficulty is not in the least in believing in that which is Divine enough to overcome any combination, however overwhelming, of physical and moral humiliation. What we find difficulty in believing is, that that which is morally and spiritually supernatural involves even any power at all of controlling or overruling what we suppose to be the fixed necessities of physical law. Our minds are jaded and hag-ridden, as it were, by the physical fatalities of modern science; and yet modern science itself might, if we only used our eyes, warn us of the extraordinary blunder we are making in thus depreciating the true power of mind over matter.1 [Note: R. H. Hutton, Aspects of Religious and Scientific Thought, 159.]

For the Apostles, the resurrection of Jesus meant that He who had claimed to be the destined Son of Man had been approved, justified, and glorified by the Father, according to the rule by which resurrection is the established and almost natural consequence and proof of justice. What they had doubted was His claim to be the Christ; not the possibility of His resurrection. When He rose, their trust in Him, in their own redemption with and through Him, in His whole Gospel of the coming Kingdom and His own place in it, was confirmed and verified, not by an exceptional but by a regular occurrence. Resurrection is the fruit of righteousness, and a tree is known by its fruit.2 [Note: G. Tyrrell, Christianity at the Cross-Roads, 140.]

8. What was miraculous about Jesus resurrection was not that God raised Him from the dead, but that He was raised before the last great day, and that He should be seen by men, and recognized in His transitional or intermediate state between earth and heaven. The visibility on earth of the risen Lord, before He ascended to His Father and ours, was exceptional, out of the common course, or miraculous.

If you should see a tree break into blossom in the month of June, and the next morning find the fruit already ripe upon the bough, you would say, That is extraordinary! It is not indeed contrary to the nature of the tree that fruit should ripen on the bough, yet contrary to all our experience of growth that the fruit should ripen in a summers day. That fruit would be a miracle upon that tree; yet not in itself contrary to the nature of the tree, but only to its ordinary conditions of fructification. The fruit itself would be perfectly natural, only the method of its growth would be extraordinary. And it would not be impossible to conceive an enhancement, or quickening, of natures forces which might cause a plant to break into fruitfulness contrary to our experience of its usual times and seasons. Somewhat so, in the view we are now trying to win, is Jesus resurrection a first-fruit of the tree of life;not in itself contrary to the law of life, but in its manner and time out of the common order. In the miracle of His resurrection we have only to think of Gods quickening, or anticipating, by His power the course of nature, not as violating any real principle of it.1 [Note: Newman Smyth.]

The yearly miracle of spring,

Of budding tree and blooming flower,

Which Natures feathered laureates sing

In my cold ear from hour to hour,

Spreads all its wonders round my feet;

And every wakeful sense is fed

On thoughts that oer and oer repeat,

The Resurrection of the Dead!

If these half vital things have force

To break the spell which winter weaves,

To wake, and clothe the wrinkled corse

In the full life of shining leaves;

Shall I sit down in vague despair,

And marvel if the nobler soul

We laid in earth shall ever dare

To wake to life, and backward roll

The sealing stone, and striding out,

Claim its eternity, and head

Creation once again, and shout,

The Resurrection of the Dead?2 [Note: George Henry Boker.]

II

The Power of the Resurrection

1. Have we yet entered into the grandeur and depth of St. Rauls teaching about the Resurrection? What is his teaching?

(1) St. Paul insists that Jesus Christ did actually rise from the dead and appeared to him, to Cephas, to the Twelve, to five hundred brethren, to all the Apostles, to James; and he infers that the appearance was of one and the same character throughout. It was no visionin the popular sense of that wordstill less an hallucination that they experienced, but a direct impression made by a living and active Person.

(2) He asserts consistently that no substantial difference exists between the resurrection of Jesus Christ and that of His followers. His was the pattern of theirs, and they can but look for a risen life such as His was. He was the first-fruits, the first-born among many brethren. Where He is, there shall also His servant be.

(3) Hence St. Paul had but a single answer to the double question: With what body did Christ rise? and With what body do Christians come from death? He tells a parable, the meaning of which cannot be evaded. We sow seed in the ground. It contains in itself the principle of life; it casts off its first body and takes another. So also is the resurrection of the dead. The earthly body is laid in the grave of life. It, too, contains an unseen principle of life. That life, too, casts off the old and natural body, and takes another, a glorified and spiritual body. The body which is spiritual is that which is suited to the spirit world, as the natural body was fitted for a material world. The spiritual is not the natural sublimated, however, but a new creation. Flesh and blood cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. The natural body, with all the atoms composing it, belongs to the present natural order. A spiritual environment demands a spiritual body. And spirit is not atomicor at any rate, St. Paul assumes that it is not.

(4) The power which raised Jesus Christ from the dead was the Holy Spirit of God. One writer declares that it was through the Eternal Spirit that Jesus offered His life while on earth without spot to God, and, in saying this, he only follows St. Paul in his declaration that He was marked out as the Son of God with power by the resurrection according to a Spirit of Holiness. The Holy Spirit given to Jesus Christ without measure was the efficient cause of His resurrection from the dead. Therefore it follows from the close similarity between the Head and the members that their resurrection is brought about by the same Holy Spirit. If the spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his spirit that dwelleth in you.

(5) The next step in St. Pauls teaching is that in which his religious originality and depth of thought are seen most clearly, and, indeed, stand out before us with startling freshness. That is perhaps the reason why this doctrine of his has fallen into the background and been overlooked. Materially minded people want materialistic images which they can grasp readily, and about which they may give a logical account. But religious truths by their very nature are too august and too evasive for logic. They are of Heaven, and logic is of earth only. Now the doctrine that the resurrection means the resumption of the old body which death had corrupted is a materialistic conception. That is why it is so popular. But it is not the doctrine of St. Paul. He was far more concerned with religion than with metaphysic or theories of being. That is why all he says about the resurrection moves strictly within the atmosphere of religion.

He saysand let this be weighed, marked, and learnedthat he has little interest in death and resurrection from the mere standpoint of physical existence. It was not the physical death and resurrection of Christ on which he based the Christians faith and hope, but His spiritual death and resurrection. But then you cannot limit these latter to the tragedy of Mount Calvary and that which immediately followed. Christs death was a death to sin, and that was in process from the first. Christs resurrection was a rising superior to sin, and that, too, took place from the first. Christ died unto sin throughout His early life, and He died finally, once and for all, when on the Cross He rose superior to the last and most bitter temptation of all. Every time that temptation came to Himand temptation came to Him continuouslyHe mastered it by the power of the Spirit of God, of that risen life which was hid in God His Father. Calvary and the great forty days were no new elements in His life, but its crown and its reward.

(6) From this follows the practical bearing for us of Christs death and resurrection. When we look on Him and are touched by our sinfulness, and come to God, and determine to live the life of faith, we die to Sin as Christ died to it; we rise to newness of life as Christ rose to it; we are buried with Him, and, like Him, become alive unto God. The sole differenceand it is immenseis that we have a past to undo, and He had none.

(7) Now we can see what St. Paul taught about our resurrection body. It is fashioned for us by holy living. It is already in course of formation within. He that is leading the spiritual life is having prepared for him gradually a spiritual body. Then, when the natural body is finally cast aside, the glorious spiritual body will leap out, as the fitting organ of a soul which has become predominantly spiritual, and death will be swallowed up in life.

The unique part of the Christian revelation is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit who forms the Spiritual body, so that when the believer dies, or, more truly, awakes, he awakes after the likeness of the Lord, to co-operate with Him freely in redemptive love. I quite understand the quickening of our mortal bodies (Rom 8:2) to refer to this, the getting rid of that death or mortality which limits or imprisons us in this order of existence, by developing and perfecting the power of the incorruptible Seed of Life which brings us into living contact and consciousness with the Life of the Universe. Then the grub body is no longer wanted; like the husk in the seed, it has done its work in the early stages of growth, and now is put off as the butterfly puts off the chrysalis-shell, and as the materials of that body go to the churchyard to return into that which may through various modifications become part of another human earthly body.1 [Note: R. W. Corbet, Letters from a Mystic of the Present Day, 183.]

Human nature, as its Creator made it, and maintains it wherever His laws are observed, is entirely harmonious. No physical error can be more profound, no moral error more dangerous, than that involved in the monkish doctrine of the opposition of body to soul. No soul can be perfect in an imperfect body; no body perfect without perfect soul. Every right action and true thought sets the seal of its beauty on person and face; every wrong action and foul thought its seal of distortion; and the various aspects of humanity might be read as plainly as a printed history, were it not that the impressions are so complex that it must always in some cases (and, in the present state of our knowledge, in all cases) be impossible to decipher them completely. Nevertheless, the face of a consistently just and of a consistently unjust person, may always be rightly distinguished at a glance; and if the qualities are continued by descent through a generation or two, there arises a complete distinction of race. Both moral and physical qualities are communicated by descent, far more than they can be developed by education (though both may be destroyed by want of education); and there is as yet no ascertained limit to the nobleness of person and mind which the human creature may attain, by persevering observance of the laws of God respecting its birth and training.1 [Note: Ruskin, Munera Pulveris (Works, xvii. 149).]

In 1865 Lord Francis Douglas, while climbing Mont Blanc, slipped and fell to his death. His body could not be found, and it was supposed that it had fallen into the bed of the glacier. According to computations based on careful estimates from experience, the glacier should have discharged the body at the foot of the mountain in the summer of 1905. All that summer, the aged mother of Lord Francis was there watching and waiting for the body of her boy, but the body, to her bitter disappointment, did not appear. Broken-hearted, she had been waiting for years just to get a glimpse of the scarred face and mangled body she loved, and to lay its dust to rest. She would have been comforted if only that had been allowed her. But there is an infinitely better thing which Christ has prepared; not the dull dust and broken body released from the icy embrace of the cruel glacier, but the living, glorified personality in the bosom of the Fathers love; not for one hurried, agonizing glimpse as the heart sobs over the memory of what it has lost; but for ever and ever in the fellowship of heaven.2 [Note: J. I. Vance, Tendency, 245.]

2. What are the consequences of Christs Resurrection?

(1) It gives us a complete Gospel.A dead Christ annihilates the Gospel. If Christ be not risen, says the Apostle, our preaching, by which he means not the act but the substance of his preaching, is vain; or, as the word might be more accurately rendered, empty. There is nothing in it; no contents. It is a blown bladder; nothing in it but wind. What was St. Pauls preaching? It all turned upon these pointsthat Jesus Christ was the Son of God; that He was Incarnate in the flesh of us men; that He died on the Cross for our offences; that He was raised again, and had ascended into Heaven, ruling the world and breathing His presence into believing hearts; and that He would come again to be our Judge. These were the elements of what St. Paul called his gospel. He faces the supposition of a dead Christ, and he says, It is all gone! It is all vanished into thin air. I have nothing to preach if I have not a Cross to preach which is mans deliverance from sin, because on it the Son of God hath died, and I know that Jesus Christs sacrifice is accepted and sufficient, only because I have it attested to me in His rising again from the dead.

(2) A living Christ gives faith something to lay hold of.The Apostle here in the context twice says, according to the Authorized Version, that a dead Christ makes our faith vain. But he really used two different words, the former of which is applied to preaching, and means literally empty, while the latter means of none effect or powerless. So there are two ideas suggested here. The risen Christ puts some contents, so to speak, into our faith. Who can trust a dead Christ, or who can trust a human Christ? That would be as much a blasphemy as trusting any other man. It is only when we recognize Him as declared to be the Son of God, and that by the resurrection from the dead, that our faith has anything round which it can twine, and to which it can cleave. That living Saviour will stretch out His hand to us if we look to Him, and if I put my poor, trembling little hand up towards Him, He will bend to me and clasp it. You cannot exercise faith unless you have a risen Saviour, and unless you exercise faith in Him your lives are marred and sad.

(3) Again, a living Christ destroys the dominion of sin.The first blessing which the believing soul receives through and from a risen Christ is deliverance from sin. If He whom we believed to be our sacrifice by His death and our sanctification by His life has not risen, then all which makes His death other than a martyrs vanishes, and with it vanish forgiveness and purifying. Only when we recognize that in His Cross, explained by His resurrection, we have redemption through His blood, even the forgiveness of sins, and by the communication of the risen life from the risen Lord possess that new nature which sets us free from the dominion of our evilonly then is faith operative in setting us free from our sins.

(4) The resurrection was the convincing proof that Christs words were true, and that He was what He had claimed to be.He Himself had on more occasions than one hinted that such proof was to be given. Destroy this temple, He said, and in three days I will raise it up. The sign which was to be given, notwithstanding His habitual refusal to yield to the Jewish craving for miracle, was the sign of the prophet Jonah. As he had been thrown out and lost for three days and nights, but had thereby only been forwarded in his mission, so our Lord was to be thrown out as endangering the ship, but was to rise again to fuller and more perfect efficiency. In order that His claim to be the Messiah might be understood, it was necessary that He should die; but in order that it might be believed, it was needful that He should rise.

(5) The resurrection of Christ holds a fundamental place in the Christian creed, because by it there is disclosed a real and close connection between this world and the unseen, eternal world.There is no need now of argument to prove a life beyond; here is one who is in it. For the resurrection of Christ was not a return to this life, to its wants, to its limitations, to its inevitable close; it was a resurrection to a life for ever beyond death. Neither was it a discarding of humanity on Christs part, a cessation of His acceptance of human conditions, a rising to some kind of existence to which man has no access. On the contrary, it was because He continued truly human that in human body and with human soul He rose to veritable human life beyond the grave. If Jesus rose from the dead, then the world into which He is gone is a real world, in which men can live more fully than they live here. If He rose from the dead, then there is an unseen Spirit mightier than the strongest material powers, a God who is seeking to bring us out of all evil into an eternally happy condition. Quite reasonably is death invested with a certain majesty, if not terror, as the mightiest of physical things. There may be greater evils; but they do not affect all men but only some, or they debar men from certain enjoyments and a certain kind of life but not from all. But death shuts men out from everything with which they have here to do, and launches them into a condition of which they know absolutely nothing. Any one who conquers death and scatters its mystery, who shows in his own person that it is innocuous, and that it actually betters our condition, brings us light that reaches us from no other quarter. And He who shows this superiority over death in virtue of a moral superiority, and uses it for the furtherance of the highest spiritual ends, shows a command over the whole affairs of men which makes it easy to believe He can guide us into a condition like His own. As St. Peter affirms, it is by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead we are begotten again unto a lively hope.

There is a beautiful sonnet of Petrarch, who sees Laura in heaven amongst the angels; she walks amongst them, but from time to time turns her head and looks behind and seems to be waiting for him:

Wherefore I raise to heaven my heart and mind

Because I hear her bid me only haste.1 [Note: Mandell Creighton, Life and Letters, ii. 168.]

The history of the three anthems which are chosen in place of the Venite for matins on Easter morning (1. Cor. 1Co 5:7-8; Rom 6:9-11; Romans 1. Cor. 1Co 15:20-22) well illustrates the care taken by the compilers of the Prayer-book to make it reflect the great doctrinal lessons of the sacred year. They do not stand to-day in their original form, but there can be no question of the greater fitness and beauty of the present arrangement. The first anthem was inserted last, and did not appear till 1662, at the last revision of the Prayer-book at the Savoy Conference. But, as an Easter anthem, it was already very old, for part of it had appeared as such in the Antiphonary of Gregory the Great. It had also been read in the Epistle for the second communion on Easter Day in 1549, in the first Prayer-book of Edward vi., when provision was made for a Collect, Epistle, and Gospel at two communions. These were ordered to be used as the special features for Easter Tuesday and for the first Sunday after Easter, though this arrangement was abolished in the second Prayer-book of Edward vi. in 1552.

The second anthem is much older. It formed a part of a short service which was prefixed in the Sarum Breviary to the ordinary matins as a special feature for Easter Day. The exact words used were as follows: Christ rising again from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over Him. For in that He liveth He liveth unto God. And this had been followed by the refrain, Alleluia, Alleluia. In the Sarum Breviary the versicles and response followed: The Lord rose from the sepulchre: who for us hung upon the tree. Alleluia. To these succeeded the following beautiful collect: O God, who for us didst suffer Thy Son to endure the yoke of the Cross, that Thou mightest drive away from us the power of the enemy; grant to us, Thy servants, that we may always live in the joys of His Resurrection. In the Prayer-book of 1549 the same anthem was placed at the head of the short introductory service therein framed before matins for Easter Day. Next to it was added the present third anthem, each being followed by the word Alleluia twice after the first, once after the second anthem. Two versicles then followed thus: Show forth to all nations the glory of God and among all people His wonderful works. Then the following exquisite collect was added, instead of the collect given above: O God, who for our redemption didst give Thine only Begotten Son to the death of the Cross, and by His glorious Resurrection hast delivered us from the power of our enemy; Grant us so to die daily from sin that we may evermore live with Him in the joy of His resurrection, through the same Christ our Lord.

A further change took place in 1552 in the second Prayer-book of Edward VI. The two anthems were shifted from the head of the service for matins to their present place before the Venite. The Alleluias were omitted, and also the special versicles and the collect just quoted. And thus it continued till 1662, when, as we have seen, the first anthem was added. These changes will serve to bring home to our minds the special importance which attaches to these three anthems in their present position in the service. From the date of the Sarum Breviary in 1085 down to the present time, that is, over a period of eight hundred years, one or other or all of them have stood at the head of the Easter service, where, in the old days, until their change of position in 1552, they were originally a sort of Introit, a processional hymn, which ushered in the worship of the Queen of Festivals. Indeed, the one alteration which we might well wish had not been made is the shifting of that position (so as to make them the mere alternative of the Invitatory Psalm) to a place in the service where their significance is almost lost in the glad festival psalms which immediately follow. Clearly they were intended all along, and are intended still, to strike the keynote of praise for the whole festival, and to sound forth its doctrinal and practical characteristics.

When we study them carefully this impression of their importance and significance is deepened. For all the great essential thoughts of Eastertide are in germ here, and three chief aspects stand prominently forward. They offer us on the morning of the Resurrection a full and complete Christ, the perfect answer to the needs and desires of fallen man. Our souls require above all things mercy to cover the past only too stained with sin. We find that offered us here through the Cross in Christ our Passover. They yearn for the secret of spiritual power in the present, that sin already forgiven may have now no dominion over us. It is laid bare to us in Christ our life, in and through whom we too, reckoning ourselves dead indeed unto sin, are alive unto God with the power of an endless life within. But our souls have also keen desire, which finds expression in earnest prayer and strong for fellowship in a life beyond the grave, which shall restore to us the losses which the havoc of death has made in this. It is offered us in Christ our first-fruits, our promise, and the first-fruits of them that sleep, the key to an everlasting destiny. Thus, as the first anthem proclaimed the Crucified Christ as the ground of our justification, so the second anthem extols the Risen Christ as the secret of our sanctification, whilst the third anthem adores the triumphant Christ as the pledge of our glorification. What a magnificent revelation of the Alpha and Omega of Grace, who once, as in the first anthem, was dead, now lives for aye, and, better still, hath the keys of hell and of death! A risen Christ in strong and glorious relation to the past, the present, and the future of His redeemed ones, whom He hath ransomed from the power of the enemy. The Lord for me: the secret of my pardon and my peace. The Lord in me: the secret of my holiness and victory. The Lord with me: the sure pledge of immortality, the first-fruits of them that sleep, the sheaf of early ripe corn waved at the Passover Feast in the temple of God as the promise of the

holy harvest-field,

Which will all its full abundance

At His second coming yield.

A Christ who is the object of adoring faith, declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead. A Christ who is the motive power of love, who died and rose that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them, and rose again. A Christ who is the inspiration of heavenly hope, who died for us, that, whether we wake or sleep, we should live together with him. Thus, if in the first anthem we specially dwell upon the victorious work of Jesus whereby the curse is removed, in the second anthem we are contemplating the ever living person of Christ in whom the blessing is restored, and in the third anthem we are echoing the rapturous music of Heaven, the song of the redeemed before the throne, which tells of the consummated Kingdom of Christ in whom Heaven itself is given to the sons of men. Or, in other words, if in the first anthem we realize the guilt of sin atoned for by the Paschal Lamb, in the second we joyfully celebrate the power of sin crushed through the overcoming life within, and in the third we foretell the result of sin cancelled through the second Adam, who is the Lord from heaven. All the three groups of thought find special allusion in the collect already quoted, which, from 1549 to 1552, followed two of these anthems at the head of the Easter morning service.1 [Note: T. A. Gurney.]

III

The Promise of the Resurrection

The first-fruits of them that are asleep.

The word first-fruits has a very definite signification in the Scriptures, There was a commandment given to the people of Israel that when they entered into the possession of the Land of Promise, they were not to begin harvest till they had first cut down a sheaf and presented or waved it before the Lord, in thanksgiving as well as in token that they and their harvests belonged to the Lord. The circumstances connected with the offering of the first-fruits are singularly suggestive of a higher symbolism. The sheaf was offered on the third day after the Passover. In this we see Christ, the sheaf of first-fruits, rising from the dead on the third day after His Passion, the first begotten from the dead the precursor of the harvest yet to come, the proof, pledge, and pattern of the resurrection of the just.

1. The resurrection of Christ is the proof of the resurrection of them, that are asleep. When a farmer holds in his hand the first ripe sheaf of corn he has in possession an unassailable proof that he will have a harvest. More decisive and satisfactory evidence to that effect could not be desired by any reasonable man. Long before this time the precious seed had been cast into the dark bosom of the earth, when no tokens were visible that nature possessed any power of life. But in due season the sun began to warm the sleeping world, the gentle rain from heaven fell upon the place beneath, and the winds of the south whispered of a coming revival. Soon there was first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear, and then the first ripe sheaf telling of a harvest at hand. Christ is the first-fruits of them that sleep, the infallible proof that we shall have a resurrection from the gloomy winter of death.

Think of one who never in his life saw a harvest or spoke with any one to whom it was a familiar thing, who was well acquainted with sowing, but an utter stranger to reaping. Suppose, further, that not one harvest had ever gladdened the earth in any corner of it, and you have some idea of the state of knowledge necessarily possessed by men of old, concerning the rising again from the dead. Men had been but too familiar with sowing; from age to age they had committed to the earth all that remained of the fondest, the fairest, the best that they had. Earth had been sown thick with graves, but there had been no harvest; none had ever been seen to return from the dark portal, the goal of all mortal. Earth had swallowed up an immeasurable quantity of seed without showing any symptom of spring-time or harvest. We need not wonder that the Old Testament gives little light on the great rising again of the people of God. The Psalms and the Prophets occasionally show that there was light, and they may have had more than we can see in their records of the old days; but their light must have been dim and uncertain, seeing that none had ever risen from the dead to die no more. Enoch and Elijah were removed from the world in a mysterious way; they never looked upon the pale messenger, and their feet never touched the cold waters of the border land; but none of the sons of mortal men had ever risen from the grave to immortality.

Before the resurrection of Christ there had been instances of what is popularly termed resurrection, as in the case of Lazarus and others whom Christ raised from the dead. In the Old Testament period, also, there had been similar cases, as in the history of Elijah and Elisha. Had the resurrection of Christ been like these earlier resurrections, as we call them, simply the return of the spirit to the waiting body, and a mere reviving and continuance of the interrupted life, it is hard to see truth in the terms frequently applied to Christ as the firstborn from the dead (Col 1:18), the firstborn of the dead (Rev 1:5), the firstfruits (1Co 15:20; 1Co 15:23). We recognize the appropriateness of such terms to Christ only when we perceive that His reappearance within the circle of the friends who had buried Him was not on a level with that of Lazarus, but in a higher mode of life than that which He had quitted. In Lazarus we behold simply the reanimation of the natural body, and the resumption of the fleshly life. In Christ we behold resurrection in the spiritual body, and assumption of the life of the world to come. This is fully demonstrated by the facts given in the Gospel record, and this is required by the exceptional pre-eminence which the New Testament accords to Christs rising from the dead. But one instance of that which is indeed the resurrection has been vouchsafed to our knowledge, as a sure pledge of that which is to come. This is manifest in the risen Christ, who thereby was declared to be the Son of God with power (Rom 1:4). All the partial resemblances to this which are found on record are cases of mere resuscitation or reanimation.

Not as a fallen stone,

Abiding where it hath been flung,

Did Christ remain the dead among,

But sprang from Hades deep invisible zone,

As the corn springs from where it has been thrown!

Not, as at Nain of yore

The young man rose to die again,

Did He resume the haunts of men,

But closed behind Him Deaths reluctant door

And triumphed on to live for evermore!

Not, as we spend our days,

Subject to sorrows, pains, and fears,

Does He persist a Man of tears;

Henceforth He feels no touch of our decays,

But inexpressive joy in all His ways!

Not for Himself alone

He fought, and won that glorious life:

For us He conquered in the strife,

That we might make His victory our own,

And rise with Him before the Fathers Throne!

Thus hath the Saviour brought

Our immortality to light!

O may He tarry in our sight,

That, clinging fast to Him with every thought,

We may partake the triumph He has wrought!1 [Note: G. T. S. Farquhar.]

In a sheltered corner of my Manse garden stands a common red flowering-currant bush. I suppose it has no value at all for anybody but me. But I would not exchange it for all the roses in the Majors fine domain across the road. For year after year it gives me the first news of Spring. Just after the New Year has come in, I begin to watch it,long before anything else in the garden has stirred. And some still, quiet morning it has its message for me. There is quite a distinct new shade of green on the buds. The wind is bitterly cold, and snow showers are about. Everything else in the garden is cold and dead. But it has risen. And the rest will follow in Gods good time.2 [Note: Archibald Alexander.]

2. The resurrection of Christ is the pledge of our resurrection.We need more than simple proof, however clear, that a resurrection of man is possible. We require a pledge of its certainty before we can taste strong consolation. How can one mans rising give assurance that we shall rise? Did He not rise from the dead purely in virtue of His power and Godhead? What more does that prove than that He was able to rise because He was the strong Son of God? How shall we, who are certainly not strong, be able to follow His example? Is not the proverb, that what man has done man may do, false on the very face of it? Who shall say that the doings of the man Christ Jesus are the just criterion of what may be expected from man? If the Lord had been related to us in the same way as we are related to our fellows, and in no other way, His rising would have proved the possibility of a resurrection, but nothing more. If He had been only our Brother, He could not have been the first-fruits of them that slept, or the pledge of their rising again. But while He was truly our Brother, He was also the Everlasting Father, the representative Head of the race of men.

Luther says: Our most merciful Father, seeing us to be overwhelmed and oppressed by the curse of the law, and so to be holden under the same that we could never be delivered from it by our own power, sent His holy Son into the world, and laid upon Him the sins of all men, saying, Be Thou Peter that denier; Paul that blasphemer and cruel persecutor; David that adulterer; that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise; that thief which hanged upon the cross; and, briefly, be Thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men. See, then, that Thou pay and satisfy for them. Now cometh the law, and saith, I find Him a sinner, and I see no sins else but on Him; therefore let Him die upon the cross, and so he setteth upon Him and killeth Him. The old order changeth, ever giving place to the latest born, and Luthers form of sound words is now obsolete, just as our little systems will have their day and cease to be; but the immortal soul of vicarious sacrifice is unchanged. It is unalterably and eternally true that Christ, as the Head of His people, and made one with them, was made a curse, was made sin, took upon Himself all their responsibilities, and fully discharged them in dying. When He was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father His reappearance on earth, or reconstitution as a man, was nothing less than Gods pledge that every liability had been settled, and that a similar resurrection belonged to them who should be found united to the Head that had suffered in their room and stead. The solidarity of our race in ruin is the groundwork of its solidarity in redemption; in a true sense, all Christs people rose up with Him on the third day, according to the Scriptures.

Little one, you must not fret

That I take your clothes away;

Better sleep you so will get,

And at morning wake more gay

Saith the childrens mother.

You I must unclothe again,

For you need a better dress;

Too much worn are body and brain;

You need everlastingness

Saith the heavenly father.

I went down deaths lonely stair;

Laid my garments in the tomb;

Dressed again one morning fair;

Hastened up, and hied me home

Saith the elder brother.

Then I will not be afraid

Any ill can come to me;

When tis time to go to bed,

I will rise and go with thee

Saith the little brother.1 [Note: George MacDonald, Poetical Works, i. 348.]

3. The resurrection of Christ is the pattern of our resurrection.The first sheaf is a specimen, type, example, or pattern of the harvest at hand. If the first fruits be poor and withered, the after fruits will be similar; if rich, full, and perfect, the harvest expected will be excellent. When we read that the Lord shall raise our vile bodies at the last, so that they may be fashioned like His own body of glory, we have at once a type of the glorified humanity that shall stand on the earth at the last day. He remained with us for forty days after He had risen, in order to give us light concerning the wonderful transformation.

(1) The condition of the spirit after death and resurrection is clearly seen in that light. Full and perfect peace was the atmosphere in which the spirit of the great Redeemer lived and moved after He had conquered death and the grave. The memory that He had of the past was clear and distinct, but not painful in the smallest degree; He contemplated the whole of His life in the past as a finished work, an arduous task accomplished, a hard-won battle endedthe whole to look back upon as a joy for evermore. His heart was the same, as kind and thoughtful as ever, and He resumed companionship with His friends very much as if there had been no cross and no grave. We hope to be like Him in all that pertained to His holy and happy humanity; our spirits hushed to rest, and blest in the possession of His peace; our minds unvexed and untortured by the element of pain that troubles our memories here, and poisons our joy when we recall the past. We look to have, like Him, the same sweet intercourse with former friends of mortal years, and to retain our old familiar, and well-known personality, set free from sin.

(2) The condition of the glorified body is unveiled in the light of His forty days sojourn after the resurrection. His was most distinctly a real body, and not a phantom without substance, to mock the gazers sight. So real was He to the disciples that, after the first natural start of terror, they fell easily into their old ways with Him, and did not seem to feel it a strange thing to walk and talk with One in a glorified state. He was easily recognized by them, for His body had the well-known marks and signs by which they were able to identify Him at once. He showed them His hands and His feet

The arm which held the children, the pale hand

That gently touched the eyelids of the blind

And opened passive to the cruel nail.

They could not fail to remember every line of His blessed face; He had been away only for a little while, and it was easy to know Him after the short grief and pain. The body of the Lord was essentially a spiritual one withal; not any longer confined to the conditions of time, space, and matter, but supreme in power over the world of sense; able to enter a fast-closed room, and to leave it at will; to become visible or invisible as He wished, known or unknownHis was a body that obeyed every wish of the Spirit.

I sent the Queen (January 1885) a little book which contained some verses due to a great sorrow of my own. In her reply she said, You surely do not think, as it would a little seem from the beautiful poem, My Yew Tree, that our dear ones sleep awhile, and that their bodies are to rise again? I thought you wrote to me once you thought, as I always think one feels one must, that the spirit is at once free in death, and that you were inclined to believe in a spiritual body within our present one?

To this I replied that the Queen was quite right in supposing that I was in sympathy with the view that the spiritual body (as St. Paul calls it) is set free at death. I have never been able to feel that the supposed long sleep and time of unconsciousness is taught us in the New Testament. The phrases I had used in my verses were used in the sense that to us our dear ones seemed to sleep; and that what I had tried to sing was a kind of triumph song, telling the cold earth that her seeming victory was no victory at all.1 [Note: Bishop Boyd Carpenter, Some Pages of My Life, 287.]

Death and darkness, get you packing,

Nothing now to man is lacking;

All your triumphs now are ended,

And what Adam marrd is mended;

Graves are beds now for the weary,

Death a nap, to wake more merry;

Youth now, full of pious duty,

Seeks in thee for perfect beauty;

The weak and aged, tired with length

Of days, from Thee look for new strength;

And infants with Thy pangs contest

As pleasant as if with the breast.

Then unto Him, who thus hath thrown

Even to contempt Thy kingdom down,

And by His blood did us advance

Unto His own inheritance;

To Him be glory, power, praise,

From this unto the last of days.1 [Note: Henry Vaughan.]

The Resurrection from the Dead

Literature

Aglionby (F. K.), The Better Choice, 157.

Alford (H.), Sermons on Christian Doctrine, 251.

Brown (J. B.), The Higher Life, 338.

Buckland (A. R.), Text-Studies for a Year, 115.

Butler (W. J.), Sermons for Working Men, 211.

Gurney (T. A.), The Living Lord and the Opened Grave, 57.

Horder (W. G.), The Other-World, 123.

Howatt (J. R.), The Childrens Pew, 71.

Jerdan (C.), Manna for Young Pilgrims, 272.

Keble (J.), Sermons for the Christian Year: Easter to Ascension, 147.

Newbolt (W. C. E.), Words of Exhortation, 147.

Pentecost (G. F.), Bible Studies: Mark and Jewish History, 193.

Pierson (A. T.), The Making of a Sermon, 96.

Russell (A.), The Light that Lighteth Every Man, 107.

Shore (T. T.), Saint George for England, 104.

Simpson (W.), in The Worlds Great Sermons, v. 121.

Smyth (N.), The Reality of Faith, 244.

Steel (T. H.), Sermons in Harrow Chapel, 171.

Thorne (H.), Foreshadowings of the Gospel, 205.

Varley (H.), Some Main Questions of the Christian Faith, 78.

Wheeler (W. C.), Sermons and Addresses, 162.

Whiton (J. M.), Beyond the Shadow, 68, 224.

Wilson (S.), Lenten Shadows and Easter Lights, 125.

Christian World Pulpit, v. 369 (Kennedy); viii. 347 (Brown); xvi. 197 (Craig); xxiii. 276 (Alexander); xli. 355 (Varley); xlvii. 257 (Newbolt).

Churchmans Pulpit: Easter Day and Season: vii. 200 (Keble), 203 (Vaughan).

Churchmans Pulpit: First Sunday after Easter; vii. 463 (Cobb).

Contemporary Pulpit, 2nd Ser., i. 245 (Alexander); v. 235 (Brown).

Treasury (New York), xix. 848 (Broadbent).

Twentieth Century Pastor, xxii. 241.

Fuente: The Great Texts of the Bible

now: 1Co 15:4-8

the firstfruits: 1Co 15:23, Act 26:23, Rom 8:11, Col 1:18, 1Pe 1:3, Rev 1:5

Reciprocal: Exo 23:19 – first of the Exo 34:26 – first Lev 2:12 – the oblation Lev 2:14 – a meat offering Lev 23:10 – sheaf Lev 23:17 – the firstfruits Num 15:20 – a cake Num 28:26 – in the day Deu 26:2 – That thou shalt 2Ch 31:5 – came abroad Isa 26:19 – my dead Dan 12:2 – many Mat 8:11 – in Mat 27:52 – many Joh 11:25 – I am Joh 14:19 – because Act 7:60 – he fell 1Co 15:13 – General 1Co 15:15 – whom 1Co 15:51 – We shall not 2Co 4:14 – that 2Co 9:6 – I say Col 2:12 – wherein

Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge

HE IS RISEN

Now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept.

1Co 15:20

Two distinct truths are taught us in these blessed words:

I. Now is Christ risen from the dead.Here is the assurance

(a) That the souls of all believers are safe.

(b) That their sin is cancelled.

(c) That death is abolished.

(d) That heaven is opened.

II. And become the firstfruits of them that slept.Here is the guarantee that the future of the bodies of believers is secured as well.

Rev. F. Harper.

Illustration

When, in the days of old, the pious Jew brought a basket of firstfruits to the priest according to Gods holy ordinance, he brought a patterna specimen of the fruits in his orchard or garden; and when Jesus rose, He rose as the firstfruits of them that sleptin the future life the body of every saint shall be like the Body of his Lord.

Fuente: Church Pulpit Commentary

1Co 15:20. Taking for granted he has proved his point, Paul reaffirms the third fact of the Gospel, namely, that Christ arose from the dead. The italicized words are significant in that they specify from what Jesus arose. He previously arose to the cross (Joh 12:32-33), and arose from earth to Heaven, but those facts were not in dispute; that from the dead was. The body is the only part of Christ or any other man that dies, hence if the body is not to be raised from the grave, then there will be no resurrection at. all. Paul has shown the awful conclusions made necessary by the theory that there is to be no resurrection of the dead. He will next show the glorious conclusions made possible by the truth of the resurrection. The first one is that Christ has become the firstfruits of them that slept; that is, he was the first person to rise from the dead to die no more. For detailed comments on this subject, see those on Rom 8:29, in volume 1 of the New Testament Commentary.

Fuente: Combined Bible Commentary

1Co 15:20. But now hath Christ been raised from the dead. As if impatient at having to linger over such wretched speculations, with what a bound does the apostle here spring on the firm ground and into the clear air of an indubitable resurrection in the Person of Christ

the first-fruits of them that are asleep. The allusion here is as obvious as it is beautiful. On the morrow after the first Sabbath of the Passover, a sheaf of the first-fruits of the barley harvest was reaped and waved before the Lord, as a joyful pledge of the full harvest to come (Lev 23:10-11; Lev 23:15-16). Even so, on the morrow after the first Sabbath of that Passover when our Lord was crucifiedbeing the first day of the weekdid He rise the First-fruits of His sleeping people.

Fuente: A Popular Commentary on the New Testament

Observe here, 1. The resurrection of Christ declared: Now is Christ risen from the dead.

2. Our resurrection from his is inferred and insured: he arose as the first-fruits of them that slept. The term of first-fruits in the Levitical law, Lev 23:10. These were offered both as an acknowledgment that the whole crop was God’s, and as a pledge and assurance of their enjoying the whole crop from God, and as a mean by which the whole crop was consecrated and sanctified to their use.

As sure as the whole harvest follows the first-fruits, so shall the saints’ resurrection follow the resurrection of Christ, as an effect follows its proper cause; for Christ’s resurrection is the meritorious cause, the efficient cause, and the exemplary cause, of our resurrection; and as it is the cause, so is it the pledge, the earnest and the full assurance of ours.

Observe, 3. Christ is called the first-fruits of them that slept; that is, the first-fruits from the dead of them that slept; not as if Christ were absolutely the first that was raised from the dead, for we read of one raised by Elijah, and another by Elisha, and of Lazarus raised by Christ; but these were so raised as to die again; they were not raised to a life of immortality: but now Christ was the first that arose never to die more; the first that arose by his own power, the first that arose to give others a pledge and assurance of their rising after him, and of their rising like unto him. Christ’s resurrection is the cause, the pattern, the pledge, the assurance of the believer’s resurrection: Christ is risen from the dead, and become the first-fruits of them that slept.

Fuente: Expository Notes with Practical Observations on the New Testament

The Resurrection, A Victory Over Death

McGarvey says, “On the morrow after the Sabbath of the Passover a sheaf of barley (the earliest grain to ripen) was waved as first-fruits before the Lord. ( Leviticus 23:914 .) The first-fruits had to be thus presented before the harvest could be begun, and its presentation was an earnest of the ingathering. Now on this very day after the Sabbath Christ was raised as the first-fruits from the dead, and became the earnest of the general resurrection.” Jesus, like that wave offering of first-fruits, signifies a general harvest of all who are in the grave ( 1Co 15:20 ).

Physical death came for all men as a consequence of Adam’s sin. There was nothing anyone else did to deserve the appointment with the first death. Similarly, all, both those who have done good and those who have done evil, will overcome the grave because Christ did. However, in this chapter, Paul only considered the resurrection of the righteous because of the flow of the argument. Elsewhere, we learn all will be raised on the same day ( 1Co 15:21-23 ; Joh 5:26-29 ; Mat 13:36-43 only one harvest).

Death, and its authority, will be overcome at the resurrection. With the last authority, other than God, conquered, Jesus will then be free to turn his kingdom over to God (see also Mat 15:13 ). Jesus must reign in his kingdom until all enemies are overcome. Dan 2:44 clearly shows that his kingdom will overcome all other kingdoms ( 1Co 15:24-25 ).

Allen points out that Jesus will reign at God’s right hand until the last enemy is destroyed ( Act 2:33-36 ; Act 5:31 ; 1Co 1:25 ). The apostle stated death will be the last enemy conquered. That conquest will come when all the dead are raised. Christ was given authority by the Father. All but the One who gave it are subject to Jesus’ power ( 1Co 15:26-27 ). In Eph 1:19-22 , Paul spoke of God’s mighty power “which He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, far above all principality and power and might and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come. And He put all things under His feet, and gave Him to be head over all things to the church” (see also Mat 28:18 ; 1Pe 3:22 ).

Jesus’ stated purpose while he was on earth was to glorify God and do his will ( Joh 4:34 ; Joh 6:38 ; Joh 7:16 ; Joh 8:29 ; Joh 12:44 ; Joh 12:39 ; Joh 14:24 ; Joh 17:8 ; Joh 17:21-23 ). That glorification will finally be complete when all enemies are at Christ’s feet. Then, he will turn all over to God, the Father ( 1Co 15:28 ).

Fuente: Gary Hampton Commentary on Selected Books

1Co 15:20-22. But now is Christ risen Here the apostle declares that Christians have hope not in this life only. His proof of the resurrection lies in a narrow compass, 1Co 15:12-19. Almost all the rest of the chapter is taken up in illustrating, vindicating, and applying it. The proof is short, but solid and convincing, namely, that which arose from Christs resurrection. Now this not only proved a resurrection possible, but, as it proved him to be a divine teacher, it proved also the certainty of a general resurrection, which he so expressly taught. The first-fruits of them that slept The pledge, earnest, and assurance of the resurrection of those who sleep in him, even of all the righteous, of the resurrection of whom, at least chiefly, if not only, the apostle speaks throughout the chapter. As to the term first- fruits, in explanation thereof it may be proper to observe, that the Israelites were commanded to bring on the morrow after the sabbath, with which the passover week began, a sheaf of the first-fruits of their harvest to the priest, to be waved before the Lord, who, by accepting it, made it an example and a pledge of the future harvest. In allusion to that rite, Christ, who arose on the very day on which the first-fruits were offered, is called the first-fruits of them who slept, because he is the first who was raised from the dead to die no more, and because his resurrection is an example and an earnest of the resurrection of the righteous. For since by man came death Since death came on the whole human race by means of one man, who brought mortality on all his posterity in consequence of one great and wilful transgression; by man came also, &c. That is, by means of another man came likewise the resurrection of the dead And our happy relation to him abundantly repairs the damage we sustain by our fatal relation to the former. For as in Adam all Even the righteous; die, so in Or through; Christ shall all these be made alive He does not say shall revive, (as naturally as they die,) but shall be made alive, namely, by a power not their own. See on Rom 5:18, a passage which is a good comment on this verse.

Fuente: Joseph Bensons Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Vv. 20-22. But now is Christ risen from the dead, the first-fruits of them that sleep. 21. For since by a man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. 22. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.

The words: But now, are, as it were, the cry of deliverance, after the nightmare through which the apostle has brought his readers, by opening up to their view the abyss into which we should be plunged by the denial of the resurrection. The now contrasts the certain reality of the fact with the perfect void resulting from its denial; this void, opened up for an instant, no longer exists, except as a vanished past.

The words , from the dead, would suffice to prove that Paul is thinking of a bodily resurrection; for spiritually Christ never was among the dead.

The verb became, added by the Byz. reading, must be rejected; the word first-fruits is not a predicate, it is a simple apposition: He rose again as first-fruits, and not to remain alone in His state of glory. Christ risen is to the multitude of believers who shall rise again at His Advent what a first ripe ear, gathered by the hand, is to the whole harvest. Is there in this expression a distant reminiscence of the rite in which the apostle had so often taken part as a Jew, the offering in the temple of the first sheaf of the year, as the first-fruits of the harvest? This festival took place yearly, on the morrow after the Passover, the 16th Nisan. It is difficult to doubt this recollection in the apostle’s mind, especially if it is held, according to the fourth Gospel, that Jesus was crucified on the afternoon of the 14th Nisan, and that consequently He was raised on the morning of the 16th. But this reminiscence, even if it is real, did not determine the idea and expression of first-fruits. Both offered themselves spontaneously.

The term first-fruits is justified in 1Co 15:21 (for).

Fuente: Godet Commentary (Luke, John, Romans and 1 Corinthians)

But now hath Christ been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of them that are asleep.

Fuente: McGarvey and Pendleton Commentaries (New Testament)

20. Now is Christ risen from the dead, the first-fruit of them that slept. A number of others had been raised from the dead before our Lord came forth from the tomb, but, as we have no assurance in their case that they received the glorified body, of course theirs was merely adumbratory resurrection, as they afterward died and became subjects of the final resurrection. The very fact that Christ arose from the dead is confirmatory proof that all will rise, and consequently He became the first-fruit.

Fuente: William Godbey’s Commentary on the New Testament

1Co 15:20-28. But why discuss this further? Christ has been raised, the firstfruits of the rest of the dead, thus, as one with them, pledging their resurrection. If man brought death, resurrection must equally come through man. The whole race died in Adam, the whole race will be raised from the dead in Christ. This universal resurrection will not be accomplished all at once but in stages according to the different classes concerned. In the first stage there is Christ Himself as firstfruits; in the second, at His return, Christians; in the third stage, the rest of mankind, when He delivers up His kingdom to the Father after He has abolished all hostile powers, for His reign must continue till this has been achieved. The last of them is death. This is foretold in Scripture (Psa 8:6), which says that God has put all in subjection to Him. (The Psalmist says to man, which Paul interprets as equivalent to the Son of Man; son of man is used in the Ps. in the sense of man.) Obviously God, who puts all things under Christs feet, is not included in the things made subject to Him. When this is accomplished, the Son will subject Himself to God, that He may be all in all, that is the indwelling power animating and controlling the whole universe.

1Co 15:22. There is no reference here to what is known as universal restoration. But there is to universal resurrection. The all is as unlimited in one place as the other. The acts of Adam and Christ are racial acts, done in their capacity as natural and spiritual heads of the race, and affecting the whole race. Christ undoes, and more than undoes, what Adam has done, physical death is cancelled by physical resurrection. This would not have been the case if universal death had been met only by limited resurrection. In Christ has here no specific reference to those who are united to Christ by faith. This relation depends on the choice of the individual, but death and resurrection are quite independent of personal volition. The general structure of the Pauline theology would compel us to postulate his belief in universal resurrection; here he explicitly asserts it.

1Co 15:24. Usually the first clause is translated as in RV, and the end is the usual sense. It seems, for various reasons, better to accept Lietzmanns view that it means here the final portion, the remainder, i.e. the non-Christian portion of mankind. There is thus a double resurrection of the dead, the former of Christians, at the Parousia, the latter of non-Christians, presumably at the end of Christs reign.

1Co 15:29-34. Very abruptly Paul descends from this soaring flight, one of his most daring pieces of speculation, to very practical arguments. What is the object of baptism for the dead? Apparently some received vicarious baptism, hoping that by being baptized in their place they would benefit friends who had died unbaptized. If there is no resurrection, they cannot be profited. Why do Paul and his colleagues run such daily risks of death? for this, he assures them by his Christian pride in them, is no exaggeration. If he had really, as men wished, fought with wild beasts at Ephesus, what would that extreme risk have profited him? The consequence of denying the resurrection is to practise the maxim, Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die (Isa 22:13). Let them not give ear to such maxims. The saying (quoted from Menander, the Athenian dramatist, 342291 B.C.) is true, Bad company corrupts good morals. Let them awake in a right spirit and not sin; a shameful ignorance of God is only too prevalent among them.

Fuente: Peake’s Commentary on the Bible

Verse 20

The first-fruits. Jesus Christ was the first who arose to immortality. Others, as Lazarus, (John 11:1-57) the son of the woman of Shunem, (2 Kings 4:32-37,) and of the widow of Nain, (Luke 7:12-15,) were only restored to this mortal life, and therefore were not cases of resurrection in the sense of this chapter.

Fuente: Abbott’s Illustrated New Testament

15:20 {10} But now is Christ risen from the dead, {11} [and] become the {f} firstfruits of them that slept.

(10) A conclusion of the former argument: therefore Christ is risen again.

(11) He puts the last conclusion for the first proposition of the argument that follows. Christ is risen again: therefore will we the faithful (for of them he speaks) rise again. Then follows the first reason of this conclusion: for Christ is set forth to us to be considered of, not as a private man apart and by himself, but as the firstfruits: and he takes that which was known to all men, that is, that the whole heap is sanctified in the firstfruits.

(f) He alludes to the firstfruits of grain, the offering of which sanctified the rest of the fruits.

Fuente: Geneva Bible Notes

The positive reality 15:20-28

Paul turned next to show that the resurrection of Christ makes the resurrection of believers both necessary and inevitable. The consequences of this fact are as glorious as the effects of His not being raised are dismal. Those "in Christ" must arise since Christ arose. His resurrection was in the past, but ours will be in the future. Christ’s resurrection set in motion the defeat of all God’s enemies including death. His resurrection demands our resurrection since otherwise death would remain undefeated.

Fuente: Expository Notes of Dr. Constable (Old and New Testaments)

The argument advances here by connecting the believer with Christ. Christ was the firstfruits of the larger group of those whom God has chosen for salvation. This is the last mention of Christ’s resurrection in the argument, but all that follows rests on this fact.

The Jews celebrated Passover on the fourteenth day of the first month on their sacred calendar. Jesus died on the day Jewish fathers slew the Passover lamb, which was a Friday that year. The Jews offered a sacrifice of firstfruits the day after the Sabbath (Saturday) following the Passover (Lev 23:10-11), namely, Sunday. This was the day Jesus arose. Fifty days later on Pentecost they presented another offering of new grain that they also called an offering of firstfruits (Lev 23:15-17). The firstfruits they offered following the Passover were only the first of the crops that they offered later. Paul saw in this comparison the fact that other believers would rise from the dead just as Jesus Christ did. He used the firstfruits metaphor to assert that the resurrection of believers is absolutely inevitable. God Himself has guaranteed it.

Fuente: Expository Notes of Dr. Constable (Old and New Testaments)

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