1 Corinthians 15:12-19

March 24, 2019

Lord’s Day Worship

Sean Higgins

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The sermon starts at 14:15 in the audio file.

Or, The Consequences If Christ Is Not Raised

 

The resurrection of Christ is not only a historical event, it is the hinge of our faith. This paragraph, 1 Corinthians 15:12-19, is a logical linchpin that demonstrates how the wheels of preaching and believing, and the wheels of forgiveness and eternal life, all fall off unless Christ is raised from the dead.

I really have enjoyed working through this paragraph because of Paul’s logic. I’ve been teaching an introductory logic class for my first time this school year, and just a week ago we got to the lesson on hypothetical arguments, the “if…then” arguments. There are at least six different hypothetical or conditional arguments in these verses. His argument here is about the consequences if Christ has not been raised from the dead.

He builds on this logic twice in the paragraph. Note the repetition in verses 13 and 16, and then a repetition in the first part of verse 14 and 17. “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised….” As I said, he cycles through this logic twice, with related, but different conclusions.

We might wonder, however, after reading through verses 1-11, why Paul even goes through this. The gospel preached by Paul and the other apostles (verses 1, 2, 3, 11), the gospel believed by the Corinthians (verses 1, 11), included Christ being “raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared” to Peter and the Twelve and a number of witnesses (verses 3-5). The death and resurrection of Christ is the center of the gospel message and the center of God’s work and couldn’t be left out.

So why were some of the Corinthians having trouble? Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, which He was, as evidenced from the previous paragraph by Paul himself and others, [then] how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? We don’t know who the some were; were there many of the “some”? Were the “some” were leaders or not? We do know that they were Corinthians, and they were apparently Christians, identified with the church enough for Paul to call them some of you, and he was writing to the believers. But if they didn’t believe that Christ was raised from the dead, then what did they believe?

It is possible, though again we don’t know for sure, that some of them thought Christ was raised but that He was the only one. Paul argues in the next paragraph, verses 20-28, that Christ is “the firstfruits,” with more to follow necessarily (secondfruits, thirdfruits, etc.). But in verses 12-19 Paul’s repeated logic concerns Christ’s own resurrection. Maybe it was an issue of being raised not in body but only in spirit. Perhaps this is why Paul talks about “heavenly bodies” and “earthly bodies” later in chapter 15 (verses 35-41). Popular Greek philosophy and mythology in Paul’s day didn’t believe in physical resurrection of flesh and bones. In Plato’s Phaedo, Cebes says that most people fear that at death there is no more existence of body or soul. Socrates tries to argue that the soul is immortal but the body doesn’t continue. In Eumenedies by Aeschulus, Apollo says that if once the blood is gone there is no resurrection (Garland). This is why we’re not surprised that when Paul preached to the Athenians, “Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked” (Acts 17:32).

In this paragraph Paul begins with their false universal premise that: No people are raised from the dead people. And Paul argues the particular from the universal (subimplication): if none are, then certainly Christ couldn’t be. This is the particular he argues from twice, starting in ve[...]