1 Corinthians 15:42-49

April 21, 2019

Lord’s Day Worship

Sean Higgins

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The sermon starts at 17:45 in the audio file.

Or, Sown and Raised with the Last Adam

Every Lord’s Day is good and to be received from God as a blessing to His people, but in some ways the brightness of those Sundays are like moons reflecting the full glory of Resurrection Sunday. It doesn’t really matter whether you follow the venerable Bede’s calculations about the proper day of Spring to celebrate the empty tomb, Easter is a highlight of our worshipping year as the body of Christ.

In God’s providence I reached 1 Corinthians 15 at the beginning of March and, though Easter is later on the calendar this year, I didn’t have to stretch the series to make sure to stay in the chapter by this day. This chapter is the definitive chapter on the resurrection of the dead in all of Scripture. It begins with the historic and prophetic facts: Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, He was buried, He was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and he appeared to Peter, the other apostles, and Paul himself later on. In The Early History of Rome Livy admitted that “the mists of antiquity cannot always be pierced,” but as for Christ, the truth of His resurrection is as open and clear as when the angels rolled back the stone of His tomb.

What some of the Corinthians began to challenge, though, is whether Christ’s resurrection had any meaning for Christians beyond being a point of belief. From verses 12-34 Paul answers this challenge. Christ is the firstfruits from the dead, and that means there will be secondfruits. One resurrection leads to many more.

The second question is, then, when the dead are raised, “with what kind of body do they come?” This is the challenge taken up in verse 35 which we began to consider last Sunday. Without hesitation Paul answered the challenge by pointing to God’s creative flair. The Lord turns bare seeds into fruitful plants, He differentiates kinds of flesh among living things, and He sets suns and moons and stars in the sky. These all point to God’s pattern of making fit as He sees fit. As the poet George Herbert wrote, “He that hath built the world can do much more” (from his 1633 poem, “The Sacrifice”).

The final answers to the question about what sort of body we will have in the resurrection come in verses 42-49. We will see two sets of contrasts. The body will be better than what we have now and that’s because of the better Adam we belong to.

A Better Body (verses 42-44)

Verse 42 opens with a conclusion indicator (“So also” NASB). God made it so that death transforms a seed, and He made many different seeds (verses 37-38). God made more than one kind of flesh (verse 39). God made more than one kind of glory for bodies (verses 40-41). So it is with the resurrection of the dead. The previous verses, though not using the word resurrection, set up this summary at the start of verse 42 which prepares us for more details in the second half of verse 42 through verse 44.

There are four contrasts between the sown and the raised, between the seed-body and the plant-body. These are not just contrasts between the corpse, but the body we live with before being buried. The intensity level rises like four crescendos in these four lines.

An Imperishable Body (verse 42b)

Of all the places to start, this one seems maybe the most obvious. The body we have now is breaking bad. Whether quickly and painfully or not, whether we recognize it or not, it is inevitable. What is sown is perishable. It is in a state of corruption, of gradual decline; the body we have is at best temporary, and at death begins to decompose into dust. This Greek word for perishable (ἀφθαρσία) translates words like “breath” and “vanity” in the OT.

But remember, this is not bad news for a seed. A see[...]