Believing Jews knew about the universal resurrection long before Christ came. They knew that the day of Judgment would come, and that everyone who had ever lived on earth would have to return to life, stand before God, and give an account of...
Believing Jews knew about the universal resurrection long before Christ came. They knew that the day of Judgment would come, and that everyone who had ever lived on earth would have to return to life, stand before God, and give an account of the life they had lived. They also knew about the messianic Kingdom, where those raised from the dead would become neighbors of those who were still alive when the Messiah came. In Paul's day, the messianic Kingdom was regarded as the Kingdom of God, in which the earthly and the heavenly were joined so that the righteous, raised from the dead and miraculously restored to life by God, would live alongside those who entered it without having died.
In those days, however, the Messiah was not regarded as the bearer of the Kingdom. He was merely its King, while the Kingdom itself was established by God according to His will. The Messiah was considered an ordinary human being by nature, given a special vocation: messianic ministry. One did not necessarily have to be born the Messiah; one could become the Messiah just as others became prophets. God called a person to ministry, and the prophet became what he was meant to be.
Paul, however, speaks of a different Messiah, the One who revealed Himself to him on the road to Damascus. This Messiah was not merely the King of a Kingdom established by God: He Himself bore that Kingdom within Himself and had borne it from His own birth, which was itself extraordinary. A Messiah who contains within Himself the entire fullness of the Kingdom is a new image; nothing like it existed in the traditional Judaism of the Gospel era.
The image of such a Messiah and such a Kingdom compelled people to look differently at familiar things. The Kingdom entered the world not simply as an external force, like the breath of God, originally foreign both to the fallen world and to fallen human nature. It entered the world through a Man who differs from each of us only in that His humanity is entirely free from the dominion of sin.
And the bonds of love established with this Man open the fullness of the Kingdom to each of us: they open it in a human way, just as these bonds of love unite us with Him in a human way. Human relationships themselves become the spiritual foundation of the Kingdom, and God enters into them, making them divine-human. Thus the life of the Kingdom becomes our life, its history becomes a fact of our spiritual biography, and its triumph becomes our salvation.
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15:12 How say some - Who probably had been heathen philosophers.
15:13 If there be no resurrection - If it be a thing flatly impossible.
15:14 Then is our preaching - From a commission supposed to be given after the resurrection. Vain - Without any real foundation.
15:15 If the dead rise not - If the very notion of a resurrection be, as they say, absurd and impossible.
15:17 Ye are still in your sins - That is, under the guilt of them. So that there needed something more than reformation, (which was plainly wrought,) in order to their being deliveredfrom the guilt of sin even that atonement, the sufficiency of which God attested by raising our great Surety from the grave.
15:18 They who sleep in Christ - Who have died for him, or believing in him. Are perished - Have lost their life and being together.
15:19 If in this life only we have hope - If we look for nothing beyond the grave. But if we have a divine evidence of things not seen, if we have "a hope full of immortality," if we now taste of "the powers of the world to come," and see "the crown that fadeth not away," then, notwithstanding" allour present trials, we are more happy than all men.
15:20 But now - St. Paul declares that Christians "have hope," not "in this life only." His proof of the resurrection lies in a narrow compass, Co1 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, that which arose from Christ's resurrection. Now this not only proved a resurrection possible, but, as it proved him to be a divine teacher, proved the certainty of a general resurrection, which he so expressly taught. The first fruit of them that slept - The earnest, pledge, and insurance of their resurrection who slept in him: even of all the righteous. It is of the resurrection of these, and these only, that the apostle speaks throughout the chapter.