For Paul, Christ's resurrection from the dead is the cornerstone of Christianity as a whole. Indeed, Christianity in every age has been founded precisely on faith in the resurrection of every person from the dead, and on the belief that this process began with the Savior's resurrection. And the point is not merely that...
For Paul, Christ's resurrection from the dead is the cornerstone of Christianity as a whole. Indeed, Christianity in every age has been founded precisely on faith in the resurrection of every person from the dead, and on the belief that this process began with the Savior's resurrection. And the point is not merely that without life after death, a person's earthly life proves largely meaningless.
In ancient times, belief in the immortality of the soul and in recompense after death was characteristic of the Egyptians, to some extent of the Greeks, and of certain other peoples. But the Bible speaks of something else. It is not saying that some part of the human person, however important, is preserved after death and that this allows a person to go on living, remembering and remaining conscious of themselves. The Bible speaks of something greater: it speaks of resurrection, of the whole person returning to life—and to a full life, not the partial and limited life that the soul alone would inevitably have. For all its importance, the soul is only a part of the human person, not the entire person.
But for human resurrection to become possible, the world had to change. Death and the evil that gave rise to it had to be driven out of the world they entered after the Fall. The world had to become God's Kingdom once again, as it had been on the first day of creation: on that first day there was neither darkness nor evil in the world; it was entirely permeated by the light of God's presence, which made it the Kingdom of the living and utterly real God. This is exactly how God wants to see the world, and He will accept nothing less. According to His design, the human person must become an inhabitant of this world and attain in it a fullness of life that is unimaginable today.
Christ's resurrection from the dead became the center of this process. Human salvation consists in joining the universal resurrection; otherwise, a person will have to forget about the Kingdom. The apostle understands all this perfectly and never tires of reminding others, for to remain outside what is happening means losing everything. Christianity itself then loses all meaning, turning into a religion, a doctrine—in short, into something that cannot by itself bring anyone into the life of the Kingdom. And to live on talk about a Kingdom toward which one is not journeying truly means being the most pitiable of all people.
15
15:2 Ye are saved, if ye hold fast - Your salvation is begun, and will be perfected, if ye continue in the faith.Unless ye have believed in vain - Unless indeed your faith was only a delusion.
15:3 I received - From Christ himself. It was not a fiction of my own. Isa 53:8-9.
15:4 According to the scriptures - He proves it first from scripture, then from the testimony of a cloud of witnesses. Psa 16:10.
15:5 By the twelve - This was their standing appellation; but their full number was not then present.
15:6 Above five hundred - Probably in Galilee. A glorious and incontestable proof! The greater part remain - Alive.
15:7 Then by all the apostles - The twelve were mentioned Co1 15:5. This title here, therefore, seems to include theseventy; if not all those, likewise, whom God afterwards sent to plant the gospel in heathen nations.
15:8 An untimely birth - It was impossible to abase himself more than he does by this single appellation. As an abortion is not worthy the name of a man, so he affirms himself to be not worthy the name of an apostle.
15:9 I persecuted the church - True believers are humbled all their lives, even for the sins they committed before they believed.
15:10 I laboured more than they all - That is, more than any of them, from a deep sense of the peculiar love God had shown me. Yet, to speak more properly, it is not I, but the grace of God that is with me - This it is which at first qualified me for the work, and still excites me to zeal and diligence in it.
15:11 Whether I or they, so we preach - All of us speak the same thing.
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.