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King James Version (en)

King James Version (en)

1 Corinthians, Chapter 15, verses 20-21

¹² he proveth the necessity of our resurrection, against all such as deny the resurrection of the body, ²¹ The fruit

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

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

Read more:1 Corinthians, Chapter 15

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15

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.

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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.

Continuing the discussion of the general resurrection, Paul evidently does not separate it...

Continuing the discussion of the general resurrection, Paul evidently does not separate it from the history of the Kingdom gradually unfolding in our transfiguring, but not yet fully transfigured, world. And for the apostle, only resurrection, and by no means the immortality of the soul, is the true victory over death.

In fact, for him the whole history of the Kingdom turns out to be a sequence of stages following one another on the way to this victory. The main victory has already been won: Christ has risen from the dead, and His resurrection becomes the pledge of the Kingdom's final triumph at the end of time (v. 20). He is the first, but others will follow Him. The pivotal confrontation of the present age, in the apostle's thought, is the confrontation between Christ and the Kingdom with its fullness of life, and the death that entered the world after the fall - a death that cannot be defeated by hoping only in the immortality of the soul (vv. 21-22). But resurrection is a process requiring time, time that can also be measured by the clocks of our transfiguring, though not yet fully transfigured, world. This is not surprising: the Kingdom is not alien to our world; it enters it in order to transform it completely, and the history of the Kingdom cannot unfold apart from the history still continuing by inertia in our world, although its meaning and driving force were exhausted with the Savior's coming.

According to the evangelist's testimony, the process of the general resurrection began at the moment of the Savior's death on the cross (Matt. 27:50-53), and it will be completed, according to Paul, on the day of His return (v. 23). On that day the Church will reveal to the world its fullness as the fullness of the body of Christ, of which the apostle spoke. Those who sought the Kingdom and found it in the present age will be able to enjoy fully that fullness of life which today, even after touching the Kingdom, we experience only in part.

For those who sought nothing, that day will become the day of the last Judgment, at which their destiny in eternity will be decided (vv. 24-25). Without such a judgment, the completion of the present historical stage is impossible, just as without it the full and final triumph of Christ and the Kingdom over the death that entered the world with the fall is impossible (vv. 26-28). Only such a prospect gives meaning to Christianity and Christian life; otherwise it is not worth beginning at all, for if the world will forever remain as it is now, then it is better, following the well-known saying, "to eat, drink, and be merry while we are alive" (vv. 29-33). Christianity is not a religion but life in the Kingdom, and therefore following Christ makes sense only for the one to whom this Kingdom is more important than anything he has or can find in our still untransformed world.

The Apostle Paul warns us against a very serious danger: confusing different things. He says that when the Corinthians gather, “it is not the Lord's supper that you eat.” How, then, should it be eaten? What is wrong in the Corinthian community, and what does it have to do with us?

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