1 Corinthians 15:12-14 - If there is no resurrection ...

15:12

Greek thought was that there was no resurrection of the dead, only immortality of the soul. See what Paul is doing here. The resurrection of Christ, which Paul has just shown to be central to the gospel, blows apart Greek thought. Some of the Corinthians, having accepted the gospel, were sinking back into a Greek way of thinking. We all need to beware of thinking like our culture. All human cultures will have something of value, but all human cultures are also seriously flawed. Yet, time and time again we find so-called theologians choosing to go with the culture rather go with the Bible. “There is no resurrection of the dead”, note the universal implication of Christ’s resurrection. His bodily resurrection means bodily resurrection for all who believe.

15:13

So Christ’s resurrection is the guarantee of our resurrection. The converse is also true. If we are not going to be raised from the dead, then neither was Christ raised from the dead. How can Paul draw such a conclusion? It is because Christ was fully human, He died as our representative.

15:14

There are many so-called liberal Christians who seek to have a Christianity without the resurrection, or demote the resurrection to a mere “spiritual” phenomenon. This verse states in the clearest terms the futility of such an approach. If there is no resurrection, if Christ was not raised, then there is no point at all the gospel, it is completely empty. It is a waste of time preaching the gospel, and it is a waste of time believing. Indeed, quite what one would preach, and what one would believe, I don’t know. One might say it is worth preaching good moral behaviour. Well it might be, but then we are still under judgement and hell-bound, and so are the people we preach to. So the message is, “be good for a few years before you go to burn in hell”. How is that good news?

1 Corinthians 15:9-11 - Least of the apostles

15:9-11

Paul then continues this slight digression, referring to himself as the least of the apostles, and definitely the least deserving. He is not referring to any hierarchy within the apostles, but to the fact that he once persecuted the church. But being an apostle was not a measure of merit, but of the grace of God. Any positions or missions we have within the church are not, ultimately, given on merit, but by grace. This does not mean we ignore skills and abilities, but even the skills we have were given to us by God. And none of us deserve to be servants of Christ, we are servants only because of the grace of God.

And this grace “was not in vain”. Too often we think of grace as being passive, ie of us receiving forgiveness and mercy (which of course we do). But grace is also active, as here. God’s grace towards Paul enabled him to take the gospel to the Gentiles.

“I worked harder than any of them”. God’s grace towards us does not mean that we do not do anything, quite the opposite in fact. If we truly receive the grace of God, then we will work all the harder. And, at least on some measures, Paul worked harder than all the other apostles. When God does stuff it always involves men and women doing stuff. God’s grace enables us to do things and be more fruitful than we have any right to expect.

“Though it was not I but the grace of God that is with me”. So the grace of God leads us to work hard, but when we are working hard in the grace of God we find that it is actually God who is working through us. We know that we do not succeed because of our abilities or effort, but because it is God working through us.

Paul then returns to the central point. Both he and the other apostles preached the same gospel, the gospel of the risen Christ, and it is this gospel of the risen Christ that the Corinthians believed.

1 Corinthians 15:4-8 - He appeared

15:4

Jesus was buried, ie He definitely died, contrary to some futile attempts to explain away the resurrection. “He was raised on the third day, in accordance with the Scriptures”. He was raised is passive, consistent with the common New Testament way of saying that the Father raised Christ from the dead, it is also a completed action. “In accordance with the Scriptures” refers to His being raised, rather than “on the third day”. There is little to nothing in the Old Testament to indicate a raising on the third day. Being raised is predicted in Isaiah 53:10-12. “On the third day” does indicate a definite time of resurrection, this was a clear event that happened at a specific time, it was no “spiritual resurrection”.

15:5-7

Paul gives a list of some of the resurrection appearances. One notable omission is that of any of the appearances to women, whereas the gospel accounts give great prominence to the fact that women were the first witnesses. This may be because the testimony of women was not considered legally valid. Jesus also appeared to over five hundred men, most of whom were still alive. The point of all this is that the resurrection was real, it was witnessed by many and various people, and they could be questioned. The resurrection was at the heart of the gospel preaching, and this started in Jerusalem, exactly where the resurrection had taken place. So if it was a fabrication it would have been easy to debunk the gospel. But no one could refute it.

15:8

Paul then refers to his own encounter with the risen Christ on the Damascus road. This was different than the others in that it happened after the ascension. The Greek phrase translated “one untimely born”, or “one abnormally born” could be used as a term of abuse, so Paul could be countering some opponents in Corinth. 2 Corinthians will involve us in much more of Paul’s responding to opponents in Corinth.

1 Corinthians 15:1-3 - By this gospel you are saved

15:1

The Corinthians have been asking many questions, and many serious issues and attitudes needed to be addressed, but now Paul comes to the heart of the gospel. What Paul is about to say is “the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand”. This is what it is all about, this is to be the foundation of our lives. If we make something else, even things like care for the poor, the heart of the “gospel” then we are badly mistaken.

15:2

What Paul is about to say is the thing “by which we are being saved”. Nothing else will save us or anything else. We certainly should, even must, care for the poor, but doing so will not save us and will not save them. We need to hold fast to the heart of the gospel. If we do not, then our belief has been in vain. It is as serious as that.

15:3

Just to make sure that they realised the importance of it all, Paul says “I delivered to you as of first importance”. Nothing else must take precedence. The message Paul relayed is the message he received, and in Acts and Galatians we read how he received this from Christ. Now Jesus should know what the heart of the gospel is, so if you have a different view of what the heart of the gospel is then you are a fool. The first thing is that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures. This “in accordance with the Scriptures” can be taken in at least two ways. One is as a direct fulfilment of Isaiah 53 where it speaks of Him taking the iniquity of us all upon Himself. The second is that the general message of the Old Testament is that all are sinners. Any religion or “theology” which forgets that we are sinners is utterly useless and has turned away from the truth. I am a sinner, you are a sinner, and they are sinners. All have sinned, and all need forgiveness.

1 Corinthians 14:34-40 - Women should remain silent

14:34,35

A verse here on women keeping silent! Now we need to remember that in chapter 11:5 Paul speaks about women praying or prophesying, so this verse cannot mean an absolute ban on women speaking in church. There are various views on how this should be interpreted. One is that women should, at least on the whole, not speak in church meetings. Another is that in the culture of the time it would have been regarded as a disgrace for women to speak in church meetings, ie the world would have then had disdain for the church. The complete reverse is, of course, now the case. A third view is that Paul is referring to discussions about whether a prophecy was in fact from God or not, a women are to keep out of such discussions (arguments!). Keeping in submission “as the Law demands” may refer back to Gen 3:16. Finally, it could be women asking questions or discussing other matters in the middle of a meeting. Something along these latter lines seems most likely in view of the instruction for women to ask their husbands at home.

14:36,37

Paul now rebukes the Corinthians. They were very full of themselves, Paul reminds them that the word of God came to them, not from them. They considered themselves wiser and better than other churches, when this was far from the case. So Paul urges them to have a bit of humility. If they were truly spiritual they would recognise that Paul was giving godly teaching. So we see here Paul being fully aware of the authority that he had in Christ.

14:38

Recognizing apostolic authority then they were not walking in the Spirit. How do we apply this today? It could certainly, and no doubt is sometimes, be grossly misapplied, with people claiming to be apostles and demanding respect when they are nothing of the sort. One things that it most definitely can mean is that if anyone is walking in the Spirit they will recognise and respect the apostolic teaching in the Bible. So anyone who rejects the teaching of the Bible is definitely not obeying God.

14:39,40

Paul then rounds off his teaching on gifts. They (and we) were to earnestly desire the gift of prophecy. Speaking in tongues was not to be forbidden, ie there was not to be an overreaction to the misuse of the gift. But everything was to be done in a proper and orderly manner.

The wonderful sovereignty of God

Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus is well known. Here was a man intent on persecuting Christians. Sometimes people wax lyrical about Stephen’s death having made an impression on Saul/Paul and this playing a part in his eventual conversion. Well maybe, but the Biblical evidence for this is precisely zero. At the beginning of chapter 8 we read that Saul approved of Stephen’s execution (8:1) and then was ravaging the church (8:3). Here we read that Saul was still breathing threats and murder and was on his way to Damascus to round up a few more Christians. Nor was Paul discriminating between men and women, if they followed Christ then he wanted to imprison them. The persecution was especially severe. So Paul was going to Damascus with a very clear purpose in mind. God, however, had a very different purpose. The Lord encountered Saul on the road to Damascus and changed the whole direction of his life. In Acts 9:20 we read that Saul “immediately proclaimed Jesus in the synagogues saying ‘He is the Son of God’”. And then in 9:22 “But Saul increased all the more in strength, and confounded the Jews who lived in Damascus by proving that Jesus was the Christ”. What a transformation!

But there is another amazing thing to consider. Why was Saul so intent on going to Damascus to continue his persecutions? Why was it so important a place to him? The reason is that it was a major commercial hub, with connections into north Syria, Mesopotamia, Anatolie, Persia and Arabia (Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, Zondervan) If the gospel took hold here, then it would start to spread to these regions and beyond. It had to be stopped! But the wonderful irony is that Saul who was going there to stop the spread of the gospel was God’s chosen instrument in taking the gospel to the Greek and Roman world.

So we see in this an illustration of the beauty of God’s sovereignty. In our day when we see the world making plans and carrying out actions to damage the gospel we should not despair. Christ is Lord, and it is His plans the prevail, and His plans are sometimes wonderfully unexpected.

Finally, a few words on Saul’s “name change”. We all know that while in Damscus, and prior to this, he was known as Saul, later he is known as Paul. When and why did his name change? There is a very good article on this here. His name was not changed. As was quite common in those days, he had two names. Saul was his Jewish name, and Paul his Greek name. In his persecuting the church days using his Jewish name made sense. Later when he was the apostle to the Gentiles, becoming all things to all men, using his Greek name was the obvious thing to do. This was not a name change given to him by Jesus, unlike with Simon becoming Peter.

1 Corinthians 14:29-33 - Not a God of disorder

14:29

We get more common sense here. Not everyone was to be prophesying, but only two or three, and their words were to be weighed, ie thoughtfully considered to see if they were genuinely of God. This is another counter to the straw man argument against prophecy advanced by some that every word a prophet says is bound to be of God. The Bible makes it quite clear that that is not the case, the words were to be carefully considered to see if they were consistent with the gospel. This is also a counter against anyone who claims “I am a prophet therefore you have to listen to me. Everything we say or do us subject to the word of God.

14:30-33

The last part of this paragraph continues the theme of order. “If a revelation is made ..” What is “a revelation”, I guess that a thought suddenly from God comes to someone. If this does happen, the first person is to be silent. So there is to be order in what is done, for God is a God or order, not disorder. Sometimes charismatic churches have the silly notion that the more chaotic something is the more spirit-led it is, there is no Biblical support for this idea. However, this does not mean that God will never do anything out of the ordinary. “The spirits of prophets are subject to prophets”. This is another example of one of the themes of what Paul has been saying, which is the link between spiritual gifts and human control. God works through people, when He gives us something He gives us responsibility as well (this is a recurrent theme in Jesus’ teaching).