First Corinthians 15:10-19 IF Christ was not raised, then what?

Good morning. If you're like me, you're suffering from the smoke. We were down east of Colorado Springs yesterday and it's just as bad down there as it is here. It's really something. Okay. Oh yeah. So. Last week we studied, looked at verses one through eight, and we found out that God, or that Paul and his disciples had preached the good news, and it rested upon the foundation of two things, the death of Christ, according to the scriptures, burial proves that there was a death, and the fact of his resurrection on the third day, according to scriptures. So basically the gospel message there, including the account of Christ's resurrection, most important part. It was the true gospel and that they should continue to believe what was presented to them. We also looked at verse four last week that talks about the burial. There were to emphasize that the Lord Jesus really did die.

If you look at Isaiah 53.9, it says, they appointed his grave with the wicked, but he was with the rich in his death. In other words, he was buried for sure because he was dead.

Why did he do this? He did it to stress the fact that Christ's resurrection, which most of the Corinthians did believe and they accepted it, It didn't prove, he did that not necessarily to prove that the resurrection was there, that it happened, but there was an objective reality about it that everybody knew about. Even though Paul had a different background than most of the other apostles, they all proclaimed the same message. So consequently, His original readers did not need to fear that maybe he was preaching something that was a little different or it was a cultic perversion of the truth or something like that.

It was the true gospel and they should continue to believe in it from Constable. Here it becomes clear for the first time in this chapter that some of them were saying there isn't any resurrection. Nobody rises from the dead. And if they were correct, it points out that all believers didn't have a past, nor do they have a future.

Now these verses that we're gonna look at today really are divided into two sections. 10 and 11 talks about Paul, and then 12 through 19 talks about, he uses this, this thing called a syllogism to make his point with a lot of negative statements. But the first part has to do with Paul the apostle himself. He says, by the grace of God I am what I am. And his grace toward me didn't prove vain or unsuccessful. But I labored even more than all of them, yet not I, but the grace of God with me.

So we've talked about the definition we've adopted of grace as the one that Chester McCauley puts forth, that it's God's unmerited, unmerited and unlimited blessings based on the totally adequate work of Christ. So God blesses us unmeritedly and totally unlimitedly because of what Christ did. Lewis Perry Chafer's definition is a little more wordy, but it gets across the same message. He says, it may be concluded that the word grace, as used in the Bible, is a relation to divine salvation, represents the uncompromised, unrestricted, un-recompensed, in other words, no payback, loving favor of God towards sinners, It is an unearned blessing, it's a gratuity. God is absolutely unconfined and unshackled in expressing his infinite love by his infinite grace based on what Christ did.

So Paul's calling as an apostle in and of itself was a totally gracious gift from God. God's grace didn't prove to be unmotivating or unsuccessful in him. His grace, God's grace when you understand it, produces the appropriate response of service and energy, but it doesn't always do that. All of us are saved by grace. It doesn't mean all of us have this incredible energy that Paul had. because what he does is he discounts human energy, he discounts human effort so that all the praise goes to God in an exalted way, that he's not responsible. His energy, his work was because of the grace. The other thing interesting about this grace is that it started a revolution, and that revolution surpassed is unsurpassed and unequal in any revolution in man's history since the world began. A revolution which was unintelligible to the trained religious person like Paul.

Paul had been in the strictest sense of the tradition of the Phariseeism, of Phariseeism, but now, He is the boldest minister of the gospel. He's the most devoted minister of the church, yet still with a mind that is eminently sober, conscientious, logical, and profound. Just because he became a believer doesn't mean his mind got dulled.

As a matter of fact, this was a really brilliant man. The appearing of the Lord Jesus from heaven on the road to Damascus explained all that Paul needed to know perfectly about who he was. And his conversion, but his work beyond all of the others was more than any other laborer. These people couldn't hold a candle to what he did. And yet he gives all the credit to the Holy Spirit and to grace. Hamilton Smith says, truly it was pure grace of God that was with him, who loved to own up to the grace while humiliating himself.

So then he says, whether then it was I or they, so we preached and you believed. So whether it's Paul or it's a great company of those who had seen the risen Christ, the gospel that was preached and which these Corinthians had believed had its foundation in the resurrection of Christ. But of those laborers so abundant and fruitful, what was the foundational truth and the enlivening spring of what they were teaching? It was the resurrection of Christ, which Paul and the other apostles preached, and they preached the same thing. There was no change. How, then, Was there such a departure in some of the Corinthians? How would the Corinthians come to this idea that there wasn't a resurrection?

Especially since, and we studied last week in verses five through eight, there were so many witnesses, so many people to talk to and saw the resurrected Christ. So what Paul's gonna do now, he's gonna proceed to reason from the evidence to the resurrection of the dead and also from their denial of the resurrection to the effect that it's gonna have, if it's true, on Christ and the gospel.

So verse 12 says, now if Christ is being preached that he has been raised from the dead, he states the fact, how does some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? That's a great question. So he introduces things by reasoning as best he can from the viewpoint of the divine test. The test is, now if Christ has been preached that he's raised from the dead, he assumes that to be true. All of his preaching assumed that it was true, that Christ had been raised from the dead.

So this is where the idea of a syllogism comes in. For those of you who ever took philosophy in college, you know what a syllogism is. But basically the definition, it's a deductive scheme of a formal argument consisting of a major premise, a minor premise that draws a conclusion.

I'll give you an example. If I said, Every virtue is laudable. Every virtue is laudable. Major premise. Minor premise. Kindness is a virtue. What would I conclude from that? That kindness is laudable. That's what a syllogism is. In philosophy, you see that, well, if this is true and this is true, then A is true, B is true, so then C has to be true.

So Paul uses this technique through the next several verses about the resurrection of the dead. Major premise, no resurrection. Minor premise, Christ died. Conclusion, Christ didn't raise. Makes perfect sense, doesn't it? So, if both A and B are equally true, then what's the conclusion? The conclusion has to be that Christ didn't rise.

So, if you take a look at the Oriental mind, and think of the matter as this, that they thought that matter was essentially evil. And therefore, making deliverance from your physical body was the highest blessing you could ever have. They created in their philosophies things like pantheism, materialism, dualism.

They create this idea that reason or experience is the sole criteria of whether something's true or not, but we fight that today. It made glory in the creative imagination of a guy like Plato. or the pure reasoning of a guy like Aristotle. If you went to Catholic school, you know who Aristotle was. You had to study his stuff all the time because they reasoned like Aristotle did. And the Stoics and the Epicureans, they ridicule and they evade the resurrection because it didn't make sense to them.

But the resurrection displays the power of God in a scene where man's total nothingness and his corruption is complete. The soul, they said, doesn't die, so it must be superior to the body. Christ risen from the dead is not only the death blow to all these workings of the human intellect, resurrection establishes as the great fact presented by God to faith. Victory over evil in Christ who bore the consequences of death in the righteous judgment of God against sin, tenant of our faith. Why did he do that? So he could deal with us in sovereign grace, so that he could give the believer the power morally vis-a-vis the Holy Spirit. so that he could associate him, you and I, openly and triumphantly with the resurrected, glorified Christ in the same condition as Christ is in, not only immediately, but forever. The problem they have is that God alone is the one who can raise the dead. Man would never even entertain that idea.

So you could maybe translate, how do some among you who say there is no resurrection of the dead, Justin McCauley says that this did not mean that they denied the resurrection of Christ. This is really interesting. However, The verse does not say that among the, excuse me, some among them were saying that Christ is not raised. What they were saying is that there is no resurrection of the human body. You weren't raised. That's what they're really saying.

So Paul shows that this is a fatal error. And it really did dishonor Christ. And as we go forward, we're gonna see that it dishonored Christ, it condemned the preaching of the apostles as fables, It made faith of the hearers useless. The preachers were false witnesses. And those that had fallen asleep perished.

And being a believer without the resurrection, you of all people are the most miserable on the planet. So he says, if then, In the face of such evidence, it's impossible to deny that Christ is risen. How could some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? Their assumption was that death was the last thing that happened to the body. So, no resurrection? Christ died, Christ didn't rise.

Syllogism. If A and B are equally true, then what's the conclusion? C has to be true. Constable says that belief in the resurrection of the body seems to have been difficult for the Greeks to grasp that concept. And they, in other places in scripture, like in Acts 17.32, Luke says, now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some began to sneer. But others said, we'll hear about this again. concerning this resurrection thing. So in the Greek mentality, the resurrection, the bodily resurrection was just a concept that they couldn't get their arms around. Eventually, evidently though, some of the Corinthians were having second thoughts about this doctrine, although they believed it at first.

These deniers apparently believed that those who are truly spiritual, in the Corinthian sense, were already reigning with Christ in glory. So there wasn't a need to be resurrected. On the whole, the Greeks did believe in the immortality of the soul. But the Greeks would never have dreamed of believing in the resurrection of the body.

The universal message, the gospel to every creature is that the Savior is raised from the dead after having suffered death for sin. The denial of the resurrection denies that not merely the future hope of the saints, but the standing fact of Christ, the mainstream of God's good news. For it is plain that if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ didn't rise.

And you know what? He had told them before that he was gonna die and that he would be raised again. And that would be the gospel message. And he says to them, if you don't believe that, or if you do believe that and I'm not raised, then you really are believing a fairy tale.

Verse 13 says, but if there is no resurrection of the dead, not even Christ is raised. If Christ is not raised, the preaching is fable, it's vain. If Christ has not been raised, what becomes of the apostolic preaching? What of the faith of the saints at Corinth and everywhere else? Major premise, no resurrection of the dead. Minor premise, Christ died. Conclusion, Christ didn't rise. So if he didn't rise, the apostles' preaching rested on a lie.

And consequently, the Corinthians' faith would have been valueless as well as misplaced. Verse 13 here tells us, verse 13 before tells us, Paul did not express disbelief in the resurrection from the dead. He assumed that none of, that there is none to make a point. In other words, he's going to use the same mindset for 16, 17, and 19.

If Christ has not been raised, Oh, that's where I made a mistake. If Christ has not been raised, then preaching is fable and your faith is empty. Think about that. If Christ didn't rise from the dead, everything that you know about your faith is not true. It just isn't true if he wasn't raised. So if the preaching is a fable, the faith of the hearers is futile. And as they put their faith into that which is false, I have to think that there are believers today that have that problem, that they think about, my goodness, later on if I'm sinning a lot, I wonder if it's really true what the gospel says. We were talking about that in Sunday school.

We were talking about positional truth as opposed to conditional truth. Positional truth is based on biblical facts, whether you feel good about it or not. And I remember one of Miles Stanford's quotes. He used to say, let the facts of your position overwhelm the feelings of your condition. If I conditionally walk around and begin to doubt things, that's a feeling. If the word of God says A, B, and C, then my focus and my faith is to be on what the word of God says.

So he says in 15, moreover, we are even found to be false teachers or false witnesses of God because we testified against God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if in fact the dead are not raised. So he's gonna go a little further here and instead of speaking of their subjective state as a light of reception of the truth, he points out that Major premise, Christ isn't raised. Minor premise, we testified that he was raised. Conclusion, we are false witnesses of God. That's the conclusion.

If the preachers who profess to come from God are preaching fables, then they're false witnesses. If it's not true, the foundations are gone. the gospel is worthless, God himself is misrepresented, and the witnesses are impostors. That's what this verse is telling them.

Moreover, the apostles would not just be an error, they would be false witnesses against God. They would be saying something untrue about God, namely that he raised Christ from the dead, when he really didn't. This would be a serious charge to make against the man who had founded the church and claimed to be a representative of Christ. In reality though, when you think about this, the denying of the resurrection of the unbeliever, in reality the denying of the resurrection by the unbeliever, the Corinthians, were really the ones that were the false witnesses. The immense fact of the resurrection was one which Christ not only predicted over and over again, but on it he staked the truth of his whole mission and his sonship. The resurrection of Christ is subsequently vital and fundamental.

It's not a secondary privilege. nor is it a proof which can be lopped off, leaving a stockpile of divine grace unimpaired. It is a manifestation of the power of deliverance from death and judgment, which was the present joy of all believers. As it is in the brightest witness of the efficacy of atonement, and the pledge of glory which Christ coming again gives us. And so too, if it's not true, the chosen witnesses are convicted of falsehood because their testimony denies God in attributing to him the raising of Christ whom he didn't raise. If in fact, no dead are ever raised. We can see how consistently Paul binds together the resurrection of Christ and the resurrection of the dead.

This is not by accident, but the faith of God's grace, the fruit of God's grace and wisdom who would associate every hope, every ground of confidence for his own with Christ as the believers truly united to him all know it. To say that there is no resurrection of the dead, of dead men, is to set aside everything that God has given.

Verse 16, for if the dead don't rise, not even Christ has been raised. Same premise, but this time There's a little bit difference in the method that he uses called the modus tollens, and it means that if A is true, B is true, or conversely, if B is false, then A is false. So Christ not raised, or dead not raised, Christ not raised, pretty simple. Just makes that statement. Paul's argument was that since there was no resurrection of believers, then Christ has not been raised.

And then 17, he says, if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless and you're still in your sins. Again, back to the syllogism. Major premise, Christ isn't raised. Minor premise, you're still in your sins. What's the conclusion? Your faith is worthless. Or you could say it this way. Christ is still dead. You're still dead in your sins. Conclusion, your faith is worthless.

Interesting how he's arguing this, because I really kind of like how he's doing it, because if they think about it, they think, gee, I've been trying to believe everything that Paul laid out, except for the fact of the resurrection. So he said, okay, if you don't believe in the resurrection, let's look at the consequences if you don't believe. And that's how these syllogisms work. Those who put their faith in that which is worthless are yet what?

You're stuck in your sins. You still are attached to them. Chester McCauley here says, again, for the sake of argument, it's assumed that Christ didn't rise, leading to two more conclusions. First, our faith is worthless. It means it's without effect. It's without results. Or in the next clause, he says, you're still in your sins. One of the great reliefs that we have is we realize we are never gonna meet our sins again. We're free from them.

He or she who is without any hope of forgiveness or eternal life, it means that the believer is still dead in his or her sins. Imagine walking around as a believer thinking like that. I'm going to meet my sins. Well, you know, we sort of, we who understand the truth sort of think, well, you could, but trust me, there's a lot of denominations that that's what they preach. You better be doing spiritual pushups or you're going to be attached for eternity to those sins. Denial of the resurrection throws everything in a kind of confusion If they remain in the grave they remain in the hold of death so if none of you have ever been positionally resurrected or you aren't going to be resurrected then you're stuck in the grave and You're stuck with your sins Apart from Christ and thus you're gonna perish and You can, but you know, as I thought about this, we can understand why, if I'm Satan and I'm gonna go against the doctrine of the church, this is where I'm gonna hit you, because why? To bring in among the Christians doubt and denial of the resurrection of the dead.

Boy, that's a perfect place to go. The denial of their future, that they are destined for resurrection on the basis of Christ's resurrection, has the net effect of a denial of their past. which means that everything that went before that from the time you believed in Christ's death for you, none of that's true either. That they have received a forgiveness of sins on the basis of Christ's death isn't true.

Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. Uh-oh, what about My mom and dad, what about the other believers that I was in fellowship with for a long time? Major premise, Christ is still dead. Those who have died, still dead in their sins, guess what?

Conclusion, they're lost forever. So dead believers are in their final state. In other words, when they died, They're staying in the grave. They're not ever coming out. Christians who had already died would be lost forever, eternally separated from God. The consequence, of course, is no less serious for believers who already passed away than those who have fallen asleep in Christ. They've perished.

The conclusion, so shocking, as to saints that are gone before us, as well as for our own souls, yet flowing legitimately from any principle of evidence of its falsity. You have to come to this conclusion if you don't believe in the resurrection. But if the conclusions were so inadmissible, who could accept the premise which make them not only true, but just and as inevitable for you?

And then he says, if we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of all men to be pitied, the most pitied. So the future, according to this assumption, is lost, and we are reduced to the hope in Christ for this life only. If the Christian hope in Christ is just what he or she can expect this side of the grave, then you really do deserve pity. If the resurrection is a fable, the living who profess it are of all men the most miserable.

For in the faith of the resurrection, they've given up this present world. Where else are they going to turn? They have nowhere else to turn. But if this is all, the Christian, instead of being the happiest man on the earth, of all men, he's the most miserable. For he falls under special trials, like all believers do, because of his faith in Christ, which are fruitless, and leaves him in his sins, if no dead people rise. For in this case Christ has not been risen and damnation must be the fate of all them that sleep in him. They suffer in the present and they've lost all hope of the future.

Can you think of a more pathetic situation? Our friend Monique loves to use this word pathetic. I was thinking about that. This is really pathetic. Thus, a climax of absurdity, the consequences that flow from the assumption that no dead rise. So, if we have nothing to hope for on either side of the grave, the Christian life would not be worth living, according to Constable. Great saying. So, to summarize the argument.

Paul claimed that if believers had no future, specifically resurrected bodies like Christ, we don't have any past and we don't have any present as well. That is, we have no forgiveness of sins in the past and we have no advantage over unbelievers in the present. Paul is insistent upon that if a man denies the possibility of the resurrection of the body, He has thereby denied the possibility of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and has therefore emptied the Christian message of this truth and the Christian life of its reality.

That's from Barclay. So let's close. Dear Father, how we thank you. We're so, so thankful for the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, which means that we Position the heaven resurrected and seated in the heavenlies in him and there will be the day that our bodies will be resurrected bodies just like his To go to glory to be with him and to glorify our bodies and we thank you father for all that the cross has afforded us In the grace of the lord jesus, and we pray in his name. Amen