Why the resurrection matters

Intro story

Today we’re finishing up our short series on 1 Corinthians by looking at Paul’s discussion of the importance of the resurrection.

But first, I want to set the scene a little.

Way back in the last century—in the Year of our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Ninety, to be precise—I made the mistake of asking God to get me out of a spiritual rut and was promptly laid off from my job after less than a year. Fortunately I received an offer to go to Tokyo, Japan for an interview even before I’d finished out my notice time. With the trepidation that could only be felt by a country boy whose experience was limited to Queensland, I flew off to Tokyo for a week.

I hated the place—it was horribly crowded, devoid of green, confusing, cramped, and the food was awful. In fact, so bizarre was the food that I mostly ate at Western fast-food joints, like McDonalds or KFC, which were predictably unsatisfying. Nonetheless, I decided that this was what God had for me, and the job itself looked interesting, as was the challenge of surviving in such a hostile place. I guess I viewed it as a monastery of sorts—I would eat little, be silent most of the time, and improve spiritually.

Of course, it didn’t turn out to be like that at all. Yes, I did grow spiritually in Tokyo, but that was more to do with relationships than physical deprivation. Indeed, Tokyo turned out to be a wonderful place to live, in many ways. Full of marvelous food, fascinating places, and endless activities. Wonderful hikes abounded just a train-ride away (a two hour train ride, admittedly, but everything is at least an hour away in Tokyo). I look back on my time in Tokyo with great fondness, and every so often I am overwhelmed by homesickness for this distant place. It doesn’t hurt that I met my wife, Mable, at Tokyo Baptist Church!

You know, I sometimes think that we Christians have a similar attitude to our future, resurrected lives with God that I had to Tokyo. We think we’ve seen bits of it, and they involved boring activities (maybe playing a harp or singing?), lots of restrictions, and nothing enjoyable. So we really don’t look forward to the resurrection at all. Sure, it’ll be “good for us,” and we’ll “get closer to God,” but it’s not really going to be fun.

The Corinthian church seem to have had a similar attitude. They were so into spiritual gifts that they had got to the point where some of them were saying that there would be no resurrection of the dead. Whether they thought we were better off as naked spirits, since spiritual gifts are where it’s all happening, anyway, or whether they thought that this lifetime is our best reward is unclear. Whatever their motive for dismissing the resurrection, Paul was having none of it.

Paul’s core concern

Let’s turn to Paul now, in:

1 Corinthians 15:3–8 NLT

3 I passed on to you what was most important and what had also been passed on to me. Christ died for our sins, just as the Scriptures said. 4 He was buried, and he was raised from the dead on the third day, just as the Scriptures said. 5 He was seen by Peter and then by the Twelve. 6 After that, he was seen by more than 500 of his followers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. 7 Then he was seen by James and later by all the apostles. 8 Last of all, as though I had been born at the wrong time, I also saw him.

Why the historicity of the resurrection is important

Why did Paul think that Christ’s death and resurrection was the most important thing he told the Corinthian church? The Corinthians themselves seemed to think that the work of the Holy Spirit was more important, after all. And the message of love in chapter 13 of the letter is pretty key, right?

But Paul said that the message of Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection was the most important part of the good news he shared.

Fortunately, Paul didn’t leave either us or the Corinthians wondering about this question. A few words later he continued:

1 Corinthians 15:16–19 NLT

16 And if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised. 17 And if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is useless and you are still guilty of your sins. 18 In that case, all who have died believing in Christ are lost! 19 And if our hope in Christ is only for this life, we are more to be pitied than anyone in the world.

Wow! “If our hope for Christ is only for this life then we are more to be pitied than anyone in the world.” Those are strong words!

Another way of putting this is, if we think our Christianity is about being able to be good people, we’re sadly wrong.

If we think our faith yields an abundant life now, we’re hopelessly off-target.

If we think our religion is for the betterment of this world, we’re disastrously mistaken.

If we think our spirits can escape this world through the work of Christ, we have grossly misled ourselves.

It is not just first century Corinthians who need this message. 21st Century Westerners desperately need to hear and understand this, too. You see, our lives are so comfortable, it’s easy to think we’ve already been saved. We mistake abundant material goods—beautiful houses, wonderful food, cheap travel, endless entertainment—for abundant life. But consumption is not life. It might fool us for a while, but eventually a life of profligacy leaves us alone and empty. Even in Jesus’ day people struggled with the idea that consumption was enough. You might remember Jesus’ story of the Prodigal Son. Of course, part of the message of that story is that consumption never provides lasting joy.

Despite what Amazon might tell us, or Apple promise us, there is no product that can take away our longing for purpose, for relationship, for meaning. Our culture tells us that we can change our careers, change our face, or even change our bodies, but we cannot change our need for reconciliation with one another, and most especially our need for God’s love in our lives.

There is nothing in this world that can make us belong here. We are doomed to be aliens in this world, always restless, always yearning for more. The only way we can avoid this pain is to dull our senses with indulgence or distractions, but even then the pain shoots through every so often. When we lose someone we love. When we fail at something important. When we are disappointed in our latest toy.

Christianity recognises the emptiness of this world, it’s inability to feed our hunger for relationship with God. And yet, at the same time, Christianity recognises that we are embodied souls—we are not merely spirits, desperate to escape this physical reality and flee to some perfect home in the spiritual realm. God created this physical realm and made us body and spirit and his design was and still is good. So then, we can never be fully at home in this world, and yet we’ll never be fully at home without our bodies, either.

And that’s why, if we are doomed to nothing but this life, we of all people are most miserable. We know that this life is empty, but without the resurrection of the body, there is only emptiness after this life. So, with the resurrection of the body, all of reality is an empty, ultimately meaningless drudgery.

But, of course, the resurrection is real. Jesus was raised! We do have the hope of eternal, full relationship with God. Paul even reminds the Corinthians of the array of witnesses to the reality of Jesus’ bodily resurrection. Of course, these witnesses are lost to us, long dead. How can we, too be sure of the resurrection?

Minimal facts argument

Well, we can, in fact, be confident that Jesus did die, was buried, and was raised to life on the third day. How? Recently the scholar Gary Habermas has developed a case for the historicity of the resurrection called the “minimal facts argument for the resurrection.” The idea is to choose a small selection of facts that any rational historian, Christian or not, will agree are most likely true. Then you demonstrate how the resurrection is by far the most likely explanation for these facts. (Note that I don’t say “the only” explanation—you can never say that something is the only explanation because weird things happen sometimes, but if the resurrection is the most likely explanation, then it is the sensible thing to believe that it is true.)

This approach has been taken up by a variety of people, and they structure the argument with a range of different facts. We’re fortunate as Christians to have such a rich historical record to rely on, which, of course, just strengthens our position. But I’ll use Habermas’s selection of historical facts in this brief outline.

His historical facts are:

Jesus died by crucifixion

Days later his followers had real experiences they thought were appearances of the risen Jesus

Their lives were transformed as a result, to the point of being willing to die for their belief in that resurrection

These beliefs were taught very soon after the crucifixion

James, the unbelieving brother of Jesus, and Paul, the persecutor of early Christians, each became convinced he had seen the resurrected Jesus and died for this

These historical facts are generally accepted, and well attested by both the Gospels and other ancient documents.

Now, how can we explain these facts? In other words, what possible historical events could lie behind these facts? Let’s look at the options, and see which account best explains all these facts. That account is the most likely.

Let’s start with one of the most popular explanations: that Jesus didn’t die on the cross, but that he entered a deep swoon. That certainly explains his burial and possibly his appearance, but it would have been clear to his followers, given the ordeal of the cross, that he was not resurrected, and so they would not have gone to their deaths for that false belief, nor taught it. And so their enemies would never have been persuaded. So swooning fails to explain these historical facts.

Next explanation!

What about the idea that the disciples went to the wrong tomb and found it empty? Note that this explanation involves the disciples being genuinely mistaken, not conspiring to make up a story, we’ll get to that explanation in a bit. Well, this can only account for Jesus execution and burial. It can’t explain Jesus’ appearance to his followers and therefore their transformation and evangelism and the conversion of others. This one is a big fail.

How about the disciples stealing the body? This is perhaps the oldest alternative explanation, and we even find it in the Gospels. But it’s a poor explanation because it doesn’t explain the rest of the disciples’ behavior, nor the way it influenced others. So out it goes.

But… What if the disciples got together and came up with a cunning plan to build a legend about the resurrection of Jesus? In this account, Jesus could have died and been buried, the disciples pretended to see him, perhaps stole his body, and they started teaching this very early, but why would they go to their deaths for an empty lie? And why would their enemies believe them when they had nothing but fatuous stories? This is a fail.

What about the natural development of a legend? This idea—that over time the stories of Jesus were spun into this elaborate, supernatural tale—was the favourite explanation of the nineteenth century Bible scholars called the “Higher Critics.” It remains a favourite to this day with liberal Christian churches. Unfortunately this is an embarrassingly useless explanation, since it doesn’t account for the extreme behaviour of either the original or the new disciples, nor for the early teaching of the resurrection.

How about a mass hallucination? Putting aside the unlikeliness of such an event, does it explain all our historical facts? No, it does not. Because the enemies of Jesus, especially Paul, were not there for a mass hallucination, and so we need to add extra hallucinations for all of these, which makes this already unbelievable explanation completely fantastical.

What about the existence of a secret twin? This is actually a pretty good explanation (putting aside the difficulty of keeping an identical twin secret until the right moment), but it doesn’t fit well with James becoming a believer—it would have been hard to keep his own brother a secret from him, nor does it account for Paul, who encountered Jesus in a radically different way. So, almost there, but it falls at the last hurdle.

Finally, what about the explanation that Jesus actually died, was buried, and then was raised to life again? This explanation, unsurprisingly, fits all the facts perfectly. The only problem with this explanation is that you need to believe in the existence of God. Fortunately, there are plenty of reasons to believe that it is much more likely that precisely this God does exists. The evidence against his existence is, when examined rationally, rather weak. So the necessity of God for this explanation is only a problem for you if you have some personal, irrational reason for rejecting the existence of God.

So, from the table, you can see that the weight of the widely accepted historical evidence leads us to believe that the most likely explanation is that Jesus actually did die, was buried, and was raised to life again. The most reasonable position to have on the resurrection of Jesus Christ, is that it is a true, historical event.

Paul’s response

Now that we can be confident, like the Corinthians could be, that Jesus did rise again, we can answer the question you might have been wondering about all this time:

Why is this so important?

1 Corinthians 15:17 NLT

17 And if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is useless and you are still guilty of your sins.

Remember that Paul has already said that our faith would be useless if Jesus hadn’t been raised, and explained that we would have been still guilty of our sins. But why is that?

He explains immediately:

1 Corinthians 15:20–21 NLT

20 But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead. He is the first of a great harvest of all who have died. 21 So you see, just as death came into the world through a man, now the resurrection from the dead has begun through another man.

Jesus’ resurrection is the first resurrection to the new body. Previous resurrections, such as that of Lazarus, or the son of the widow of Nain, or the son of the widow of Zarapheth, etc.—these were all merely revivifying an existing body, which went on to die. But Jesus’ body is never going to die. He has opened the way for eternal life.

Paul continues to explain:

1 Corinthians 15:51–58 NLT

51 But let me reveal to you a wonderful secret. We will not all die, but we will all be transformed! 52 It will happen in a moment, in the blink of an eye, when the last trumpet is blown. For when the trumpet sounds, those who have died will be raised to live forever. And we who are living will also be transformed. 53 For our dying bodies must be transformed into bodies that will never die; our mortal bodies must be transformed into immortal bodies. 54 Then, when our dying bodies have been transformed into bodies that will never die, this Scripture will be fulfilled: “Death is swallowed up in victory. 55 O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” 56 For sin is the sting that results in death, and the law gives sin its power. 57 But thank God! He gives us victory over sin and death through our Lord Jesus Christ. 58 So, my dear brothers and sisters, be strong and immovable. Always work enthusiastically for the Lord, for you know that nothing you do for the Lord is ever useless.

What this means for us

The priority of eternity over the present

Wow! It’s hard for me to read this without wanting to burst into the recitative and aria from the end of Handel’s Messiah. What stirring stuff!

Here Paul shares the mystery of our faith: it is ultimately not about this life, but about the next!

When God comes to judge us all, Jesus death and resurrection rescues us from the fate we were destined for, the punishment we deserved. And so, instead of being cast out of the light, warmth and goodness of God’s presence, we are transformed.

These perishable bodies, these bodies with which we have struggled through our lives, will be transformed, just as our souls have already been. No longer will there be this struggle between spirit and flesh, as our bodies tempt us with the vigorous desires and lusts of youth. No longer will we endure the weariness and pain of age. No longer will we be betrayed through our body’s weakness into selfishness and loneliness.

No, in their place we will receive immortal bodies. To the church in Thessalonica, Paul explains the exchange as “natural bodies” exchanged for “spiritual bodies.” To the Corinthians he says “dying bodies must be transformed into bodies that will never die.”

Our faith is not about the pathetic benefits of prosperity in the midst of a sinful, suffering world, trapped in rebellious, dying bodies. We are not here on earth so that we can enjoy deadly affluence while others suffer deadly deprivation. The promised sabbath rest is not found in the midst of temptation, pain and loss.

Rather, what our faith points towards is this great victory: the victory over death. No longer will death and sin have any hold over us, but rather we will be ruled over by our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. We will dwell with him in joyful wonder, free from temptation and suffering. Praise God!

The impact of eternity on the present

But of course, for all of us here, this is in the future. We are, after all, all alive. Am I right? Jesus hasn’t come again to judge the living and the dead.

So what impact does this future have on our present lives, regardless of either how certain this future is, or how close or distant we may feel from it?

Oliver Wendel Holmes, Sr., the famous American physician, once said,

“Some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.”

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Throughout the ages, Christians have demonstrated the lie of these words. Hospitals, universities, orphanages, charities, the abolition of slavery, and an endless list of worldly goods have been forged by heavenly-minded Christians, and not by worldly-minded people.

Why?

Paul’s last words in his letter, before he turns to practical matters, are to urge the Corinthians to live in the present according to their knowledge of their heavenly reward. He says,

1 Corinthians 15:58 NLT

58 So, my dear brothers and sisters, be strong and immovable. Always work enthusiastically for the Lord, for you know that nothing you do for the Lord is ever useless.

Our confidence in our eternal state gives us strength. It makes it impossible for this transient, ephemeral world to shake us or shift us from our foundation in Christ. We cannot help but strive for Christ. If we understand our true destiny, our enthusiasm for the gospel will be endless. Our confidence in God’s plans will be unlimited. We will share God’s boundless love for his earthly creatures. It is only to the extent that we are truly heavenly-minded that we become of genuine, earthly good.

So often we struggle to obey Jesus, to live Godly lives. We struggle with injustice, with our own doubts, with pain and sickness and weakness and a simple lack of enthusiasm. Paul has already placed this into perspective earlier in this letter, when he explained:

2 Corinthians 4:17 ESV

17 For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison,

Even suffering and persecution cannot slow us down when we keep our eyes fixed on that eternal weight of glory.

So, for us, like the Corinthians, let us be certain the Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!

And, in that knowledge, we can go out, no matter where we live, no matter what we do, no matter who we are or what our abilities, we can go out and be strong and immovable, working enthusiastically for the Lord, knowing that nothing that we do for Him is ever useless.

There is no more meaningful life. No greater purpose. No more wonderful way to spend our days!

Let’s pray,

Lord, as your word tells us, we will do. Fill us with confidence in this wonderful truth of your resurrection. Help us, like the disciples to live transformed lives. Help us, like the disciples, to transform our world.

In the name of your beloved Son, our Lord,

Amen!