The Fruit of Christ’s Resurrection: Part 2
The Church of Corinth; Struggling to be in the world but not of the world • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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Intro:
What event in your life do you anticipate it’s completion?
Graduation from high school or college
Engagement
Vacation (tired parent)
Vocation(retirement)
(Wiseguys) this sermon
Review:
I Immediate Fruit
1. Confirmation of the resurrection (20)
2. Effects of the Resurrection (21-22)
3. Order (23)
II. Future(promised) Fruit
II. Future(promised) Fruit
A. The End will Come
A. The End will Come
24 then comes the end, when He hands over the kingdom to the God and Father, when He has abolished all rule and all authority and power.
Paul uses the common term “end” to refer to the time in history where Jesus second coming leads to the finality of his work of redemption and kingdom building in this world. Jesus uses this term in Matthew 24:6
6 “You will be hearing of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not frightened, for those things must take place, but that is not yet the end.
14 “This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come.
7 The end of all things is near; therefore, be of sound judgment and sober spirit for the purpose of prayer.
Another synonymous term is what the OT prophets most frequently used,
“the day of the Lord.” This term signified the end, when the Lord would bring swift and final justice to its enemies and establish a earthly and heavenly rule for all eternity.
Turn with me to
6 Wail, for the day of the Lord is near! It will come as destruction from the Almighty. 7 Therefore all hands will fall limp, And every man’s heart will melt. 8 They will be terrified, Pains and anguish will take hold of them; They will writhe like a woman in labor, They will look at one another in astonishment, Their faces aflame. 9 Behold, the day of the Lord is coming, Cruel, with fury and burning anger, To make the land a desolation; And He will exterminate its sinners from it. 10 For the stars of heaven and their constellations Will not flash forth their light; The sun will be dark when it rises And the moon will not shed its light.
Israel as a nation experienced God’s judgments from foreign nations but nothing reached the cosmic scale that this describes.
Joel 3:14–16(NASB95)
14 Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision! For the day of the Lord is near in the valley of decision. 15 The sun and moon grow dark And the stars lose their brightness. 16 The Lord roars from Zion And utters His voice from Jerusalem, And the heavens and the earth tremble. But the Lord is a refuge for His people And a stronghold to the sons of Israel.
Finally, the NT writers saw that Day of the Lord event, being in the end when Jesus would return from heaven and carry out his final acts as Redeemer and Victor over sin, evil and death.
For example:
Paul has already used “day of the Lord” twice in this epistle.
6 even as the testimony concerning Christ was confirmed in you, 7 so that you are not lacking in any gift, awaiting eagerly the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ, 8 who will also confirm you to the end, blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.
5 I have decided to deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.
As we can see through these verses, the end when God would bring about a completion to his work in the world was always predicted. Through the progress of revelation, it becomes clear that Jesus Christ would be the one given the task of bringing that work to completion.
The idea of an END is something that all the world must understand is coming. THE END IS NEAR signs that you see from people holding up on the street corner are often mocked and laughed at but it is a clear truth the Bible teaches. It is also a truth that even unbelievers recognize because of the indisputable evidence that death comes to all.
For Paul, he is giving these future promises of the resurrection as a way to give confidence to the Corinthians and the church worldwide. Because Christ raised from death, he gains victory over sin and death, releasing the bondage to sin that all humanity is bound to. In his resurrection, as the first fruits, he also will raise his church up to new life with a new glorified body. This resurrection of believers serves as the pre-curser to the end.
It is important to see the Great Timeline of God’s work of Redemption:
Creation
Fall
Redemption
Consummation
The term consummation is a better word than “the end” because consummation means completion of something already at work. At the end, during the day of the Lord, the Lord Jesus will bring to completion the work that He was set out to accomplish. He began that work at the end of his earthly ministry. But he completes it when he comes again.
There are obvious differences in interpretation as to what that end will look like and the order of things, but the resurrection is what sparks those final and end events from occuring. We will not focus on the differing views of eschatalogy during this sermon, but we can all agree on these points that Paul mentions: starting with - there will be an end.
Application:
As believers, we look forward to that end, because he know how it benefits us. We see the end of sin and death for good. We receive glorified bodies that are calibrated to live eternally in the presence of Christ. We long to escape this corrupted and difficult place.
But we also pause for those in our lives that do not know Christ. We anticipate, but we hesitate. Our hesitation is not because we do not want to see the end, but because we do not want our friends and loved ones to. We know what is coming for them and it terrifies us.
This drives us to love them and lead them in the gospel. We cannot give up on them because Christ has not yet arrived. Remember the words of the apostle John.
3 Blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of the prophecy, and heed the things which are written in it; for the time is near.
Now v 24 is somewhat of a summary verse with v 25-28 the details of that end act. Let’s look at the details that will come in the day of the Lord.
B. The Enemies will be Abolished
B. The Enemies will be Abolished
1 Corinthians 15:24–26 (NASB95)
24 ….when He hands over the kingdom to the God and Father, when He has abolished all rule and all authority and power. 25 For He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet. 26 The last enemy that will be abolished is death.
v 24 seems to be in reverse order. The end consists of two major events: he first abolishes all and authority and power. This leads to the Son handing over the kingdom to the Father. Let’s break that down in these next two points.
v 24 tells us that in the end, all rule and authority and power will be abolished. Abolish means to render useless, bring to nothing, strip away all power. Destroy then is an appropriate translation here. Two things are abolished in these verses:
“all rule, authority and power”
death itself
First, all rule, authority and power are speaking of both earthly and spiritual forces in this world. It cannot be merely physical alone and it cannot mean only spiritual. All that possess any shadow of power, rule and authority that wield it for their own purposes and good will be humbled and destroyed. This will occur at the resurrection of the wicked for Jesus stated
28 “Do not marvel at this; for an hour is coming, in which all who are in the tombs will hear His voice, 29 and will come forth; those who did the good deeds to a resurrection of life, those who committed the evil deeds to a resurrection of judgment.
While Paul deals specifically with the resurrection of believers in these verses, other passages show that there will also be a resurrection of the wicked. The Lord will separate the sheep from the goats or the tares from the wheat. In that judgment, he will pour his hot fury on all who opposed his name, including the earthly and rebellious hosts of heaven and of earth. His judgment is an eternal judgment, which that annihilation from existence is not in the plans of God. Annihilation would be a mercy from God compared to the his fury that they will face in judgment.
Secondly, Paul looks to death as the final enemy. This may seem a strange title for death, as the enemy of God.” Truthfully, death is under God’s power. He allows death to come to individuals and he removes its power in resurrection. Death was assigned to all men when sin entered the world and so death is a weapon of the Most High God. But death is the enemy of God also because death opposes that which God gives to this world-life. God allows death to reign through the works of sin and Satan but death also has its end.
14 Therefore, since the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise also partook of the same, that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, 15 and might free those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives.
Now here, we must not infer that Satan possessed a power in himself that God did not have greater power over. That would be false. Death does not belong to Satan anymore than hell does. God created hell for punishment and he allowed Satan to work within the confines of death and destruction for a time, so that God’s purposes might be fulfilled.
Luther comments on Heb 2,
Hebrews
In his wonderful wisdom, he compels the devil to work through death nothing else than life, so that in this way, while he (Satan) acts most of all against the work of God, he acts for the work of God and against his own work with his own deed
So then, death, sin and Satan could all be labeled the final enemies of God. But for Paul, death is that antithesis to the life from God, most importantly, resurrection itself. So in the end, death, Satan and sin and stripped of any use and power in this life and the next.
look at another verse with me:
15 When He had disarmed the rulers and authorities, He made a public display of them, having triumphed over them through Him.
the word disarm here in the GK is APEKDUO, which is a derivative of EKDUO which means to strip naked. We all remember the humilation that our Lord endured when he was stripped naked of his clothing before his accusers at calvary. By far not the worst He would face, but the public humiliation of a naked and beaten Lord before his lying mobs of people is enough to get a persons blood boiling.
This verse in Col 2 takes it to another level because Paul uses similar language, much like in 1 Cor 15, but here God through Christ, strips these evil human and spiritual entities, not from physical clothing, but strips them of any power to oppose his name.
Then, Paul continues to say that they are paraded, much like Jesus as he carried the cross to Golgotha, as people spit and pushed and hit him. Now these enemies of God are paraded before the world to see as Jesus triumphs over them. The language here paints the picture of Christ, mounted on his white horse, wearing a grin of victory upon his face and his armor, dragging behind him his captives, shamed and humiliated before the whole world.
What an amazing illustration that Paul paints for us in Colossians and Corinthians as we look to Christ as the victor over his enemies. It matches perfectly with the poetic nature of John’s description of the victorious Christ,
11 And I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse, and He who sat on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness He judges and wages war. 12 His eyes are a flame of fire, and on His head are many diadems; and He has a name written on Him which no one knows except Himself. 13 He is clothed with a robe dipped in blood, and His name is called The Word of God. 14 And the armies which are in heaven, clothed in fine linen, white and clean, were following Him on white horses. 15 From His mouth comes a sharp sword, so that with it He may strike down the nations, and He will rule them with a rod of iron; and He treads the wine press of the fierce wrath of God, the Almighty. 16 And on His robe and on His thigh He has a name written, “KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS.”
We serve a king who will come again and he will finish his domination against all enemies of God’s kingdom. Their end is guaranteed torment and separation from all the mercies that God has given them in his earthly life. They will truly experience for all eternity what it means to be an enemy of God that suppress the truth in unrighteousness.
Friend, if you trust in Christ, know in the simplest of terms- he has won the war for his glory and your good. He is your victor and your eternal future rest in his power and might over your enemies. When you face trouble, know the Victor that your serve. With the old phrase, “to the Victor goes the spoils” reminds us that in His Victory, the eternal spoils of this cosmic war are yours in Christ.
C. All in Existence will be in Subjection to God
C. All in Existence will be in Subjection to God
27 For He has put all things in subjection under His feet. But when He says, “All things are put in subjection,” it is evident that He is excepted who put all things in subjection to Him. 28 When all things are subjected to Him, then the Son Himself also will be subjected to the One who subjected all things to Him, so that God may be all in all.
This last section flows from this previous section and yet has a great an final word on this work of redemption. Paul looks back to two OT passages in Psalm 110. As Paul quotes from this text, he helps us navigate a rather difficult grammatical construction of these verses in 1 Cor 15. The wording is somewhat of a challenge in this section, specifically in regards to who is designated in the pronouns. But it appears that looking back to Psalm 110:1-2
1 The Lord says to my Lord: “Sit at My right hand Until I make Your enemies a footstool for Your feet.” 2 The Lord will stretch forth Your strong scepter from Zion, saying, “Rule in the midst of Your enemies.”
In this prophecy, YHWH says to ADONAI “sit at my right hand. We can interpret this inter-trinitarian meeting as an establishment of the plan of God Father where He speaks of the honor of the Son, Adonai, and how the enemies of God will be placed under his feet of subjugation in the end. We understand this place of the Son to be after the ascension of Christ where God’s plan of redemption will continue on earth until its time for Christ’s return to bring about judgment on all enemies of God.
Paul makes this perfect clear to the Ephesians
20 which He brought about in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, 21 far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. 22 And He put all things in subjection under His feet, and gave Him as head over all things to the church,
So then in 1 Corinthians 15, after the second coming of Christ when judgment comes to all who oppose him and blessings come to all who follow him, the honored Son completes his victory over the enemies and in that completion, “hands over the kingdom back to the Father.” Now we are not to think that in these words, the Son is no longer ruling and reigning. It was the final step of the work of redemption for the Son to hand the kingdom back over to the Father in this last act of God’s redemptive plan. As God, Father, Son, and Spirit all rule throughout eternity as the Godhead who reigns supreme, just as it was before Creation.
Macarthur writes,
1 Corinthians: The MacArthur New Testament Commentary The Restoration
all things will be restored as they were originally designed and created by God to be. In the end it will be as it was in the beginning. Sin will be no more, and God will reign supremely, without enemy and without challenge. That gives us great insight into the divine redemptive plan. Here is the culmination: Christ turns over the restored world to God His Father, who sent Him to recover it
So in this final act of submission, we are reminded that God rules supremely and all that exists will be under his rule and authority. Nothing in eternity will have some autonomous freedom outside of the total and complete rule and reign of God. Instead, all of eternity will be about the rule of God and his kingdom.
Friends, this life and the next has always been, is and always will be about the glory of God. We exist for his glory. All creation exists for his glory. All eternity will exist for his glory. Let this truth remind us this afternoon of our place in the world.
