Sermon Tone Analysis

We have already discussed in this chapter the reality of the resurrection of Christ.

Now remember what is behind this is that some among the Corinthians in the church at Corinth were denying bodily resurrection.

That is a very serious error.

Paul wants to affirm the reality of bodily, physical resurrection and he starts by clarifying the fact that Jesus rose from the dead, therefore there is such a thing as bodily resurrection.

The theme, as you remember in verses 1–11, is the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

And then in verse 12 he says,

“If Christ is preached, and you have believed it, and been redeemed by believing it, that He has been raised from the dead, how do some among you say there’s no resurrection of the dead?

If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ hasn’t been raised.

Conversely, if Christ has been raised, there is a resurrection.

And then it’s only a question of looking to the Word of God to see who also participates in that resurrection.”

So Paul starts with the resurrection of Christ and then he moved to a section demonstrating the tragic results of not believing in resurrection.

Christ is not raised, we are not raised, the evangelists who preach the resurrection are liars and we’re, of all men, most miserable, all the way down to verse 19.

Then in verse 20, he turns a corner and he discusses the order of resurrection, Christ being the preeminent one, the firstfruits, and the rest follow.

And we looked at that last time and he swept us all the way into eternity when all the redeemed are resurrected, gathered into the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ, His bride is complete, then He in an act of reciprocal love to the Father who gave this bride to Him, returns the bride and Himself to the Father so that God is all in all.

So resurrection is defended, based upon the resurrection of Christ, based upon the fact that if you pull the resurrection out, the whole Christian house collapses.

And then he gives us the full extent of resurrection, sweeping us all the way into glory.

Now starting in verse 29, he says that the truth of resurrection has implications, practical implications.

And in these few verses we see those implications laid out for us.

This is a little bit like a simple statement, for example, in Psalm 116:12 where the psalmist asks the question,

The fact that God has promised us a resurrection has very powerful influence on us.

The resurrection is a reality and now he will discuss for us its practical implications.

Those implications are not only discussed here, of course, all of the gospel in all of its fullness and all of its glory, and all of its promises comes with great implications.

But particularly in this passage, Paul wants us to see how really practical believing in the resurrection is.

And I hope that you’ll be able to grasp that.

But let me give you just a few illustrations.

Do you think, for example, that Stephen would have offered himself to the stones that crushed out his life if he didn’t believe in a resurrection?

Do you think that Andrew would have confidently allowed himself to be martyred by being tied to a cross and left for days until dead, or Peter would have been willing to be crucified upside down or James would have put himself in a position to be beheaded, or any other of the apostles who was martyred, or any other martyr would have been willing to do that, or even the Apostle Paul would have put his head on a block and waited till an axe chopped it off his body if he didn’t believe in a resurrection?

They drew the reality of the resurrection out of the Old Testament.

Job said, “Though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.”

And this is precisely what was behind the willingness of martyrs to give their lives.

They and everybody else who names the name of Christ through all of human history has embraced Christ with the hope of resurrection, with the hope of eternal life.

They believe that Jesus was risen and they would rise to be with Him in resurrection glory and to be with all the rest of the saints in resurrection glory.

And here come the Corinthians, however, and for whatever reason, they have bought in to the dominating pagan lie that was familiar to them in their culture that there is no bodily resurrection, that material is bad, spiritual is good, the spirit survives, the material does not.

And so, some of them were questioning whether there was a real resurrection.

If there was no resurrection, Jesus didn’t rise, they wouldn’t rise and that changes absolutely everything.

If redemptive history ends as a cul-de-sac, in a grave outside of Jerusalem, and that’s where Jesus’ life ended, then some grave somewhere is where ours ends as well.

But that is not what the church has believed, and in fact, all who have ever sacrificed their lives, all who have presented themselves as living sacrifices in the words of Romans 12, because of the great mercies of God which have been promised to us, we do what we do because we have no fear of death and because we have hope of life after death, not hope that we will be some floating spirit, absorbed in the great universal spirit, as some would suggest, but that we will be who we are in the life to come.

This is the very foundation of our faith.

Because the resurrection is a reality and he has established that in the first 28 verses beyond doubt, because the resurrection is a reality, because the resurrection is a fact, it carries with it some great incentives or some great motivations.

If we remove bodily resurrection, we lose those incentives.

We lose those motivations.

Paul wants to say here, we can’t get people to present their bodies to Christ.

We can’t get people to come to Christ.

We can’t get people to serve Christ.

We can’t people to live a holy life if we don’t have a resurrection.

And so again, we see that Paul’s approach in this chapter is to say to the critics in verse 12 there, who said there’s no resurrection.

If you say that, here’s what you’ve done.

And in this little section, he says in effect what you’ve done is to remove some major incentives out of Christian living.

Principles of behavior.

And what it boils down to is this, people are not going to give their life to something they don’t really have hope in.

And if you tell people there’s no bodily resurrection, what makes you think for a minute they’re going to bother with Christianity?

Or what makes you think they’re going to live a sacrificial life?

Or what makes you think they’re going to set their life apart to holiness if there’s no resurrection, if there there’s no consequences, if there’s no rewards, if there’s no punishments, if there’s never any accountability?

That’s the essence of this chapter.

On the other hand, if there is resurrection, if we will face Christ, if we will have to be at the judgment seat of Christ, if there will be a day of reunion in heaven, if there will be a time when we dwell with the Lord Jesus and the saints and the ages forever, if there are those things in eternity for which we hope and in which we can believe, then there is incentive for this life.

Incentive

I think what Paul is saying here is simply this, people get saved because they anticipate resurrection.

Incentive of Salvation

In other words, one of the strongest incentives for people to become Christians is the hope of resurrection.

You know, it … to become Christian means you don’t have to look at the bleakness of the … of the grave.

You can have resurrection hope.

To become a Christian means that you can be rejoined with everybody else as a Christian and spend eternity with them.

To become a Christian means you can enter into heaven and dwell with God and live in His celestial kingdom and all the marvels of that kind of afterlife.

You see, that in itself is a great incentive for salvation.

And I think essentially that’s what Paul is saying here.

Now the Mormon church takes this verse and they take what appears on the surface to be the most obvious view, that somebody is baptized for a dead person.

And the Mormons call it vicarious baptism.

They say Paul is saying this that a Christian who is alive and has been baptized can get rebaptized for a dead person so that the dead person can get saved by proxy.

Okay?

So like if you’re great dear friend at work dies without the Lord, you can come here and get baptized for that dead person and by proxy he’ll get saved.

The Mormons, of course, teach that the spirits of those who have died can’t enter heaven unless a Mormon is baptized for them by proxy.

Now it’s obvious, I think, to all of us that we don’t believe that.

Proxy baptism, vicarious baptism could only be extrapolated out of this text, and there’s a simple principle, a biblical interpretation.

You never generate a doctrine out of an obscure text when no other text in the Bible teaches it.

I mean, you … that’s mercilessly attacking the Bible with your own bias and making it say what you want it to say and you can’t do that.

The person who gets baptized himself doesn’t get saved by being baptized let alone a dead person.

We believe you’re saved by faith in Jesus Christ, right?

And baptism is simply an act of obedient faith that proclaims that … that testimony of salvation.

But no one is saved by baptism.

Not living people to say nothing of dead ones.

It is a point unto men once to die the Bible says and after this the baptism?

After this, the judgment.

Christian baptism is in view in this verse.

Let’s look at that.

You see the term baptize.

Let’s take it piece by piece.

The term baptize is referring to Christian baptism I believe.

It’s the normal term.

Some people are being baptized in a Christian manner.

Some people are coming to Christ is what it’s literally saying.

Now mark this in your thinking.

Whenever you see in the New Testament the idea of being baptized, it always has a relationship to salvation unless it’s talking about something like the baptism of the Holy Spirit, which is a spiritual thing.

But when you’re talking about water baptism in the New Testament it is something that is synonymous with salvation.

And that goes all the way back to the words of Jesus in the great commission.

Because Jesus said, “Go into all the world and make disciples, baptizing and teaching.”

Jesus didn’t teach baptismal regeneration.

He didn’t mean save them by dunking them.

What He was saying was, “Go into all the world and make disciples, first by winning them to Christ and then by teaching them.”

In other words, from the very utterance of Jesus, baptism was a term used synonymously with salvation.

Now we go to the next word, for and then the dead.