1 Corinthians 15:50

“Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption.”

The formula τοῦτό φημι, here is what I say, is used by the apostle to announce a decisive and final explanation, the exposition of a more profound point of view, which will put the truth previously stated in its full light; comp. 1 Corinthians 7:29. It differs from τοῦτο λέγω, which announces the repetition of the same idea in a more developed form.

Before giving the solution of the particular question, Paul lays down a general law which refers equally to the point hitherto treated and to that which is about to follow, so that the verse forms the transition between the two passages. In this context the expression: flesh and blood, can only designate our present physical organism; flesh, in respect of its substance; blood, in respect of the life-principle which animates it; for, according to Scripture, blood is the seat of the vital principle. Irenaeus and Chrysostom took the word in its moral sense: τὰς πονηρὰς πράξεις, as if the passage were parallel to Romans 8:12-13; but the expression σάρξ καὶ αἷμα has never the meaning of σάρξ standing alone. It is from this interpretation, likewise excluded by the context, that the false reading φορέσωμεν, in 1 Corinthians 15:49, has proceeded. What the apostle means is, that it will not be by being clothed with a body of such a nature that the believer will be able to participate in the perfect state of things which is called the kingdom of God. Such a body would be a curtain which would veil from us the face of God, too weak an instrument to bear such emotions, too dull an agent to execute the works to be done in this new state. Paul has taken care not to say σῶμα, a body, because it will be with a body that believers shall take part in that kingdom.

In the second proposition, the verb in the present expresses, as Edwards says, “the nature of the thing;” it is a law which is equivalent to the οὐ δύναται, cannot, in the first proposition; only the particle οὐδέ, neither, and the subject ἡ φθορά, corruption, imply a gradation. Corruption, ἡ φθορά, denotes flesh and blood in a state of dissolution already begun. The expression therefore leads us to suppose that the first proposition refers to Christians who shall be alive at the time of the Advent, and the second to dead Christians who do not inherit, in so far as they are not raised. The idea is this: it is so impossible that the present body should participate in the life of heaven, that, whether dissolved by death or not, it must be transformed. This is precisely what is developed in the following verses.