1 Corinthians 15 - Introduction

The religion of Greece was but the worship of Nature in all its chief features, through symbolic forms. To the genuine Greek, therefore, the resurrection of the dead could not but be repulsive. Presupposing, as this doctrine did, the vanity of all present things, as blighted and doomed on account of sin, and holding forth as the grand object of just desire a life out of death, this view of things was in the teeth of all his modes of thinking and feeling, and gave the death-blow to his most cherished ideas. No wonder then that the doctrine of a resurrection from the dead and this based on the fact that it had actually occurred in the resurrection of Christ was “to the Greeks foolishness,” and had to encounter the contempt of pleasure-loving Corinth. In these circumstances we might expect that among the converts, after the novelty of the Gospel had begun to abate, there would be found some who, by, mixing too freely for their own good with their lax-living, scoffing fellow-citizens, would have their principles shaken (1 Corinthians 15:33), and be tempted to refine and explain away the obnoxious doctrine, as meaning no more than that new life here which every Christian experiences. As this was to undermine Christianity itself, and with it all assurance of pardon, and of power to conquer the last enemy, the apostle was too jealous for the truth to close his Epistle without dealing thoroughly with it. But he reserves this topic to the last, not only because it belongs to the ‘Last Things,' but because by so doing he would be able to rise to the highest views of the purposes of God towards the Church, and open up the whole subject, so far as it had been revealed to himself. Here, accordingly, we have brought before us the resurrection of the dead

in the certainty of it, its relation to death as the wages of sin, the order and issues of it in the Divine economy, the objections urged against it, the nature of it, the glory of it, and its practical power in the Christian fife. As a Pharisee, the apostle had, before his conversion, held it as an abstract doctrine, in opposition to the Sadducees, and by his avowal of it before the Sanhedrim gained thereby the support of the Pharisees (Acts 23:6-9). But not thus did he now preach the resurrection. In the light of the undeniable historical fact of the resurrection of Christ did he hold it forth, as not only demonstrating the doctrine in a palpable form, but as assuring believers of pardon through His death, and of eternal glory with their risen Lord.