Have you ever contemplated this: how easy it is to lose all hope by simply overthinking God or letting other people sow doubt in our minds?
How easy it is to lose all hope
by simply overthinking God or letting other people sow doubt in our minds.
Many people argue that the most
important Chapter of the Bible is 1 Corinthians 15. While Chapter 13 is one of
the most loved, in its focus on love, Chapter 15, focuses on a gospel truth –
the resurrection. You see while love hung on the cross as a sacrifice for us,
love always brought the resurrection of our Christ, and the resurrection of
ourselves.
With love comes the hope of the
resurrection. Love opens the door to us for the hope of a resurrected life
lived in harmony and unity with our Father, his Son and his Holy Spirit.
Chapter 15 is a long Chapter. So
to get to the gist of it, I am going to read from the paraphrase: The Street
Bible:
He [Paul] drums
up the core principles: the Liberator died to wipe out our mess; then he came
back, alive and kicking. There were witnesses and Paul was one of them. If
Jesus didn’t come back from death, then pack it in team! Without that, it’s all
a big game: we’re just a club like any other (only sadder). But he did come
back to life and blew apart Adam’s death-chains that hold us back from
limitless lfe. He’s in charge and he’ll pick off his enemies until it’s only
the big one left – death itself. Then he’ll kill death! All because he came
back to life. Like a seed only grows when it’s been buried in the earth, so
we’ll die and get a new lease of life. We don’t know the details yet, we can’t
draw a diagram, but it’ll happen.
I’m telling
you, guys, our mortal bodies don’t get to heaven. You can’t have something that
ages, rots and dies living somewhere timeless – it doesn’t work. But the
secret’s out. Some of us won’t snuff it, but all of us will get a
body-exchange. No coded warning: some angel will get the nod; then a blink
later he’ll blast his trumpet and the dead will come back alive permanently;
we’ll rip off our mortal clothes to be kitted out with our new, designer
immortal bodies. Then the old line ‘Death’s drowned in Victory’s Ocean’ will
have come true. Like Hosea said it:
Death, you’ve
lost your edge – how come?
Death, your
bullets are blank – how come?
Death’s
ammunition is our mess – he just packs it into bullets that comply with Moses’ Rule
Book, and then fires it all back at us. But thank God, our Boss, Jesus the
Liberator, has emptied the bullets by clearing up our mess, so the bullets are
duds and just ricochet off us. We win!
So, my good
mates, don’t shift. Don’t get blown off the road. Go for it 100 percent –
you’re working for the Boss and you know it’s worth breaking sweat for. It’s
not a waste of time. Hang in there.
How easy it is to lose all hope
by simply overthinking God or letting other people sow doubt in our minds.
Chapter 15, the resurrection
chapter, is a powerful chapter. Powerful, not only in its message, but also
powerful in terms of the context that Paul is speaking into.
You see Paul is directly speaking
into a context of fake news. He is telling them – here are the facts. This is
the gospel truth – believe it in its fullness. In all of your chaos, you have
overthought the gospel. You have been misled by the philosophies of others. And
by doing this, you have removed the hope out of the gospel truth. The gospel
didn’t stop at the cross, it only just started there.
Paul is directly speaking into
this fake news and shining a light on it.
How easy it is to lose all hope
by simply overthinking God or letting other people sow doubt in our minds.
We learn from the opening verses
of Corinthians 1, that the church was overthinking the gospel, rather than just
believing in facts, the Church had spilt. People had started to take sides on
who gave the correct teachings of Christ and the way of the Church. The Corinthian
church had become a church divided by conceptions of Truth.
And, it appears that, all of
these conceptions centred around a divide in the Greek world – a divide that is
also in the western world, the culture of our world today – and that is the
divide of the body and the spirit. Often this divide has the spiritual as
meaning more, and of more value, than the physical. This is simply not true.
It is possible that some of the
church at Corinth had started to rethink what was meant by resurrection. Some
may have concluded that true resurrection occurs when our spirit is set free
from our bodies. Some may have even concluded that in death, our body is gone,
there is nothing more. Some may have thought that the resurrection had already
occurred, there was no resurrection to look forward to. Some may have even
questioned the resurrection of Jesus – maybe they doubted it, maybe they
thought he broke free from the prison of his physical body.
Afterall, let’s be honest – if
you think about it, if you really, really, think about it, I mean it you spend
a good deal of time thinking about it – physically coming back from the dead is
a ridiculous concept, isn’t it?
Aside from the story told to us
in the Bible – how many of us know someone other than Jesus who has come back
from the dead after three days – just think about it. Resurrecting a physical
body is just ridiculous.
How easy it is to lose all hope
by simply overthinking God or letting other people sow doubt in our minds.
Paul puts his counter-argument to
the fake news spreading in the Corinthian Church through three key sections. In
the first 11 verses, he focuses on the historical event of Christ’s
resurrection, in verses 12 to 34, he points out that the only hope for the Corinthian
church is in resurrection and from 35 onwards, he challenges the Corinthian
church to live a resurrected life. So, let’s look at each aspect.
The historical event
Paul is quick to point to the
facts of the resurrection of Christ. Paul does not argue for a doctrine or
philosophy of resurrection. He points to the facts. It is a fact that Jesus
died. It is a fact that his body was physically buried. Jesus did not just
disappear. He died on a cross and to ensure that he was dead, a soldier pierced
his side. His death is a physical fact. Furthermore, his death was a very
public death. Everyone that was there would have seen it. His body was buried by Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea. They
physically picked his body up, laid it in a tomb and closed the tomb. Three days later the tomb was found empty – fact.
The risen Christ appeared to more
than 500 people including Paul. When Paul was writing this, many of these
people would be still alive and would still able to testify to what they had
seen. So, just as his death is a
physical fact, the physical resurrection of Christ is a fact. A side fact to
all of this, is that we know from scripture, that the disciples did not expect
Jesus to come back from the dead.
It is a belief in these facts
which brought the church into existence. It was the reality that some people in
Corinth believed in these facts, that the church in Corinth existed. If these
facts are not true, the church in Corinth existed on foolishness, and we today
would as well. The church exists because of the resurrection.
Yes, if you really think about,
talk about it, and debate it, concepts like resurrection seem extraordinary,
impossible and improbable. But the gospel is built on facts, not philosophies
or thinking.
The gospel does not give us
guidelines for our life; it does not tell us what we have to do; it is not a
set of rules – instead it tells us the truth that Jesus died for us, he died
for our sins, and in order to give us a new life, he was resurrected from the
dead. The new life, our new life, comes in the resurrection
Because Christ rose from the dead
so we too will rise.
How easy it is to lose all hope
by simply overthinking God or letting other people sow doubt in our minds.
Now that Paul has established the
facts around the physical resurrection of Christ, he goes onto his next point.
The Resurrection, Our Only Hope
Paul asserts that while love was nailed to the
cross, our sins were atoned at the cross, that our point in hope is within the
resurrection moment – the victory moment. Death, the ultimate enemy, could not
hold him down – he is risen. Death will not hold us down, as we too will join
into the resurrected moment.
So our hope, Christian hope goes beyond death.
For us, the day may end in a sunset, but we are looking beyond the sunset to
the sun rising – and there is a double pun there because I am also talking
about looking beyond the s.o.n. set to the s.o.n. rising.
Without a belief in our own
resurrection, our own physical resurrection, our faith, our point of hope, is
useless. Without the resurrection moment, and the hope that it brings, we have
no assurance of the revelation moment, when we are reunited with each other,
the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
If we have no hope for this
future – we are fools – because we suffer for nothing in this moment. Every
time we confess the name of Jesus, without hope of the resurrection, we speak
without the power that it brings.
Jesus died for our offences, our
sins, in his resurrection is our justification. The victory is in the resurrection,
not the moment of death on the cross.
And, if Christ did not rise, then
our faith is pointless – he would not be able to advocate for us; we would not
have a hope in a future – it would be all pointless. A dead saviour cannot take
away sins, rescue us from the God’s wrath, or develop a relationship with us
Resurrection is where our hope is
planted, to not believe in the resurrection either of Christ or of the church
is to believe in something without power. There is no point in believing in
falsehoods, the Christian life is only the best life when it is based on the
truth of the gospel.
How easy it is to lose all hope
by simply overthinking God or letting other people sow doubt in our minds.
So, Paul establishes through
facts, the gospel truth of the resurrection, he then goes onto pointing out the
hope of the resurrection for believers. He then moves into the final part of
his discussion on resurrection from verse 35:
The Resurrection Life
This final bit still hits the
fake news creeping into the Corinthian church yet again. This comes back to the
physical and the spiritual. And a concept that some of us even fall into now,
of thinking about resurrection as something solely spiritual. When we sing of
the hope of the resurrection, many of us have a spiritual picture in our minds,
we do not see in our minds a resurrected physical body. We have fallen into the
trap of thinking that our God, the God who created us physically, only cares for
our spiritual selves. This is not true. The reality is, as Paul would remind
the church of Corinth, resurrection is very physical.
It is important to realise that
whenever the resurrection is mentioned in scripture it is about the physical
standing up of the body – it is about the physical body being stood up. The
Greek word for resurrection, anastasis means just this ‘to stand up’. Now
commentators are very quick to point a simple truth out (a truth that doesn’t
involve too much thinking) – a spirit simply cannot be stood up, float up maybe
but for a spirit to do something physical is impossible.
Added to all this is that we are
so often caught up in this debate about the physical and the spiritual, and
what matters most to God is that we miss the real focus. The real point of
difference that we need to focus on, the real difference we should be focused
on is our current body and condition which is subject to death, it is mortal,
and our future body and condition which is immortal.
Paul reminds us that by one man’s
sin (Adam’s sin) we were made unrighteous, by another man’s obedience (Jesus’
obedience) we have been made righteous. Death is not the final word on our
lives and while most of us in this room will die – we, along with those that
have left us in death, will experience a resurrection moment.
It will be physical, but one
thing we know is, our mortal bodies are flawed products. They break on us, we
get sick, we experience plan and most of us have our own disabilities. Our
bodies are broken.
Paul is quick to remind the Corinthian
Church, though, that bodies are not prisons and that in our resurrection we
will inhabit a new body, one that is immortal without the flaws of our current
condition.
It is a little like we are seeds,
and in our death we are planted, but in our resurrection we become the plant
the seed was destined to be. Or for the younger of us, it is like we are like
Marvel Superheroes, our human condition is broken, but in our metamorphosis
into a superhero, we realise our immortal and ultimately perfect condition.
It a tough bit of theology, but
it is key: resurrection is a fact in the gospel, it is our hope, and in our
hope we will be resurrected anew.
What helps me understand this is knowing
that in his own resurrection, Jesus was not recognisable immediately to his
disciples. It tells me something deep happens in a resurrection moment. And it must
– after all, once you have physically conquered death, you must be transformed.
And it is while we live in this hope
and expectation, that we live in preparation of our resurrection moment. And the
best way to prepare is to live a life in service to each other, in the way of
love knowing that hope springs eternal.
How easy it is to lose all hope
by simply overthinking God or letting other people sow doubt in our minds.
Let us hold onto the gospel Truth
of the resurrection – it is physical, it is real and it is our hope.
Are you prepared to believe these three key messages:
1) The act of love on the cross is followed by the hope that is found in the victory of the resurrection.
2) That if we dismiss this simple truth, we reject the reason for our being as a Church.
3) That if we accept this simple truth, the promise is that we too will both physically and spiritually be resurrected into immortality so that we can commune with our Father, his son and be in the presence of his Holy Spirit.
