The great Samuel Johnson once said about John Milton’s Paradise Lost that although he knew many people who had “read it,” he knew very few who had read it “through.” That is true of many literary classics. Books like Plato’s Republic, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Melville’s Moby Dick, and others are recognized as outstanding works. But there are millions of people who have never read them and have no intention of reading them. The same is true of much biblical literature. In fact, even Christians neglect much of it. When we talk about the New Testament one book that fits this category is James.
The great Samuel Johnson once said about John Milton’s Paradise Lost that although he knew many people who had “read it,” he knew very few who had read it “through.” That is true of many literary classics. Books like Plato’s Republic, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Melville’s Moby Dick, and others are recognized as outstanding works. But there are millions of people who have never read them and have no intention of reading them. The same is true of much biblical literature. In fact, even Christians neglect much of it. When we talk about the New Testament one book that fits this category is James.
That is what the Gospel core leads us to. If you do not think in terms of the Lord Jesus Christ dying for your sin, being buried, and then being raised on the third day according to the Scriptures to declare in a public way that God has accepted His sacrifice on your behalf, then you are like Paul before his conversion. You will boast in your supposed good works and think God has to take note of that.
I think it is interesting that, although Paul’s concern in this chapter is to talk about the resurrection, nevertheless, when he gets to this point and mentions the fact that Jesus Christ appeared to him last of all, Paul immediately thinks of the grace of God to give such a revelation and entrust such a Gospel to a person like himself.
Now, it is important when Paul points out that Christ did not merely die, but that He died for our sins. If he had said merely that Christ died, somebody could very well reply, “Well, so what? Everybody dies.” But when he says that Christ died for our sins, he puts that in a different category altogether. People die for different reasons, such from old age or an illness. Some might even die in a heroic fashion on behalf of somebody else. Or we might die as a martyr for some noble cause. Jesus did not die in any of those ways. He died for our sins, which means that He died in our place, as our substitute.
Paul has some interesting terminology here that is not at once apparent in our English translations but is more so in Greek and probably in the Hebrew terms that stand behind it. Paul says that he delivered to the Christians in Corinth that which he had received. Those two terms, “delivering” and “receiving,” to us sound like just incidental verbs. But in the language of rabbinic literature, those two terms were important because they describe what was the essential duty of a disciple of a master.
1 Corinthians 15 is the most comprehensive chapter in the New Testament on the resurrection. It joins Hebrews 11, which is the great chapter on faith, and 1 Corinthians 13, the great chapter on love. There are many other great chapters in the Bible, of course. But I think of those three together because at the very end of 1 Corinthians 13, Paul says, “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love” (v. 13). I think 1 Corinthians 15 fits into that list well because the resurrection is the essence of the Christian hope.
Finally, Paul talks also of the benefit of this for unbelievers. It is interesting how he does it. He begins to talk about it in verse 22, saying that tongues are signs, not for believers, but for unbelievers; while prophecy is for believers, and not for unbelievers. What he means by that is that tongues is a miracle, which is something that the unbelieving world will notice, whereas in the experience of Christian people, it would not get their attention in the same way.
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