When Paul gets to the end of this chapter, he has a great conclusion, but the conclusion has weight only if the resurrection is as real as Paul says it is. When Paul gets to the end, he encourages the Corinthian church, “Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain” (v. 58). If there is no real resurrection, our labor in the Lord is in vain, because there would be no forgiveness of sins and peace with God. But if Jesus rose, as the Bible says He did, then it is also true that He will return to reward those who trust in Him.

Once we move into the second half of chapter 15, Paul still needs to deal with other areas surrounding the idea of resurrection. At this point, the Corinthians might have come to acknowledge that the resurrection of Jesus is true, and that because we are united to Jesus by faith, we too will one day experience our own bodily resurrection. Nevertheless, they still had a question about the nature of this resurrection body. How is it possible, a Greek would argue, that a material body can inherit an immaterial, heavenly existence? Everybody acknowledges that God is spirit and that the realm of heaven has to be a realm of spirituality, not materiality. So how can you talk about a resurrection of the body?

The Corinthians’ difficulty with the resurrection grew naturally out of Greek philosophical thought. The Greeks basically had a great difference between mind and matter in the sense that everything that was of the spirit or the mind was good, and everything that was of matter was evil. They would have said that the problem is not that we are sinful human beings—including our minds and our spirits, which is what the Bible teaches. Rather, they believed that the problem is that we have bodies, which are the cause of our evil desires and bad behavior. These bodies tend to drag us down, while there is something within us, the mind and the spirit, that aspires to go upward to God.

In the twenty-second chapter of Matthew and also in Luke’s gospel, there is a story about the Sadducees’ coming to test the Lord Jesus Christ on the subject of the resurrection. It was one of a number of tests because people were trying to attack Him on different subjects. They had asked Him about the law and what was the first and greatest commandment. There was also a question about taxes, hoping to catch Him on His views concerning the relationship between one’s obedience to God and to the Roman government. Then the Sadducees came with their question about the resurrection.