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.
This is not a difficult chapter to outline. We are going to cover 1 Corinthians 15 in three separate weeks, and divide it up into four parts. The first portion of it, which is verses 1 through 11, deals with the truth of the resurrection. The second section, found in verses 12 through 34, discusses the importance of the resurrection. It is one thing to say that something is true. It is quite another thing to show that such a thing is also important. The third section, verses 35 through 49, addresses the resurrection body. It answers some questions that the people in Corinth probably had. The final section, verses 50 through 58, emphasizes the victory which is ours because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, with the final verse exhorting the Corinthians to stand firm and to be faithful in the Lord’s work because such labor is never performed in vain. This idea of standing is seen at the very beginning, when he says that this doctrine of the resurrection is that which was preached to them, which they received, and on which they had taken their stand.
Now apparently, the doctrine of the resurrection was being denied by some of the alleged Christians in Corinth. We do not know anything about them. There are some people who have suggested that they were probably Sadducees who had become Christians, or pretended to be so. The only reason a person would suppose that it was referring to Sadducees is that we know the Sadducees denied the resurrection. But there is nothing at all in this chapter, or in the rest of Corinthians, or in anything else we know about Corinth, to suggest that is who Paul is addressing.
It is far more likely to suppose that this was simply an outcropping of what would be very understandable in the thinking of anybody who had been raised in a Greek tradition. The Greeks had a certain approach to philosophy which in one of its most fundamental areas said that anything that was of the flesh was perishable and, more than that, was evil. Conversely, everything that was good was in the realm of the mind or spirit. So when they thought about salvation, they thought that the way you got saved was to get rid of the body and to live in the realm of the spirit. Now the closest you could come to this view of salvation in this life was to live in the realm of the mind and deny the body.
That gave rise to a number of different heresies, because if the body is evil and only the spirit is good, then the divine Christ, the Son of God, could not have taken unto Himself a human body because that would be the equivalent of saying that God became evil or took evil to Himself. So there was a tendency in Greek areas where Christianity was taking root to deny the incarnation in its fullest sense. We see that in other areas as well. There is a whole movement of heresy in early Christianity known as Gnosticism that did precisely that.
Thus, rather than being a reference to Sadducees, it is reasonable to think that it was out of this kind of Greek cultural background that the denial of a bodily resurrection arose. For the benefit of the church in all ages, the apostle Paul speaks of the resurrection and does so in a comprehensive way, saying in the first instance that the resurrection is of the essence of Christianity. It is part of the core Gospel, and therefore a person who denies the resurrection or fails to understand it does so at the peril of their own soul.
