In last week’s devotional we looked at the first eleven verses of this chapter. We saw that Paul was dealing with a situation in Corinth on this subject. There were people who apparently did not believe in resurrection. You cannot tell exactly from these verses whether they discounted the resurrection of Christ as well—probably not from the way he argues. But they were certainly willing to discount the resurrection of believers. We do not know exactly who these people were who were creating the problem, but it is not too difficult to figure out the nature of the objection. The Greeks had an idea in philosophy that everything that was of the spirit or of the mind was good, and everything that was material or of the flesh was bad. Salvation for the Greeks was essentially a philosophical and intellectual issue. You escaped the ties of the flesh, which are evil, by means of your mind.
This apparently had carried over into the Corinthian church and would probably have expressed itself in the following way. People who were formed by this Greek philosophical tradition would have said that the Gospel that Paul is preaching has come out of a Jewish environment. But that really is not the way things are. Matter is evil, and if matter is evil you cannot really have hope in a genuine, bodily resurrection. That would be the equivalent of saying that we are going to take our sinful nature into heaven with us. Thus, what we have to look for is not a bodily resurrection, but a spiritual one. We have to look to the freeing of our minds and spirits through Christianity.
We already saw in the first eleven verses how he started to address that idea. He began by reminding them what they had been taught. He said in effect that the Christian teaching that has been presented to them is not something which they are to filter through their philosophical system, such that they decide which parts of Christianity fit with it and which parts do not. The Christian Gospel is that God has made Himself known in the person of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. And Paul wants to remind them that what he preached was not something he made up. Rather, the Gospel he preached was received by him from others. This is what was preached from the very beginning. The Corinthians are being given that which is the truth, that Christ was crucified for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, and that He was raised again on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that this was witnessed by many people still living, and even up to five hundred of the brethren at one time. So if you have any question about whether or not the resurrection of Jesus Christ really happened, you simply have to go and talk to those who were eyewitnesses of the event.
Moreover, this same Gospel that he himself received is the very Gospel the Corinthians have received from him. This idea of receiving the Gospel and then faithfully passing it on to others was clearly important because of how he emphasizes it in verse 1 and also in verse 11.
Having reminded the Corinthians of what the Gospel is in the first eleven verses, beginning now in verses 12 and following he is going to discuss the consequences if one denies the resurrection, and also show how the resurrection fits into the whole scope of God’s activity in history. Paul knows that the resurrection does not fit in with the Corinthians’ philosophical thinking. What Paul wants them to do is think clearly about it because if it is true that the dead do not rise, then a number of very significant consequences follow.
