Theme: The defeat of death.
This week’s lesson’s show us the joy of Jesus’ resurrection.
SCRIPTURE
Matthew 28:1-15
Now after the Sabbath, toward the dawn of the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. And behold, there was a great earthquake, for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone and sat on it.
Theme: The defeat of death.
This week’s lesson’s show us the joy of Jesus’ resurrection.
SCRIPTURE
Matthew 28:5-9
But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for he has risen, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay.
Theme: The defeat of death.
This week’s lesson’s show us the joy of Jesus’ resurrection.
SCRIPTURE
Matthew 28:6
He is not here, for he has risen, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay.
LESSON
Theme: The defeat of death.
This week’s lessons show us the joy of Jesus’ resurrection.
SCRIPTURE
Matthew 28:7
Then go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead, and behold, he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him. See, I have told you.”
LESSON
Theme: The defeat of death.
This week’s lesson’s show us the joy of Jesus’ resurrection.
SCRIPTURE
Matthew 28:11-15
While the women were on their way, some of the guards went into the city and reported to the chief priests everything that had happened, “When the chief priests had met with the elders and devised a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money, telling them, You are to say, His disciples came during the
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Canadian Committee of The Bible Study Hour
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