As I read verses 13 through 19, I find that every verse except verse 16 has a consequence in it. This is no doubt because verse 16 is simply a repetition of a consequence that came earlier. Thus, every single verse talks about something that is bad if you deny the resurrection. In verse 13 Paul writes, “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised.” There is where he starts because the first great problem, if you are going to deny the resurrection in general, is that in order to be consistent you have to deny the resurrection of Jesus as well. Now, it may well be that in the church of Corinth, those who were denying the resurrection had not quite come to the point of saying that. Perhaps they did not realize that by denying the resurrection of the body, they would necessarily deny the resurrection of Christ Himself.
Paul needs to show them that if there are no resurrections, then Jesus did not rise, either. And if they argue that by saying that since Jesus was God His resurrection was somehow exceptional, the answer is that when we speak of Jesus’ resurrection we are not talking about the resurrection of His godhead; we are talking about the resurrection of His body. That is the issue: new bodies rise. If one denies resurrection in general, you also deny the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The second consequence of denying resurrection is in verse 14, which is the emptiness or meaninglessness of the Christian proclamation. If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. If there are not any resurrections, then Jesus has not been raised. And if Jesus has not been raised, our faith is emptied of all its substance. Oh, we can go around preaching different things. We can preach morality, and we can preach about God in some general sense, and we can preach about meaning in the flow of history. But if you take the resurrection out of it, it vitiates it all. In Christianity, we are dealing not chiefly with a philosophy. We are talking about God’s intervention in history in a supernatural way, which has an impact on each one of us. If there is no resurrection, Jesus is not raised. If Jesus is not raised, then this preaching about Jesus is emptied of all its content and all its real meaning.
We have a lot of men in pulpits today who do not believe in anything supernatural and certainly do not believe in the resurrection. And yet, they go right on preaching. Of course, that is one reason why their churches are so bad, and why people are not converted. Instead, their churches become clubs, where people of the same socioeconomic level can sort of pat one another on the back and look askance at anybody who comes along who does not quite fit in. But nothing of any real spiritual note is happening. No wonder, because if one takes out Christ’s substitutionary atonement on the cross for sin, and also His bodily resurrection from the dead, that is the heart of the Gospel.
I read an interesting poll some time ago that compared belief in the resurrection among ministers with the amount of education they have had. It is a very distressing thing. I do not remember the exact figures, but if the pastor went into the ministry having only gone to high school, about forty percent of them did not believe in the resurrection. If perchance the minister had made his way through college, the percentage of disbelief rose to about sixty percent. If he was able to have a seminary education, it went up even higher, somewhere around seventy percent. And finally, if the minister went on for further education and earned a doctorate, the level of disbelief in the resurrection edged up into the eighty percent range. Those tragic statistics speak to the failure of those seminaries to train ministers in the things of God. It calls us back to the kind of logic that Paul uses here in 1 Corinthians 15.
There is a third consequence, which is that if there is no resurrection, verse 15 says that those who are apostles are found to be false witnesses about God. A false witness is a liar. Paul is saying that if there is no such thing as a resurrection, those who witness to their faith in the resurrection are liars, including the apostles. This is obviously a very serious thing, since there were two qualifications to become an apostle. The first is that he needed to have seen the risen Lord, and the second is that the risen Lord had commissioned him to be an apostle.
Now, in the case of the early disciples, of course they had been with the Lord during the three years of His public ministry, and then He had appeared to them afterwards. In Paul’s case, he had not been among that band of disciples, but Jesus had appeared to him on the road to Damascus. Because of this there were people who said, “Well, Paul’s no true apostle because he wasn’t there among that original group.” Consequently, Paul had to defend his apostleship, which is how we know what the qualifications were. But if Christ has not been raised, Paul says, we as apostles are liars because we are the ones who are going around the Roman world telling people that Jesus is risen, and that we had seen Him.
