Is there anything in the Old Testament that could be called a confession of faith? Of course, the Shema (see Deuteronomy 6:4-9) would qualify. But there is another confession of faith that appears in every part of the Old Testament: the Pentateuch, the historical books, the wisdom literature, and the prophets. Interestingly, the first person to make this “confession” about God was God. In Exodus 34:6-7 God proclaims his name (YHWH) to Moses: “YHWH, YHWH, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.”
This proclamation of his name includes a description of his character. YHWH is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. This, the ancient Hebrews confessed, is the nature of our God.
God’s proclamation of his own character resounds throughout the Old Testament by those who found it to be true. Forms of it appear three times in the Psalms (86:15; 103:8; 145:8), in Joel 2:13, in Jonah 4:2 (where the unhappy prophet is complaining that God is like this even with hispeople’s enemies), and in Nehemiah 9:17.
I once took a class from a teacher who described the God of the New Testament as loving and forgiving, but the God of the Old Testament as angry and vindictive. He had not read the Old Testament carefully enough.
Someone might respond, “But surely the God of the Old Testament is often spoken of as angry.” Yes, this is true. But he has much to be angry about. He is angry about injustice, abuse, and oppression. He is angry at the things and the people that are ruining his beautiful creation, but he is slow to anger. On the other hand, he is quick to forgive, to help, and restore.
This Old Testament confession of faith was around before Israel became a nation, and it was still on the lips of faithful Jews after Israel ceased to be a nation, went into exile, and then returned to as a remnant.
When we come to the New Testament, we see this confession in another setting—or rather, in another person. While Old Testament people made the good confession in prayer, like Nehemiah and Jonah, or in song, like the Psalmists, or put it in writing like the prophet, in the New Testament the nature of God is expressed in a person: Jesus.
This is what St. John had in mind when he wrote, “No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known” (John 1:18). What the Old Testament put into words about God, Jesus put into a body. He is the walking, talking, weeping, loving exposition of the Old Testament confession. In Jesus, the Infinite and Eternal was embedded in space and time.
The Old Testament confessed that YHWH is compassionate. Jesus demonstrated what that compassion is like by healing the diseases of the “harassed and helpless” (see Matthew 8:35-36). When Jesus and his apostles went across the lake for a little R&R, people found out where they were staying and crashed their vacation—by the thousands. Instead of being angry, Jesus “had compassion on them” and made sure that they all received a good meal (Matthew 14:13-21; Mark 6:3-44). When a widow lost her only son, Jesus felt compassion for her (NIV, “his heart went out to her”), and he raised her son back to life.
The confession proclaims that God is gracious. St. John went so far as to say that God’s grace came to humanity through Jesus Christ (John 1:17), who was “full of grace” (literal translation, John 1:14). This grace was demonstrated in Jesus’s willingness to go to a Gentile’s home to heal his servant, his readiness to take time from his busy schedule to stop and bless little children, and his gentle way with people excluded from society (Luke 5:12-15; 7:36-50; John 4:4-26). That grace was epitomized in Jesus’s decision to lift us out of our poverty by becoming poor for us through the incarnation (2 Cor. 8:9).
To Moses, God revealed himself as being “slow to anger.” This was, of course, demonstrated to Moses himself when God called him (Exodus 3), to Israel as it grumbled and rebelled in the wilderness (see Nehemiah 9:29-31 for a comment on this), and with the people of Ninevah in the days of Jonah (Jonah 3:9-4:2).
That God is slow to anger does not mean that he never gets angry. When an adult abuses a child, God is angry. When a nation refuses to turn from its idols, God is angry. When the rich oppress the poor, God is angry. Jesus perfectly demonstrated this. He was slow to anger, putting up with ignorance and error and calming childish fears. But he could become angry, as he did when a synagogue of hard-hearted people ignored a man’s needs because they were more concerned for their rules (not God’s) than they were for their fellow man (Mark 3:1-6). Jesus was angry at his own disciples when they turned people away, thinking Jesus (and themselves) too important to waste time with children (Mark 10:13-16). He overturned the tables of the money changers and drove the merchants out of the temple, where they had usurped the place of Gentile worshipers and turned the temple into a market (Mark 11:15-17).
In the Old Testament confession of faith, it is acknowledged that YHWH is forgiving. Jesus embodied this forgiveness in everyday life. He forgave the young man who was paralyzed – how liberating his words of forgiveness must have been (Mark 2:1-5). He forgave a woman whose sordid life had been the subject of gossip in the community (Luke 7:36-50). He demonstrated forgiveness to a scheming, unpatriotic, greedy tax collector named Zaccheus (Luke 19:1-10). The forgiveness he expressed toward each of these people – and more besides – scandalized those who were present.
The quintessential example of forgiveness comes when “wicked men” handed Jesus over to be crucified. As the soldiers drove spikes through his hands/wrists and feet, he prayed: “Father, forgive them; they don’t know what they are doing.” Such mercy, expressed in forgiveness, boggles the mind.
The point, of course, is that this is exactly what YHWH the creator God is like. Jesus perfectly demonstrated his Father’s nature (John 14:9-10) by being “compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in love and faithfulness … forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.” He is “the image of the invisible God,” the “radiance of God’s glory, and the exact representation of his being.”
God Most High is exactly like Jesus? He is. And that is good news for the entire human race.
This sermon from 1 Corinthians 15:50-58 explores some exciting themes: death, deathlessness, and the transition from this life (everything we have known) to the life to come (everything we hope to be). This passage wraps up Paul’s brilliant exposition of the resurrection.
If you would rather read the sermon than watch it, the text is included below.
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I am neither a prophet, nor the son of a prophet, but I am going to die on June 23, 2031 – at least according to the website, http://www.deathclock.com. Years ago, I entered my birth date, height, weight, sex, and body/mass index, along with whether or not I have been a smoker or a drinker. According to the formula they use for such things, I’ve got 6 years left on earth. They have me dying seven days before our 52nd wedding anniversary. I first read that about 20 years ago, and 2031 seemed a long way off. Seems a lot closer now.
According to the same authority, Karen is going to outlive me by four-and-a-half years. She dies on February 17, 2036.
Of course, their calculations may be all wrong. Probably are. Karen and I have walked two miles a day, five or six days a week, for decades. We exercise. I played basketball until I was well into my fifties. We could live to be 90. Maybe a hundred. I might not die on June 23rd, 2031. I might make it to May 1st, 2041. Or Karen and I might crash our hover car and die together on August, 16th, 2052. Wouldn’t be a bad way to go.
But we are going to go.
In the sure and certain gloom of death, do our efforts to live loving, holy lives mean anything? Praying, reading Scripture, visiting the sick, practicing generosity—none of that is going to exempt us from dying.
The apostle Paul was just plain blunt about this. He wrote to the Corinthians: “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.”[1] If death has the last word, then our efforts are useless. Religion is meaningless. Preaching is vain.
But death, Paul insists, does not have the last word, as Jesus’s resurrection proved. The theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg put it this way: “The evidence for Jesus’s resurrection is so strong that nobody would question it except for two things: First, it is a very unusual event. And second, if you believe it happened, you have to change the way you live.”
That’s what we’re thinking about this morning: how Jesus’s resurrection changes the way we live. If resurrection is not changing us now, there is reason to doubt that it will change us in the future. And we need that future change. Paul says in verse 50, “I declare to you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.”
Those of our species who will survive death must be changed in the very makeup of their bodies and their souls. We’re talking about an evolutionary leap that dwarves anything Darwin ever imagined. Because “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” we need to be changed.
But isn’t there a problem here? Jesus said that people can enter the kingdom of God in this life, in this “flesh and blood.” He said that prostitutes and tax collectors were already entering the kingdom of God while he was on earth.[2] Is Paul contradicting Jesus? The Lord says we can enter the kingdom as flesh and blood people, but Paul says that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom.
There is no contradiction. Think of it this way: You can enter the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina. In fact, you are invited to do so (for a fee). You might even get a job there. But entering or working at the Biltmore is far different from inheriting the Biltmore. Anyone can enter the kingdom of God who chooses to do so. In fact, everyone is invited to do so (and the fee has already been paid). You can even get a job in the kingdom; everyone who enters does. But that is not the same thing as inheriting the kingdom. Flesh and blood cannot do that. To inherit the kingdom, you need to be a family member – one who shares the life of Jesus Christ – and even then, before you can come into your inheritance you will need to be changed. And that, verse 51, involves a mystery.
Mystery is one of the great Pauline words. Three out of every four times it is used in the New Testament it comes from his pen. A mystery, in Paul’s sense of the word, is something hitherto unknown about God’s plan, something that, apart from divine revelation, no one would ever guess. But God has made it known.
In the Bible, there are many such mysteries – things once hidden, but now revealed. For example: the mystery of Christ’s indwelling;[3] the mystery of the union of Gentiles and Jews in the church;[4] the great mystery of God in a human body.[5] In our passage, Paul gives us yet another one: “We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed.”
We’ll think about the nature of that change in a moment, but before we do, I need to say something. It’s true that the Bible has unveiled many mysteries, but God has not let all his secrets out of the bag (Deut. 29:29). Some people seem to think that what we have in the Bible is not only all we need to know, but all there is to know. It is true that we have all we need to know in order to be included in his salvation; but it is hardly all there is to know.
The secret things belong to the Lord, and he is not telling all his secrets—perhaps only a tiny percentage of them. We are surrounded by mystery. We are a mystery. Apart from God himself, we may be the biggest mystery of all.
But in verse 51, we have a mystery that has been, at least in part, revealed. Remember that flesh and blood must be changed in order to inherit the kingdom of God, and that change happens after death. There are currently no direct flights to the age to come. We are all booked for a layover at the terminal we call death.
I read a few years ago that one airport has been consistently voted the worst in the nation: Newark, New Jersey. If you can avoid Newark, you will. But say you want to go to Bermuda, your favorite place on earth, and every flight goes through Newark. You’d put up with Newark if it meant Bermuda. That is like death. We don’t like it and we’ll do our best to avoid it, but if it is only a layover on our way to glory, we can put up with it.
But here Paul lets us in on a secret. He unlocks a mystery for us: not everyone will enter heaven that way. God is going to book some people on a direct flight without a layover in death.
“We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed.” Sleep here refers to death. In fact, fifteen of the eighteen times the word occurs in the New Testament, it refers to death. Do you see what that means? The early Christians were not overawed by death. They thought of it like we think of falling asleep. It’s not a big deal – at least, not for someone who is connected to Christ through faith.
But Paul says, “We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed.” It is possible that some of us in this room are going to be changed without dying. In the New Testament, the word change is often used in the sense of “exchange.” To make it in the age to come, we will need to exchange this flesh and blood body for what Paul calls a spiritual body. Some Christians will make that exchange without passing through death.
(By the way, “spiritual body” does not mean a body made of spirit, just like an electric car does not mean a car made of electricity. A spiritual body is powered by spirit, not by flesh and blood. It’s not a ghost; it’s not anything like a ghost.)
Do you understand what Paul is saying here? Some people are booked on a direct flight for the age to come. They will be changed, but they won’t die. That was hitherto unknown and unexpected; it was a mystery.
Verse 52: “In a flash…” The Greek word is atomos, from which we get our word “atom”; it signified a thing that could not be divided. Here it refers to a moment of time so brief as to be indivisible. “…in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.” Darwin would have said that such a leap forward would take millions of years. God will accomplish it in a nanosecond.
This change Paul speaks of is not only a major step for us, but for the entire universe because we are not the only ones being changed. The author of Hebrews, uses this same word when he writes that God will change the heavens and the earth “like a garment.”[6] God is not only going to reclothe us with a spiritual body; he is going to reclothe the universe.
This same word for “change” is also used of the demonized man of Gadara. That poor man saw the world in a daze, through a fog. Everything was unclear to him, and hateful. Then Jesus changed him. We read that when the townsfolk next saw him, he was “sitting at Jesus’ feet, dressed and in his right mind.”[7] I think the change from flesh and blood to spiritual body will be something like that: it will be like waking up from sleep—for some people, from a nightmare. When we are clothed in our new, spiritual body, the bad dreams will be over. We will be awake to realities we never knew existed.
Paul says that the change, verse 53, will be from perishable to imperishable. The word perishable has the idea of a thing that is subject to corruption, to falling apart, becoming worthless. That describes us now, when “the outward man wastes away”; but when we are changed, that will no longer be the case. We will be imperishable.
Before the change, we are mortal (the Greek word means, characterized by death) but after the change we will have immortality (or literally, deathlessness.) Flesh and blood are death-full. Everyone dies! Maybe not on June 23rd, 2031, but (apart from the mysterious exception of verse 51) none of us gets out alive. As the Book of Common Prayer puts it, “In the midst of life, we are in death.” But it is even worse than that: death is in us, and has been ever since Adam’s rebellion. But the enormous change of verses 51 and 52 will transform us from death-full to deathless beings.
That has been God’s plan all along. Isaiah the prophet foresaw this a millennium before Paul, and Paul quotes him in verse 54: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.” In Paul’s Greek it is actually, “Death has been swallowed down.” You know who swallowed it, don’t you? The Captain of our salvation, the Lord Jesus himself. He swallowed death, and it went down hard. He took death into himself so that he could take it out of us, so that it would be possible to transform human beings from death-full mortals to deathless immortals.
Christ has taken the victory away from death and given it, verse 57, to us! There was a time when victory belonged to death. Itreigned asthe undefeated champion of the world.
Death was winning all its matches, though according to the Scriptures, there were a couple of forfeits: both Enoch and Elijah were called away before their match could take place). But then death met Jesus Christ, and he swallowed it down. He took, verse 55, its sting.
A father was riding in a car with his young son, who was deathly allergic to bee stings. When a bee appeared in the car, the boy panicked and started swatting at it. The father saw it was a honeybee, and that his son was going to get stung if he didn’t do something. So, in one lightning-fast motion, he grabbed the bee out of the air.
He winced, then opened his hand and the bee flew away. The boy began to squirm again and whine, but his father assured him that the bee could no longer harm him. He had taken its sting. We were afraid of death, and we had good reason to be. Humans are deathly allergic to it. But Jesus took its sting.
The scholar Jaroslav Pelikan edited a four-volume work he called, Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition. Among the creeds, he included one from the Masai tribe of Nigeria. In their creed, Masai believers say that Jesus “was always on safari, doing good.” They declare that Jesus was “tortured and nailed hands and feet to a cross, and died, he lay buried in the grave, but the hyenas did not touch him, and on the third day he rose from the grave. He ascended unto the skies. He is Lord.”[8]
Pelikan says that when a Nigerian student translated that creed for him, he got the shivers. “The hyenas did not touch him.” Death met Jesus, and he swallowed it down, and gave the victory to us.
That is why I can look at June 23, 2031 (or whatever date it might be) and say, “I know it’s on the calendar, but that’s alright. Death is not my destination. I’ll just be passing through.” And who knows? I may not even do that. Perhaps I, and you with me, will be spared that nasty layover. Because of Jesus, Death does not have the last word.
And because death does not have the last word, our commitment to Jesus is not in vain. Because I am connected to Jesus through faith, he imparts his life to me, and that life makes possible the change from mortal to immortal, from perishable to imperishable. But understand: the change begins as soon as the connection is established. You can’t have Jesus’s death-defeating, God-obeying, devil-defying life and not be changed.
Because death does not have the last word, “we know that our labor in the Lord,” verse 58, “is not in vain.” What we do for the Lord makes a difference, if not in the world, then in us. So, we stand firm We let nothing move us. We always give ourselves fully to the work of the Lord.
But how? How do we stand firm or, as the Greek has it, “become firm”? How can we become unmovable (which is a literal translation of the phrase, “Let nothing move you”)? I once heard about a Kung Fu master who positioned his body just so, then his disciple tried to push him down. Then two disciples. Then three, and four, but they couldn’t do it. They couldn’t push him down. It was like pushing an oak.
That is something like what Paul had in mind. We become unmovable like the deep-rooted oak, and we cannot be pushed out of the path of devotion to Christ. Are we more like the oak or like its leaf, which is blown here and there? Paul wants us to be unmovable, rooted and grounded in Christ.
If that is going to be true of you, you’ll need to send your roots deep, and send many of them. You will need to draw life and nourishment daily from Christ himself, through prayer and the reading of Scripture. If you haven’t learned how to do that, talk to me after the service. If you need to be somewhere – it is Mother’s Day – call me, or email, or text. But don’t procrastinate. This is important.
But sending your roots deep is not enough; you also need to send them wide. Learn to draw life from Christ through worship (there’s more to it than just coming to church), through spiritual disciplines like solitude and silence, giving, and service, through community, spending regular, meaningful time with other Christians. Let your roots become a rich and complex system that connects you to Christ in a thousand different ways. That’s how you become firm and unmovable. Sunday mornings alone cannot provide that.
This is verse 58 “Give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord.” In the original language this phrase is, “overflowing in the work of the Lord.” Every Christian needs to be involved in the work of the Lord. If you’re not, it is time you got started. If you don’t know where to start, we’ll figure that out together, and we’ll do it in a way that fits who you are. Too many people try to do as little as possible for God and still get by. Let’s not be like that. Let’s be like Jesus, and give all we can.
When death comes to people who are overflowing in the work of the Lord, they will find no terror in it. When Christ comes (which will make the coming of death seem trivial), those who are overflowing the in the work of the Lord will find no terror in him. That cannot be said for those who are not. I’d rather not be found among their company.
There I was, sitting in the church’s auditorium for our denomination’s regional conference. The meeting had been going on for hours by this time. It began when the regional director called the meeting to order. The newly elected regional director was then introduced, and he shared his vision for the future. The denominational president and other leaders cast vision and shared reports, and the treasurer for the region talked about income, expenses, and investments.
At some point during all this, I happened to notice the back of the chair in front of me. It was, like many found in church auditoriums, steel-framed, with a padded seat and back. Below the seat, a narrow steel dowel ran from one back leg to the other, and attached to it was a round cup holder.
There was hardly anything new about this. The church I served previously had similar chairs, with similar cup holders. The difference, though, was that the cup holders in our previous church (like many others I have seen) was made to hold small glass or plastic cups, the kind Protestants frequently use in Holy Communion. But the cup holders in these chairs were not made for communion cups – at least not Holy Communion cups. It was made for coffee cups.
Not surprisingly, there was a coffee bar in the lobby, and people were welcome to bring their cups into the meeting. On Sundays also, when people enter the auditorium to worship, the cup holders are convenient for those who bring their coffee into the service. No one wants to raise their hands in worship when they are holding a coffee cup. Someone may think that they are promoting Starbucks.
Something about this struck me as incongruous and significant. Incongruous because the church is not a coffeehouse but a place of worship, where people gather to exalt and adore God, not to hang out and sip Iced Cinnamon Dolce Lattes. Significant because it seems to symbolize a change in the way the church (the evangelical church, at least) thinks of its gatherings.
When I first came to faith and began attending church, “fellowship time” was planned. It generally took the form of church picnics, fall festivals, or summer swim parties. Occasionally, people would go out after the evening service to share a light meal. In those days, taking a cup of coffee into a worship service would have struck the vast majority of evangelicals (or any other Christians) as bad form, and maybe even sacrilege. Would someone carry a cup of coffee into a meeting with the King Charles or Pope Leo XIV? And if they would not do that, how is it that they think nothing of carrying a coffee cup into an encounter with God?
Or have we stopped thinking of worship as an encounter with God and started thinking of it as a concert followed by a lecture or a pep talk? Perhaps worship etiquette has changed because we have come to think differently about what is happening during the time we are gathered. And for this reason, the coffee cup holders on the back of those church chairs seems significant to me.
When I first became a Christian, I had no real understanding of worship, what it was or why we offered it. This, I think, was an oversight on the part of our church and its leaders. But I did understand that worship was not designed for me. Perhaps others thought differently, but it never occurred to me to judge the success of a worship service or base its value on whether my favorite songs were sung or the preacher maxed out my emotion meter. As our society has become ever more consumeristic, worship has been tailored to the worshiper rather than to the Worshiped. The music industry has had the Billboard Hot 100 since 1958, and woe to the radio station that didn’t include a high enough percentage of the Hot 100 in their playlist. It may have taken 50 years, but the worship industry now tracks their biggest hits with the CCLI Top 100, and woe to the church that does not include enough of the Top 100 in its worship services.
So, is taking a cup of coffee into a worship service a spiritual faux pas? I don’t think so. A person can carry a cup of coffee into a worship service without denigrating God’s character or his worth. Still, I fear that we have turned the worship service upside down. We have taken the place of God by making ourselves the recipients of worship. We often act as if the music, the sermon, and the prayers are presented for us rather than him.
I, who have planned worship services for decades, have not been guiltless in this. I have sometimes forgotten that God’s satisfaction with our worship is what matters most. I have sometimes judged the success of a worship service by whether people seemed engaged and emotionally moved. If no one said, “Great service!” or “Good sermon!” as people streamed out, I was apt to feel our time together was a flop.
Coffee cups in the sanctuary are not a problem. Religious consumers in the sanctuary are, whether they drink coffee or not. I don’t know how to solve the problem – if I did, I would have done it already – but I am sure it will require big changes. The spectator version of the faith that dominates the Western church, nurtured by a gospel that makes Christians passive receptors rather than active disciples, must come to an end.
Watch this hopeful message from 1 Corinthians 15:50-58 or read it below.
I am neither a prophet, nor the son of a prophet, but I am going to die on June 23, 2031 – at least according to the website, http://www.deathclock.com. Years ago, I entered my birth date, height, weight, sex, and body/mass index, along with whether or not I have been a smoker or a drinker. According to the formula they use for such things, I’ve got 6 years left on earth. They have me dying seven days before our 52nd wedding anniversary. I first read that about 20 years ago, and 2031 seemed a long way off. Seems a lot closer now.
According to the same authority, Karen is going to outlive me by four-and-a-half years. She dies on February 17, 2036.
Of course, their calculations may be all wrong. Probably are. Karen and I have walked two miles a day, five or six days a week, for decades. We exercise. I played basketball until I was well into my fifties. We could live to be 90. Maybe a hundred. I might not die on June 23rd, 2031. I might make it to May 1st, 2041. Or Karen and I might crash our hover car and die together on August, 16th, 2052. Wouldn’t be a bad way to go.
But we are going to go.
In the sure and certain gloom of death, do our efforts to live loving, holy lives mean anything? Praying, reading Scripture, visiting the sick, practicing generosity—none of that is going to exempt us from dying.
The apostle Paul was just plain blunt about this. He wrote to the Corinthians: “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.”[1] If death has the last word, then our efforts are useless. Religion is meaningless. Preaching is vain.
But death, Paul insists, does not have the last word, as Jesus’s resurrection proved. The theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg put it this way: “The evidence for Jesus’s resurrection is so strong that nobody would question it except for two things: First, it is a very unusual event. And second, if you believe it happened, you have to change the way you live.”
That’s what we’re thinking about this morning: how Jesus’s resurrection changes the way we live. If resurrection is not changing us now, there is reason to doubt that it will change us in the future. And we need that future change. Paul says in verse 50, “I declare to you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.”
Those of our species who will survive death must be changed in the very makeup of their bodies and their souls. We’re talking about an evolutionary leap that dwarves anything Darwin ever imagined. Because “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” we need to be changed.
But isn’t there a problem here? Jesus said that people can enter the kingdom of God in this life, in this “flesh and blood.” He said that prostitutes and tax collectors were already entering the kingdom of God while he was on earth.[2] Is Paul contradicting Jesus? The Lord says we can enter the kingdom as flesh and blood people, but Paul says that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom.
There is no contradiction. Think of it this way: You can enter the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina. In fact, you are invited to do so (for a fee). You might even get a job there. But entering or working at the Biltmore is far different from inheriting the Biltmore. Anyone can enter the kingdom of God who chooses to do so. In fact, everyone is invited to do so (and the fee has already been paid). You can even get a job in the kingdom; everyone who enters does. But that is not the same thing as inheriting the kingdom. Flesh and blood cannot do that. To inherit the kingdom, you need to be a family member – one who shares the life of Jesus Christ – and even then, before you can come into your inheritance you will need to be changed. And that, verse 51, involves a mystery.
Mystery is one of the great Pauline words. Three out of every four times it is used in the New Testament it comes from his pen. A mystery, in Paul’s sense of the word, is something hitherto unknown about God’s plan, something that, apart from divine revelation, no one would ever guess. But God has made it known.
In the Bible, there are many such mysteries – things once hidden, but now revealed. For example: the mystery of Christ’s indwelling;[3] the mystery of the union of Gentiles and Jews in the church;[4] the great mystery of God in a human body.[5] In our passage, Paul gives us yet another one: “We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed.”
We’ll think about the nature of that change in a moment, but before we do, I need to say something. It’s true that the Bible has unveiled many mysteries, but God has not let all his secrets out of the bag (Deut. 29:29). Some people seem to think that what we have in the Bible is not only all we need to know, but all there is to know. It is true that we have all we need to know in order to be included in his salvation; but it is hardly all there is to know.
The secret things belong to the Lord, and he is not telling all his secrets—perhaps only a tiny percentage of them. We are surrounded by mystery. We are a mystery. Apart from God himself, we may be the biggest mystery of all.
But in verse 51, we have a mystery that has been, at least in part, revealed. Remember that flesh and blood must be changed in order to inherit the kingdom of God, and that change happens after death. There are currently no direct flights to the age to come. We are all booked for a layover at the terminal we call death.
I read a few years ago that one airport has been consistently voted the worst in the nation: Newark, New Jersey. If you can avoid Newark, you will. But say you want to go to Bermuda, your favorite place on earth, and every flight goes through Newark. You’d put up with Newark if it meant Bermuda. That is like death. We don’t like it and we’ll do our best to avoid it, but if it is only a layover on our way to glory, we can put up with it.
But here Paul lets us in on a secret. He unlocks a mystery for us: not everyone will enter heaven that way. God is going to book some people on a direct flight without a layover in death.
“We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed.” Sleep here refers to death. In fact, fifteen of the eighteen times the word occurs in the New Testament, it refers to death. Do you see what that means? The early Christians were not overawed by death. They thought of it like we think of falling asleep. It’s not a big deal – at least, not for someone who is connected to Christ through faith.
But Paul says, “We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed.” It is possible that some of us in this room are going to be changed without dying. In the New Testament, the word change is often used in the sense of “exchange.” To make it in the age to come, we will need to exchange this flesh and blood body for what Paul calls a spiritual body. Some Christians will make that exchange without passing through death.
(By the way, “spiritual body” does not mean a body made of spirit, just like an electric car does not mean a car made of electricity. A spiritual body is powered by spirit, not by flesh and blood. It’s not a ghost; it’s not anything like a ghost.)
Do you understand what Paul is saying here? Some people are booked on a direct flight for the age to come. They will be changed, but they won’t die. That was hitherto unknown and unexpected; it was a mystery.
Verse 52: “In a flash…” The Greek word is atomos, from which we get our word “atom”; it signified a thing that could not be divided. Here it refers to a moment of time so brief as to be indivisible. “…in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.” Darwin would have said that such a leap forward would take millions of years. God will accomplish it in a nanosecond.
This change Paul speaks of is not only a major step for us, but for the entire universe because we are not the only ones being changed. The author of Hebrews, uses this same word when he writes that God will change the heavens and the earth “like a garment.”[6] God is not only going to reclothe us with a spiritual body; he is going to reclothe the universe.
This same word for “change” is also used of the demonized man of Gadara. That poor man saw the world in a daze, through a fog. Everything was unclear to him, and hateful. Then Jesus changed him. We read that when the townsfolk next saw him, he was “sitting at Jesus’ feet, dressed and in his right mind.”[7] I think the change from flesh and blood to spiritual body will be something like that: it will be like waking up from sleep—for some people, from a nightmare. When we are clothed in our new, spiritual body, the bad dreams will be over. We will be awake to realities we never knew existed.
Paul says that the change, verse 53, will be from perishable to imperishable. The word perishable has the idea of a thing that is subject to corruption, to falling apart, becoming worthless. That describes us now, when “the outward man wastes away”; but when we are changed, that will no longer be the case. We will be imperishable.
Before the change, we are mortal (the Greek word means, characterized by death) but after the change we will have immortality (or literally, deathlessness.) Flesh and blood are death-full. Everyone dies! Maybe not on June 23rd, 2031, but (apart from the mysterious exception of verse 51) none of us gets out alive. As the Book of Common Prayer puts it, “In the midst of life, we are in death.” But it is even worse than that: death is in us, and has been ever since Adam’s rebellion. But the enormous change of verses 51 and 52 will transform us from death-full to deathless beings.
That has been God’s plan all along. Isaiah the prophet foresaw this a millennium before Paul, and Paul quotes him in verse 54: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.” In Paul’s Greek it is actually, “Death has been swallowed down.” You know who swallowed it, don’t you? The Captain of our salvation, the Lord Jesus himself. He swallowed death, and it went down hard. He took death into himself so that he could take it out of us, so that it would be possible to transform human beings from death-full mortals to deathless immortals.
Christ has taken the victory away from death and given it, verse 57, to us! There was a time when victory belonged to death. Itreigned asthe undefeated champion of the world.
Death was winning all its matches, though according to the Scriptures, there were a couple of forfeits: both Enoch and Elijah were called away before their match could take place). But then death met Jesus Christ, and he swallowed it down. He took, verse 55, its sting.
A father was riding in a car with his young son, who was deathly allergic to bee stings. When a bee appeared in the car, the boy panicked and started swatting at it. The father saw it was a honeybee, and that his son was going to get stung if he didn’t do something. So, in one lightning-fast motion, he grabbed the bee out of the air.
He winced, then opened his hand and the bee flew away. The boy began to squirm again and whine, but his father assured him that the bee could no longer harm him. He had taken its sting. We were afraid of death, and we had good reason to be. Humans are deathly allergic to it. But Jesus took its sting.
The scholar Jaroslav Pelikan edited a four-volume work he called, Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition. Among the creeds, he included one from the Masai tribe of Nigeria. In their creed, Masai believers say that Jesus “was always on safari, doing good.” They declare that Jesus was “tortured and nailed hands and feet to a cross, and died, he lay buried in the grave, but the hyenas did not touch him, and on the third day he rose from the grave. He ascended unto the skies. He is Lord.”[8]
Pelikan says that when a Nigerian student translated that creed for him, he got the shivers. “The hyenas did not touch him.” Death met Jesus, and he swallowed it down, and gave the victory to us.
That is why I can look at June 23, 2031 (or whatever date it might be) and say, “I know it’s on the calendar, but that’s alright. Death is not my destination. I’ll just be passing through.” And who knows? I may not even do that. Perhaps I, and you with me, will be spared that nasty layover. Because of Jesus, Death does not have the last word.
And because death does not have the last word, our commitment to Jesus is not in vain. Because I am connected to Jesus through faith, he imparts his life to me, and that life makes possible the change from mortal to immortal, from perishable to imperishable. But understand: the change begins as soon as the connection is established. You can’t have Jesus’s death-defeating, God-obeying, devil-defying life and not be changed.
Because death does not have the last word, “we know that our labor in the Lord,” verse 58, “is not in vain.” What we do for the Lord makes a difference, if not in the world, then in us. So, we stand firm We let nothing move us. We always give ourselves fully to the work of the Lord.
But how? How do we stand firm or, as the Greek has it, “become firm”? How can we become unmovable (which is a literal translation of the phrase, “Let nothing move you”)? I once heard about a Kung Fu master who positioned his body just so, then his disciple tried to push him down. Then two disciples. Then three, and four, but they couldn’t do it. They couldn’t push him down. It was like pushing an oak.
That is something like what Paul had in mind. We become unmovable like the deep-rooted oak, and we cannot be pushed out of the path of devotion to Christ. Are we more like the oak or like its leaf, which is blown here and there? Paul wants us to be unmovable, rooted and grounded in Christ.
If that is going to be true of you, you’ll need to send your roots deep, and send many of them. You will need to draw life and nourishment daily from Christ himself, through prayer and the reading of Scripture. If you haven’t learned how to do that, talk to me after the service. If you need to be somewhere – it is Mother’s Day – call me, or email, or text. But don’t procrastinate. This is important.
But sending your roots deep is not enough; you also need to send them wide. Learn to draw life from Christ through worship (there’s more to it than just coming to church), through spiritual disciplines like solitude and silence, giving, and service, through community, spending regular, meaningful time with other Christians. Let your roots become a rich and complex system that connects you to Christ in a thousand different ways. That’s how you become firm and unmovable. Sunday mornings alone cannot provide that.
This is verse 58 “Give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord.” In the original language this phrase is, “overflowing in the work of the Lord.” Every Christian needs to be involved in the work of the Lord. If you’re not, it is time you got started. If you don’t know where to start, we’ll figure that out together, and we’ll do it in a way that fits who you are. Too many people try to do as little as possible for God and still get by. Let’s not be like that. Let’s be like Jesus, and give all we can.
When death comes to people who are overflowing in the work of the Lord, they will find no terror in it. When Christ comes (which will make the coming of death seem trivial), those who are overflowing the in the work of the Lord will find no terror in him. That cannot be said for those who are not. I’d rather not be found among their company.
My wife and I had dinner with a young woman and her boyfriend this past week. I think I heard her say that she is almost 21. He is 24. We’ve gotten to know them over the past year, and we like them. They are friendly and smart, and both of them are committed Christians.
At some point in the dinner, the subject of aging came up. I cannot remember the immediate context for her comment, but the young woman, speaking of when she is older, said: “I want to be the cool grandma, the one with a nose ring.” (She wears a ring on the left side of her nose.)
The idea struck me funny. Perhaps a grandmother today who had a ring in her nose and, say, purple hair, is cool. Just possibly, her teenage grandchildren say to their friends. “You should meet my grandma. She is really cool!” But by the time our young friend is a grandmother, I suspect that only old ladies who are forty years behind the times will be wearing nose rings. Everyone else will have abandoned the practice decades ago. Nose rings will be painfully uncool. (Saying “cool” will probably also be “uncool.”)
I thought all this in a flash. I spoke it more cautiously. “You know, by the time you’re a grandma, it’s possible that people won’t be wearing nose rings anymore. They might not be cool by then.”
I don’t think she had ever considered the possibility that nose rings might go out of fashion. She seemed surprised by the idea and, for a second at least, nonplussed. Could it be that what is cool now will be totally lame in ten years?
It may be that in ten years no one will be wearing skinny jeans. Pants that don’t cover the tops of a person’s shoes may be thought an embarrassment (as they were when I was young, and people mockingly referred to them as “highwaters”). When scrolling through old photos on their phones, adult children might be saying, “I can’t believe my mother made me wear jeans that had holes in the knees. That has got to be the stupidest fashion trend in history.” It may be that no self-respecting male will be caught dead with a man-tote, and shoppers might have to search shoe stores in all fifty states (or will there be fifty-one by then—or perhaps 49?) to find one that still sells torpedo shoes.
Time seems to roll across the continuum of existence in waves, and we all ride on a particular wave. The ideas, images, terminology, values, fashions, and amusements of the wave my generation rides will be somewhat different from the waves ridden by the generations that precede and follow my own. To know this enables me to be generous with people from other generations and to be humble about my own.
I spent most of a day last week in a conference with other pastors and denominational officials. One of our leaders (from a younger generation than my own) addressed the conference. He was wearing “skinny pants” and a shirt that came right out of a trendy clothing catalog. Later, another leader also spoke. He was wearing pants that were inches shorter than I would ever wear mine.
At the time, I thought these two were trying to be hip to win acceptance by the cool kids. But upon reflection, I think these men are simply riding a different wave than me. They wanted to dress appropriately, and this is what they, and people of their generation, deem appropriate. I was wrong to attribute to them any other motive.
The temporal seascape has seen an unbroken succession of waves. In the past, those waves were well spaced and moved more slowly, but the winds of change have picked up considerably, and the waves are passing quickly. It is silly to expect other people, younger people, to want to ride my wave or to concede that it is somehow better or more permanent than their own.
The waves advance and recede, though from my perspective one remains forever at the center: my own. (Of course, this is a delusion. If any wave occupies the center at all, it is the one Jesus rode during his earthly ministry.) But whatever wave we ride on, all the waves belong to the same sea.
St. Paul tells us to “keep the unity of the Spirit.” This cannot be done atop the crest of the latest wave of ecclesial practice or theological emphasis. Nor could it be done atop the ecclesial practices and favorite theological emphases that carried my generation along. To keep the unity of the Spirit with God’s people from other generations – older or younger – we need to be aware of our own strong preference for our generational distinctives.
We must go beneath the waves into the generation-spanning love of God, expressed preeminently when Christ emptied himself and died for people who cared nothing for him. The deeper we go into God’s love, the less difficulty we will have in keeping unity. If we go so deep that the pressure of Christ’s love reshapes us into conformity to his selfless sacrifice, unity will be natural. But if we stay shallow, stay where the waves of theological and ecclesial fashion toss us hither and thither, we will not find unity, only contempt and distrust.
This great passage, properly understood, is one of the most encouraging texts in all the Bible. Enjoy the video (and share it, if you can think of someone who would benefit from watching it) or read the text of the sermon (always a little different from what I actually say) below.
(1 Corinthians 15:19-28) If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men. But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in his own turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him. Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For he “has put everything under his feet.” Now when it says that “everything” has been put under him, it is clear that this does not include God himself, who put everything under Christ. When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all. (NIV)
I think it was Dr. Johnson who said, “Men live in hope, die in despair.”
I was in college when I first heard that quote—not in an English lit class but in the Student Union, while I was playing ping-pong. (I changed my major from billiard science to ping-pong my junior year.) The professor of ping-pong was my roommate and great friend George Ashok Kumar Taupu Das – I called him “the doctor.” Looking back, I’m amazed at his patience. In our first games, he beat me 21-3 or 21-4 and, even then, I only scored points when he was goofing around or not paying attention.
But after months of playing almost daily, I had become competitive. He was still beating me every game, but it was 21-10, then 21-14, then 21-18—and he had started paying attention.
It was during one of these contests – sometimes tied, sometimes the lead changing by a point or two – that the finish line came in sight for me. Just a couple of more points, and I would finally win. But the doctor got serious, shut me down, and handed me yet another defeat.
I must have said something about how I would get him next time. And that’s when our resident genius John Erdel, who was sitting there, idly watching the game, gave me a deadpan look and said: “Men live in hope, die in despair.”
What a dismal view of life! What a demoralizing view of death! “Men live in hope, die in despair.” Anyone who actually believed that would die in despair but could certainly not live in hope. But the resurrection of Jesus means that we can live and die in hope. The death and resurrection of Jesus has transformed the landscape. It is the biggest thing that has ever happened in the world, and whether you know it or not, it is the biggest thing that has ever happened to you.
Last week, we talked about what the resurrection means. This week and next, we will look at why it matters. (And if you missed last week’s sermon, you should go to www.californiaroad.org and watch it online. It provides the foundation for what I’m going to say today.)
The resurrection of Jesus Christ makes a difference in my life—in the way I think, and act, and in the way I will die. We need to drill down into this passage to see why that is true.
In verse 22, Paul writes: “For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.” In verse 53, he announces the defeat of death: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.” Then, in verse 54, he borrows the words of the prophet Hosea to taunt death: “Death, what happened to your victory? Where is your sting now, Death?” Paul wants us to know that the resurrection of Jesus has brought death’s reign of terror to an end. Death has tyrannized humanity since the time of Adam. The fear of death lies behind, and feeds, all other fears. We cannot even imagine life without the fear of death.
Susan Sontag, the brilliant atheist writer and filmmaker, was 71 when she died from cancer. The doctors and nurses tried to talk to her about death and help her prepare, but Sontag refused to listen. Death was too awful even to think about. It terrified her.
For Sontag, this world had become a foul tomb, filled with the stench of decay—but she didn’t dare leave it. “She thought herself unhappy,” her son said, yet she “wanted to live, unhappy, for as long as she possibly could.” Even though life was a nightmare, she was afraid of waking up. How different her life would have been if she’d had the hope of the resurrection.
We who have that hope expect to wake up to joy unspeakable that is full of glory. Because the death-defeating life of Jesus is, by the Holy Spirit, already in us, we can face death with courage and even joy. The author of Hebrews writes: “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death” (Hebrews 2:14-15).
Our friend Amy Snapp was the Kids’ Min Director at our previous church. She was diagnosed with cancer in her forties. Like Sontag, she improved with treatment, and the cancer went into remission for a while. Then it came back.
Unlike Sontag, Amy wasn’t hiding from the future. Toward the end, when I stopped to see her, she told me: “I’m good. Ready to go. I’m not afraid.” She said she expected dying to be an adventure, like Lucy going into – and through – the wardrobe in the Chronicles of Narnia.
When Amy mentioned Narnia, it brought to mind a favorite passage, which comes at the very end of book 7. The Lion Aslan, the Christ figure of Narnia, says to the children: “You do not yet look so happy as I mean you to be.”
(I am quoting.) “Lucy said, ‘We’re so afraid of being sent away, Aslan. And you have sent us back into our own world so often.’
‘No fear of that,’ said Aslan. ‘Have you not guessed?’
Their hearts leaped and a wild hope rose within them.
‘There was a real railway accident,’ said Aslan softly. ‘Your father and mother and all of you are—as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands—dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream has ended; this is morning.’
And as he spoke he no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”
Jesus, and the resurrection of Jesus, gives his people hope in the face of death. In 1973, during the reign of Idi Amin, the Butcher of Uganda, the people of Kabale were ordered to come to the stadium to witness the execution of three men. Bishop Kivengere asked for, and was granted, permission to speak to the men before they died. He approached them from behind and was surprised by what he saw when they turned around. Their faces were radiant. They smiled. One of them said, “Bishop, thank you for coming … I wanted to tell you: Heaven is now open, and there is nothing between me and my God. Please tell my wife and children that I am going to be with Jesus.”
The bishop thought the firing squad needed to hear that, so he translated their remarks into the soldiers’ own language. It left the firing squad so flummoxed that they forgot to pull the masks down over the Christians’ faces before executing them. The condemned men were looking toward the people in the stands and waving, handcuffs and all, and the people waved back. Then shots were fired, and the three were with Jesus.
The next Sunday, the bishop preached in the hometown of one of the three men. As he spoke, the huge crowd that had gathered erupted into a song of praise to Jesus![1] The hope of the resurrection can free us from the fear of death, but it does so in exact proportion to our nearness to Christ. Even Christians remain fearful when they are far from him.
By his resurrection, Jesus Christ cut death down to size. The English poet George Herbert said, “Death used to be an executioner, but the gospel” – he’s referring to the death and resurrection of Jesus – “has made him just a gardener.” But what a gardener! When he plants those who belong to Jesus, they rise with a splendor that is indescribable, unspeakable, and full of glory.
But our hope is greater than the hope that we will somehow survive death. The resurrection gives us reason to believe that we will be – that nothing can stop us from being – fulfilled, completed, perfected. Paul puts it this way: “The body that is sown” – gardener imagery again! – “is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power…” (vv. 42-43). And verses 52-53: “we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality.”
Susan Sontag got it wrong. Earth is not a grave but a garden. This – weakness, sickness, inability, depression, aging, loss – is no more the whole story than the kernel is a whole stalk of corn or the acorn is a towering oak. God’s plan for humanity is not pain and suffering but joy and glory. It is not weakness but power. It is not sadness but joy. It is not the shame we know but a glory that eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor human mind imagined. (1 Cor. 2:9).
You, if you have received resurrection life from Jesus through faith, will be happier than you can now conceive, stronger than you can now imagine, and overflowing with the vitality of love. The promise would seem too good to believe if we hadn’t already tasted this life, experienced its power, felt its love.
Listen: Jesus’s resurrection is evidence that the long, tortuous project known familiarly as Shayne Looper – substitute your own name if you have Jesus and he has you – will one day be finished and it will be good. Very good. Even Shayne Looper will be crowned with glory and full of joy, bringing glory and joy to God himself and to all the rest of us. This – nothing less, and certainly far more – is what awaits the people of God.
But the hope of the resurrection is more than the hope – as great as it is – that we as individuals will be fulfilled. It is the hope that all things in heaven and on earth will be made right, good, and glorious. The resurrection means that God’s plan is unstoppable, and that heaven will make right every earthly wrong. What has happened to Christ will happen to us, and something like it will happen to the world.
There are times when that has been hard to believe. I have stood in the ER with a family as the doctor performed CPR on their son and brother, whose body lay before them, torn by a hideous gunshot wound. The doctor eventually gave up. Too many times, I’ve sat with families – sometimes a young dad and mom, the mom holding her three-year-old or her baby in her arms – while the nurse removed life support.
I’ve cried with too many people whose image of themselves was shattered like glass by the terrible abuse they suffered as children. You’ve known them too. We’ve not only known them; we are them: the sufferers, the abused, the wronged, the fearful, the damaged. So, what if the future holds inconceivable glory? The past holds unutterable pain. Even if we someday attain joy, will we not always be haunted by the suffering?
No, we will not. C. S. Lewis was right: We “say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.”[2]
Listen to these words of hope from the throne of God. “‘Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.’ He who was seated on the throne said, ‘Behold, I make all things new!’”
The singer-songwriter Andrew Peterson put it into words this way.
“After the last tear falls, after the last secret’s told After the last bullet tears through flesh and bone After the last child starves and the last girl walks the boulevard After the last year that’s just too hard
There is love…
Cause after the last plan fails, after the last siren wails After the last young husband sails off to join the war After the last, ‘This marriage is over’ After the last young girl’s innocence is stolen After the last years of silence that won’t let a heart open
There is love Love, love, love. There is love.
And in the end, the end is oceans and oceans of love and love again We’ll see how the tears that have fallen Were caught in the palms of the Giver of love and the Lover of all And we’ll look back on these tears as old tales
‘Cause after the last tear, falls there is love.
There is love because, after the last tear falls into nail-scarred hands, there is God.
Our hopes are audacious and unparalleled. The Marxist hoped for a better world. The Christian hopes for a perfect one: a new heaven and new earth, where righteousness dwells (2 Peter 3:13). Karl Marx’s most enthusiastic hopes fade from sight in the shining hope of the resurrection, the way the light of a candle fades before the noonday sun.
Our hope is not just that our sins – worse than we remember and more than we can count – will not be held against us, though because of Jesus, they will not! Our hope is not just that our pains will be forgotten, swallowed up in bliss. Our hope is not just that our shame will be buried with us when we die and left in the grave when we rise. Our hope is not just that evil and injustice will be destroyed, never to return. Our hope is that God will be all in all (1 Cor. 15:28).
This hope is not like the Buddhist hope of Nirvana, in which the delusion of selfhood is at last extinguished and there is only the Unity. No, when God is all in all, we will be more than we have ever been. We will have becomeus, more ourselves than ever before, made to be with God and to be filled by God.
What lies at the foundation of all existence is not some subatomic particle or the so-called four fundamental forces. What lies at the foundation of all existence is a relationship: the overflowing, joyous relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And what rests at the pinnacle of all existence is relationship: the overflowing, joyous relationship of Father, Son, Holy Spirit and, by the triumph of grace, us.
This long story of bullets and wars, of marriages ended and innocence stolen, is different than we thought and better than we’ve dreamed. It is the story of the perfectly joyful, perfectly beautiful Trinity making perfectly joyful, perfectly beautiful beings of us and inviting us to join their party. Emptiness is not our future, but fullness, “for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:9).
Because of the joyful love of the Triune God, this is what awaits us. And it has been made possible, made real, by the loving sacrifice and glorious resurrection of our man in heaven, who is also “our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.”
This is why the resurrection matters. This is why we hope. Amen.
Watch the sermon, First Stone in an Avalanche, or read the sermon below.
(1 Corinthians 15:20-26) But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in his own turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him. Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.
You’re on your way home from Chicago’s north side, and it looks to be a long drive. I-90 isn’t stop-and-go; it’s just stop. You turn on the radio and scan the channels, and you land on the Cubs’ game. Your dad was a Cubs’ fan, as was his dad, and you’ve been a Cubs’ fan for as long as you can remember. Pat Hughes is calling the play by play, and the Cubs and the Dodgers are scoreless.
You’ve been listening for about half-hour – and you’re not even to I-55 yet – when it occurs to you that Pat has not used the words “pitch,” “swing,” or “out.” How can you call a game without using those words? Maybe you just missed it. So, you start listening intently but there’s not a single, “Swing and a miss.” No, “And here’s the pitch…” And after two full innings, no mention of an out. You wonder what is going on. This has got to be intentional.
I had an analogous experience in reading the Gospel accounts of the life and death of Jesus. (This really surprised me when I first realized it, and it surprises me still.) No one ever uses the word “resurrection” to describe what happened to Jesus, neither the Gospel writers nor the people whose conversations they reported. They report that Jesus was alive after being dead but never use the one word you would expect them to use: “resurrection.” It’s as if they were trying to avoid it.
That ought to raise a question in our minds: Why didn’t they use the word resurrection? The answer comes in two parts, the first of which is very straightforward: The Gospel writers did not use the word “resurrection” because the people whose story they were telling didn’t use the word. The fact that the writers refrained from using what is arguably the most important word in the vocabulary of the early church speaks volumes about their intention to faithfully recount what had happened.
Some biblical scholars think that everything theological in the Gospels – especially everything that points to the deity of Jesus and his status as the Messiah – was invented by the Church and written into the Gospels in an act of historical revisionism. Those scholars believe that the healing miracles, the transfiguration and especially the resurrection never happened. They think the Church fabricated it all as a way of elevating Jesus’s status and validating their faith.
Yet here we have the most important thing ever, the climax of all four Gospels and the core tenet of the Christian faith, and not one of the writers gives in to the temptation to describe it as resurrection. This is an overlooked and remarkably important evidence for biblical authenticity.
But that brings us to the second part of the question. Why didn’t the people in the story – Peter, John, the apostles, Mary Magdalene – refer to Jesus’s return from the dead as “resurrection”? The doctrine of the resurrection was profoundly important to most first century Jews. So, why didn’t any of the disciples, or after the fact, the fearful chief priests, ever mention the word?
I think the answer is once again straightforward, though it might surprise us. In the immediate aftermath of Jesus’s return from the dead, the disciples didn’t realize he had been resurrected. Now don’t misunderstand: they knew Jesus had risen from the dead. The evidence overwhelmingly supports that conclusion. They did not, as some have suggested, think that Jesus lived on in spirit or as a “life force” or as a powerful memory. They didn’t point to their hearts and say, “He’ll always be with me!”
No, the disciples believed that Jesus died—that he was stone-cold, dead as a doornail dead, and buried. And they believed that after three days he came back to life; he was alive—walking-talking-eating-drinking-alive! But it did not occur to them that he had been resurrected.
That may sound like a contradiction, or even heresy, but it is not. The disciples had seen three people (that we know of) raised back to life after they had died: the daughter of Jairus, the young man who lived and died in Nain and, most spectacularly, their friend Lazarus. These people had been dead – stone-cold, dead as a doornail dead – and Jesus had somehow brought them back to life. But the disciples did not think that they had been resurrected. The idea never occurred to them – and it wouldn’t.
When they heard that Jesus was alive and then saw him for themselves – after having seen him horribly killed – they believed their Master had come back from the dead, and they were overjoyed. But that did not signify to them that he had been resurrected. In their minds, and in the minds of their contemporaries, resurrection was a different thing altogether. It didn’t happen here or there, to this or that individual. When it happened, it would happen to everyone, and that would be on the last day. Resurrection would close this age and inaugurate the age to come.
So even though Jesus rose from the dead and his friends knew it, they didn’t make the connection between his rising and the resurrection. In their minds, when the resurrection happened, everyone who had ever died would be raised from the dead – the righteous to eternal life and the unrighteous to eternal death. It took time and instruction – most importantly from Jesus himself – for the enormity of what had happened in that garden tomb to sink in. Jesus had not only come back to life, as remarkable as that was; the resurrection – the coming to life of everyone who had ever died – had begun. That is stunning news!
By the time we come to the early chapters of Acts, Jesus’s followers are using the word “resurrection” right and left. What changed? After he rose, Jesus had met with them repeatedly over a forty-day period and explained to them from the Scriptures what had happened and what it meant. In Luke’s words, “[B]eginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). So, less than a month-and-a-half after Jesus rose, we find the disciples “proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection of the dead” (Acts 4:2).
They now understood that the resurrection – the coming back to life of everyone who had ever died – had commenced. That brought them to the remarkable conclusion that the “last days” had begun and “the renewal of all things” (those were Jesus’s words) was at hand.
On Easter, churches often focus on the fact that we will continue to live after we die. As true as that is, it’s important to realize that most people believed that before Jesus rose from the dead. They believed that humans continue to live in some form (as ghosts, or spirits, or as some kind of life force) after they die. The resurrection of Jesus signaled something more radical and far-reaching than that.
No one has explained the implications of Jesus’s rising more thoroughly than the apostle Paul. When he first heard people say Jesus was alive, he didn’t believe it. (We assume that people in the first century were gullible and would believe anything, but that’s rubbish. They were no more likely to believe that a man three days dead would return to life than we are.) Paul never doubted it was a hoax … until he saw the resurrected Jesus for himself. That changed everything.
From then on, Paul could not stop talking and writing about the resurrection. In his biblical letters, he used the noun “resurrection” approximately four times as often as the noun “forgiveness”. The verbs related to resurrection and forgiveness are even more out of balance. It is impossible to overstate the importance of the resurrection to Paul. As far as he was concerned, there is no “faith in Jesus” apart from belief in the resurrection.
Paul’s most comprehensive explanation of resurrection comes in 1st Corinthians 15. The entire letter was written around the idea that God is restoring all things, and the resurrection is at the center of his plan. And when I say “resurrection,” I am referring to the resurrection of Jesus and the resurrection of all the rest of us. In Paul’s mind – and in the minds of the early Christians – the two cannot be separated. His resurrection initiates and is the guarantee of ours. Ours is the outcome and achievement of his. The bond between them is unbreakable.
Yet some people in Corinth were trying to break it. They couldn’t see how sophisticated, first century intellectuals could possibly believe in resurrection. Yes, they believed that God had raised Jesus from the dead, but they denied that the rest of us would be raised. They believed, as Plato taught them, that death unchains people from their weak and corrupt bodies and releases their spirits into the eternal world. The idea that the spirit would then be reunited to the body was repulsive to them.
Now look at 1 Corinthians 15. The central question in this passage comes in verse 12: “But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?” These educated Corinthians were affirming that Jesus had been raised but denying the resurrection of the rest of us.
In this chapter, Paul begins with the question of whether the dead are raised, then moves to the question of when the dead are raised, and finally to the question of how the dead are raised. It is a brilliantly organized piece of writing. We don’t have time to look at all of it, so we’ll focus on the relationship between the miracle of Christ’s rising and our own resurrection.
Now remember than some of the Corinthians denied there is a relationship between the two. Paul insists that there is. He carefully avoids speaking about Christ’s resurrection and our resurrection, as if they were two different things. Jesus’s resurrection is a part of the resurrection. Or it might be more accurate to say that the resurrectionflows out of Jesus’s resurrection. The two cannot be disconnected. There is one resurrection, but it happens in two phases. Christ’s resurrection is the first stone in an avalanche.
Why make such a fuss about this? Because Paul understood that the resurrection is about more than a spirit being united to a body following death. That is far too individualistic a way of looking at it. Resurrection is the pivotal event in God’s plan to “make all things new.” Resurrection inaugurates the last days, initiates the Great Renewal, and promises the glories of the kingdom of God. Resurrection is the threshold into the age to come. Most Jews believed that. What they didn’t know was that resurrection had already begun in Jesus. That was the astonishing good news the Christians had to tell. It was not just that people go on living after they die – everyone already knew that! It was that the new age had arrived when Jesus rose from the dead.
That is why, in verse 20, Paul calls Jesus “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (or died). In the first century, people understood the image of the firstfruits, but we might not. Each year, at the very beginning of the wheat harvest, the Israelites took their first ripe wheat as an offering to the Lord’s temple. It was called the Feast of Firstfruits. Seven weeks later, when all the wheat had been harvested, they went to Jerusalem to celebrate the Feast of Weeks. Just as Firstfruits announced the harvest had begun and promised more to follow, Jesus’s rising announced the resurrection had begun and promised more to follow. The two thousand years between Christ’s resurrection and today are but the interval between Firstfruits and the Feast of Weeks.
Behind this passage stands the idea that God is restoring creation. There are allusions to creation – as recounted in Genesis one and two – everywhere in this chapter. That is intentional. There are seeds and plants, like Genesis 1; men and animals; birds and fish; there is the sun, the moon, and the stars. And in case we still haven’t caught on, Adam himself shows up. Paul is thinking about creation … and recreation. The first creation floundered upon Adam’s rebellion and is dying. The new creation was established on Jesus’s obedience and is ready to rise. Look at verses 21-22: “For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.”
“But,” verse 23, “each in his own turn.” Here is where the Jesus-follower’s understanding of resurrection goes beyond the ancient Jewish understanding. It didn’t change it (Paul’s view is still thoroughly Jewish), but it added to it. The additional insight was this: There is an order to the resurrection. It happens in phases. That’s the thing Paul and his colleagues had not previously understood. When he did, it changed everything.
Christ’s resurrection was not simply proof that people continue to live after they die, though they do. It was not just proof that death had been defeated, though it was. It was proof that the new age had dawned, that the ancient promises – of a kingdom, a restoration, and a renewal – were being fulfilled. It was proof to the disciples, as Chesterton once put it, that the world had died in the night and that “what they were looking at was the first day of a new creation…”[1]
Judaism divided time into two ages: The present age and the age to come. The present age is a time of injustice and conflict. Paul refers to it elsewhere as “the present evil age” (Galatians 1:4).
The age to come, on the other hand, will be the time of God’s undisputed rule, characterized by peace and justice – a time of prosperity, reconciliation, and joy. And, as everyone knew, the line between this present age and the age to come was the resurrection.
And here is Paul, telling us that the resurrection has already begun. The claim is staggering. The resurrection began in a Jerusalem garden on a spring morning somewhere around 30 A.D. when Jesus came out of the tomb, and it will conclude when Jesus comes back from heaven. But if that is true, what has happened to the age to come? Is this … it? Is this all there is?
That is an important question, and no one contemplated it more deeply than Paul. He believed that the new age had already dawned and that everyone who confesses Jesus as Lord is already part of the new creation (“If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation” – 2 Corinthians 5:17). The new age had dawned but the old age would not conclude until the completion of the second phase of the resurrection, when King Jesus returns. The sun has already risen, but the moon still hangs in the sky. We live in the overlap between the arrival of the new age and the termination of the old one.
We think of the resurrection as proof that we will go to heaven when we die. Paul thought of it as proof that God’s kingdom has come to earth while we live. The new age had dawned or, to be more precise, is dawning. In the overlap time, we still have the sorrows, sins, and corruption of the present age. But we can already tap into the joy and peace and freedom of the age to come. The winds of that age are blowing across the borders of our time, and we can lean into them. We can experience “the power of the resurrection” even now, during the overlap period.
There are battles to be fought and won during the overlap. There is a way of life to be learned. There is work to be done. So, Paul says in the last verse of this chapter: “Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.”
Easter – the resurrection – means more than life after death. It means that we can live a different kind of life before we die, as we draw on the resources of the age to come. Most people live out of the past. For good or ill, they are molded (and often shackled) by it. But through faith in Jesus Christ, people can break the mold and learn from him how to live out of their future. They can know, as Paul put it, “the power of the resurrection.”
If that’s what you want – a future-oriented, God-empowered, old-habit-breaking, hope-inspiring life – there is one place to find it: in a connection to the Resurrected One, Jesus—a connection established by faith. I invite you to believe on the Lord Jesus today. If you already have a connection to him, I invite you to learn how to draw your life from that connection.
[1]The Everlasting Man. The entire quotes runs: “On the third day the friends of Christ coming at day-break to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways, they realized the new wonder; but even they hardly realized that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn.”
We know the story. The religious authorities joined forces with the political superpower of the day to end what they saw as an offense against piety and an assault on the established order – in other words, to terminate a threat to the status quo. They acted decisively to stamp out the menace. And when they were done, they had stamped him into the ground, into a hole in the ground; and they buried him there. As far as they were concerned, the fire of extremism had been snuffed out.
But the combined forces of religion and politics buried more than a man in that tomb. They buried his followers’ joy, their hope, and their future. When we see those followers again, they are filled with despair: Peter weeping in the night, the Eleven, trembling with fear, hidden behind locked doors. You can hear the despair in the voices of the two on the road to Emmaus when they said: “We thought” – but alas, we were mistaken – “that he was the one who would redeem Israel.”
These people had staked their lives on Jesus. They had left everything, as Peter declared, to follow him: jobs and families, homes and security. Now what were they to do? Would they have jobs to go back to? Would their families take them in? Would their company be disbanded? These men and women were closer than family. Would the future tear them apart, leave them only memories? And even those memories were being pushed from their minds. Right now, all they could think about was their Master being dragged away, nailed down, strung up, and crying, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
A handful of women went to the tomb early on Sunday morning. They left from different parts of the city, but intended to meet there to properly finish the Jewish burial procedure. But as they approached the tomb, one of them suddenly remembered the great stone that sealed the entrance. “Who will roll the stone away?” they asked. It seemed an insurmountable obstacle. But heaven had solved that problem even before they had begun to worry about it! (I wonder how often that happens to us.) They arrived to find the stone already rolled away. They may have thought that Joseph, who owned the tomb, or Nicodemus who accompanied him, were acting on the same idea and were already inside, completing the burial rites.
Or perhaps something more nefarious. The stone rolled away, the Roman troops missing, the body gone—it all pointed to one thing. The authorities must have removed the body as a final humiliation. One of the women, who arrived at the tomb before most of her friends, turned and ran to tell the apostles. That was Mary Magdalene. She was out of breath when she reached them. Peter and John ran to the tomb to see what had happened, and she followed them, but she could only walk, panting.
By the time she got back, the men had already left. She stood there, crying at this final indignity. They (whoever they were) had committed one last sacrilege; they had desecrated his tomb and taken his body. They were probably doing unthinkable things to it right now, after which they would throw it on the garbage dump in the Hinnom valley, which is what happened to most execution victims.
This was too much. Not having slept for days, overcome with emotion, and finding herself all alone, she breaks into tears. When a couple of men there ask her, “Woman, why are you crying?” she bawls, “They have taken my Lord away and I don’t know where they have put him.” Even now, she doesn’t grasp of what has happened.
We can hardly blame her. The world has turned upside down and inside out. The prophet once said, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.” But God had done just the opposite, had turned evil to good, put light for darkness, and transmuted unbearable bitterness into something unforgettably sweet.
Have you ever looked at something for a few seconds without really seeing it? Then suddenly it dawns on you what you are looking at? These people in the restaurant are your friends—this is a surprise party for your birthday! The face in the window isn’t your neighbor. It’s your oldest friend – you haven’t seen him in three years – and he’s laughing at you from the other side. Or this place … this is the town you stayed in thirty years ago, when you first got married. We’ve all had that experience, when things seen but not understood suddenly come into focus. For the Magdalene, everything came into focus at the sound of her name: Mary. Suddenly she knew the men to be angels, the Gardener to be her savior, and the Garden tomb a little bit of heaven.
Some of us have had a similar experience. We see the tomb with the stone tossed away. We believe the tidings of the apostles. And then God speaks our name. That’s when everything comes into focus. This, all of this, was also for you and me. The stone was not only rolled from the Garden tomb; it’s been rolled from our graves, as well.
In this retelling of the events of the first Easter, John the Apostle and Mary Magdalene narrate the story of the morning of Jesus’s resurrection from their own perspectives. Two of California Road Missionary Church’s resident actors, Cam Matteson and Janelle Rundquist, bring their stories to life. Watching this will give you a new appreciation for the biblical account of the resurrection!
There is a story in 2 Kings chapter 18 that reads like the Hollywood script of a twenty-first century political thriller. A country’s young leader is faced with a dreadful decision. His country must either submit to a ruthless foreign power’s unfair demands or go to war against an opponent whose military might dwarfs their own.
The young leader is Judah’s King Hezekiah, who reigned around the turn of the seventh century BCE. He was an excellent leader who won his people’s confidence in the early years of his reign. But after fourteen years on the throne, Assyria, the superpower of the day, demanded that Hezekiah and his people pay the Assyrians tribute. Hezekiah did not want to do this, but neither did he want to expose his country to a hopeless war. He paid the tribute.
But yielding to a bully only invites further bullying. It was not long before Assyria was back. This time the demand was nothing less than the dissolution of the nation. The king of Assyria sent his shrewdest envoys, backed by a large army, to Jerusalem to negotiate the dissolution of the Judean government and the transfer of national land and wealth to Assyria.
What follows is something like a chess game. The king refuses to speak to the diplomatic team from Assyria but sends representatives out to them. The Assyrian king’s underlings are not important enough to speak directly to Israel’s king. If they have something to say, let them say it to his subordinates.
But his subordinates are completely outmatched by the Assyrians. Their spokesman insists on holding talks before the public. This is not because they care about the public, but because they think they can leverage the public into pressuring the government to surrender. The Judean representatives ask that negotiations be conducted in Aramaic rather than Hebrew. They worry that Judah’s citizens will believe the malicious propaganda that is being spread. The Assyrians completely ignore them and continue speaking in Hebrew – perhaps more loudly than before.
The Assyrian representative publicly blames the conflict on Judah’s king by claiming that he has “rebelled” against Assyria. He then mocks Judah’s defense plans and berates her (potential) allies. He makes the idea of going to war against Assyria appear absolutely ridiculous. He even taunts Hezekiah with a wager: “My master will give you two thousand horses to help you in your war (though I doubt you can find two thousand horsemen to ride them), and, even so, his B-team will still destroy you!”
Because the Assyrians know that King Hezekiah is a pious, God-fearing man (and that many of Judah’s citizens are not), they mock his faith. “Oh, you are trusting in your God! That’s just what the people of Hamath and Arpad said, right before we wiped them out. That’s what Samaria claimed, before we conquered them and took their land.”
“Besides,” he taunts, “who do you think sent us to conquer you? It was the LORD himself, the God you worship. If you fight us, you are fighting Him.”
The Assyrian spokesman then addressed Judah’s people directly in their own language. (It would be like an English-speaking representative of the Chinese government purchasing air time from broadcast companies and streaming platforms to directly petition the American people to defy their president.) Using Hebrew, he warns the people not to put their trust in the LORD for deliverance. “That’s the kind of thing all our enemies think—right before we destroy them.”
This story, with its high stakes, devious tactics, and diplomatic intrigues shines a bright light on James 1:2-3, which states: “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance.”
James understood that our trials are a test of faith. This is so hard for us to remember. When we face a difficult trial – think of Hezekiah and the people of ancient Judah – we assume that our courage is being tested, or our intelligence, or our strength. Perhaps they are, but the primary test is always of our faith. Will we trust God or not? In the course of any trial, we may be tempted to doubt God’s intentions (2 Kings 18:25) or power (18:33-35); question our fitness (18:23-24); worry about our past actions (18:22); fear for our future (18:27); and make compromises for our comfort (18:31).
But it all boils down to one thing: will we trust God or not? We think it is more complicated than that. But once we know what the right thing to do is (which can be very difficult to determine), the only question left is whether we will trust God and do it. It is our faith, as James clearly states, that is being tested.
It helps to know what we are being tested on. If I have a major exam in my History of Western Civilization class, it will help me prepare if I know what the subject of the test is: is it on Greek supremacy from the time of Alexander through the Carthaginian War, or the Western response to Hitler’s expansion in pre-World War Two Europe, or the rise of nationalism in western nations in the first quarter of the 21st century? I’d better know what I’m being tested on.
We do know what we are being tested on when trials come our way: our faith in God. The test is not meant to fail us but to show us where we are and help us get to where we want to go.
How do we get better at faith? We start by doing what we know God wants us to do. We don’t need to go off to a monastery or enroll in seminary (unless that is what obedience to God requires). There are things for us to do right where we are: invite the neighbor we don’t know well to dinner or to church; love a fellow church member by a word of encouragement (or even rebuke); speak well of a former friend who speaks evil of us (blessing those who curse us); fast for a day and pray—or a thousand other things perfectly suited to our lives. Every act of obedience exercises, and so strengthens, faith.
In the final tests of faith, death and judgment, it is those who have exercised faith (Paul refers to this as “the obedience of faith”) who pass the test.
The Way Home 
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