“Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.” (1 Corinthians, 15, v. 58.)
Now the Apostle Paul in this remarkable chapter (the whole of the Bible is remarkable, but this is a remarkable chapter) reminds the “beloved brethren” of the Corinthian Church of the Gospel that he declared unto them, and by which they were saved. He points out two fundamental truths and glories in connection with that Gospel which he preached, and on which they stood. That was “that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures; and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures”. There is not only there mention of the Divine Redeemer, but there is the mention of the rising of the Divine Redeemer again from the dead. That is the substance of this remarkable part of the Holy Scriptures. When we come back to the first verse that I read, the terms of it are, “Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast” and so on. When we think, and when I began to think of this portion some time ago, the “therefore” became very vital in my meditation. That brings me without undue delay to consider, first of all, some matters that deal with what gave rise to this exhortation and encouragement. There is a three-fold exhortation in the verse, and then there is a distinctive encouragement. “Be ye steadfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord.” That is the exhortation. Now in the latter part of the verse there is this encouragement given: “forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord”.
What is behind all this? What gave rise to this three-fold exhortation and this encouragement to the beloved brethren in Corinth? That is what I would like to say something about first of all.
Then, secondly, I would like to say something about the exhortation itself: “be ye steadfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord”, and lastly, a word on the encouragement: “forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord”.
In coming to deal with what gave rise to this encouragement and exhortation, we must first of all, apply our minds to what is revealed here by the Apostle. This was the propagation of what is spiritually to be described as damnable heresy, and damnable heresy in relation to the resurrection of the Son of God, and the resurrection of His people. As you will find it elsewhere, the Apostle raises this matter: “How say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead?” Now, that of course, covers all resurrection. In the chapter, the Apostle deals with the inevitable and the disastrous consequences inherent in this dogma. These consequences are given in detail by the Apostle. The Apostle through the Spirit considered that it was of importance to show and to expose this heresy that was being propagated.
Briefly, I would like just to remind you of these matters, but do little more than remind you of them. The first consequence was and is, that where there is a holding of this damnable heresy that there is here an out and out rejection of the physical, historical, fact of the resurrection of the Son of God from the dead, and of the resurrection of the people of God. That in itself of course is tremendous, as we shall see as we remind ourselves of the other consequences. For instance, wherever there is an utter rejection of the resurrection of the dead, involving the Son of God and His believing people, there follows as a consequence that what I may call the Divine authority and efficacy of the means of salvation are of course nullified, and emptied of their authority and efficacy. As the Apostle says, “then is our preaching vain”, “and we are found false witnesses of God”. “It pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.” His servants are “ambassadors for Christ” in a very special manner. They are witnesses, and that in the discharging of their functions and their duties in the ministry of the Gospel, as Paul himself and others discharged their functions in the Apostolic office in preaching the Gospel. All this, as a consequence, is entirely deprived of Divine authority and Divine efficaciousness, and of any possibility of any Divine blessing following upon the preaching and the witness of the servants of Christ and the Church of God.
The next consequence is, as I may describe it in my own terms, related to spiritual experience, and what the Apostolic Church in the days of the Apostle, and the Church today, considers to be experience by reason of the workings of the Divine Spirit of God in the souls of believers, is a delusion, a fantasy. That is a consequence of this damnable heresy. As the Apostle Paul puts it, “your faith is vain”. This faith the Lord gives to His people in the Divine Redeemer in the Gospel. This is emptied of its nature, and its worth, and it becomes nothing at all, a delusion, and as I said, just a fantasy of experience.
Conjointly with this, there is this tremendous consequence. Those who claim to have this wonderful faith which is “the gift of God” upon the Divine Redeemer, are yet in their sins. That is an extraordinary thing, that those who have come to have real experience of faith in the Divine Redeemer, and have had the pardon of their sins and reconciliation to God sealed upon their consciences through faith in the blood of Christ; all this becomes a delusion, something just of the imagination, nothing!
A further consequence is that those whom we believe, and whom the Apostle believed to have fallen asleep in the blessed holy Saviour, that is, died in the Lord as believers, perished. They came to the end of their existence. They came to an end of everything that they considered they were heir to, according to their faith, and according to the promises of the Gospel, which are yea and Amen in Christ. They are perished. Not only are they perished, but the Apostle takes up the extraordinary situation of the believing people of God in this world. Among their fellowmen, they are “of all men most miserable”. Now that is to say, as the Apostle states: “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable”. All this is a consequence of the denial of the resurrection. Having a hope in Christ, going through this world living a life of faith in Christ, battling against sin, warring against the flesh and against the adversary, passing through trials and difficulties for Christ’s sake—that’s all of no consequence. It separates the Christian into a class of persons who among their fellowmen are a most miserable class, because they have no expectation of the hope that they entertained ever coming to fulfilment, or of enjoying the blessedness of the eternal world in Heaven. That is a very brief summary of the consequences.
Now, I want to say just a word of application. There is an upsurge today in certain areas of the professing Christian Church of disbelief in, and rejection of, the physical, actual, historical, resurrection of the Lord of Glory. I’m not going to feed you with press information, but I read last week three articles in the ‘Scotsman’ with regard to the present Church of Scotland, and the fact that the Confession of Faith, which still in a manner is their subordinate standard to the Scriptures, is to be relegated to a historical document, and to be eliminated from its honoured place as the subordinate standard of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. These articles, and some of you will have read them, were most revealing. A term that was used is used in regard to many things. It appears from these articles that any considered formulated view of Biblical doctrine in the Church of Scotland at the present time, or in the foreseeable future, is in the melting-pot, in the extreme sense of that term. The first article dealt with all the varied matters in the Confession, and the relegation of the Confession to the background. At the very end of the article, the writer has this to say: ‘Churchmen no longer have the clear certainty of their seventeenth century ancestors.’ He quotes, ‘On the third day He arose from the dead with the same body in which he suffered.’ The matter of the resurrection, of course, has been to the fore publicly again and again in recent years, and I have already recalled to your minds the consequences of the denial of the resurrection of the Divine Redeemer, and the resurrection of His believing people. That is behind this exhortation in the first instance—the propagating of this extraordinary heresy. This extraordinary view is now being held very largely in our own land today by churchmen. They do not assert, and they do in fact reject, the factual, historical truth of the resurrection of the Divine Redeemer.
On the other hand, the Apostle Paul, over against this extraordinary heresy, maintains the fact and the Divine truth and reality of the physical resurrection of Christ, and of His people. That is the other side of the matter behind this exhortation. The Apostle Paul was conversant, of course, with the Old Testament Scriptures, the Word of God. He said he was conversant with the Psalms, for instance, the Psalm we were reading in, and of which we sang a part, in connection undoubtedly with the resurrection of the Messiah, the promised Saviour. “Thou wilt not leave My soul in hell: neither wilt Thou suffer Thine Holy One to see corruption.” (Psalm 16.) To all who accept the Word of God, that is a reference to the resurrection of the Lord of Glory. Following upon the resurrection, as far as the Psalms are concerned, there is:
“Thou hast, O Lord, most glorious,
Ascended up on high;
And in triumph victorious led
Captive captivity.” (Psalm 68, v. 18: Metrical version.)
Following this line out briefly, you’ll find the Apostle Paul in his preaching the Gospel, refers again and again not only to the resurrection of Christ, but gives the background for declaring the glories of the death of Christ, and the glories of the rising again from the dead of the Lord Jesus Christ. For instance, before Agrippa, (I’m putting it in my own words just now) he said, did Agrippa think it was a thing incredible with God that God should raise the dead. In the same defence of himself before Agrippa, he mentioned the doctrine that he preached, and the message that he was preaching, and that was a message that Christ suffered and rose again from the dead. He prefaces that with a reference to the Scriptures of the prophets and Moses. He was preaching exactly according to what the prophets and Moses had said should come, and should happen, that Christ should suffer these things and should rise again from the dead. There are the declarations of the Divine Redeemer himself that we have recorded in the four Gospels in regard to the reality of His resurrection. There is one thing, among many things, that the Saviour said: “I lay down My life, that I might take it again.” “I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This commandment have I received of My Father.” Now that is only one assertion that the Lord of Glory made in regard to what was in prospect for Him. In addition to suffering and dying, there was to be this rising again on the third day. Christ maintained that this would be so again and again and again.
In this chapter, the Apostle Paul also takes up the matter of witnesses. Witnesses are very vital in matters of controversy. And he brings before us in his argumentation about the resurrection of Christ, that there were many witnesses of this fact. He speaks about Cephas, and he speaks about others. “After that, He was seen of above five hundred brethren at once.” He speaks about the twelve Apostles, and in the actual Gospels we find all this, of course, verified. After the resurrection, there were many and varied kinds of witnesses among men, and there were women also, and so on. We are dealing just now with the record of the inspired and infallible Word of God. I would just make a comment in passing. We see that this damnable heresy of the rejection of the resurrection involves even the inspiration and the infallibility and the authority of the Scriptures. The thing goes right through the warp and woof of the Bible, and through the whole Christian faith. It is not merely the resurrection, although this is the question in hand. We aver and maintain what is here stated by the inspired Apostle, is what we believe to be the inspired Word of God by the Spirit and that there were witnesses. There were witnesses, and hundreds of witnesses, to the fact and to the reality that the One Who was crucified on the cross between the thieves, rose again from the dead on the third day, and manifested Himself to His Church and people.
In the reference to the Apostles, I was thinking of another matter in regard to this. It was after the resurrection that the Lord of Glory gave first of all the commission to His Apostles and to His Church to go “into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature”. He said, “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned”. Is that great commission to go overboard, as a commission that was never given? It was in a personal appearance of the Lord of Glory that He spoke to His Apostles and to His Church in regard to that commission. Where does the Sacrament of Baptism go? The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was instituted by the Redeemer before He died, but it was after His resurrection that He said unto the Apostles, “Go ye therefore, and teach (disciple) all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you”. That is a Sacrament that the Christian Church administers since the Apostolic age until this day. What happens to it if Christ rose not from the dead? I’m only posing that by way of question. Then churchmen, and those who are true churchmen, again and again have reason to refer to that wonderful pre-eminent promise (there are “great and precious promises” otherwise) that Christ gave to His Church after the resurrection. “Lo,” He said, “I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.” If Christ be not risen, He never instituted Baptism, and if Christ be not risen, we have no commission here to go into the world and preach the Gospel.
But the Apostle, on the positive side, says that He appeared unto five hundred brethren, and so on, and when He did, He gave the fundamental, Divine, commission, sacrament, and promise to the Church, to which the true Church holds tenaciously until this day. The Apostle himself, in this chapter as elsewhere, takes a lowly place as to his call to preach the Gospel. He says, “Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, is this grace given, that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ”. In this chapter, he says, “For I am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God”. But what does he say in verse 8? “And last of all He was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time.” This is a line of meditation in regard to maintaining the fact and the reality of the resurrection of Christ that the Apostle Paul himself was maintaining. As far as the wonderful beginning of his spiritual experience in this world was concerned, on the road to Damascus the Divine Redeemer from Heaven spoke to him, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me?” “It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.” Saul replied, “Who art Thou, Lord?” “I am Jesus.” That’s how Paul met Christ. It is not as men aver today that the dust of the Saviour is lying in Palestine. The risen Lord “crowned with glory and honour” in the Heavenly realm brought about the conversion of this extraordinary personality in the history of the world and the church, the Apostle Paul. He says, “He was seen of me also”. Then with regard to the dramatic statement by the Apostle Paul in the Epistle to the Romans, he writes there by the Spirit that Christ “was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification”. Now you are familiar with the doctrine of justification taught from our pulpits, in regard to the fact of the justification of believers in Christ. Christ was delivered to the cross for the Church’s offences, but raised again for their justification. Christ endured the punishment His covenant people merited for their sins from God, and that required by God’s justice. His resurrection was vital and essential as a living testimony in His own Person that His death was accepted fully as an expiation for the sins of His people by God, by the justice of God.
Just to sum it up in a few words: What we have to conclude from the Word of God, and from the Apostle’s doctrine is, that in his Person, the Son of God in our nature, in His death on the cross, and by His actual resurrection from the dead, constitutes the entire and the one foundation of the justification of believers. It’s quite a remarkable statement of truth that believers are justified by the resurrection of Christ, and I’ve given there what is to be understood by that. If Christ is not risen, whatever He did in His life in relation to being made under the law, and whatever He did in His death, where is it all? Where is the foundation of the believer’s justification if Christ be not risen? But the Divine Spirit through the Apostle makes that wonderful doctrinal statement that He “was raised again for our justification”. There is a declaration to Heaven, and to earth, and to hell, that what Christ did in being made under the law to redeem them that were under the law by His life and death, was accepted by Heaven, and that on the basis that God is a just God, and justifieth the ungodly who believes in Jesus, the risen Saviour.
Further, Paul had evidence, evidence that we have referred to already, and in the exercise of his own faith, he maintains positively and dogmatically in this chapter, “Now is Christ risen from the dead”. How clear and unequivocal this declaration by the inspired Apostle is in this part of the Word of God! That is a statement as to a fact from one who had evidence and one who had faith, and that in the truth and in the reality of the physical resurrection of the Lord of Glory. Again, in the doctrinal statements in this chapter, Paul says, “Since by man came death, by Man came also the resurrection of the dead”. Of course, the first man is Adam, “by man came death”, so by Man, that is the Man Christ Jesus, “came also the resurrection of the dead”. These are dogmatic, plain statements by the inspired Apostle with regard to the resurrection of the Saviour.
Again, there is another matter in regard to the actual resurrection of Christ, and it is this. The actual resurrection of Christ was what I may call a glorious step by Him on the way to “the Holiest of all”, “into Heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us”, for His covenant people, whom He carries, as we say, upon His heart, and that before the presence of God in Heaven. Intercession, and the Divine intercession of the Son of God is a basic matter in regard to the salvation of any. It says in one place in Isaiah, that He “made intercession for the transgressors”. Well, of course, those who were chosen in Him before the foundation of the world, were just as fallen and sinful as others. Let us remember that. They were transgressors. It was essential for the salvation of His covenant people that He appear in the presence of God to intercede for them on the basis of His death and resurrection. The resurrection was a glorious part of this basis. It was a glorious reality on the way to this finality of engaging in the accomplishing of the salvation of a multitude of this race of ours that no man can number. If Christ is not risen, He is not in Heaven. Who but they, who even deny the resurrection today, talk about Heaven! They talk about Heaven, a Heaven without Christ. There is no Christ in Heaven if He rose not from the dead. How blind and dark and foolish men are! The resurrection has this wonderful sequel—His going to the right hand of the Majesty in Heaven, there “to appear in the presence of God” for the like of us, on the basis of His death and of His resurrection.
(To be continued.)