06/19/2022 – Day 112 – 1 Corinthians 15 – 16 /”Take away the thought of a life to come and this life loses its value.” Barclay’s commentary – pg #154
As I did earlier today, I am going to share with you some rich commentary from William Barclay’s “The Letters to the Corinthians, starting on pg. # 137, ISBN Ref # 0-664-24108-5.:
“1 Corinthians 15 is both one of the greatest and one of the most difficult chapters in the New Testament. Not only is it in itself difficultk but it has also given to the creed a phrase which many people have grave difficulty in affirming, for it is from this chapter that we mainly derive the resurrection of the body. The chapter will be far less difficult if we study it against its background, and even that troublesome phrase will become quite clear and acceptable whn we realize what Paul really meant by it. So then, before we study the chapter, there are certain things we would do well to have in mind.
(i) It is of great importance to remember that the Corinthians were denying not the Resurrection of Jesus Christ but the resurrection of the body; and what Paul was insistent upon was that if a man denied the resurrection of the body he thereby denied the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and thereby emptied the Christian message of its truth and the Christian life of its reality.
(ii) In any early Christian church there must have been two backgrounds, for in all churches there were Jews and Greeks.
First there was the Jewish background. To the end of the day, the Sadducees denied that there was any life after death at all. There was therefore one line of Jewish thought which completely dnied both the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body (Acts 23:8). In the Old Testament there is very little hope of anything that can be called life after death. According to the general Old Testament belief all men without distinction, went to Sheol after death. Sheol, often wrongly translated Hell, was a gray land beneath the world, where the dead lived a shadowy existence, without strength, without light, cut off alike from men and from God. The Old Testament is full of this bleak, grim pessimism regarding what is to happen after death.
See following bible verses: Psalm 6:5 ; Psalm 30:9; Psalm 88: 10-12; Psalm 115:17; Isaiah 38:18; Psalm 39:13; Ecclesiastes 9: 4,5,10; Ecclesiastes 17:27; Baruch 2:17….
(iii) When we turn to the Greek world, we must firmly grasp one thing, which is at the back of the whole chapter. The Greeks had an instinctive fear of death. Eurpides wrote, ‘Yet mortals, burdened with countless ills, still love life,. They long for each coming day, glad to bear the thing they know, rather than face death the unknown. (Fragment 813) But on the whole the Greeks, and that part of the world influenced by Greek thought, did believe in the immortality of the soul. But for them the immortality of the soul involved the complete dissolution of the body….
For the Greek immortality lay precisely in getting rid of the body. For him the resurretion of the body was unthinkable. Personal immortality did not really exist because that which gave men life was absorbed again in God the source of all life…
Why did Paul regard a belief in the Resurrection of Jesus so essential? What great values and great truths does it conserve? It proves four great facts, which can make all the difference to a man’s view of life hear and heareafter.
(i) The Resurrection proves that truth is stronger than falsehood…. ‘Now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth.’ (John 8:40)
(ii) The Resurrection proves that good is stronger than evil.
(iii) The Resurrection proves that love is stronger than hatred… If there had been no Resurrection, it would have meant that the hatred of man in the end conquered the love of God.
(iv) The Resurrection proves that life is stronger than death.
Paul insisted taht the Resurrection of Jesus was not a fact the whole Christian message was based on a life, that many thousands had died trusting in a delusion, that without it the greatest values in life have no guarantee. ‘Take away the Resurrection’ , he said, ‘ and you destroy both the foundation and the fabric of teh Christan faith.’ “
Soli Deo Gloria!