Death

In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, you find the story about the Sadducees’ coming to test the Lord Jesus Christ on the subject of the resurrection, something in which they did not believe. The Sadducees were the modernists of that day. They thought they would give him a question that would expose how foolish the idea of a resurrection is, and, if he held to the resurrection, they would show how foolish he was, too.

Here in this portion of 1 Corinthians, Paul deals primarily with this matter of the resurrection body, that is, the nature of the kind of body that we are going to have in the resurrection. He did that, presumably, because that was the chief question in the minds of the Greek people here to whom he was writing. I mentioned in an earlier study of Paul’s epistle how this difficulty with the resurrection grew naturally out of Greek philosophical thought.

Now, in chapter 15, verse 35 and following, Paul was likely addressing those who acknowledged that the Resurrection is true. This audience believed that Jesus rose from the dead, and as a result of their union with him, they would rise too. Nevertheless, this group still had questions about the resurrection of the body. They could not understand how, if we will be in heaven with new bodies, that will really be any different from life here on this earth.

I once did a study of what Paul had to say about death in chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians. I found it interesting that he mentions death even more than he mentions the resurrection. The word death or dying or dead occurs twenty-five times in the chapter. And the word resurrection or raised, or anything related to that, occurs twenty-four times–just about equal, but actually the words for death occur more often.

When Hollywood makes movies about the life of Christ, they are often very good up to the point of the Resurrection. I saw one of those films, and in it, at the scene of the Resurrection, the disciples were there, but Jesus was nowhere to be seen. Finally towards the end, there was a sort of mystical, cloudy head up in the sky, just floating away.