SUMBER KRISTEN: KOTBAH BAHASA INGGRIS
melayani jemaat dan hamba Tuhan
melayani jemaat dan hamba Tuhan
I remember a conversation I had a few years ago, standing on the
sidelines of a youth soccer game. A friend and I were watching
our sons play and talking. He was a very successful, prominent
businessman in our community. We had become friends because our
boys had played soccer together since they were little kids. We
were talking about news we had just received that another friend,
a relatively young man who served on the school board in our town,
had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. I'll never forget what
my friend said to me: "I am scared to death of dying."
He caught his unintended pun and chuckled. But he was honestly
expressing what most people feel. Even with increased life expectancy,
tremendous advances in medical technology and pain management,
and all kinds of philosophical and therapeutic approaches to death,
no one has found a way to lessen people's fear of dying.
This is not some new psychosis; it's as old as the human race.
King David, the great warrior and leader of the nation of Israel,
wrote about his feelings toward death in Psalm 55:4-5 (NIV):
"My heart is in anguish within me;
the terrors of death assail me.
Fear and trembling have beset me;
horror has overwhelmed me."
Fear is the normal human response to the unknown, and the personal
experience of dying is an unknown for all of us.
In 1 Corinthians 15 the apostle Paul faces this unavoidable reality
head-on. In verse 26 he speaks as a realist: "The last enemy
that will be abolished is death." Death is truly an enemy.
But in coming to grips with that enemy, Paul doesn't take us into
a philosopher's lecture hall, some cryogenics laboratory, or a
psychologist's office. He takes us to an empty tomb where an angelic
messenger said, "Why do you seek the living One among the
dead? He is not here, but He has risen." (Luke 24:5b-6a.)
We're going to devote several messages to chapter 15. It's one
of the most beautiful, exhilarating passages in all of literature.
Paul communicates his powerful conviction that death has been
conquered through the resurrection victory of Jesus Christ. This
long chapter is a comprehensive study of the relationship between
life and death, of the triumph of eternal life in Christ over
the fear of death, of the absolute certainty we can have of our
own bodily resurrection after death, and of the implications for
each one of us here and now. We will learn about personally appropriating
the resurrection life of Christ so that we can come to grips with
death in order to live life to the fullest.
Now, Paul was writing to a very adolescent church. They were relatively
new Christians, impressionable and easily influenced by the culture
around them, as any adolescent is. We've already examined their
confusion over many issues: singleness and marriage, idolatry,
freedom and responsibility in the Christian life, headship in
the home and in the church, their use and misuse of spiritual
gifts, and, most recently, their self-absorption in worship. So
it shouldn't come as any surprise to us that they're perplexed
about the fear of death.
The culture that was informing them was Greek. The Greeks didn't
believe in the resurrection of the dead. Remember the story in
Acts 17 of how Paul came to the great intellectual center of Athens
and preached the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead as
historic reality. They laughed at him. They thought a dead body's
being raised to life was a silly idea. Most Greek philosophers
considered the human body a prison, and they believed that at
death the soul was freed to a kind of immortality, but it involved
the complete dissolution of the conscious identity and personality
into the cosmos, or absorption into some kind of divinity. Some
schools of philosophy in Greece denied any kind of afterlife at
all. All of these ancient perspectives are also very modern. We
hear our contemporaries in the world talk these same ways about
the possibility of life after death.
So these young Christians in Corinth were more pagan than Biblical
in their understanding of life and death. They were afraid of
being disembodied spirits, because they hadn't yet embraced the
Christian conviction that human beings will experience resurrection
to eternal life. Paul addresses their confusion with the reality
of Christ's own bodily resurrection. He says succinctly in 15:12,
"Now if Christ is preached, that He has been raised from
the dead, how do some among you say that there is no resurrection
of the dead?"
Paul begins in verses 1-11 by pointing to what the Corinthians
did believe: Christ rose from the dead. That is the key to Paul's
argument that believers will also be resurrected. The resurrection
of Jesus Christ is, moreover, the primary truth of the Christian
faith, the foundation of the gospel. Without a belief in Jesus'
bodily resurrection, there can be no personal salvation. That
will become clear in these verses. Look at how Paul summarizes
the gospel in verses 1-5:
Now I make known to you, brethren, the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received, in which also you stand, by which also you are saved, if you hold fast the word which I preached to you, unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.
THE GOSPEL ON WHICH WE STAND
Notice that Paul begins the chapter with a word of reminder.
He isn't proclaiming the gospel to these Corinthians for the first
time. They have already heard the gospel and have believed this
great good news that in Jesus Christ, God fulfilled his Old-Testament
promises and opened a way of salvation to all people. But with
a note of urgency, Paul tells them he has to teach it to them
again. They have to rethink and review just what the gospel is.
Now, why would those believers in Jesus Christ need this review?
Why do you need to hear again the essence of the gospel? Because
we all very easily forget fundamental truths. Could you go out
right now and explain the gospel to a nonbelieving friend? Hopefully,
as we work through this passage, we'll have a greater confidence
that we understand and can explain what the gospel is.
Paul offers three phrases from verses 1-2 that define the benefit
of the gospel. The three phrases focus on salvation past, present,
and future.
Look at the first phrase: "The gospel...which also you received."
They received salvation through trust in the good news of Christ's
death and resurrection, and their lives were transformed. They
were receptive to this saving message that Paul had offered, and
they could look back to that point in time. And it's as true for
each one of us as well. You can remember the time, perhaps the
very moment and the place, when you opened your heart to this
life-saving reality. Or perhaps you remember the process you went
through of coming to that point of conviction.
The second phrase speaks of their present experience: "In
which [gospel] also you stand." The tense of the verb "stand"
refers to a past completed action with ongoing results. So they
are presently standing on the gospel as their foundation for life.
And that's what the gospel does for us in the present. In a dangerous,
seductive, slippery world, it protects us, stabilizes us, keeps
us standing securely.
The third phrase: "By which [gospel] also you are saved."
Literally in the original Greek language it says, "You are
being saved." Our salvation is an ongoing process. Paul
tells us 2 Corinthians 3:18 that we are being changed "from
glory to glory." What Jesus did for us was a glorious event
in the past, but his work in us is continuing, and we'll be ultimately
glorified and completed. So we live in anticipation of this full
salvation, the finished work when we stand before the Lord. The
gospel makes us tremendously optimistic and hopeful about the
future.
There is a word of conditionality here: "If you hold fastunless
you believed in vain." The term "in vain" literally
means "at random" or "without basis." In the
paraphrase The Message, Eugene Peterson turns that conditional
phrase into a parenthetical statement: "(I'm assuming, now,
that your belief was the real thing and not a passing fancy, that
you're in this for good and holding fast.)" (1). Faith that
is in vain or a passing fancy is a superficial response to the
gospel, such as seeing it as fire insurance: "I don't want
to go to hell, so I'll accept Jesus." Or it may be a response
of selfishness: "I want Jesus because I won't feel as guilty,
and things will work better in my life." It's a way of adding
value to your life. Paul would consider those responses vain or
empty in terms of any stabilizing reality in people's lives.
Let me summarize these first two verses. Paul says he had come
to Corinth and preached the message of the gospel, and saving
faith had transformed their lives. An integral part of the gospel
message was the fact of Christ's resurrection. After all, a dead
savior can't save anybody. Paul's readers had received the word,
they had trusted Christ, and they were now standing on that word
as the assurance of their salvation. The fact that they were standing
firm was evidence that their faith was genuine, not empty or superficial.
And what is the nature of the gospel that they responded to? First
of all, he says it is "of first importance." That means
that it is foundational, preliminary to everything else. What
follows is the essential message of the gospel, the most important
message the church has to proclaim. Of all the things that Paul
taught those believers in Corinth about Christian life and witness,
verses 3-5 are primary and indispensable.
Paul makes reference to the source of the gospel in the middle
of verse 3: "...I delivered to you...what I also received...."
Paul passed on only what had been passed on to him. In Galatians
1:11-12 he writes, "I want you to know, brothers, that the
gospel I preached is not something that man made up. I did not
receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received
it by revelation from Jesus Christ." (NIV.) Paul was not
the source of the gospel message, and neither was any other apostle
or disciple. God himself, speaking through the Lord Jesus Christ,
was the source.
JESUS CRUCIFIED, BURIED, AND RESURRECTED
Let's look at the elements of the gospel now in the rest of
the sentence in verses 3-5. It has a clear literary structure.
Four phrases define the gospel's content, each beginning with
the word "that."
First, in verse 3: "That Christ died for our sins according
to the Scriptures." When Jesus died on the cross, he dealt
with the reality of our sin. By his death as a substitute in our
place, he enabled us to be forgiven for our sins, to come into
a relationship with God, to have a new, eternal life that starts
here and now. His was a unique work of salvation. Many people
were crucified on Roman crosses, but only one man voluntarily
died for the sins of the world. Paul says his death was in fulfillment
of the Old-Testament Scriptures. Much of the Old-Testament sacrificial
system pointed to the sacrifice of Christ as our Savior. The annual
day of atonement in Leviticus 16:29-34 and the messianic prophecies
like Isaiah 53 anticipated Jesus as the ultimate sin-bearer.
The second element is in verse 4: "And that He was buried"
By that phrase Paul is confirming the physical reality of Jesus'
death. Jesus was not in a swoon when he was placed in the tomb,
nor were his death and resurrection merely spiritual phenomena.
The disciples placed a corpse in a tomb, and that tomb was sealed
shut.
A dead body buried in a tomb prepares the way for a bodily resurrection
and an empty tomb, which is the third element of the gospel in
the middle of verse 4: "And that He was raised on the third
day according to the Scriptures." The God who spoke the universe
into being exercised that same mighty power to accomplish the
resurrection of Jesus Christ. Jesus did not resurrect himself.
He was raised. That's passive. The tense of the verb in Greek
makes it clear that what once happened is now still in force.
He is still living. The effect of his eternal life on each one
of us is amazing, magnificent.
As was his death on the cross, Paul adds, his resurrection was
also in fulfillment of the Old-Testament Scriptures. Jesus himself,
in his own preaching ministry, made reference to one of those
Old-Testament anticipations: "Just as Jonah was three days
and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so shall the
Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the
earth" (Matthew 12:40). The angels at the empty tomb reminded
the women of that: "Remember how He spoke to you while He
was still in Galilee, saying that the Son of Man must be delivered
into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third
day rise again." (Luke 24:6.)
C. K. Barrett summarizes these first three elements of the gospel
in a wonderfully succinct way:
"Christ died, but he is not now dead. He was buried, but he is not now in the grave. He was raised, and he is now alive." (2)
The fourth element is in verse 5: "And that He appeared to
Cephas, then to the twelve." By this Paul is emphasizing
the objective reality of the resurrection. He was raised, and
the way we know that is that he was seen by a great number of
people. Each one of these appearances substantiates that Christ
indeed rose again. His resurrection means that he wasn't merely
resuscitated, coming back to the life that he had before. He came
back to a new kind of life, a glorified life, a categorically
different life. But in the mystery of resurrection, he was the
same Jesus with the same wounds on his body that those eyewitnesses
to his appearances could see and touch to verify who he was.
The content of the gospel is those four basic facts. They aren't
philosophical, psychological, or even doctrinal. They aren't the
opinions or ideas of men about how things should have happened.
They are historical realities. They can't be evaded or eliminated.
These facts changed the history of the world. And our faith rests
on These foundational, historical realities. The saving effect
of the gospel is undermined if Jesus' resurrection is denied.
That's very clear farther on in verse 17: "And if Christ
has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in
your sins." The resurrection of the Lord Jesus from the dead
is the assurance for Christians that he is still committed to
us. It guarantees that his saving work on the cross was approved
by God and that this salvation will never lose its effectiveness
in our lives.
THE WITNESSES OF THE RESURRECTION
To strengthen his case, Paul calls a number of witnesses to the resurrection. In verse 5 he appeared to Cephas and then to the twelve. Then in verses 6-7:
After that He appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep; then He appeared to James, then to all the apostles.
Paul mentions five individuals or groups altogether. It struck
me as very touching that the first disciple who was mentioned
in verse 5 was Cephas or Peter, who profanely denied his Lord
publicly. The risen Lord Jesus lovingly appeared to him and folded
Peter to himself. Paul mentioned the twelve at the end of verse
5. (He called the disciples "the twelve" even though
there were only eleven of them before Judas Iscariot was replaced.)
In verse 6 he mentions five hundred brethren. We don't know when
this happened; it's not recorded in the Biblical literature. But
Paul is emphasizing the quantity of reliable witnesses who were
available. He mentions James in verse 7. This is the half-brother
of Jesus, the son of Joseph and Mary. James did not surrender
his life to Christ as his Savior and Lord until after the resurrection,
probably until this appearance of Jesus to him. The mention at
the end of verse 7 of all the apostles is probably a summary statement.
Over that period of forty days between Jesus' resurrection and
his ascension, he did appear to all his disciples on different
occasions.
Paul's main argument is that there were still eyewitnesses to
the resurrection living at the time he was writing this first
letter to the Corinthians. Paul is inviting people to check out
the reality of the resurrection for themselves. He's saying, "There
are nearly five hundred people who, some twenty years ago, saw
Jesus after his resurrection. Ask one of them." This is very
convincing proof of the resurrection, because Paul would never
have challenged people like this in a public letter that was going
to be circulated if these eyewitnesses had not in reality seen
the resurrected Christ. Paul was convinced that his witnesses
would confirm the facts.
Notice the beautiful way Paul describes those of the original
five hundred who had died in the last twenty years: "...[They]
have fallen asleep...." The terror of the antagonist that
none of us can withstand, Paul is saying, has become, for the
Christian, nothing more than drifting off to sleep. What a tender
thought.
PAUL'S WITNESS
The final witness to the resurrection is Paul himself, and he's a bit more expansive in talking about how the resurrection has changed his life. He refers to himself in two amazing ways. First, he calls himself a premature birth, and then he calls himself nothing more than a trophy of the grace of God. Let's read verses 8-9:
"And last of all, as it were to one untimely born, He appeared to me also. For I am the least of the apostles, who am not fit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God."
Paul was a hateful unbeliever, violently opposed to what God
was doing through the church, until Jesus confronted him on the
Damascus road (Acts 9). The phrase Paul uses, "one untimely
born," was the normal phrase for an abortion, miscarriage,
or premature birth-essentially a life unable to sustain itself.
In carrying the idea of being unformed or dead or useless, the
phrase was also a common form of derision. Paul looks back and
sees that as an unbeliever before his conversion, he was spiritually
unformed-dead, useless, a person to be scorned. The irony is that
as an unbeliever, he was convinced that Jesus was dead. But by
God's sovereign grace, the resurrected, living Christ confronted
Paul and changed his life. Paul remembers how he was as an outsider,
an enemy of the church of Jesus Christ, a violent persecutor,
to use his own word, who deserved nothing, least of all an apostolic
ministry. This is not false humility on Paul's part. Paul never
could get over the fact that Christ would call him, of all people,
to apostolic responsibility.
THE LIFE-CHANGING EFFECT OF THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS
Paul's personal sense of being unqualified, undeserving, and weak provided the Lord the opportunity to be his adequacy, his qualification, his strength. It was the power of the resurrection, the life-changing grace of God at work, that transformed Paul, that motivated and empowered him. He speaks of all that in verses 10-11 when he says it's all of grace.
"But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me did not prove vain; but I labored even more than all of them, yet not I, but the grace of God with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed."
It didn't matter who preached to the Corinthians-Peter, James,
or Paul himself-it was the grace of God at work. And it was the
grace of God at work in the Corinthians that allowed them to respond
to the gospel.
The same grace of God that was responsible for Paul's salvation
was responsible for his faithfulness in ministry. The power of
the resurrected Christ had brought three great changes in Paul's
life. First, he had experienced a deep recognition of his own
sin. For the first time he realized how far his external religious
life was from being internally godly. He saw himself as he really
was, as an enemy of God and a persecutor of the church. Second,
he experienced a revolution in his character. From being an enemy
of the church, he became her greatest defender. His life was transformed
from self-righteous hatred to sacrificial love. He changed from
being an oppressor to being a servant, from an imprisoner to a
deliverer, from a life-taker to a life-giver, from a judge to
a friend. Third, he experienced a radical redirection of his energy.
He was a passionate, zealous person, and just as passionately
and energetically as he had ever opposed the family of God in
Christ, he now served that family. No wonder Paul was so excited
about the resurrection of Jesus Christ-it had gripped him and
turned him around.
I grew up with the Easter hymn He Lives. It speaks of all
the evidences of the resurrection, but the most telling evidence
is in the line "You ask me how I know He lives? He lives
within my heart."3 And that is the testimony of the apostle
here: "He turned my life inside out, made it worth something,
and now he's using me to his glory!" That just blew Paul's
mind.
Let's go back to where we started. Are you scared to death of
dying, to use my friend's phrase? Listen to Paul's words to Timothy:
"For God has not given us a spirit of timidity, but of power
and love and discipline" (2 Timothy 1:7). The apostle Peter
says that what God has given us is "a living hope through
the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead" (1 Peter
1:3). Paul wrote to the church in Rome, "If God is for us,
who is against us?" (Romans 8:31.) The power of God raised
Christ's body from the dead, and that same power is available
to deliver us who are in Christ from the grip of fear and anxiety,
and to cause us to rejoice in the glorious and certain hope of
what God has prepared for us in eternity. We don't have to be
afraid of what comes after death.
But the resurrection also guarantees victory in our daily lives
here and now. The power of the resurrection can be expressed in
us as it was in Paul, in all places, under all circumstances,
to the glory of God. We don't have to live with the fear of death.
We can echo Paul's victorious shout at the end of our chapter
in verses 54-55, quoting the Old-Testament prophets Isaiah and
Hosea: "Death is swallowed up in victory. O Death, where
is your victory? O Death, where is your sting?" Then in verse
57 he responds to that miraculous truth: "But thanks be to
God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."
That victorious view of life and death is ours because of our
risen Lord Jesus Christ.
Are you realizing that your faith has to some degree been "in
vain," that there has been a superficiality to it? Have you
been in it more for what you could get out of it? You don't have
to live that way. As you have probably already figured out, a
little bit of God is a very unsettling way to live. There is no
stability in that. The world is too slippery and seductive. But
you don't have to go on that way. With the Corinthians, you can
embrace the absolute reality of the resurrection of Christ as
Lord of life. That's another point of the resurrection: He took
our sins at the cross, and he earned the right to be the Lord
of our life in the resurrection.
Or maybe you have heard all this for weeks or months or years,
but you have never received the gospel, accepted Christ's forgiveness
for sin, and surrendered yourself to his lordship over your life.
You don't have to go on that way, either.
There's a story in Acts 16:23-34 of a frightened Roman jailer
standing before Paul and Silas, thinking about his own execution
because he thought he had let the prisoners escape. He said, "Sir,
what must I do to be saved?" All they said was, "Believe
in the Lord Jesus, and you shall be saved...." The Christ,
the Promised One of the Old Testament, Jesus, Y'shua, the Savior
of the world and the Lord of life as well-believe in him, and
salvation is yours. That is amplified in Romans 10:9: "If
you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your
heart that God raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved...."
Salvation can be yours right now. Accept his forgiveness for your
sin, and then surrender your life to him as the risen, glorified
Lord.
Notes:
1. Eugene H. Peterson, The Message, © 1993, 1994
by Eugene H. Peterson. NavPress, Colorado Springs, CO. P. 363.
2. C. K. Barrett, The First Epistle to the Corinthians,
1966, p. 28, Harper & Row Publishers, New York.
3. Text by Alfred H. Ackley. © 1933 by Homer A. Rodeheaver.
© renewed 1961 THE RODEHEAVER CO. (a division of WORD, INC.).
All rights reserved.
Catalog No. 4535
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
28th Message
Doug Goins
August 30, 1998
The Scripture quotations in this message are all
taken from New American Standard Bible, © 1960, 1962, 1963,
1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 The Lockman Foundation.
Used by permission.
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