The chapter in the Word of God that deals exclusively with the question of the resurrection of the dead is 1 Corinthians Chapter 15. From this chapter we understand that the Corinthians held a position similar to that of Hymenaeus and Philetus in 2 Timothy 2:18. Concerning them, the apostle Paul tells his spiritual son Timothy (2 Timothy 2:16-18):
Notice that, although they have wandered away from the truth, Hymenaeus and Philetus do not deny that there is a resurrection but maintain that it has already taken place. Perhaps they considered that it was past and spiritual. Perhaps this understanding of theirs was based on an excessive emphasis on the spiritual resurrection. For example in Ephesians 2:1-5 the apostle Paul says:
Maybe Hymenaeus and Philetus considered that, since God has "jointly resurrected" us and seated us with Him in heavenly places in Christ, the resurrection has already taken place. Consequently there is no such thing as a future bodily resurrection of the dead.
It seems that some of the Corinthians would have agreed with them. And clearly amongst those there were some who were saying "There is no resurrection of the dead" (verse 12). But what did they mean by that? Surely not that there is no resurrection at all. Rather, as we can infer from this chapter, they too, like Hymenaeus and Philetus, considered that the resurrection is only spiritual and that it is past.
One way or another we can only be grateful for their mistake, because it provoked the apostle Paul to write this significant chapter in which he proves that the resurrection we await is not only past and spiritual but also future and bodily. Thus he strengthens our faith and motivates us to serve God with courage and certainty, knowing that "in the Lord our labour is not in vain" (v.58).
What did the Corinthians have in mind when they maintained that "there is no resurrection of the dead"? Does it mean that they did not believe in the resurrection of Christ? Evidently that was not the case. They did believe in the resurrection of Christ. That is precisely why the apostle Paul starts from that very point - from what the Corinthians have received. When the apostle Paul comes among them, he preaches to them the crucified and risen Christ. The Corinthians receive this gospel and take their stand on it. So that belief in the resurrection of Christ is not a problem for the Corinthians (v.1-2).
Notice that this is the gospel which the Corinthians have received and on which they continue to "take their stand". What did the apostle Paul preach to them? The apostolic gospel - the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ (v3-4).
The resurrection of Christ is a fulfilment of a number of Old Testament prophecies. Moreover, it was confirmed by the apostles. They were witnesses "chosen beforehand by God" to the risen Christ (Acts 10:41). That is why, after His resurrection, He appeared to them on more than one occasion (v.5-8).
Paul himself is also an apostle. Despite the fact that he believed on the Lord after his meeting with Him on the road to Damascus and was not one of the disciples whom Jesus trained in the time of His earthly ministry, he is one of Christ's apostles, because Jesus appeared to him specially and sent him to proclaim the good news to the Gentiles (v 9-11; 1 Corinthians 9:12, Acts 22:14-15).
Up to this point Paul is establishing the basis of his argument in defence of the future bodily resurrection of believers. And that is what the Corinthians have received and believed and which continues to be their conviction, namely that Christ not only died for our sins and was buried, but that He rose on the third day for our justification. In support of the fact of His resurrection there are not only the Old Testament scriptures, but also the testimonies of the apostles who personally had had fellowship with the risen Christ. The resurrection of Christ is the common ground, the point of contact between Paul and the Corinthians. It is the common doctrine both of the apostles and the Church.
From this point onwards Paul changes the direction of his proofs. Up to here he has established the fact that Christ's resurrection stands as the basis both of the apostolic gospel and of their faith. Rejection of a future resurrection of the dead is in contradiction to Christ's resurrection. And denial of Christ's resurrection removes the power of the gospel message and the meaning of the Christian faith. If Christ is not risen, it means that for us there is no salvation from our sins. All believers who have died have perished and since we have been deceived in the extreme, then of all the people in this world we are most to be pitied. Then we would have to reject the authority of the prophets and likewise the authority of the apostles. Because they testify to the resurrection of Christ. And if it did not happen, that means they are false witnesses and deceivers.
For a Christian living in the 21st century, it is very difficult to imagine how it is possible for any Christian not to believe in a future resurrection of believers. But we must not forget that we have reached our conviction through reading the New Testament, whereas these early Christians from Corinth did not yet have New Testaments. At that time the books of the New Testament had not yet been written. In fact this very epistle to the Corinthians is one of the earliest New Testament documents. Moreover we know that the apostles taught new believers about the resurrection of Christ but we do not know to what extent they taught them about the future resurrection of believers. Evidently this question was not thoroughly explained, because we understand from the earlier First Epistle to the Thessalonians that the Thessalonians too, like the Corinthians, did not have a very good understanding of the future resurrection of believers (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18).
Apart from that, despite the fact that, at that time, in certain areas of Judaism there was already a fully developed teaching on the resurrection of the dead, there was no such teaching in the Greek world. Some Greeks believed in the resurrection of the soul, but not in the resurrection of the body. To them the very idea of resurrecting a dead body was unacceptable. They looked on the body as something bad and evil and on death as a means by which we rid ourselves of our bodies and begin to live in a higher, non-material, spiritual world. The credit for such ideas goes to the Greek philosophers and especially Plato. He searched for the meaning of human existence and tried to discover and define the way in which the world functions. According to him, the world exists on two levels - the transcendent world of eternal and immutable being and the changeable world of manifestations which is nothing more than a pale reflection of reality.
One world is the world of perfection and ideas, whilst the other is a world in which all objects are a copy of the ideas of the first world. This second world is constantly changing. For example if we look at a cup. In the material world, this cup can get broken, but in our consciousness it remains whole. According to Plato, since the soul is eternal, it belongs to the world of ideas and being. When it is implanted into a person, it helps him to remember and compare the visible things of the world of manifestations in which we live with the ideas of which they are a copy (anamnesisis). According to the Greek philosophers the real person is the soul. The body resembles a house or clothing in which the person lives. In fact the body is often likened to a cemetery or prison for the soul. The true destiny of the soul according to the Greek philosophers is for it to be freed from the body. But according to the Bible, a person is not just a soul. He is created "an intricate unity" (Job 10:8 NKJV). It is very possible that, for the Corinthians, a future bodily resurrection of the dead was too materialistic to be true. Perhaps they considered the resurrection to be something spiritual that happens to a person at the moment when he believes. Perhaps they thought that, since they had already died and risen with Christ by faith, then death itself was the thing that led to the full realisation of their resurrection. It meant an end to the body, such that the spirit of the person could return to God forever. Thus for them the resurrection was past and spiritual, not future and bodily. That is why some of them maintained that "there is no resurrection of the dead". But the apostle Paul brings them back to reality. The resurrection of Christ was not spiritual but bodily. Consequently our resurrection too will be a bodily one.
After His crucifixion and death, the risen Lord was seen by the apostles alive, in a body, with physical and not spiritual eyes. And that happened after He had been "buried" (v.4). Burial is something that happens with a person's body after his death and it underlines not only the materiality and reality of his death, but also the materiality and reality of His resurrection. After he was resurrected, Jesus appeared to his disciples (Luke 24:36-43).
Note that this text specifically underlines the fact that Jesus is not only a spirit, but that he has a body, which has "flesh and bones" and a body which can take food.
Christ is the "first fruit". The first fruit is a guarantee of the harvest. As the first fruit is, so will be the rest of the fruit. For Paul the resurrection of the dead is part of the events of the Last Days. The fact that Christ's resurrection has taken place signifies that the future has already begun to come about. What God has begun with Christ, He will complete through the believers. Just as He has been resurrected, so all those who have died with faith in Him will also be resurrected. The metaphor of the first fruit is a particularly apt choice to represent the time in which we find ourselves by God's clock. The first fruits have already been harvested, but the harvest has still not been finally gathered in. The resurrection of Christ is already a fact, but our resurrection is still in the future.
Just as through the sin of Adam something was unlocked and set in motion, namely sin and death, so in Christ something else was unlocked and set in motion, namely righteousness and life. Because of Adam we continue to this day to harvest sin and death, but it is just as certain that those who are in Christ at His coming will reap resurrection and eternal life.
Not only that - through the resurrection of Christ, God put into action a large-scale operation, at the finale of which everyone in this world will submit to Him, so that He will be "all in all".
If we do not hope for a future resurrection, then everything we do would be in vain. Better then to enjoy worldly pleasures as much as we can and not to think at all about God and life after death.
"Let us eat and drink,
for tomorrow we die."
The apostle Paul finishes the first part of his teaching with this appeal:
With these words, he classifies the idea of a past resurrection as false teaching. False teaching that could produce only falling morals and separation from God.
By this point Paul has already proved his assertion that our resurrection has not yet taken place. It is still a forthcoming, future event. The question remains however of the nature of the resurrection body. Paul has already hinted what it will be like. As the first fruit is, so will the rest be (v.20). Here he completes his argument by entering into an imaginary dispute with his opponents. In this dispute he moves from the known to the unknown. The known is this - that sowing is not an end but a beginning, and that every seed produces fruit according to its kind. The unknown is that death is not an end, but the beginning of a new life and that the stem and fruit of the plant are different in kind from the seed, but all of them together - seed, stem and fruit - represent the same plant.
For Paul death is not an end but a sowing. The sowing is not the end of the seed, but the beginning of its new life. The sheaves grow as a result of the death of the seeds. You do not sow what will be, but what will be comes as a result of the death of what is. Jesus said a similar thing in John 12:23-26.
Not only is the sowing not an end but the beginning of life, but the seed is different in form from the shoot and fruit of the plant (v.37-38).
Notwithstanding that the "body" of the plant is different in form from the seed from which it has grown, even so it belongs to its seed. It is the same plant. It is just the same with resurrection bodies. Our present, physical bodies are like seeds. Our future resurrection bodies are like sprouting plants, but the perishable and the imperishable body belong to one and the same person.
Each body is made by God to correspond to the purposes for which it was created. Birds have bodies suited to flying. Fish have bodies suited to swimming. So too our perishable bodies are made for life in this world, whilst our resurrection bodies are made for life in eternity.
Just as the seed is different from the plant, so too the mortal body is different from the immortal.
Christ is the last Adam and the Second Man. Those who have believed in Him and received Him will become like He is. Just as He was transformed and through His resurrection received a heavenly body, so we too will receive heavenly bodies at His coming.
How have we "borne the likeness of the earthly man"? Can anyone remember how he was born into this world? Each one of us, before he began living in this world, lived for about nine months in his mother's womb. There he fed, there he went to the toilet, there he swam in the amniotic fluid. In a moment, however, by some or other secret laws of life, we came out from the wombs of our mothers, we breathed oxygen, we gave our first cry and we began living in a different environment. Now we live in that environment. The day will come, however, when we leave this world. But that will not be the end, because first of all, as bodiless spirits, we will wait in Christ's presence for God's time. Then, on the Day of His Coming "we will awake" and, as we look, we will see that we have new bodies - bodies that do not get ill, bodies that do not grow old, bodies that do not die, bodies like that of Jesus. The apostle John also says this (1 John 3.2).
And so, our resurrection is not in the past. It awaits us in the future. Moreover it is not only spiritual. It is bodily. However, the fact that it is bodily does not mean that the resurrection body will have the same nature as the mortal one. It is different in form, but still continues to belong to the same person.
Paul finishes his teaching on the resurrection of the dead with a majestic and victorious passage that sounds like a hymn (vv.50-53).
Here Paul is talking about the rapture of the church, what will happen "at the last trumpet" (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18).
At the time when he wrote these epistles to the Thessalonians and the Corinthians, he believed that Christ would return before his death. This is the dream of every believer - for Jesus to come and take him before his death, so that he will not have to pass "through the valley of the shadow of death".
It should also be noted, that when Paul talks about a "mystery", he does not mean information that is accessible only to a particular number of initiated individuals. A "mystery" is a doctrine that has not been revealed to us up to that moment but which has been given as a revelation to the apostles to be shared with the whole church. In 1 Corinthians 4:1 Paul says:
The doctrine of the rapture of the church is not something said "in secret". It is a doctrine of the church. In one way or another at the coming of Christ we will be resurrected. Then our triumph will be indescribable.
Paul completes the chapter by returning us from the future to the present.
Yes, our future is glorious, but until it comes, we will have to be tested, we will have to be perfected, we will have to serve God and endure difficulties and hardships. However, all this is not in vain, because it is on behalf of more resurrected people.