CRITICAL NOTES
Note:
1. The main teaching of chapter is almost pure dogma. It is for the most part matter of simple revelation and belief.
2. The earliest extant written account of the appearances of the Risen Lord. The earliest Gospel is not so early as this. This account written not more than thirty years after the asserted Resurrection of Christ. [Important in its bearing upon 1 Corinthians 15:6.]
1 Corinthians 15:1. I declare.—With some shade of reproach that they required it. See the same phrase, 1 Corinthians 12:3; 2 Corinthians 8:1; Ephesians 6:21; Colossians 4:7; 2 Peter 1:16.
1. Note, Christ’s resurrection is an integral part of “the Gospel”; which is here both the historical facts, and the good news founded upon, rooted in, the facts. (Cf. Galatians 1:6-9.)
2. Note the cumulative “also, also, also.” Q.d. “You have as great a stake in the matter of its falsehood or truth as I have. True, I preached it; but so did you accept it, and it is your basis of life.”
3. Note “which … in which … by (means of) which.” (Cf. “we stand” in Romans 5:2; Romans 11:20.)
1 Corinthians 15:2.—Note the punctuation and supplied words of the Ye are (being) saved.—Continuously; present part., as usual. In what word.—Literally; so then “the word of the Cross” (1 Corinthians 1:18) includes much more than merely the Crucifixion; there would be no Atonement without a Resurrection. In vain Choose between
(1) margin, and
(2) “so as to end after all in no saving result” (Galatians 3:4; Galatians 4:11).
(1) would imply a baseless belief;
(2) a fruitless belief. (For the thought of
(2) Hebrews 2:11.) Evans prefers “rashly, without due reflection.”
1 Corinthians 15:3. I received, … I delivered.… Ye received (1 Corinthians 15:1).—Three first links in tradition. A typical preacher:
(1) A witness; of
(2) what he heard at first-hand and himself had seen;
(3) not creator of message; it is objective, not subjective. First of all.—Not
(1) in order of time in the history of his preaching at Corinth, nor
(2) in the order of doctrine in their Christian instruction, but
(3) as of first-rate importance. Died … buried … rose.—These are all included in the “word of The Cross” (1 Corinthians 1:18). For our sins.—Evidently, then, the vicarious character of the death of Christ must not be made to rest, in (say) 2 Corinthians 5:15, upon the mere lexical force of the preposition; it is abundantly to be gathered from the sense of (say) John 11:50. See other prepositions in Romans 4:25; Galatians 1:4; 1 Peter 3:18. According to the Scriptures.—E.g. Isaiah 53:5; Isaiah 53:8; (Daniel 9:26); Psalms 22.; Zechariah 12:10; the Paschal Lamb. See how authoritatively the Risen Lord put His disciples into this Christian way of reading the Old Testament (Luke 24:25-27; Luke 24:44-46). [Everything He did and said on that first Christian “Sunday” was carefully chosen and significant—typical—carrying a large principle with it.] So before His death (Luke 22:37). Peter, at Pentecost, at once began using this Christian method of exposition; N.B., at Pentecost, another day which carried ruling precedents with it (Acts 2:25-31). [Peter kept to this principle (1 Peter 1:11; 1 Peter 2:24). As to New Testament in Old Testament, cf. also Acts 8:35; Acts 13:33-35; Acts 17:3; Acts 26:22-23; John 2:22; John 20:9.] “These words carry us back to a time when the events of Christianity required not only to be illustrated or confirmed, but to be justified by reference to Judaism” (Stanley).
1 Corinthians 15:4. Buried.—Not an unimportant link in the chain of Christian evidences. Looks, moreover, like a touch of the oral detail with which the story was by the first preachers communicated. Emphasised also in each of the four Gospels. Yet did not need the emphatic clenching “According to the Scriptures.” “Earth sacred above all planets as the burial-place of the Redeemer” (Beecher). Was raised.—Not “rose”: cf. Psalms 2:7; Isaiah 55:3 (Hosea 6:2); Psalms 16:10.
1 Corinthians 15:5. Cephas.—The first man, to see the Risen Christ. A very important coincidence with apparently casual words in Mark 16:7 (and Luke 24:34, which most probably has this force). Cephas too [“Cephas,” as they said at Corinth] was an authority at Corinth; an ad homines touch, this. Twelve.—Already “officially” equivalent to “the Apostolic college”; in fact ten (Luke, as above), and then eleven (John 20:26).
1 Corinthians 15:6. Five hundred … at once.—Probably in Matthew 28:16 (perhaps confirmed by John 21:1). The one hundred and twenty of Acts 1 were only those in Jerusalem. Paul’s word, so obviously open to challenge, and, if false or mistaken, to refutation, is authority for this fact. [Not to insist upon his inspiration.] The omission of this in the Gospels agrees with John 20:30. Fallen asleep.—(1 Corinthians 15:18; cf. 1 Corinthians 7:39; 1 Corinthians 11:30.) After the death of Christ, dying is never in the New Testament called “death,” in connection with Christians. Was the phrase born of the words of Christ, Matthew 9:24? “The Church never dies or thinks of death, though she buries her dead” (Pope). Remain.— John 21:22-23; 1 Thessalonians 4:15.
1 Corinthians 15:7. James.—Unrecorded. The James of Acts 15, and of the Epistle. Tradition (in “Gospel of the Hebrews”) that (from Matthew 26:29) James (unbelieving in John 7:5) had vowed neither to eat, from the Last Supper onward, until he had seen the Risen Lord. Jesus appeared to Him. “Bring a table and bread. My brother, eat thy bread because the Son of Man is risen from the dead.” See the prominence of Cephas and James in Galatians 1,
2. All the apostles.—Choose between John 20:26; Matthew 28:16; and Acts 1:4. [Evans would emphasise “apostles” rather than “all.”]
1 Corinthians 15:8. Due time.—Rather lay stress on the physical inferiority of the abortive-born than upon the comparative time of birth. [Paul was born long after time, not before time.] Stanley gives Suet., Octavius, xxxv. 2, as authority for magistrates appointed irregularly being called abortivi. To me.—A necessary credential to put him on equality with Cephas and the rest. See 1 Corinthians 9:1; Acts 9:17 (where Ananias is presumably reporting what he has learned from Christ Himself), Acts 26:16 (read in connection with Galatians 1:16, which must not be forced into mechanically restricted coincidence with this “appearance” alone). Last of (them) all.
1 Corinthians 15:9.—“I am nothing;” 1 Corinthians 15:10, “I am greater than any of them.” Cf. another Pharisee (Luke 18:10).
1 Corinthians 15:10. In vain.—Cf. 2 Corinthians 6:1. [Like the stony ground, or thorny-ground, hearers.] Cf. also Ephesians 3:8; 1 Timothy 1:12-16.
HOMILETIC ANALYSIS.— 1 Corinthians 15:1-11
Paul and the Gospel.
I. Paul himself.—
1. The evangelist.—Note this:
(1) He is preaching the Gospel whilst he is teaching such many-sided facts as these of our paragraph, and whilst rising to such an exalted strain of prophecy as follows in the chapter. He is “the Prophet Paul.” He claims in 1 Thessalonians 4:15 to speak “in the word of the Lord,” like a prophet of the old dispensation (cf., e.g., 1 Kings 20:35-36). In this very chapter he soon leaves behind him Old Testament Scripture and Contemporary Testimony, and soars away to a height and into a glory of Revelation as to the future, where our eye can scarcely see anything distinctly for very brightness, and where we hear his words indeed, but can hardly interpret some of them. Yet he never ceases to be practical. The lark at her highest flight, and lost in a blaze of glory where her song is indistinct for very distance, belongs to earth. Paul’s sudden, swift return to theology in 1 Corinthians 15:56-57, and to the practical, prosaic round of daily duty and service in 1 Corinthians 15:58, is very like her sudden drop to her nest, and to her motherly duty to her young ones, when her song is done. None of these exalted themes are revealed merely for the sake of giving, even accurate, information about the future. What is revealed is for the sake of its bearing upon practical life; so much only is revealed as may serve this purpose, [(a) “What is that to thee? Follow thou Me” (John 21:22). (b) “Are there few that be saved?” “Enter ye in at the strait gate,” i.e. “Few or many, see that you make one” (Luke 13:23). (c) “Lord, who did sin, this man or his parents?… We must work the works of Him that sent Me while it is day” (John 9:2; John 9:4). (d) These may illustrate a Bible reading on 2 Timothy 2:23.]
(2) All this sheds useful light on his words in 1 Corinthians 2:2: “Christ, and Him crucified,” is no narrow theme. “The Cross” touches everything in the history of a fallen, redeemed race. But “the Cross” here includes the Resurrection. “So we preached,” when he came to Corinth. No scorn should be poured on the Evangelical preachers of the Georgian Revival that with them it was all “the Cross,” “the blood.” These themes were greatly prominent; the men were physicians for souls, who had found by observation and comparison of many thousands of “cases,” of all types, ages, ranks, what was the mischief of the human heart, and, by as wide experiment, what form of presentation of the truth, and what particular detail of the whole round of Truth, best cured their “sick.” Certainly results justified them. But they did not, in point of fact, confine themselves so literally to the Cross. They quite understood, “saved by His life” (Romans 5:10), and preached the Resurrection and the high-priestly Intercession as the necessary complements of Calvary. A “Gospel” preacher will roam far and wide in the field of revealed knowledge; he will explore in many directions, but he will always start from the Cross; he will account himself to have lost his bearings when he can no longer see it; he will account himself “lost” when he has wandered so far that the Cross has sunk beneath his mental horizon; he will keep open, however far afield, his communications with this Sacred Base of operations. Every theme will be traced up to, and treated as it is related to, the Cross and its atonement; subject to that condition, every theme of Revelation and its suggestions is open to him. Such themes as the Resurrection of the Lord, of the saints, of the sinner; the victory of the Lord over all opposing evil; the mysterious “End”;—so dealt with, these are all part of “the Gospel.” His prime qualification is that he is—
2. Paul the witness.—
(1) To have seen Christ Jesus as the Risen Lord was a necessary credential of apostleship, in the narrowest sense of that title. It made Paul, perhaps, rather than Matthias (Acts 1:26), the twelfth of these patriarchs of the new Israel. [The Benjamite was the youngest-born, the Benjamin, amongst them.] Peter may have been too forward [Pentecost had not yet given the fulness of the Spirit] in choosing the man, but at least he was right as to the requisite credential: “One must be ordained to be a witness with us of His resurrection.” The Resurrection gives an adequate account of the origin of the Christian Church; thus actually to have seen Christ gives an adequate account of the transformation of Saul into Paul; taking all the circumstances of the case into the reckoning, nothing else does. To see the glorious Form, and to hear the voice of Jesus of Nazareth speaking as from heaven to him, years after He had been accounted dead, buried, and finally disposed of, like any other dead man,—this was a fact which at one blow brought down in ruins all the creed and all the personal righteousness of Saul of Tarsus. “These Nazarenes, then, whom I have been imprisoning because they said that the Crucified One was living again, and even bringing to the death when I could not get them to apostatise,—they were right; I have been wrong. My orthodox Judaism has no room for this fact; I must needs recast it. And who is He Whom I have despised, hated, calling Him a ‘blasphemer,’ who deserved to be crucified? I have been mistaken. I have been the blasphemer. I am the sinner—chief of sinners!” The one fact revolutionised Paul’s life. [No man’s life is ever the same, he cannot himself be again the same, when once he has intelligently, distinctly, come face to face with the Risen Christ and His claims. The meeting may lead to salvation; it may intensify rebellion: but life can never after be the same.] He also would have been the most earnest in saying that his capacity to be a witness to the Resurrection was no mere eyewitness capacity for testifying to a bare historical fact, however important and however far-reaching in its consequences. He knows of a belief in and a confession of a Risen Christ which only coexists with, which indeed is, salvation (Romans 10:9-10). The aim of his personal life is to have a knowledge, which is a sharing, of the resurrection of his Lord (Philippians 3:10-11). The Christian apologist of to-day, rightly enough, only appeals to the eyewitnesses of the historic fact; but Paul would have made the appeal of his “testimony” to lie here,—not that, so many years ago, God revealed His (risen) Son to him—a fact to grow more and more dim, perhaps, as it receded into the perspective of the past, and to become every year more and more a memory, open to challenge and to critical doubt as to its validity,—but that God, then and ever after, “revealed His (risen) Son in him” (Galatians 1:16); the historical fact became an experienced one; the objective having a subjective which was its counterpart, and its continuously new verification.
(2) Still, here Paul is the historic witness, “delivering what” he has “first received.” For apologetic or evidential purposes, the “simpler” the witness, so he be manifestly honest, the stronger the evidence he gives. The man who has evidently no arrière pensée, who in all transparent directness does nothing but repeat what he knows at first-hand, is the best purveyor of facts for a verdict. Paul, like his brother apostles, was “put in trust with the Gospel” (1 Thessalonians 2:4); they were simply “stewards of the mysteries,” not creators or proprietors (1 Corinthians 4:1); it is “a deposit” (2 Timothy 1:14); as with every true preacher, there is with him no “feigning these things out of his own mind.” [He had, moreover, “received” it just as the Corinthians had received it in their turn from him. In them it had been a “believing” which made them, who were once “without strength,” to “stand,” and had “saved” them.] The old argument is of perpetual force, that the very inartificiality of the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection, the very “discrepancies” which testify to independence and to absence of collusive design, are guarantees of the truthfulness of the witnesses, and so inferentially to the truth of their story. [So, again, the only effective preacher of the Gospel is one who “delivers what” he has “received.” Hence his knowledge of the facts and of the dogmas depending upon them, here passes over into his personal character. He is—].
3. Paul the sinner saved.—
(1) How diverse his tone: in 1 Corinthians 15:9 he labours, he accumulates language of depreciation, to make out that he is nothing before God and in comparison with the rest of the Apostolic company; in 1 Corinthians 15:10 he boldly claims equality with the best of men, and to be more than they all. “Is that honest and consistent with Christian sincerity? Particularly, is it true when he says ‘least of all’ [and ‘chief of sinners’]? (1 Timothy 1:15). Would you not rather call him chief of apostles, chief of saints?” Natural questions. Yet all he says is true. [2 Corinthians 2:17 should apply most strictly to a man’s statement of his Christian experience, particularly to his relation of his ante-conversion experience. There is no use, and no honour done to God, in forgetting, or undervaluing, or denying, the good wrought in a man by the Spirit of God, even before by regeneration he became definitely a Christian.] For “I persecuted the Church of God.” (a) Sin once committed, not even God can undo it. Pardon of the past cannot alter the past. It may be forgiven, but it abides a fact. Paul did stand by, “consenting,” when Stephen was stoned, as certainly as he did study in the school of Gamaliel. The veil of Divine mercy may “cover” the sin, but the thing is there. Sins fade from our memory, or the remembrance may lose its poignancy by time [it evidently did not with Paul]; God’s anger on account of them is turned away, from the moment that the sinner trusts in Christ; from that moment there is no hell to fear on their account: but they are there. The prodigal sits forgiven and happy at his father’s table, but the riot of a far country is a fact and the inheritance is wasted. The bankrupt gets his order of discharge, but his debts are facts nevertheless. And he owes them still. Legally they no longer concern him; he is “justified” from them. He may prosper, and his new gains are safe; but he is in debt still. The law and the favour of his creditors make him safe; but an honest man feels that morally and in fact he is a debtor still. So Paul, the chief apostle, is God’s debtor still. In the moment fixed precisely for his readers in Philippians 3:7, a line was graciously drawn across the record of his life; nothing beyond it would again come up to his condemnation. But the line was drawn by grace, by mere favour for the sake of Another. The persecutor might and did build high in holy attainment, but the foundation was an act of favour, grace, and only grace. “By the grace of God I am,” etc., is as continuously true of his standing before God as of his abundant and fruitful life-activity. In himself and his own status, this chief apostle is “not meet to be called an apostle, because,” etc. The guilt of his persecution is not now upon him; he is being sanctified from his love of sin; it has no dominion over him, we may well believe; he is pardoned, rejoicing, God-honoured, holy. But there is the fact, unalterable to all eternity,—“I persecuted.” And the remembrance of all this will make such words as 1 Corinthians 15:9 always natural and always true. (b) How does that father [e.g. John Tregenoweth: His Mark, M. G. Pearse] in after-years look upon that child whom years ago he injured or blinded in the utter ignorance of deep intoxication? How does that man look upon his friend, when he finds that in an hour of passion, though in perfect good faith [the good faith of a madman], he said and did what proves to have been utterly false and to have done a lifelong wrong to his friend, at least with some who have not come, or will not, to know his friend as he now knows him? How does he feel, who in the dark has struck his very brother, supposing the while that he was resisting an enemy? With all the energy of a grand native capacity and all the force of intense conviction, Paul had flung himself against [“fallen upon” (Matthew 21:44)] his Brother, his Best Friend, the Redeemer of his soul, his Divine Messiah. True he “did it ignorantly,” but he did it. Oh, the horror of it! Oh, the shame of it! Oh, the wrong, the sin, of it! “Chief of sinners!” “Least of the apostles! Not worthy to be called an apostle!” The words are natural, honest, true. All this, then, being remembered, he is free to say—
(2) “More than they all.” But “by the grace of God.” [Some poor, wretched, lost souls on earth have to say, and in hell will have to say eternally, “In spite of the grace of God, I am what I am!” Men may “receive the grace of God in vain,” making it to end in no such saving result as it was designed to accomplish. There are some lives of which one has to say, reversing Romans 5:20, “Where grace abounded, sin did much more abound.” In many senses true, “What maketh heaven, that maketh hell.” Paul is a “good steward of the grace of God” (1 Peter 4:10).] He is not here thinking only or principally of his standing with God, but of himself as measured by what he has been able to accomplish for his Master’s work. Not merely “by the favour of God”; “grace” seldom means so little as that in the New Testament. It is rather the actual power which has quickened and enlightened the mind, and energised the will, and aroused the devotion of the heart; a power and force which, when pursued to its last analysis, is revealed as the indwelling, personal Spirit of God. [John Hunt, one of the early missionaries to the Fiji islands, desiring to impress this practical interchangeableness of the thoughts, “grace” and “Holy Spirit,” in a preliminary and confessedly tentative rendering of some of the Epistles into the Bau dialect, several times deliberately translated “grace” by “Holy Spirit” (told to H. J. F. by Hunt’s colleague, R. B. Lyth).]
(3) The meaning and practical value of such self-assertion as is here found in Paul’s letters, is dealt with in many other places of these Epistles, particularly chap. 9 and 2 Corinthians 10 sqq. It is never the gratuitous parading of himself which is natural to the vain man, who cannot be happy unless he is the centre of attention; nor the masterful self-assertion of the consciously strong man. It is always forced upon him by others (2 Corinthians 12:11, “Ye have compelled me”); it is forced out from him by others. It is here a question of safeguarding and vindicating an Apostolic status and consequent authority, whose primary purpose and main worth were the service of the Churches and the “edification” of the Corinthians themselves (2 Corinthians 10:8). And, moreover, with the more reason, that he found his action in declining the maintenance by the Church which other teachers accepted, was misconstrued into a confession of conscious inferiority of status. A Christian man cannot be too utterly humble as before God; his sense of abundant and entire indebtedness to the grace of God for all he is, and for all he has been able to accomplish, cannot be kept too keen. After every new success [and at every new “failure”] he will do wisely to present himself before God, with fullest acknowledgment that in it all he is only the organon of the Spirit of God. [There are two moments when Self is very near and when self-centering thought is a very real peril to the spiritual life; the moment of “more abundant” success, and the moment of more abundant failure.] Comparison with his fellow-workers is a dangerous occupation of thought for any man, and, as here, needs instantly and constantly guarding with the fullest acknowledgment, “Yet not I, but … God.” [Cf. another, “Yet not I, but,” etc. (Galatians 2:20), where the thought is substantially unaffected by the important various reading.] It will be the rarest occupation of his meditation, and still more rarely will such words of self-assertion come to his lips. The facts of his life and work best speak for him. Yet, like Paul, he may thankfully appear before his Master,—like the servant in the Parable of the Pounds [not, of course, the Talents, the structure and teaching of which illustrate a distinctly different point],—whose pound has gained ten pounds, whilst the same original “capital” in the case of his fellow-servants has only produced five or none (Luke 19:16-20); and may remember how greater native capacity and more abundant work have co-operated with the grace of God, to give him a real pre-eminence in toil and fruit. And he may bear himself amongst his fellows as one in whom the grace of God has found a conspicuous and instructive example of what it can do in human nature. But all for the glory of God, and for the advancement of the work committed to his hands.
We have also in this paragraph:—
II. An early account of “the Gospel” as,
1. Resting on facts;
2. Rooted in Old Testament Scripture;
3. Received by faith.
1. Resting on facts.—
(1) If any facts of ancient history can be attested at all, such main outlines at the least of the Gospel story as are given here may be. Naturally such facts, particularly that of Christ’s resurrection from a real death, need more evidence than do facts against which no presumption arises from their being unlike those of ordinary experience. “Need,” for producing conviction in ordinary minds; for one “proof,” if it were irrefragable and gave demonstration, may establish a certainty; anything beyond simply facilitates belief, by eliminating the chances of error which may lurk behind a single proof, and by giving the (not simply added, but) multiple certainty of convergent proofs, and by reducing to a minimum the force of any preliminary presumption against. When a writer says, “Early Christianity was, in all its essentials, a special development of the common religious ideas of Asia Minor and Syria. It was the creed of Adonis, the creed of Attis, dressed up afresh and applied with minor differences to a certain historical or mythical personage, said to have lived in Galilee about the beginning of the Christian era. Of this personage himself we know really nothing but the name or names; every supposed fact or incident related of him is merely one of the common and universal incidents related of all the other gods” (Grant Allen, Fortnightly Review, September 1893),—he is not only asserting what few responsible historical students would affirm, but is displaying a scepticism which would make any certainty about all ancient history, or about any facts not actually within a man’s direct personal knowledge, impossible. Historical evidence is probable evidence; but sufficient testimony may make probability practical certainty.
(2) These verses are a piece of documentary evidence acknowledged on all hands to be of the highest value. There is no important disbelief that they are part of a letter of a man practically a contemporary of the events he chronicles, writing not more than twenty-eight or thirty years after the date assumed for them. They are of a good class of testimony; epistolary, incidentally stated, not formally proved; asserted to be accepted by the readers of the letters as well as by the writer; and that, moreover, by readers many of whom were at most not favourably disposed towards the writer, whilst some of them would have been glad to discredit anything he was or said; especially when also he is here using what he claims to be their belief, to rebuke and refute what he asserts to be their inexcusable, unreasonable, mischievous error. The fact of a resurrection of a dead Christ is not one hard to be brought to the test; it is not easy, or a thing easily credible as an explanatory theory, to mistake for a Divine man risen from the dead in full vigour and glory a crucified sufferer, never really dead, reviving from a swoon, creeping feebly out of a grave (and this especially guarded) to an obscure life where no most interested enemy ever suspected His presence, or succeeded in discovering Him. The death was officially secured and acknowledged; the burial was conducted by friends, but with the cognisance and under the surveillance of enemies; a real resurrection was not difficult of verification or disproof. Fraud or conscious deception on the part of the early witnesses is not now seriously alleged.
(3) Very marked and warranted attention has of late been drawn to the evidence of 1 Corinthians 15:6. Its force was long ago perceived, but it has come into prominence as meeting the suggestion of some hallucination of a woman, infecting other women, and working with a predisposition to believe [a thing entirely without evidence, and against all such evidence as is extant, whatever be its value], to make a company of disheartened men believe that, not only was Jesus risen, but that they had seen Him so risen. “The greater part” of five hundred simultaneous spectators and auditors of the Risen Lord remained for testimony and examination. I.e. not fewer than two hundred and fifty-one, and perhaps three or four hundred, persons are asserted by Paul to be still living, not later than thirty years (at the outside) after the fact in question,—a fact about which there could be little room for mistake,—and all of them most thoroughly assured that they all saw the Crucified Christ at one and the same time. The history of conspiracies does not make it likely that in this one case only there should never have been either a penitent, or a traitor, to reveal a concerted deception, if even so many could have been brought to agree to it in the first instance. One person may be under an illusion, but hardly twelve, or two hundred and fifty-one, or five hundred; and certainly no two or twelve or five hundred would be under the same illusion, and all under the same at once. The number of the simultaneous witnesses eliminates everything subjective,—predisposition, illusion, temperament, fraud. [Myths, it is also urged, take longer time to grow than did this “myth” of Christ’s miracles and resurrection, which (N.B.) had plainly already “grown,” some years earlier than this Corinthian date. Myth, or subjective persuasion, does not account for the holy character and effects of the story. A myth, or a story whose basis was a predisposition or a temperament or a mistake, does not afford adequate foundation for the Christian Church, or account for the character and the steadfastness of the first Christians, who, against all their interests, against all the tendencies of the sinful human heart, and at severe and deadly cost, persisted in their creed and succeeded in spreading it. Nor do they account for the perennial vitality of the belief age after age, or for its renewing power in all races, Churches, social ranks, ages, both sexes, etc.
2. Rooted in Old Testament Scripture.—
(1) Christianity and its several basal facts are never fairly judged if brought to the bar standing alone. Its most startlingly miraculous fact loses much presumptive improbability, gains some presumptive probability, if it is seen to be part of a coherent scheme of facts and doctrines, in which each lends meaning and support to every other, and which gives an adequate reason for the divergence from the “natural” order and ordinary human experience. The whole company of facts must be brought to trial in their combination. [E.g. on the Christian theory of the nature and work of Christ, it is not improbable that His entrance into the world should be exceptional, or that His departure from it should be exceptional; that such a person for such a purpose should work miracles, or rise from the dead. Christianity, on its own suppositions, gives an adequate reason for all the “miraculous” in it.]
(2) Christianity must be read in the light of this fact amongst others, that it was preceded by a collection of books, held sacred by its Jewish opponents, of which it claims to be the continuation, the expansion, the complement, the fulfilment (Hebrews 1:1). The very claim is noteworthy, in face of the notoriously unfriendly attitude of Judaism to Christianity from the very first; let the reasons for making such a claim be considered. However to be accounted for, the fact remains that the Old Testament from beginning to end contains many things, many passages, which exhibit a wonderful coincidence with, and suitableness to, the history and the Christian account of the work of Christ. The Founder of Christianity Himself put His followers upon the track of discovery of such correspondences. (See Critical Notes.) Christianity and the Resurrection of its Christ are no isolated facts, sprung full-grown into a void place in the history of religions. The theory of the creation of a Christ by His followers out of presuppositions and expectations gathered from their reading of the Old Testament, disregards the only available or colourable historic evidence, that their reading and training in the Old Testament led them, as it led their Jewish enemies, into quite another line of conception and expectation of the Christ. Old Testament and New Testament are two parts of one Revelation. The Mosaic system is not the main stream of the Old Testament. It “came in” by the way; “it was added” for a special purpose (Romans 5:20; Galatians 3:19); it flows alongside of the main stream. It is abundantly rich in teaching about Christ and the Gospel, the very arrangements of the Tabernacle being an object lesson in Divine truth (Hebrews 9:8; Hebrews 9:11). But “the Scriptures” are larger than “the Law,” and some are older, or contain a record of an older revelation, than “the Law.” Christ, and the Resurrection which sets the seal of completeness upon His redeeming work, are the fulfilment of, not the hope of Israel only, but of man. In Christ are the pledge and the contents of a covenant as old as Abraham (Galatians 3:14; Galatians 3:16; Galatians 3:29). Christ is a new Adam, over against the first Adam. The importance of rooting the new Gospel thus firmly in the Old Testament Scriptures lay in this, that it was not Israelite only in its scope and redemption grace, but wide as mankind. And amongst its cogent “evidences” is this, that it fulfils previsions, predictions, promises, hopes, put on record long before—fulfils them where only One Mind, the Divine, could have arranged the coincidences, the correspondences, the paired anticipations and realisations (see Appended Note).
3. Received by faith.—“Ye believed;” “unless ye believed in vain.” How vital was the connection between the truth of the history and their personal Christian life will be seen subsequently in the chapter (1 Corinthians 15:12-19). But it is there discussed with regard rather to the theory of the Christian life. Practically the connection is very close. John often connects faith in the Incarnation with regeneration (1 Ephesians 4:15; Ephesians 5:5; Ephesians 5:10-12, etc.). Paul himself very closely connects salvation with faith in the Resurrection of Christ [Romans 10:9; observe also how this is rooted in Old Testament Scripture, Deuteronomy 30:14]. The Lord and Teacher of both had connected “eternal life” with “knowing the Only True God” (John 17:3). In fact, no doctrine is believed in until it has become a truth into which living experience has admitted a man. He may indeed fall away, fearfully, from such knowledge as is even thus gained (Hebrews 10:26; Hebrews 6:4-6). But it is a remote possibility. The people of Christ are “sanctified by the truth.” They have within themselves a Faith deeper than a mere Creed, however intelligently accepted and held. Without being a theologian a man may be a believer, and one also who can give a good account of his “faith.” A new environment, where unbelief is customary; a crop of difficulties and objections, not known or appreciated earlier; above all, a moral deterioration; may sever the merely “othodox man” from his creed. The believer “stands” by his faith; it gives him status before God—his only status; it brings him a real strength in which he “stands” against trial, persecution, doubt. The martyrs were drawn from this class of believers. They died for truths which had become part of their very selves, for truths which had made them what they were. [Might it be said by way of illustration, that the merely orthodox man, like the crustacean, carries his skeleton and shield and strength outside him, and so can easily “cast” it, as the crustaceans do; whilst the believer has his supporting, strengthening “truth” within, where vertebrates have their skeleton? The skeleton within the man is belief; the skeleton outside the man is orthodoxy.]
SEPARATE HOMILIES
1 Corinthians 15:5-6. “According to the Scriptures.”—Two points grow out of this phrase:—
I. This organic unity between Old Testament and New Testament, and between their separate component parts, must not be underestimated. It is a fact perceived by so many students of Scripture, of such various types of mind and training, and so variously equipped with “learning,” possessing much or little of it, or (in the ordinary sense) none; it is a fact the evidence for which, whilst it can be conclusively stated in broad outline, nevertheless so reveals its full force, and the abundance of material from which it is drawn, only to patient and minute students of the Scripture, every fresh reading adding to the evidence both wealth and cogency; that it cannot be dismissed as a mistake, a subjective fancy, the dream of a particular, “mystical,” cast of mind, or of a particular school of interpretation. All devout readers find forced upon them a consistent scheme and plan in a Revelation developing from the earliest ages, and from what have hitherto been reputed the earliest books, to the latest. Above all, they have seen a disclosure of the coming Christ, growing fuller in detail, more definite in outline, from the beginning onwards. The fact has been too often perceived and verified by too great a number and variety of students of Scripture to be dismissed as an error. Part and part “hang together”; part and part give and receive light and confirmation in turn; the coincidences between Old Testament and New Testament are so many, so often incidental, so often “trivial”—many times escaping notice at a first or many a subsequent reading—that, even mathematically speaking, the chances are infinite against the Coincidence being anything less than, any other than, a real, designed, organic Connection. All the results of many centuries of study of Scripture by students of all types have accumulated “evidence” of internal harmony, of a coherent history, embodying a consistent, gradually unfolding scheme of truth, and an ever clearer disclosure of a Personality, all of which culminates in Christianity and Christ, and finds its clearest expression in Him as He is expounded by the Holy Spirit. All this must be taken account of in the present-day inquiries into the historical value of (say) the earlier story of Israel or of the Mosaic Institute, and into the literary history of the process by which the Bible has reached its present form. Higher Criticism approaches the problem of the origin and composition of the extant Bible, simply as dealing with an ancient literature. It endeavours to discover and exhibit the constituent elements of those books which it believes to show a composite structure; it hopes to trace the process of literary composition, as conducted by several hands at several points of time; it endeavours to trace and date the sources from which material has been gathered for our present books; it hopes to fix scientifically the authorship of whole books or separate portions. Moreover, it endeavours to appraise the historical value or no-value of the contents of the books. The process of inquiry is perfectly legitimate; the Bible may be examined from that standpoint, as from many others. The results arrived at are reached under the conditions and with the risks attaching to all “specialist” inquiry, or any many-sided or complex subject whatsoever. And they need checking by and co-ordinating with the results arrived at on all other lines of inquiry, and yielded by the examination of all other kinds of evidence, which may bear upon the problem of the literary origin and history of the composition of what, in the issue, is in the hands of the Church as the Old Testament and the New Testament,—the Bible. Inquirers and students who are not competent to attack the problem from the side of literary criticism can and do attack it from the side and study of the organic connection and consistent development of both history and doctrine which is found to obtain in the extant Bible. When some Higher Criticism pronounces that no books in their present form, and no very reliable history amongst their contents, date much farther back than (say) the days of Josiah, and that very much of the Mosaic Ritual Law, and even the Tabernacle itself, is a late, very late, and not very honest, after-thought of a priestly order, then the students of the organic structure and development ask that their results may also be taken into account before the verdict on the whole case is finally given. They point out, e.g., that in 1 Corinthians 15:22; 1 Corinthians 15:45-49 a parallel is brought out, and wrought out, between Adam and Christ and their respective relations to the race—a parallel which is by no means a mere Rabbinic allegorising of a story which may be a pretty and serviceable myth, but is a development of a great idea of God underlying the whole scheme of ruin and redemption, from its inception in Eden to its consummation in glory. Before the early pages of Genesis are dismissed as unhistoric, the place their narrative occupies in the organically developing Divine plan should be considered. If “Abraham” be a mere eponymic personage, it is difficult to attribute any serious present-day value to the arguments in Galatians 3:4 as to the relation of “the covenant confirmed to him by God in Christ” to the Law and to the Gospel and the privileges of believers. If the widely current critical account of the origin and history of the Tabernacle and its ritual of atoning and other sacrifices be true, what permanent worth, what truth which would be more than pretty fancies or happy allegorising, what truth for which God could be held responsible, would there be in all the discoveries therein, by (say) the writer of Hebrews, of anticipations of the Great Sacrifice and of the whole scheme of Sin and its Remedy? The whole story of Israel, and especially of its Exodus from Egypt and its Eisodus into Canaan, yields an abundant and abundantly verified harvest of points of spiritual significance and of parallelism with the regenerate life, and with even the historic life of Jesus of Nazareth. All these separate and very significant episodes of the Old Testament story are so used by Christ and His apostles as to bring them into the closest designed connection with the one, whole, harmonious, age-long unfolding of God’s redeeming idea and its historical introduction into the world. if Christ, if Redemption, if the Christian life are all “according to the Scriptures,”—“Law, Prophets, Psalms,” all (Luke 24:44),—then what are the Scriptures, even in their earliest portions? If they be not history, then there might have been indeed a developing story of a Redemptive Work, but at all events we have no reliable account of it. If Adam and Abraham and Moses and David are not certainly historical, then all the New Testament account of the Old Testament preparation for Christ, in which they are essential factors, has no practically certain value.
II. Another suggestion may also be of some practical value. If the Author of Nature be the same with the Author of Revelation, and if there is development apparent in the history of the process by which Nature and Revelation have reached, each of them, their present form and stage, it would only be in agreement with all we know of His work in other directions to expect that the principle of the development would be identical, though the facts with which in the one case and the other it stands connected would belong to diverse orders, whilst yet presenting some analogies to each other. Many a student of Scripture and Revelation can pretend to no such acquaintance with the facts of the natural world as enable him to exercise an independent judgment on the methods or conclusions of the man who is a student of biological science; but he does claim a fairly complete knowledge of the facts of his own special field, where moreover the area of the field is not too large to be very thoroughly known. What be finds to be the truth about development in revelation he would expect to find to hold true in nature—that and no more. He would expect to find that the ultimate form of the theory of Origins, accepted by the students of physical science, will coincide with the result of his own working on his own group of facts, and in his familiar field. He would say, e.g., that “Man came, and is, ‘according to the Scriptures’ of the ‘stone book’ of the earlier geological history of the earth, just as Christ is, and came, and died, and rose, ‘according to the Scriptures’ of the earlier, the Old Testament ‘strata’ of the successive stages of Revelation.” The idea of the Creator, first set forth in very meagre, simple form, has in both cases been more and more fully developed. From time to time, never apart from a distinct interposition of the will of the Author of all, a new stage has been reached, a new departure has been taken, a new embodiment of His idea has been exhibited, in both Nature and Revelation. The new form has always been on the same essential lines as the older, but with many modifications, with new touches here and there, with fuller detail everywhere, adapting the old to new conditions and to the requirements of a new stage in the ruling purpose. Until at last the one series of developing expositions of the Worker’s thought culminated in Man, and the other in the God-man. [Both in the end meet in Him (Hebrews 2).] Man is the goal of Creation; Christ of Revelation. Man sums up all the creatures which have preceded him; Christ and His history sum up all the persons and the history which preceded them. The development which is verifiable in the history that leads up to Christ will be found to be the verifiable development in the geological and biological history which has led up to man.
HOMILETIC SUGGESTIONS
1 Corinthians 15:6. “Fallen asleep.”—Sleep the new, Christian name for Death. The new, Christian name for a burial-place: Cœmetery (= Sleeping-place).
I. Merely an incident in a continuous life.—
1. No break at death in the personal life. The same Self awakes; and, through the night’s parenthesis in consciousness and activity, the same Self has gone on. [No inference to be drawn from the figure, as to any asserted loss of consciousness between death and resurrection. Figure only suitable at all as seen from the spectator’s standpoint, not the sleeper’s.] “I shall awake—I.” “I shall see for myself,” etc. Shall answer the call of the awakening trumpet, with the consciousness that it is my same Self which greets the dawn of the eternal Day.
2. As, of a morning, the happy soul has many a time awoke eager to resume “fellowship with the Father”; has awoke to find the Father, Who has been waking whilst the child slept, still there, just as He was there, filling the last moments of last night’s consciousness with the sense of His presence; so the soul which closed its eyes in the presence of the Father, wakes from this “Sleep” to say, as its first glad greeting of the Morning of Eternity: “When I awake I am still with Thee!” The same Self awakes, to find the same God, and to enjoy the same holy fellowship.
II. Sleep has the prospect of awakening.—Bold unbelief in the French Revolution wrote upon the gate of Père la Chaise, “Death is an eternal sleep.” No. Whatever Death may introduce to, it is but to a terminable, temporary experience. The “grave is not the goal” of life; only another, passing, stage towards the goal. [The certainty of the awakening “in Christ” is mainly in this chapter. But the man out of Christ is to remember how temporary is the episode called “Death”; how certain is the awakening; how he then takes up again, how indeed he has all through taken along with him, the old responsibility and guilt.]
III. A brief passage in our continuous existence.— Psalms 90:5 reminds how a night’s sound sleep seems but as a moment; a man seems only just to have come to rest. It will not be long before our “sleeping” shall be broken in upon by the voice of one who says tenderly, and yet mightily, “Talitha cumi” (almost = “Awake up, my child”). Then also rest is suggested; an escape from the trouble and clamour of life, and from the tension which strain brain and heart almost past endurance (2 Thessalonians 1:7).
IV. Remember: “Asleep in Christ;” “asleep through Jesus.”
V. Remember the first instance of the phrase: Stephen has struggled to his knees for a prayer, after the crush of the first stones, hurled upon his chest by the witnesses, as he lay upon the ground. Next he is struck down again by the hail of stones, or sinks exhausted. But he sees his Lord “standing,” watching the scene with keen interest; standing, as if He could not keep His seat upon His throne, in His eager restlessness to welcome the first to follow Him through the gate of blood into heaven’s rest. And he no longer sees the scowling, angry, murderous faces that glower upon “the Nazarene blasphemer.” The shouts of execration die out of his ears. He perhaps hardly longer feels the stones. He sees the Son of Man, and “falls asleep.” A rough bed for the death scene!
1 Corinthians 15:6. Some are fallen asleep.—The first reflection upon the early resting of one of the ministers [workers] of Jesus Christ comes most naturally in the words of His own comforting question, “Are there not twelve hours in the day?” He gave it as a reason for not shrinking from the risk of returning into a dangerous place at the call of duty. “Immortal till His work was done,” He would “go into Judæa again.” He would “walk today and to-morrow and the day following,” regardless alike of Herod’s threatening and of Judas’s treachery; the day has twelve hours, and it will surely see them to their close. This teaches us a new measurement of time. It is not the accomplishment of the threescore and ten or fourscore years which makes a life complete in the reckoning of God’s sanctuary. The life of a little child has its twelve hours. It may be a complete life, as God sees it, quite as truly as the life which has been dragged out to its utmost length of ninety years on a hundred. It may as perfectly have accomplished the thing whereto He sent it—it may have borne as real a testimony to His loving, life-giving grace—as if childhood had lived on into youth, and youth into manhood, and manhood into old age. “They reckon not by days and years, Where he has gone to dwell.” There were twelve hours, even in that life’s brief day. Though the constituent “hour” may not have been one year long, still—to apply, somewhat inaccurately, the words of a Prophet—still “the child may die,” in God’s reckoning, “a hundred years old.” Certainly there may be the twelve hours of a very full day in a [ministerial] life very brief in years. Some of the men of everlasting remembrance in the Church [of England] have died at the age of thirty years or under. It is the devotion which counts. It is the earnestness which tells. We do not undervalue the testimony of a long life—a life protracted into days even of weakness, suffering, and silence in the holy service. But we say this, that in some respects, and for some purposes, no testimony is like the testimony of the young, and no [life’s] ministry has the same astonishment in it, for the world that looks on, as [that] of one who, with all the life in him, all the impulses which drive others into self-indulgence and sin, is seen firm in principle and resolute in duty, having “given himself first to the Lord,” and then all he has—all that he might have enjoyed, and all that he might have become.
Brethren, the time is short for the youngest of us—what must it be for the one eldest?… Age advances, and death must come; let us work while it is day. Let us help one another while we can. Let us remember them that are fallen asleep, trying to follow them as they followed Christ, “whose faith follow, as you contemplate the end of their conversation”—their death, that is, in the faith of Jesus; remembering that One Person never dies—“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and to-day and for ever.” Let us cherish the bond which binds us to each other—a true bond, powerful to knit hearts. Let us pray for one another, that we may all meet at last, not one missing, in that world of which it is written, “These are they that have washed their robes”—they were not clean always—“and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore,” etc.—Extracted from sermon by Dean Vaughan, “Rest Awhile,” pp. 94–100.
1 Corinthians 15:6, coupled with 1 Corinthians 15:34.
I. There is a death which is only a sleep.
II. There is a sleep [of sin] which is a [moral] death (Ephesians 5:14).
1 Corinthians 15:10. All of Grace.
I. Our experience.
II. Our labours.
III. Our success.—[J. L.]
1 Corinthians 15:11. Two All-important Things about the Preaching.
I. Not the preacher, but the truth preached—[“Whether I or they;” that matters nothing.]
II. Not the hearing, but the belief of the truth.—[J. L.]