Moral Certainty of the True Christian's Resurrection.
I. The Apostle means the words of the text to express what is most shocking and most impossible. If they who had lived all their days in patience and self-denial and love, had done all this for nothing; if they had set their hopes upon a fond dream, purifying their hearts and enkindling their best affections with the thought of Him to whom they were nothing, and who was nothing to them; if the only good men in the world should prove to have been the only foolish ones, the only ones who had lived in vain then indeed our language and our very nature seem confounded; it would be well with us if we and all around us were but the creatures of a dream.
II. Many persons lessen by their conduct, both for themselves and others, the argument for belief in the resurrection; they so live that when they are gone, it would not seem in any way monstrous to think that they were perished for ever. By "perished" I mean what the word means in the text that is, were become as though they had never been born, and were vanished into nothing. But conceive of one who, loving God in Christ, has been chastened by His fatherly hand in a long course of severe suffering. Conceive such a one, so young, so suffering, so sanctified, finding in the very last hour no abatement of pain, but a fearful increase of it; yet while they who stand by were most distressed, the faith and love of the sufferer were never clouded, and the trust in Christ and cheerful submission to His will never for a moment shaken. Conceive this; and shall not heaven and earth pass sooner than that one sleeping in Jesus should not also be raised up by the Spirit of Jesus, and presented by Him before the throne of His Father, to live for ever in the fulness of His blessing?
T. Arnold, Sermons,vol. iii., p. 103.
References: 1 Corinthians 15:18. E. C. Wickham, Church of England Pulpit,vol. vii., p. 308.