I. "Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished." They have perished. This does not mean that upon the supposition made they have ceased to exist. The question of the continued existence of men after death is not raised in the argument What the Apostle has in his view, as to those which had fallen asleep in Christ, is not their perishing in the sense of ceasing to exist either in the body or out of the body, but their perishing in the sense of not being saved, but lost. Was it a lie that these holy men and women grasped in their right hand when they walked so fearlessly through the valley of the shadow of death? And are their eyes now opened in that other world to the sad and awful truth that for all their faith in Christ they are yet in their sins; that they believed in One who died, indeed, for their sins, but is not, to this hour, Himself extricated from them?
II. In truth the innovation involves us all, the dead and the living, who have believed on Christ in one common ruin: "If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable." In this life we have hope in Christ, and there may be pleasure in such hope in Christ while it lasts. But it is a hope which, if there be, as there assuredly is, a hereafter, will be found to be utterly hollow and untrue. For it is the hope, it is the faith of our being saved from our sins. But we are not saved from our sins if Christ be not raised.
But it is not so. Christ is risen from the dead. He who was dead is alive for evermore. Therefore we, as well as our predecessors in the life of faith, have a hope which neither death nor sin can touch.
R. S. Candlish, Life in a Risen Saviour,p. 48.