St. Paul speaks in this chapter as if the resurrection of Christ were the victory over the grave. Was it impossible then, for men, before the resurrection of Christ, to look beyond the grave?
I. The apostles unquestionably speak of our Lord's resurrection as an unprecedented fact in the world's history. But they say that its importance to human beings lay in this, that it declared Jesus to be the Son of God with power. It was an act retrospective and prospective. It revealed the Head of the human race. It revealed the relation of the human race, in the person of its Head, to the Father of all. That which was manifested to be true, when He who had taken on Him our nature, and had died as we die, rose out of death because He could not possibly be holden of it, had been true always. Those who believed in Christ could not doubt that man was to learn his condition from Christ, that he could learn it only from Christ. The evidence for the resurrection lay in all the history, in all the experiences and life of men, up to that hour. Fishermen and tent-makers could not establish it. If there was such a Person, such a Head of man, such a Son of God, as they said was denoted by this event, God would show that there was; if not, there was no gospel.
II. It is God who giveth us the victory. We are in as much danger of fancying that He is not the God of Life, but of death that is bent on our destruction, as the Jews or Greeks were. And next, it is most needful to remember that this victory is a gift. Therefore give up thy life to God, that He may use it as He knows best. Let Him have thy vigour, to turn it against the foes of thy country and of men. Let Him have thy feebleness, that His fatherly love and sympathy, and the obedience that He wrought out in Christ by suffering, may shine forth in thee. Be sure that He has most various methods of manifesting the power of His Son's resurrection here; but that, if thou trustest in Him, and dost not faint, the end will be the same; all shall share alike in the victory.
III. It is a victory. Immortality is not natural if by natural is meant that which would befall us supposing we were not voluntary spiritual beings. It belongs to us only as voluntary spiritual beings. If we surrender that condition, we surrender our immortality, we take up our position as mortal. But we cannot surrender it; we feel and know that we cannot, even when we are trying most to do it, even when we are stooping to the deepest ignominy. And therefore let us not for a moment cease to connect resurrection with faith, with hope; therefore with conflict. We cannot, if we connect Christ's resurrection with ours, if we judge of ours by His. He set His face as a flint, His garments were the garments of One who trod the wine-fat. It was an agony, though it was the agony of submission. His sweat was as drops of blood, though the issue was, "Father, not My will, but Thine be done." Therefore God gave Him the victory, the perfect victory of spirit and soul and body.
F. D. Maurice, Sermons,vol. iii., p. 299.
References: 1 Corinthians 15:57. G. B. Ryley, Christian World Pulpit,vol. vii., p. 116; H. W. Beecher, Ibid.,vol. xxiv., p. 402; G. Brooks, Five Hundred Outlines,p. 112; J. J. S. Perowne, Contemporary Pulpit,vol. ii., p. 230.