If Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins.The significance of the resurrection of the body of Christ remains a conundrum to many Christians. They see the resurrection as an inessential oddity. This, in turn, explains why so many professing Christians over the past two centuries have been able to abandon a belief in the resurrection of the body of Christ, whilst still claiming to be Christian.
I Corinthians 15:17
Yet our text definitively and emphatically declares that without the bodily resurrection of Christ, the whole Christian faith is worthless—a chimera, a vanity. The question is begged. Why? There are partial answers to the question, which, though true as far as they go, are yet incomplete. The partial answers appeal to matters of veracity and vindication.
The “veracity” argument is used in our text. Paul and the apostles had proclaimed Christ risen. If God did not actually raise Him bodily from the dead, the apostles would have borne false witness—they would have lied. (verses 14,15) The apostles would have said things about God and His Christ that were not true: therefore, all that they proclaimed on the authority of God would be equally suspect and erroneous. The credibility of the apostles as God's spokesman would be null and void. The faith of the Church would likewise be an empty vanity.
Now this argument draws a clear line in the sand between Christians who believe truthfully and those who claim the faith, yet deny the bodily resurrection of our Lord. If you deny the bodily resurrection, you deny the apostles and the Gospel writers. If you deny them, you deny God and the possibility of saving faith—since saving faith believes that what God has said is true. The emphatic biblical statement that “Abraham believed God and faith was imputed to him as righteousness” cannot apply: therefore, if you deny the resurrection, you are still in your sins.
The “vindication” argument goes further and considers the matter in terms of the atonement and the work of Christ upon the Cross. The undoubted Christian (apostolic) faith is that Christ bore our sins in His body upon the Cross. He bore our guilt and our penalty. He descended in to hell in our place. If God had left Him in hell it would only have been because the atonement was incomplete or inadequate. It would not be finished; Christ would, therefore, have been wrong in His sixth word from the Cross, when He declared: “It is finished”--that is, it is over. It is done.
Therefore, God raised Him up to vindicate the Son and His atonement. His resurrection from the dead declares to His people and to the world that full and complete atonement for the sins of His people had been accomplished and that the wrath of God was fully satisfied against our sins. (This is intimated in Hebrews 1:3: “When He has made purification for our sins, He sat down at the right hand of God.”) The resurrection also declared that Christ Himself was sinless and death could not hold Him. The resurrection is, therefore, at the same time, a vindication of the perfect sinlessness of our Saviour. (Acts 2:24)
But to these considerations, we must add a third. Christ had to be raised bodily from the dead because He came to save His people from their sins and His people are bodily, fleshly and material beings. If He were not to save them in-body, He would not save them at all. If Christ had not been raised bodily, then there is no life for men in the future. That is why Paul declares, “If we had only hoped in Christ in this life, we are of all men most to be pitied.” (I Corinthians 15: 19) Without a bodily resurrection of Christ, there is no eternal life to come for men.
Now this argument seems strange to many today. But there is a reason it lacks force. It is because ever since the early Church a synthesis between Greek and Christian thought was promulgated which has infected and done great damage to the Church ever since. It is an error we have yet to root out. As Oscar Cullmann has put it: “ . . . down through the history of doctrine to the present day there can be traced a great misunderstanding, upon the basis of which that which is claimed as 'Christian' in reality is Greek.”
Oscar Cullmann, Christ and Time (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1964), p.54.
The root of this heresy or apostasy from biblical Christianity is the belief that the real perfect realm is a timeless mystical sphere where the material and the body has no place. This Greek world view was deliberately revived by the Enlightenment, and its influence continues strongly to this day. In principle, this heresy sees the bodily resurrection of our Lord as a backward step—the vestige of an earthly and primitive mind. In asserting the bodily resurrection of Christ, the apostles were merely reflecting their primitive ignorance of reality. This world-view is quite at ease with denying the bodily resurrection of our Lord—it is unimportant in the grand scheme of things. If there is to be any salvation at all, it will only come through escaping the material and the bodily to the timeless realm of ideas and pure thought—that is, to the realm of the divine. This explains why many modern professing Christians, caught in the thrall of Greek pagan ideas, have been more than willing to deny the physical resurrection of the Christ. It is nought (they say) but a primitive symbol of moving to a higher (non-material) plane of existence. Such make shipwreck of their faith.
When God created the world, and man as His image bearer in it, He created him body and soul. The body is just as much the perfect image of God as man's mind and his soul. Thus, when Christ came forth to redeem mankind and the world, He rose bodily as the first born from death. If He were not to rise corporally from the dead, man would still be shattered, and broken, still under the penalty of sin. His resurrection would not be a resurrection of man. For perfect, sinless man is ever a material and physical being. Christ could not be the Head of a new human race if it were not a material and physical race: for the sinless perfection of the old race lay intrinsically in those corporate aspects.
That is why Paul declares that if we do not continue in eternity as material and corporal beings Christ is of no significance for us beyond this life. We have no hope of eternity. We will cease to exist as the perfect beings God created in the first place.
Thus, the resurrection is the proof that Christ is indeed restoring and saving us in every way. It is proof that His atonement and salvation is complete and total. It is proof that in Christ we are indeed a new creation; the old has passed away, and that all things have become renewed. That is why the resurrection is at the centre of the Christian faith.
No comments:
Post a Comment