Grab your Bibles and let's go to 1 Corinthians chapter 15 this morning.
When I worked on this text for our conference back in February, I was convinced I wanted to use this for our Easter congregation, and that's what I'm going to do. 1 Corinthians 15. We'll look at verses 20 and then jump over to verses 50 through 58. 1 Corinthians chapter 15, verse 20, and then verses 50 through 58. But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who are asleep. Now verse 50. Now I say this, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.
Behold, I tell you a mystery. We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye at the last trumpet, for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. Well, this perishable must put on the imperishable, and this mortal must put on immortality. But when this perishable will have put on the imperishable, and this mortal will have put on immortality, then will come about the saying that is written, death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting? The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is in the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your toil is not in vain in the Lord. God, in effect, has been on an eternal rescue mission. If you believe the Bible, then you know that God is sovereign. If he's not sovereign, he's not God. And if he is sovereign, and he is God, he rules and controls everything. And God, for his own pleasure and for his own glory, decided to have for himself a people that would be his before the world began.
But there was an enormous problem. All people were sinners. All people were subject to the corruption and the pollution of sin and the corruption of the grave and to eternal wrath that a holy, just God must pour on all sinners. So it's as if God the Father turned to Jesus, God the Son, and he said, our children are in peril.
We must go fix this problem. And thus we have the powerful work of the premier person, Jesus Christ, going to the cross, bearing our sins, receiving the blast of eternal wrath for our law-breaking and sin in our place as he died on the cross. Rising again on the third day, proving now that we all who are his can stand justified, that is, have a right standing before this holy and just God.
And so Paul, writing to the Corinthian church here, is explaining to the church afresh all that has been accomplished for us through Jesus the preeminent conqueror. You see, Jesus' enemies and our enemies are basically the same. In verse 20 of our text, he's called the firstfruits in his resurrection. The reason he's called the first is because he's going to make sure all the children follow in like manner.
He's the first, but all the rest of us are going to follow along. The enemies of death and of sin and of the law's condemnation are all conquered in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And Satan, though he's not mentioned in this text, is called in Hebrews 2.14, the one who has the power of death. So he has been conquered likewise. Now, the word victory is used three times in this text. So there is this exaltation and glory and wonder of all that God has done for the children, for those who believed on Christ. Verse 57, for example, says, Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Listen to me, friend. If you're going to sit under my preaching, you're going to have to remember everything centers on Jesus. Everything rests on him. He is the preeminent one. So here we have Jesus coming into the earth, facing the enemies of sin and death and hell and the grave and the law's condemnation. And he takes the whole burden that's on us and he puts it under his massive shoulders and he throws it aside. And he is the preeminent conqueror.
I've outlined the text this way. Roman numeral one, let's talk about the explanation. He's explaining to these Christians what is ours because our champion, Jesus, has conquered and won the victory. He says, first of all, we will all be changed in verse 51. He said, No, well, not all sleep. That's a word for death. Now, the word sleep is used for death because Christians don't die to stay dead. They die to get back up again.
So it's just like asleep. He said, Not every Christian on earth will die, but every Christian to be with his God and Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, and enjoy a glorious, perfected eternity with him. They must be changed. You can't get in that kingdom with your old body still attached to you.
So first of all, the first sub point here would be it's a necessary, even essential change. He says in verse 50 that flesh and blood cannot inherit this coming eternal kingdom. Are you going to be in heaven?
Are you going to be in this eternal kingdom when Christ returns and banishes all sin and wrong and establishes his kingdom in this earth and be his and enjoy the pleasures and the beauties and the joys of God forever? Well, then you're going to have to get a new body because flesh and blood cannot inherit it. This old body is corrupted by sin, and this old sin-polluted, sin-corrupted body cannot inherit an incorruptible and sinless kingdom.
They're just incompatible. The present earthly bodies do not fit our heavenly home. We must be dressed up aright and made presentable before he takes us home because he is holy. The bride of Christ must put on the wedding garment. She cannot enter the groom's kingdom wearing a corrupt and weak and perishable, dishonorable, dying and decaying body, which is exactly what our bodies are going to do. Now, a lot of you are younger and you think you look pretty doggone good, and you do.
But trust me, you give it some time and everything about you is going to sag, bag, and drag. These old bodies wear out because they're corrupted. But there's a new day coming, a new resurrection day coming, when there will be a new type kingdom in the earth, a new heaven and a new earth, the Bible says. And we're going to have to have new bodies if we're going to dwell in that new kingdom. That's why he says it's essential.
It's necessary. You've got to be changed. You see, while the King of glory now reigns in our hearts, he doesn't yet reign fully in our bodies. I have a kingdom heart, but I do not yet have a kingdom body. My spirit is regenerate, but my body is not yet born again and recreated in the glorious image of Christ. You see, for now, my ears do not always hear like kingdom ears. My eyes do not always look out like kingdom eyes should.
My hands do not act like kingdom hands should act, and my feet do not always act like kingdom feet should act. I'm still too affected by sin. We have this polluted, sin-corrupted body package, this unredeemed humanity that we're dwelling while we're down here. But when I am changed, my body will be incorruptible, and I will fully yield that day to the Holy Spirit. He says there in verse 50, these kinds of bodies cannot inherit. The changed body, you see, is not just possible because of Jesus' resurrection.
It's necessary. It's essential to fit in his new eternal kingdom. Your present physical body, you see, is offensive to a perfect and holy God. A sin-corrupted, weakened, ever decaying body is not presentable in God's kingdom. One scholar says these bodies are perishable, like our text says, because they're disposable, if you will. They're like animal-souled bodies. You know, we have this craze going on in our world today where animals have all of a sudden become as important as people. They're treasured like people. Now, I love my dogs, but I love them as dogs. Not like people. If I see one more disaster come through, and the disaster barely gets over, and people are in peril and dying everywhere, and somebody puts up on the TV, help us save the dogs. Dogs are not equal to humans. Now, I'm getting on a tangent. I don't need to do that. But what I'm saying is that we have animal-like bodies for now, because when your dog dies, or your cat dies, or your whatever dies, it goes into the ground, it becomes worm food.
And so do you. Just old, corruptible, disposable bodies. How in the world can you take that body into the glorious, perfected, eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ? God had a problem, but in effect, God's never really had a problem, because he can fix every one of them, and he did through Jesus Christ. Through his powerful death, burial, and resurrection, he provides for us the capacity to be transformed on that great resurrection morning, and have new, glorified, eternal bodies that fit his kingdom.
So Paul writes to the Corinthians and says, I want you to understand something. Some of you might be alive when Jesus comes back. If so, you'll never die. You'll just be transformed right there on the spot. But some of you will die, and you'll have to be resurrected one day, and get a new, perfected, glorified body so you'll fit in the kingdom. But either way, through the rapture or through the grave, you're going to have to be changed. And Christ, the mighty, preeminent conqueror, has provided the victory for that change. Well, it's an essential change, hurrying along. Notice our text says it's a lightning-fast change.
Verse 52. In a moment, he says. The Greek word for moment there means an inseparable period of time. It's so quick that you can't even separate it. One moment, you're just like you are now. The next moment, you're immediately glorified. It's like the twinkling of an eye, he says in the text. That means the time it takes for the eye to react to light is how quickly you're going to go from no sinful, corrupted, decaying body to a glorious, cleansed, purified, eternal body. It's a lightning-fast change.
And he says something interesting here. In verse 52, he said it's going to happen when the trumpet sounds. Now that's reflecting on Revelation 11, where we have the seven trumpets of the seven angels, the apocalyptic trumpets. And the first six trumpets are trumpets of judgment, but then all of a sudden, boom, there's a change. Because throughout history, trumpet sounds have often signified a change. Reveille in the military means you go from rest to attention all at once. Well, this trumpet means something's going to happen all at once.
And notice what the text says about this seventh trumpet sound. Then the seventh angel sounded, and there were loud voices in heaven saying, the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign forever and ever. Quickly, radically, lightning-fast. This kingdom, this world, everything we presently know will be evaporated into the holy wrath of God. They'll be re-established a new kingdom.
You'll have a brand new body, and we will dwell there with him forever. That's what he wants us to understand. All this is absolutely and only the victorious work of the preeminent conqueror, the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, number two, not only an explanation, and it's all really an explanation, but here he gets into more of what I'd call an exclamation, because the word victory is used three times in this section. It's kind of like Paul's writing, and he just can't add enough about the glory and the wonder of what's coming for us.
Forgive me for my voice, I was working in the pollen yesterday, and the pollen won. What he says here, first of all, the victory itself. Look at verse 54, death is swallowed up in victory. The last phrase there, verse 54, death is swallowed up in victory. The idea here is that God has made something disappear, and that something is death. Through the merits of Jesus Christ, death is now swallowed up, if you will.
Isaiah 25, verse 8, the prophet said he will swallow up death for all time. Skipping line, and he will remove the reproach of his people. What's a part of our reproach? That part of us that makes us unacceptable, unappealing to a holy God.
Well, a huge part of that is our corrupted sinful bodies, but he's going to remove that reproach away and give us new glorified bodies like the Lord Jesus Christ. So Christ will swallow up death once and for all, and death can never again retain its power. You know, death's victory is permanently over when Jesus returns and ushers in that final glorious resurrection. Just as a cake can never be unbaked, the butterfly cannot go back to being the caterpillar, and a plant can't go back to the seed. So in the new state, things will have flourished to their perfected point, and we can never go back to the imperfection and the corruption of a world that knew death. Can you imagine a day where the words never used again?
It's irrelevant. It will never be necessary again. Hebrews 2 14 says that through death he might render powerless him who had the power of death that is the devil. Through death, he rendered powerless the one who had the power of death. So Jesus, through death, put to death death. It's done.
It's over. So the new resurrected glorified bodies we'll have when Jesus comes again can never be returned to a state of sin and corruption. Death is swallowed up.
It's consumed in the power of the resurrected Christ. You see, in the new heavens and the new earth, in the new glorious kingdom of God that's coming, listen, God will place a zero tolerance policy on death. Not gonna have it here. Not gonna be allowed anymore. Sort of like Donald Trump when it comes to illegal immigration.
He's gonna stop it, and he should stop it. So it's crushed and defeated. It always brings to my mind when old Samson was in Gaza and the men of the city said, we don't like this guy Samson. Tell you what, at daylight when he leaves the city, we're going to meet him at the gate down there and we're going to destroy him right there at the gate of the city. Samson put one over on them. He got up in the middle of the night. He said, I'll show them. So he goes down to the city gate, boasts pars, ripped them up, gate, posts, bars, and all on his massive shoulders, and went down on the mountain and threw them down.
And that's exactly what Jesus Christ has done. He went into the city of death. He rose from the grave. He saw those bars. He's ripped open and ripped apart.
Gate, posts, bars, and all. He's thrown them away. Now when you enter into death, there's a gaping hole in the back wall that says, welcome to heaven. He has destroyed death's city. He has destroyed death's house. Well, not only is he telling us here that there is a victory that we have itself, notice secondly, he says death's sting is removed. Death's sting is removed. In verse 55, oh death, where is your sting? Now the Bible says it's appointed to men once to die and then face the judgment. Listen to me, every single one of you, every single man, woman, boy, or person who's ever lived has an unalterable, unchangeable appointment with death, and after that, the judgment. That's the sting of death. Death isn't so bad, unless at the point of death, you stand before a holy God to answer for your sin. That is the sting of death. Now once you know Christ is your Lord and Savior, death is a kind messenger that takes you to a better home. But if you don't know Christ, the sting is still there.
Oh, but now the writer says, oh death, it's sort of a sarcastic thing. Just where is your sting now, buddy? Because when Jesus went on the cross, the stinger of our sin responsibility before our holy God, the stinger was extinguished into the flesh of our elder brother Jesus Christ.
M.R. DeHaan tells the story of walking through the field with his older son and his younger son, and a honeybee flew up to that older boy and stuck him right above the eye. And he whacked it off and was screaming and crying, and then the honeybee got after the little boy. And the little boy just falls on the ground, waving his arms around and screaming, and M.R. DeHaan said, son, son, that bee only has one stinger, and he's already extinguished it into the flesh of your older brother.
That's what's happened for us. All the sting of death has been vanquished as God the Father, out of love for the children, out of love for the children, said, I'm placing the stinger they deserve into the flesh of my precious son. And he was adequate to take it and extinguish it. So now we bear none of that burden before a holy God. Death's sting is removed. So now death cannot harm us, because we do not face God in our sin, because our sin was laid on Christ and extinguished in the death of Christ. But now we will face God in the purified righteousness of Jesus Christ.
What a gift that is, friend. Thirdly, the text tells us the law's condemnation is silenced. He says in verse 56, the last phrase, the power of sin is in the law. I've said to you many times, the law is good. The law is holy and righteous. The law of God cannot be altered. It's unalterable.
It's non-negotiable. We're all judged by the absolute holy standard of divine justice reflected in God's law. But the thundering condemnation that we are under, the crushing thundering crush of the law's guilt and condemnation on us, is now silenced in the vicarious death of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ on our behalf. Jesus lived the law perfectly. Then he goes to the cross and he bore the law's consequence that is against all of us sinful law breakers. And so he has conquered that problem so that we would not be under the guilt and condemnation of holy law. And when you think of all these things, as a matter of fact, as Paul unfolds this, it doesn't categorize into simple little distinct categories. All of these truths are just wrapped up in each other and reciprocal and interconnected.
But while we may not can fully wrap our minds around them, we can fully rest our hearts upon them. I serve a risen Savior. He's in the world today. I know that he's living no matter what men may say.
Oh, I rest my heart upon him. Well, the victor himself is pointed out in this exclamatory sense, if you will, down in verse 57. How is all this done? How is all this accomplished? How could all of this be true for us sinners who are worthy of nothing but guilt and condemnation and corruption and eternal decay? Well, verse 57 says, How? But thanks be to God. Oh, the loving God, the God who loves us.
Listen to me. With an everlasting love. Are you listening to me, child of God? God never started loving you. He's always loved you. He's eternal. He didn't have a starting point. He loved you before you were you.
And he'll never stop loving you. So he says, In my unquenchable, eternal, unchangeable love, I will send to even my only one and only begotten precious son, Jesus, and give them the victory over sin and death and hell and the grave and the corruption of the grave and the utter condemnation, the crushing condemnation of the law. I'll give them victory over all that. I'll take care of it.
How? Thanks be to God, verse 57, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Now, you may have noticed when you enter our, what we call the mall area back there you walk in, we wanted to make it big so people could hang out and fellowship a lot. You see the Ten Commandments out there. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.
Honor your father and mother. You shall not commit murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not lie.
You shall not covet. And we violated every single one of them, either in action or in heart motive or attitude. And James says, if you violate one commandment, you're guilty of all of them. We've violated every single one. But Jesus has not.
Not a single one. And he went to the cross and became as if he had violated all those law absolutes and took upon him the curse, the wrath, the retribution of divine justice in our place. So now we have the victory as if we had never violated God's law in the tiniest way.
Oh, what a gift he has given us. That's why when you look at all those Ten Commandments out there and you think of the fact that all of us are guilty in one form or fashion of all of them, then you come in here and you look at that verse up there. I can barely see it for the glare of the lights.
Can you see it? But Christ is the end of the law for righteousness. You no longer go to the law, try to achieve perfection through the law to make God like you again.
No, no, no. You don't go to the law, now you go to Jesus. And in Jesus, you fulfill the law. Christ is the end of using the law to try to obtain righteousness, of trying to obtain a right standing before God.
Christ ended all that. He gave us a new way. Faith in him. Simple, restful, faith in him.
He is the victor, the mighty conqueror. And then, Romans 3, one quick note. Paul doesn't end there. You see, Paul was a local church-centered preacher. He didn't just want to thunder the doctrine, he wanted the church to know, now that you know this doctrine, now make this change your thinking.
Make this change your attitude, your disposition. Because of this doctrine, make your lifestyle now different than you had before. As one Puritan used to say, we're not just to believe the doctrine, we should adore the doctrine. Because, listen, all of the doctrines of this doctrine just means teaching. All of the doctrine of scripture is a description of the nature of our wonderful God. So, as we love the doctrine, we love the God of the doctrine. So, Paul being a local church-centered expositor, if you will, says, verse 58, therefore, because this is gloriously true, it can't be changed, it's unalterable. God's declared it, it's established, it stands, it forever will stand. Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast. I mean, don't let anything turn you from it. I love the story, and I've told it to you before, but you know when you get old like me, you tell your stories over and over.
And I appreciate you acting like you like it again. Sam Houston was a Tennessee boy, but he went out west to seek his fortune in the territory called Texas. And he became the captain of the army of Texas. And he was wanting to defeat the Mexican army led by Santa Ana. Remember, Santa Ana had ravaged the Americans at the Alamo just a few months earlier. And through a series of events, sure enough, Sam Houston and the army of Texas defeated Santa Ana. Matter of fact, routed them. This destroyed the army. Sam Houston took a mini ball to his ankle.
He's laying under a tree. He sees this commotion in the distance getting closer and closer, and sure enough, his men had captured General Santa Ana. And they were shouting and yelling, General Houston, General Houston, let's kill him right now, let's lynch him right now for what he did to our brethren at the Alamo. Sam Houston raised his hand and said, well, wait a minute. An alive Santa Ana is better for us than a dead Santa Ana.
Sure enough, a few weeks passed and Santa Ana alive stood before the United States Congress and signed all the documents succeeding all the territory of Texas, what will become the state of Texas and the United States of America. You see, Houston won the battle, but he shared the spoils with everyone because today there's 30 million people living in Texas worth about three trillion dollars. That's a lot of spoils. Well, that's what Jesus has done for us. He's won the battle, and he's alive, and he's gone before the heavenly father, and with his precious own blood, he's written out the statement that says, now all of the children are joint heirs with me. They're in my will because I've attained it all. So Paul is saying, therefore, that's our verse, verse 58, therefore, church, this being gloriously true, you can't leave on this Easter Sunday morning thinking, believing, and acting the way you did when you came in.
There has to be at least a little change. It's all free. Now you see, this is the most hopeful, glorious, blessed text, but it's the most horrifying text if you're not one of his because none of this is true for you if you're not one of his, but it's all true if you are. Oh, Jesus. So he says, I want to give you this exhortation, church. Be steadfast, immovable, kind of the same idea. It means don't let anyone veer you away from these doctrines and from serving the Lord. Then he gives us that phrase, always abounding in the work of the Lord. Notice that present tense verb, always abounding in the work. Don't put on serving the Lord here and there. Make it the pattern of your life to anchor yourself in a Bible believing, Spirit empowered local church and pour your family's energies there to serve the Lord.
Always abounding. In other words, Paul is saying, knowing these things to be true, how can you do any less than that? How could you do any less than that? You see, are you listening to me? Abounding in the work of the Lord is not robbing you of something, it's gaining for you everything.
You just don't have enough sense to know that the world stuff you're giving yourself is actually slowly ingesting poison instead of the living manna of the truth of the Word of God. So knowing these things to be true, we know that our toil, last phrase verse 58 and we're done, your toil is not in vain in the Lord. You know, actually toil means to labor to exhaustion. You remember brother Noel Wright, our small groups guy before the brother David ran him off and took it over?
He didn't really do that. I just thought I'd get your attention. Toil here means laboring to exhaustion. Brother Noel used to say, I've never seen an overworked Baptist.
I've seen a lot of underpowered ones, but not an overworked one. Well, Paul says, man, there's plenty of reason for you to toil for the Lord when he's done all this for us, and we can't lose. You can't lose your salvation because Jesus can't lose you, and he wouldn't lose you. You think he's going to go to the cross and die for you and cleanse you and rise for your justification and intercede for you at the right hand of the Father and not get his prize, which is us?
Where the spoils he won? Our toil is not in vain. Actually, your toil for Christ is the only toil that's not in vain.
Every other toil is vain, except our toil for Christ. And everything would be in vain if there's no victor, if there's no preeminent conqueror, if there'd been no resurrection. We don't serve a philosophy. We don't serve an idea.
We don't serve a little hoop jump system where you go through the motions and credit yourself with eternal security and going out. That's not the doctrine of scripture. That's a perversion of the doctrine of grace. We serve a risen Savior, and we serve him with our lives because he lives again for us. We ought to live and die for him. 1 Corinthians 15 14 says, And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, and your faith is in vain also. Therefore, therefore, don't just be an Easter bunny.
Don't misunderstand me. I'm glad you're here. We love you. Hope you'll come again. These things being true, Paul says, how could you not be steadfast and immovable and always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing your toil is not in vain in the Lord.
