Resurrection and the Gospel Message, 1
Cor. 15:3-5; 11
The point of 1 Corinthians chapter
fifteen is not to explain the gospel or the content of the gospel, it is to
explain to and remind the Corinthians of the significance of the resurrection
for their spiritual life.
We live in a world today when
there are many different distortions of the gospel. There are people who not
only add to the gospel but there are people who take away from the gospel. As
we study the Word we should be asking the question: What is it that we must
believe in order to be saved? And we should also be addressing the question of
when I am explaining to someone how they are to be saved, what is the
information that I should be giving them? That is going to vary from person to
person depending on their background, exposure they have had to the Bible, and
on how much time we have. Believers in the Lord Jesus Christ are expected to
witness to unbelievers, to explain the gospel to them, so we need to have in
our minds a clear understanding of what it is that we should be communicating
and what it is that is necessary to be believed in order to be saved.
We also live in an era where
in recent years there have been some disagreements and also divisions that have
come out by specifically what we refer to as the free grace movement. The free
grace movement refers to mostly a group of men coming out of a background of
Dallas Theological Seminary who recognize the danger of what is known as
“Lordship salvation” which is really a sort of back door works gospel. In a
nutshell what Lordship salvation does is the idea that the final authority on
how you really know you are saved is that you have works that indicate that.
They will take a verse out of context, such as the statement by Jesus, “By
their works you shall know them.” The context of that statement by Jesus is the
works are their words, the teaching of the Pharisees. It is not their external
activities, it is what they teach and it was inconsistent with the rest of
Scripture. Lordship salvation basically says that if you claim to believe in
Jesus as your savior and you are still carrying out all the same terrible
sinful things you were doing before you were saved then you don’t have the
right kind of faith in Jesus; you are not really saved. This is a subtle back
door introduction of works to the gospel. It is saying that the real faith you
much have is always going to be indicated by certain kinds of works. Who are we
to judge? One problem with the Lordship gospel is that it makes everybody a
fruit picker, a fruit judger. The focus is on a subjective look at works and not
the objective belief in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
In the context of this
movement there have been many wonderful and great things that have been said
and produced and written that have truly clarified many problem passages and
many issues related to the gospel and that the gospel is truly a free gift. But
in the last seven or eight years many within that movement, specifically within
a movement called Grace Evangelical Society [GES], began ask a question. Often
in the history of Christianity the way people get off track is they start
asking the wrong questions. It results in trouble when they try to answer them.
The question they were asking is: What is the minimal information somebody
needs to believe in order to be saved? The Bible never addresses it that way.
When we look at the explanation of the gospel by Acts two, by Peter and John in
Acts 3, by Paul in Acts 13, 17, and later on when he is testifying before Felix
and Agrippa, we do not see a cookie cutter gospel approach. Each time Paul
presents the gospel he is very attuned to his audience and their background and
understanding and therefore different facets of the work of Christ on the cross
are emphasized. There are also passage sin Acts where the gospel is simply
summarized but statements surrounding it indicate that much more was said than
that one statement. We think it is wrong to say there is simply one very narrow
way of expressing the gospel. The problem also is that the GES gospel said that
you do not need to know anything about what Christ did on the cross, that all
you have to do is believe that Jesus can give you eternal life and you will be
saved; you don’t have to know anything about Jesus. There has to be some
content to who this Jesus is that we are proclaiming before we believe in Him.
The second thing that is
wrong with their approach is that they go to passages that are statements of
Jesus in the Gospel of John that are before Jesus goes to the cross and
addressed to people who are not clear that He is going to the cross. But when
we look at statement of Scripture after Jesus goes to the cross it is the cross
that becomes the focal point that Jesus died on the cross as a substitute for
our sins. So this has caused a tremendous ripple and reaction. We always have
to be careful about any reactions we have to some sort of erroneous teaching
because the history of the church is also filled with these kinds of patterns
where somebody goes off in one direction and then the corrective goes all the
way to the other side, and often it is not quite right either. So it forces us
to go to the text and to see what is stated there.
When we look at Galatians
1:6-8 Paul talks about this gospel, and they way we know he is talking about a
narrow use of the gospel is because in the second chapter he refers to the
gospel again in verse fourteen. In the structure of the epistle to the
Galatians the first two chapters deal with their distortion of the gospel and
chapters three through six deal with their distortion of the spiritual life.
But in
It has been emphasized that
as Paul gets into the discussion in 1 Corinthians 15 he talks about “the gospel
that you received,” past tense, completed action, “in which you now stand,”
perfect, active indicative of histemi
[i(sthmi]. It is a stand that has been taken in the past and
it is emphasizing the current results of the already completed action of
standing. He is reminding them that they believed the resurrection when he
first came, but now they are doubting it. His emphasis in this chapter isn’t on
their entry into eternal life, justification, but in the implementation of
resurrection for our ongoing spiritual life—“by which also you are being saved,
if [assuming they would] you hold fast to the good news which I proclaimed,
unless you believed to no purpose.” You can believe in Christ to no purpose,
not that you are not saved but that it doesn’t lead into spiritual growth
because, like Corinthians at that time, you never grow or advance in the
spiritual life.
Paul goes on to say in vv.
3-5 what he taught the Corinthians when he first came. This is a passage that
many people go to to get a kernel of the gospel; that this is where we are
going to understand what the gospel is. It seems that way at first glance. 1
Corinthians 15:3 NASB “For I delivered to you as of first
importance [the priority of what should be communicated] what I also received,
that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, [4] and that He was
buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,
[5] and that He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.”
To understand what is going
on here we not only have to understand the context but we have to understand
the grammar. The grammar is crucial. The main verb is “I delivered.” This is
what Paul taught them, what he explained to them when he first went to
When we chart this out what
we see is that these four clauses must be given equal weight. We have to
address the question: What is the role of resurrection in what we believe to be
saved? But when we look at the grammar here what it shows is that there are
four points of equal weight. Christ died for our sins, He was buried, He was
raised, and He appeared. If this is telling me what the core of the gospel is then
I not only have to believe that Jesus died for me but I must also believe that
He was buried and that He was raised and that He appeared to Peter and the
twelve.
When we ask the question, what
place has the resurrection in our justification, we need to distinguish between
information that is given in gospel presentations in the Scripture and
information that must be believed in order to be saved. That is an important
distinction. What we have in the book of Acts and in 1 Corinthians 15 is a
reference to what was explained in a particular context. If we go through the
book of Acts and look at every time there is more than a summary statement of
the gospel we realize that different points are emphasized and different things
were stated about what they believed. We don’t have a fuzzy gospel. We have
such a complex gospel because Jesus solved so many different problems on the
cross. As long as we are believing that He did something on the cross that
solved our problem then we have salvation.
Romans
When we go to the Levitical
offerings—the Scripture says Christ is our Passover—the focus there is the
lamb. The lamb is sacrificed for us. Did it come back to life? Where is the
type of resurrection in the sacrifice of a lamb? The New Testament says that
Christ is our guilt offering. The guilt offering, as we study it in Leviticus 4
& 5, has no resurrection. The focal point on what is necessary to solve the
sin problem is what occurred on the cross between
1 Corinthians 2:1, 2 NASB
“And when I came to you, brethren, I did not come with superiority of speech or
of wisdom, proclaiming to you the testimony of God.
Louis Sperry Chafer, Salvation, p. 101, says: “Preaching the
gospel is telling someone about Christ and His finished work for them which
they are to believe.” (The focal point there is His finished work. They are
told something and they are to believe it).
“This is the simplest test to be applied to all soul-saving appeals. The
gospel has not been preached” (he is now talking about what has been communicated,
not what is believed). “The gospel has not been preached until a personal
message [i.e. you must believe this] concerning a crucified and living savior
has been presented and in a form which calls for the response of a personal
faith.”
Jesus is presented as
resurrected and living, that is different from saying that they must believe in
the resurrection or they are not saved.
Nowhere do we see that
resurrection is a necessary component of what we must believe in order to be
saved, but it should be there when we explain the gospel. The command is to
believe that Jesus did something for you. This is what Paul is saying in 1
Corinthians 15.
1 Corinthians