You may be seated. Please turn in your copy of the scriptures to the New Testament Book of First Corinthians. Today, we pick up in Chapter 15, looking at verses 20 through 28. Remember, there are those in that church who are denying the resurrection. By that, we mean not necessarily denying the resurrection of Jesus, but denying that there will be a resurrection. for believers. And so today we will hear Paul give some of the effects of the resurrection of Jesus. And there are many, and there are more to come in this chapter that we’ll look at in the weeks to come. From time to time, you hear me say we have oversimplified the gospel. Our evangelism sometimes is something like this.
You don’t want to go to hell now, do you? And of course, yes, that’s the right answer. Thank you, Freeman. But the work of Jesus, the work of redemption is way more than to put it in monopoly terms. Get out of hell free. OK, there’s so much more to our salvation through Jesus Christ. And we want to think on that today. And so here now, God’s word. First Corinthians chapter 15, picking up at verse 20. The apostle says to the doubting Corinthians.
But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead. He is the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, that’s Adam, by a man has also come the resurrection of the dead. Of course, that is our savior Jesus. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. but each in his own order. Christ, the first fruits, then at his coming, those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end when he delivers the kingdom to God, the Father, after destroying every rule and every authority and every power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.
For God has put all things in subjection under his feet. But when it says all things are put in subjection, it is plain that he is accepted who put all things in subjection under him. When all things are subjected to him, then the son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him. That God may be all in all.
Let’s look to God in prayer. Lord, today as the rain waters replenish the earth, as the dry land is weary from the heat of the summer, so also our souls are weary. Our souls are parched and so send the rain of your word that we might be watered and nourished and that the good gospel seed may produce fruit in each of our lives. This we pray in the name of Jesus. Amen. We learned a little saying when I was in seminary, and it goes like this, and it’s going to shock a few of you. Jesus died for trees.
Let that soak in for a moment. Every time I say that over the years, there is always someone that comes up to me and says, like a two year old. And I say, read Romans eight. Romans eight, our beloved chapter of Paul’s epistle. I think some of you sat through the Sunday school series in recent months on Romans chapter eight. And there is that phrase in the eighth chapter of Romans where Paul speaks of the sufferings of Christians and then he elevates our individual suffering, our corporate suffering as a church to a cosmic suffering.
And he says, all creation groans and all creation eagerly awaits the adoption of the sons of God. We know from other places in the scripture that one day there will be a new heavens and a new earth. And all of this is brought out by the power of God through the redeeming work of Jesus. Jesus says in the book of Revelation, Behold, I come and I make all things new. Yes, we believers are new creations in Jesus. Yes, the church of God will be in the heaven of God and fully glorified, fully holy and without sin.
But the creation that was subjected to futility, that is now groaning outwardly as we groan inwardly, waiting for Jesus. That creation subject subjected to futility, I can’t say it to futility, is groaning under that bondage of sin. The fall. We say brought all mankind into a state of sin and misery, but it also brought great curses on the earth. Remember when God lined up Adam and Eve and Satan and he issued their curses, Satan, you’ll crawl on your belly. Eve, it’ll hurt to have babies. Won’t be fun to be married to Adam. He said the ground will become difficult to bear fruit. There will be thorns and there will be thistles. And there will be difficulties in this life, even death.
And of course, Adam and Eve experienced that so quickly when Cain killed his brother Abel. We want to be reminded today, or perhaps you are hearing it for the first time, that yes, Jesus did die for trees. They don’t have souls that will last forever like we do, but there is a cosmic sense of redemption in Jesus’ work. There is a corporate sense. He’ll save, he’ll recreate the world. He’ll save his church, but there is also an individual sense.
And if the resurrection, as some Corinthians were saying, is not true, if the resurrection is not true, there are massive consequences. There are huge repercussions to come. And so over the weeks we have left in First Corinthians 15, we’ll hear more of those. But today, We have six R’s and I got to zip through them because I know we have the Lord’s Supper, but there are six R words. So listen out for those as we think of the implications of the redeeming work of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus and what it means. I want us to think first today of the word representative.
We sang it in the song after our confession of sin and assurance of pardon, all mankind In Adam fell theologically when and biblically, when Adam disobeyed God in the garden and ate the forbidden fruit, Adam was our representative. He represented all mankind who would come from him or after him by ordinary generation. We’ll say more later, but that’s why the virgin birth. of Jesus is so important. Jesus was not born with Adam’s sin. He was not born with the sin nature. He had to be the sinless savior, the sinless son of God. But every person born after Adam’s fall is born fast bound in sin and nature’s night as we sing from that Wesley hymn.
We need the eye of God that diffused and quickening ray to wake us from our slumber, to wake us from our death. We need the God of Ezekiel 37 to rattle our dry bones and to breathe breath back into our dead bodies in order that we have may have life.
Every person born in Adam. Every person born after Adam is born in sin and misery, fallen, broken, alienated from God, dead in sin and trespasses. Paul gives that comparison in Romans chapter five, but also today in our passage verses 21 and 22 say so clearly for as by a man came death. But by a man has also come the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all men be made alive.
And so when we come to faith in Jesus, when we see our sin and see our Savior, when we tremble at God’s threatenings and embrace his promises and yield our lives in obedience to our Lord, when we are in Christ, we are no longer in Adam. We are no longer in our sins, and we are a new creation. We are, as Paul says in Romans 8, the first fruits of the Holy Spirit. We are born again from above, as Jesus teaches Nicodemus. And verse 22 says, so importantly, we are made alive in Christ. We have been given new life.
And so representatives, it’s a big word. It’s a big part of our theology. We speak of the federal government. It’s a representative government. Well, in our theology, we speak of a federal theology. Adam is our federal head until we put our faith in Jesus. And Jesus then is our head. And in Adam, we disobey. But in Christ, we obey.
Remember justification. It’s just as if I never sinned. And it’s also just as if I always had obeyed and never was a sinner. And so representatives are important in the Bible. Are you in Adam dead and sin or are you in Christ and made alive in him? So after representatives, we want to think of the word ruling.
If you got a new Sunday dress Maybe for Easter as a child and you went to Sunday lunch as we all did after Easter and you spilled Kool-Aid on your Sunday Outfit and your mother said with her hands ringing it is ruined You know exactly what that means.
It can’t be washed. It can’t be cleaned. There’s no soap. There’s no dry cleaner There’s no nothing that can get that stain out of your Clothing well the sin of Adam ruined God’s good creation. All mankind proceeding from Adam were born in sin. They were born in misery. They were born alienated from God, lost and dead and without hope in this world except Jesus would come. And so the ruin of our bodies, the ruin of our minds, the ruins of our souls, but also the ruins of this creation are what we are seeing little bitty down payments of as we go through life. The ruin came because Adam disobeyed God and ate.
Adam disobeyed God’s commandment, God or Adam trusted in himself and in Satan and not in God and his good commands. And so the fall brought all kinds of sin and misery. If you are learning the little kids’ catechism, it says that in the garden, Adam and Eve were happy and holy before sin. But what did sin do? It made them sinful and miserable. And so the ruin came to us as a result of sin. And let me just say, the effects of sin, the effects of the ruins of sin are devastating.
Many of you will go to an ancient city, maybe you’ll take a tour of the Middle East, or you’ll take a tour of Europe, and you’ll see ancient ruins from civilizations long ago. You’ll see the foundations. And if you’re a history buff, you’ll say, what happened?
Well, they got too big for their britches. Their morality went down. Why did the Roman Empire fall? Why have the Russians had so many changes over in government, or the Chinese, or go through every nation, every history? And you can begin to figure out what is wrong. Years ago in a paper in Great Britain, there was an offer in the paper to write in your answer to the question, what’s wrong with the world? And the author, G.K. Chesterton, wrote a letter into the paper and his answer was simply this. I am. What’s wrong with the world? I am.
And we see the effects of the ruins on the evening news with the crime report. We see the effects of the fall when we get a report from our doctor and errant cells in our body are growing the wrong way and they’re growing too rapidly. We see it on the highway when we pass an automobile wreck. We see it in the deformities of the human body. We see it in the struggles of relationships all across this world. We see the ruin of the fall, the effects of the ruin of the fall all over the place.
But we don’t want to think on a dreary day too much on that because the third R is the word redemption. And redemption is the word that we want to remember so well and so much in our lives. When we get down because we see sin and ruin in the world around us and it begins to affect us with our bodies, our relations or other aspects of life, we need to quickly remember that Jesus has accomplished the work of redemption. And it is being applied to each of us by the spirit through the ministry of the church. It is being worked out in real human history. And at the last day, which we’ll get to in a moment, the work of redemption will come to a glorious completion. And what a day, what a joy that will be.
But when we think of the word redemption, we don’t need to think of ruin and disobedience and Adam. But we need to think of Jesus, the second Adam, who was born without sin. He did not come into this world with the original sin and the sin nature that we all have inherited from Adam, our first father. That’s why we must hold to the doctrine of the virgin birth of Jesus. I don’t know if you have thought about it, but lots of things we said today in the Apostles Creed are going to pop up hot like popcorn in this passage today. He was conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary. You deny that and you’ve got a sinful, not sinless Savior. And so our Redeemer, Jesus, the second Adam was born without sin. He did not have a sin nature and he never committed any actual sins.
Satan tried his best and Adam in paradise, Adam in the garden, Adam with a wife, Adam with food and drink, and all the blessings of the garden fell into sin and went into the temptation that was offered him. But Jesus, 40 days in the wilderness, 40 nights without good sleep, good food, good sustenance, no companionship, was met by Satan after those 40 days and tempted, and he was tried. Satan basically gave him an easy way out. You want to be the king of the universe? You don’t have to go to the cross. Just bow to me.
And there were other temptations, and Jesus answered with scripture, because he fully trusted, he fully loved, he fully obeyed his father. And so it is the life and the obedience, and it is the sacrificial substitutionary death where Jesus, who obeyed in our place and died in our place, and took the covenant curses due to Adam and us for disobedience.
It is because of that work of Jesus that we have redemption. And so we believe in a risen savior. We believe, as we have said today in our creed, we believe in a savior who has ascended to the right hand of God, the father. We believe the gospel, the good news of salvation. We believe that by the Holy Spirit, we have been born again from above or regenerated. We believe that by God’s word. by God’s spirit, through the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper today, we believe that through our suffering, our sanctification, more and more, our growth and grace, our holiness is being worked on by God. And one day, when God has subdued all his enemies through his son, King Jesus, and we do pass into glory through death, we believe that that last enemy will have been won And we believe that our bodies, our souls being raised up in holiness and glory will no longer experience that ruin, but they will be made whole again, both body and soul.
We look for the resurrection of the dead. We look for the resurrection of the last day and the return of Jesus. We look for those righteous to be welcomed into glory and we look for those who remain in their sins to be cast into outer darkness. And so we think today of these R words. We think of representatives, Adam and Christ. We think of ruin, the effects of sin. We think of redemption and the work of Jesus. We have a fourth R word, and that is the word reign. What is Jesus doing in heaven now?
Well, the risen and ascended Christ who is prophet and priest and king. He is speaking to his church by the word and by the spirit and by the sacraments. He is ruling his people from the throne of heaven through the church and through the elders and through church discipline and church order. He is subduing all his enemies and all our enemies under his feet. We have quotes today from Psalm 8 and from Psalm 110 where Jesus is the king. Jesus is who God has put in charge. He has a delegated authority. And so the king of kings and the Lord of Lord reigns from heaven.
And he is continuing that battle promised to Eve in the garden, the seed of the woman. will perpetually, until the end, battle the seed of the woman. And we live in that world where the seed of the serpent and the seed of Eve, Jesus, are continuing to duke it out. But we think of Martin Luther, his love for the 46th Psalm, and we think of that great phrase that we love to sing on our tippy toes, usually in October, around Reformation time, lo, his doom is sure. And one little word shall fail him.
Jesus reigns. Jesus rules. There may be all kinds of things around us that look topsy turvy, but there is one in charge, one on the throne and one at the helm. Well, a fifth R word is the word return. We’ve looked at representative, we’ve looked at ruin, we’ve looked at redemption. Now we’ve looked at rain. Now we want to think of the return of Jesus. And that’s a big part of this passage. In fact, verse 23 says at his coming, we expect Jesus to come. We expect him to return.
Jesus says to his disciples, while he’s still on earth, let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in me and my father’s house are many mansions. I’m going to go there and I’m going to prepare a place for you and I’m not going to leave you high and dry. I’m not going to ghost you as the young people say.
I’m going to come and take you there so that where I am, you may be with, uh, we may be with one another forever in heaven. And so the return of Jesus at his second coming will be the return of the bride of Christ. to the groom, to the Lord Jesus. Our task is to be watchful. Our task is to be ready. Well, our final R word is the word resurrection. It’s what is being denied in the life of the Corinthian church. It’s what’s often denied in our culture. We don’t believe in the supernatural.
I brought this little, this is my funeral cheat sheet here. I tuck it in my Bible when I do a graveside service. When we go to the graveside of a dear loved one and we are seated there or standing there as the body of our loved one is being soon lowered into the ground, committed to the earth, we call it, we perform what is often called the committal service. And there is a wonderful prayer that I love to use, and it goes like this. For as much as it, or this is not the prayer, this is the statement. For as much as it has pleased Almighty God in his wise providence to take from this earth, and the person’s name is given, we therefore commit their body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
And that’s not the end. And we look for the resurrection of the dead. We look for the life of the world to come through our Lord Jesus Christ at who’s coming in glorious majesty. The earth and the sea shall give up their dead and the mortal bodies of those who sleep in him shall be changed. and made like unto his own glorious body, according to the mighty working whereby he is able to subdue all things unto himself.” That is right out of 1 Corinthians 15.
And I will tell you this, this is my experience, even in recent weeks, serving at a graveside, people need to hear resurrection truths. You know, last week we spoke of all the goofy things that people believe about what happens when we die. You know, we, you know, we sprout angel wings, all kinds of crazy business. When you’re at a graveside, it’s down to brass tacks. And I think I’ve mentioned to you, I love to recite the catechism number 37 from the shorter.
The souls of believers are at their death, made perfect in holiness, their bodies being still united to Jesus, do rest in the grave until the resurrection. That is a wonderful truth for us all to hear. It’s a truth we need to hear, we need to receive, we need to believe, we need to be steeled in, we need to have firmed up in our minds and in our hearts. At the resurrection, when Jesus returns, our passage tells us, he is the first fruit of the resurrection, we will be the harvest.
We’re not really farmers around here. Perhaps some of y’all got some tomatoes on your back porch. That doesn’t count. Good for you. But in the Old Testament days, in the scripture days, when the first fruit of the harvest came, they brought it to church. They brought it to God and said, you are going to feed us. You are going to make our crops successful. And then about five, six weeks later, they would have the, the, the harvest. You know, some of you are good Baptist folks.
You’ve probably saying all, however many verses there are of bringing in the sheaves. You know, we sing it at Thanksgiving, bringing in the sheaves, that’s what would happen. Uh, so Jesus is the first fruit, the one little kernel of, of wheat. But we are the sheaves.
And think of the last day. Think of the resurrection of Jesus. All the saints rising up to heaven, singing that good old hymn, bringing in the sheaves. Jesus, when he comes, because he is the first fruit of the resurrection, will raise up all the rest. Jesus in his own life and ministry spoke of the last days as a harvest. There will be a harvest at the end of the age. And those who found are found in Jesus. will be safely brought into their heavenly home. But those not found in Jesus, it’ll be the winnowing fork. The wheat and the chaff will be separated. And so we understand these things from our knowledge of the scriptures.
Life in this world hurts. I can guarantee you in this room right now, some of you have aches and pains. Some of you are freezing. Some of you are hot. Um, see, I know, um, some of you can’t hear, some of you can’t see. Some of you have something that your doctor has told you that you’re not telling others, but you’re praying over.
You have aches and pains in your body. You have aches and pains in your soul because though forgiven, you have committed sins that have brought hurt and damage to others in your life. And you deeply regret it. You have all sorts of aches and pains, body and soul.
And this truth of the resurrection reminds us that one day these things will no longer be. All sad things one day will be untrue. And if there is no resurrection, then all sad things will remain. But life hurts in body, life hurts in soul, life hurts in relationships.
But we have hope in the resurrection of Jesus. He is the first fruits. And one day, like his body, we will have a new body. Like him, one day we will rise to glorified perfection. We will, as we sing in the hymn, be saved to sin no more. But until then, until then we put our hope in Jesus. He is the down payment. He is the first fruits. And then when he returns, the full harvest will come. And the scripture tells us there is a reason for it. It’s found simply at the end of verse 28. It’s that God may be all in all. Why does God do the work of redemption? It is for his own glory.
And so we ought to pray as St. Paul did. Come Lord Jesus, come quickly. And we add our own groaning to it and say, come make all things new. Take away our pain, our sorrow, take away our heartaches and our hardships and finish your redeeming work. May that be our prayer today. Let’s prepare now for communion by singing praise to God.