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May 7, 2026 |
| Therefore, Your Faith Is Worthless | ||
We're going to be looking at something that Paul says to the Corinthian church. Some of them have a belief that he is going to refute.
Paul is dealing with a problem in the early church that is not a problem in the church of today. So you might think, well, what would we get from this study? His approach to refute the belief is to ask if they had thought through this belief. What would be the consequence if this belief were true? If you follow it through to its conclusion, would that result match what the Bible says? Then he takes them, step by step, through the process of following it to its conclusion. The value in this study is that we can also use his technique to combat the many bad teachings around us.
This passage is also just a clever piece of writing by Paul. I like the way it's structured and the way he gets around to making his point.
We'll be studying 1 Corinthians 15:1-19.
I teach you, my brethren, the Gospel that I preached to you, and you received it and you stand in it, 2 Paul uses both the words "teach" and "preach." Modern Christians don't understand the difference, and thus don't understand all that Paul is saying here. Preaching was the presentation method that was used for outreach; teaching was the presentation method for believers. Preaching was oratory and assumed no background knowledge; teaching was interactive and for people who had some understanding. So Paul is saying that he preached the gospel to them first (and they converted). Now he teaches them more about the gospel. and by it you have life in that message which I preached to you, if you remember, unless you have believed worthlessly. (1 Corinthians 15:1-2)
Paul uses the word "worthlessly." Some translations use the word "vain," but that means the same thing. He is going to use this word again at the end of this passage. He calls them to remember when he first preached the gospel message that brought eternal life to them, and how, later on, he taught them more about it. Then he tacks on, "unless you believed worthlessly."
What he means is: what if everything I told you is all a big lie? What if the things you were taught were unworthy of your belief? You would have life, except that perhaps this is all garbage. Maybe it has all been a waste of time and effort.
Their false belief is that Jesus did not rise from the dead. Paul is introducing the result of following that false belief to its conclusion.
The Corinthians probably thought it was a theological matter that didn't matter. You believe that; I believe this; we're all okay. Paul will show them it's not a trivial little idea.
For I have declared to you from the first, according to that which I have received: the Messiah died for the sake of our sins, just as it is written; 4 And he was buried, and he arose on the third day, according to what is written; (1 Corinthians 15:3-4)
Twice here, we see the idea "it is written." That isn't a mistake or redundant repetition; it's intentional. Paul's point is that he had told them what was in the scripture, that is, he didn't make it up. Old Testament prophecy had foretold that the Messiah was going to die for the sake of our sins, that he was going to be buried, and he was going to arise on the third day.
And he appeared to Kaypha, and after him, to the twelve. 6 And after that, he appeared to more than 500 brethren together, many of whom remain until now, and some of them have fallen asleep. 7 And after these things, he appeared to Yaqob, and after him, to all the Apostles, 8 but to the last of all of them, as if to an aborted baby, he appeared also to me. 9 For I am the least of the Apostles and I am not worthy to be called an Apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. (1 Corinthians 15:5-9)
To make his point that Jesus arose from the dead, Paul is providing a list of people who actually witnessed Jesus being alive after he was crucified. When he says "many of whom remain," he implies that the readers can ask those people themselves. They don't need to take Paul's word for it.
Paul includes himself in that list. His experience of seeing Jesus was different from the others, not bodily like the other apostles did. As the last person to see Jesus alive, Paul saw him after he had ascended. If you remember, that happened on the road to Damascus, as Paul was on his way to persecute and kill Christians. Therefore Paul refers to himself also as the least.
Paul provides an estimate of the number of people who saw Jesus after he arose. At "more than 500," it isn't a small number that a person might think they conspired together to defraud others.
Paul says, "Some [brothers] have fallen asleep." Keep this in mind. Later, Paul will come back to this point, and we'll discuss the reason he is including this seemingly off-topic information.
Now Paul starts talking about God's grace working in him.
But by the grace of God I am whatever I am, and his grace which is in me has not been worthless, but I have labored more than all of them; not I, but his grace that is with me. 11 Whether I, therefore, or they, in this way we preach, and in this way you have believed. (1 Corinthians 15:10-11)
In this direct translation that I use, the sentence structure can be difficult, as it is here, making the text complicated. Paul says he has labored more than all the other witnesses, more than 500 of them, and he has achieved more.
His preaching was obviously not in vain, he says. Its success was due to God's grace being with him. His point in saying this is that, if he were preaching lies about God, then God would have been against him, and he would have had no success.
Remember that Paul was sent to all of the Gentiles, to be their apostle, the person who would preach and teach the gospel message to them. Because there were many more Gentiles than Jews, he worked more and traveled more than anybody else.
Verse 11 is the part with the complicated sentence structure. His point is that he and the other witnesses preach the same message of a resurrection of Jesus. If you were to ask them for details, there wouldn't be differences in what they teach, as you would expect with a fabricated story. This large number of witnesses would say the same thing.
Here is a quick summary of what Paul has said about witnesses of a resurrected Jesus.
Paul is going to refer back to all of these points.
Paul is about to change tack. He has been talking about all the evidence for a resurrected Jesus. Now he is going to ask why some in the Corinthian church don't believe that.
But if the Messiah who arose from among the dead is preached, how are there some among you who say there is no life for the dead? (1 Corinthians 15:12)
Notice that there is an apparent misalignment between what Paul has been talking about, the resurrection of Jesus, and what he says some of their people are saying: there is no return to life for anyone who has died.
Probably the people in the Corinthian church believed that Jesus arose from the dead, as an exception to the rule that there is no life for the dead, because he is Jesus. Paul sees it differently - if one man can arise from the dead, then any man can.
The point of this verse, then, is to say, if there is all this evidence that Jesus arose, how can you possibly believe that no one can arise? "That's directly in contradiction to what we've been preaching", he says.
We can't be certain where this idea came from; it isn't explained here or anywhere. We do know from the Bible that there was a Jewish group called the Sadducees who didn't believe in any kind of resurrection, and they were the only group with that idea. We know the Corinthian church had Jews in its group. Perhaps some of them were Sadducees.
The After Death study covers this in more detail. It may also be that the "going to Heaven" idea in the modern church came from that. Remember that Justin Martyr, 100 years after Paul, saw that there had become a large number of people in the Christian church who believed that they were going to go straight to Heaven when they died. Justin recognized that this meant there was no need for a resurrection.
Getting back to our main topic, Paul asks how they can say there is no life (resurrection) for the dead?
Paul, having gone through all of this setup, now announces the problem he's contending against. His argumentation method has been the traditional, list all the evidence, argument. Now he is going to present a series of "if this is true, then this must be true" steps. He's going to show them the consequences of believing there is no resurrection for the dead.
We saw the word “risen” before, and also “worthless.” They are keywords for us in the next verses.
And if there is no [coming to] life for the dead, even the Messiah has not risen. 14 And if the Messiah is not risen, our preaching is worthless and your faith is also worthless. 15 But we are also found to be lying witnesses of God, for we testified of God that he raised the Messiah, when he did not raise him. 16 For if those who have died do not live again, not even the Messiah is alive. 17 And if the Messiah is not alive, your faith is empty and you are yet in your sins; 18 Doubtless also those who fell asleep in the Messiah have themselves perished. 19 And if in this life only we hope in the Messiah, so it is that we are more wretched than all people. (1 Corinthians 15:13-19)
Quickly, he says, if there is no life for the dead, then everything is waste in the garbage. All of the time and effort that Paul personally and others have put into preaching and teaching, and all the suffering they endured, were all wasted. Everything these believers in the Corinthian church have done is wasted. Their faith is wasted, and they have no hope of eternal life. They, and Paul, and all the others, are more wretched than the poorest of the poor because they have nothing but think they have everything.
I'll summarize all that he said.
Believing there is no resurrection is not a small thing, not a silly theological argument. It's foundational.
Sometimes we hear ideas in the church, or maybe we come up with ideas ourselves. Maybe we're reading along in the Bible, and we say, "Oh, I think this must mean this," or "then this must be true." When this happens, we must check the consequences of those ideas. Does that idea make sense along with everything else that you understand?
One of the great failings of the Christian church is that people do not do that and have not done that in the past. They don't do that because they're not in the habit of doing that. They aren't practiced at doing that. Instead they reject all new ideas, including ones that would correct false ideas already in the church, and they keep all old ideas, including ones they should be rejecting.
Thanks to the internet, new false teachings abound, but there are also many false teachings already in the church. Pastor worship has allowed false ideas in, and tradition keeps them in.
Whenever you hear a new teaching, you should say, is this really in the Bible and what are the consequences if this is true? We also need to do the more difficult thing - look at existing beliefs and traditions and do the same thing.
In these verses, Paul is showing the Corinthian Church and all other churches how to use this method. You say, "There is no resurrection." If that's true, what would be the consequences of that? He isn't just showing them the consequences of that particular belief; he's giving them a method to use on all beliefs.
What did the Corinthian church do with Paul's words about their idea? The Bible doesn't say, but history tells us. All of Christianity came to believe the false teaching that Justin Martyr spoke about when he said, "They are not Christians." They patched the Corinthian idea by saying, "When Christians die, they go straight to Heaven."
If the Holy Spirit had told Paul to preemptively shut down that idea, he would have included something like this in these verses.
If all Christians go to Heaven when they die, then there is no one to be resurrected to life, and then there is no resurrection. And if Moses, Elijah, and others also went to Heaven when they died, then there was no reason for the Messiah to die for their sins and to be resurrected to life.
There are many other consequences to that belief, but I'm not going to go into that here; the After Death study covers all of that.
The ultimate message here is to test everything against the Bible. I think a lot of people don't do that because it takes work and time. The more you test new ideas and old ones, the easier it will be to do that.
When you listen to a message, you need to be prepared to pull yourself out of the message and ask yourself, "What if?" Most people just follow along with the message. They don't want to stop and think, and thus miss part of the message.
I remember listening to a message with another person. Afterward I said to that person, "You know he's teaching Prosperity Gospel, right?" He sat and thought for a while and later said, "Yeah, you're right." So, "now" is always the right time to test what you hear.