What Is Resurrection?

Joel R. Beeke

PUBLISHING

P.O. BOX 817 • PHILLIPSBURG • NEW JERSEY 08865-0817

© 2014 by Joel R. Beeke

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—except for brief quotations for the purpose of review or comment, without the prior permission of the publisher, P&R Publishing Company, P.O. Box 817, Phillipsburg, New Jersey 08865-0817.

All Scripture quotations are from the King James Version.

Italics within Scripture quotations indicate emphasis added.

ISBN: 978-1-59638-935-9 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-59638-936-6 (ePub)

ISBN: 978-1-59638-937-3 (Mobi)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014937874

Basics of the Faith

Sean Michael Lucas, Series Editor

HOW DOES CHRIST’S RESURRECTION SHAPE OUR HOPE?

We all live by hope. If you are an unbeliever, you put all your hope in this life. You get some satisfaction out of life, due to God’s common grace, but ultimately your hope is vain, for it will perish. If you are a believer, you build your hope on a different foundation: you build your hope on the sure, unchanging foundation that Christ has been raised from the dead. For you, life is like a long trip or a spiritual pilgrimage to reach Christ and to be with him in glory. Everything about your hope depends on Christ being alive and almighty.

Let us look more closely at how our hope is affected by Christ’s resurrection. In the process, we will examine our hope, our life, and our attitude to the resurrection. We will pursue this theme via various portions of 1 Corinthians 15, which is Scripture’s most profound, doctrinal defense of the church’s confession, “I believe in the resurrection of the dead.” Let us specifically focus on verses 19–20: “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept.”

A MOMENTARY YET MISERABLE HOPE

The Corinthian Christians did not deny the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, for as Paul says in the opening part of 1 Corinthians 15, hundreds of living witnesses testified (v. 6) of the resurrection. Indeed the resurrection was already part of the apostolic tradition.

Some Christians at Corinth, however, had difficulty believing in a general, physical resurrection of the dead. They could not believe that all believers would be raised like Christ and that their bodies would be reunited with their souls and become like the glorious body of the Lord Jesus.

These Christians were influenced largely by Greek philosophers who believed that, when we die, our souls enter another world but our bodies perish forever. Unlike many philosophers today, they believed that though the body perished, the soul was immortal. Plato, for one, taught that the soul is imprisoned by the body. When someone dies, Plato said, his soul escapes the body like a bird escapes from its cage. For Greek philosophers, ...