Standing Before the Risen King

The Resurrection as the Heart of First Corinthians 15

I'm going to read a section from our passage this morning that's quite lengthy, but I'm going to get the heart of it. First Corinthians 15, beginning in verse 12. Now, if Christ is preached that he has been risen from the dead, how do some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?

But if there is no resurrection of the dead, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain. Your faith also is vain. Moreover, we are even found to be false witnesses of God because we bore witness against God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if in fact the dead are not raised.

For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless. You are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.

If we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of all men, most to be pitied. But now Christ has been raised up from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since by a man came death, by a man also came the resurrection of the dead.

For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive. But each in his own order, Christ, the first fruits. After that, those who are Christ's at his coming. Then comes the end when he hands over the kingdom to the God and father.

When he has abolished all rule and all authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be abolished is death. For he has put all things in subjection under his feet.

But when he says all things are put in subjection, it is evident that he is accepted who put all things in subjection to him. And when all things are subjected to him, then the son himself also will be subjected to the one who subjected all things to him so that God may be all in all.

Prayer for Illumination and the Glory of the Risen Christ

Let's pray the. Treasures of your word, Lord. As we read them, your people could have scarce to imagine thousands of years ago, the lengths that you would go to to save them from their sins. And as we stand on the other side of that event, looking back.

Lord, it occurs to me to to pray to you that we would be protected from treating as common that which is the most uncommon. Lord, you have died to save our souls, but you have resurrected to give us life.

And if we forget that, Lord, we have nothing. Lord, we count our sins lightly and we forget the cost. But you have paid the way and made a way to give us hope, to give us the tools of righteousness and to give us peace because you are the prince of peace or I pray that you would give strength and power to Houston's message this morning, Lord, I pray that you would cut it straight.

That he would deliver with clarity the riches and treasures of your word and Lord, that your people would be strengthened. But more importantly, and most of all, that you would be glorified and honored for what you're worth, which is everything.

Or we ask these things in your matchless, precious, holy name.

Amen. The 15th chapter of First Corinthians is a chapter that most of us know well. We have probably heard it preached at countless funerals and we have probably listened to countless sermons on it on Sunday morning.

Many of us probably have large parts of this chapter memorized because of how powerful and special it is. And yet I think that often many sermons on chapter 15 miss the point of what Paul was talking about.

Paul did not write this chapter as a standalone theological treaties to be stuck at the end of a book so that we can read about it at funerals. Everything else in Corinthians has been dealing with a practical issue.

It's been Paul applying theology to life, not just laying out doctrine. And this chapter is no different. This chapter is the climax of the entire epistle. Everything that Paul has been doing has been driving towards this moment.

I mean, just think, the Corinthian church had been blessed beyond belief with gifts. They had great expositors, they had people speaking in tongues, they had people prophesying. And yet throughout the entire epistle, Paul has been dealing with a church wracked by divisions because of their factions centered around their preachers.

A church that was boasting in its tolerance for allowing an incestuous relationship to continue. A congregation that would drag its own members before pagan magistrates because they didn't trust their own brothers to render judgment.

We had Christians eating meat sacrificed to pagan idols and hiding behind their Christian liberty to excuse it. We have the gifts that God has poured out for the edification of the church being used in a chaotic manner, disrupting worship, and often for the purpose of self-aggrandizement instead of glorifying the Lord.

We even had members coming to the Lord's table and getting drunk on His blood. We have to ask why? What's going on with the Corinthian church that for all its gifts, it would have such chaos? And the answer is here in chapter 15.

The Corinthians had forgotten who they were, what Christ had done for them, and the fear of the Lord. In Calvin's commentary, he says that Paul saved this issue for last because the Corinthians needed to be humbled and brought low before they were ready to understand and receive this argument.

So what is the issue at the root of the Corinthians' problem? It was that some among them were saying there was no resurrection of the dead. And at first glance, we might kind of pause and say, that's the biggest problem in the church out of all these other problems?

We sit back and we think that when we talk about the resurrection today, we often lump it in with eschatology and that it's part of these eschatological systems that Christians can debate in good faith and have differing opinions.

But the resurrection is not a secondary issue. It is the cornerstone of the gospel. To deny the resurrection of the dead is to functionally deny the resurrection of Christ. And without the resurrection of Christ, you have robbed the gospel of its power.

And in Corinth, not only did you have individuals confessionally denying the resurrection, but there had become a culture of living in the effects of the denied resurrection. You see, even if they didn't confess that they denied it with their mouth, they were living as if they had no fear of God.

They were living as if there would be no future accounting before God and that our bodies belong to ourselves and not to Christ. You see, when we lose sight of the resurrection, we begin to live as if there is no future.

That we have no king that is returning. And when that happens, everything else in the Christian life begins to fall apart. And that's why Paul writes this chapter as a loud wake-up call and rebuke to a Corinthian church that was living as if they had no fear of God and as if this life that we're in right now is all that there is.

Paul’s Gospel Reminder to a Gifted but Divided Church

Paul begins chapter 15 by doing something that probably would have upset and galled many in the Corinthian church. He writes to them and says, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which you also have received, and wherein you stand, by which also are you saved, if you keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless you have believed in vain.

Or in other words, Paul is telling them, hey, let me remind you of the gospel that I originally preached to you, that you're supposed to be standing on, and which you'll be saved by if you continue in the manner that I preached it to you, unless you've believed it for nothing.

And think about what the Corinthians would have been thinking if that was read to them. They would have been looking around and being like, Paul, we know the gospel. We're Christians here. Look at the gifts that God has given our church.

We've got a guy that's speaking in tongues. We probably have five or six of them speaking in tongues. We've got men that can prophesy. We've got people that can lay hands on and heal. We've got all these gifts.

We are this light, an outpost of Christ in the darkest city in the Roman Empire. What do you mean, remind us of the gospel? And yet, that's exactly what Paul does. He takes the Corinthians back to the fact that Christ was crucified, Christ was buried, and that Christ rose again, and that He was seen by Cephas, the rest of the disciples, 500 witnesses at one time of who the greater part were still alive, James, all the apostles, and finally Paul.

And whether it was Paul or someone else that preached it to them, that was the message that they were preached. So why did Paul do this? Why did he do something that the Corinthians would have been like, what's going on?

Because the Corinthians had forgotten that. If they weren't actually denying it in their confession, because of their denial of the resurrection, they had cut away the very foundation of the gospel on which they were standing.

I want you to imagine you've got a guy standing on a three-legged stool, and he gets off the stool, looks at one of the legs and says, I can't really understand why that leg is there. I don't get why we have this, so I'm going to cut it off.

He cuts it off. And you're looking at him like, what are you doing? He goes, oh, it's fine. He gets on the stool, and what's going to happen? We know that the stool is going to collapse under his weight.

And Paul shows us that there are three truths that the gospel was built upon, that Christ was crucified, Christ was buried, and Christ rose again. And in denying the resurrection of the dead, the Corinthians had by implication denied the resurrection of Christ, even if they didn't understand why that was the case.

They had cut away one of the legs of the stool, and it was going to collapse as soon as the weight of life pushed upon it. So what is the guy going to do when his stool starts to collapse? He's going to start looking around for something to put underneath it and try to prop it up.

And that's what the Corinthians were doing. They were looking for something to prop up the power of the gospel. But they had lost it. They began trusting in their teachers and using earthly wisdom and rhetoric as a guide for who was the best teacher.

And once they found that, that's what they centered their faction around, and everyone else had a worse teacher and therefore wasn't in the church. They began trusting in the gifts that God had given them for the edification of the church and to glorify Him as signs of personal holiness and righteousness.

They were looking for something else in the world to give them the power to holiness. Because without the resurrection of Christ, we have nothing that can make us holy. And we know that in our bones that we have to have something because we know that we stand guilty before God.

And that's why Paul declared that he was determined to know nothing among them except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. To drive home to the Corinthians that the power of the Christian faith is not found in our wisdom or the gifts that God gives us, but the power of the Christian faith comes from Jesus Christ who is crucified for our sins and resurrected for our justification.

Martin Luther once said that we must preach the gospel to ourselves daily because we forget it daily. He wasn't saying that we forget the actual doctrines of Christianity, but that we forget the power of the gospel and the implications for our lives that the gospel brings.

Doctrine, Love, and the Folly of Christian Factions

And that is something that humans in our flesh are prone to do. And in our Reformed camp of Christendom, we look back and we look at the Corinthians and say, that's not us. We would never do that. I mean, look at all the doctrine we have that is about the justification that we have in Christ.

Look at all of our doctrine on salvation. We know where our salvation comes from. And yet it is that very doctrine that we often elevate to become an idol. We elevate our knowledge of doctrine and our theology as though it was the end in and of itself.

As if that knowing the most theology or being the biggest Theo bro in the room makes you somehow holier than everyone else. And in the pursuit of that holiness, we begin to hate Christ's bride. We begin to build factions.

We begin to announce that I'm of MacArthur, I'm of Sproul, I'm of White, I'm of Webben. Or if we're really trying to beat up the other side and just show, boy, I'm so much holier than you, you don't even stand a candle to me.

We say, I'm of Jesus. We will sit back and cast off the cords of fellowship and throw people out of the church of God just because they do not have the same position on surlapsarianism or postmillennial theonomy or some other theological distinction.

And look, doctrine is precious. If you know me, you know that I'm a nerd. You know that I love to read this stuff. We should want to learn doctrine. We should want to contend for the faith once delivered to the saints.

Yet Paul tells us that knowledge without love serves only to puff up. It feeds our pride and our self-righteousness and makes us think that we are holier than we are. But tell me, who is holier? The man who has no love in his heart and hates Christ's bride and thinks of himself as the smartest man in the room who exists solely to win theological debates because he can quote the entirety of Calvin's Institutes for Memory?

Or the little grandmother who loves the church, who goes out of her way to pray for others, who submits to her husband, who nurtured her children well, who is a fountain of wisdom for the younger women in the church on how they should submit to their husbands and how they should keep their home and nurture their children, who will gladly serve the church when asked, and yet the extent of her theology is simply that Christ was crucified, Christ was buried, and Christ was risen again.

You see, doctrine and theology are not the end goal of the Christian life. Doctrine and theology point us to Christ. They tell us what we need to believe about God and how we should worship the God who has saved us.

But they are not what saves us. And the Corinthians hadn't lost their doctrine. They loved their religiosity. They loved putting that covering on their head. They loved taking communion. They loved getting baptized.

But they had lost the fear of God. They had lost the truth of the resurrection and the power of the gospel. Paul is telling them that they must return to the ground upon which we all must stand, that Jesus was crucified, He was buried, and He rose again on the third day.

The Logic of Christ as Firstfruits

And once Paul has oriented them back to this fact and what you must believe about the resurrection of Christ as a core foundation upon which our gospel stands, he gives what is a master class in argumentation.

If you want to be an attorney or a debater or just have a career in public speaking and making arguments, you should be required to read Paul's arguments in verses 13 through 34. You see, Paul has just told them that they must go back to standing on the gospel.

And he knows what the Corinthian response is going to be. The Corinthians are going to say, Paul, we don't deny the resurrection of Christ. We know that He is risen from the dead. It's what you preach, it's what Apollos preaches, it's what Cephas preaches.

We know. But the general resurrection, you and me, Paul, we're not going to be resurrected. This body has no lasting importance. The body itself as flesh is evil and we're going to be taken out of this physical creation and be in the spirit.

And what Paul does is he says, all right, let's grant you your premise. Let's follow this out and see where it leads. He does what we call a reduction to absurdity. He's going to take their argument and he's going to carry it out to the absurdity of its logical conclusions.

He's going to show that at the end of this is absolute foolishness. And if you follow it all the way out, you will be left with nothing. But as you see, if there is no resurrection of the dead, then there is no resurrection of Christ.

Why? Because Christ is the first fruits of the resurrection. Under the Mosaic Law, the Israelites were commanded to bring the first portion of their harvest and offer it up as a sacrifice to God. And God, if the sacrifice was accepted, would bless it and sanctify the rest of the harvest and show that it all belonged to God.

But if there was no harvest that year, if something had happened and there was no harvest to take from, there would be no first fruits. So, if there is no resurrection of the dead, if there's no harvest from the dead, then there can be no first fruit of the dead.

Which means Christ isn't raised. And if Christ isn't raised, what does that mean? Paul tells us if Christ is not raised then our preaching is vain. Your faith also is vain. And we are found to be false witnesses of God because we have testified of God that He raised up Christ whom He has not raised up.

And if so be that the dead rise not for if the dead rise not then Christ is not raised. And if Christ be not raised your faith is vain. Ye are yet in your sins then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished.

And if this life we have only hope in Christ we are of all men most miserable. And then just a little ways down he continues on and says what shall they do then which are baptized for the dead if the dead rise not at all?

Why are they then baptized for the dead? And why stand we in jeopardy every hour? By your rejoicing which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord I die daily. If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus what advantageth me if the dead rise not?

Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we'll die. You see if Christ is not raised our preaching is vain. Every sermon you've ever heard is worthless because it's just a man in a grave. And every time that you've heard someone preach or testify about God we've all been made false witnesses of our God because we're saying that he's done something that he hasn't done.

And because of that we are lost. Our faith is shipwrecked. There is nothing for us to hold on to. All those who have died before us in Christ have perished because Christ's resurrection is vital for our salvation.

Paul writes in Romans that he's delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification. So yes on the cross he was crucified for our sins. He drank the cup of wrath that God was pouring out for his elect.

But if it ended there if all we had was good Friday if there was no Easter Sunday then there would be nothing good about that Friday. All would be lost. His resurrection is what vindicates that the sacrifice of the Son has been accepted saying here are the first fruits of the coming harvest.

Baptism, Suffering, and the Absurdity of Life Without Resurrection

And if that didn't happen we have no hope. The grave winds and death sting awaits every single one of us. And if that is the case what point is there in our baptism? You see verse 29 is considered by many to be the hardest passage in the New Testament and the Bible.

And I'll admit that when you read it you sit there and say well it obviously can't mean what it says. So what are we going to do with this? Where do we go? And if you read commentaries you're going to be turned around and confused because I'm going to tell you they all go different directions.

But I want us to look at what you're preaching is vain if Christ hasn't risen up. And if we look at them each one of those absurdities is general. None of them apply directly to Corinth alone. They apply to the church Catholic.

So when we're looking at that we say well it's not about Corinth. It's about Corinth symbolically buried with Christ and then risen to new life in him. Baptism as an ordinance points towards our union with Christ in His death and in His resurrection.

It is the sign and seal of our future resurrection. We are being baptized to put out death in us and show the promise of keeping it. Why are we still doing this sign if nothing is being signified by it?

And Paul doesn't just stop with our ordinances. He pushes the argument all the way into the arena of the Christian life. Why on earth would we risk death and suffering if our faith doesn't work? Why would we risk death and suffering if our faith don't we risk death and suffering doesn't.

Why is not working or deny the resurrection of Christ and slide into hedonism as the absurdities of the Christian life without the resurrection collapse around them just as the stool with a leg chopped off will collapse under the weight of a man.

But Paul does not leave us there. He does not leave us in a world without the resurrection where it is better to eat and drink for tomorrow we die. He declares what we and the Corinthians know to be true from the testimony of countless witnesses and the testimony of all of Scripture.

But now is Christ risen from the dead and was made the firstfruits of them that slept. For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.

But every man in his own order, the firstfruits is Christ. Afterward they that are Christ at his coming shall rise again. Then shall be the end when he hath delivered up the kingdom of God, even the Father, when he hath put down all rule and all authority and all power.

For he must reign and ruleth and put all of his enemies under his foot. For the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. For he hath put all things under his foot. But when he saith that all things are subdued unto him, it is manifest that he is accepted which did all things put under his feet or under him.

And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that did subdue all things under him, that God may be all in all. Our Savior is not in the tomb. Our Savior has risen and ascended to sit at the right hand of his Father.

He is the firstfruits of a much greater harvest. The entirety the elect from all nations shall be raised to new life in Christ. And we can rejoice that not only is our Lord alive, but he is reigning as King of the universe.

The resurrection was his vindication. The Father has raised him up and exalted him and seated him at the right hand. Just as Psalm 110 declares, the Lord said unto my Lord, sit thou at my right hand until I make thine enemies a footstool.

All authority in heaven and earth has been given to Christ. And he is actively reigning over the world. He is actively building his church, gathering in the harvest from all the elect, and putting every last one of his enemies under his foot.

Every rebel power, every earthly ruler, and earthly nation that rejects Christ will be subjugated to the Son. Every spiritual dominion and principality will be put under his feet. They will all be brought to heel, and the nations will be subjected to the Son, and they will either kiss the Son or perish in his wrath.

And when all that has been completed, the Son will offer back all of creation to the Father. And the Father being well pleased with his faithful Son, who has done all that he has commanded of him, will give this creation and all the nations to his Son as an inheritance.

It will be the fulfillment of Psalm 2. I declare the decree the Lord hath said unto me, thou art my Son, this day I have begotten thee. Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the ends of the earth for thy possession.

Christ will have the people as his own. Christ will have the ends of the earth for his own. He will have redeemed back from a heathen people and made them a particular nation, a nation of priests for his own possession.

He will have redeemed back the earth that Adam lost to sin. And you see that exposes the foolishness of the Corinthian church. They were living as if there was no king who ruled over them. They were living as if there was no coming judgment.

They were living as if there was not going to be a day that Christ would return to his creation. They had no fear of God. Would someone that feared God go to a brothel when God has said that that is wrong?

Would a person that feared God cause divisions and factions in his bride? Would a person who feared God go and willingly take part in a pagan ceremony and eat meat sacrifice to a false idol? No. You see, to the Corinthians the gospel had become some sort of a story only about God saving man out of creation and into a more spiritual plane.

Not the story of God redeeming all of creation and redeeming a particular people unto himself. So Paul gives one of his only two commands in this entire chapter to the Corinthians. Awake to righteousness and sin not.

Stop living like Christ isn't king. Stop living as though Christ's grace makes your obedience optional. Because Christ is alive and you will be risen from the dead and stand before him to give an account.

Resurrection Living, Personal Holiness, and the Fear of God

This means that we cannot live our lives unchanged. We must live in light of the fact that our king is subduing all things under him and that we will be resurrected to stand before him. And this is true for us today.

We look at the Corinthian sin and we scoff and say, how could you get that turned around? But men, do you think you can sneak into your bedroom at night, that you can turn off the lights and hide in darkness and watch pornography and think that the risen Lord doesn't see you?

Do you think you can claim to be his servant, claim to be part of his bride and yet spurn his law and give yourself to join a harlot? Because that's what you want to do in the flesh. Fathers and husbands, do you think that you can come home and neglect ruling your household?

Do you think that you can neglect your wife when she needs you in her hours of need and neglect your household when it's in disorder and say that, well, I've got liberty. I deserve this break. Do you not think that one day you will stand before your God and have to give an account to him how you led the household that he gave you?

Women, do you think that you can sit back amongst one another and gossip and slander your brothers and sisters in the church and think that it's okay? And think that you're not going to stand before God and give an account for every idle word that you speak?

Do you think that you can go and pick up a book off the bookshelf and read something on a page or listen to something on an audio book that you would condemn as sexual immorality if a man or your husband watched it on a screen?

Do you not think that you will have to give an account for your sexual immorality? Wives and mothers, do you think that you can neglect submitting to your husbands? That you can say you've got a covering and then go around and act like you have no covering at all?

Do you think that you can walk around and neglect the nurturing and the raising of your children in the fear of the Lord because you want to indulge in your own comfort and your own independence and your own autonomy?

Do you not think that you're going to have to stand before the Lord your God and give an account to how you submitted to the husband that he put over you as a covering and how you raised the children that he gave you as a blessing?

What are we doing? Is that not denying the very resurrection that the Corinthians were denying? Is it not the same functional denial that we will stand before our King? Are we not living as if we're going to die and that's going to be the end of it?

Do we not fear God? Have we forgotten it is His word that it is appointed unto man once to die and then the judgment? And that it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. We have forgotten that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

So what do we do? Paul tells us stop sinning, turn away, run away from it, flee sexual immorality, practice self control over your tongue, lead your household, submit to your husband and you'll say I try.

I try not to sin. I just I try so hard but I keep falling back into it over and over again. Do you not understand that the resurrection is the power of the faith? You see the Corinthians had turned away from it and they began to look for their righteousness and other things but they had lost the power of the gospel.

They had lost that the power of the gospel is the resurrection. It is the resurrection that vindicates the Son so that He may give us His spirit to dwell within us to wage war against the flesh. It is the resurrection that tells us that Christ is enthroned at the right hand of the Father as our great high priest eternally pleading His wounds for us.

It is the resurrection that tells us all of the heartache and toil and work of self denial on this earth is worth it because one day our God who has saved us, we are going to stand before Him and shout holy holy holy is the Lord God Almighty the one who was and is and is to come.

So what are we going to do? We run to the cross of Christ. We get down on our knees and we know that we cannot fight sin alone. We're not strong enough. We run to the cross. We pray to the risen Lord to keep us from sin.

We pray that His spirit would conquer every rebel power in our flesh. We pray that He would make us His slave bound to His will and not our own. And we trust that the Christ who rose from the dead is conforming His people to His image and that He who began a good work in you will surely bring it to completion.

The resurrection is the power of the Christian life. We must remember to live in the fear of God and live in the remembrance of the coming resurrection and that are standing before our Lord or that and that are standing before our Lord and not only of remembrance of it but in anticipation for the day that we will see the Lord with our own eyes even if it's after our own flesh has moldered in the grave.

The Resurrection Body and the Final Victory Over Death

But you see the Greeks this to them it didn't make sense. All their philosophy was focused on escaping the physical world. Most of it was focused around this view of shedding out of the flesh which they viewed as evil and going to be in a spirit.

And much of their philosophy was based on rationalism of what they could rationally observe and see. And to them this is wild. So Paul anticipates the argument. He knows what the Corinthians are going to do.

He knows that they're going to see and they're going to say, Paul tell me how does a body that has been buried in the ground and has decayed away and is nothing but dust get up and walk again? And Paul answers them, you fool!

And we sit back and we're like man that's kind of harsh. I thought there was no stupid questions. And there isn't. If it's an honest sincere question, if it's a question that's sitting back and marveling at God and marveling at his power and saying, God, Paul tell us how does God work this miracle?

But that's not what it was. It was a mocking question. It was people who denied the resurrection because they couldn't envision it in their own minds and tried to limit what God could do. It was the creature saying to God the Creator that he can't do something.

So Paul gives them an analogy and it's a humble analogy to show just how foolish they were. In the first century pretty much everyone would have understood the food cycle because of how much closer they were to it.

Pretty much everyone would have had to in part grown or raise their own food. And today we're completely disconnected from that. I mean probably very few of us here actually know how food gets from the soil to our plates.

And so to us this analogy can seem a little bit more complicated but it's not. You see when a sower sows a seed into the ground it appears to die. We bury it in the ground. The seed dissolves away and what looks like decay.

But that's not the end. Instead a green plant shoots up from the dirt and what appeared to be dead burst forth into new life. It is the same substance but it is transformed and taken on a new form for us to look at.

Just as our body is sown into the ground as a corruptible, dishonorable, weak and natural body and will be raised from the ground as an incorruptible, glorified, powerful and spiritual body. And yet it will be the same substance.

Just like if I plant a turnip seed I'm not going to come back in six months and expect I'm going to have an orange tree standing there. When we bury a human in the ground we're not coming back and expecting to have a spirit or an angel.

No. We expect to find a glorified human. It will be a human that is no longer bound to corruption. Bound by the fact that their flesh is corrupted in every faculty by sin and doomed to death and decay.

It will be a body that is no longer bound by dishonor and shame and separation of God and showing the outward manifestations of sin in our sicknesses and deformities. A body that is no longer bound in weakness dependent upon food and water just to survive and growing tired and exhausted in our work.

Or a natural body that is driven by our fleshly desires and urges that wage war against the new spirit that we've been given in Christ. No. The glorious news that Paul proclaims to the Corinthians is that we shall be raised in an incorruptible body.

That will be free from the taint of sin. It will never decay again. It will never face the grave again. A glorious body that will bear the perfect image and beauty of our God. Free from all the deformities and maladies of the fall.