1 Corinthians 15:12-20, Consequences and Results

1 Corinthians 15, we'll be reading from verses 12 to 20. Hear the word of the

Lord. Now, if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?

But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain.

We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that He raised Christ, whom

He did not raise, if it's true that 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 futile, and you are still in your sins.

Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.

But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead. The first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.

May the Lord add His blessings to the reading of His Holy Word. Well, have you ever done something or made a decision to change in life, something you thought would be good for you, and found it came with some very unpleasant, unintended consequences?

Maybe you changed jobs, you had a comfortable, but not a well -paying, maybe government job, and you changed it to something, private job, and what you thought would be a more lucrative career, but then it's less stable, and you end up, the consequence is you're unemployed.

Our decisions often come with unintended consequences. For example, over the last 30 years, it became popular for local governments to enact laws that require bicycle riders to wear safety helmets.

While this has brought about a reduction in the number of head injuries, there also appears to have been an unintended reduction.

Now, this assumes that correlation is causation. There has been a reduction in the number of children riding bikes, because assume it's because many of them don't like the way the helmets look.

So now that fewer kids are cycling, because they don't want to wear the helmets, they're getting less exercise, which makes them less healthy.

One study showed that the unintended consequence of helmet laws was a net health cost of up to $5 billion per year in Australia, Britain, the

Netherlands, and the USA. Kudzu is an example of the law of unintended consequences.

It was introduced into the US from Japan to help prevent erosion in earthworks, but it has now become a major problem in the southeastern

US, where we are, displacing native plants and effectively taking over large portions of land.

You know, if you're outside, don't stand still in the spring. You might get devoured by kudzu.

Other unintended consequences are more personal. Some people decide to become a little too close to someone of the opposite sex they're not married to.

They intend, maybe only at first, just to have another friend and someone to talk to, but then one thing leads to another, and the relationship gets closer, and then sexual, and then it gets found out, and then they're divorced, and the family is broken, and it just spirals out of control.

All of it, unintended consequences. Ideas also come with unintended consequences.

Often the consequences are the opposite of what those propagate them intend.

They may intend on the idea of bringing more freedom, and it produces the opposite.

In 19th century Germany, a philosopher named Friedrich Nietzsche taught that religion, which meant Christianity, was the tyranny of the weak, constraining the truly great.

It was a slave morality, he said, that enslaved the powerful. And if we could just throw that off, throw off Christianity, we would be free.

And the church taught an idea of God, he said, to frighten those who are superior into serving the inferior.

But now, in his time, the 1800s, since fewer and fewer people were really believing in God, he taught that it was time for people who knew they were the superior, what he called the supermen, in German, the übermensch.

It's time for them to rise up, to free themselves, free themselves of Christian morality, and impose their own morality on the world.

He is famous for saying, God is dead and we have killed him. With God being dead, now the supermen can now rise up, they can take over and impose their vision, their values of right and wrong.

It's right because I say it's right, they said. Impose their views on the world. Nietzsche eventually went insane, maybe he was already insane, but he eventually went insane due to syphilis, was put in an asylum and died that way.

But his philosophy caught the attention of many people, especially a group of people in Germany, a group that thought that they could be the race of the so -called supermen, imposing their ideas of right and wrong on everyone else, unrestrained by religion, the teachings of Christ.

They could just throw that off, impose their values, or just throw off what many, most people thought were just, you know, just plain decency.

Those people were, of course, the Nazis. So the ideas of a demented man produced the consequences of millions of people being killed.

The idea that he thought would bring greater freedom brought one of the worst tyrannies the world has ever seen as the supermen tried to rule the world.

Ideas have consequences. Here the idea some are expressing is a common one in the

Corinthians Greek culture. They hadn't renewed their minds yet, not completely anyway.

They had seen life differently from what they've been trained in as Greek people. Instead, they've imported into their new

Christianity some of the ideas they had been inculcated in as children, as Greek children in their

Greek pagan culture. And we too have to be aware of the ideas in our culture that we can import into our faith and to the church unwashed with the words, ideas have consequences.

And so when people bring the ideas of their culture into the church unchecked by the word, we encounter problems, fundamental assumed ideas about things like individualism, individual autonomy, you know, that we are islands unto ourselves.

Those kinds of ideas, we bring them into the church. It distorts the church, can eventually destroy the church by undermining what it is, what it's supposed to be.

The idea of church membership, like people just, you know, they think they're just autonomous. Why should we believe in a church covenant?

Why should we really believe in church membership? Why should we believe in being dedicated? Why should I keep my word? Why should my yes be yes, my no be no?

Everyone else around us in our culture says one thing and then later will do another. They don't keep their word. And so they import these practices into the church.

Why shouldn't we have a church that's just for our kind of people? Nevermind about there being one body. Why shouldn't we assume the worst about our leaders?

You know, like we do in American culture, in our politics, we bring that into the church.

Guess what happens? We, why shouldn't we just go where we get the best service? You know, like we do for restaurants.

Why shouldn't we do that? Ideas like individualism, racism, consumerism have consequences that can destroy the church.

The idea here imported into the church, unwashed by the word, was that there was no resurrection.

In verse 12, the dead do not rise. They already thought their preconceived idea, that is, was that the body was only a prison for the soul.

That's what the Greek philosophy taught them. It's just part of their culture. To die, they thought was to be released from the prison of the body.

And so it was a good thing. Why would anyone even want dead bodies to rise?

That was their idea. That's what they had been trained in. They thought that they had thought that through. But here

Paul shows them the unintended consequences of that idea. Last week, we saw why the resurrection must be true.

Here we see why it must not be false. The apostle Paul lists for them seven dire unintended consequences of the idea that there is no resurrection.

First, in verse 13, if there's no resurrection, well, then that applies to Christ too.

That sounds like common sense, but it appears that the wise people of Corinth had never thought it through that far.

Sure, it is the first and most logical consequence of the idea that if there's no resurrection of the dead, then

Jesus wasn't raised when he was dead. He's still in the grave, although no one could present his body.

But people aren't so logical. They often don't think through the consequences of their idea.

Today, the atheists will say, well, you know, say there's no God. But if you try to reason with them, what are the consequences of this idea?

This is your faith. You can't prove there's no God. You just believe it. What are the consequences if there's no God? Well, if there's no

God, there's no creator. So everything that exists must either be eternal, which today science shows is not true.

Science says the universe had a specific beginning and it will have an end. So if there's no

God, where did it come from? Or it's self -created. The universe created itself.

Now, before it existed, how could it have created itself? Because it didn't exist.

So it's just an absurdity. It makes no sense. Something that doesn't exist can't create. It can't make itself come into being because before it comes into being, it doesn't exist to make itself.

Obviously, it seems pretty common sense. It's unreasonable. In other words, since there is no creation, since there is a creation, excuse me, there must be a creator.

If there's a watch, there must be a watchmaker somewhere, right? This thing didn't just come about, falling together randomly, and I found it somewhere and put it on my wrist.

Someone made it. If you try to reason with most atheists like this today, you know what the answer is?

No. I mean, that's about it. It really doesn't get much deeper than that. They refuse to follow the consequences of their ideas.

So too, someone in Corinth was saying, well, there's no resurrection, but hadn't yet applied that to Christ and thought it through very far.

The message was the thing of first importance. Remember from last week that Christ rose from the dead.

Then the reason tells us if Christ rose from the dead, then there must be a resurrection. Obviously, he started it.

If there's no resurrection, then Christ did not rise from the dead. Paul here is saying that you must follow the consequences of your ideas.

And the first dire consequence of the idea that there is no resurrection is that Christ has not been raised.

And the next six dire consequences just flow out of this monumentally bad idea.

There's no resurrection and there's no resurrection of Christ. Then he says in verse 14, our message is in vain.

It's important theme throughout all this chapter. What's in vain? In other words, useless. It's meaningless. It comes to nothing.

The message of the message. They're often translated as the preaching. Here is like last week. Remember, it's not referring to a kind of style of communication like preaching in contrast to teaching or sharing or writing.

The message, the preaching is the content, the teaching that Jesus lived without sin.

He was the Messiah who was crucified for our sins and he was raised for our life.

That's the message. And if the dead are not raised and so Jesus is not raised, the consequence on that message is dire.

Now, they would not have admitted that. They would just want to say there's no consequences to it. Like the atheists say, no.

Just like some of over the last couple of centuries who want to deny miracles, especially the miracle of the resurrection. They want to avoid the consequence of their idea.

They would want to say that the message, the preaching, the message, the gospel is still a sweet story.

It's still life transforming. It's still hope giving. It's still life giving. That still makes us feel good about our future, about God, even though it's factually false.

The message, even though we modern people with our electrical lights, you know, and our knowledge about how the body works and our medicine, how it's impossible to bring dead tissue back to life.

That message is still encouraging, isn't it? I mean, even though it's not really true.

It lifts us up. It still does something for us. So it's true, kind of, in a way, in a supposedly spiritual way.

You know, I mean, you don't really believe in a resurrection physically, literally, but you believe it's kind of a metaphor for a new life, right?

It is spiritually true, even though it's factually false, they say. That, in essence, is the point of view of some of the most prominent theologians over the last century or more.

The most read theologian of the 20th century was a man named Rudolf Bultmann, who famously said that you cannot use electrical lights and believe in the resurrection.

I don't know. We're doing it right now, Rudolf. I don't know. But in other words, for him, science had proven that the natural world works according to its natural laws.

And if there's one thing that we know about nature is that the dead do not rise. When something is dead, it's dead.

You can't bring life back to it. But you could still believe in the resurrection, he would say, as sort of a spiritual reality, a sunrise in your heart, a metaphor for a spiritual reality.

For him, the idea that the dead do not rise was a truth for the natural realm, for the world, physical world we live in, the world of science, where God does not do miracles, if there was a

God. I mean, after all, in his view, you know, like Nietzsche said, God is dead and we have killed him.

But for the spiritual realm, there is a resurrection, a sunrise in your hearts, a new hope, a new cheery outlook on life.

Hope springs eternal. It's a symbolic story of how life will win out over death eventually, how spring comes after a hard winter, how love conquers all, you know, love wins, a good bumper sticker.

It is then a spiritual truth built on a factual falsehood.

He could both say that the resurrection was not something, you know, if you could go back in time through some kind of time machine with a camera and you could be right outside the tomb as Jesus was raised from the dead on that resurrection day, he would say, you wouldn't have anything to take a picture of.

No body came out of the tomb. But you don't get a picture of Jesus, but the spiritual result, he would say, is still the same.

You still get hope. You still get some kind of spiritual something happening to you, whatever it is.

The idea that there is no resurrection, he says, and the idea that Jesus raised from the dead are separate in an odd way.

The idea is, he says, is that there is no resurrection. And that idea, he says, has no consequences to our spiritual life.

Does that make sense? And we think, well, come on, that's, I mean, you got, you spend too much time in seminary.

That's kind of abstract, sophisticated academic theology. It's just so remote and irrelevant to us.

We're either too simple to waste our time with such highfalutin theology, or we're just too well -grounded to be deceived by people who are educated beyond their intelligence, right?

We won't be fooled by that kind of stuff, right? Well, really, the first week that I was here, moved down here from Pennsylvania in 2007.

I had to attend the funeral of a church member, a man I'd only briefly seen struggling for life a few days earlier.

At that funeral, a so -called pastor, really a rebellious Sunday school teacher, playing pastor, a man helping perform it from this area with no theological education or academic training that I know of, told a story actually in the cemetery, just about a half mile from here down the road.

And he said, in this story, he said, an angel had come down from heaven looking for a soul to take home.

Apparently God sends angels to go look for souls, but not with vague instructions. The angel came upon a little girl, but the

Lord told the angel, no, it's not her time yet. And the angel came upon a middle -aged man working for his family.

And, but the Lord told the angel that, oh no, he had many more years to go. And the angel came upon an older woman and thought, you know, a grandmother and thought, she must be the one to take.

But the Lord told the angel, no, that she had many more years to enjoy her grandchildren. And finally, the angel come upon the man who's now laying in the casket and said, yes, that's the one, my fateful servant, now being summoned to his reward, you know, free of the prison of his body,

I guess he could have added that. Oh, what a wonderful, heartwarming story and a pile of lies, lies.

What did the man do at a funeral? He told a story, he told a myth that he had fabricated.

There's no silly angel going around day and they'll confuse about which soul to pick up. And what a horrible reality that would be, you know,

I might accidentally get the wrong one. The Bible doesn't say anything like that. And where does he get off making up a story like that?

I mean, who gave him the authority that he can make up stories about angels picking up souls? Who do you think you are that you can make this kind of stuff up?

The Bible would say that kind of thing. Of course, the answer is obvious. The story made some people feel good.

And so it is then because it made people feel good. It's in a way true, isn't it?

I mean, if it made people feel good, does it make it true? That is factually false, of course. It's not really important, at least not to them.

And all that is important is that it warms our hearts. And so right here, right here, right among the average people is the idea that there's the realm of facts, either the dead don't rise, as Bultmann said, or even here, that the fact that everyone really knew that there's really no angels going around looking for which soul to take.

And there's that realm over there of facts. And then there's the realm of the spirit where we are uplifted by stories, whether they're true or not, who cares?

And those two realms, the factual and the spiritual are detached.

But what Paul is saying here is that they are not detached, that ideas have consequences, that to tell a myth, a fictional story you made up for a funeral to make people feel good, it says something horrible.

That's totally an un -Christian thing to do, that you can't deny the resurrection without denying the resurrection of Christ.

And if you do that, our message is in vain. It might make you feel good for a while.

Telling a story at a funeral, a great story may make you feel good for a while, but it's just numbing you to reality.

It's like a drug that numbs you so you don't feel. Your hand is being burned on a hot stove that you're leaning on.

The anesthesia is not letting you know the consequences of what's happening to you. You feel fine while that drug is lying to you, while it's basically cutting off the realm of facts from the fact your hand is being burned from the consequences of what's happening to you.

But when it wears off, you'll be in pain. So he is saying that we can't separate the world of facts from the world of spiritual truth.

If Christ is not raised, our message is empty.

It depends on being true. Well, the third dire consequence in verse 14 is that our faith is in vain.

Here again, modern people have a difficult time understanding this. What do you mean our faith is in vain? Our faith is for nothing.

They want to say that it doesn't matter what you believe in as long as you're sincere, right? And a lot of people, Americans now believe that.

If it helps you out, more power to you. That whatever you believe is good, if it's good for you.

But here Paul is saying that if there is no resurrection, and so Christ has not been raised, that faith that you had in him, it's useless.

It's of no value to have faith in a falsehood. The fourth dire consequence in verse 15 is that we have been misrepresenting

God. We've been lying. In other words, we've been telling people that God raised Christ from the dead. We meet every

Sunday. We meet today, the first day of the week, because that is the day in which we say Christ rose from the dead, which

Jesus rose. We sing about it, we teach it, we preach it. But if Christ has not been raised, all of that is a lie.

Either Jesus rose or we are liars. Or maybe for us, maybe we're just the stupid people.

Stupid enough to believe those original liars. That's the choice. There's none of this idea that even if you couldn't take a picture of it, if you went back in time, that it's still uplifting.

And so it's still true, in a way. It still makes me feel better about my life. Please remember, our message is not simply good advice on how to live.

That if you follow these secret steps, you stop hating, and you stop fornicating, and you stop getting drunk, and you tithe, and you're a little bit religious, and well, then you're going to prosper, and you're going to have a better, happier life.

And you're going to have your best life now, even. And so it doesn't really matter what inspires you to get you start to living differently, as long as something inspires you to do that.

If we tell you not to be naughty, because Santa Claus will put a lump of coal in your stocking instead of giving you gifts, and if that lie works to improve your behavior, well, then that's great.

If we puff you up with flattery about how terrific you are, you're smart, you're amazing, you're a superman, and you'll be motivated by that to live better, well, that's creating a myth to inspire you.

That's not the Christian idea. We're not saying that the sacrifice of Christ on the cross and the resurrection is just a great, inspiring story, and it will motivate you to change, and that change will just improve your life.

We're saying it's true. And the truth of that reality is what has the power to change you.

Our message is that something real happened. Jesus rose from the dead.

And if that didn't happen, we're lying. The fifth dire consequence in verses 16 and 17 is that we are still in our sins.

In verse 16, he reminds us of the original bad idea that produces all these dire consequences.

That is that if there's no resurrection, then Christ did rise from the dead. Now, they did not intend on destroying the foundation of their faith when they continue to believe that the dead are not raised.

Right? Remember, that's what their culture taught them. They continued to believe that. Right? They didn't change that in light of what they're supposed to believe that Jesus rose from the dead.

That's just what, that's the idea that they were taught as Greek children. It was assumed, no one questioned it, just like people here in the

U .S. didn't intend on destroying the church when they imported their individualism and consumerism into it, when they made it into another service provider, like a movie theater, all about putting on the best show for the consumer of religious entertainment.

They didn't intend on destroying the church when they did that, but they did. Here, they are reminded, if the dead are not raised, then

Christ has not been raised. And the consequence of that is, again, your faith is futile.

It's empty. It's good for nothing. That it entertained you for a while only means that it distracted you from the miserable reality that you are still in your sins if there is no resurrection.

The consequence then is there's no payment for your sins. We're still guilty.

We're still under the power of sin. We're still damned. If Jesus stayed dead, for whatever reason, the payment to atone for our sins was then not acceptable to the

Father. So there was no triumphing over death. So the consequence of teaching that there is no resurrection is to teach that there's no atonement.

There's no pardon. There's no justification. There's no right standing before God.

There's no salvation. There's no hope. The sixth dire consequence, in verse 18, of the idea that there's no resurrection is that those

Christians who have died are dead. And that's all they will ever be. There's no more life for them.

It's over for them. It's through the resurrection of the body that we have eternal life.

It's not just... We're not just gonna be a spirit floating around, sitting on a cloud, plucking on a spiritual harp.

So if there's no resurrection, if the body lies cold in the ground forever, eventually just disintegrating back into the earth and then the earth eventually dissolves, then there's no more life forever.

All the comforting talk about death, triumphing over death, where's your sting? All that kind of stuff is only empty words.

If Christ is not a living savior, if he's only a dead guru, the seventh dire consequence, last one, verse 19, is that we are, of all people, most to be pitied.

People should feel sorry for us, for all we've given up and sacrificed for this story.

If it's not true, if you couldn't take a picture of Jesus coming out of the tomb on that first resurrection day, then the whole thing is a fraud.

The so -called joy and the peace we talk about, just a psychological trick we played on ourselves. We could have had the same thing with another religion that didn't ask so much from us or maybe just living for ourselves, you know, living for the dollar.

Money could have made us happy, but we followed Jesus who said you can't serve God in money. So, you know, we lost.

We served Jesus who's dead. That's not very good. And that ends up being nothing.

We took up our cross. We sacrificed pleasures. We gave when we could have splurged on ourselves.

We read a Bible when we didn't feel like reading it. We trudged through Leviticus. I mean, have you ever read that book?

Oh, and we've denied ourselves the pleasures of the flesh when we really wanted them.

We stayed in church listening to boring sermons when we could have been doing something fun. We could have slept late on Sunday morning and not sacrifice our

Sunday afternoons or evenings or Saturday afternoons trying to reach sometimes unappreciated people. We could have spent more on ourselves.

We could have had more sexual experiences. We could have all got all kinds of fun. We could have followed

Nietzsche's advice and just imposed our own ideas of right and wrong.

Whatever suits us. We could have made ourselves the supermen instead of the stupid sheep.

We could have killed God and done as we pleased. If there was no resurrection, we sacrificed for nothing.

Nothing is something in this chapter. Vanity, emptiness, futility.

It's a repeated theme over and over again. In verse two, they are warned that if they do not hold fast to the gospel, then they may have believed in vain.

Otherwise they had a faith that comes to nothing if they don't persevere. In verse 10,

Paul points to the work of grace in his life, how it's made him work. All that grace has done in him.

He points to that as proof that the grace of God has not been in vain. It's not been for nothing.

It's produced something. In verse 14, the consequence of the bad idea that there is no resurrection is that it makes our message, it makes the gospel and our faith vain, empty.

Here, futility is the alternative to the resurrection. We either have the resurrection or we have nothing.

He had shown us before why the resurrection must be true. Here he is showing why it must not be false.

If it is false, we're living a life of utter futility. I mean, everything we think is meaningful is actually meaningless, is profitless, useless.

It's fruitless. It's powerless. It's worthless, everything.

We're just wasting our time. It's hollow and void. We are like Syphesus, the man in Greek mythology who's condemned to an eternity of rolling a huge boulder uphill.

And just before he reaches the top, just before his job is about to be finished, he has to let it roll back down again to the bottom and start all over.

And that's our life without the resurrection. One of the Nazis' methods of torturing prisoners in their camps was to get a group of men to move a large pile of dirt from one place to another.

And then when they had finished, move it back again. Then again and again for no reason whatsoever.

After a while, some prisoners would just go out of their mind and just throw themselves on the barbed wire, you know, with machine guns there from the tower.

Preferring to be machine gun to death rather than to continue to live with such futility. And here he's shown us that if Christ has not been raised, then all of this, our faith, the gospel, our lives, our church, everything you think is precious, it's just all empty.

It's all worthless. It's nothing. It's moving piles of dirt from one place to another and back again.

There's just nothing to it. But he proclaims in verse 20, Christ has been raised.

In fact, that's the reality. And it turns those seven sad negatives into seven happy positives.

His resurrection is the great reality that turns those seven dire consequences into glorious intended results.

What are the results of Christ's resurrection? The intended results?

Well, first, he is the first fruits. That is, he's the beginning of the resurrection.

There's this harvest of the dead and he's the first one. His resurrection is in the past so that we can know that ours is in the future.

The intended result of Christ's resurrection is that we do not have to live a futile life, just as eating and drinking and dying and going back into the ground again, like any other animal.

We have a future and a hope to look forward to of being raised with him. Second, our message is full.

It's not empty. The message that Jesus lived a perfect life. He taught living truths.

He died for our sins, rose from the grave. He sent his Holy Spirit for us. That's not just a fairy story made up to make us feel good.

It's not just a drug, an anesthesia to numb us to the realities of life. So we'll do our duty, you know, get through life, not feeling the pain as much as it really is.

Hurry up and die. No, the result of the resurrection is that our message is full and powerful, that the

Holy Spirit can use that message to breathe life into our dead bones.

That is the most interesting and most meaningful message that there is. Third, because our message is full and powerful, our faith is not fruitless.

Our faith, because it is faith in something real and what God has done for us. It's not just a warm feeling that helps us endure the hard realities of life.

It's not just a charming story told at a graveside to make us feel better. Something made up by a good storyteller to help us get by.

It is faith in a real God who sent his real son who really rose from the dead.

It's something solid and secure because he who gave it to us secures us with it.

Fourth, since Christ has risen from the dead, then we are testifying about God accurately.

We are telling those kids who come from Jim Jr. the truth when we tell them the gospel.

We're telling the youth who come here for Jim absolute realities when we tell them about Christ.

Why then would we exchange the absolute, that absolute truth, that reality that can transform lives for mere moralizing, you know, about how to be better boys and girls, how to be well -mannered, how to address and talk properly, how to be religious rule keepers, rules that are empty of the power to change people, things that will eventually become to nothing.

Why? Why would we do that? We have in the gospel the absolute truth of what

God did for us. So that's what we should be telling. Fifth, because Christ has been raised, we're no longer in our sins.

Sure, we still have sin to wrestle with, still lingering in our lives, but we are no longer a slave.

And before the father, we are not seen in our sins, but dressed in the righteousness of the living son.

We are forgiven and have been pardoned. The punishment we deserved was unleashed on the son, on the cross.

And God showed us that he accepted that sacrifice by raising him from the dead.

So Nietzsche was half right, you know, when he said that God was dead and we have killed him.

God's not dead. He was wrong about that. But we did kill him. We killed him when we killed the son with our sins.

Then the father raised him up, proving that he had made atonement for our sins.

And that God is not dead. He is alive. Six, because Christ has been raised, those

Christians who have died aren't really dead. They've fallen asleep.

Not in the sense that they're unconscious, but that their body is lying down, now waiting to be raised up.

They are alive and they're waiting for that resurrection of which Christ was the first. That the intended result of the resurrection of Christ is that now we are living in the era of the resurrection.

It began with the resurrection of Jesus and it will end with our own resurrection.

We are now living between resurrections. Seventh, because Christ has been raised, we are most to be envied.

We have benefits for a better life now and a sure hope of our best life later.

We have a life now worth living. The joy and the peace and the love that we claim come from being right with God, that's real.

That's not just a psychological trick we play on ourselves. We are, according to verse 19, those who hope.

We are hopers with a confident assurance now. We have promises now. We have promises we can depend on.

That when we fall asleep, as Paul calls it, we have something real and true in the future.

Something substantial that we can depend on. We don't just have an opiate. We don't have an anesthesia that numbs us to the pain of life.

But we have come to a real God who has accepted us because of Christ.

Because Christ died for our sins and we have a real eternal life.

Our life can be better now and we can have our best life then.

So now, of all people, we are most to be envied.

No one wants to come to the end of their life and think, you know,

I wasted it. It was all for nothing. This is all for money that will be wasted.

It's all for property that will just fall apart. It comes to nothing. No one intends on living in an utterly futile, completely empty life.

No meaning, no value. But a wasted life is the consequence of not truly believing that Jesus rose from the dead and so is

Lord. People live meaningless, empty lives when they choose to live just for themselves and not for the one who rose from the dead.

C .S. Lewis, in his interesting little book, The Great Divorce, pictures those condemned to hell as small, shrunken, unsubstantial, nearly vaporous people living in hell, the gray town, he calls it, where everything is shadowy and dismal and they are continually thinking that what they need is something, some more money, some more things that they can have for themselves, empty, vain things, and they're always waiting, always hoping for it, but of course it never comes.

Today, he might say that hell is full of people waiting endlessly on the next iPhone. They have lived giving themselves over to hollow things and so they have become hollow people.

Life, they thought, was all about making money, getting stuff, acquiring property, the newest gadget, living in luxury, and that is a picture, that is indeed an accurate picture,

I think, of hell, eternally empty, just living for the dollar, the next thrill, like moving piles of dirt from one place to another, back and forth, rolling a rock uphill only to have it roll back down again, always meaningless, never producing anything.

The way to not eventually become a shrunken, hollow shell of a person is to trust in something that is real, a

God who is real, to a God who did something you could not do, who raised the dead, to a

God who you helped kill, but he's still alive. It's to trust in the absolute truth, not in what we can do with enough exertion, what we can produce from ourselves, but in what

God did with his life -giving power. We cannot make ourselves meaningful by living a lie, by believing a lie, by trying to, the things that we produce is where life is.

No, the only way out of futility for us is for God to do what only he can do.

The only way is if Jesus rose from the dead. No one intends on living a futile life.