An Airtight Argument

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Please take out your Bibles and turn with me to 1 Corinthians chapter 15.
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We continue this morning in our exposition of 1 Corinthians 15, which is now going well into our second year of this study, going verse by verse through Paul's letter to the church at Corinth.
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We're going to read verses 12 down to verse 20.
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The Apostle writes, 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.
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And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain.
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We are even found to be misrepresenting God because we testified about God that He raised Christ, whom He did not raise, if it is true that the dead are not raised.
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For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised.
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And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins.
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Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.
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If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.
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But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.
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Father in heaven, as it comes now, the time for the hour of the word, I pray, Lord, that now that the hour has come, I pray that You would, by Your mercy and grace, keep me from error.
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For I know that, Lord, I am fallible and capable of preaching error, and for the sake of Your people and for the sake of Your great name, and for the sake of my own conscience, I would want to be protected from that.
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And Lord, I would want to know that truth has been proclaimed from this pulpit today, and that we stand as a church standing upon the foundation of the word of God, standing upon the foundation of the gospel.
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And Lord, may it be that as the gospel is proclaimed today, that those who know You would be drawn closer in their conformity to the Lord Jesus Christ, and those who do not know You would be challenged in their sins to repent and to turn and to trust in You.
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Father, it is a real reality, as the apostle has already shown us earlier in this book, that any time we come together that there are those among us who do not know the Lord.
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So may it be today that today would be a day of reckoning, a day where they would be challenged, a day where they would come to know Christ.
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But Lord, we know that that is a work that only You can do, or only You can change a heart.
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So we pray, O Lord, and leave that to You alone as we seek to understand Your word together.
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Holy Spirit be with me in Christ's name.
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Amen.
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Recently, I had a friend invite me to another church where I was asked to come and hear their pastor speak on the subject of Calvinism and Arminianism as a reformed theologian.
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I was intrigued to hear what the conversation was going to be like from the pastor.
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And during the message, he said something that caught me by great surprise.
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In fact, when he said it, my friend and I both looked at each other with what the deer in the headlights would look, you know, just amazed.
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And this is what he said.
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I want to quote exactly what he said.
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He said, sometimes we may find things irrational, and that shouldn't surprise us.
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God isn't a rational God.
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Now, the reason why he said that was because he was holding two contradictory positions.
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He said something, and then he said something else that completely contradicted what he said before.
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And he said, that's not a problem.
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God isn't rational.
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Now, I want to be fair to this brother, because I do think he is a brother, but I don't think he understood the weight of what he said.
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I think, at least I'd like to hope, that what he meant to say is that God is incomprehensible, because that is true.
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God is so high that we cannot fully comprehend Him.
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In fact, we can no more carry the Atlantic Ocean in a bucket than we can fill our minds with the fullness of that which is God.
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But just because God is not able to be fully comprehended does not mean that God is irrational.
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To say that God is irrational is actually to attack His nature and to insinuate that He is untrustworthy.
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I want to quote Dr.
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R.C.
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Sproul.
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He says this, quote, Christianity affirms the rationality of God alongside the incomprehensibility of God.
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Our minds can go only so far in understanding God, and to know God, we need to know His salvation.
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But that revelation is intelligible, not irrational.
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It is not gibberish.
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It is not nonsense.
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The incomprehensible God has revealed Himself truly.
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End quote.
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Brothers and sisters, God is not illogical.
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God does not deal in the irrational.
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Yes, His ways are above our ways and His thoughts above our thoughts.
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Isaiah 55, 8 and 9.
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Yes, the secret things do belong to the Lord.
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Isaiah or excuse me, Deuteronomy 29 and 29.
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But this does not mean that He is a God of contradiction.
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He is a God of truth.
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He does not contradict Himself in His word or in His nature.
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And one of the clearest examples that we have of the expression of God's rationality is found in our text today.
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Paul is going to lay before us, his hearers, a case which is based on sound logic and airtight reasoning.
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That's why I entitled the sermon, An Airtight Argument.
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This is an airtight argument.
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Like Sherlock Holmes, Paul is going to display a case of clear and concise deductive reasoning, which will lead us to only one conclusion.
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And his arguments, which will come one after the other after the other, will force us to a logical conclusion.
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So over the next few moments, I want to walk you through his argument.
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If you're taking notes, if you want to take the outline, it's very simple.
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We're going to look at the claim in verse 12.
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We're going to look at the consequences of the claim in verses 13 to 19.
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And we're going to look at the counter to the claim in verse 20.
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So we have the claim in verse 12, the consequences in verses 13 to 19, and the counter to the claim is in verse 20.
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And through this, I hope to show that Paul's rational argument actually demonstrates the rationality of God.
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He is trustworthy.
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He is not contradictory.
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And he is not calling us to believe the illogical.
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He is not calling us to embrace the contradiction.
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He is not calling us to check our brains at the door.
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He calls us to a logical conclusion based on an orderly understanding of his word.
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Therefore, let us now dive into the text.
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Looking at verse 12, we see the claim.
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Now, if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? Right there is your claim.
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There are those in Corinth who have claimed there is no resurrection from the dead.
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This one verse actually sets up the entire chapter because the rest of the chapter is going to deal with this.
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In verses 12 to 34, Paul is going to deal with the resurrection of Christ.
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In verses 35 to 58, he's going to deal with the resurrection of the believer.
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So, by the way, if you thought you got all of your fill of resurrection discussion last week on Resurrection Sunday, you ain't seen nothing yet.
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We're probably going to be here for the next four weeks at least getting through all of what Paul has to say, both about the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ and about our own coming resurrection.
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That's the focus.
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But it's all based on one issue, one claim, and that's this.
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There's no resurrection.
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That's the claim.
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Now, why would anyone who believes they're a Christian, why would anyone who says they're a Christian deny the resurrection? Well, the answer is actually rather simple.
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In the first century, remember this is when Paul's writing this, Paul is writing to the Corinthians who had been influenced by not only their Christian teaching that he had given to them, but they had been influenced also by other philosophies and other religious traditions that they had brought into the church with them.
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The philosophies of the day did not believe in the resurrection of the body.
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In fact, they thought that such a thing was actually a bad thing.
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They were what were called dualists.
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Dualism actually has its roots in the teachings of Plato.
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And dualists believed that the spiritual realm was inherently good and the material realm was inherently evil.
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That's dualism.
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You know, there's one side that's good.
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There's another side that's evil spirit, good body, bad.
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So if you taught a resurrection of the body, that just meant that you were going back to the bad.
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If you died, that was a release from the bad.
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That was your that was like your pardon when you died, your your pardon spiritually.
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And so you don't want to go back to the body.
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The body is bad and the matter is bad and and the the physical is bad.
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We want to break free from that.
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In fact, Charles Hodge, great Princeton theologian and and commentator on this passage speaks of that very thing.
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He said that in that time period, the philosophy would have been that the hope of a resurrection was the hope of swine, meaning that it was lesser.
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You remember when Paul preached on Mars Hill, he preached the resurrection and they sneered at him because they were the philosophers.
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They were the intelligentsia.
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They were the ones who knew that matter was evil and spirit was good.
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And so to see someone preaching, they said he's preaching foreign divinities.
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He's preaching something that's so abstract and so strange because he's preaching the physical resurrection of the body.
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Consider also within the Jewish community, within the Jewish community, there were those who rejected the resurrection.
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You remember the Sadducees? The Sadducees were the counterparts to the Pharisees.
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The Pharisees were the conservative supernaturalists.
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They believed in the supernatural.
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And then you had the Sadducees.
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They were the they were the religious naturalists.
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They believed in their religion.
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They were part of the priesthood.
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They even had high positions in the temple and even in the Sanhedrin, which was the Jewish court of law.
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And yet they did not believe in the resurrection.
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In fact, they were the ones who came to Jesus.
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And it says the Sadducees who did not believe in the resurrection came to Jesus and said, good teacher, if a man dies and his wife marries his brother and then he dies and he marries someone else on and the resurrection, whose wife shall he be? What was the reason for the question? Did they really care about whose wife she was going to be? No.
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Their whole point was they were trying to disprove the resurrection.
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They didn't believe in a resurrection.
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And so they were using that as a as sort of as a catch 22.
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Well, if you believe we're going to be raised, to what way will we be raised? Who's going to be whose wife and so on and such and such? So could it be and again, I'm offering a hypothesis here, could it be that there were Sadducees who had gotten saved and now were in the church and had carried into the church their bad theology? So not only do they have the influence of the Greek tradition of dualism, but they may even have the influence of the Sadducee and tradition of no resurrection.
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This is the danger.
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Listen to this.
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This demonstrates the danger of attempting to bring in false and pagan understandings to our faith.
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And sadly, much of church history has been influenced by the attempt to insert all kinds of false beliefs into the church and into the Bible.
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I could take a right turn and spend all the rest of my time on that.
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I'm not going to.
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You know what I mean? People have all kinds of false ideas that they bring in all kinds of this is why we teach history here.
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This is why we have Sovereign Grace Academy here, because we want to show what the what the historic Orthodox Christian faith is and why the church should be ever vigilant in its pursuit of the truth.
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Because there will always be those who try to bring in something.
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That violates the word of God, you realize there are still people today who deny the resurrection.
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People who identify themselves as Christians.
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In fact, I want to offer you a quote from Serene Jones.
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Serene Jones is the president of Union Theological Seminary in New York.
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This past week, she made national attention or she gained national attention for herself and her seminary because she chose to write an article as the president of Union Theological Seminary advocating that Christians could be Christians and reject the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
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She wrote an entire article not only saying you could reject the resurrection, you could reject the virgin birth.
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And then she went on to Twitter and she and this is what I'm going to quote.
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She said this was her quote last Lord's Day.
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Happy Easter.
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You can believe in resurrection without believing in bodily resurrection.
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Faith is more than adherence to rigid dogma.
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End quote.
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Faith is more than adherence to rigid dogma.
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You see who Paul was addressing in his day still exist in our day, the people Paul was addressing in his day at that time.
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They're still alive and well today and they're running our seminaries.
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Union Theological Seminary has a student base of over 250 students from 24 different denominations.
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And the president of the seminary doesn't believe in the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.
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So that's the claim.
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Verse 12.
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There's no resurrection.
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So now Paul in his masterful, as I said, almost like Sherlock Holmes, he's going to dive into the deductive reasoning.
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He's going to go right at the heart of this and he's going to display the consequences.
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OK, you say there's no resurrection.
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Well, let's decide.
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Let's see exactly what would be the result of that being the case.
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You say there's no resurrection.
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Let's see what the consequences are.
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First Corinthians 15, beginning now at verse 13, he gives us, I've outlined eight consequences or rather seven consequences, seven consequences of rejecting the resurrection.
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I'm always scared to tell you when it's such a high number, when I have seven points, I'm afraid I'm going to lose you guys.
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Don't don't don't walk.
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I'm going to go through these as as as briskly as possible.
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Try not to get bogged down in the particular.
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But there's seven different consequences.
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And Paul gives them in the if then structure, if that's the case, then this will be the result.
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If this is the case, then that will be the result.
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And he demonstrates that in their rejection of the resurrection, they've actually abandoned the faith.
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Hear that again.
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In rejecting the resurrection, they have abandoned the faith.
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And he shows that in eight consequential statements.
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Let's look at the first one.
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He says, if you reject the resurrection, Christ has not been raised.
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That's verse 13.
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And he says it again in verse 16.
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He says, if you reject the resurrection, then Christ has not been raised.
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That is a purely logical syllogism.
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If it is true that there is no resurrection, then it stands also true that Christ has not been raised.
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It's purely logical.
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That's a purely syllogistic way of structuring an argument.
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If this is the case, then this is the result.
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Notice, I want you to see this.
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Paul is not accusing them of denying the resurrection of Christ.
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Because it is possible that they believed that Christ was raised, but that they denied the resurrection.
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You say, how is that possible? It is possible that people can hold mutually exclusive beliefs.
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Because people are dangerously inconsistent.
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Here again, have you never had somebody who tells you one thing and then the next day tells you something that totally contradicts what they said? I've had people do it in the same sentence.
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As I said, I went and heard the pastor preach and he said something and then right away said something that contradicted what he said.
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And then he said, it's OK, God's not rational.
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So what's the result? I don't have to be rational.
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It's possible they were saying, yes, Jesus rose and yes, there's no resurrection.
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Or yes, Jesus rose because he was somehow unique and special, but there's no resurrection for anyone else.
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You see, somehow they're trying to have their cake and eat it, too.
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So Paul is challenging them at the very heart of the problem.
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If you say there's no resurrection, then there can't be a resurrection of Christ.
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If there is no resurrection, then Christ has not been raised.
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You can't have it both ways.
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It's one or it's the other.
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So that's the first consequence, if there's no resurrection, Christ has not been raised.
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That's number one.
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Number two, if there is no resurrection, our preaching is in vain.
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Look with me at verse 14, if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain.
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What's the word vain mean? Well, it's actually got several meanings.
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But in the clearest vernacular, the simplest vernacular, it simply means foolish or worthless or empty.
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I like Laonita.
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Laonita is a Greek lexicon that uses semantic domain and range to help understand how words work.
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And in this particular word, it says it's stupid.
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That might be a little simple, but that's what Laonita says.
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It says, if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is stupid.
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It's useless.
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Everything I do on Sunday is worthless if Christ is still in the grave.
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Every time we go out witnessing, it's worthless if Christ is still in the grave.
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Every time Mike straps on that microphone and stands at the corner and preaches on the street, it is worse than useless if there is no resurrection.
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Every time we take the fishing hole booth and we go to the fair or we go anywhere else and we set up and we hand out gospel tracts, because we do believe that we believe in witnessing.
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Every time we do that, it's for nothing.
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It's useless if there's no resurrection.
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Preaching is worse than nothing without the resurrection.
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It's vain.
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So if the resurrection is not true, Christ has not been raised and your preaching is in vain.
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Number three, your faith is also in vain.
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Notice verse 14 goes on to say, not only is our preaching in vain, but your faith is in vain.
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Not only is my part in vain, but you're believing what I'm saying is in vain.
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And he says it again in verse 17.
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He says, if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile.
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Futile and vain are synonyms.
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Both have the idea of emptiness.
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They have no substance because they're not true.
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It's like somebody who trusts in the gods of Ares and Jupiter of the ancient Romans.
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It was not true, thus it was empty and useless.
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It's like believing in Diana or Aphrodite or any of the other pagan gods.
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It's useless because they're not true.
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This is where a lot of people misunderstand faith.
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Faith requires an object.
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You don't just believe.
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You believe in something.
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You understand that, right? Because people say, oh, I have faith.
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Pastor, what do you have faith in? A lot of people tell me I do funerals all the time.
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And it seems like I've been doing more lately, sadly.
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And I do and I and I and pastor, you know, I believe.
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But what do you believe in? Whom do you believe? Because let me tell you this.
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Your faith is an awful fiction if there's no resurrection, your faith is an awful fiction.
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If there's no resurrection, it is in vain, it is futile.
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I mean, this is what I would say to this woman, this this Serene Williams or Jones.
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If if I had just a moment to speak with her, I would say, what what in which what are you believing in? You know what she said? She said, what what's going to happen when we find Jesus's bones one day? Yeah, I mean, that's the that's the idea.
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What's going to happen when we find Jesus's bones? Talk about a useless faith.
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Talk.
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And that's why the people always say, well, do you ever get nervous when these archaeologists say they found something in the Middle East? No, because I know Jesus is gone.
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You keep looking, keep digging.
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He ain't there.
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If he was there, they would have dug him up 2000 years ago to prove that the Christians were wrong.
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They would have went to the tomb and pulled the body out to show that he was dead.
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He is not there, for he is risen, as he said.
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Number four, if there is no resurrection, we have misrepresented God.
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Verse 15.
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And I like this because Paul now is digging into the legal issue, because the word misrepresenting here actually is the word pseudo-martyrs.
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Martyrs is where we get the word martyr or witness.
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And pseudo means false.
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Think of like a pseudonym, right? False name.
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So a pseudo-martyr is a false witness.
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He's actually here appealing to the commandments.
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What is the ninth commandment? Thou shalt not bear false witness.
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Thou shalt not bear a false witness against thy neighbor.
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And if we have preached that Jesus is raised and he is not raised, we've borne false witness against who? God.
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Because we said he did it and he didn't.
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We are now legally liable to breaking God's law against God bearing witness about him.
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We will give an account, you understand, you're going to give an account for every idle word you speak, the scripture says.
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We will give an account for every time we bear false witness.
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And who worse to bear false witness against than God himself? By the way, this is the danger of being a false teacher.
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Because false teachers bear false witness against God.
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Serene Jones is bearing false witness against God.
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Many of the television preachers and teachers bear false witness against God.
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And sadly, many pulpits today are filled with men and women who are willing to bear false witness against God.
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What a dangerous thing it would be to bear false witness against God.
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And if we say there is no resurrection, that's what we do.
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That's the consequence.
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That's the fourth consequence, the fifth consequence, and this one is the one honestly almost cried when I thought about this this week.
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You know, as I say, I preach to me first, then I come preach to you.
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I have to preach the sermon to me first.
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I have to sit and read it.
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This one really struck me.
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Because the fifth, if there is no resurrection.
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You're still in your sins.
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Verse 17, if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.
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You know what that means? That means you're unforgiven.
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That means the weight of the sin.
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That you have transgressed against a holy God still abides on you.
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I want you to think about the Corinthians for a moment.
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What has Paul already said about them in chapter six? Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived.
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Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor those who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.
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And such were some of you.
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But you have been washed.
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You have been sanctified.
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You have been justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of God.
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Such were some of you.
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If there's no resurrection, such still are you.
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You understand? Without the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, you are still in your sins.
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You are still what you were.
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And you are still under the condemnation of Almighty God.
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You are not new in Christ.
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You are still dead in sin.
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Do you understand the weight of that? If Christ is not raised, we are still dead just like him.
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That's Paul's point.
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If he is still dead, so are we.
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And thus, number six, those who have died have perished.
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That's the next consequence comes in verse 18.
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Then those who have fallen asleep, that's that's a euphemism.
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Christians are never said to die in scripture.
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It's always fall asleep.
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And that doesn't teach soul sleep.
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So don't let that confuse you.
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It's just simply the idea that Christians don't die.
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They sleep in the Lord and their spirits are with the Lord.
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But what Paul is saying here, and by the way, the word perished here.
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Some people take that to mean they simply have been annihilated.
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I want to read Charles Hodge.
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He said perdition, according to scripture, and that's a word here, perdition.
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It's not annihilation, but everlasting misery and sin.
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It is the loss of holiness and happiness forever.
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If Christ did not raise for the justification of those who died in him, they found no advocate in God's court and have incurred the fate of those who perish in their sins.
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What does John 3, 16 say? For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son so that whosoever believeth in him will not perish.
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Same idea, same thought.
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You see, if you're still in your sins, you're going to hell.
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And if Christ didn't come out of the grave, you're still in your sins, you're going to hell.
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Paul's not promising the hope of annihilation.
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Let me tell you something, if it's annihilation or hell, you better hope for annihilation.
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If it's annihilation or hell, you better hope you're annihilated.
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Paul's not giving the hope of annihilation here.
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He's giving the promise of absolute condemnation apart from the Lord Jesus Christ.
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Do you realize you deserve that? Do you realize that apart from the Lord Jesus Christ, you deserve the wrath of Almighty God? But Christ took the wrath in your place on the cross when he cried out, it is finished.
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But if he didn't rise, it was a lie.
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And this leads to number seven, our last of this series of what ifs.
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Paul says, if there's no resurrection, verse 19, then we are of all people most to be pitied.
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Imagine spending your whole life believing a lie and dying only to find out you were deceived.
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You know, that's that's a lot of people.
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There are a lot of people who spend their whole lives believing a lie and they die deceived.
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And that's scary.
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That's that should that should I think about suicide bombers.
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Think of a guy who thinks so much of what he believes in that he's willing to strap to himself explosives and walk into a crowd of people.
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And we look at that person and we're angry with them and we have righteous indignation.
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And it's rightly so.
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But isn't there also a swell of pity for somebody so committed to a lie? For somebody so committed to something that's that's not the truth.
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So much so that he's willing to give himself and take others.
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Beloved, imagine church history.
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Throughout our history.
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Christians have been fed to wild animals, burned at the stake, drowned, stoned, drawn and quartered, dismembered and all kinds of other things that I can't even attempt to explain in polite company.
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All because of their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
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What a pity if it weren't true.
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But even we who haven't faced such things, if we've lived in hope for something that isn't true, that's also pitiful.
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In fact, John MacArthur says this.
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He said, we deserve nothing but the compassion reserved for fools.
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If there be no resurrection.
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In seven points, Paul has made an absolutely airtight case that if you deny the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, you have denied the faith because there's no faith without it.
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Our faith is in vain.
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Our preaching is in vain.
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We've misrepresented God.
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And above all things, we are still in our sins.
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We're going to die and go to hell.
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And above all men, we are most to be pitied if Jesus is still in the grave.
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That's his case.
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And it's airtight.
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And now we finally come to the counter argument.
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He's heard the claim.
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There's no resurrection.
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He's made his.
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He's told you what the consequences, if that's true.
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Now he's going to give the counter argument, the counter claim.
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And this is actually going to start our sermon next Sunday.
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So I'm not going to fully exegete this passage.
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But I just want to say, because I can't end at verse 19, I can't end with us being pitied.
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I got to go to verse 20.
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I can't end there because he says, but in fact, if you have a New American Center Bible or King James, it says now.
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Christ has been raised from the dead.
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In fact, he has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.
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See, now he's gone from the hypothetical to the actual the hypothetical.
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What if what if he's not raised? Well, this, this, this, this and this.
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But in fact, he is raised no longer hypothetical.
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Now we're going to talk about the actual and the actual is this.
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He has been raised.
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We do not have to worry about the hypothetical consequences of him not being raised because we have confidence that he has been raised.
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How do we have that confidence? Verses one through eleven.
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We talked about this last week.
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He said Jesus Christ was.
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He died for our sins, according to the scripture, he was buried, he was raised on the third day, according to the scriptures, and he was seen first by Cephas and then by the twelve, and then he was seen by over 500 people at one time.
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And then he was seen by his brother James.
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And then he was seen lastly by me, one who was born in an untimely way.
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That being the apostle Paul.
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The resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ is the most well attested event in all of antiquity.
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He is risen.
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We have all the reason to believe it.
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And that resurrection promises that it is the first of many.
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That's what first fruits means when the first fruits come, that promises that the seeds have taken root, that they have germinated and they've begun to sprout.
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So when the farmer goes out and he sees the first fruits, he knows that the rest of the fruit is on its way.
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The seeds have done their job.
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Jesus raises from the dead and he becomes the first fruits of all of his brothers and sisters who will be raised.
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It says we will be raised like him.
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Jesus is the promise that we too will be raised.
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Most of us.
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Most of us understand that there are certain parts of our body.
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That we can live without if it were absolutely necessary.
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My daughter, Hope, had her tonsils removed just a few years ago.
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Jennifer and I both have had our gallbladders removed.
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And I imagine if I took the time to walk around the room, you could all share with me your ails and things of things that you might have had taken out.
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And yet you're still functioning, though your life may have changed somewhat.
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You're functioning and you're alive.
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Well, beloved, that's the way a lot of people look at the resurrection.
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They say, well, you remove it like you remove tonsils or you remove an inflamed appendix and everything's going to be OK.
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Let me tell you this, the resurrection is the heart of the faith.
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If it comes out, the body dies.
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In fact, Alistair Begg said it like this.
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I thought it was a great illustration.
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He said, imagine you get 22 men together.
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You put the outfits on them, you line 11 of them up on one side, you line 11 of them up on the other side, and there ain't no ball.
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It's useless.
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You know that's football, right? Is it 11-11? OK, I'm just making sure not everybody understands.
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He said if there's no ball, there's no game.
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If there's no ball, there's no reason to come together.
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And beloved, if there's no resurrection, all of this is useless.
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And the sad reality is, despite the airtight argument of the Apostle Paul, there are still people today who call themselves Christians who would say that the resurrection is not essential.
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And I want to quote Hodge one more time.
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He said this, he said, people seldom see the consequences of the false teachings they embrace.
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But we've seen the consequences today.
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The consequences Paul outlines are disastrous.
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And like a skilled attorney, Paul has laid before us a case which focuses us and forces us to only one conclusion.
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The fact is, Christ has been raised from the dead, and in that, we have hope of our own resurrection.
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Do you believe that? Do you believe that today? Is the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ the driving force of your faith? And does that reality move your soul? Or are you yet unconvinced? Are you still wavering, as it were, on a fence? Unwilling to take a stand? I tell you today, He is risen.
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And He commands all men everywhere to repent of their sins and trust in Him.
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You will be raised to eternal life, or you will be raised to eternal conscious torment.
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So I encourage you this morning, get off the fence.
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And trust in the Lord Jesus Christ.
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Let us pray.
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Father, this is a call to action.
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This is a call to anyone who has not yet bowed the knee to the Lord Jesus Christ.
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That today might be the day that they would turn from their sins and trust in Him.
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God, may You, by the power of Your Spirit, grant life to those who need it this morning.
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And Lord, to those who have it, may You grant to them, Lord, a better understanding of the life that they have.
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So that they can, by virtue of Your power and Your Spirit, follow more closely to Your Son.
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Father, I pray that You would move hearts today.
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I pray that Your Spirit would open eyes today, unstop ears.
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Lord, let the words of the gospel go into the ears, through the mind and down into the heart.
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Lord, that You might save even one.
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But we know, Lord, this is an act of Your will.
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We are simply the vessels and we give everything to You.
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Trusting that You will do in accordance with Your will.
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And as the Lord Jesus Christ prayed, not our will, but Thy will be done.
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Father, we pray in Jesus' name.
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Amen.