Sunday Sermon: Talking More About Death (1 Corinthians 15:29-34)

The Church’s Podcast and Weekly Teaching Rhythm

You are listening to the teaching ministry of Gabriel Hughes, pastor of First Southern Baptist Church in Junction City, Kansas. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday on this podcast, we feature 20 minutes of Bible study through a New Testament book.

On Thursday is our Old Testament study, and then we answer questions from listeners on Friday. Each Sunday we are pleased to share our sermon series, presently going through the letters to the Corinthians.

This is the sermon that was preached last week from our pulpit. Here's Pastor Gabe.

Reading 1 Corinthians 15:29-34 and Praying for Understanding

In honor of the word of the King, would you please stand? First Corinthians 15 verses 29 through 34. The Apostle Paul writing to the church in Corinth. Otherwise, what do people mean by being baptized on behalf of the dead?

If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized on their behalf? Why are we in danger every hour? I protest, brothers, by my pride in you, which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord. I die every day.

What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. Do not be deceived. Bad company ruins good morals. Wake up from your drunken stupor, as is right, and do not go on sinning, for some have no knowledge of God.

And I say this to your shame. Let us come before the Lord in prayer. Our great God and King, to whom belongs all glory and honor forever. We thank you for the words that you have given to us through your apostles, which we have been diligent to study this year, going through this letter that Paul wrote to the church in Corinth.

And as we come close to the end of our study of this particular letter, may the words that we have read continue to resonate in our spirits, convicting our hearts to live lives of obedience and holiness before the Lord, but also renewing our hope and giving us courage and encouragement to know that in Christ Jesus, we have the resurrection of the dead.

There is no other way that a person's soul can be saved except by the name of Christ. And by faith in Jesus, what he did on the cross for our sins, rising again from the grave has ascended into heaven, where he is seated right now at the right hand of the throne of God, mediating for us on our behalf.

As we have read these things in the scriptures, in fulfillment of the scriptures, may we know with confidence that as we pray this morning, you hear our prayers. We as feeble human beings praying to an infinite God, our prayers are heard by you because of Christ, our mediator, who advocates for us before the Father.

What a great and wondrous privilege it is to gather together as the saints like this on a Sunday morning. Hear you speak to us through your word. So hear us speak to you now as we cry out with our hearts to be forgiven our sins and made new in Christ Jesus.

And Lord, where things in the scriptures become difficult for us to understand, especially when as finite creatures, we're trying to understand the infinite, where our spirits are weak to understand this.

May the spirit of God intercede for us with groanings too deep for words. Give us your spirit to understand and discern spiritual things. In the name of Jesus, we pray and all God's people said, amen.

A Family’s Reluctance to Talk About Death

Thank you. You may be seated. There was a man and a woman who met one another. They fell in love. They got married and they decided to start a family. They had a son at first, followed by a daughter. And after two kids, the wife was in the kitchen one day with her children, feeding them, watching television.

And there was an ad that came on TV about putting together your will. And she thought about that and was like, you know, we haven't really done this. We have children now. We need to put together a will.

What would happen to our children if something were to happen to my husband and I? What would happen to our stuff? Where would it go? So we need to put together a last will in Testament. So when her husband got home from work that day, she raised this with her husband.

We need to put together a will for the sake of our kids. And her husband said, oh, you know what? Kids are still young. We're still young. We're still healthy and vibrant and strong. Nothing's going to happen to us.

We're fine. We're okay. We don't need to think about that now. Something we need to plan for in the future. Well, they had another child. The family continued to grow. They have three kids now, then a fourth kid.

And this came upon the wife's heart again. We need to be preparing for our children's future. And one of the things that we need to do for our kids is we need to put together a last will in Testament.

So she raised this with her husband again. We need to do our will. We need to get this finalized and authorized and all of this taken care of. And he said, well, tell you what, you put the paperwork together.

You get everything done that you think that we need to do. And then when you need me in that part of the process, just let me know. And so that's what she did. She got the paperwork together and she quickly realized that this was not a one party job, but a two party job.

His signature was needed on several things. She even went to the lawyer to get certain things notarized. And he told her, well, I can't do this without your husband. He needs to be involved in this process.

He needs to look at this document and this document. He needs to sign here, here, and here. And so he told her everything that she needed to take back to her husband and then pull him into the process of putting together their last will in Testament.

So one night after dinner, when the kids had been dismissed from the table, she raised it with her husband again and said, I've gotten everything done that I need to finish up to this point and I still need you.

We need to put together our will. And this time he got really upset. He got really angry, just kind of, why, why do you need me in this process? She said, well, I can't even get this done without your signature.

We need your signatures here. And he said, well, can't you just forge my signature? And she was totally taken aback by this and said, I can't believe you're talking like this. You can't just forge your signature.

If it were to come out that I had done that, it would make these documents null and void. This is our children that we're talking about here. We're doing this for our kids. I don't understand why you're acting this way.

Why don't you want to be a part of putting a will together? And the husband said, because we're talking about death. We're talking about death here. We're talking about my death. And she said, well, we're talking about mine too.

And he said, well, sure. But, but when we talk about death, I feel like it makes it inevitable. Like the fact that we're talking about my death means that it's going to happen. And she was a little dumbfounded by this at first.

And she said, what are you talking about? Of course it's going to happen. Everyone dies. I'm going to die. You're going to die. Do you actually think by not talking about death that you won't die? And he sighed and he said, well, now that you've brought it up, I guess we'll never know.

Will we? Death is not a comfortable topic. We don't like talking about it because in talking about death, we have to recognize our own mortality that we're not invincible. You're really not in control and you really don't have as much freedom of the will as you think you do.

You can't will yourself to keep living. You can't will yourself to not get sick. You can't will yourself to not feel the aches and pains in your bones. Now you can will yourself to push through it. I'm going to get through this day anyway, even though I am feeling my body deteriorating as I go, but you're not in control of when you live and when you die.

Mortality, Sin, and the Curse of Adam

In Job chapter 14, he recognized this when he said that the Lord has set limits upon a man that he cannot pass. We have no control over when we live or when we die. And whenever we talk about death, we become all the more aware of that.

But if there's one statistic that I know that I can say to you as a pastor that will be true, no matter what, it's that one out of every one person dies. Every single person is going to face death. And we always add that little caveat, unless the Lord comes back, which is true.

But the reality of your situation is mostly that you're looking at dying. That is the reality for every person, been the reality of every person who's ever lived on this planet up until now, with the exception of Enoch and Elijah.

But do you really want to play those odds over how many billions of people have lived on this planet over 6 ,000 years? And there's two men who walked with the Lord and then they were taken up into heaven.

You're not those men. That's not going to be your story. Every person faces death because as we read in Romans 3, that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And in Romans 6, verse 23, for the wages of sin is death.

That's what we have earned for our sin against God. Romans 8, God subjected all things to futility because of our sin and our rebellion against God. And as we considered last week, where Paul is talking to the Corinthians here in 1 Corinthians 15, he says that as by a man came death, that's Adam.

The original sin, that first sin that was committed in the Garden of Eden, the rebellion against God. And as I mentioned from Augustine, all of mankind was present with Adam in the garden. And so when he sinned, it affected all of humanity that would come after him.

We have inherited the curse of Adam. We have inherited his sin nature. What God cursed creation for at the time that Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, that is the curse that we are living under even now.

As by a man came death, Adam's rebellion against God brought sin into an otherwise perfect world. A pastor friend of mine just this past week made a particular point online. He said there are only four chapters in the Bible where everything's perfect.

The first two and the last two. That's it. Everything started great. Everything's going to end great. In the middle, we live under this curse because of the rebellion of man against God. But praise God for being a loving and merciful God.

He did not leave us dead in our sins, but sent a Savior to die for our sins, Jesus Christ. As by a man came death, by a man has also come the resurrection of the dead. Verse Corinthians 15, 21. Then verse 22, for as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.

All who are in Christ Jesus will live forever because of what Christ had accomplished on the cross for our sins. When we started off this particular section, 1 Corinthians 15, this argument that the Apostle Paul is presenting for the resurrection of Christ and therefore our resurrection if we believe in Christ.

He says in verse 3, for I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures. That he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.

There's the gospel message right now. Jesus died for our sins and he rose again from the grave. And that is of first importance. That is the truth upon which the church is built. That God became man, lived a perfect life, lived the life that we could not live, died the death that we were supposed to die.

And as he had the authority to lay down his own life, he had the authority to take it back up again and rose again from the grave so that we have this confidence, this assurance that all who believe in Jesus will also live.

We have died a death that is like his in our sins. We have risen again to new life with Christ in righteousness. So as Paul continues this argument for the resurrection of Christ and therefore arguing for our resurrection if we are in Christ, we get to verse 29 where he says, otherwise what do people mean by being baptized on behalf of the dead?

If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized on their behalf? So the Greco-Roman understanding was that a person did not have an eternal soul. When the body died, the soul died with it.

It just went into the ground. That was it. The person ceased to exist. That was what the philosophers taught, that the person just died. There was no infinite with the gods. The gods were the gods. We people are people and when we die, we just go into the ground and that's it.

That's all there is to that story. So we are led to believe that some of the Corinthians, even within the church in Corinth, believe this very thing. How important really is it to believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead?

Is that really an important thing for a Christian to have to believe? Can I just follow the philosophy of Jesus? All that sounds pretty good to me. Jesus seemed like a nice guy, seemed like another one of the philosophers, and so I'll just believe what it was that he taught and that's enough, right?

That's good enough. One of the things that Jesus taught is that whoever would have faith in him would be raised again on the last day. So do you believe everything that he taught or just the things that you want to believe?

Just the stuff that's philosophical, just the stuff that sounds neat to other people? But the Greeks and the Romans, they would mock this idea of the resurrection of the dead. Who's ever heard of that?

The resurrection of the dead. That's crazy talk. So when we get to verse 29, Paul presents an interesting argument here related to a certain religion that was going on nearby Corinth where they were baptizing the dead to raise them to life.

So the point that Paul is making here is, see, even though the common Greco-Roman understanding is that the body just dies and goes into the ground and there is no resurrection of the dead, look at this other cult over here.

This religion that's in this town nearby to you, and they actually do believe in the resurrection of the dead. So clearly there is some sort of understanding, even within the human spirit, a desire to want to live beyond the physical life in which we live now.

So that there's this religion in which the dead are being baptized that they might have the resurrection of the dead. Well, why would they be doing that? If what the philosophers say is true, that there is no resurrection of the dead, clearly there's something in our human conscience that desires a resurrection.

We don't want the grave to be the end. We don't want that whole epitaph on the tombstone, rest in peace, the body just lays there in the ground and that's it. We want to believe that there is a life beyond the grave.

Mormon Baptisms for the Dead and Paul’s Real Target

Now, this passage has been taken out of context to mean some other things. What do people mean by being baptized on behalf of the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people being baptized on their behalf?

And the largest religion in the world that takes that verse to mean that we are to baptize on behalf of the dead is the Mormon religion. In fact, there was a story that came out just a couple of weeks ago in Newsweek.

This is what the story said, members of the Mormon church are breaking church rules by posthumously baptizing victims of the Holocaust and the ancestors of celebrities like President Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and the Kardashians, a researcher revealed.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints allows the ancestors of its members to be baptized into the church after death, but it is against church rules to baptize the ancestors of people who are not Mormon.

Nevertheless, it has become a regular practice for Mormons to baptize the ancestors of celebrities and even Holocaust victims, a Mormon researcher explained to the Associated Press. Mormonism is the only major religion that believes in performing baptisms after death.

The public first learned about the tradition in the 1990s, when it was revealed that the Mormon church had performed baptisms for several hundred thousand Holocaust victims. Jewish leaders condemned the activity at the time, and the church passed a rule making it illegal to posthumously baptize Holocaust victims, except in the rare circumstance that the person in question is related to a certain church member, a current member of the church.

Now, insiders say that the practice continued, despite falling out of the public eye. Baptisms for the dead, as they are called in Mormonism, are performed because Mormons believe that those who do not get baptized into the church during life can still make it to the highest level of heaven if they are baptized after their death.

They are also meant to keep families united in the afterlife. Recent documents revealed that Mormons had baptized the parents and grandparents of Donald Trump. Other noteworthy baptisms are those of celebrity Kim Kardashian's grandparents, Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, and the grandparents of politicians like Joe Biden and Mike Pence.

The mother of the Queen of England was also baptized, according to records. The church's genealogical records are available to the public through its website FamilySearch .org, but the baptisms after death are stored in a part of the database accessible only to church members with a password.

So this is a religious practice that goes on in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Now, we have such a church here in Junction City, but they don't do those kinds of baptisms there. They do baptisms for the dead at the temple, which is in Kansas City.

So if you want to do a baptism for a dead member of your family, you would have to go to the temple in Kansas City to do that. And the baptismal fount, according to Mormon tradition, is under ground level.

So you go into the temple, and then under the temple, in the basement, is where the baptismal fount is. Why would the baptismal fount be there? We have our baptismal fount right there above ground level.

Well, in the Mormon tradition, it's below ground level because it represents a resurrection out of the ground. You would go in with a certain baptismal garb. They have a certain garb that they wear to do baptisms in the Mormon Church.

And you go in with the names of people that are dead that you want to be baptized on behalf of. And then you'll go into the baptismal fount, and they have, you know, the priests that are there to administer the baptism.

And you pray a certain prayer, mentioning the person's name in that prayer that you are being baptized on behalf of. And then you'll be dunked in water and raised up, and you just got baptized for them even though they're dead.

And they'll do that process over and over again. Some of them come in with whole lists of names and will be baptized on behalf of those people who have died. Now, this has always been in the Mormon tradition.

It was a doctrine that was created by Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet, who claimed that the angel Moroni showed up and gave him these gold tablets, which became the Book of Mormon, which is a very easy religion to dispute, by the way, Galatians 1, 8 through 9.

If we or even an angel from heaven come preaching to you a gospel different than the one that we preach to you, let him be accursed. But yet Mormonism continues to this day. And so Joseph Smith created this doctrine of the baptism of the dead.

And the passage of Scripture that he came up with this doctrine from is this one, 1 Corinthians 15, 29. But what Paul is talking about here is not the baptism of the dead as though we as saints or followers of Christ can be baptized on behalf of somebody else who has died.

That's not what he's talking about. There's no personal ownership of this doctrine as Paul presents it as an example. What do I mean by that? Well, he doesn't include the words us or we. He's not talking about we are baptized on behalf of the dead.

He's saying that it happens somewhere, but it isn't within the Christian religion. Verse 29 again. Otherwise, what do people mean by being baptized on behalf of the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized on their behalf?

So he's talking about something else, something else that somebody else is doing, not something that we practice. Because this would, if you wanted to make an argument for the baptism of the dead within the Christian faith, this is the only verse that mentions it, the only one.

There is no baptism on behalf of those who have died. So what could Paul possibly be referencing? Well, he's talking about, as I mentioned already, a cult that was going on in a city nearby Corinth called Eleusis.

Now, if you look at Corinth on a map, Corinth is located on kind of the northeast corner of the Peloponnese Peninsula. So it's kind of like that country of Greece. You got that Peloponnese Peninsula there.

The body of water that's just to the north of Corinth is the Gulf of Corinth. Then you have the Isthmus of Corinth that connects that peninsula with the rest of the country, and then the sea to the east of that is the Aegean Sea.

Well, Eleusis is right there on the Aegean Sea. Corinth would be where the Gulf of Corinth is, but then you have the Isthmus, and Eleusis is on the other side. And that country is on the Aegean Sea. So there was a religious group there that believed in a baptism of the dead.

And if you were baptized on behalf of somebody who has died, that they would be raised up from the dead. They believed that the Aegean Sea itself had a power. And so if you were baptized in the Aegean Sea, the strength of the sea, the power that was in the gods that reigned over that sea, would therefore work in that baptism to raise a dead soul to life.

And so Paul is coming to the Corinthians with this argument. He's probably specifically talking to those Corinthians who still had that Greco-Roman understanding of just absolute annihilation of the spirit.

He said, okay, if that's your argument, then why are there still other religions that are baptizing on behalf of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, why are there people even outside of Christianity that desire a resurrection of the dead?

So even within a Greco-Roman culture, there were still some who believed in the resurrection of the dead. The point that Paul is making out here is he's laying out these arguments for the resurrection, the resurrection of Christ, and therefore the resurrection of those who are in Christ.

We had the eyewitness accounts that were at the start. Well, we had the scripture accounts. This was in according to the scripture. You have the eyewitness accounts. Paul, having witnessed himself, Christ, who appeared to him on the road of Damascus, then he provides the if-then arguments, verses 12 through 19.

If Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If we have all of this testimony, all of this eyewitness account, all of this proof of the resurrection of Christ, how can some of you still believe that Jesus did not rise from the dead?

If Christ is not raised from the dead, no one gets raised from the dead. Paul says in verse 17, if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you're still in your sins. Those who have fallen asleep, they've perished.

Mourn for them because there is no resurrection of the dead. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied because we believe in something that isn't actually going to happen.

Then you get to verse 20 where Paul says, but in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. So he has risen first, he has received his glorified body, and then everyone who is in Christ will receive the same.

When you die, your soul goes to be forever with the Lord, but Paul points out, each in his own order, Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming, those who belong to Christ. So your soul goes to be with the Lord, but it's not until Christ returns that your body is risen from the grave and what was perishable is made to be imperishable like the body of Christ.

He is the first to receive an imperishable glorified body. He sits at the right hand of the throne of God right now in an imperishable glorified body. He wasn't just fully man, fully God, very man, very God when he was here on this earth.

He's still very man and very God right now as he is seated at the right hand of the Father and is mediating for his people in heaven. He is mediating in heaven for his people who are on earth. So each of these things has a certain order, Christ first, then when he returns, our bodies get raised, reunited with our souls, we are made imperishable like him, all of his enemies are put under his feet, he presents the perfect kingdom to his father, and then when all things are subjected to him, the son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him that God may be all in all.

And then as Paul continues the argument, saying there are even those outside the Christian religion who believe in the resurrection of the dead. Why are they doing this if there is no resurrection of the dead?

So the argument Paul is presenting now is that it's inherent within us to want to live beyond the finite life that we exist in right now. We don't want to continue in the same pain and suffering that we're in in this life, but we do desire to live on from this life.

As Solomon said in Ecclesiastes, God has put eternity in the hearts of men, but they cannot fathom what he has done from beginning to end. There is a desire for eternity in our hearts. You look at some of the philosophies that the atheists try to press on people today, and you can see a desire even in the atheist heart for eternity.

Richard Dawkins, one of the arguments that he has made concerning the universe is that it's eternal. We live in an eternal universe. It's just kind of in this state of flux. Sometimes things are living in it, sometimes things are not, sometimes it's extremely chaotic, sometimes it's ordered.

Just on and on it goes. Or you'll hear some of those atheists that'll even argue for an infinite number of universes. We just happen to live in the one where life is possible on planet Earth, but there could be another universe in an infinite number of universes where life is possible on Pluto or some other planet way out in the far reaches of the galaxies.

We just happen to live in the universe in which life happens on planet Earth, which is an absolutely absurd argument. But it's the eternity that they have in their hearts, the desire for eternity, and that's just how it manifests itself into this idea of an infinite universe rather than an infinite God.

This idea of an infinite number of universes rather than a God who sits over all creation and judges righteously. I don't want to believe in that because then I have to submit to somebody. But if I can believe that there are an infinite number of universes, then I'm the God of my own universe, right?

This just happens to be the universe that I reign over. So even within the secularists, even in their hearts, you hear eternity that is in the heart of every person. We have a longing for eternity. Paul points that out in this argument himself.

There are other religions that desire the resurrection of the dead. Why are they even baptizing the dead if it were not so? And then he relates that to the dangers that we put ourselves through as Christians.

Why would we even subject ourselves to these things if there was not a resurrection of the dead? Why would you even care to suffer for the cause of Christ? I mean, what's the point of even being ridiculed by people you know or being ostracized by members of your family for the faith that you have and you believe if there is no resurrection of the dead?

What would be the point? What would be the point in being persecuted or ridiculed for your faith if there is no resurrection of the dead? Verse 30, why are we in danger every hour? Paul's saying to the Corinthians, why am I even doing this?

Why have I endured shipwrecks and being stoned and being beaten with whips and having my life threatened, being smuggled out of Thessalonica because the Jews wanted to kill me, escaping in the cover of night, being arrested, thrown in prison?

Why do I even bother going through any of this if there's no resurrection of the dead? What point does it make? If this is all we've got, if this life is it, if this is all we have, why would I desire a miserable one?

Why would I not want to make everything that I have in this life as pleasurable as it could possibly be, no matter what that is? And by the way, this was also from some of the Greek philosophers. Pleasure is all there is, and so you just need to attain the highest pleasure that you possibly can.

Eat, drink, and be merry. But Paul says we're in danger every hour. Why? Why would we even bother doing that if there was not a resurrection of the dead? Verse 31, I protest, brothers, by my pride in you, which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord.

I die every day. So as Paul sets this up, he's not boasting in himself, he's boasting in Christ. He's saying that you are my children because I have brought you to Christ. It was by the testimony that I shared, the gospel that I preached there in Corinth, that you have become children of God.

And so it's out of a jealous love for you that I am saying what I go through for you. I protest, brothers, by my pride in you, which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord. I die every day. I have given up my rock star status as a Pharisee, and, Luke 9, 23, I take up my cross daily and follow after him.

And I'm doing this for you. I die to myself every day. I put off the pleasures of the flesh every day. I labor, I work, I struggle, I toil in the gospel every day for you. Why would I do that if there wasn't a resurrection?

What would the point be? I mean, this is not just a theological argument, it's deeply philosophical as well. What would the point be in doing anything that would cause me to die every day if there was not the hope and the promise for me of a resurrection that was to come?

Because, see, this life is nothing compared to eternity. So what does it matter to me, what happens to me while I'm in this body, in this flesh, if I know that guaranteed for me is eternity with God? That's what I'm laboring for, that's what my gaze is focused upon.

When you get to Paul's last letter in 2 Timothy chapter 4, he says, I fought the good fight. I have run the race. Paul knows he's at the end of his life and he is finishing strong. He has done everything for the Lord that God had asked him to do.

He gave up everything for the cause of Christ. And he knew the reward was waiting for him on the other side. That's what it's all about, having that perspective of eternity in mind. Never, my brothers and sisters in Christ, very important, never lose your perspective on eternity.

Never lose that. We fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and the perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is now seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

He did this for the joy of the Lord. Philippians 2 .11, he did this to the glory of God the Father. And so we likewise in Christ can have confidence in life, knowing that no matter what you go through, no matter what you endure in this life, and I'm not just talking about the general aches and pains and stresses and anxieties that you feel about life.

You know what? Everybody feels that. Some more so than others, but even secularists, non-believers, naturalists, atheists, Buddhists, Taoists, Muslims, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses. Everyone feels aches and pains in your body as it gets older.

Everyone feels stresses and anxieties on the burdens of life, on the things that you have to do today or tomorrow, on the things that even happened in your past that you can't seem to shake or let go of.