2 Corinthians 5

KingComments

‹ Chapter 4 2 Corinthians — All Chapters Chapter 6 ›

2 Corinthians 5:1

The Gospel of Salvation

The chapter you now have before you is the longest of the letter. Just like the previous chapters, Paul deals here with something that had to be corrected with the Corinthians. What we have here however is not a wrong practice, but a wrong doctrine. Not that practice and doctrine can be separated. You will see that a wrong doctrine always goes together with a wrong practice. In a positive respect it is also like that. If you are occupied with the sound doctrine of the Bible, it will result in a sound balanced Christian life.

The wrong doctrine here has to do with the resurrection of the dead. There are people who say that there is no resurrection of the dead (1 Corinthians 15:12). Paul is explaining here what the effects are of this error. As is often the case, he also uses the wrong doctrine that was preached to tell you a lot of things about Christ. He shows what effect a certain deceitful doctrine has for the Person of Christ.

That is something you can learn from. If you happen to deal with people who want to teach you and who want to make you believe something which you do not know whether it is in accordance with the Bible, then the best thing you can do is ask yourself what effect that teaching has on the Person and the work of the Lord Jesus.

What Paul also does, is showing what the truth of God is, thus how you should really see it. He uses the opportunity to teach the believers further about the subject that is attacked by the enemy. With regard to the resurrection, he even makes known a mystery (1 Corinthians 15:51-55). In that way this chapter becomes an extraordinarily beautiful and important chapter.

1 Corinthians 15:1. In the first verses, before he speaks in details about the resurrection, he once more presents the gospel to the Corinthians, in a simple manner and intently. He had already preached it to them, but it was necessary to do it once more. They seemed to have forgotten about that, which was possibly caused by the influences of false teachers who took them on a wrong path about the truth of resurrection. Therefore he shows them right at the beginning, that if they believe this error, they jeopardize their salvation. He deliberately says it that way to indicate the gravity of the error and what is jeopardized by following this error.

There is the assurance that believers cannot perish. The Lord Jesus gives the absolute guarantee for that (John 10:28-29). This assurance is from God. He is the One Who guarantees that. However, here Paul is not talking about what God does, but about the responsibility of the believer. That is something you should distinguish well. There are more verses that make that distinction.

It may be helpful if you read two verses in Colossians 1 (Colossians 1:22-23). There you read what God does (Colossians 1:22) and what the believer should do (Colossians 1:23). Do you notice that the last verse (Colossians 1:23) starts with “if”? Phrases that start with this word “if”, are often about the responsibility of the believer. Another example you read in Hebrews 3 (Hebrews 3:6).

1 Corinthians 15:2. You also find the word “if” here in 1 Corinthians 15:2. It is not meant to make you doubt about your salvation. It is meant to talk to you about your confession. Have you really been converted and did you really accept the good news of God? Are you really sure about that, without doubts? Are you sure that you will be saved by that, which means: that you will definitely enter heaven? This is how Paul approaches the Corinthians.

He had preached the gospel, the good news from God, to these profoundly lost sinners. He had seen that they accepted that good news. He knew that they made that choice; they had gained a certainty that kept them from being driven back and forth by their desires. He knew that they would reach the final goal safely. But … they have to prove that it is true by holding fast what they had learned from Paul.

That also applies to you and me. There is only one way to show that your confession is true and pure and that is by showing that you hold fast the Word of God. Otherwise “you believed in vain”. ”In vain” means that your faith is empty, meaningless.

1 Corinthians 15:3. To make them well aware again of the content and the value of the gospel, he first of all points them at how he brought it to them. He had not told them anything different than what he himself had directly received from the Lord. He did not hear it from anyone else, so they could not possibly have misunderstood him. Second, they could verify the content of the gospel, for it was “according to the Scriptures”. In the Scripture you can read about the work of Christ.

So Paul makes every effort to affirm the accuracy of the gospel they had heard. I am glad that he says it that clearly. There is no doubt about the content of the gospel. It is about Christ and about what happened to Him. Because it is written twice “according to the Scriptures”, you may say that the gospel is resting on two pillars. Should you take one of them away, then there is no gospel left.

The first pillar is “that Christ died for our sins”. The death of Christ was necessary because we sinned. To be able to redeem us from our sins, He had to die in our place, bearing our sins. God judged our sins in Him.

1 Corinthians 15:4. But if this would have been all that Christ did for us, we would have never known whether God was really satisfied with what the Lord Jesus had done. Therefore it was necessary that He raised the Lord Jesus from the dead, as a proof that His work was fully accomplished and was accepted by Him.

The second time that “according to the Scriptures” is mentioned, it is preceded by “that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day”. The burial and the resurrection are mentioned in one breath. Therein lies a tremendous consolation with the burial of a believer. The burial takes place with a view to the resurrection! One who had to bury someone whom he loved, may know that there will be a reunion. That will happen in the resurrection. Things will be far more beautiful than they were on earth. How things will be, is made clear from 1 Corinthians 15:42.

This whole chapter makes clear how important it is to believe in the physical resurrection. The book of Acts also testifies to this. When in Acts 1 a new apostle has to be appointed in Judas’ place, the apostle to be chosen had to be able to witness of “His resurrection” (Acts 1:21-23), which is the resurrection of Christ. In the speeches of Peter and also in one of Paul’s speeches, the resurrection is mentioned again and again (Acts 2:31; Acts 3:15; Acts 4:2; 10; Acts 5:30; Acts 10:40; Acts 13:30; Acts 17:31). Believing in the resurrection is a crucial part of the Christian faith. He who does not believe in the resurrection, may call himself a Christian, but he is not a child of God.

There is a chance that you hear people talking about the resurrection, but that they mean something totally different than what you learn from this chapter. They mean by that what is called reincarnation. That is: returning to this world after death, but then in another form. There are more and more people who believe this lie. You can only counter this with one thing and that is to put before them what Paul says here about the resurrection. That is the truth through which deceit is unmasked.

Now read 1 Corinthians 15:1-4 again.

Reflection: Why is resurrection important?

2 Corinthians 5:2

The Gospel of Salvation

Now read 1 Corinthians 15:1-4 again.

Reflection: Why is resurrection important?

2 Corinthians 5:3

The Resurrection of Christ

1 Corinthians 15:5-6. To support the fact of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, Paul summarizes a number of witnesses, of whom some even were still alive when he wrote this letter. So it was a fact which could be verified by the Corinthians! After His resurrection Christ was never seen by unbelievers, at least, we cannot find this in the Bible. Wherever His appearance is mentioned in the Bible after His resurrection, it is to believers.

The Holy Spirit does not let Paul mention all witnesses. So Mary Magdalene is passed by (John 20:11-18) as are the two going to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35). The witnesses that are mentioned, are, so to speak, chosen because of their personal reputation (Cephas, i.e. Peter) or because of their number (the twelve, five hundred at the same time) or because of their special position (James, all apostles). In that way all doubts about the physical resurrection of Christ are removed.

1 Corinthians 15:7-8. At last Paul mentions himself. To him the Lord appeared in an exceptional way. The other witnesses saw the Lord during His forty days on earth after His resurrection (Acts 1:3), but to Paul the Lord appeared after His return to heaven. In Acts 9 you read about this event (Acts 9:1-9). His conversion also happened at that moment. That’s why he was too late born again to be able to see the Lord on earth as the Risen One. Therefore Paul calls himself here “one untimely born”.

1 Corinthians 15:9. While he is writing about that and looks back to the circumstances in which he found himself then, he again is impressed of God’s grace. It’s not possible for him only to talk about God’s truth intellectually. His heart is in it. And when he sees again what he was occupied with, he deeply humbles himself before God. He has not forgotten about his past. He was a persecutor of the church of God. He calls himself the “foremost” of all sinners (1 Timothy 1:15). He does not try to talk his way out of it, but he frankly admits how terrible his crimes were. He doesn’t do that out of some pride to show how bad he was. No, he does that to emphasize the grace of God even more.

It is no humble pride when he calls himself “the least of the apostles”. It is no disguised form of self-praise when he talks about himself to be “not fit” of being called “an apostle”. He means what he says from his heart because he is impressed of God’s grace.

You can learn here in which wonderful way you may be occupied with the truth of God. Whatever truth you read about in the Bible, God’s purpose has always been that the Lord Jesus becomes more important and that we get less important. John the baptist understood that well when he said: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). That’s something you cannot pass on to each other; that must be the desire of your heart. When that is in your heart, then that admiration for God’s grace comes forward more and more every time you read something in His Word. You then take the right position before God so that He can use you, for in this way you are of value to Him.

1 Corinthians 15:10. Therefore Paul could say that the grace of God made him who he was. It is really wonderful to see how, on the one hand he is aware that everything is grace and that man is nothing, and on the other hand how exactly that awareness motivated him to great activity. He made every endeavor for God’s work that he could say without any form of self-praise that he had labored more than all of them. But even that he does not ascribe to himself, but ascribes that totally to the grace of God that was with him.

So he says successively: 1. I am nothing; 2. what I am, I am by grace; 3. therefore I have labored more than whoever; 4. but even that abundant working I could only do because God’s grace gave me the power to.

God wants to teach you to repeat these things. Not as a lesson you’ve learned by heart, but by practicing it in your daily life.

1 Corinthians 15:11. The result will be that He receives all honor from the ‘preaching’ that is reflected in your life. That is what Paul is presenting the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 15:11. He himself was thoroughly aware of the grace that was shown to him at his conversion and during his life afterward, just like the other apostles. This is how they preached the gospel and this is how the Corinthians have believed it.

When we are thoroughly aware of the grace that God proved to us at our conversion and which He still proves daily, we shall be able to preach like Paul and the other apostles have done. Not that we can emulate Paul, but the content and power of our preaching then comes from the Source from which Paul also drew.

1 Corinthians 15:12-19. In these verses it is proved in a simple way how far-reaching the denial of the resurrection is. When you read these verses carefully, you can sense the power of the apostle’s argumentation. It is clear and unambiguous.

Paul says, as it were: ‘Beloved Corinthians, you should think it through what it actually means, if you do not believe in the resurrection of the dead anymore. Listen carefully: If no dead are raised, then neither Christ has been raised; if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless, for you are then still in your sins. And that makes us false witnesses, for we have then just been pulling the wool over your eyes in our preaching. And those who are dead already, are perished.

We would be no more than a bunch of fools, if only in this life our hope is in Christ. That would mean that we take distance from the fun and the pleasures of the world and experiencing trials instead, with nothing in return in the afterlife. Then we are the most pitiable of all people. Now we have nothing and in future we have nothing. It is all for nothing.’

Of course that was not the intention of the Corinthians, but Paul shows that these are the consequences of what some of them said. The raising of the Lord Jesus by God is exactly the conclusive proof that all sins of all believers are taken away.

Here you see also how inseparable Christ is connected to the believers. What applies to Christ also applies to the believers. Are the believers not raised? Then neither Christ has been raised!

I already indicated in the introduction to this chapter, and it is good to repeat it once again, that Paul is offering us a good method here to unmask a wrong teaching. That method is: Explore what the consequences of a certain doctrine are for Christ and His work.

2 Corinthians 5

2 Corinthians 5:1

2 Corinthians 5:2

2 Corinthians 5:3

2 Corinthians 5:4

2 Corinthians 5:5

2 Corinthians 5:6

2 Corinthians 5:7

2 Corinthians 5:8

2 Corinthians 5:9

2 Corinthians 5:10

2 Corinthians 5:11

2 Corinthians 5:12

2 Corinthians 5:13

2 Corinthians 5:14

2 Corinthians 5:15

2 Corinthians 5:16

2 Corinthians 5:17

2 Corinthians 5:18

2 Corinthians 5:19

2 Corinthians 5:20

2 Corinthians 5:21