What Comes of a Dead Christ

1 Cor. xv. 14, 15

“And if Christ be not risen, then is oar preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God.” — I Cor. XV. 14, 15.

QE do not prove that an event has happened by showing the advantages of believing that it has. And so the statement of consequences of the denial of the Resurrection in this context is not intended as proof of the reality of the Resurrection. Paul has established that in the previous part of the chapter by the only legitimate evidence — viz., the testimony of eye-witnesses. Here he deals with the results that would follow from the denial of a Resurrection in order to show, not that it has verily taken place, but that the belief of it is fundamental to all real Christian belief.

The peculiar form of heresy against which the Apostle is arguing — viz, the denial of a general resurrection of the dead, accompanied with an acceptance of Christ’s Resurrection, does not concern us now. Nor are we concerned with the place in his argument which this enumeration of the destructive effects of the denial of Christ’s rising again, holds. I confine myself to the consideration of that list of consequences. If we invert them we gather the blessed results of the faith in a Resurrection. I deal, not only with the clauses which I have read, but with the others which belong to the same subject in the adjoining verses.

I. — The first point the Apostle makes is this: that with the Resurrection of Jesus Christ the whole Gospel stands or falls.

‘*If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain.” Now that does not mean, as a mere English reader might take it to mean, “it is useless for us to preach.*’ “Preaching” here means, not the act, but the subject-matter of the message, and “vain” means, not idle, but empty, Paul thinks that unless Jesus Christ be risen the Gospel is emptied of its contents. Its life-blood is drained out of it. As we say colloquially, there is nothing in it. It is an empty shell. A dead Christ makes a hollow Gospel; a living Christ makes a full one.

Let us just illustrate that for a few moments. If the Resurrection goes the supernatural goes; if the Resurrection remains the door is opened for the miraculous. We hear all round about us to-day, in all sorts of voices, the declaration that all miracle is impossible There is one fact that stands on its own appropriate evidence, evidence which I venture to say is irrefragable — viz., the historical fact of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, which shatters all such contention. That fact is the key of the position. Like some great fortress standing at the mouth of the pass into the fertile country, as long as it holds out, the storm of war is rolled back in broken foam from its firm battlements; if it yields all is surrendered. Round the alleged fact of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ turns this whole controversy; and more and more it will be manifest that any theory of the relations between God and man, which is not able to find a place for the fact of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, is unable to hold the field. All sorts of preposterous theories to account for the belief in it upon natural grounds spring up, generation after generation, and generation after generation are swept away into the dust-bin of forgotten absurdities, and the old message stands, “Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.” If that be the truth, there is a gap in the iron wall of natural sequence that rings round men’s lives, wide enough for all supernatural communications from the loving Father of us all to enter in. This is the test question. Do you believe in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ?

Again, if the Resurrection of Christ goes, all the peculiarity of His nature goes with it. He said, as I believe, that He was the Son of God. His life is full of claims to a unique position. When He was laid in the new rock tomb, and the stars shone down upon it that night, was He laid there for ever, and is He there still r If so, there is no use in mincing the matter, Jesus Christ’s talk about Himself was false; and Jesus Christ’s claims to be a reliable religious teacher are subject to the tremendous deduction that, with all the beauty of much that He said, and the sweetness and humbleness of His life, He advanced claims which the fact of His dying the death of all men, and lying in the tomb, has pulverised and absolutely destroyed. But if it be true that He has risen from the dead, then we say with Paul, “declared to be the Son of God by the resurrection from the dead” And in that mighty act which befel, as in the breaking dawn of this day, we hear the last and the clearest of God’s utterances of approval, “This is My beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.”

Again, with the Resurrection of Jesus Christ stands or falls the special character and efficacy of His death. If He has been laid in the tomb, and has not burst its bonds, then it is idle to talk of anything in the nature of expiation or sacrifice for sin in that death which He died; but, if it be true that He indeed has come forth from the grave, then we have the great Divine attestation to the efficacy of His sacrifice, and the acceptableness of His expiation, and can rejoice that, the Victim having come forth from the darkness of death, that which He died to effect has been effected, and our sins are passed away.

If, on the other hand, there be no Resurrection, then there is no sacrifice, and if no sacrifice, then there is no pardon, and the very heart of the Gospel has disappeared, and Christ falls back into the crowd, and there is nothing in Him that there is not in the rest of us.

So, if all these things go — the miraculous, the Divinity of our Lord, the sacrificial nature of His death — if these things go, what is left is not

Christianity. Paul says: “If Christ be not risen, our preaching’* — the thing that I preach — is emptied of all its contents; it is not worth preaching. What, then, was his conception of the Gospel? Suppose there were no Resurrection, what is left? All that a great many think makes Christianity. Its removal does not touch the beauty of Christ’s words. It does not, in the slightest degree, affect the loveliness of His character; it does not at all, except inferentially, affect His position as our Pattern and the very ideal and summit of the human nature. “Yet,” says Paul, “if that is all I have to preach, I have nothing but an empty shell to preach.*’ He thought that the things which went with the Resurrection of Jesus Christ were all the things that made Christianity. If you took it away, you struck out the centre pole of the tent, and all the rest came down in a huddle of wet canvas, below which no man could live.” If Christ be not risen, our preaching is vain.**

II. — Secondly, with the Resurrection of Jesus Christ stands or falls the character of the witnesses.

The Apostle, in his down-right fashion, puts his finger upon the real state of the case when he says, “This is the question: Are we, these eleven men and I, John, Peter, and all the rest of us, are we liars or are we not? ‘* He points out, too, the palpable improbability, when he says that if so, they are ‘* false witnesses of God” — men believing themselves to be servants of Him who is the God of truth and purity, and thinking to advance His rVJIAT COMBS OF A DEAD CHRIST. 141

Kingdom by telling a monstrous falsehood. There have been priests, plenty, that have not felt any inconsistency in such a position, and have been orthodox liars for God. But it is impossible to suppose that that was the character of these Apostles. Enthusiasm never lives with falsehood, nor does self-sacrifice. No conscious liar can preach a lofty morality. These men were self-sacrificing enthusiasts who had devoted their lives to the promulgation of the loftiest morality. Is it credible that flowers of that sort grow in the rotten swamp of unveracity? Do men gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles? The hypothesis that the early Christian witnesses to the Resurrection were deliberate falsifiers of fact will not hold water.

And by the acknowledgment of the disbelievers of the Resurrection to-day it does not hold water, for the vulgar old theory has been long abandoned, and nobody now ventures to say that they were false witnesses. Oh, no! The men that least accept their testimony are those who abound in compliments to their moral elevation, to the purity and beauty of their religious character, to the “genius” of Paul, to the large wisdom that marks many of his words. I can fancy how he would have looked at some of these modern teachers, who kiss first and then deny. He would have said to them: I do not want your compliments. I am not here as a great religious thinker; my business is to tell a plain story. Do you believe me, or do you not?

And that really is the issue to which we have to come. For no attempt to save the character of the first preachers, and to give up the historical fact, has ever been able to stand its ground, or ever will. They talk about illusions. Strange illusions that sprung up in a soil that had nothing in it to prepare for them! There was no expectation which might have become parent of the belief. They tell us that the desire was father of the thought I wonder if people that try to explain the Resurrection on the ground that longing to see Him again made the Apostles fancy that they had seen Him again, ever yearned

For the touch of a vanished hand.
Or the sound of a voice that is still«

I think if they had, they would have looked for some other explanation. Illusions shared by 500 people at once! They fancied they saw Him amongst them; they fancied they saw Him eat and drink; they fancied they heard Him speak; they fancied that they heard Him say, “I go into Galilee “; they fancied they met Him there; they fancied they saw Him go up into heaven! Surely, such an explanation, by the very desperation of the shifts to which it is reduced, bears involuntary witness that the Resurrection is an historical fact, resting upon evidence with which it is vain to struggle. We are shut up to the alternative — either Jesus Christ is risen again from the dead, or these noble lives of enthusiasm, faith, self-sacrifice, and lofty morality, are the spawn of a lie. “Yea! we are found false witnesses of God.”

III. — Again, with the Resurrection of Jesus Christ stands or falls the faith of the Christian.

Twice in this context does the Apostle use the expression, according to our Authorised Version, “Your faith is vain/* But the two words rendered “vain” are not the same. The first of them is that employed also in the previous clause, “Then is our preaching vain,’* and in both cases it means “empty.** The second, in the 17th verse, is a different word, and means vain in the sense of having no effect.

So notice, first, a dead Christ makes an empty faith. There is nothing for faith to lay hold of It is like a drowning man grasping a rope’s end swinging over the side of the ship, which is loose at the other end and gives; or like some poor creature falling down the face of a precipice, and clutching at a tuft of grass, which comes away in his hand. A dead Christ is no object for faith. He may be for admiration or imitation; but for faith — No! You want a living Lord for that, “a Christ that died, yea! rather that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God.” Faith is empty of contents unless it grasps the risen Lord; and if it lays hold of Him it is solid and full.

Again, a dead Christ makes a powerless faith. The Apostle proceeds to give one illustration of its powerlessness. Unless we believe in a risen Saviour we have no deliverance from our sin, either as a ground of condemnation or as a power over our lives. A religion which does not bring conscious deliverance from sin, both as guilt and as tendency, is not worth calling a religion. If our faith has not set us free from condemnation, and from the love and service of evil, it is not worth calling faith. How much vain faith, then, there must be going up and down the world, if all faith which leaves men “in their sins is to be gibbeted as “vain “! What about yours? Does it take you clean out of the region of sin and death, and lift you right into the region of righteousness and life? In Paul’s judgment no religion will deliver a man from the condemnation and the power of evil, except a religion which grasps the fact of the risen Christ. That is so, because, as we have seen, unless for the Resurrection, we have no ground of belief in the expiation and sacrifice of the Cross. And if we have not that, we have nothing that assures to us the cleansing of our sins.

And it is so for another reason — because, unless we have a faith in a Christ that lives to help and quicken and purify us, we shall never really be delivered from the dominion of our sins, nor live a life of purity and of righteousness. So, both because the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the key to the power of the death of Christ, and because it is the beginning of the continuous life of Jesus Christ with us, in us, and for us, our faith has no operation in delivering us from the burden and chain of evil, unless it grasps a Cross, an empty sepulchre, and a filled Throne. “If Christ be not risen your faith is vain.”

IV. — And, lastly, with the Resurrection of Christ stands or falls the Heaven of His servants.

JFffAT COMES OF A DEAD CHRIST. 14S

That is set before us in the context in two forms: “Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished.” A dead Christ means dead Christians. All the saints that have gone, as they thought, with “singing and with everlasting joy upon their heads,” into the presence of the living Lord, have gone out of life with a lie in their right hand, and have lain down in the dust, there to remain for evermore. The dark curtain falls. There is one thing that makes immortality certain — the fact of Christ’s Resurrection. There is but one thing that makes the believer’s eternal life sure — the eternal life of his Lord. A living Head means living members; a dead Head means members dead and corrupt. So, for ourselves, for all our dear ones, for all the generations that have trod the common road into the great darkness, there is the one hope — a risen Christ. “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” “Because I live, ye shall live also.”

And, again, another form of this thought is, a dead Christ makes deluded Christians, “for if in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.” Now, that “only” does not merely apply to the words that precede it in our translation, but to the whole clause: “If in this life we have hope in Christ, and if that is all, we are of all men the most to be pitied.” So says Paul, and then people say, “What a low notion that is! Would it not be better to be a Christian than not, if there were no future life? Did not the Stoic philosophers, who said, * Virtue is its own reward,* reach a higher elevation than this Apostle who said, If there is no future life for Christians, then they are most to be pitied of all men? *’ I do not think so. Notice, he does not say they are most to be pitied, because of any sorrows or trouble that they have had here, although that is the ordinary explanation of the words. They are the most to be pitied because the nobler the hope, the more tragic its disappointment. And of all the tragedies of life there would be none so great as this, that Christian men cherishing such aspirations, with such high, buoyant, jubilant confidence in a great eternity, should all the while have been clutching a phantom, grasping mists, “filling their belly with the east wind,” as the Old Testament says. If we, journeying across the desert, are only cheated by miragey when we think we see the shining battlements of the Eternal City, which are nothing but hot air dancing in empty space, surely none are more to be pitied than we. On the other hand, a living Christ turns these hopes into certainties, and makes us, not the most pitiable, but the most blessed and felicitous of the sons of men; for they are happy, whatever their outward fate, who live, entertaining a pure hope, and who die into its fulfilment. And this is the lot of the Christian man.

So, brethren, this Gospel, that Christ died for our sins, and was raised again the third day, is the Gospel that is worth preaching. That is the Gospel that makes our faith solid. That is the Gospel that gives us deliverance from our sins. That is the Gospel that makes it possible for us to think thankfully, peacefully, sometimes even joyfully of those that sleep in Jesus. That is the Gospel which will make us, whilst we live, blessed in hope, and when we die thrice blessed in fruition. Do you see to it that it is the Gospel which you believe, by which also you stand. And take for your own that great shout of triumph with which our Apostle turns away from the ghastly picture of what would come of a dead Christ. “Now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first (ruits of them that sleep.”