Father Stephen De Young: Verse 42:

So St. Paul’s making a series of contrasts, right, using the sown language. So he’s going back to his first metaphor, which was about plants, this farming metaphor. So all of these things in the first set of contrasts are true of our bodies now. Our bodies now are corrupt. Our bodies now manifest the effects, of our sin and the sin in the world. They are corrupt, they are not pure. They are dishonored. And he contrasts dishonor with glory. Meaning because of that sinfulness and because of that corruption, we are now outside of paradise. We’re cut off from the presence of God.

It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. So now we are weak. Our bodies are physically weak. We have aches, we have pains, we have suffering. We have, as Christ said to his disciples when they couldn’t pray with Him, spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. St. Paul talked about in his epistle to the Romans, the good we want to do, we don’t do. The evil we don’t want to do, we end up doing. We have this weakness that’s part of our mortal and corrupt bodies.

And so you see sort of the escalation here then, in the contrasts. That corruption is replaced with incorruption. Our bodies are purified. They’re now incorrupt. Our dishonor is replaced with glory. We’re able to again draw close to God and be in the presence of God. Our bodies are sown in weakness and they’re raised in power, right? Power. There is power or authority.

And it’s not coincidental that those last two where he talks about glory and power, those two ideas are why he introduced the concept of the angelic beings in the first place, the first one being the glory. He talked about how they differ from each other in glory. The ranks, what we would call the ranks of angels, in our present sort of Orthodox usual terminology, they differ from each other in glory and how close they are, they are to God. You will notice in the icons of the saints, what we have gotten used to in the west as calling a halo, that’s actually a nimbus around the saint’s face, this is supposed reflect the idea that they in the presence of God, are now reflecting the glory of God. It is not their own glory, but it is God’s glory reflected in them in which they’re participating because they’re in his presence.

And sort of Exhibit A of that, of course, is back in the Torah when Moses goes and speaks to God face to face on Mount Sinai. When he comes back, his face is shining with the glory of God. And the Israelites can’t stand the glory of God. It’s painful to them because of their present sinful state of being. And so Moses has to wear a veil and hide it from them. But this is true of the saints who are there with Christ face to face all the time. And we reflect that in our iconography. This is why the nimbus around Christ is different and reflects both his identity, It has the name of the Lord there, in Greek transliteration, Yahweh, identifying him, and it has the form of the cross because of course, if you read St. John’s gospel, that’s where Christ is glorified is in his death, is in his crucifixion. That’s the terminology that St. John uses, for it is his glorification. So that’s Christ’s own glory, it’s not reflected, but for the saints it is reflected.

And so for St. Paul, in the same way that those angelic beings have different bodies, they appear differently. When Isaiah or Ezekiel see them, they look different than each other. That different participation requires a different bodily form, in the same way, this destiny that we have in Christ to be in the presence of God, to be transformed by the presence of God, to have him glorify us by allowing us to participate in his glory, which is reflected from us, that requires a transformation of our body, that requires a new type of body for that destiny.

And then the third element that he mentions, power or authority, is again directly connected to this idea that not only our bodies are going to be in the resurrection, are going to be more like celestial bodies, more like angelic bodies. But our role, not merely the participation’s connection to the presence of God, but the role that we play in creation, authority or power, is also going to be more like the current role or order of the celestial beings, of the angelic beings. Meaning that we like the angelic beings, now, in addition to being in the presence of God, he will also share with us his governance of the creation.

And that second part, of course, is where the entire theological teaching surrounding the saints comes in the Orthodox Church, that this is human destiny, that the angelic beings who fell and became what we now call demonic beings are replaced by glorified humanity in this role of governing the creation.

So we see this in the Book of Revelation in several places, some of them subtle, some of them more obvious. Of course, we see it in Chapter 20 where the saints in glory rule and reign with Christ. We see it in Christ’s promise to the twelve disciples that they’ll sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel, right? Ruling over the twelve tribes of Israel. So this language is used in terms of promise all through the Scriptures. It goes back to the promises made to Abraham that his descendants would be like the stars, like the angelic beings. And as I mentioned, they’re in subtle ways, too. So in Israel, there were 72 elders who governed Israel. And it’s not a coincidence that when St. John has his vision of heaven, the Book of Revelation, and he sees the worship there, he sees 24 human elders. Well, 24 human elders, 24 out of 72 is one third. And so then when you get to Revelation 12 and you see that one third of the angelic beings have fallen with Satan, you get the point that St. John is making. That one third has been replaced by the saints in glory who are now governing and administering the creation.

So St. Paul is here setting out that role that humans are going to play as the argument that, well the body we will have in the resurrection, the body which we will be raised with, is going to be a body that’s suited to those purposes in the same way that angelic beings have bodies suited to their purposes. Same way animals have bodies suited to their purposes. The same way plants have bodies suited to the purposes for which God created them. That our bodies will be suited in the same way.

So he goes on in verse 44:

It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body.

This is one of the more easily confused portions of St. Paul’s discussion. The next few verses are actually, but this is one that a lot of people have trouble with. And part of it is the way in which the English word “spiritual” has sort of been devalued in our modern world. So we hear the word “spiritual”, and we may think of people who say that they’re not religious, but they’re spiritual. The word “spiritual” to us just sort of refers to some kind of ephemeral, kind of bodyless, something, maybe made up of feelings or sensations or emotions or something similar.

And so, the idea of a natural body makes sense to us, right? Natural, okay, right. We’ve all got bodies that are natural, that have natures. But then what’s a spiritual body? In fact, from a lot of pagan perspectives at this point in time, “spiritual body” would essentially be an oxymoron. It would be self-contradictory. Body and spirit were opposites. Spirit means not body, sort of by definition. And therefore body physicality would mean not spirit.

But as I’ve commented before in this Bible study, a bunch of times, almost, not every single, but almost every time you see the word “spirit” in the scriptures, it should have a capital S in front of it. It is very rare, not completely absent, but very rare that the term “spirit” or “spiritual” is used in the Scriptures just to refer to that kind of ephemeral thing or bodiless. It is in a few places. It isn’t a few places like when Christ “Says touch me and see, for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have,” that’s that kind of use. So there are places, but most of the time spirit should have a capital S in front of. So what St. Paul is contrasting here is a body which is characterized by nature, by a certain nature, and a body which is characterized by the Spirit, meaning the Holy Spirit, meaning the Spirit of God.

These are the two kinds of bodies he’s talking about. And this is sort of a fine tuning of what he said before when he talked about terrestrial bodies and celestial bodies, terrestrial bodies being created things on earth, celestial bodies being angelic beings. He’s building off of that a little bit. So our natural body, our body that we are now is part of the nature of this world, of the visible world in which we spend most of our time. It is subject to all the processes that everything else in the natural world is subject to. My circulatory system is different to my dog’s circulatory system, but it’s not that much different, we’re both mammals, and so it is part of our bodies now are part of this age, part of this creation, part of this world. St. Paul is saying that the body with which we’re raised is going to be characterized not primarily by its connection to this world and this creation, but it can be characterized primarily by the way it is permeated by the Holy Spirit. That the Holy Spirit who now dwells within us, God himself who dwells within us as Christians, as people who have been chrismated, as people who have been anointed, been baptized with the Spirit, is now not only going to dwell within us as a temple, but it’s going to permeate us.

What exactly does that mean? I don’t know. Neither did St. Paul. So this isn’t some kind of spiritual science that crosses all the T’s and dots all the I’s. But what St. Paul is saying here about our bodies is the same thing that St. John is saying in Revelation 21 about the creation. Because what does he say about the creation? He says that in the new creation there’s no temple. There’s no temple because God Himself will dwell with us forever. St. Paul has just used the language earlier in chapter 15 of God being all in all after Christ’s glorious appearing. In the Old Testament prophets, it talks about how the knowledge of God will cover the earth as the water covers the sea.

So in the same way that on that cosmic level, the prophets and St. John talk about God’s presence and his creation in the age to come in the world to come, being filling all things in the same way, our body is going to go from being the temple of the Holy Spirit, as St. Paul said earlier in First Corinthians, to being permeated and characterized by the Holy Spirit, being transformed by the Spirit. And so that’s the analogy that St. Paul is drawing. He can’t beat in on it.

He’s going to say, we can’t fully understand what all this means now, but we have these images and metaphors that can help us understand it. But the whole reality of it is beyond our comprehension now. And ultimately we get to a point where we have to just stop and give glory and thanks and praise to God for the great things he has in store for us, which we can’t now fully understand. Verse 45:

And so it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being.” The last Adam became a life-giving spirit.

So this verse, First Corinthians 15:45, is infamously difficult. I mentioned, I think, last time, that in one of my Protestant seminary classes, the whole assignment for the term was to write a fairly lengthy paper on this verse, on how it should be translated and what it means, because it’s infamously difficult. I just read it from the Orthodox Study Bible, which is basically, in this case, it’s the New King James.

I’m about to, in our discussion, sort of retranslate it, because as it’s translated, it’s really confusing, especially the part about the “last Adam becoming a life-giving spirit”. And if you have your Orthodox Study Bible and are looking at it, you may notice that in that second clause, the word “became” is in italics. That’s because it’s not there in the original, it’s assumed. Now, you may also notice, if you’re looking at it in your Orthodox Study Bible, that the phrase is in quotation marks and in italics. “The first man, Adam became a living being”. And that is because it is a translation from Genesis 2, verse seven. It’s a quotation that’s very clearly from the Greek. Just for anybody keeping track of when St. Paul quotes the Hebrew and does his own translation, which he does fairly often, or when he just quotes the existing Greek translations, which he also does very often. In this case, he’s quoting the Greek.

So the quotation that St. Paul makes when he says “so it is written, the first man Adam became a living being,” I’ve talked before a lot in this Bible study that we have to always remember that until the 16th century, these chapter and verse breaks did not exist. That means St. Paul could not say to the people to whom he was speaking, “Check out Genesis 2:7, or read Genesis 2, 1:10”, in order to make his point.

If you ever look at my blog, I will frequently throw in parentheses and then a whole list of Bible verses that you can go look up, if you don’t trust me, or you just really want to dig into it. But St. Paul couldn’t do that, there are no verse references. So, the way in which texts were quoted in the ancient world, the way they’re quoted in the New Testament, is that you would quote either the first line of a section to which you were referring and when you quote that first line, that would mean someone who wanted to look it up could go to the scroll, go and find the line you referred to and then read. Or, you would refer to sort of a key sentence or key verse or key part of it that would ring a bell and they would say. “Oh yeah, that story,” And they’d go back and again, either way, read the whole thing.

So whenever you see anywhere in the New Testament a verse quoted, it’s important that you go… and if you want to understand what the New Testament author is doing, that you go and look at the passage from which that verse came. Because they’re not just referring to that sentence. They’re not just sort of proof texting or taking things out of context. They’re referring back to that context. They expect you to either be familiar with it or to go and look at it, so that you know, “Oh yeah, that’s what it’s talking about.”

So in this case, this is from the creation of Adam. St. Paul is taking us back to the original creation. And God has formed Adam. He’s formed his body out of the dust, out of the dust of the earth, we’re told. He’s formed out of clay. He’s molded. And then God breathes the breath of life, we’re told, into his nostrils. And so, the portion that St. Paul quotes and so because of that, because of that breathing of the breath of life into him, he becomes a living being.

So St. Paul starts by referring us back to how we came to have the bodies we have now, how we came to be the beings who we are now, how we came to have our life in this world in this age. It was a gift of God at this event. So this is our picture of how the natural body came to be. This is our picture, not yet, you’re going to have to go to Genesis three to see how that body then became corrupt and weak and those other things. But this is how this body came to be.

Now, the second half of verse 45, then, is going to be St. Paul telling us how the new body he’s talking about, how the resurrection body that he’s talking about came into being. And so it is regarding that that he says “the last Adam” and again, New King James inserts “became” a life giving spirit. So that word “became” isn’t there. It just says “the last Adam” and then what they’re translating as a life giving spirit. Remember what I said about the previous verse, 99.8% of the time, “Spirit” needs a capital S. So what it literally says there is the last Adam, verb assumed, not there the last Adam, the Spirit who gives life, with a capital S.

So who is the last Adam? Well, in St. Paul he’s already talked about this in First Corinthians, made this connection between Adam and Christ, death entering through Adam, life through Christ. He’s done it earlier in this very chapter. He also does this in Romans 5, St. Paul makes the same comparison between Adam and Christ with death and eternal life. So the last Adam, we’re talking about Christ here. So, Adam is the first man from whom all of us have inherited our nature, including our natural body in this world and in this life. We are what we are through descent from Adam. That’s why we’re mortal, that’s why we’re corruptible, that’s why we’re weak. All of these things, he’s the progenitor. So now Christ is being set up. Christ is being set up as the progenitor, the body, the nature that we will have in the Resurrection.

So, St. Paul’s also building off of what he said earlier in First Corinthians 15, which is about the intimate connection between Christ’s resurrection from the dead and our eventual resurrection from the dead. So, St. Paul is here saying that the body he’s been talking about, the spiritual body, the body characterized by the Spirit, begins… sort of the last Adam or the first man of the new creation is Christ’s humanity, Christ’s humanity in the Resurrection. So, our body in the Resurrection is related to Christ’s body and His Resurrection in the same way that our body now is related to Adam’s body. That’s the parallel that St. Paul is setting up.

And so, you don’t need to insert the word “became” here. The verb that’s translated became in the first half of the verse, first Adam became first man, became a living being can mean, it’s ginomai in Greek can mean “become”. It could also mean come, arrive, enter into, appear, start to exist. There’s a number of ways it can be translated. But with the parallel that St Paul is making, if you go to Genesis two, what happens? The breath of life from God enters, it, comes into Adam’s nostrils, and that makes him now a living being. That’s what transforms him, that’s what creates what makes the natural body, the spiritual body, which is the body which is permeated by the Spirit, that is characterized by the Holy Spirit, that St. Paul is saying we will have in the Resurrection, begins with Christ, when what happens when the Spirit who gives life, when the Holy Spirit entered into him, raising him from the dead.

St. Paul in different places says that all three persons of the Trinity were the agent of Christ’s Resurrection. He says that Christ rose right. St. John says the same thing, In St. John’s Gospel, Christ says no one takes my life from me. I lay it down, I can take it up again. St. Paul says that the Father raised Christ from the dead. He says, not just here, that the Holy Spirit raised Christ from the dead, that this is an action of the entire Holy Trinity, the resurrection of Christ. And so here he’s focusing on the Spirit who gives life, right? The Holy Spirit as the agent of Christ’s resurrection and therefore involved in our own resurrection.

This is why the whole key here is the fact that we as Christians, we as people who have been baptized, have been baptized into Christ, put on Christ in St. Paul’s terminology, and that we have then part and parcel of that is receiving the Holy Spirit within us. So there’s a sense in which we talked last time about how for St. Paul, all of these promises are already true of us. They’ve already been received by us in his Epistle to the Ephesians, he’s going to say, we’re already seated with Christ in the heavenly places. We’re already ruling and reigning with him while we’re alive in this world. All these promises are already ours in a sense, but at the same time, again, we talked about potency and reality at the same time, they are not yet fully realized from our perspective.

And so for St. Paul, the same thing is true of the resurrection. We are already resurrected in a certain sense. We are already resurrected in the sense that we have already received the Holy Spirit. We have already died and risen with Christ in baptism. We’ve already put on Christ, and we are awaiting the reality of that to be reflected in our souls and bodies at Christ’s glorious appearing. So all that is to say, I would, and have at one point on my blog, I would translate this verse more like “and so it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being, and into the last Adam came a lifegiving Spirit”, would be how I would translate that, to bring out… “into the last Adam came the Spirit who gives life”. I’m sorry, to sort of make the point that St. Paul is making in English. So it goes on in verse 46:

However, the spiritual is not first, but the natural, and afterward the spiritual.

So he says there’s an order to things, right? There’s an order to things. And this verse is also important, the point he’s making here about the order of things, about this progression, is important when we’re talking to certain people. Our Mormon friends from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints being probably the most common modern people, but there were Origenists in the ancient world and Gnostics and others, even Platonists of a lot of varieties, who had the view of the preexistence of souls. That we had some previous divine or semi-divine existence, and then we fell into this current natural state and then we’re going to escape it or supersede it in the future.

St. Paul is wiping that whole idea out, right? The natural comes first. When we were born into this world, that’s when we came into existence, period. And now the spiritual is what comes next. Is what comes next, if we’re in Christ.

The first man was of the earth, made of dust; the second Man is the Lord from heaven.

So he’s drawing out what he just said in verse 45. So that first man he’s made out of the earth, he’s made out of this creation. If you read closely in Genesis 2, God creates him out of the earth and then takes him and puts him in paradise. Man wasn’t created in paradise, he wasn’t created in the presence of God. He was created in this world as part of the creation of this world, and then he’s placed in paradise, and then after his transgression, is removed from paradise back into this present world.

And the second Man, and this is important again for anybody who wants to try and say that St Paul didn’t believe that Christ is God. He says the second Man is the Lord from heaven. The reason why the Lord from heaven is important is that in most cases, in the Greek and the Greek translation of the Old Testament being what St Paul just quoted, and if you go and look at Genesis 2 and compare the Hebrew and the Greek, you’ll see that in the Hebrew, the name Yahweh is used for God in Genesis 2. And in the Greek translation, that name, rather than being transliterated as it is in some places as O-on or something else, is translated as kyrios. It’s replaced with Lord. So when he says Christ is the Lord from heaven, the “from heaven” is making it very clear. He’s not just saying Christ is the Lord in the sense of Lord or Master or Ruler. When he says the Lord from heaven, he’s making it very clear that he’s saying Christ is Yahweh who came from his heavenly place to become Man. It is abundantly clear that that is what St Paul’s referring to. And he’s writing this in the mid-50s. So anyone who wants to tell you that the idea that Jesus was God is something that developed over the course of a couple of centuries is all wet. St. Paul presupposes everywhere.

We’ve already seen back in chapter eight, we’ve already seen how St. Paul inserted the person of Jesus Christ into the Shema, into the prayer of Israel, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord Yahweh, your God. Yahweh is one.” He’s inserted Christ into that. So it’s very clear here in First Corinthians that St Paul sees Christ as Yahweh, the God of Israel incarnate.

So he goes on:

As was the man of dust, so also are those who are made of dust; And as is the heavenly Man, so also are those who are heavenly. And as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly man.

So just as we’ve borne the image of Adam, in fact, at the end of Genesis 3, we’re told that Adam brought forth a son in his own image. As we’ve borne the image of Adam, as we’ve had a body like his, a soul like his, as we’ve lived our lives in the world as he did, so also St. Paul’s telling us we will be like Christ in the Resurrection. And again, he’s specifically speaking here about how our body will be, not just we’ll be like him in terms of moral virtue or knowledge or whatever, but that our bodies will be like Christ’s body in the Resurrection.

Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does corruption inherit incorruption.

So I mentioned this before with St. Paul. St. Paul has a number of important distinctions he makes that are sometimes lost in English, at least to us as readers of modern English. One of those that’s very pertinent here is the difference between how St. Paul uses the word “body” and the way St Paul uses the word “flesh”. So you may notice in this last verse he has been talking about bodies. He’s been talking about Christ’s body, our body, the angelic bodies, animal bodies, plant bodies. We’re talking about all different types of bodies. And all of a sudden he says, flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. So he’s not here talking about “no body”, nothing bodily can enter the kingdom of God, as if he’s saying, “Well, we have to die, and then our soul goes off or our spirit goes off and enters the kingdom of God. Once we escape this body.”

He’s not now contradicting himself, he’s talking about the flesh. When St. Paul talks about the flesh, he’s talking about the sinful and corrupt element of our body and blood, throughout the Old Testament, blood is life. We’re told over and over again that the life is in the blood. When he talks about flesh and blood, he’s talking about our life in this world and our body as it’s corrupt in this world. And he parallels that to make that point clear by saying that corruption does not inherit incorruption. So when he talks about flesh and blood here, he’s not talking about our bodies, but the corruption of our bodies, being unable to inherit.

Because for St. Paul, and in St. Paul’s understanding, part of what happens when man is expelled from paradise is that Adam and Eve receive a different type of body. It is not just that their bodies were just like ours now, but now all of a sudden they could die or that they were always mortal. God was just making sure they didn’t fall off a cliff or get trampled by an elephant or something, but they were mortal just like us. They were created immortal, they became mortal.

And fathers focus in, and most of our second temple Jewish sources focus in on the episode where we’re told that God makes garments of skin for Adam and Eve when they’re expelled from paradise. A lot of times we read this in a very materialist way that like, oh, well, they’re naked, remember, and fig leaves don’t work so well, so God’s showing them how to make leather clothes, right? But that’s not how ancient sources, Jewish or Christian, understood that little part of the story.

They understood that as twofold. First, God killed animals to do that, to show them what death was, to show them what they were now going to be subject to. And those garments of flesh are the same flesh and they would have been bloody because they’re skinned animals, right? So the flesh and blood that St Paul refers to here is connected to this idea, the idea that they’re given mortal bodies that are subject to corruption, subject to death, subject to pain and suffering. That’s what humanity received.

And the reason for that, again, as we’ve already mentioned tonight, is that God was giving mortality to man to enable repentance, to enable change, to enable transformation. The demons, at the various times when they rebelled, at the various times when they decided to turn against God, there is for them no repentance. They are immortally fixed in their rebellion. But God granted this extra grace to humanity that when humanity chose to rebel, when Adam and Eve chose to rebel, God did not leave them immortal. He said it would not be good for them to be immortal. Then we would have been like the demons. We would have just been permanently and forever in rebellion against God. But he gave us our life in this world, he gave us mortality, which brings with it mutability and changeability, the ability to suffer and be transformed and to change and to repent. He gave that to us as a gift.

This is what St John of Damascus is talking about in his hymns, in our funeral service, when he talks about how “He turned us back to the ground from which we were taken to entreat repose”, that this is why we’re given over to death, so that we could have this repentance. So that the destiny God created us for, St Paul’s just been talking about this great destiny that God created us for, that we will receive in full, in the resurrection, that’s what we were created for in the first place, so that we might not lose that god gave us mortality so that we could repent.

Now, unfortunately, what’s presented in Scripture is that not everyone will take this opportunity to repent, that there are some who will remain hardened in rebellion against God. And so at the time of the end, when they face eternal condemnation, they will go on to share the fate of the demonic beings because they continue to share in their rebellion. They continue in their hatred of God. But for those who repent, God has appointed forgiveness and has kept that destiny for which he created his open.

And that’s what St Paul is talking about here. He’s talking about the fact that it’s not just a question of for us to be transformed, this needs to die. It’s that this needs to die because the flesh and blood, because the mortality, because the corruption need to be gotten rid of, need to be taken away. Now, death will have served its purpose. Death doesn’t disappear. But death now has no sting. Death now has no victory, St. Paul is going to say. It no longer has power over us. Rather, it serves its original purpose of purifying us and delivering us from our sin and corruption and delivering us into the salvation of God.

Behold, I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed—in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.

So St Paul is saying we won’t all sleep, meaning not everyone will die on this earth. There will be a last generation at Christ’s glorious appearing who was alive at the time. He’s returning now to this theme of the general resurrection and the last judgment of when Christ appears, when Christ is present with us again. When that happens, there will be people who haven’t yet physically died, but they too will be changed in the same way; they too will receive this resurrection body. And then St. Paul talks about this last trumpet.

I’ll go into this a little bit. This is a theme with St. Paul; St Paul also talks about this in Second Thessalonians. He refers to this trumpet that sounds at Christ’s return. And the reason he’s talking about a trumpet and that this is associated, is that the Feast of Trumpets, what’s called the Feast of Trumpets in the Old Testament is actually what is now called the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah, which literally means the head or the first of the year. It’s the New Year celebration, it is, datewise on the Old Testament calendar, the first day of the month of Tishri, and the first day of the month of Tishri is important for a whole pile of reasons. It’s the day Noah was born. It’s the day the flood ended and the world began again after the flood. It’s the day that David was crowned as King of Judah, and the day that all the kings of Judah after that, which would of course include the Messiah, would include Christ, were crowned and began their reign was on first Tishri.

And so this idea came to surround the idea of the day of the Lord, when the age to come begins. It will begin with this trumpet blast to signal that this new age is beginning, that the age of the Messiah is beginning. Christ’s full reign over the entirety of creation is beginning. And that date corresponds to somewhere in the depending on, of course, the Jewish calendar is a lunar calendar, so it bounces around a little bit, but somewhere in the early half of September, and it’s related to this, why we have our Church New Year in the Orthodox Church on September 1. That it’s a parallel point. There are some people who argue that, they want to argue based on largely all those things I just said, plus a really interesting interpretation of Revelation chapter twelve, that Christ was actually born on first Tishri in three B.C. But when we get to Revelation 12 in the Bible study, I will talk about that. I’m not totally convinced, but I’ll at least tell you about it, what that theory is.

But that’s the idea here. That’s why St. Paul associates this trumpet blast with that; it means it’s the beginning of the new age. Christ has now been enthroned as King is going to judge the world, he’s going to judge the living and the dead. It’s sort of the signal. And so he uses it as sort of a symbol of the whole end of this age and the beginning of the age to come in the Resurrection.

And so in the same way that Adam and Eve were clothed in garments of flesh, were clothed in mortality, now our mortality is going to be clothed with immortality, this is going to be reversed. And so, St Paul is associating first Tishri with the new creation… That’s another thing with which first Tishri was thought to be the 6th day of creation on which humanity was created. Especially pertinent here, since St Paul’s just been talking about the creation of Adam. So now he’s associating the general resurrection with that same day, same kind of idea of a new 6th day of creation, when we are recreated in the Resurrection.

Verse 54: 

So when this corruptible has put on incorruption, and this mortal has put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written: “Death is swallowed up in victory.” “O Death, where is your sting? O Hades, where is your victory?” The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

So he says. this is when this is going to be brought to completion. This is sort of already and not yet idea, right? So when it happens, when the Resurrection happens, and when our mortal flesh has put on incorruption, sin is gone, death is gone, spiritual powers of evil who are arrayed against us have been put down once and for all and Christ is all in all. He hands over the kingdom to his Father, we have life eternal in the world to come. This is when this will truly be fulfilled, that death has no victory, death has no sting. Hades, the grave has no victory because Christ has conquered them all and dispatched them all, and they’re all gone. Those three enemies that we talked about last time have all been finally and permanently defeated and destroyed. Notice he says the sting of death is sin and the strength of sin is the law. And he’s already talked to us a little bit about that in terms of the law, in terms of the Torah, the strength of sin is the law? Well, the law shows us sin. The law shows us sin. It points us to the power of sin.

St. Paul said in Romans also, reading the commandments led him to temptation because all those things he read, he wasn’t supposed to do, he started to do. He says that doesn’t make the commandment evil, that makes him evil and the commandment good. And so, of course, the sting of death is sin. What is a sting? Well, the sting of an animal or the bite of a snake, the sting of a scorpion, a spider bite or sting is a wound that inflicts you with poison, poison that will kill you. That’s what he’s getting at. So sin comes, sin gets into us. Sin is this malign power as this force comes and corrupts us, get into our bodies, get into our souls. It’s like a poison that weakens us, destroys us and ultimately kills us,

And so, that sting, the sin is taken away. The sin is taken away also. And the Law is taken away at that point also, because we don’t need it. We talked about earlier in First Corinthians and in Romans that the Torah is in essence a way of dealing with sin, a way of managing sin and repentance. And that’s no longer necessary because sin is gone and death is gone and it’s all gone. And we have life in return through the victory of Christ. He says:

Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labor is not in vain in the Lord.

And so he now returns to the practical. He returns to the practical point that was his point all along. Remember when he started out, “Well, if we’re not raised from the dead, then that means Christ hasn’t been raised. And if Christ hasn’t been raised, then our hope is in vain. Then all of this is pointless. Everything we’re doing is worthless.”

He says, “Why am I, as an apostle risking death to spread the Gospel if there’s no resurrection, if Christ is not raised? Why are you doing any of these things if Christ is not raised?” But so now that he’s shown that Christ is risen, that we will rise, and he’s shown the destiny that God has prepared for us, that gives everything we do in this life, every act of repentance, every work of the Lord, which is how St. Paul here describes our good works. Notice it’s not that, oh, we do something good, we do God a favor, but that we participate in what God is doing in the world. Every cold cup of water that we give to someone who is thirsty, everything we do in service to the Lord, all of this now has infinite meaning. It’s the opposite of vain because of the truth of the resurrection and our destiny in Christ. That’s what gives everything we do in this life, all the choices we make, so much import. Ultimate importance. And so St. Paul ultimately, well, through a lot of this chapter, he’s been chiding them, he’s called them fools, he’s criticized them. That’s ultimately not his intent. His intent is to strengthen them, to urge them on to be steadfast, to keep doing what they’re doing, to keep doing what they’re right, to keep following Christ because of how important it is, and to keep running the race because of how great the prize is that waits for us at the end.

So that brings us to the end of chapter 15. So this is a good place, I think, to end for tonight. So I will go ahead and end here in terms of the recording.