Father Stephen De Young: St. Paul continues:

The last enemy that will be destroyed is death. For “He has put all things under His feet.” But when He says “all things are put under Him,” it is evident that He who put all things under Him is excepted. Now when all things are made subject to Him, then the Son Himself will also be subject to Him who put all things under Him, that God may be all and all.

And so, St. Paul is here quoting from Psalm 8, and it’s talking about how Psalm 8 prophetically talked about how he, God, would place all things under the feet of Him, the Messiah. And so, St. Paul is saying this has been fulfilled and is being fulfilled and will be fulfilled, that Christ has won this victory, Christ is already ruling, God has already placed him under his feet, and the time will come when they will be utterly destroyed. And of course, he’s saying, obviously, God the Father is not going to be under Christ’s feet, because there is no opposition between God the Father and God the Son. And so, God the Son, Christ in his incarnation has always been obedient to his Father. And so, when all things are made subject to Christ, then God will be all in all.

And so, this is setting up St. Paul’s view. And this is important to understand because this is one of the overarching themes in St. Paul’s epistles. It’s sometimes described in terms of, again, his eschatology, his understanding of the last things, of the final things. Sometimes it’s a tension or just a distinction between the “already” and the “not yet”, the fulfilled and the remaining, that St. Paul sees Christ himself as having fulfilled everything already in the victory of the Gospel. But he also sees that there will be a finality to this victory that happens at Christ’s appearing.

And this is part and parcel of the basic understanding of how prophecies find their fulfillment in Scripture. And so, this is important for just interpreting the Scriptures as a whole. Oftentimes prophecies are given in this way. There is some immediate fulfillment, and then that immediate fulfillment serves as a guarantee. There’s something that happens right away, and then that happening right away, right now, we see it is the guarantee to us that the rest of it, the rest of the prophecy, that might seem more distant, more crazy, more unlikely, more hard to understand that that too is going to come true.

One of the classic examples of this, of course, is in Isaiah 7:14, which is where during what was called the Syro-Ephraimite War, and you can go back and listen to the Bible studies I did on Isaiah, if you want to hear me talk about why the Syro-Ephraimite war is a bizarre name for it, since the Syrians were not fighting against the Ephraimites, they were on the same side. But during the Syro-Ephraimite war, the northern kingdom of Israel and the Syrians were attacking Judah, the southern kingdom. And Isaiah makes this prophecy that a young woman will have a son. They’ll name him Emmanuel, and before he’s old enough to know good and evil, before he’s old enough to have any understanding or wisdom, while he’s still a young child, God will deliver Judah from the far superior united armies of Israel and Syria. So what you see there is that this thing is going to happen. This young woman is going to have a child. Once you see or have the child, you’ll know, it’s only going to be a short amount of time now and we’re going to be delivered. So it’s a sign of the fulfillment of that greater prophecy.

What’s interesting about how the apostles then read the Old Testament, is that they take that entire prophecy as the first stage. They say that entire prophecy, both the woman having the child and the deliverance of Judah from Israel and Syria are the sign. They’re the immediate thing, and they were the sign of something that was going to happen later. This is what St. Matthew does with that precise verse, with that precise prophecy. He says that was the immediate thing that we saw and that we read about in the Hebrew Scriptures. But what was pointing to was the birth of Christ from the virgin. And so when we saw Christ born from the virgin, we knew that there’s even greater deliverance, a far greater deliverance than the deliverance of Judah from Israel and Syria, especially since Judah fell to the Babylonians not that long after, this much greater deliverance was going to take place in Christ.

And so the word “fulfillment”, remember, literally means to “fill full”, to fill up, to overflowing. And so this is how all the apostles read the Scriptures, is they take everything in the Old Testament as prophecy in this way. It gets called allegory, but it’s not really allegory. It’s a consistency of the Scriptures, as this is prophecy. And the Old Testament saints are prophets, even the ones who weren’t technically prophets in the sense we usually think about it when we think of Isaiah, Jeremiah, St. Elias, Elijah, we think of these people as prophets, classically, but everyone—in the Orthodox church, we refer to pretty much every saint of the Old Testament and of the Old Covenant as a prophet. And they are a prophet in this sense that the things that we read, that they did and said are all signs. They’re all immediate fulfillments and markers of something that’s going to come later, or specifically someone who is going to come later. And so that’s their reading. They read all of it as an extended prophecy. It’s all prophecy.

Once we understand this idea, we could see what St. Paul’s doing here, about Christ’s resurrection and our resurrection, about the defeat of the powers and then the ultimate defeat of the powers, that all of these things have an immediate fulfillment and then a later fulfillment. And once we understand this, a whole lot of passages in the New Testament make a lot more sense.

So you’ll hear these debates, when Christ in St. Matthew’s Gospel, in St. Luke’s Gospel, talks about the time of the end, it talks about the Last Judgment, he also seems to be saying stuff about the Romans attacking Jerusalem in 70 A.D. and in 132. Well, which is it? Which is he talking about? Well, the answer is both. The answer is one of those is an immediate thing that they’re going to see unfold before their eyes. And when they see it, they’ll know that what he’s saying about the time of the end, which was going to be distant for them. They’ll know that what he said about that is true because the immediate thing has come to pass, just as he said it would.

St. Paul now with the Corinthians, he’s addressing these members of the community at Corinth who either because they think the idea of bodily resurrection is silly from their pagan backgrounds, or because they came from a Jewish background that didn’t believe in it, we talked last time about how there were a significant number of members of the Jewish community who simply didn’t believe in the bodily resurrection and still are to this day within rabbinic Judaism, and so, for whatever reason, they don’t believe in it, St. Paul is saying, “Look, we already saw the firstfruits of it, we already saw the beginning of it. Everything that I’ve taught you about Christ’s appearing, about his becoming present with us again”, if you want to use the word return, “Everything I’ve told you about that, about the last day, all that is true. And we know it is true because we—”, including St. Paul himself, “saw Christ risen from the dead. We know, therefore, that all of these other things are going to come to pass. That this current present period is not just the state of things and we don’t just die and escape from it because it’s not very good. Because there are all of these enemies that we have to face and struggle with and contend with in this life. All of these evils in the world that afflict us. All of the suffering that we wrestle with. That is not the end. We don’t just escape that when we die and get away from it, but that the day is coming when at Christ appearing, all of that will be at an end. All of that will be put to an end.”

And so, the three enemies that St. Paul has shown us are these hostile powers who we just talked about, these demonic powers who are seeking to destroy humanity. The second enemy is what they use to ensnare and enslave and destroy humanity in that sin. That sin. It’s important that for St Paul, on only a few occasions, they’re rare, he does do it, but on only a few occasions to St. Paul talked about sins in the plural, sins as sort of transgressions, as individual actions that we do that are sinful for the most part, in the vast majority of cases, St. Paul talks about sin in the singular. Sin is a power, sin is a malevolent power. And this is in keeping with the way sin is talked about, again, going all the way back to the book of Genesis, the first time the word sin is used in the Book of Genesis is with regard to Cain. When God comes to Cain before he commits his murder and says “Sin is crouching at your door, it wants to master you, you must master it.”

And the word for “crouching” there is actually a Hebrew word that’s derived from an Akkadian word that was used to refer to a particular type of demon, a Babylonian demon that we believe crawled out of cracks in the earth, that would sort of crawl across the ground, hunting after people. And so that’s the imagery there, that that is what sin is like. So sin is this power, sin is this enemy for St. Paul through which the demons ensnare people. And then, of course, that sin makes people subject to death.

And so, St. Paul sees these three enemies as being overcome in the reverse order in which they come to be. They come into the world and come to afflict humanity. First, as he mentioned with Adam, and his disobedience in the expulsion from paradise, comes death. Death enters the world. Human beings become mortal and subject to death. Then, through Cain and his descendants, sin comes into the world. The power of sin and the demonic spirits who are using it along with kingdom. This culminates in the Nephilim, and sorry to disappoint people, but I’m not going to go into detail on the giants right now. But that culminates in the Nephilim and the flood to sort of wash away the sin that has corrupted the world. And then at the Tower of Babel, when humanity is divided and God steps back from humanity, humanity tries to draw God down and control him. In response, God steps back away from the world and governs it through his created angelic beings who then also fall, become the gods of the nations who are demons, as St. Paul told us here in one Corinthians, who dominate them.

So, at Christ’s resurrection, at the resurrection, the anastasis Christ has arisen and he’s judged the earth and he’s judged those powers and dethroned them. So he now holds all authority in heaven and on earth. That’s why St Paul has gone out and he’s brought the gospel, he’s brought the call, not just a report of Christ’s victory, but the call to return to the most high God who created them out to all the world and all the nations.

The next enemy is sin. Sin is the enemy who we struggle with during these latter days. Those demonic powers, while they’re not enthroned anymore, are still around and are still using sin to attempt to corrupt and destroy us.

And then, as St. Paul says, the last enemy to be dealt with is death itself. Because when we all have been raised bodily, when we all have been freed from the realm of death, then death will be empty and utterly destroyed. And so, these enemies are finally defeated in reverse order.

And so, that is why it is sin and repentance that make up the fabric of our Christian life. The struggle against sin and the struggle to repent is because it is the enemy that we are struggling with and dealing with in this age, even though St. Paul will say at the cross, Christ has really defeated that enemy too. But there is this already, and this not yet element in terms of that victory as well. So now, a very non- controversial section, St. Paul goes on, in verse 29:

Otherwise, what will they do who are baptized for the dead, if the dead do not rise at all? Why then are they baptized for the dead?

So, needless to say, there’s been a lot of ink spilled over that verse over the course of recent centuries, at least. And our Mormon friends, or as they prefer to be called, our Latter-day Saints friends, have a very sort of literal understanding of this. They have the idea that if someone died who had never been baptized in the Latter-day Saints Church, that a member of that church can go and be baptized on their behalf, and that baptism sort of works retroactively to baptize that person even though they’re already dead. And this is why, or one of the main reasons that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as their full name is, does so much genealogical research and has such vast genealogical libraries because they considered it a good deed to sort of work your way back and make sure that all of your ancestors end up being baptized.

And so there are a lot of modern interpreters of St. Paul here in First Corinthians who basically say that’s what St. Paul’s talking about. That there were some people doing that. And a lot of those who are sort of believing Christians will then try to sort of marginalize. And they’ll say, “Well, I mean, St. Paul doesn’t say that’s a good thing to do.” Or “St. Paul doesn’t say that we’re doing that. He’s just talking about some people doing that, and he’s saying, well, why would they do that if there’s no resurrection?” Well, there’s a basic problem with that interpretation, because if this is some other weird group doing a practice that St Paul doesn’t approve of, how would he make any kind of point here, right? I mean, if I came to you and you, for whatever reason, didn’t believe that there was any resurrection of the dead, you thought that you’re Thomas Jefferson, right? And you think that Christianity is a good moral philosophy, and we should follow it while we’re alive, but then when you die, that’s it, forget it. And I came to you, and I said, “Well, okay, but then if there’s no resurrection, why are Mormons baptized for the dead?” You’d look at me and say, “Well, the Mormons are wrong. You’re not a Mormon. You think they’re wrong, so why would you hold them up as an example?”

St Paul, by making this argument, by making this argument, by saying this practice demonstrates that the resurrection of the dead is true. That’s the argument he’s making. He’s saying that there must be some validity to that practice, because if St Paul pointed to an invalid practice, whatever the practice is, he wouldn’t make the point that he’s trying to make. So, whatever the practice that St. Paul is pointing to, he is by nature of the argument itself, by the fact that he holds it up as evidence that the resurrection of the dead must be a reality, means that he’s saying there’s some validity to it.

So we need to dissect this a little more and refer back again to the original Greek to understand exactly what the practice is that St Paul is referring to. And so there’s another important Greek distinction in St Paul, and I’ve referred to this, I know in the Bible study before, but it bears reiterating that St. Paul makes a distinction in how he talks about “the dead” based on whether he uses the Greek article. The article is the word “the” basically in English. It’s a lot more complicated than that in Greek. I’m not going to go all into it now. There are whole books you can buy on the usage of the Greek article. Every Greek grammar on the shelf has a chapter about the article as a chapter about the word “the” essentially. And when you’re studying Greek, especially the first time through, as a new Greek student, you basically skim that chapter real fast and move on, because it is not exciting at all, but it has important aspects. So just like in English, the word “the” serves to make something specific. In English, we have an indefinite article “a” and a definite article “the”. So if I say “a horse”, I’m just talking about any old horse. If I say “the horse” or “this horse”, I’m talking about a specific horse. That’s the basic function.

So St Paul talks the same way about the dead. And this isn’t reflected well in English, because in English, whether there’s an article or not, we say “the dead” and we do that because it’s better English. If on Pascha, we all sing “Christ is risen from dead”, that wouldn’t flow really well in English, right? To make it work in English, we have to put the “the” there, even though there’s not actually an article there in Greek. And so, St. Paul sometimes puts the article, sometimes does not. When he doesn’t, when there’s no article, it’s just nekron, dead, right? We still translate it “the dead”. But when there’s no article there, he’s just talking about everyone who’s dead. It’s not specific; everyone who’s dead or just the realm of death or the power of death, like the dead, everyone in the grave.

When St. Paul uses the article, which would be, in his case, “the dead” or “these dead”, to refer to a specific group of dead, he always uses it. St. Paul, always when he uses the article, is referring to deceased, departed Christians, departed members of the Christian community. “These dead in Christ”, for example. He’s always using it to refer to members of the Christian community who have fallen asleep. That’s who “the dead” with the article are for St. Paul, I went through all that as kind of complicated as it is, because he uses the article here. So when St. Paul says here those who are baptized for the dead with the article, he’s not talking about people who are baptized for just dead people in general. He’s also, though, not talking about people who are baptized for departed people who were not members of the Christian community.

So it cannot be, because of the grammar that St. Paul uses, and he’s careful about this distinction, it cannot be referring to the Mormon practice. It cannot be referring to someone who is a Christian, who’s a member of the church, who’s a member of the Christian community, going and being baptized for someone who died unbaptized. The grammar won’t support it. That can’t be what St. Paul is talking about. So he is talking about people who are baptized “for” departed Christians. So to understand what that would mean, we have to get into what that word “for” is they’re baptized for. And for the recording, I’m doing scare quotes, “for” the dead, “for” these departed Christians. The word there, that’s translated as for as yper, which sometimes is kind of literally, and King James translated as “on behalf of”. And that preposition in this usage means “with some benefit too”, meaning I’m doing something that in some way benefits the object of the preposition.

So these people being baptized are being baptized to do something for, or give something to, or attribute something to these departed Christians. And when you look into the culture of the time. When you look into the cultural background of Corinth, the way in which that preposition is used in these kinds of statements. What comes out is that the most likely reference for this, the one that makes sense, the usage of that where one group of people is doing something on behalf of this other group of people, that makes sense in this context and fits with the culture in Corinth, is related to the understanding of patronage un the Roman world. Patronage was a key social system in the Greco-Roman world. We today sometimes use that term. We’ll talk about like art patrons or patrons of a store. And it was a relationship between two people where one person who was more established, generally wealthy, or who had more influence, social influence or political influence, would act as a benefactor, as a guardian, as a protector for another person who is of lower social status, younger, less wealthy, just starting out, of less cultural influence.

And these relationships were formed in all different ways in daily life. Everything from the way that might immediately spring to mind, like someone is an artist, someone is a poet or something, and they have a wealthy person who sort of pays their way, who admires their work and pays their way. But this is how apprenticeship basically functioned when you were going to be a craftsman. If you are a young person who wanted to become a blacksmith, you would go and find an established blacksmith with an established blacksmith shop, and you would go and he would become sort of your patron and pay your way and teach you and lead you into it. This is true in the entering into the political life, the academic life of the time, with teachers and their disciples at Plato’s Academy and at other philosophical schools. So this idea of patronage was everywhere.

And it seems very clear that that’s the usage of the word here, that’s what makes sense both in the Corinthian context and in the first century and in the context of the grammar here that St. Paul uses. It seems fairly clear that he’s talking about what we would call people who are baptized with a patron saint. We are already, at this point in the 50s A.D. So there are already Christians who have fallen asleep. There are already Christians who have fallen asleep in the Lord, who as St. Paul will say “their lives are hidden in Christ”. They are with Christ, they are in paradise. Whatever language we want to use, they are now spiritually established by virtue of that; they have now received, in part there’s that already, and not yet still. But they have received their rewards to some extent. And so now new people entering the Christian community, not all of them. This practice is just beginning. That’s why St. Paul says those who do this so this is something that some people are doing and not others. In the mid-50s A.D. We’re only about 20 years after Christ resurrection, this is beginning to happen. They are coming. They’re being baptized into the faith. They are taking the name and taking as a patron one of the saints, one of the departed brethren who has gone before them, who is seen as now being established with Christ in the heavenly places and therefore able to serve as their patron in life.

And this practice, of course, has continued all the way down to this day of the Orthodox Church. This was either for, I think, all of us who are in the Orthodox Church, this was either done for us as a child when we were baptized or when we were baptized or chrismated and received into the church we chose or were given a patron saint, someone who has gone before us who is our patron.

And so, this is what St. Paul is referring to here. And so the point he is making is he’s pointing to this practice that had already begun and had already begun in Corinth, so that he could point to it there and say, “Hey, if there’s no resurrection from the dead, what are they doing? What would be the point of that? What would be the point of having a heavenly patron if there’s no resurrection from the dead? That makes no sense. There’s no way to have that relationship that they’re establishing through this baptismal practice if that departed person is just gone, there’s no resurrection.”

So that’s what St. Paul is referring to here. He’s referring to the beginning of this nascent tradition within Christian baptism that we’ve received down to this very day, almost 2000 years later. So this is another, he’s giving out another series of arguments, right? So why would we do this? Why would anyone do this if the resurrection weren’t a reality? He continues:

And why do we stand in jeopardy every hour?

So he says, “I’m out here risking my life, people. I’m out here…” St. Paul’s getting stoned, he’s getting shipwrecked, he’s getting flogged and beaten within an inch of his life. He’s risking death every day. If he doesn’t believe that there’s anything after, why on earth would he be doing that? Why on earth? Why wouldn’t he just be playing it safe? Why wouldn’t he be trying to save his own skin when opposition showed up in a city? Why didn’t he just get out of Dodge immediately, before anything bad happened to him and before his life was endangered? He never did that. And St. Paul’s pointing out, “Well, look, at least I clearly believe this is true. I clearly do!”

Because we talked before when we’re going through St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans about how faith, the word we translate as “faith”, really is more like “faithfulness “because it includes both. Because if you really believe something is true, that’s going to shape how you act and what you do and how you behave. And so, St. Paul is using this for an argument. He says, “Look at how I live, look at how I behave. This is an argument that I really believe it’s true. I’m not just coming to you with this story, ‘Oh yeah, I saw Jesus after his resurrection’, but clearly I really believe it because I’m out there risking my life, willing to sacrifice my life on this earth over and over again in order to proclaim this gospel as true.”

So he goes on:

I affirm, by the boasting in you which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die daily. If, in the matter of men, I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantage is it to me? If the dead do not rise, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die!”

So he says, “Listen, if this is it, if you only live once, let’s yell ‘YOLO’ and go party, right? Let’s have a good time. Why would I be going and getting thrown to the animals in Ephesus? Why would I every day be facing death? Why would I be practicing any kind of asceticism? Why would I do anything in this life looking for a heavenly reward if there is no heavenly reward? Why would I do anything? I would just go out and enjoy this life for as long as it lasts, because once it’s over, that’s it. Once it’s over, that’s it.”  But clearly that is not what St. Paul is doing. He says:

Do not be deceived: “Evil company corrupts good habits.”

So that statement in most translations, including the Orthodox Study Bible here, “evil company corrupts good habits”, or “bad company corrupts good morals”, I think is the way the King James translates it. It’s in quotation marks because it’s a quotation, and you may not know from where. It’s from a play by Menander. Menander lived in the generation right after Alexander the Great. He lived during the reign of the first of Alexander’s successors. So we’re talking about around the year 300 BC. Menander, as a playwright, sort of won all the awards. There were these drama festivals in Greece during his life. He won the most prestigious one eight times and won some of the lesser ones as well. It’s sort of like if you won a bunch of Oscars today and then a few Golden Globes and a few People’s Choice Awards that you keep in the bathroom or whatever. So Menander was sort of the theatrical genius of the early third century BC. And he wrote a play called The Thais, which was one of his comedies, actually. And that’s where this line comes from.

So, St. Paul is here actually quoting not the Hebrew scriptures or even anything out of the Jewish tradition. He’s actually quoting to the people at Corinth from one of their famous cultural figures. So if you ever hear your priest or a priest give a quote from a movie during a sermon, you can’t condemn them because St. Paul did it first. He used this quotation from one of theirs and a comedy at that, not even a serious drama. And the point he’s making with that quote is that, well, look, what has he just been arguing? “Hey, look, if there’s no resurrection and this life is it, then let’s just go eat, drink and be merry. Let’s just go have fun. Let’s just live life to the fullest”, like Frank Sinatra said, “Live every day like you’re going to die tomorrow.” Let’s just go do that.

And now what St. Paul is saying is, “Look, hey, even one of your own pagan dramatists, said to you that, ‘look, you keep bad company, you hold fellowship with these kinds of people. That’s going to corrupt your good morals.’” So he’s pointing to exactly what he’s been pointing to all through the epistle up to this point. If you go and you live that way, if you go and you live that way, that way that you used to live, that way that you used to live, you’re going to end up in the same pattern of slavery to sin, slavery to those demonic powers, that same cycle of self-destruction that you were in before that Christ freed you from.

So notice what St. Paul is doing here. He’s drawing this direct line between what we would call the theological or the doctrinal, or between the content of the gospel, the fact of Christ’s resurrection from the dead and how it proves our own resurrection from the dead. He’s drawing a direct line from that to the practical effect of how we live our lives. And the freedom or slavery, the destruction or life, the sin or the blessing that we experience in this life is directly related. Directly related. So the freedom they’re experiencing, the growth in Christ they’re experiencing, the new life they’re experiencing now in the Christian community in Corinth, is only possible, is only real, is only a thing, because Christ rose from the dead. And if Christ rose from the dead, we’ll rise from the dead. And if that’s true, then we can’t live that way anymore. These things are woven together. They can’t be separated from each other.

You can’t live like a pagan and worship Christ. That’s been his point and his main theme all through First Corinthians. Now you’re a Christian, now you’re in the community that belongs to Christ. You’re part of the body of Christ. You can no longer live like that. You can no longer live like that because you’ve come out of that and you’ve come into this community. And so now you need to live this new way and it’s all a product of what Christ has done. And so the fact that you have that life, the fact that you have this spiritual experience now, is the proof that Christ has risen from the dead, and therefore the proof that one day you will rise and will give an account for what you’ve done in this life.

So St. Paul concludes this section:

Awake to righteousness, and do not sin; for some do not have the knowledge of God. I speak this to your shame.

So he says, “Wake up, people. Wake up to righteousness.” It’s the same word as justice. Wake up to justice. Wake up to what is right. Wake up to the way the world is, because when Christ comes, he is going to establish justice. And so you need to set things in order now, you need to set things in order now. Because the person who truly does not believe in the resurrection is the person who lives like there’s no resurrection. And that person is a person who has no knowledge of God, regardless of what knowledge they claim to have. We’ve seen through First Corinthians, St. Paul has over and over again been condemning some of the people in their midst for thinking that they have a lot of knowledge and thinking that they have a lot of wisdom, that they do not really possess and being puffed up with pride. And so, St. Paul is saying these are the signs that the knowledge of God is not really there. And that’s why he says, “I say this to your shame”, you should not be proud of this. He’s just said that he boasts about them, he boasts about the freedom they have in Christ. He boasts about the salvation that they’re experiencing as former pagans. But this he is ashamed of, that there are some of them who are proving by what they teach and what they do and how they live that they don’t have the knowledge of God. And that is the shameful part.

So, we didn’t get through a very big section, but as I mentioned last time, First Corinthians 15, as sort of this climax of the whole epistle is very dense. It’s very dense theologically, very dense in ideas as the climax of the epistle. So, this is probably a good place to end for this evening. I’m going to end the recording and once I’ve stopped the recording, I’ll pick a few questions from the live feed.