He's turning the Bible now to 1 Corinthians, Chapter 15. 1 Corinthians, Chapter 15. I'm going to read the first 11 verses. You can find this on page 961 there in the Pew Bible. Page 961, 1 Corinthians, Chapter 15. Please give your attention to the Word of God. Now, I would remind you, brothers, of the Gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the Word I preached to you, unless you believed in vain. For I deliver to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the 12. Then he appeared to more than 500 brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God, I am what I am. And His grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we preach, and so you believed. By the gospel, it says, you are being saved. You see how seriously he says it. He says, I remind you, brothers, I remind you of what I said, I remind you of what you heard, I remind you that you stand in it, I remind you that you are being saved by this gospel. The word gospel means an announcement, good news from a king, that we won the big war. or that a crown prince has been born. Something that secures the kingdom's future has happened. And so everything is gonna be good. That is the sense of the word gospel. And you notice a gospel is something that has happened. It is the announcement of an event. Which means that Christianity is not a philosophy. It means that it's not that you sit under the tree until you become enlightened. You don't sit there with pencil and paper and sketch it out and figure it out. The core of what we believe had to be accomplished by God in history and then the news of it has to be explained to everybody. That means a couple of things. One thing that that means is that we cannot agree to some theory of truth that says the truth is only found in math and science. Math and science gives you some useful truths, thank you very much. But there are also truths of things that really happened in history and they are of actually greater importance. This is of the greatest importance to us. What God did in real space, real time, in history on this earth. And also we cannot agree to sort of terms of cultural engagement or rules of the house that say you could never talk about these things. because people need to hear the announcement. And you cannot assume that people know what you mean when you say, do you know the gospel? People need this announcement. So we have to be prepared to announce it. So he says, hold fast to the gospel, the announcement of what God did, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scripture, that he was buried and that he was raised from the dead in accordance with the scripture. Notice one more thing about the Gospel. The Gospel is not in the first place an announcement of what we need to do. There are things we need to do, it's fairly obvious. We need to believe and respond to this message. But that's not the Gospel. The Gospel is the message. The Gospel is what God did. The Gospel is that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures. He was buried and He was raised from the dead according to the Scriptures. So then, Christ died for our sins. Easy to believe that somebody died. Hard to believe that somebody else died for our sins. As Jesus says, that is the greatest love. That is the greatest love, not something romantic, not some patriotism. The greatest love, as Jesus says, is when somebody lays down his life for his friends. Only Jesus, of course, did it one better. because while we were still rebels, he died for us. And you can say, I can scarcely believe this. And so it's important for us to see that this is in accord with what the scripture said. What was the first sin? First human sin? Adam and Eve, all right? And what followed on that? After God meets with them, interviews them, pronounces judgment on them, then what does it say? God made them skins and covered them. Because the first thing that they had felt when they sinned was that they were naked. And they wanted to be covered. They had this instinctive physical reaction, we want to be covered up. And God said, yeah, you do need to be covered up. But you're doing a terrible job. I will cover you. And how do you get the skin of an animal? Well, it doesn't say how God did it, but the normal way we would do it is you first kill the animal. Then you take the skin off it. Then you start working on how to cut it and stitch it. So it would appear that Adam and Eve, they are covered by the death of something. Something has to die for them to be covered. And God's the one who set that up. And you can look forward as you go through the scriptures. You come to the Israelites, they're in Egypt, and God is hitting them with plagues. First few plagues hit everybody. Next few plagues, just the Egyptians, not the Israelites. But when he comes up to the last plague, the one about death, he says to the Israelites, you're not gonna get hit with this one, but here's what I want you to do. You have to, every family group takes a lamb, kill it at twilight, gather up the blood, paint the doorposts with the blood. And when the angel comes through the land to kill the firstborn, he'll see the blood and pass over your house. Notice again, it's a very different story, but something dies so that they can be covered. Something dies, and then as death comes through, the consequence of sin, it does not touch them. And every year they were to celebrate Yom Kippur, bringing in two goats, slaughtering one for their sins, then praying. The chief priest would pray with his hands on the head of the other one, confessing the people's sins and send it away into the wilderness. Sending your sins away. Remember, there are two goats. The other one was sacrificed for sins. And all through that time, if you were conscious of sin, you were to bring an offering to the Lord. An animal that would die, a burnt offering, a sin offering, a guilt offering. But the removal, you might say, the covering over of your sins. So it's summarized somewhere, it says, you know, without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins. But can an animal pay for a person? But can people kill each other? Isaiah in 42, it says that God will give a servant, his servant will be a covenant for the peoples. And how do you make a covenant? Back then, again, kill an animal and you cut it in parts and you set up the parts on either side and you'll walk between the parts as a way of very seriously saying, if I don't keep my covenant, let me be like this animal. So the actual idiom is not make a covenant, it's cut a covenant. Because you cut an animal up when you make a covenant. And so it said in Isaiah 53 that that servant would be wounded for our transgressions. He'd be crushed for our iniquities. Upon him would be the chastisement that brings us peace, and by his stripes we are healed. The Lord has laid on him the iniquities of us all. And what was never understood couldn't really be understood until Jesus did it and taught it. was that that servant of the Lord who would bear the sins of the people is the very same person as the Messiah who would come and fulfill the oath to David to be the king. You don't see that by itself. This guy's reigning and that guy's dying. But Jesus is both. He died for our sins. And when it says, in accordance with the Scriptures, we mean both the specific prophecy of Isaiah 53, as well as the whole pattern of Adam and Eve only get covered when something dies for their sins. He was buried. That's in Isaiah 53. That's in Psalm 16. You will not abandon my soul to the grave. Didn't say you wouldn't see it. You won't be left in it. Jesus himself pointed to Jonah and says, you know, Jonah looked pretty dead for three days. Nobody could see him. He was entombed in a fish. Would have been at his tomb if he'd stayed there much longer. And he was raised from the dead in accordance with the scripture. Again, it's in Isaiah 53. You keep reading it. The guy is buried and now he's seeing his days. He's seeing his offspring after he got buried. Psalm 16, the Holy One, you will show him the path of life. Jonah is vomited back out and he's alive again. Christ died for our sins, he was buried. And the burial, of course, does something else. The burial fulfills the Old Testament. But it's also important to note that the people closest to Jesus knew he was dead. If you still think someone's alive, you don't bury him. You don't bury him until you are sure that he's dead. And they knew death better than most of us. I'm gonna leave the nurses and the doctors out. But most of us, how many people have you seen die? How many times have you killed a cow or something? Most of us don't know this very well. They did. They knew death. And those closest to Jesus said, time to bury this one. He was truly dead. So this is the gospel. That Christ died for our sins, as the Bible said. He was buried, he was raised the third day, as the Bible said. But it's one thing to promise it, it's another thing to deliver on a promise. And so he transitions from talking about, according to the scriptures, to his list of witnesses. And who are the ones who saw this guy alive? What are you talking about? He appeared to Cephas, that's Peter, then to the Twelve, then to more than 500 brothers at one time, then to James, then to all the apostles, then to me. That's a list. He's running through a list. And the point of running through that list is to say, these are the people who saw him. If you don't believe me, you can go talk to them. That's why he brings out most of the 500 who are still alive. Now, do you notice anything funny about the list? You should notice one thing funny about the list. There's no women explicitly listed on that list. Maybe women are included in the 500, but there are no women listed. Now, in the Gospels, the women see him first. So why aren't there any women listed here in 1 Corinthians? Well, he's already told you earlier in this letter. that to the Jews he became as a Jew, to the Greeks he became as a Greek. He becomes all things to all men that by all means he might save some. And he knows he's dealing with a chauvinist time in which women's testimony is not as trusted as men. So he's like, well, if it's going to be a hindrance to your believing this for me to lead with the women, I'm not going to lead with the women, because we got both. I can use either one. But when the gospel writers say, well, let's lay out for people what happened, well, they've got to tell the story. This is what happened. The gospels tell you what happened. And Paul here, he shows you one way of, you could say, how you make your case so the people in his era listen. For us, of course, that makes it even more impressive. Not only do you have this list of witnesses, there's a longer list. You go to the gospels, and you could add a bunch more names there. But of course, he appeared to them. appeared. But maybe there was a mistake? Some of those people see things that aren't there? Were they hallucinating? You know, the Gospels note a couple things to address that. They note that Jesus ate food. That Jesus invited being touched. You don't think I'm here? Come up and grab me. Come on, Thomas, you can put your hand into my side. Alright, so he was there. They also make it clear that the tomb was empty. And the evidence for that is, you start the book of Acts, and they preach the resurrection in the same place almost immediately, and they're making a big sink, and the authorities don't like it. What should the authorities have done to stop it? They should have pulled Jesus' corpse out of the tomb and said, fellas, I know it's been hard for you, but here he is. He's dead. All the rest of you, don't listen to these guys, because the fact that they didn't do that is evidence that they couldn't. You can't if you can't find the body. So his tomb was empty. But somebody will say, well, maybe the apostles stole the body and they told a lie that he was alive. All right? Did you know that all of them except John die a martyr's death? That for decades they say Jesus is alive and they spread the news of it until they're put to death for it? It's a long time to keep up a lie. No, that doesn't work. They're definitely genuine. They definitely believe it. You can go back to the hallucinating. But I say, wait a minute, if they were hallucinating, the body would have still been in the tomb. It's a very odd thing. How do you work it out? How do you work out these absolutely convinced guys that Jesus is alive? And there they are, they're testifying to it, and clearly the tomb is empty. Now, all that is from the Gospels. All that Paul says here is something a little bit different. It's his own evidence against the wish-fulfillment, hallucinating hypothesis. He said, yeah, Cephas, who was glad to see Jesus, and the 500 brothers who may have been glad to see Jesus, and James, his brother, who was glad to see Jesus, and then me, who wasn't glad to see Jesus. Nobody was working harder to stamp out the Jesus movement than Paul. Paul did not want to see Jesus. This was not wish fulfillment for him. Paul had to ask, who are you, Lord? He was not happy about this. So for him, there is no wish fulfillment. When Paul says, Jesus appeared to me, he was not happy about it at the time. So you see by these many proofs that Jesus rose from the dead on the third day, and we're not speaking metaphorically. We are not saying, he always lives on in our hearts. We are not saying, and I know he's looking down on me from heaven. And we're not saying, his teaching will never die. No, we're talking about a full, literal, physical, bodily resurrection. We are saying that his heart stopped. And then unaided, 36 or 40 hours later, the heart started. We're saying that the brainwave stopped. And unaided, 36 or 40 hours later, the brainwaves started. We're saying that breathing stopped, and then the breathing resumed again, without help of CPR or anyone else. And it'd be too long anyway. That's what we're saying. We're saying a full, physical, bodily resurrection. What power that is. Hold fast to the Gospel, that He died for our sins, and He rose again. Of course, some of you have probably seen scary movies where somebody dies and comes back. And the question becomes, what's he coming back to do? So as you look at the list again, I want you to point you to the three personal names on that list. And see, while the list is in the first place a list of witnesses, people who saw Jesus alive, it functions another way. It shows us that when He came back, He came back in grace. He appeared to Cephas, Peter. It's Aramaic for Peter. Do you remember what Peter had done? Peter said, oh, Jesus, you're so wrong. Nevermind the scripture. I'm not falling away tonight. Oh, the rest of these guys will, but I will never fall away. And he blew off Jesus's warnings, and he wouldn't listen when Jesus said, you better watch and pray. And then he denied him three times. And he appeared to Cephas, not to strike him down, not to disown him, but to reown him, to restore him to the apostleship. He appeared to James, this is not James the Apostle, it's James the brother of Jesus. Now do you remember what the role of his family is back in the Gospels? His brothers said, well why don't you go down to Jerusalem if you say that you are anybody? For not even his brothers were believing in him. At another point, they go to take custody of him because they were saying he's out of his mind, he never gets any kind of rest. It was so bad that when Jesus is on the cross and he sees his mother and he sees the apostle John there, he says, behold your mother. He's entrusting his mother, not to his brothers, but to an apostle. But then he appeared to James. And James becomes one of the most devoted followers. He becomes the leader of the church in Jerusalem. He is martyred for Jesus in the year 62. And not just James, but all of his brothers, of which he had quite a few. They become members of the early church, because he appears to them in grace. And then finally, of course, we've already mentioned Paul, who tried the hardest to destroy the church. And then Jesus appears to him, redirects him, and says, now you're going to try the hardest to build up the church. Everything you were trying to do in the first half of your life, now you'll do the opposite in the second half. Jesus came back to save sinners. And when the sinners had rejected Him, they had killed Him, the apostles had failed Him, He didn't return in wrath. He returned for their salvation. This is what we believe. That Christ died for our sins, as the Bible said He would. That He was buried, that He raised on the third day, as the Bible said He would. And I want to remind you that He is raised in a different way from anybody else in Scripture. I think there's about nine people in scripture who die and then are raised. But the other eight are all different than Jesus in this. The other eight all had to die again. I've been in the church in Larnaca, Cyprus that claims that they have Lazarus buried underneath their church. And maybe they do, I don't know. But there's no Christian church out there that says, we have Jesus buried underneath our church. No, you don't have that. Yes, there's a church built over where he was buried, But there is no church claiming that they have Jesus' bones underneath their church. It's not a Christian church if you claim that. That is not claimed. All the others rose to die again. They were resuscitated. But Jesus was resurrected, never to die again, because he had conquered death. Now, are we free from death? This is a long chapter. We're going to spend about four weeks in this chapter. Because the rest of the chapter goes on talking about how Jesus' resurrection is the proof and the guarantee of our resurrection. And so he's going to go on in considerable length and drive home the importance of that resurrection for us. But this afternoon we're just simply starting here with the fact of his bodily resurrection. And we're also going to return now to verse 2. He says, by which this gospel is what you are being saved by, if you hold fast to the word I preach to you, unless you believed in vain. You know, salvation is a complex topic. There's parts of our salvation that are instantaneous. As when we pray for God to forgive our sins, in the name of Christ, and God forgives us. He justifies the sinner. That justification is instantaneous. It's God's declaration. Forgiven! And He doesn't leave us out in the cold. He adopts us. He calls us sons and daughters. The adoption, again, is instantaneous. He declares it. This one is mine. And because of these things, many say, once saved, always saved. And in the plan of God, yes, once saved, always saved. God has known His own from all eternity. God knows. God's very clear on all this. But we see in part. We're down on this earth. Things are muddy and muddled up to us. And so these other elements of our salvation need to be lifelong. We need to continuously repent and believe and to grow more like Christ. We have to be growing in our perseverance and our sanctification and our love. We have to keep on repenting, keep on believing. And parts of our salvation happen when we die. Part of our salvation happens probably quite a while after that. There's a lot that flows from Christ's resurrection. But I want to encourage you not to bank too much on the once saved, always saved slogan. There's a sense in which that is true. And there's a sense in which that is misleading. Jesus warned us that many would say, Lord, Lord, do we not prophesy in your name? And He will say, depart from me, I never knew you. So notice here that we are to hold fast. We must hold fast to the gospel that Christ died for our sins and that He rose from the dead. We're to rejoice in our justification and adoption. It's that that gives us the power and the strength for everything else. But then we're to use that strength and power to persevere in the gospel. This morning, Evniki had sent me the text that said that Tabitha Stuyvesant had died, and I went to the Caring Bridge, a little comment on it, where Jeff said that he'd gathered the kids and read Pilgrim's Progress, the appropriate part towards the end. Pilgrim's Progress is a book from the 1600s. It's an imaginative allegory of the Christian life. And it does not end when the guy gets to the cross. is just getting rolling when the guy gets to the cross. He gets to the cross and the burden falls off his back and he is forever glad that the burden is off his back, but the book is just getting started. Because now he has to endure and go on through many trials until he comes to the river that he must cross to get to the celestial city on the other side. The point is that the Christian life is not simply I believed and now I'm biding my time till I die. there is a pilgrimage, there is a growth, there is a continuing, and there is a holding fast. So hold fast to the gospel, that Jesus died for our sins and was raised for our justification. Hold to that testimony of many witnesses. This is the gospel in which we stand. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for what you have done, for what you have done in human flesh, for what you've done for our older brother in the faith, Jesus Christ. And Lord, we thank you for this promise, that as you have raised him, so you also will raise us. Heavenly Father, help us to live in this hope. Help us to abide in it. Help us to proclaim it. Help us not to be ashamed of it. Lord, give us an answer to the one who mocks. And we pray, we pray that you would come soon, Lord Jesus, that we might see you as you are. We pray this in Jesus' name.