All right, well, if you have your Bibles, please open them up and turn with me to 1 Corinthians 15. 1 Corinthians 15. We'll be drawing from our epistle reading for the sermon text today. Now, I won't read the whole passage again, but just verse 20. That'll be the main text for our sermon. And the main point of our sermon is this, Christ is our first fruits, therefore his resurrection guarantees our resurrection. All right, 1 Corinthians chapter 15, verse 20. This is the word of the Lord. But now Christ is risen from the dead and has become the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. Let's pray. God, we thank you for this wonderful, wonderful truth that we are celebrating today, that you, in fact, have risen from the dead never to die again, that you have ascended into heaven and are seated at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty, and you are praying for us, God. We thank you for this wonderful, wonderful truth. God, I pray that today as we hear your word, we would not harden our hearts as your people did long ago, but that you, in fact, would open our hearts and that you would wash us anew by your Spirit. God, we pray that we would be raised from the spiritual sluggishness and perhaps even death that some of us are sitting under today, Lord. God, I pray that you would preach straight to the conscience of every single person hearing my voice, that they would not hear merely from me, God, that I would not be a distraction, but that they would hear your spirit speaking to their heart. God, I pray, Lord, that as I speak, I would not veer off into any wrong or unhelpful doctrine, that I would only say that which is true and accords with your wonderful gospel. God, bless my mouth and bless our hearts now as we worship you. In Christ's name, amen. You may be seated. So as a reminder, our sermon this morning is gonna dial into one theme. Christ is our first fruits, therefore his resurrection guarantees our resurrection. We call today Easter or Resurrection Sunday. It's a wonderful day, but it's not something we can only joy in once per year. In fact, every single Lord's Day is a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The bodily resurrection of Jesus undergirds every single thing we do here. Jesus conquering death and rising on the first day of the week is the reason, in fact, that for 2,000 years, the church has gathered every Sunday and worshiped the triune God. So in reality, we have 52 resurrection days each year. How awesome is that? We don't have to wait 365 days until the next one. And I don't mean to diminish the importance of Easter by saying that, not at all. Rather, I just want to remind us that we can elevate in our minds all the resurrection days that we get. God is not willing that a single week should pass where we aren't reminded that He defeated death, that through Him we will defeat death also, that we can rise again. It was the resurrection of Christ that calls God's people to stop meeting on Saturday and start meeting on Sunday. That was a significant change for those early Jewish Christians. Further, it was the resurrection of Christ that gave us an entirely new calendar. When doing outreach, sometimes I've heard people say things like, it's the 21st century, we don't need to get our ethics from the Bible anymore. And in response, I'll say something like 21 centuries since what? What are we marking this time by? What happened 21 centuries ago for you to say that? And yes, I know that the calendar doesn't date back to Jesus's resurrection, it dates back to His birth, that's true. But I can tell you that if He was born and lived a life and died and stayed in the grave, we would not be counting our time based on Jesus's birth. If Christ stayed in the grave, this Christianity thing that we all affirm and believe in would have died out shortly after He died. But praise God, that's not what happened. Right before we get into our text today, the Apostle Paul says that if Christ isn't risen, there is no hope for any of us after death. That we're all just wasting our time here and that above all the men in the world, it's we Christians who should be most pitied. But we read here in 1 Corinthians 15, 20, that Christ is in fact risen from the dead and has become the first fruits of all those who have fallen asleep. Paul is making the argument that if Christ is risen, then that means sin and death do not have the final word. If Christ is risen, then all who are in Christ will rise too because Christ is the first fruits. Now, first fruits is a term that we probably don't have as much familiarity with as we would if we were Jews living in the first century. But this is not just a word that Paul decided to use because it sounds nice. He wasn't just trying to spruce up his letter a little bit with fancy language. Rather, Paul is showing us how Jesus gloriously fulfills the old covenant law. In addition to the weekly Sabbath, God uniquely gave his old covenant people seven feasts that they were to observe throughout the year. You can see these laid out in detail in Leviticus 23. The first three of these festivals were to be observed very, very close together, just one right after the other. First, you have the Passover, where the spotless lamb is offered as a sacrifice to recall how God spared his people by not taking the lives of their firstborn sons. If you remember in that final plague that God brought on Pharaoh and on all Egypt, he went through the land killing the firstborn son of every household that did not have the blood of the spotless lamb painted on their doors. Thus God delivered his people through a terrible act of judgment on his enemies. This is the feast we see Jesus celebrating with his disciples on the night that he was betrayed. Then immediately following the Passover, you have the feast of unleavened bread. For this feast, the people were to get all the leaven, which is like yeast. They were to get all the leaven out of their homes to represent that God delivers his people, not only from physical slavery, but also from the far worse slave master of sin. Oftentimes in the Bible, leaven represents the mysterious and cancerous working of sin, which spreads everywhere, infecting everyone and everything. This is one of the reasons that we confess our sins before we dine at the Lord's table. Before the Israelites celebrated God's salvation by sitting down and eating bread together, the father of the family especially had to make sure that all the leaven was out. Not only out of the bread, but out of the homes too. He would walk through the house searching, ensuring that no leaven was there. And now every Lord's day before we celebrate God's wonderful work of salvation by sitting down and eating bread at his table, we ask that our Father in heaven would purge all the sin out of our hearts anew. Then we come to the feast of first fruits. Now, Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread always occurred on the same exact dates of the year. This is the same as a lot of our civic holidays today. Independence Day, for instance, is always on July 4th. It doesn't matter what day of the week it is. It's always on the 4th. But First Fruits is different. The Old Covenant law said that the First Fruits always occurs on the day after the Sabbath. So the date might change from year to year, but firstfruits always occurs on the first day of the week and after Passover. And what does this Feast of Firstfruits commemorate then? The Feast of Firstfruits reminds us of God's provision of the fruit of the promised land. Leviticus 23 says this, And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, Speak to the children of Israel and say to them, When you come into the land which I give to you and reap its harvest, then you shall bring a sheaf of the firstfruits of your harvest to the priest. He shall wave the sheaf before the Lord to be accepted on your behalf. On the day after the Sabbath, the priest shall wave it. So after wandering in the wilderness for 40 years and eating nothing but manna day after day after day, after all the adult Israelites had died, except for Joshua and Caleb, God's people finally, at long last, enter into the promised land. And after keeping the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread, then they walk out into the fields. These are fields that they have not planted, that they did not water, that they did not work for, but they're full of crops. And they walk out in these fields and they are looking. Is the harvest that God has promised to us ready, they ask. And maybe at first glance, they don't see the ears of barley. Maybe at first they just see this huge field of grass, but they keep looking. And then someone spots some full ears of grain. The rest of the field probably wasn't ready for harvest quite yet, but the person who spots it runs into the field and grabs the first fruits and brings it to the priest. And he praises God for providing this food, food the like of which he had never tasted in the wilderness. This is the food of the promised land. And even though he only has this one sheaf of grain in his arms, this is the first fruits. That's the first fruit of the harvest. It's like a down payment from God. It's a guarantee from Yahweh that there is a whole lot more where that came from. That one sheaf of barley wasn't the end of God's provision. It was, in fact, just the beginning. And Paul says here in 1 Corinthians 15 that Christ has become the first fruits for those that have fallen asleep. which is just another way of saying that Christ has become the first fruits for all of those who have died. Think of those first feasts again with me. First is the Passover. The Bible says also that Christ is our Passover. How is it that we avoid the wrath of God today? When God passes through our land and lets loose his wrath upon his enemies, how will you be spared? Will your attempt at good works do anything for you before a wrathful and avenging God? They will not. Will your church attendance or how much you put in the offering plate do you any good? No, it will not. What is it that will save you from the wrath of God? It is only the blood of the spotless lamb, Jesus Christ. Man looks on outward things, but God looks at the heart. And when God looks at your heart, if he sees the blood of Christ, then you will have mercy. He will pass over you in judgment. But if the blood isn't there, then God will pour out his wrath upon you. Right before his death, Christ keeps the Passover one final time with his disciples. And then he offers up himself as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. He is our Passover Lamb. Then that second feast right after the Passover is the unleavened bread. Here we see Christ taking all the leaven of all of his people onto himself and becoming sin for his people. He became a curse for us on the cross. That's the feast of unleavened bread. And then three days later, on the day after the Sabbath, on the feast of first fruits, Christ himself becomes our first fruits. When the barley seed is planted, it goes into the ground and it dies. The seed dies. But then in the wonderful and mysterious providence of God, that seed that had to die raises up into a tall and fruitful stalk of barley, far more glorious in appearance than that little seed that was sown into the ground. So also Christ died for us on the cross on Good Friday. And then on that first resurrection Sunday, he rose again from the grave never to die again. And because Christ is the first fruits, that means he is just the beginning of the harvest. His resurrection is a guarantee from God that all who have fallen asleep in him will rise as well. The Feast of Firstfruits was given to celebrate God's gracious provision of Canaan's fruit. But it's not only a reminder calling us to look back to something that happened in the past, one time many years ago, but the Firstfruits also calls us to look forward to something coming in the future. Christ's resurrection is a promise that we too will enjoy the glorious fruit of the promised land, which is the resurrection of the body. We sow seeds in the ground and we hope for a harvest one day. And sometimes the harvest comes. I remember years ago though, an occasion where the harvest did not come. We had planted these tomato seeds in the soil and we watered the soil and we made sure the animals didn't dig there and we made sure the soil had good sunlight. We never had a harvest. We never even had a tomato plant. I don't know what happened. Maybe some of y'all can relate to situations like that. Well, the Bible says that similar to how we sow seeds in the ground and hope that one day a fruit bearing plant will spring up, we also sow the bodies of our dead loved ones in the ground. And we're hoping that one day that body will raise up more powerful and glorious and incorruptible than ever it was before. We don't want death to be the end. And by God's grace, it will not be. Farming is an uncertain business. It requires an enormous amount of faith to be a farmer. There is no salary, no guaranteed wage for the farmer. But when we sow our bodies into the ground, if we are in Christ, it is not like that. There is no uncertainty about what will happen to those who die in Christ. For the Christian, God says, if you sow, you will reap. It's a guarantee. Puritan pastor Thomas Watson says, we are not so sure to rise out of our beds as we are to rise out of our graves. Think of that. Everyone's planning on getting up tomorrow, right? You are not promised that. You are not promised tomorrow. You could go to sleep tonight, healthy, wealthy, and wise, and die before the sun comes up. Not a single one of us is promised any tomorrows. But we have an ironclad, unbreakable promise from God that if we are in Christ, we will rise out of our graves incorruptible, immortal, and glorious. And this isn't just a New Testament teaching. Paul is introducing something new here that the Old Testament saints didn't know about. We see many people in the Old Testament looking forward to the day of bodily resurrection. In addition to the Feast of Firstfruits, which pointed toward this great future blessing for the people of God, there are also a number of prophecies given. First, there are prophecies about Jesus rising from the dead. In Psalm 16, David speaks of Christ in this way. He says, therefore, my heart is glad and my glory rejoices. My flesh also will rest in hope, for you will not leave my soul in Sheol, nor will you allow your Holy One to see corruption. And the apostle Peter tells us in that great Pentecost sermon that this psalm was referring to the bodily resurrection of Christ. Jesus's body did not decay. The Holy One of God did not see corruption. His flesh rested in hope, knowing that for him, death would be easier to wake from than a long nap. There are also the prophecies about believers rising from the dead. Job confidently proclaims, after my skin is destroyed, this I know, that in my flesh, I shall see God. What else could that mean but the resurrection of the body? To put it even more bluntly, we could render Job's statement like this, I will see God in my body, even after my body is dead and gone and destroyed. Or the psalmist in Psalm 71, Also, your righteousness, O God, is very high. You who have done great things, O God, who is like you? You who have shown me great and severe troubles shall revive me again and bring me up again from the depths of the earth." Up from the depths of the earth. Bodily resurrection was a great hope of many long before Christ came. Think of when Jesus comes to meet Mary and Martha after Lazarus has died. Jesus says to Martha, your brother will rise again. Martha says, I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day. Martha thought, Jesus, I know this. You don't need to tell me something I already know. This isn't news. Now, of course, what she didn't know was that in that case, Lazarus was about to raise from the dead right then and there. But we can see from Martha's example that Bible-believing Jews were confident that one day God would raise his children up again. That's why earlier in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul says that Christ rose again on the third day according to the scriptures. That means according to the Old Testament. The resurrection of Christ is proof that God keeps his word. And it is like an additional promise that God will continue to keep his word until the very last day. Now, as wonderful as all this is, I want us to pause here and ask, but why is it so important that we rise from the dead? Why, why is this so important to us? We know that when the believer dies, his soul immediately goes to heaven. If we're absent from the bodies, then we are present with the Lord. Jesus says to the thief on the cross, today, you will be with me in paradise. Not many thousand years hence you'll be with me in paradise, but today. And that thief wasn't raised from the dead right then and there. Jesus was talking about his soul being with him. And isn't that enough? We might ask. Isn't it enough that our souls go to heaven when we die? Why is it so important to us that our bodies are raised too? Wouldn't it be better if we could just shake off this mortal coil, as Shakespeare might say, and be freed from the body? And the Apostle Paul would respond, by no means, absolutely not. That would not be better at all. We're not merely souls walking around in body suits. Sometimes online you might see this quote often attributed to C.S. Lewis. It says, you don't have a soul, you are a soul, you have a body. Sounds nice and it sounds smart and tons of people believe it, but it's just not true. You are not merely a soul, nor are you merely a body as the evolutionists and the secularists claim. In the creation account, the Bible says this, and the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being. This mass of dirt that God held in his hands and crafted into a body became a human being. Now, some have been tempted to think that because of this, the body is really nothing. It's just a lump of dirt after all. Man wasn't man before he was endowed with a soul. Therefore, our bodies aren't really us if there's no soul in them. But this argument is wrong in a few different ways. It's true that Adam wasn't Adam without his soul, but it's also true that Adam wasn't Adam without his body. He became a living being only when body and soul were united. Plus, no one else has ever been created in the way God made Adam. God doesn't make lifeless bodies out of the dirt and then breathe life into them anymore. This was unique. We are created as body-soul units all at once at the very moment of conception. The Bible's crystal clear on this point. And just like God doesn't make soulless bodies, he also doesn't make bodiless souls and call them human beings either. The soul and the body are made at once. They are made together and they are made in complete union with one another. Both the body and the soul are made by God and are important to God. One of the reasons that death is a great curse and the last enemy to be defeated is because it separates body and soul from each other. That's not how things were made to work. To borrow some language from another teaching of Christ, we could say that even though we die and our soul leaves our bodies, from the beginning it was not so. If our souls went to heaven and our bodies stayed in the grave forever, then this would only be half of a salvation. Christ would only be half a savior. The plans of God would have failed. The promises of God would be broken. The justice of God would be injustice. And we would never have our salvation complete if our bodies just stayed in the grave. In Romans chapter 8 Paul writes this, For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it in hope. Because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now. Not only that, but we also who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body. And what is Paul talking about here? The glory which shall be revealed in us is not disembodied souls floating around in heaven. The glory is that we would receive resurrected, glorified bodies, and we would live forever in a resurrected, glorified new heaven and new earth. And they would worship a resurrected, glorified Christ forever and ever, body and soul. We are waiting for the adoption, Paul says, which is the redemption of our bodies. Our souls are born again here in this life. God's word says, blessed and holy is he who has a part in the first resurrection. That's talking about being born again spiritually. But our bodies won't be born again until the last day. So we're still waiting for our adoption as sons of God to be fully consummated. And that will only happen at the resurrection. Thomas Watson again says this. God will not leave his people in the grave. Our friends bring us to the grave and leave us there, but God will not. He will go to the grave with us and watch over our dead bodies and take care of our ashes. Rizpah watched over the dead bodies of the sons of Saul and guarded them against the ravenous fowls of the air. Thus the Lord watches over the dead bodies of the saints and looks to it that none of their dust be missing. Christian, thou hast a God to watch over thy body when thou art dead. As God said to Jacob, I will go down with thee into Egypt and I will surely bring thee up again. So the Lord will go down with us into the grave and will surely bring us up again. Children, children here in the congregation, who here knows the story of Humpty Dumpty? Raise your hand. Okay, a lot of people, very good. I want you to say it with me now. And adults, you can say it too, okay? Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again. Good job. Now think about that story for just a moment. All poor old Humpty did was fall off a wall. That seems pretty minor. That's it though. And even with that simple accident, all the resources in the kingdom couldn't repair him. It's so hard sometimes to put things back together that are broken. Sometimes it seems like even the most simple repair jobs just won't work. Even if all the pieces are right there in your hands, sometimes you just can't seem to get them to go back together. And even if you do get the pieces back together, whatever it is you mended will almost always be weaker than it was before. But you see, this is the exact opposite of how God raises us from the dead. And children, I want you to listen closely here. When you die, your body starts to crumble apart and eventually it turns to dust. Now, how hard would it be to put back together a whole human body if all you had was dust to work with? Would that be hard or easy? Hard. It'd be impossible. Now imagine this, what if the dust wasn't even all together? What if it was spread all over a large area or mixed with the dust of a bunch of other people or even with the dust of animals? Think about all those people that that dragon ate before St. George slew him. What happened to their dust? Does some of it get mixed in with dragon dust? How could it ever get sorted out? This would be an impossible task for any mere man. We would just be like all the king's horses and all the king's men sitting there confused, wondering what to do. But for God, this is easy. It's effortless. Jesus says that even the very hairs on your head are numbered. Do you think that God loses track when they fall out? Of course not. He has ordained where each hair will fall and he has ordained where each little piece of dust will remain once your body has lain in the grave for thousands and thousands of years. God cares for your body, even in the grave. And God is able to put your body back together and raise it up stronger and more glorious than ever it was before. The Heidelberg Catechism opens with this question, what is thy only comfort in life and death? And it answers this way, that I, with body and soul, both in life and death, am not my own, but belong unto my faithful Savior Jesus Christ, who with his precious blood hath fully satisfied for all my sins, and delivered me from all the power of the devil, and so preserves me that without the will of my heavenly Father not a hair can fall from my head, yea, that all things must be subservient to my salvation. And therefore by his Holy Spirit he also assures me of eternal life, and makes me sincerely willing and ready henceforth to live unto Him. In life and in death, your body and soul belong to Jesus. In life and in death, the hairs on your head are numbered. All things must be subservient to your salvation. That includes death. That includes when you're lying in the grave. God makes that subservient to your salvation. Now, this is all the case, what the Heidelberg Catechism says, this is the case in one sense for everyone, not that their sins are paid for, but that everyone, body and soul belongs to Jesus Christ. But for the Christian, it's doubly true. Because for the Christian, God is not only your creator, but he's also your savior. And he will save your body as well as your soul. The stuff of the earth has always been important to God and central to his plans. He loved the world so much that he became part of it in the person of Jesus Christ. And he loved his children so much that he died for us. He went through death for us. but God was not willing to let Jesus's body stay in the grave. And he is not willing to let the body of even one of his children stay in the grave either. Christ rose on that feast of first fruits 2000 years ago, and we will rise when it's time for the full harvest to come in. So as you reflect today on the fact that Christ rose from the grave, remember that he is our first fruits. Think of that first Israelite long ago who spotted that first ear of grain in the land of Canaan. How happy was that man to run into the field and harvest that first sheaf. All the promises he had heard his whole life were beginning to come true. He was probably just a little child when his family left Egypt. Or maybe he hadn't even been born yet. Maybe he had only ever tasted manna on his tongue. And here he is with the food of Canaan in his hand. He'd been told his whole life that God would bring him body and soul into a land flowing with milk and honey. And now he was there. holding that firstfruits. I'm certain that man remembered that moment for the rest of his life. When he held the firstfruits in his hand, he knew that God had given him the promise and that he would provide the full harvest before too long. So when you think of Christ's resurrection, think of that. God has given you the first fruits. And if you are holding Christ in your heart, then you can be absolutely certain that you will see the full harvest before long. We will enter the greater Canaan, which is the new heavens and the new earth with glorified bodies and souls. And it may feel distant right now. It may seem impossibly far away, but when you're on the other side of eternity and you look back on your life and you look back even to the time of your body lying in the grave, you'll realize that it was only a vapor in the wind. But the harvest will last forever. Those who sow in tears will reap in joy. So believe on Christ today and glorify him in your body as you eagerly await the resurrection. Let's pray. God, we thank you that you are our firstfruits. God, we thank you that you did not abandon your holy one in the grave, that he did not see corruption, that you raised him up in power on that wonderful feast of firstfruits many years ago. We thank you, Lord, for his victory over death and that promise that we will rise too. God, please encourage our hearts today. It feels, Lord, like the resurrection is forever away. God, when we lay our loved ones into the ground and then have to go living decades without them, Lord, it feels far away. Lord, when we come to the point where our bodies are laid into the ground, our souls will be with you, yes, but we will want our bodies, God, and it might feel far away even then. But God, I pray that you would encourage our hearts that the harvest is coming. Thank you, Lord, for your grace. In Christ's name, amen.