Please turn now to the Bible, to 1 Corinthians, at chapter 15, verse 29. 1 Corinthians, chapter 15, at verse 29, which you can find on page 961, there in the Pre-Bible. You will see an interpretive difficulty right out of the gate. It's been the occasion of some back and forth between me and Hunter. Hunter said, you gave me head coverings. You gave me, let the women be silent. You get this passage, so. All right, I get this one. So you can look for what I'm getting. There we go. First Corinthians chapter 15, reading from 29 to 49. Please give your attention to the word of God. Otherwise, What do people mean by being baptized on behalf of the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized on their behalf? Why am I in danger every hour? I protest, brothers, by my pride in you, which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord. I die every day. What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts in Ephesus? If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. Do not be deceived. Bad company ruins good morals. Wake up from your drunken stupor, as is right, and do not go on sinning. For some have no knowledge of God. I say this to your shame. But someone will ask, how are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come? You foolish person, what you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body, as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body. For not all flesh is the same. There is one kind for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish. There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies. But the glory of the heavenly is of one kind, and the glory of the earthly is of another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars, for stars differ from star in glory. So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable. What is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor. It is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness. It is raised in power. It is sown a natural body. It is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, the first man, Adam, became a living being. The last, Adam, became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the natural, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust. The second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust. And as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven. So going back to that first verse, baptized on behalf of the dead, what is that? One commentator claims that there's over 40 interpretations of it. You know what you can say when there's over 40 interpretations of something? There are so many because no one really knows what it means. But that does not mean that all interpretations are equally valid. The Mormons have a bad one. The Mormons say, ah, you can be baptized for the dead. You should be baptized for your ancestors. So they go to great lengths to discover who your ancestors are. And if you happen to have some Northern European ancestor, you could probably find some useful data for yourself in their database that they have made available online. So thank you very much for the genealogy that they make easily available. But it is, of course, false that you can be baptized now and save your ancestor from three generations or more back. But that's wrong because it's appointed to us once to die and then comes to judgment. It's not the kind of thing that gets revisited if somebody then gets baptized hundreds of years later. Nor can we be baptized for someone else. There's no evidence of this being done before Paul wrote this letter, and only heretics have started to do it since he wrote the letter. In all chapters, he's not giving away a salvation at this point. The entire lengthy chapter is arguing for the resurrection of the dead. So what does it mean? Well, no one knows, but it's not likely that it's one being baptized for another, because Paul would have condemned that kind of mistake. So, what does it mean? You have to pull out the Greek right here for a second. You don't have the words on behalf of. you have simply the preposition huper, from which we get hyper. And so there's a bunch of ways that you might translate that particular preposition. I want to suggest on account of. What do people mean by being baptized on account of the dead? And following a recent interpreter, let's take it this way. Some baptized Christians had died. Others, Wanting to be with them in the future. Knowing their faith. On account of them being dead and saying, I want to be with them in the future, the way to do that is for me to be baptized. So that I can be with them when they are raised and I am raised in the future. In that sense, they're being baptized on account of those who are dead. Their desire to imitate their faith and share in their future. The advantages of this interpretation are that dead means physically dead, which makes sense in a chapter on the resurrection of the physically dead. Baptism still gets the meaning baptized with water, which is its primary usual meaning. There's no sin involved in this. And best of all, in this interpretation, it would make no sense if there were no resurrection of the dead to look forward to. So he's saying, if there were no resurrection of the dead, why would people be getting baptized to join the baptized dead at the resurrection, if there was not going to be a resurrection? He's arguing for the resurrection, for what people were doing. And that's because it is so important for us to hold to the resurrection of the dead. The Christian faith, he says, is worthless without it. And so as this letter begins with the cross of Christ, so it ends with the resurrection of Christ. These two great events in Christ's life must be held together for us, essential in our thinking, essential in our future. And so what we see in this part of the chapter is this. You bear Adam's image, but God has provided a better image for you to bear. Come, bear Jesus' image in a glorified body. In this first paragraph, he's saying Christian practice presupposes the resurrection of the dead. They're baptized to be with the dead at the resurrection. That makes no sense if there's not going to be a resurrection. Then in verse 30, he goes on to speak of his own practice. He says, if there's no resurrection, why am I living this way now? Why am I getting beat up? Why am I working so hard? Why am I in danger every hour? Why do I die every day if there's no resurrection from the dead? I am wasting my existence if there's no resurrection. He says, my practice, the practice of these believers being baptized on account of the dead, it presupposes the resurrection. And he goes on to say, if you deny the resurrection, well, that leads to immoral and condemned outcomes. He says, if there's no resurrection, you might as well grab all the pleasure you can now. You might as well eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. But those words have already occurred in scripture. They're in Isaiah 22. And God condemns those who were saying that back then. He says, if that's what you're saying, this sin will not be atoned for until you die. You're not supposed to respond that way. So what he's saying here is denying the resurrection leads to that conclusion. That conclusion has been condemned. Therefore, the premise is wrong, the premise that there is no resurrection. This wrong premise would lead to a wrong condemned conclusion. And so then he warns the believers there. He says, stay away from the faction in the church that's denying the resurrection. That's bad company. That's going to corrupt your morals. Don't spend time with them. They're ignorant of God. How shameful in church to be ignorant of the power of God. So it begins by saying that Christian practice presupposes the resurrection, and that denying it will lead to condemned outcomes. Then in verse 35, he goes to say, all right, I need to answer an objection. The objection says, well, we have no experience with the dead coming back. They are dust. How would they come back when they are dust? So he says, nature itself gives you a suggestive parallel to the resurrection. Why do you balk at the resurrection when every day you'd see that a seed is put into the ground, it apparently dies, and then a plant comes up? And Jesus already said, a seed must fall into the ground and die so that life can emerge from it. So he's saying, you're familiar with the principle of life from death. And furthermore, when you say, well, what kind of body does it come with? Well, when a plant grows, the plant doesn't look like the seed. It's a different kind of thing than the seed. It's connected, but it's different. So why do you fret over what kind of body we will be raised with? God gives plants the body that each one should have as he chooses. God will give the resurrection the body that he chooses for them. Because, he says, you already know there are different kinds of bodies. Human flesh, animal flesh, bird flesh, fish flesh. You know God makes different kinds of bodies. He says there's bodies in heaven that are similar. The bodies in heaven are similar in being different from one another. There's one glory of the sun, another glory of the moon, another glory of the stars. And now he's given heavenly examples and earthly examples. So it is, he says, in verse 42, with the resurrection of the dead, we are sown in the earth like a seed in the ground. We have perished, but we are to be raised imperishable. We're sown in dishonor. No one ever said, boy, I wish I could be a seed. Nor do we say, I wish I could be dust. Sown in dishonor, but raised in glory. Even as the plant is much more glorious than the seed. Sown in weakness, like a seed, but raised in power. So he says, God has set before our eyes already a picture of the resurrection in the very common and familiar experience of the seed going into the ground and the plant emerging from it. He's already shown us that there are many different kinds of flesh. There's no real problem here for our belief. Then he goes on and changes the argument where he adds another argument to it. He says, if there is a natural body, there is a spiritual body. All right, well, how do you reason so? Well, he says, we know the natural body, both from experience and from scripture. Adam, our first father, was made in God's image. We are made, we don't want to say in God's image, but it also says we're made in Adam's image. Adam had a son, Genesis 5, and had a son in his own image. He says, Adam was made of dust and returns to the dust, and so everyone since. But now Jesus has come. And Jesus is the second great head, great representative, great leader of humanity. And he is himself, in a much higher sense, the image of God. As Adam was the first in bringing death to the world, so Jesus is the first at rising from death. And how did he rise? Well, with the same body, it still had the gashes and the holes in it, but a different body, different properties, for then he could pass through doors. Then he was immortal. So Paul calls this a spiritual body. Not only was he alive, but he could then give life to others by pouring out his spirit on us. When he calls Jesus a life-giving spirit, he does not deny the physical resurrection. The whole point of the chapter is the physical resurrection. He calls Jesus a life-giving spirit. To say that now Jesus works through the Holy Spirit. Jesus and the Holy Spirit, you could say, are now very closely associated in the work that we are doing on the earth. Jesus works by and through the Spirit to give life to us. He says, as Jesus followed Adam, and his resurrection follows death, so the spiritual body follows the natural body. First the natural, then the spiritual. The spiritual is second in time, but higher. It comes in glory. It is not perishable. It comes in power. And all this is because it is more like the ultimate pattern. God the Son existed before Adam. God the Son, here we have, you could say, the ultimate image of God. And we have here what we are striving to attain. It says in Romans 8.29 that He predestined us to be conformed to the image of His Son. That's where we're predestined to go, to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ. What he's teaching here is that there's two great representatives, two great heads of all humanity. There is Adam and there is Jesus. And we're all descended from Adam. We were all represented by Adam. We all sinned and fell in Adam. He was made of dust and returned to dust. We are made of dust and will return to dust. We all begin in Adam. We are all under the curse of the law, the covenant of works. But God sent Jesus into the world so that we might have hope. Jesus came in fulfilling the covenant of works on our behalf. He has made a covenant of grace with us. And so when you believe in Jesus, when you take the steps of faith, when you are baptized and join the church, you are in Christ. And by his Holy Spirit, Jesus remakes your character, and he will raise your body so that you might bear his image, the image, as he's called here, of the man from heaven. That is to say, you bear Adam's image, but God has supplied a better. And so our goal, our destiny, is to bear the image of Jesus, the man of heaven, as those who die in him will rise in him. That's all he's been saying in the passage we've seen tonight. Christian practice, Paul's practice, scripture, all these things presuppose the resurrection. Nature itself, scripture, and the life of Jesus illustrate and testify to the resurrection. So let us enter the body of Christ by baptism so that we may receive this glorified spiritual body when he returns. We're to live conformed to his image. So I encourage you to go back to that first paragraph. To live like Paul and live boldly for Christ now. When I wrote this, it was earlier in the week. It was still sunny outside. And what a beautiful place. All the azaleas in bloom, nice and hot. It was a beautiful place, beautiful time. But it's not our ultimate home. Because God is providing and making it better. And so we should not live as those who have a lot to lose. We've got to live as those who have a lot to gain. A lot to gain with God and Christ. So let us live boldly and live for Christ. And when the time comes for you to die, remember the imagery here, that a seed must fall into the ground so that it can bear much fruit. And a word on burial. Jesus was buried. The better to rise. And Christians always buried for the last 50 years to follow their savior and to testify to the hope of the resurrection to a world that was more comfortable and used to cremation. The cremation gives voice to the desire to not be back in the body. Burial gives voice to the desire and the hope of being back in the body. In your life and in your death, pursue the image of the man of heaven, because that is the image that Christians will bear forever. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you that you have provided us Jesus Christ, that you've not only brought us into the world, but that you have provided a way out of our sin. that you have provided for us that we might know you as Heavenly Father and not as condemning judge. Lord, help us to follow in the footsteps of our Lord Jesus and live boldly, even as Jesus lived boldly before us. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.