What If Christ Remained Dead

What If Christ Remained Dead

A look at 1 Corinthians 15

Khen Lim




Image source: acts17.net

To any Christian to find out that Christ was after all not resurrected would be more cataclysmic than coming to terms with a nuclear detonation. It would be unthinkable. Unacceptable. Un-everything. It would be… un-Christian. 

Why? The plain reason would be that Christianity itself would simply evaporate into thin air like spontaneous combustion. A more complicated answer would require a few more words than that.

No more Good News

Our view of the universe around us would probably gone completely orbital because everything that revolves around Jesus as the Son of God who tells us He is the way, the truth and the life (Jn 14:6) would simply turn out to be one big fat lie. 

His word, the spoken truth, would be false and our understanding of the Bible would be as useful as a ship in the middle of desert. The fact that Jesus did not rise from the dead would not be the good news we have long come to believe and share with everyone.

God is powerless

Without the resurrection, we miss the greatest and most compelling evidence of God’s power – and that is the power to return life to the dead. To believe in the resurrection is to believe in a God who not only created the universe but has complete infinite power over it, the same power He wields to resurrect the dead. 

Because God has this omnipotence about Him, we feel entirely convicted of our faith and worship to Him. And it is with this very power that we know He can reverse the hideousness of death and only He can remove the sting and gain victory over the grave (1 Cor 15:54-55, NLT):

“Then when our dying bodies have been transformed into bodies that will never die, this Scripture will be fulfilled: ‘Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?”

Messianic disproof

If Christ did not arise, He couldn’t possibly be who He said He was – the Messiah. If the resurrection did not occur, there is no salvation for us because He couldn’t therefore be the Son of God. According to Matthew 16:1-4, Christ’s resurrection was a ‘sign from heaven,’ the only piece of authenticity we ever need to validate His ministry:

“One day, the Pharisees and Sadducees came to test Jesus, demanding that He show them a miraculous sign from heaven to prove his authority. He replied, “You know the saying, ‘Red sky at night means fair weather tomorrow, red sky in the morning means foul weather all day.’ You know how to interpret the weather signs in the sky, but you don’t know how to interpret the signs of the times. Only an evil, adulterous generation would demand a miraculous sign but the only sign I will give them is the sign of the prophet Jonah.” Then Jesus left them and went away.”

His resurrection would also give Christ complete authority over the temple in Jerusalem:

“But the Jewish leaders demanded, ‘What are you doing? If God gave You authority to do this, show us a miraculous sign to prove it.’ ‘All right,’ Jesus replied. ‘Destroy this temple and in three days, I will raise it up.’ ‘What!’ they exclaimed. ‘It has taken forty-six years to build this Temple and you can rebuild it in three days?’ But when Jesus said ‘this temple,’ He meant His own body. After He was raised from the dead, His disciples remembered He had said this, and they believed both the Scriptures and what Jesus had said.” (Jn 2:18-22, NLT)

And for all of us and the millions of other eyewitnesses around the world in the past two-thousand years, His resurrection has long become the irrefutable cornerstone of Christ our Saviour:

“I passed on to you what was most important and what had also been passed on to me. Christ died for our sins, just as the Scriptures said. He was buried, and He was raised from the dead on the third day, just as the Scriptures said. He was seen by Peter and then by the Twelve. After that, He was seen by more than five hundred of His followers at one time, most of whom are still alive though some have died. Then He was seen by James and later by all the Apostles. Last of all, as though I had been born at the wrong time, I also saw Him.” (1 Cor 15:3-8, NLT)

Flawed divinity

In a world where Christ had remained dead to the world, we would have enough reasons to doubt His perfection and divinity. Christ sinless? We won’t know then. Christ divine? Well, if He’s dead and He remains so, everyone would doubt it.

In Psalm 16:10, the psalmist said that God is the Holy One who cannot see corruption and even after He died, He still could not see corruption:

“For You will not leave my soul among the dead or allow Your Holy One to rot in the grave.”

Here’s another:

“And now we are here to bring you this Good News. The promise was made to our ancestors and God has now fulfilled it for us, their descendants, by raising Jesus. This is what the second psalm says about Jesus: ‘You are My Son. Today, I have become Your Father.’ For God had promised to raise Him from the dead, not leaving Him to rot in the grave. He said, ‘I will give you the sacred blessings I promised to David.’ Another psalm explains it more fully: ‘You will not allow Your Holy One to rot in the grave.’ This is not a reference to David, for after David had done the will of God in his own generation, he died and was buried with his ancestors and his body decayed. No, it was a reference to someone else – someone whom God raised and whose body did not decay.” (Acts 13:32-37, NLT)

If Christ’s resurrection did not occur, Jesus’ proclamation that all our sins would be washed away would not wash at all (pun unintended). This is because had He remained dead, He couldn’t have save us from our sins, which means none of us would have been able to escape death ourselves:

“Brothers, listen! We are here to proclaim that through this man Jesus there is forgiveness for your sins. Everyone who believes in Him is made right in God’s sight – something the law of Moses could never do.” (Acts 13:38-39, NLT)

Useless prophecies

Because the Old Testament patriarchs had prophesied of Jesus’ ordeal and His resurrection, a dead Jesus who remains dead would have invalidated everything about His deity:

“As was Paul’s custom, he went to the synagogue service and for three Sabbaths in a row, he used the Scriptures to reason with the people. He explained the prophecies and proved that the Messiah must suffer and rise from the dead. He said, ‘This Jesus I’m telling you about is the Messiah.” (Acts 17:2-3, NLT)

Jesus was also Himself prophetic about His own death and His resurrection:

“Then Jesus began to tell them that the Son of Man must suffer many terrible things and be rejected by the elders, the leading priests, and the teachers of religious law. He would be killed but three days later, He would rise from the dead.” (Mk 8:31, NLT)

Needless to say, had He failed to resurrect, not only His own prophecy would have been shambolic, but we would have no hope whatsoever in being resurrected. In the same vein, we would also be bereft of the One True Saviour who could offer us salvation and a hope of eternal life. And because of that, our faith in Christ would be ‘useless’ because there would be no power in the whole Gospel. With a powerless Gospel, what chance is there that our sins would be forgiven then?

“And if Christ has not been raised, then all our preaching is useless and your faith is useless. And we Apostles would all be lying about God – for we have said that God raised Christ from the grave. But that can’t be true if there is no resurrection of the dead. And if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is useless and you are still guilty of your sins. In that case, all who have died believing in Christ are lost! And if our hope in Christ is only for this life, we are more to be pitied than anyone in the world.” (1 Cor 15:14-19, NLT)

No victory in death

An un-resurrected Christ will not be able to fulfil the promise of eternal life for us and John 11:25 would simply be a worthless statement for He would neither be the resurrection nor the life. If He isn’t the life that He has defined Himself to be, then death – and therefore, sin – will have power over Him. In 1 John 5:11-12, Jesus says He confers His life on those who place their trust on Him so that in the end, all of us can share in His triumph over death:

“And this is what God has testified: He has given us eternal life and this life is in His Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have God’s Son does not have life.” (1 Jn 5:11-12, NLT)

In other words, with the life that Jesus offers to those of us who believe in Him, we will experience resurrection and hence overcome death:

“For our dying bodies must be transformed into bodies that will never die; our mortal bodies must be transformed into immortal bodies. Then when our dying bodies have been transformed into bodies that will never die, this Scripture will be fulfilled: ‘Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?’ For sin is the sting that results in death and the law gives sin its power. But thank God! He gives us victory over sin and death through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Cor 15:53-57, NLT)

The centrality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ in the Christian faith is its testimony to our ability to rise again despite death. It is for this reason that Jesus is ‘the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep’:

“…Christ has been raised from the dead. He is the first of a great harvest of all who have died.” (1 Cor 15:20)

This is a hugely important tenet for all Christians because unlike other religions, only we have the Son of Man who not just surpasses the threat of death but has laid down an ironclad promise that all those who follow Him may do the same. Outside of Christianity, all other religions were established by mortal men who faced their graves and could never transcend them be it Mohammad, Buddha, Krishna or anyone else.

Only Jesus Christ was able to. His resurrection give us a complete circle of events beginning with how He was born on this Earth to become man, then was crucified to die for our sins, was buried like any man but rose on the third day to defy His critics (1 Cor 15:3-4). The grave did not hold Him back and neither could any of the Roman soldiers posted to protect His tomb. Today, He lives and sits at the right hand of the Father in heaven:

“But our High Priest offered Himself to God as a single sacrifice for sins, good for all time. Then He sat down in the place of honour at God’s right hand.” (Heb 10:12, NLT)

The doubtless arisen Christ

For every Christian, without Christ’s resurrection, their world comes unhinged. The Apostle Paul’s letter to the Corinthians spells this out succinctly:

 “And if Christ has not been raised, then all our preaching is useless and your faith is useless. And we apostles would all be lying about God – for we have said that God raised Christ from the grave. But that can’t be true if there is no resurrection of the dead. And if there is no resurrection from the dead, then Christ has not been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is useless and you are still guilty of your sins.”(1 Cor 15:14-17, NLT)

Without any shadow of doubt, an arisen Christ is important to our faith for His resurrection defines why we’re uniquely called to be of service to the Lord:

“So, my dear brothers and sisters, be strong and immovable. Always work enthusiastically for the Lord, for you know that nothing you do for the Lord is ever useless.” (1 Cor 15:58, NLT)

And because of the assurances that His resurrection offers us, we are now more emboldened than ever possible to confront persecution, knowing that by our endurance for Christ’s sake, we will inherit eternal life just like the thousands and thousands of Christian martyrs throughout history before us. They had given their lives on Earth with the knowledge that Christ’s resurrection will be their source of eternal empowerment. And because of this, we possess the guarantee that we will all rise again just like our Lord did.

So why is Christ’s resurrection so important that till today, detractors of our faith continue to try to tear us down? Why are there still so many who want to prove that it never happened but they just can’t? Why do they go to such an extent? Why?

Because His resurrection simply proves who He truly is, the Son of God, the Messiah, the only One who saves. His resurrection is the clearest proof that Jehovah and no one else has the power to raise us from the dead. It further proves that unless you accept Jesus Christ as your Saviour, you won’t be among the bodies of those who will not remain dead but be forever arisen unto a life eternal.