What if Jesus Was Not Raised from the Dead?

Tom Shrader walks through 1 Corinthians 15:11-20, systematically tracing Paul's argument about what would be lost if Christ had not risen from the dead. Without the resurrection, preaching is empty, faith is worthless, the apostles are liars, and believers remain trapped in their sins with no hope for those who have died. The teaching closes with the reassurance of verse 20 — that Christ has in fact been raised — and calls the congregation to pray for those who do not yet know Him.

“Without the resurrection, all preaching is a waste of time, faith is useless, we're liars, we're guilty, those who have died are lost and are present, and our future is hopeless.”

— Tom Shrader

Series: 1 Corinthians

Recorded: 2002 at East Valley Bible Church

Duration: 37 min

Themes: resurrection, hope, faith, gospel, doubt, eternal life, evangelism, sin, doubting their faith, questioning christianity, grieving a loved one, new believer, skeptic exploring faith, sharing the gospel, facing death, young adult

Scripture: 1 Corinthians 15:3, 1 Corinthians 15:11-20, Hebrews 9:27, Luke 24:39, Luke 24:41-43, Revelation 1:17-18

Theological Themes: resurrection of christ, soteriology, justification, bodily resurrection, apostolic witness, eschatology, atonement, saving faith

Full Transcript

Introduction: The "What If" Question

Open your Bibles to 1 Corinthians, Chapter 15. I was in a bookstore not long ago and saw what must be at least a series — it was Volume 2, so there are at least two volumes of this work — and the title was *What If?* The premise was: what if Lee retreated at Gettysburg? What would that mean? What if John Wilkes Booth was stopped? And then you just play that out.

One of the "what ifs" in this book was: what if Jesus Christ was never crucified? Paul has, in a sense, a theme of that in 1 Corinthians 15, and the theme is this: what if Jesus never rose from the dead? That really becomes the title of what we are going to look at this morning. What if Jesus never rose from the dead? What if you could go to a place in the desert and there were His bones, or there was a tomb, and you knew Jesus was in there? What difference would that make? Would it make any difference at all?

You need to understand that there are some, even in the world that would call themselves Christians, who would say that really doesn't matter much. After all, He was just a moral leader or a teacher, and that is all that mattered. We know that there is much more at stake in this discussion than that.

The Gospel Paul Preached

We begin where we left off in verse 11. Paul writes: "Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believe." He uses the plural personal pronoun there — he is talking about the people he listed prior, the ones who had seen the risen Christ: Peter and James and the twelve and the five hundred. Whether it is me who preaches that to you or whether it is those men who preach that to you, it really does not matter. What matters is that you believe.

The New Living Translation paraphrases the verse this way: "So it makes no difference to us whether I preach or they preach, the important thing is that you believed what we preached." And we do not have to wonder what he preached. Look back at verse 3: "I deliver to you as of first importance what I also received." By now, if you have been with us the last couple of weeks, you should know what that is — that Christ died for our sin, according to the Scripture, and that He was buried, and that Christ was raised, according to the Scripture. That is what he preached — what we would identify as the Gospel. It really does not matter whether it is me who preaches to you and you believe, or they preach to you and you believe. It does not matter, just as long as you believe.

The Question of Our Own Resurrection

In verse 12, Paul begins to hone in on the issue before us: "Now if Christ is preached that He has been raised from the dead, how do some among you say there is no resurrection of the dead?" They understood that Christ had been raised from the dead — otherwise Paul would not have called them brethren, brothers and sisters. That very term indicates he considered these people Christians, and there is no way they could be considered Christians if they did not believe in the resurrected Christ. They believed that. Where they were stumbling, where they were questioning, was: what about us? What about the fact that we are not Christ? What happens to us when we die?

One author writes this: "Because Christ was raised, resurrection from the dead is obviously possible. On the other hand, unless men in general can be resurrected, Christ could not have been raised. The two resurrections stand or fall together. There could not be one without the other." Paul makes a very simple point: Christ has been raised from the dead, and because He has been raised from the dead, you should expect that the same is going to happen to you.

What Happens When We Die?

The question of what happens to us when we die is one that intelligent, thinking people have asked for years. Those fundamental questions — who am I, why am I here, where am I going — have received a variety of answers. Let us look at them.

The first answer is extinction. That is it. It is over. This is all there is. You somehow end up here, you die, and it is done. I am especially sympathetic to junior high and high school students on this point. At least when I was being brought up — setting theology aside for a moment — the idea was that there was some creator and a grand scheme, and then we had to fill in the definition of who He was. Young people today are raised in an environment that says there is no rhyme or reason to any of this. It is just accident. There is a big bang, there is no driving force, things just come together, you are here, and when you die, you are just dead.

There is a bumper sticker that goes something like: "Practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of goodness" — or some version of that. It drives me to ask: why? Why should I be nice to that person across the street? Why should I be nice to anybody? If I just landed here and when I am dead I am dead, is this just our attempt to bring meaning to life? We will pretend that things are important. We will find some purpose. I believe that is why you see so many people who are deeply lost doing so many misguided things — we will save a whale, and in saving a whale, we find meaning. Tucson goes through that when they try to build a telescope and someone asks, "What about the squirrels?" And what they discover every time is that the squirrels go right over the hill into the trees. They do it every time.

What Happens After We Die?

There is a perspective that says life has no ultimate purpose beyond what we make of it — and some people respond to that vacuum by latching onto causes. As Christians, we probably ought to be genuine environmentalists who care about protecting the planet, but not to an extreme degree. What you often find, it seems, are people who have no life, no purpose, and no meaning, so they grab a theme and run with it.

A second view is what you might call the golfing analogy: life is a mulligan. You knock it out of bounds, you re-tee, you reload, and you pop it again. That is what reincarnation teaches. The principle is simple — you have a life, and at the end of that life, unless you have achieved perfection, you come back and try again.

I was sitting with a man once, and he said we just come and come and come until we are perfect, and then we spin off into whatever it is. I asked him if he had ever met one of these perfect people. He said no. I said that is because they do not exist. But that was his belief: you live a life, you live a better life, you come back as a better person with more responsibility, and after a poor life you come back as a lower life form.

Thirty-three percent of the American public believes in reincarnation — one out of three. That is an extraordinarily high number. My friend Larry Wright used to define reincarnation this way: if at first you do not succeed, die, die again. Hebrews 9:27 speaks directly to this: "It is appointed for men to die once and after this comes judgment."

The Greek Idea of the Soul and Why It Matters

This reincarnation concept flows from teaching that goes all the way back to Plato, who is credited with the idea of dualism — that what is spiritual or non-physical is good, and what is physical is bad. The most repugnant thing a Greek could imagine would be a resurrected body united with the soul. Their idea was that once the soul is free of the body, it is finally free.

It makes sense, then, that the church at Corinth was struggling with these issues. They were living in an environment where they were constantly combating this false teaching. A related idea is that the soul returns to its source — when you die, your soul simply becomes part of whatever the greater whole is, like a drop of rain swallowed up into the ocean, now breaking on Malibu Beach. Things are simply disseminated back into everything.

Who Knows? Who Cares?

A fifth view is simply: who knows, or who cares? Many people believe that, especially when death seems far away. I have shared this before — when I turned 30, I said I needed to get busy because my life was half over. When I turned 40, I said the same thing. When I turned 50, I knew we were in the second half and we had better get after it. But even then, what seems "old" keeps shifting. I asked a ten-year-old recently how old is old, and he said thirty. Mr. Schrader, I told him, is just coming into his prime.

The attitude often is: it does not matter, because I am a good person, so whatever it is, it will work itself out and I will be okay in the end. I came across a statistic recently that said something like 69% of people in the country believe they are going to heaven, while only 3% think they are going to hell. That is the last category — who knows, who cares, what difference does it make? I am going to heaven anyway. Whatever your barometer is, you are better than the next person, so you are not worried about what happens when you die. It is either far away and you will deal with it at the end, or it will simply work itself out.

Paul's Devastating Logic in 1 Corinthians 15

Paul addresses the issue of life after death directly and theoretically in 1 Corinthians 15:13–19, asking the pointed question: what if Jesus did not rise from the dead? The logic he builds is so strong and so profound, and the more you study it and teach it, the more you feel it building — like a cloud that hovers over everything.

He writes in verse 13: "But if there is no resurrection of the dead, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain. Your faith also is vain. Moreover, we are even found to be false witnesses of God because we witnessed against God that" —

What Hangs on the Resurrection

"He raised Christ, whom He did not raise if, in fact, the dead are not raised. If the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless. You are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If we have hope in Christ in this life only, we are most of all to be pitied."

What if Christ is still in the tomb? Let me remind you of a very simple statement that we started this chapter with. Ray Stedman said this: everyone here who is a Christian knows the fundamental question upon which Christianity ultimately rests is this — did Jesus Christ actually, literally, physically rise from the dead? Everything hangs on that question.

If you are one of those people who did not take communion, you do not believe what we believe. Maybe you are even antagonistic toward it. Maybe you are a young person forced to be here with your parents, and you resent it, and you would like to show them what a mockery this thing is. Here is how you do it: just destroy the resurrection. That is all you have to do.

We will tell you where we are vulnerable. We are vulnerable at the resurrection, in the sense that if you destroy the resurrection, all of the Christian faith falls apart. So if you want to destroy the Christian faith, the way you do that is to attack the resurrection — defeat it, disprove it. Many have tried. No one ever has. Many have been converted in that process. So perhaps that is a good thing for you.

Paul's First Conclusion: The Gospel Is Useless

Paul plays with this theme for a while. What if Christ never did rise from the dead? Let us look at some of his conclusions. Verse 13 is a very obvious deduction: if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. In other words, if dead people do not rise from the dead, then Christ is still dead. There is a place somewhere where His bones are, His body is somewhere. He was like us in every way — human, fully human. He ate, He slept, He got tired, He got thirsty, so He drank.

He was like us in more ways than we thought. We thought He was like us in every way except sin. When He died, He conquered death — but if indeed nobody rises from the dead, then it would have been impossible for Christ to rise from the dead.

Now, we know He did rise. Luke talks about the risen Christ in Luke chapter 24. Jesus appears to His disciples and says, "See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me, see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see." Then verse 41: while they could not believe it for joy and were marveling, He said to them — and I love this moment — "Have you anything to eat?" They are filled with joy, marveling at His risen body, and Jesus says something completely unexpected: have you got any food around here? And they give Him a piece of fish, and He took it and ate it. Why? Because there is a resurrected body. That is the point.

Revelation chapter one, verses 17 and 18 records John's account: "I saw Him and I fell at His feet as a dead man. And He laid His right hand on me and He said, 'Do not be afraid. I am the first and the last, the living one. I was dead, but behold, I am alive forevermore.'" But if dead people do not rise from the dead, then Jesus could not have risen from the dead.

The Rotten Fruit of a Vain Faith

If that is the case, then this whole gospel is meaningless. Look at verse 14: "If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain and your faith also is vain." That word vain means useless — empty, without purpose. It is used to describe rotten fruit.

Perhaps you have had this experience. If the gardener does not get back to the orange trees — and we have a decorative orange tree, which always seemed silly to me, oranges you cannot eat — there are literally thousands of oranges on this tree. If you do not rake them up, they rot. I have had the experience of going out to pick up leaves and picking up an orange, only to feel it oozing with that putrid smell. That fruit is vain. It is useless. It is rotten.

Paul says our preaching is exactly that if Christ has not been raised from the dead. And we do not have to guess what that preaching is — it is right there in verse three: "I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the scriptures." That is the message. Every time a message is delivered in the book of Acts, its center point is the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Here is the logical extension of that: if our preaching is vain, then your faith is vain. If the preaching is useless, then the faith you placed in it is of no value. We would be calling you to a dead Savior. What value is that? Your faith is of no value at all. It is hard to think about, but there are enormous ramifications in your life — ultimately, it would mean that all of it is pointless. Certainly everything you do here. Many of you have already been here a couple of hours today. You have already served in the nursery.

When Faith Feels Like a Sham

People are here at 5:45 this morning making coffee so you'll have coffee to drink. People are paying a price just to be here to serve. Some will be back tonight. Some were here yesterday and are here this morning. The prize team will be here all day. And then on into the week, you go around as a group of people who call Jesus master — meaning you're His slave, meaning we find everything in Him.

But if our preaching is vain because He is in the tomb, then our faith is vain, meaning all of our life has no real meaning, no real purpose. It's a sham. It's a facade. We're going through hoops for no purpose at all.

The Jefferson Bible

A couple of years ago at Easter, I did something very brief on the Jefferson Bible. The premise was this: Thomas Jefferson was a very smart man. John Kennedy spoke of one time being in the White House with a group of his cabinet-level people, and he made the comment that there had not been so many great minds gathered in that room since Thomas Jefferson dined there alone. Thomas Jefferson was a genius. But when it came to this book, he was dumb as a brick. He never got it.

How come he never got it, and you — who are a little pea brain like me compared to Thomas Jefferson — how come you got it? Well, praise God, because He opened your eyes to see it. That's why. It's not because you're smarter, obviously.

Here's what Jefferson did. He took the Gospels in particular and said there's a bunch of stuff in here I don't buy. So he took out the stuff he didn't like — anything supernatural. It's now called the Jefferson Bible. I think he called it something like the Teaching of Jesus, which is exactly what you have when you take away the supernatural. You just have a bunch of teaching. Helpful, I suppose, for life, but without any real power in it, apart from Him dying and rising.

You can go to Borders or Barnes and Noble and look at the Jefferson Bible. But don't buy it. The last verse of the Jefferson Bible is this: "They placed him in a tomb and rolled a stone in front of the opening." That's it. Good luck. Have a nice day. Do the best you can, because that's all we've got. The presumption is, at least in Thomas Jefferson's mind, that if you rolled that stone back away, he'd still be there — because dead people don't rise, and so Jesus wouldn't have risen from the dead. So your preaching is useless, and if you believe it, that's useless too.

False Witnesses

Here's an indictment in verse 15: "Moreover, we are found to be false witnesses of God, because we've witnessed against God that He raised Christ, whom He didn't raise if, in fact, the dead don't rise."

In other words, we — and who is he talking about? He's talking about Peter and James and the twelve and the apostles and the five hundred — we're lying to you. He doesn't say we were smart people who were buffaloed. He doesn't say we were deceived. He doesn't say we were mistaken or misinformed. He says we determined, premeditatedly and calculatedly, that we'd lie. And in fact, not only were we liars — in essence, what he's saying is that Jesus was a liar too, because Jesus said He would die and be in the ground three days and then rise. If He didn't rise, then not only are we liars, Jesus is a liar.

Watergate and the Resurrection

I thought of a book the other day, written in 1983 by Chuck Colson, that has a chapter called "Watergate and the Resurrection." What was interesting to me — and a great reminder as you teach, to know and understand who's listening — is that none of the people I was speaking to the night before had a clue what Watergate was. It happened thirty years ago, so let me remind you.

When Richard Nixon was president, during part of the re-election campaign in 1972, a group of people operating under the authority of some in his administration broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters. Nixon, I don't think, knew anything about that initial break-in. But then came the cover-up, and he was part of that. People were now covering up this lie while the press — Woodward and Bernstein — was on to it, and Senate hearings were underway.

John Dean, who was special counsel to the president, decided things were going to get hot and close to him. So he went and told the truth in order to protect himself. Within two weeks of that decision, the whole thing fell apart.

Chuck Colson was a special assistant to the president, and he writes this in that chapter titled "Watergate and the Resurrection":

"With the most powerful office in the world at stake, a small band of hand-picked loyalists — no more than ten of us — could not hold a conspiracy together for more than two weeks. Think of what was at stake. Each one of us involved — Ehrlichman, Haldeman, Mitchell, the rest — believed passionately in President Nixon. To enter government service for him, we had sacrificed very lucrative private law practices and other endeavors. We had sacrificed our family lives and privacy. We had invested our whole lives in the work, twenty-four hours a day if necessary. Only a few months earlier, the president had been re-elected in a historic landslide victory. The ugly Asian war was finally over. We were riding the crest in every way. Think of the power at our fingertips. A mere command from one of us could mobilize generals and cabinet officers, even armies. We could hire or fire personnel, manage billions in agency budgets. Think of the privileges. A call to a military aide's office would produce a limousine..."

The Conspiracy That Couldn't Hold

None of them were in grave danger. No one's life was at stake. Yet after just a few weeks, the natural human instinct for self-preservation was so overwhelming that the conspirators, one by one, deserted their leader, walked away from their cause, and turned their backs on the power, prestige, and privilege.

Here is what Colson is saying. We couldn't keep a lie together, and our lives weren't even at stake. Frankly, if we had just hung in there, we probably could have gotten away with it. But all of a sudden, we decided to protect ourselves.

Perhaps that could be said of the apostles. But there were also five hundred witnesses. There is no record in Scripture, or anywhere else in history, that any of those five hundred ever denied what they had once said — that they had seen the risen Christ. They stood by that story to the end. Not one of them took money to recant. Not one of them ever said they had been misunderstood or misquoted.

There is something extraordinarily powerful about that. When I read that chapter, I thought, what an extraordinary study in human nature that lends credence to the resurrection. Now, that is not why we believe the resurrection. We believe the resurrection because God's Word says it. But isn't that an interesting thought?

Still in Your Sins

Paul repeats himself in verse 16: "If the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised." That is a major point. He continues in verse 17: "And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless." It is the same thing he said in verse 14, where he used the word "vain." If Christ has not been raised from the dead, your faith is worthless.

But he adds something further. He says you are still in your sins — meaning you are still guilty. I think we have perhaps reached a point where the word "sin" has lost some of its punch, even in my own life. I was talking to someone a week or so ago who had a friend who announced that he no longer sins. He has overcome sin. He is done with sin, and he and sin will never appear in the same sentence again.

At a recent conference, one of the books in the bookstore was *Holiness* by J.C. Ryle. One of the men here at church had mentioned he was reading it and couldn't wait to get home each day to pick it up. So on Wednesday at the conference, I went and bought a copy. On Thursday, they gave every attendee a free copy. That was fine — I inscribed it, autographed it, dated it March 7, 1898, and gave it to one of the guys over in Tempe. I thought it would be good for them.

What Sin Actually Is

Here is what Ryle writes about sin. It is a little wordy, but you will get it. "Sin, in short, is that vast moral disease which affects the whole human race of every rank, class, name, nation, people, tongue — a disease from which there never was but one born of woman who was free," and that would be Jesus.

He then defines sin more particularly: "Sin consists in doing, saying, thinking, or imagining anything that is not in perfect conformity with the mind and law of God. The slightest outward or inward departure from absolute mathematical parallelism with God's revealed will and character constitutes sin and at once makes us guilty."

Sin is to do, say, think, or imagine anything contrary to God's will. And when we speak of God's will, we do not mean whether you should buy a blue house or a red house. We mean this Book. Here is His moral will for your life — how God would have you live, what God would have you do. To sin is to do, say, think, or even imagine anything contrary to what is written here, or to omit doing something it commands you to do.

Do you ever do, or say, or think, or imagine anything contrary to what God says is right? Ever? Because if you do, you are at once guilty, at once lost, and you need to be found. You are helpless, and you need a Savior. But if Christ has not been raised from the dead, then you are still in your sins — all the sins of the past, where you are now, and with no hope for the future. You are stuck there.

No Hope for the Dead

Paul adds in verse 18 that those who have fallen asleep in Christ have also perished — meaning they have no hope. If there is no resurrection, they have no hope at all.

We can look back over two thousand years and speak of giants like Augustine, Calvin, and Luther, and fast-forward through so many others, even to men like Martyn Lloyd-Jones. But Paul is also talking about your grandparents, your great-grandparents, your mother and father who have died. If Christ has not been raised from the dead, there is no hope for any of them.

Without the Resurrection, Our Hope Is Hollow

Paul wants us to grasp the full magnitude of what is at stake. All those who have gone before us, dead and guilty in their sin, have no hope at all. Even those who are still alive cling to some small sliver of a chance — maybe somehow, maybe somewhere, there is some way out. We know there isn't, but we tell ourselves there might be. Yet for those already dead and gone in their sin, Paul is clear: there is no hope whatsoever.

The obvious conclusion follows in verse 19: "If we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of all men most to be pitied." Our whole life is a waste. Christianity has no point. Any word about life after death is meaningless, because the One we call Savior is still in the grave. We are in massive trouble at that point, and even our life here has no point or meaning — it is random, with no possibility of improving our condition.

Here are Paul's points all rolled together. Without the resurrection, all preaching is a waste of time, faith is useless, we are liars, we are guilty, those who have died are lost forever, and our future is hopeless. When writing these out, the thought came: what an awful way to live. And then comes the sobering realization — many people do live exactly this way, because they do not believe in the resurrection, and so their life is a gigantic waste with no hope.

Billions of people on this planet right now live stuck inside that package. Going through these implications again and again, one can almost feel a cloud that hovers and settles in. When you take away the resurrection, there is no hope. All of these things become a waste.

But Christ Has Been Raised

That is why verse 20 is so important: "But now Christ has been raised from the dead." There is the good news. If the weight of everything preceding this verse has begun to press down — if you have been genuinely considering that our preaching is a waste, that faith is useless, that we are liars, that we are guilty, that those who preceded us are gone forever with no hope — then let that pressure be relieved immediately. Christ has been raised from the dead.

Three weeks from this Sunday, there will be massive celebration across this entire campus, especially from the platform and in this room, as we celebrate Easter. We like to think we celebrate the resurrection every Sunday, but especially on that Sunday. And on that Sunday, there will also be many people on this campus who do not yet know Jesus.

Begin praying for them now. Pray that God would open their eyes, that He might save them, that we would be faithful and true, that we would preach the Word faithfully, and that God might save them. That is the good news. We can examine the theoretical consequences of a world without the resurrection, but the reality is that Christ has been raised from the dead, and we celebrate in that.

Father, help us see this truth. Help us understand this truth. We were lost, but we are found. There is hope in this life because of who You are. God, thank You for that. We praise You and we worship You in Jesus' name, amen.