'But now is Christ risen from the dead ... the first
fruits of them that slept.'--1 COR. xv. 20.
The Apostle has been contemplating the long train of dismal
consequences which he sees would arise if we only had a dead Christ.
He thinks that he, the Apostle, would have nothing to preach, and we,
nothing to believe. He thinks that all hope of deliverance from sin
would fade away. He thinks that the one fact which gives assurance of
immortality having vanished, the dead who had nurtured the assurance
have perished. And he thinks that if things were so, then Christian
men, who had believed a false gospel, and nourished an empty faith,
and died clinging to a baseless hope, were far more to be pitied than
men who had had less splendid dreams and less utter illusions.
Then, with a swift revulsion of feeling, he turns away from that
dreary picture, and with a change of key, which the dullest ear can
appreciate, from the wailing minors of the preceding verses, he
breaks into this burst of triumph. 'Now'--things being as they are,
for it is the logical 'now,' and not the temporal one--things being
as they are, 'Christ is risen from the dead, and that as the first
fruits of them that slept.'
Part of the ceremonial of the Passover was the presentation in the
Temple of a barley sheaf, the first of the harvest, waved before the
Lord in dedication to Him, and in sign of thankful confidence that
all the fields would be reaped and their blessing gathered.
There may be some allusion to that ceremony, which coincided in time
with the Resurrection of our Lord, in the words here, which regard
that one solitary Resurrection as the early ripe and early reaped
sheaf, the pledge and the prophecy of the whole ingathering.
Now there seem to me, in these words, to ring out mainly two
things--an expression of absolute certainty in the fact, and an
expression of unbounded triumph in the certainty of the fact.
And if we look at these two things, I think we shall get the main
thoughts that the Apostle would impress upon our minds.