You Only Live Twice

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With all the graduations going on right now, my wife and I, this time of year, always get a little bit nostalgic about our teaching days. Not nostalgic enough that we want to go back and do it again, but nostalgic enough that we think about it and we swap stories and talk about, you know, so-and-so started college. You hear so-and-so got married and so-and-so’s having a baby.

We talk about some of those stories. We talk about things that happened back during the time when we were teaching. And I vaguely remember a student of mine once toward the end of the year.

You know, the closer you get to the middle of May, the crazier they get. Right. And we had a very strict school.

Things like this were not supposed to happen. But I remember a kid jumping over something. I can’t remember for sure what it was because I just was so shocked.

it may have been one of the cafeteria tables it may have been a desk for all I know he may have jumped a flight of stairs but he jumped over something he was not supposed to and I caught him and I said what on earth are you doing and he yelled out hashtag yolo now I was born old I had to go google that and see what what does yolo mean and it stands for you only live once and that’s been kind of a justification I don’t know if the kids still say that like I said I was born old I’m not an authority on what the kids are saying. But there for a while, that was kind of a common phrase, and it was meant as an explanation for, well, we do crazy things because you only live once. Have any of you ever heard that?

Because some of y’all are looking at me like, I’ve never heard YOLO in my life. You teach, you understand. Are they still saying it?

Are they still acting it out, though? No. All right.

That’s not true, though. Because the Bible, I mean, the story I told you is true. I left some of the names out in case former students are watching.

But the Bible does not teach you only live once. The Bible teaches you live twice. And what we do in this life is made more meaningful by the life that’s to come.

This is a dress rehearsal before the big show. And if we didn’t have that big show to look forward to, if we didn’t have another life ahead of us, I think it would take some meaning out of this one. Now, I was listening to an interview yesterday with J.

Warner Wallace, who is a cold case homicide detective, atheist turned Christian, has written numerous books. And he talks about when he was an atheist, he said, my life was going on just fine. He said, you hear all the stories of people searching for meaning and then they find Jesus.

He said, my life was just fine. I wasn’t searching for anything. But I was confronted with this and the question was, is it true?

That’s what I wanted to know. I wasn’t concerned about meaning because my life was fine. I listened to that and I thought that’s an interesting perspective, but I don’t think most people are as analytical as this homicide detective.

I think most of us are looking for meaning. I read an article this week talking about what happens after you die, not in the sense of an afterlife, but what happens here on earth after you die. And it was not written from a Christian perspective.

The man was talking about how for a few days you will be at the forefront of everybody’s thoughts as they process their grief they go through the funeral and get closure and he said over time memories begin to fade and he led to the point he said most of us will be remembered for about three generations and maybe not much more he said even if you do great things and your name’s in a history book people will probably only know a little bit about you now I’ve been into genealogy for you I haven’t had time I haven’t had time to work on it since I came here but for years I was into genealogy, Christy and I have talked about it. I know a lot of names and dates, but I don’t know much about the people at all. It’s true.

It’s true that even in our own families, we don’t remember people past about three, maybe four generations. And for me, that was a depressing thought sitting in my office reading that article on Thursday. I think that’s more depressing than the thought of dying is the thought of nobody remembering, but it’s reality.

And that to me, I looked at that article and I looked at what the Apostle Paul is talking about here in 1 Corinthians chapter 15 and realized if we don’t have the life to come and all we do is just live here for a short time and nobody remembers and it doesn’t make an impact in a lasting way because even those we impact eventually are gone and forgotten to. If that’s all there is, this whole life that we live has lost a lot of its meaning, has lost a lot of its luster. Paul was talking to a group of people who had made professions of faith in Christ. We’ve talked about this the last few weeks as we’ve been studying our way through 1 Corinthians 15.

Paul was talking to a group of people who had made professions of faith in Jesus Christ. They believed that he had died and risen from the dead. But there still wasn’t room in their philosophy for the idea that we would be raised from the dead. There wasn’t room in their philosophy for the idea that we would live again.

They believed these Greek philosophies that said you die and that’s it. And Paul has been, as we’ve gone through 1 Corinthians 15, he’s been making the argument that if the resurrection of Jesus Christ is true, then all these other things logically follow. And the section we’re going to look at today, he’s talking about the life that is to come.

He’s already said that there is a life to come in the passages we’ve looked at previously. But here he talks about the importance of why that is the importance of that life to come for the life that we live now. So we’re going to be in 1 Corinthians 15, starting in verse 29 this morning.

If you haven’t turned there with me, please do so. And once you find it, if you’d stand as we read together from God’s Word, if you don’t have your Bible or can’t find 1 Corinthians 15, it’ll be on the screen for you here. But follow along as we read here these 20 or so verses.

Paul says, Otherwise, what will those do who are baptized for the dead? He’s talking about if there is no resurrection, if there’s no future life. Otherwise, what will those do who are baptized for the dead?

If the dead are not raised at all, why then are they baptized for them? Why are we also in danger every hour? I affirm, brethren, by the boasting in you which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die daily.

If from human motives I fought with wild beasts at Ephesus, what does it profit me? If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. Do not be deceived.

Bad company corrupts good morals. Become sober-minded as you ought and stop sinning, for some have no knowledge of God. I speak this to your shame.

But someone will say, How are the dead raised? And with what kind of body do they come? You fool?

That’s kind of surprising for him to throw in there. You fool. That which you sow does not come to life unless it dies.

And that which you sow, you do not sow the body which is to be but a bare grain, perhaps of wheat or of something else. But God gives it a body just as He wished, and to each of the seeds a body of its own. All flesh is not the same flesh, but there is one flesh of men, and another flesh of beasts, and another flesh of birds, and another of fish.

There are also heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one, and the glory of the earthly is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars. For star differs from star in glory.

So also is the resurrection of the dead. it is sown a perishable body. It is raised an imperishable body.

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. So also it is written the first man, Adam became a living soul. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit.

However, the spiritual is not first, but the natural, then the spiritual. The first man is from the earth, earthy. The second man is from heaven. As is the earthy, so also are those who are earthy.

And as is the heavenly, so also are those who are heavenly. Just as we have borne the image of the earthy, we will also bear the image of the heavenly. And you may be seated.

There are a lot of things in here that have the potential to be confusing. So I want to try to break them down for you as best I can what he’s talking about. This kind of starts from the premise that this life isn’t as meaningful without the next one.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t find any meaning. I’m not saying that people that don’t believe in eternal life or people who don’t believe in God at all, I’m not saying they don’t find any meaning or any fulfillment in their lives. But the life to come adds a whole different level and layer of meaning that we would not have otherwise.

It gives significance to the things that we do here on earth. to know that everything that we do, everything that we do to serve the Lord, everything we do to serve others is written somewhere in the Lord’s book. It’s remembered.

He remembers what we do to serve Him. That gives an eternal significance to the things that we do day by day here on earth. Paul gives some examples of things that he says would be less meaningful if they’re meaningful at all without the next life.

He says that baptism would be an empty ritual. Now we can get into this more tonight, about why this is, but this is not, as some religions practice, the idea when he says baptism for the dead. This is not what some religions practice where I’m going to go and get baptized on behalf of a dead person so that they can have eternal life. The idea, that whole concept is just foreign to Scripture.

This is kind of an obscure passage that we can debate about what it does mean, but from other things that are taught in Scripture, I just know that’s not it. My suspicion, the explanation that seems to fit best as I read it, is that he’s talking about our bodies that we are destined to die. He’s referring to us as being dead already.

And he’s making the case that we baptize as a sign of new life in Christ. When I baptized Mitchell the week before last, it’s not commanded in Scripture, you have to use that certain phrase, but it is derived from Scripture. So I said, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, buried with Christ in baptism. That’s the part that’s not commanded.

Buried with Christ in baptism and raised to walk in newness of life. It’s a picture of dying to our old selves and being raised to walk with Christ. And I think what Paul is saying here in verse 29 is that if there’s not a future life, all these people that are going through baptism, the Christians at Corinth, anybody that’s following Christ and going through baptism, He says, what is the point? Because you’re proclaiming a resurrection and your body’s dead and you just don’t know it yet.

That’s all you’re ever going to be is just a dead body. So what is the point of all of this? I believe that’s the point he’s making when he says, what good does it benefit to baptize on behalf of the dead?

You’re just dead and that’s all you’re ever going to be. Baptism, which we have been commanded to do, it is a step of obedience. It is a mark of following the Lord Jesus Christ. It is not optional. And yet he says it would be meaningless if there’s no life to come.

The things that God is calling us to lack meaning if we ignore this promise that’s been given to us. Then we look in verses 30 through 32, and he talks about being in danger every hour. Paul understood what it meant to be in danger and to suffer for his Christian faith.

There’s at least one place in the New Testament where he recounts all the places he’d been in trouble, all the times he’d nearly died. Paul said, for the sake of the gospel, I’m in danger every hour. What’s the point of that?

In verse 31, I affirm, brethren, by the boasting in you which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die daily. He says, I have to make sacrifices every day. I die to myself every day.

Not only am I put in peril from outside, part of dying to myself every day is the willingness to undergo that threat and that persecution, but also the willingness to tell my flesh no. He says, but I do that daily. And if from human motives I fought with wild beasts at Ephesus. I’ve read some commentators that think those wild beasts he’s referring to are the church members that he fought with at Ephesus.

If there’s a record of Paul fighting actual wild animals, I’m not aware of it. So who exactly he fought at Ephesus is up for debate. But for the sake of the gospel, he fought somebody.

And he said, what does it profit me? Here’s what he’s saying here. As Christians, we are called to take up our cross daily.

We are called to do things that are inconvenient. We are called to do things that are unpleasant. We are called on to suffer and even die if necessary for the sake of the gospel.

And Paul says, if there is not a promise of something to come, if there is not a life on the other side, what is the point of any of it? Our personal sacrifice would never be repaid. And right there, I told you last week, I think it was, about the pagan philosophies that they had adopted that were distorting their view of the gospel.

That is a direct attack on one of those pagan philosophies. The Stoics said this life is all there is, and the whole purpose of this life is to do your duty and live virtuously. It was a very sacrificial thing.

And Paul’s saying, you can do all that, and then you’re still dead, and it’s still meaningless if this life is all there is, because those personal sacrifices would never be repaid, and they’d never be repaid by even giving them meaning. It’s not that God promises us riches in exchange for our personal sacrifices. But we’re assured that our sacrifices are not forgotten and they’re not made in vain.

And then he goes and attacks the other group, the Epicureans, because their thing was this life is all there is so we should pursue lives of pleasure. That’s what gives life meaning. The Stoics said it’s virtue and duty that gives life meaning.

The Epicureans said it’s pleasure that gives life meaning. Paul goes in verse 32 and says, if the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die. If this life is all there is, then why not do that?

Why not just live however we want to? And then he says, do not be deceived. Bad company corrupts good morals.

He tells them to become sober-minded as you ought and stop sinning. He says, you know that that’s not what you’re supposed to do. The Bible has given us, I know we say all the time, the Bible’s not a rule book, and that’s true.

And Christianity is not a set of rules. It is more than that. But we have to at least acknowledge that there are things taught in Scripture that are rules if we want to please God and want to bring Him glory.

They’re not things that we do to earn our salvation, but they are things that we do because they are right and because they please God. If this world is all there is, why not just do whatever we want? He’s telling them, as Christians, you can’t believe in personal sacrifice.

You can’t believe in following Christ in baptism. You can’t believe in living a moral life and not believe there’s something to come. If you reduce this to just being an ethical system, it falls apart.

Our morality would be ungrounded. It means there would be no reason for our morality. And this is an argument that Christians and atheists have all the time.

Atheism cannot justify morality. I’m not saying atheists can’t be moral people. I’m not saying atheists can’t.

. . I’ve known a number of atheists who were very nice people.

What I’m saying is atheism as a system can’t justify morality as anything other than what we prefer. There’s no objective standard there. So without this promise of eternal life, without something to look forward to, Paul says our morality would be meaningless.

And so he’s attacked all these false views that are distorting their ideas of the gospel and making them think that this life is all there is. Some of them are still going to have questions. Does anybody have questions about what eternity is like?

I do. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t know. Daniela and I were talking about it this morning.

She said you look tired, but I don’t know why you wouldn’t be tired with, I hope it’s okay to quote you, I don’t know why you wouldn’t look tired with five kids and a farm and pastoring. And I said, I am tired. And we were talking about heaven, and I said, I hope, though, that there’s going to be farming in heaven.

Now, you know, there are aspects of it that you don’t want to have to clean up after the animals. Tammy, there will not be farming in your section, okay? I think that’s in here somewhere.

But over in my neighborhood, you know, there are animals we don’t have to clean up after, There are plants we can grow without weeds and all that. At least that’s what I hope. But I don’t know.

I know we’re going to spend a lot of time praising the Lord. I also know I praise the Lord when I’m out working the soil or other things. We all have questions about eternal life, about eternity.

How is this going to work? What’s going to be there? Who’s going to be there?

What’s it going to be like? We all have unanswered questions because God saw fit to tell us what we needed to know and not what we wanted to know. But here’s the thing, lingering questions about the next life don’t mean that it won’t happen.

For some of them, that was their reason for rejecting the very idea that there was eternal life because there were so many things they don’t know. I cannot explain to you how we get from ones and zeros to all the stuff we have on the internet. Talk to Jonathan about that.

That is over my pay grade, okay? I believe there’s an internet. I believe there are computers.

I’ve been told that this thing I hold in my pocket has more computing power than the thing that sent the astronauts to the moon in 1969. I can’t explain to you how it works, and that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. There’s all sorts of things I can’t explain how they work, but it doesn’t mean we have to reject everything about them.

So these lingering questions that you and I have, how’s it going to work? What’s going to be there? What are our bodies going to look like?

What’s the relationship that we’re going to have to each other? Those questions don’t mean that eternal life isn’t real. They just mean there’s some things about it we don’t know yet. We see that eternal life has always been a difficult concept for people to imagine.

In verse 35, he says, someone will say, how are the dead raised and what kind of body do they come? These were the questions they were asking. Wait, how do they come up out of the ground?

What do the bodies look like? And these questions were thrown out to say, oh, it can’t possibly work. It’s a very similar objection to what the Sadducees had when they came to Jesus and said, okay, so Moses said that if a man dies without children, then his brother marries his wife and has children on his behalf.

And if that brother dies, so he said, so imagine the Sadducees said to Jesus, imagine a scenario where this woman goes through all seven brothers and they all die childless and then she dies last in the resurrection. Whose wife would she be? And they’re thinking, okay, if you can’t explain this most extreme scenario, it just shows that the resurrection is baloney.

And Jesus says, you don’t understand the scriptures or the power of God. And what we’re supposed to take away from there, this very same issue, is just because you can’t understand every detail, just because we can’t pin down every scenario of how it’s going to work, doesn’t mean that it’s not going to happen and doesn’t mean that it’s not going to work. There are always going to be questions.

The Sadducees struggled with a resurrection. The Corinthians struggled with a resurrection. Sometimes we even struggle with the resurrection, how it’s going to work, what it’s going to look like.

But Jesus knows, and that’s all we need to know. Jesus said it was going to happen, and again, I go back to, Benjamin reminded me last week, it was Frank Turek who said it, if a man predicts and accomplishes his own resurrection from the dead, I’m just going to listen to what that man says. I figure he knows at that point more about the resurrection than I do.

And besides which, Paul makes it clear, those questions are always going to be there until we get there. People have always struggled with these questions, but God has proved he can transform things. Paul walks through an argument of what God has shown he can do.

God has proved he can transform things. He gives the example here of seeds, starting in verse 36. What you sow doesn’t come to life unless it dies.

For there to be a resurrection, there has to be a transformation that takes place. That seed dies. I had my garden ready to go and weed free at the beginning of April, and then God decided to send all the rain at once.

So I’ve not been able to get back out there and plant anything, and I now have more weeds than I started out with. I don’t know if a garden’s even going to happen this year. It’s probably too late.

But I’ve ordered all my seeds, and all my seeds are, I think, in an old pickle jar in my workshop. And they’re just sitting there being seeds. They are never going to grow unless they are stuck in the ground to decay and to split open, basically to die, in Paul’s language here.

Until that death occurs, there is no resurrection. And he says, what you sow, you do not sow the body which is to be. I don’t stick a full tomato in the ground and expect a full tomato is going to pop out.

It can. I mean, our ducks scattered pumpkins everywhere. Now we’ve got pumpkin vines growing.

We just pull the vines and feed them those. But they had to go through that seed stage first. The fruit had to break down and you had to get to the seed and that seed is what grows. So he says, what you put in the ground is not exactly what you’re going to get out of the ground.

We understand this concept. And what you sow, you do not sow the body which is to be, but a bare grain, perhaps of wheat or something else. And Paul uses this very simple example to say, God has already proved that he’s able to transform things.

All we have to do is look at something as simple as a seed that’s planted. This tiny little thing goes into the ground and dies, and then a whole new life comes from it that looks different. Its essence is the same, but it’s taken on a different form.

God does this every day. Not only that, God has proved He can create different kinds of things. Paul gives some examples here in verses 39 through 41.

He says, all flesh is not the same. He says, look at all the living things around us. You’ve got people, you’ve got animals, you’ve got birds, you’ve got fish.

God made us all. We’re not all the same. We’re not all the same.

And so why would we look at a God who is able. . .

If you start from the premise that God created everything, that God spoke everything into existence. If you start from the premise of a God who can do that, I don’t understand why it’s so difficult to look at these smaller things and think God can’t do that. If God could make people, and God could make fish, and God could make birds, and God could make all these things, what is so hard about believing that God could take something earthly and God could take something temporary and He could make a glorified form out of it?

God’s not doing it. In the resurrection, God’s not doing anything but what God has already done thousands of times. He refers to the signs in the heavens.

God created the sun. He created the moon. He created the stars.

God created the planets and the comets and the asteroids, and they’re all different. And yet God made all of them. Again, if you start from the premise that that’s who God is, a lot of these little things that seem so difficult to buy into are not out of His grasp.

It’s hard for our minds to imagine, but not for His, not for His hands to accomplish. He’s proved He can create different kinds of things. And God has also proved He can make temporary things permanent.

So also, Paul says, what he’s saying here is it’s the same way. And he talks about the resurrection of the dead, talks about a perishable body being raised into an imperishable body. Talks about a body being sown in dishonor, being placed into the ground.

even though we honor the memory of a loved one, it’s a dead body that’s being placed into the ground. And so he says it’s done so in dishonor. It’s raised in glory.

It’s sown in weakness. There’s nothing weaker than a dead body. It can’t do anything.

It’s sown into the ground in weakness and raised in power. It’s sown a natural body that we’re all born with and it’s raised as a spiritual body. And God’s proven he can do this.

Can you think of an example where God has already done this by the time that Paul’s writing this. Jesus, thank you. Yes, whenever I ask you all questions, I think you think I’m trying to trick you.

Jesus, Jesus had already raised from the dead. He was dead. The Romans made sure of it.

People started saying in the 1800s, oh, maybe he just passed out. No, he was dead. You read the descriptions in the Gospels and they are describing medical things that they would not have known about for hundreds of years.

He was dead. And I think the story of what came out when the spear went up through his side shows that by the time they did that, he’d already been dead for at least 30 minutes because the blood had started to separate. He was dead.

He was taken off the cross. He was put into a tomb. You want to talk about dishonor and weakness and a perishable body and a natural body.

And what came out of the grave was something completely different. That human body that was temporary became a glorified body that was permanent. And that’s what we’re talking about with us as well.

When we’re raised, He takes this temporary body. I don’t know if it’s going to look the same. I hope not.

I’d like to be taller. I stand at the deacon’s meeting and I feel like I’m at the kids’ table. I don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like, but I know that God can take this temporary body with its aches and pains and its shortcomings, and He can transform it into something glorified and permanent.

God has already shown that He can do this. So what Paul says to the people at Corinth is that to continue living this way, where they were looking at Christianity as just something you do here and now, and there’s really nothing to look forward to afterwards. It just becomes a religious system.

It just becomes a set of rules. It becomes something very temporary. To do that sucks all of the meaning out of the things that God has told us to do.

And all of the questions that we have and say, well, it can’t be this way because I can’t imagine it. God has already proven that He can do the things that we’re talking about Him doing. He’s already shown us.

And so for them, they were being told that they had to look forward to this hope of eternal life. Now, for most of us today, our culture has not taught us, oh, there’s no eternity. At least our Christian culture has not taught us that.

Our problem with this frequently is that we just forget about that. We believe there’s eternity. We believe there’s eternal life.

But we get so focused on the here and now that we forget about it. the same interview I was listening to yesterday between Jay Warner Wallace and Alicia Childress. They were talking about a last chapter.

And I don’t know if you’ve ever, if there’s a movie you love, think about what your favorite movie is or your favorite book. Now imagine the writer had stopped two-thirds of the way through. Like, I love the Indiana Jones movies.

I know there’s some questionable things and we try to fast forward through. But I love the stories of the Indiana Jones movies. And they were talking about that and I thought, There’s a point in each of those movies where you could stop and say, well, the Nazis or the Russians or whoever, they just got the thing that they’re chasing that week, and that’s the end of the story.

Be kind of a letdown. Living without eternity in mind is kind of like that. Because we’re left in whatever struggle we’re in, we’re left in whatever pain we’re suffering from, we’re left with whatever the hurts are or the disappointments, we’re left with all of the heartbreak, we’re left with all of the unanswered questions, and there is no other chapter.

But because Jesus died and rose again, no matter what happens here on earth, there’s still another chapter. There’s a chapter where God finishes the story. There’s a chapter where God redeems all of the pain, all of the hurt, all of the struggles, all of the suffering, and makes it worthwhile as that sacrifice is remembered, as those tears are wiped away, as we are brought into a perfect fellowship with the God who made us.

And we’re able to do that because Jesus paid for us to be there. We don’t have to earn it. We don’t have to deserve it.

Paul ends this passage with the point that Jesus is the payment for our eternal life and the proof that it will come. Jesus has done everything that’s necessary for us to have eternal life with the Father. Jesus has done everything that was necessary so that we know no matter what happens on earth, that story is finished and redeemed because it ends with us in the presence of the God who made us and loved us enough to send his Son for us.

And we as Christians need to live with eternity in mind. One of the questions that I think, well, one of the questions th