1 Corinthians 15:21-28

Alexander the Great was known for his military conquests and had worked to build a Greek empire that stretched across the Mediterranean world. No one could stand against his military might. According to one legend, after one of his greatest victories, he sat down and began to weep—because he had conquered the world and there was nothing left to conquer.

Many people have pointed out the irony of that story, given that, as great a conqueror as Alexander was, he only conquered a small portion of the world. His accomplishment was something great, but really, it was very limited.

And really, even if it had been something greater—even if a man built an empire that stretched from pole to pole, that would be such a limited thing. Certainly, it would be an amazing victory, but still so limited. You can build an army, but an army can only fight so many enemies; you can create governments, but governments can only pass so many laws. Perhaps in the end, Alexander was right to weep; there is at the height of all human victories a certain sense of sadness and futility. 

Alexander was called the conqueror. And Jesus Christ is also called a conqueror; he is a victor. But unlike Alexander, Jesus was not merely a military conqueror—He didn't do something as comparatively easy as mowing down armies and setting up flags. Many people expected Christ to do that when He came—and they did not understand how much of a step down that would have been. Jesus came to bring a victory, but a victory of a much greater kind than anything that the armies of this world could ever dream of—and He brought about that victory through His resurrection. The resurrection is the triumph of Christ; the triumph of God, and, by extension, it is our triumph as well.

The resurrection is a triumph over the past.

There is one fixed and indisputable thing about life.  The future is uncertain. The present is often uncertain. But the past is certain. The things which have gone before, the events which have already come to pass—they are certain and unavoidable. You can change the future; you can change the present; BUT you CANNOT change the past. You cannot undo or alter anything once it has been written into the books of history. For good and for ill, those things remain unaltered forever. 

And for many of us, it is for ill. Many times, we think “If only I could go back...”--if only we had the chance to make certain choices a different time; if only we could erase a certain action or call back a certain sentence; in both trivial matters and in matters far more serious, most of us come back and back again to this idea—a wish or a desire to change the past. And really, this is in miniature the whole story of the human race.

For, according to the Bible, our entire condition as humans is tied up with one bad choice. “And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” (Genesis 3:17-19) It was the sin of the first man, Adam, which brought all suffering and death into this world. The union between God and man was broken by man's betrayal, and so disorder was unleashed upon the world.

There has been a long debate in theology about how to explain this fact; how can it be right for us to suffer because of the sin of our long-dead ancestor? And we're not going to get into that debate here. For our purposes, it is sufficient to see the reality. We have the sin of Adam, and from that we have a causative relationship to sin, to death, and to all the other ills we see in the world. It is because of this primordial act that we live in the world we do.

But we do recognize that even if the sin of Adam is the first link in this chain, it is not the only link. Each of us also has our share. Each of us has made choices that took us away from God, from goodness, from justice, from sanity. We all have our part in the sin of Adam. Look at what Paul says in Romans 5:12: “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.” Adam started the sinning business, but we have all, in turn, taken up the family business.

You can picture something like this: suppose a man ran up a very large debt and then died, leaving his children with the duty of paying off the debt. And then, rather than trying to pay it off, his children just ran up more debt. 

So we have this relationship. We have the sin of Adam. And that stands in a causative relationship to all the sin and death in the world. We have all had our part in this reality, but it all traces back, in some way or another, to Adam. In Adam all die. “Since by man came death” is both true in the grand scheme of history and in the individual scene of each of our lives. For all of us as individuals, as well as for the human race as a whole, there is something in the past that stands as the root of our present condition.

This is the power of the past. And it is something we cannot change. We cannot go back and undo the things we've done. Even God, seemingly, CANNOT alter the past.

And yet this is the triumph of the resurrection; it is a triumph over the past. That is the contrast which Paul is setting up in verses 21 and 22. By the sin of Adam, by the sin of mankind, there came death. But by the resurrection of Jesus, by the resurrection of a man, there shall come life and resurrection. Later in the chapter, Paul will refer to Jesus as “The last Adam” because he succeeded where Adam failed; Jesus was what Adam was supposed to be.  Even God could not UNDO the events of the past. But what He could do—what He did—was to provide a remedy for those events; what He could do and what He did was triumph over them to bring an end to their power.

Earlier, I compared the burden of sin to a debt. If someone has run up a debt, then that fact cannot be ignored or erased. But it is possible for someone to do away with the debt by providing a means for it to be paid off. That is what Jesus did.

Just as there is a causative link between Adam and the inevitable death of all men, so there is a causative link between Jesus and the possibility of life for all men. Christ is the patriarch of a new race, and all his seed share in his life.

And now we move into more philosophical speculation, but I think that is part of the reason for the incarnation. Jesus, as God, is alive, is immortal, and undying. Because God cannot die, God cannot be resurrected. And because man is dying, he needs resurrection. Only a person who was man—and so able to die—and also God—and so able to conquer death, could bring resurrection. God didn't simply undo or cancel the reality of the past, but He did create a new reality where the power of the past could be broken. Everything that was lost through the fall of Adam may be reclaimed in Christ.

This is true on a cosmic scale for the past of all mankind, but it is also true on a more limited scale in our personal lives. This doesn't mean that God simply erases our past, nor that we never have to face consequences for our own actions. We are inextricably entangled in the fabric of our own lives. And yet Jesus is the victor. Because of his resurrection, there is a triumph over the past.

Paul himself is a good example of this. Remember what Paul said earlier in the chapter: “For I am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.” (1 Corinthians 15:9-10) Paul's past was that he was an enemy of Christ, a persecutor of the church. This was a man who had led to Christians being beaten and imprisoned. And that past didn't go away because he became a Christian. For all his 'forgetting those things which are behind,' Paul never truly forgot his past. But because he had an encounter with the resurrected Christ, there was a triumph over his past. It was no longer a cause for persecution or even guilt. Instead, it became a cause for praise and worship to God; you could even argue that the reason why Paul did labor so much and so hard as an apostle was because of his past. That is the difference which the living Christ can make; that is the triumph of the resurrection.

But it isn't just about the past. In the resurrection, there is also a triumph over the present.

I said earlier that one of the certain facts of life is the fact that we cannot alter the past. And just as certain is the fact that we cannot stop the present.  The world continues to turn, the tide rises and falls, and the passage of time marches forward regardless of anything we do. And as we look at the passage of time, it often seems like something almost savage and uncontrollable. Certainly, the events that happen within that stream of time often seem random and purposeless. One of Shakespeare's characters says that life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. So often, that is how the world seems. 

But as Christians, we believe that Jesus is alive. And because Jesus is alive, because He rose from the dead, He has triumphed over the present.

In verses 24-27, Paul is setting up the following idea. Jesus is reigning over this world as a king over his kingdom. By breaking the power of the sin of Adam, by succeeding where the first man failed, Jesus won a kingdom. Of course, as God, Jesus was sovereign over the world anyway.  But because Jesus came to this world, because He died and rose from the dead, He has won a special victory and gained a special right as a king over this world. Paul shows this same idea in the familiar passage from Philippians 2:8-9: “And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name.” Do you see the progression? Jesus humbled Himself and experienced death and THEREFORE, God exalted Him and gave Him a name above every name. Jesus has now the right of conquest as well as the right of succession.

In this passage, Paul's perspective is more aimed at the future—at the final consummation of that kingdom which will come at the end of time. But notice what Paul says in verse 25: “He must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet.” Do you see the significance of that? Someday, Jesus will bring a full and complete victory over the world; someday everything will be completed; someday every wrong will be made and every flaw will be perfected. BUT UNTIL THEN—He will reign.

Commentators think that Paul is referencing the prophecy of Psalm 110:1: “The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool.” There is coming a future victory over all his enemies, and yet until then, he is sitting at God's right hand—that is, in a position of power and authority. In other words, Jesus is reigning now, and He will keep on reigning until his work is done. He isn't going to leave His work half-finished. Until that last moment comes when the last enemy is destroyed, until the story of this world reaches its conclusion, until then He must reign. That phrase doesn't just mean that He IS reigning—it means that it is necessary, it is right, it is fitting and proper that He reign. It is the way things should be and the way they are.

No matter how crazy and meaningless the events of life may seem, they are not crazy or meaningless. No matter how chaotic this world may seem, chaos does not have the final word.  Think of how things must have seemed to Jesus' disciples during the events of the first Easter. They had seen Jesus, the man they had followed, they had believed in, they had worshipped—they had seen him arrested and falsely accused and strung up to die. They had seen him beaten and bloodied and nailed to a cross. They had seen him overcome by his enemies. He had lost and his enemies had won and he had been killed. That must have seemed simple and undeniable. The game was over and there side had not come out on top. End of story.

And yet that wasn't the end of the story. Jesus' enemies had managed to kill him but even they couldn't manage to keep Him dead. That is the one great fact of Easter. The power of evil went as far as it could go—but it couldn't go far enough. Hell spent all its rage and fury on Jesus and Jesus remained unconquered. That is the triumph of the resurrection. And because of that, Jesus is reigning right now, over all things. There is nothing that has a claim on Him; there is no rival power.

Verse 27 is a rather complex and even convoluted verse, but the point is something simple. What Paul is saying there is that all things are put under Jesus' feet; everything is under his authority. The only exception is the one who put everything under Jesus' feet, that is, God the Father who bestowed this kingdom upon the son.

Do you see what that means? The only thing in reality which is not under Christ's authority is God Himself. Jesus is the supreme authority who answers to no one except His Father. He is at the top of the cosmic totem pole. No one can contest his right or rival his authority, for there is no one higher except God and it is God who gave all things in to His hands.

This world may seems to be go wild, but it is not out of control. Jesus is reigning over the present. I talked about the tide before as something certain and unstoppable. It is a common example—but I'll be honest, I don't think about the tide all that much. The tide doesn't effect us much here in Ohio or Pennsylvania. I've only been to the ocean a couple of times in my life and so I don't pay that much attention to the rise and fall of the tide. There are probably people in the world who have lived all their lives inland and don't even know about the existence of the tide. But none of that changes the fact that the tide is still rising and falling.

We may not always be aware of Jesus' reign. We often don't see His hand; sometimes we may even doubt it. Certainly, there are people in the world who don't believe in it. And yet that doesn't stop Christ from reigning, anymore than our ignorance stops the tide from rising. We can ignore it; we can doubt it; we can deny it; we can fight against it. But none of that changes the fact that HE SHALL REIGN. This is the triumph of the resurrection, the triumph over the present. Jesus is reigning over this world, right now and right here.

And all of that leads us to the fact that the resurrection is a triumph over the future.

Hope, for the natural man, is always something of a gamble; it is placing our bet on the future and hoping it pans out. W. S. Gilbert put these words into the mouth of one of his characters: “Tomorrow, be kind/Tomorrow, to me/With loyalty blind/I curtsey to thee/Today is a day of illusion and sorrow/So viva tomorrow!”  That sort of blind loyalty and hope in the future is all many people have and the only refuge they have against the turmoil of the present and the burden of the past. That is the best the world can give as far as the future is concerned.

But because of Easter, because of the Resurrection, we know there is something better; because Jesus has triumphed over the past and over the present, we know that He also has triumphed over the future.

That is the main focus of Paul in this passage. Because of Jesus' death and resurrection, we have a hope for the future. In verse 23, he refers to Jesus as the 'firstfruits.' We talked about this in a previous article. The firstfruits, in Jewish thought, were the first products of the harvest, the first pieces of produce brought from in the field, and they stood symbolically for the entire harvest. The resurrection of Jesus is the firstfruits—it represents everything that God is doing to do. Just as Jesus rose from the dead, so all Christians will someday be resurrected.

Jesus is reigning now, and he is going to continue reigning until all enemies are cast out. And then we come to verse 26: “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.”

Olin Curtis, the Methodist theologian, had been influenced by evolutionary science and tried to argue that death is a natural and necessary part of the world and always had been. But he wrote: “I am obliged to reject [this] as insufficient. It is too easy. It does not penetrate the awful tragedy of sin. Sin, I believe, has spoiled the whole universe... Let the scientist investigate and induce his conclusions; I will in my thinking and feeling make no terms with death. I hate death; I hate it everywhere -- in garden, and meadow, and swamp, and forest -- everywhere; it violates every noble thing in me; I long for a world where there will be no dead thing, where every created thing will just live, live, live forever!”

According to the Bible, death is an intrusion into the world; something that never would have existed without sin. “By man came death.”

If there were no sin, there would be no death. In that sense, death is an enemy of man and of God. But given that sin is in this world, death is also a necessary thing. As beautiful and wonderful as this world may be, it is not good enough to live forever in. This is especially true regarding the wicked. We see how much people can destroy themselves and other people in their short lives. Imagine what it would be like if they lived for thousands of years. Death, in a world such as ours, is a mercy.

And yet none of that changes the fact that death does not belong to this world. It may be necessary, but it shouldn't have been necessary, and someday it will not be necessary.  Death, the one great certainty of life, will someday be an uncertainty. John Donne put it: “Death thou shalt die.”  Because of Adam, all suffering and death came into the world. But because of Jesus, there is life out of death—that is, resurrection. Christ's resurrection in the past and the Christian's resurrection in the future—these are the ultimate conquest of death. Death cannot keep anyone in the grave. And in the resurrection, not only will there be no life, but there will be a new world with no need of death. John had a vision of this in Revelation 21:4: “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”

In verse 28, Paul draws a picture. He pictures Jesus as a general who wins a complete conquest, so that all things are under him, so that there are no more enemies left, so that his victory is complete. And then He will offer up his kingdom to the Father so that God may be all in all. In other words, His work will be done. The story of this world will have been brought to a successful conclusion. What all is involved in this reality we do not yet know, but the general picture is that of completion. The file will be closed, and the war is over. Victory has been achieved.

Jesus is reigning even now, but that final victory has not yet been achieved. But there is no doubt that it will be accomplished. There is no question that Jesus will be victorious and that his final kingdom will be established, because of the victory He won through his resurrection.

Alexander the Great carved out a great empire while still very young. And then he died, while still very young. And the empire he created was divided among his generals and would eventually fall to the Romans, who fell to the Barbarians, and today there is nothing left, politically speaking, of all that Alexander accomplished. He could conquer the world, but he could not conquer death; in human life, death always has the last word. And Alexander was an unusually successful conqueror. Most men never accomplish so much or hold onto it for so long. We still know the name of Alexander, millennia later; most men are forgotten within a few generations. Human conquest, human victory, human accomplishments—at their best, they are all very limited things.

But Jesus is the true victor. Through His death and resurrection, He accomplished a final and lasting victory.  He brought about a victory over the past, so that the sins and mistakes of the past no longer have the final say; He made it possible to escape from their power. He brought about a victory over the present, and He reigns over this world so that no one and nothing can contest His authority. And He has brought a victory over the future, so that we have nothing to fear from the future; but instead we have a hope of new life and a new kingdom.

That is what we have because of the resurrection. That is what we have because of Easter, a triumph greater than anything Alexander or any other human soldier could ever dream of. There is a full and complete victory in Christ, and we have only to put our faith in Him so that we may share in it.