Moment of Meditation: Purpose (1 Corinthians 15:17-19)

If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.
If in this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.
(1 Corinthians 15:17-19)

Purpose

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!!

Some have come around Corinth since Paul left from his last preaching visit and started spreading the teaching that there is no resurrection of the dead. And the worst part about it--some of the Corinthian Christians bought it! If there is no resurrection from the dead, there is no Christianity. It's as simple as that.

Many people try to disprove the resurrection of Jesus, but they can't do it. They try all sorts of excuses: the disciples went to the wrong tomb; the disciples moved the body to propagate the biggest hoax in human history; Jesus never really died. All sorts of ways to disprove and remove the resurrection from Christianity. The biggest problem: many of these are coming from people calling themselves pastors standing in the pulpits in so-called Christian churches. What a wretched time we live in when even the people called to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ--the story His death and resurrection--want to take the most important part of the message away.

Paul points this out very clearly way back in the first century--just three decades after Jesus' crucifixion: If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile" (v17). It's as simple as that. Christianity falls if there is no resurrection because that is the chief cornerstone of our faith--that Jesus rose from the dead so that He could raise us from the dead on the Last Day. If that's not the Christian's chief hope, what is? Amen.