“What if there is no resurrection of the dead?” asked Apostle Paul, and with ruthless logic follows the conclusions.They are enormous.You may have managed to read them yesterday.
“If there is no resurrection”, he says, “we Christians are all liars and confidence tricksters”.
All who have experienced Christ, all who witnessed his resurrection appearances, are simply bare faced liars,or deluded idiots.The men and women who went out into all the hostile world, facing torture and scorn, defeat and death,did it all to propagate a tale they knew to be untrue.If you can believe that,you can believe anything, again because people just don’t behave like that.Even if one unbalanced fanatic could,not millions of them, and for over 2000 years.
Christ is risen! You’d better believe it, or believe that Jesus and all he stood for is a pack of lies, or a terrible waste, with the life and death of Jesus as obscene tragedy.If there is no resurrection, there is no victory over our sinfulness; no forgiveness, because there is no one ‘out there’ to forgive us. “We are still in our sins” as Paul puts it. We are merely animals, lost in space, so we might as well live like animals.Many would, if only they could; but we can’t get rid of our sense of guilt.We know we are sinners, and there is nowhere to go if Christ be not risen.There is nothing left to live for, Paul said:
“And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raise Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised.And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost.If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men”. I Corinthians 15:14-15, 17-19

A Prayer:
I thank you, living God, that Christ IS risen.He is alive.Thus we have hope “For as in Adam, all die. So in Christ shall all be made alive.” Hallelujah!

Now, for reading today, have another go at I Corinthians Ch.15.