1 Corinthians 15:41

1 Corinthians 15:41

This is part of St. Paul's great argument for immortality. The reasoning is quite clear. He speaks of the splendour of heavenly things. He has been claiming man's resurrection on the strength of Christ's resurrection. Christ has risen and entered into His glory; man, because he is one in human nature with Christ, must rise.

I. St. Paul bases the argument for immortality on the richness and splendour of this mortal life. Because this world is so great and beautiful, therefore there must be another greater and still more beautiful. St. Paul makes heaven not a compensation, but a development. His doctrine seems to teach that immortality is not a truth to be distinctly striven for as an end, but a truth which will hold itself around the man who deeply realises the meaning of life, the man who realises living, how identity and variety blend and unite to make the richness and solemnity of living. To quicken identity with variety, to steady variety with identity, is to make a man always keep himself and yet always feel the power of new conditions around him.

II. Consider the consequences of this truth of identity and variety. (1) It will produce self-respect. If you can only know two things first, that you are a different creature from any that the world has ever seen since Adam, and, secondly, that you are a branch of the tree of life from which sprang Isaiah and St. John there must come self-respect from both these truths when they are really wrought and kneaded into the substance of the human nature. "There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars." There is the ground of self-respect. (2) Then see how inevitably respect for others is bound up in such self-respect as this. The absorbing character of great enthusiasm is a matter of the commonest observation. He who cares very earnestly for anything is apt to care very little for other things, and to be indignant that other people do not care as much as he does for the thing he cares for. But surely it must be possible for men to be profoundly devoted to their own work and yet profoundly thankful for the work which other men are doing, work which they cannot do, and whose details and methods it is not in their nature to understand! "All things are yours, and ye are Christ's, and Christ is God's." That every thing should reach its best, that every man should do his best in his own place, in his own line, that every star should shine brightly in its own sphere, comes to be the wish and prayer and purpose of my life. (3) To Paul this truth was a proof of immortality. We want the life of earth now, the life of heaven by-and-by, and all clear with its own glory, and our humanity capable of them both, capable of sharp timely duty here and now, capable also of the supernal, transcendal splendour of the invisible world when the time shall come: the glory of the star first, the glory of the sun at last.

Phillips Brooks, The Light of the World,p. 63.

Reference: 1 Corinthians 15:41; 1 Corinthians 15:42. J. H. Thom, Laws of Life after the Mind of Christ,2nd series, p. 284.