I Corinthians 15:1-7
Now, brothers,
This is Family Truth.
I want to remind you of the Gospel I preached to you,
Paul has previously taught these people at Corinth the Good News of the death burial and Resurrection of Jesus, as was predicted by the Old Testament prophets.
which you received,
They believed Paul then.
and on which you have taken your stand.
These people have argued for the Truth against others who have refused to believe and opposed it.
By this Gospel you were saved,
Their lives were changed for the better because of this belief, this is trust in Christ, the New Birth.
If you hold firmly to the Word I preached to you.
Continue to trust in God to be faithful to what He said He would do.
Otherwise, you have believed in vain.
If God is not trustworthy to keep His promises, or I, Paul, have been wrong in proclaiming what I believe to be true really isn't, then believing it would have no purpose, no power to change anything in our lives.
For what I received I passed on to you
This is what I learned from God, and I told you accurately what God taught me.
as of first importance:
This has Priority One, the foundational facts we build everything else on.
That Christ died for our sins
Jesus took our place in death, each one of us, to pay off our eternal debt we owe to God for all our deficiencies and missing the mark of His perfection.
according to the Scriptures,
Exactly as was foretold by the prophets long ago (see Isaiah 53).
That He was buried,
Because He really did die, they buried His dead body in a grave.
That He was raised on the third day
He came back to life and walked out of that grave with a whole new, Resurrection life, in the same body that died, but is now changed, on the third day after He died.
according to the Scriptures,
Just as had been previously predicted, years before, by the prophets.
and that He appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve.
He proved that He was really alive again by spending time with those who knew Him best, who would have recognized an impostor.
After that, He appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time,
This could not have been a mass hallucination, just thinking that they saw him if they, in fact, hadn't. They all really did see Him alive.
Then He appeared to James, then to all the apostles,
This may have been His half-brother who grew up with Him, but didn't believe in Him until after His Resurrection. (Can you imagine having a big brother who never did anything wrong?) James became the Church Leader, the Pastor of the church in Jerusalem.
Then He appeared to all the other guys who knew and followed Jesus from the beginning of His ministry.
This is the foundation of our faith. If Jesus didn't really die, or if He really didn't rise from the dead, then the foundation of our faith has been removed and the whole structure crumbles. That's why Paul was very careful to show the proofs of the fact that Jesus really did die, and really did come back to life after death. And this was all very clearly predicted by the Old Testament prophets.
We can be confidant that God's Truth is real, and we can put our full trust in God's fulfilling everything He has promised, no matter how unlikely or impossible it seems to us. God is God, and we are not. He sees the end from before the beginning, and He made it all and planned it out and designed everything to work according to the order He put into it. He knows about everything that is happening now and will in the future, and He has never promised anything that He has not already planned for.
Even so, come, Lord Jesus!
