1 Corinthians 15:54 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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1 Corinthians 15:54

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The quotation is from Isaiah 25:8; what a phrase! – ‘Death [personified now] is swallowed up in victory.’ Not a trace of it; it is swallowed up. Death is at an end. This tells you even more about the resurrection, and the resurrection life, and the resurrection body. There will be no grief, no sorrow, no sadness, no parting – all those painful aspects of death which we experience now. Death is swallowed up in happiness, in rejoicing and victory – grief, sorrow, sadness, and parting find no place anymore.For centuries, for millennia, death has been doing all the swallowing up. It is death that has swallowed up everyone. Death is the great devourer. It is like a great beast, a tremendous monster. It is pitiless. It comes to everyone. It is described in the book of Job is the king of terrors – a wonderful description given by an ungodly man, Bildad, the rudest of the so-called comforters in Job. He may have been rude, and he may have been an obnoxious character, but he was a remarkable poet. And ‘the king of terrors’ is only one of his amazing statements, condemned as he was as a sinner. Death comes by day; it comes by night. It takes the young so often, it takes the old. It comes by illness, by tragedy, by accident, by murder, by war, or by famine. We fight death – let us personify it – we fight him tooth and nail; but it is a losing battle. We can only put him off. We can only delay him. He is the devourer. He has been doing it for centuries. Look in the graveyard. You see all the headstones: most of them are worn out; the wording erased from many of them, tilted at all sorts of angles. It is all a monument to death, the devourer that takes everyone and has done for so very long. It takes the proudest – they fall. It takes the strongest – they weaken and fall before him. It is cruel – it takes people who are sorely needed by their children, by their loved ones. Death even, at the behest of Satan, stood before the Son of God, the Man-child, according to Revelation 12, seeking to devour him before he was even born. But because he was the Son of God, and it was not yet his time, death could not take him, but death takes everyone.

Application

But the resurrection swallows death. ‘When this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality [here is the magnificent power of Christ] then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up.’ You see the power of the statement now. The devourer is devoured. The resurrection says to death, ‘Give up your billions; give them up, surrender them.’ Death’s irreversible process is put into reverse at the word of Christ. They are in the earth; their particles have gone. They are scattered by the sea. Death has reigned over them for generations, for hundreds of years. Surely there is no turning back the clock. How can death be defeated in an instant, in an indivisible moment of time? Such is the power of Christ, and the right he has – purchased by his suffering in agony for our sins on Calgary’s cross – that in an indivisible moment of time he can command death to give up all it has swallowed down, and death itself can be devoured. All the groans and all the sighs of creation will be at an end in the great change that will come, and there will be everlasting security. What a verse it is!

Questions

What will you remember of your time in this world? You will remember some things, but everything that you remember will be a memorial of how all things worked together for good to them that love God, how God blessed you through every step of life's journey.

Will I have regrets in heaven? I didn't witness enough; I didn't reach that person; I let that blessing go; I let that child down; I failed to do this; I failed to do that. Death is swallowed up in victory; it is gone.

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Introduction

1 Corinthians 15:54 Commentary and Bible Study