Paul first appealed to the Corinthians' logic.365Here it becomes clear for the first time in the chapter that some of them were saying that there is no resurrection of the dead. If they were correct, they had neither a past nor a future.
15:12 Belief in the resurrection of the body seems to have been difficult for Greeks to have accepted in other places as well as in Corinth (cf. Acts 17:32; 2 Tim. 2:17). Evidently some of the Corinthian Christians were having second thoughts about this doctrine.
"These deniers apparently believe that those who are truly spiritual' (in the Corinthians' sense) are already reigning with Christ' in glory (see 4:8)."366
"On the whole the Greek did believe in the immortality of the soul, but the Greek would never have dreamed of believing in the resurrection of the body."367
15:13-14 Belief in bodily resurrection is foundational to the Christian faith. If the resurrection of the body is impossible, then the resurrection of Jesus Christ is a fiction. If He did not rise, the apostles' preaching rested on a lie, and consequently the Corinthians' faith would have been valueless as well as misplaced.
This is the first in a series of conditional statements that run through verse 19. They are first class conditions in the Greek text, which express the assumption of reality for the sake of the argument. In verse 13 Paul did not express disbelief in the resurrection from the dead. He assumed there is none to make a point. This was also his tactic in verses 14, 16, 17, and 19.
15:15 Moreover the apostles would not just be in error, they would be false witnesses against God. They would be saying something untrue about God, namely that He raised Jesus Christ when He really had not. This would be a serious charge to make against the man who had founded their church and claimed to represent God. Really by denying the resurrection the unbelieving Corinthians were the false witnesses.
15:16-18 Paul repeated his line of thought contained in verses 12-14 in different terms. If Christ was still dead and in the grave, then confidence in Him for salvation is futile.368This means the believer is still dead in his or her sins. He or she is without any hope of forgiveness or eternal life. Christians who had already died would be lost forever, eternally separated from God.
"The denial of their future, that they are destined for resurrection on the basis of Christ's resurrection, has the net effect of a denial of their past, that they have received forgiveness of sins on the basis of Christ's death."369
Paul evidently meant that given the Corinthians' position the believer has no future of any kind. "Perished"probably has this meaning since even though they denied the resurrection they were baptizing for the dead (v. 29). It seems unlikely that they would have done this if they believed that death ended all.
15:19 If the Christian's hope in Christ is just what he or she can expect this side of the grave, that one deserves pity. Of course there are some benefits to trusting Christ as we live here and now (cf. 1 Tim. 4:8). However, we have to place these things in the balance with what we lose in this life for taking a stand for Him (cf. Phil. 3:8; 1 Cor. 4:4-5; 9:25). If we have nothing to hope for the other side of the grave, the Christian life would not be worth living.
To summarize his argument, Paul claimed that if believers have no future, specifically resurrected bodies like Christ's, we have no past or present as well. That is, we have no forgiveness of our sins in the past, and we have no advantage over unbelievers in the present.
"It is a point of very great importance to remember that the Corinthians were not denying the Resurrection of Jesus Christ; what they were denying is the resurrection of the body; and what Paul is insistent upon is that if a man denies the possibility of the resurrection of the body he has thereby denied the possibility of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, and has therefore emptied the Christian message of its truth and the Christian life of its reality."370
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