One of the great Scottish divines of the last century was Robert Candlish (1806-1873), who for about eleven years was principal of New College at Edinburgh. He wrote an entire book just on 1 Corinthians 15, entitled Life in a Risen Saviour. In it he has several chapters at the end devoted to these last verses that conclude Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. He reflects on that image of death being swallowed up or death swallowing up. That very aptly describes what death has done down through all the millennia of human history. Death has swallowed up every living thing. Here’s the way Candlish puts it:
Death in this world is the great devourer. It swallows up all living things. The tender babe, the fair youth, the blooming maid, the strong man in his prime, the veteran, tough and scarred, the feeble cripple tottering under the weight of years, all alike come to him. He swallows them all. Hungry and greedy, he prowls in all streets and lanes, and all highways and bypaths, in every city, village, hamlet, throughout all houses. And with all this, he never gets gorged. He craves for more, like the devil whom he serves. He goes about seeking whom he may devour. Bribes, entreaties, tears, all alike fail to move him from his purpose. Beauty has no charm, love no spell to mitigate his rage. Power has no weapons to resist his onset. Worth has no protection against his rancor, nor wisdom against his wiles. None are humble enough to be overlooked and pitied. None are good enough to be reverenced and spared. None are high enough to bid him stand at bay. The king of terrors, formidable to all, is himself afraid of no one. He sees us and swallows up remorselessly, the whole family of man, and even Jesus.
Jesus is the One who described Himself in John 14:6 as the way, the truth, and the life. Jesus said, “No one takes my life from me. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again.” But when Jesus stood alone before this formidable foe, it seemed by any reasonable analysis, any objective appraisal, that it wasn’t Jesus who was victorious, it was death. Forget heroic conduct. Many people have been heroic in the face of death, but for all their heroism, death still triumphs and it seemed to triumph here. And not only did death seem to triumph, but so had Christ’s enemies, and so had the devil, and so had sin. But, you see, the point of it is that these were only Pyrrhic victories. For a very short while, the enemies of Christ and man did indeed seem to have triumphed.
But on Easter morning, that illusion was dispelled and these apparent victories were forever snatched away. Now we ask the question at that point, “Who has the victory?” And the answer is clear. It’s what our text is talking about. The victory belongs to Jesus. How does it belong to Jesus? It belongs in two ways: by His victory on the cross, and by His victory over the tomb. It’s not usual on Easter to talk about Christ’s victory over the cross because on Easter, we talk about the resurrection. We, more or less, reserve talking about the cross for Good Friday. But we mustn’t forget that the cross was a victory, too.
Good Friday for Christians is not to be some mournful time in which we try to put ourselves into the mood of the disciples between Good Friday and Easter, who didn’t know what had happened. We know what happened. We know that what Jesus Christ was doing on the cross was winning a victory. Thus, Good Friday as well as Easter is a victory celebration for us.
How is that? Why can Good Friday also be a victory celebration? Our text explains it, for when these verses talk about the victory of sin and the sting of death, it explains in verse 56 that the sting of death is sin and the power of sin is the law. That’s what makes death so bad. Death is linked to sin. Death is the penalty for sin, and the strength of sin is the law of God, which we have broken. You see, if it weren’t for those things, there wouldn’t be anything to fear about death at all. But the reason we do fear death is that we sense, rightly, that through that portal, we come to face divine retribution for our many sins. That’s the problem that Jesus dealt with. He died on the cross for our sin. And when He died on the cross for the sin of His people, taking their punishment upon Himself, He broke all of that forever and He achieved a great victory. It absolutely transforms death for those who believe on Him and are His followers.
If the cross is a victory as well as the resurrection, we can ask how those two are linked. They are linked in this way: the resurrection is the evidence that the sacrifice that Jesus made upon the cross was accepted by His Father. If Jesus had only died and had not risen from the dead, how would any of us ever know that the atonement that He claimed to have made by His death was acceptable?
It had to be a perfect sacrifice. Jesus seemed to be a good man, but we can’t see the heart. Only God can see that. We would say, well, maybe He did sin. If He did sin, then when He died, He had to die for His own sin and not for our sin. We’d never know that we had a perfect and all-sufficient sacrifice. But when God raised His Son from the dead and gave Him a victory even over death, we look to His resurrection and we say, yes, that’s God’s seal upon the atonement. That’s the proof that Good Friday worked. It tells us that Jesus is our Savior, and God is satisfied with His death on our behalf.