Biblion Bible Commentary
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Why Then Do We Stand in Jeopardy?
1 Corinthians 15:29-34
29 Or else what will they do who are baptized for the dead? If the dead aren’t raised at all, why then are they baptized for the dead? · WEB
Three arguments from practice — a rite Paul does not explain, his own daily risk, and the conclusion the deniers should draw if they are right.
Or else what will they do who are baptized for the dead? If the dead aren't raised at all, why then are they baptized for the dead? 1 Corinthians 15:29.
One of the obscurest verses in Scripture, and the honest course is to say what it does and does not give. Paul mentions a practice, does not describe it, does not commend it, does not say who they are — he uses the third person, not you or we — and never returns to it. No other passage in Scripture refers to it. What the argument requires is only that somebody was doing something that made no sense unless the dead rise. Everything beyond that is reconstruction, and where Scripture names a thing once and explains it nowhere, the honest course is to stop.
Why do we also stand in jeopardy every hour? I affirm, by the boasting in you which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die daily 1 Corinthians 15:30–31.
The second argument is his own life, and it is evidence of a different kind. A man who is beaten, hungry, homeless and in danger every hour 1 Corinthians 4:11 2 Corinthians 11:23–27 is behaving irrationally unless something follows death. I die daily is not a devotional phrase here but a description of exposure.
If I fought with animals at Ephesus for human purposes, what does it profit me? 1 Corinthians 15:32.
Whatever the episode at Ephesus was — the phrase may be literal or a figure for the ferocity he met there Acts 19:23–31 2 Corinthians 1:8–9 — the question is the same: what does it profit me? Strip out the resurrection and his conduct becomes inexplicable.
If the dead are not raised, then "let's eat and drink, for tomorrow we die."
And the conclusion the deniers ought to draw, quoted from Isaiah, where it is the motto of a city under sentence that has stopped caring Isaiah 22:13. Paul does not call it foolish; he calls it consistent. If death ends everything, the appetite has no rival claim — which is precisely the reasoning behind the Corinthian slogans about food and the body in chapter six 1 Corinthians 6:12–13. The denial of the resurrection and the loose living in this church were not two problems but one.
Don't be deceived! "Evil companionships corrupt good morals" 1 Corinthians 15:33.
A proverb, apparently from a Greek playwright, quoted because it was current — the same willingness to use a familiar saying appears in the address at Athens Acts 17:28. Its point here is causal: bad company had brought this doctrine in, and doctrine of this kind produces the conduct the whole letter has been correcting.
Wake up righteously and don't sin, for some have no knowledge of God. I say this to your shame 1 Corinthians 15:34.
The rebuke is aimed at a church that prided itself on knowledge 1 Corinthians 8:1: some have no knowledge of God. And it is put to your shame — the same instrument used over the lawsuits 1 Corinthians 6:5, and used sparingly.
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