24Then comes the end, when He delivers the kingdom to God the Father, when He puts an end to all rule and all authority and power.
These verses are not a clear and concise description of the end of the age.
We gain extra insight into the last days by reading Rev. 19:11-16, Rev. 20, and Rev. 21:1-4
When Paul writes of the sequence of events of the end of the age, he begins from the time when Jesus will have completed his work, subdued his enemies, cast the devil and death and Hades into the lake of fire and then delivered the kingdom back to the Father.
25For He must reign till He has put all enemies under His feet.
That is all couched in the future tense, Jesus shall reign, but the Biblical truth is he does reign, and he shall continue to reign until his enemies are made his footstool.
I do not know anything that has more power to steady us in times of pressure, and undergird us in times of discouragement, defeat, and oppression than the realization that Jesus now reigns.
He is in control now .
Matthew 28:18 18 And Jesus came and spoke to them, saying, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth.
Jesus reigns and rules right now, though their still exists evil in the world.
The Lord allows evil kingdoms to exist, for the purpose of accomplishing His will.
In the Old Testament, God raised up the Babylonians and the Assyrians and brought them against Israel.
He allowed Jerusalem to be taken; he allowed the Israelites to be taken into captivity, not because that was the way he wanted things to happen on earth, but because that was necessary to teach his people the lessons they needed to know.
God brings these things to pass for our sake, and it is part of the authority of Christ that allows them to happen.
That is a very important truth that we often forget.
26The last enemy that will be destroyed is death.
Universally, death is never going to disappear from this earth until we come to that moment, described in the book of Revelation, when a new heaven and a new earth come into existence.
In this present heaven and earth death reigns and will continue to do so even during the millennium, even during the time when Christ personally rules on earth, as I believe he will, and peace and righteousness prevail all over the earth.
Nevertheless, death is present.
The prophet Isaiah says, “the child shall die a hundred years old,”
{Isa 65:20 RSV}.
He means that death will be an unusual experience during the millennium, when someone one hundred years old will still be a mere child as far as the possibilities of his life are concerned — he could go on and live the entire thousand years.
But death is still present, and it is not until the end, when our Lord subdues his enemies, that death is finally destroyed and cast into the lake of fire.
Therefore, the last enemy to be destroyed is death.
Morally and spiritually speaking, we experience a kind of life coming from death all throughout our Christian life.
We struggle with sin, we sometimes give in quickly, other times we fight against sin.
In a sense we die often when we sin against God, but we receive forgiveness, cleansing, and renewal when we confess our sins and repent.
1 John 1:6-10 6 If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. 7 But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin. 8 If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. 9 If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 10 If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us.
As the Christians walks with Jesus, there is a continual pointing to the time when death and sin are forever undone.
There is coming a time when this body will die, and death then is destroyed for us. “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”
Once we pass through the experience of death into resurrection, like our Lord himself, we shall never die again; that is the wonderful statement.
Christ having once died, Paul says in Romans, never dies again, and we share his existence. He is the first fruits of the great harvest of which we are a part.
27For “He has put all things under His feet.” But when He says “all things are put under Him,” it is evident that He who put all things under Him is excepted.
28Now when all things are made subject to Him, then the Son Himself will also be subject to Him who put all things under Him, that God may be all in all.
Here is the description of the end of Christ’s work as a mediator between God and man.
Paul reminds us that the Son will not someday be superior to the Father; the relationship of Father to Son will be eternal
Jesus’ submission to the Father doesn’t come from any inherent inferiority; rather from the administrative order of the Godhead
“The son of a king may be the equal of his father in every attribute of his nature, though officially inferior. So the eternal Son of God may be coequal with the Father, though officially subordinate.” (Hodge)
During this present time, our Lord Jesus is singled out, as it were, from the persons of the Godhead as the supreme object of worship, and we are invited to worship him and give honor to him.
Paul tells us in Philippians 2 that, because of our Lord’s faithfulness,
God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow … and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. {cf, Phil 2:9-11 RSV}
So to worship Christ honors God. In that great scene in Revelation 5, the whole universe gathers about the throne worshipping the Lamb that was slain, crying, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honor, and glory, and blessing,” {Rev 5:12 KJV}. Everyone is invited to worship the Son.
But there is coming a time, Paul says, when the work of the Son in subduing a lost creation will be finished.
When the full results of the atonement of the cross have been completed and all the harvest of the earth is gathered, then, according to this account, the Lord Jesus returns the kingdom to the Father in order that “God [the three-fold God, Father, Son. and Spirit] may be everything to every one.”
Though Jesus has not yet subdued creation, He is still in control of creation.
Many Christians forget this.
Many unbelievers do not know this at all.
Matthew 6:25-34 25 “Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 27 Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature? 28 “So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; 29 and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 30 Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? 31 “Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 33 But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you. 34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble .
The mark of maturity, the mark that indicates that man has come into his own, has fulfilled his purpose, is the time when he understands with all his heart and mind and soul that God is everything to every one.
After that the mediation of our Lord is no longer required.
God the Triune God is everything to every one.
29Otherwise, what will they do who are baptized for the dead, if the dead do not rise at all? Why then are they baptized for the dead?
Either Paul is referring to a pagan custom (notice he uses they, not “we”), or to a superstitious and unscriptural practice in the Corinthian church of vicarious baptism for believers who died before being baptized
Either way, he certainly does not approve of the practice; he merely says that if there is no resurrection, why would the custom take place?
The Mormon practice of baptism for the dead is neither scriptural or sensible
The Mormon church bases a major part of their religious activity on this one verse. Unless you are a “good” Mormon you are not permitted to enter one of their temples. People ask, what goes on in them? Well, one of the things is that they are being baptized on behalf of the dead. The Mormons believe that you can go back through history and be baptized for all your ancestors. That is why they put great reliance upon genealogical tables and spend a lot of time tracing their ancestry, because they believe they can be baptized on their behalf and thus save them.
Well, what does this verse mean? I do not know. It evidently refers to some form of proxy baptism, but it is noteworthy that the apostle does not refer to it as though it was something that the Christians in Corinth practiced, because he puts it in the third person: “Otherwise what do ‘people’ mean” (not what do “we” mean by being baptized on behalf of the dead), but what do “they” mean, that is literally what he says. “If the dead are not raised at all, why are ‘they’ baptized on their behalf?” He returns to the first person in the next verse, so that it is clear it is some practice that some people were engaged in that he does not necessarily approve of or disapprove of. He simply refers to it as a practice. It would be a shame to miss the significance of the point he is making because we do not understand what that practice he refers to was.
The point is this: Something was motivating people to take this action; something had a powerful effect upon them, and they so strongly were moved by it that they actually went out of their way to be baptized on behalf of someone who had died. Now perhaps it was a case where some people had died without being able to be baptized; they had become Christians by faith, but they had not had an opportunity to be baptized before they died. So some were adopting the practice of being baptized on their behalf, out of a kind of superstitious idea that you could not enter heaven unless you were baptized.
Whatever it was, the apostle is arguing that the belief in a resurrection has a profound motivating force upon our lives, and it will make us do things to help others.
Now he is not arguing that this is proof of the resurrection, because many people believe in things that do not really exist and their belief does not prove that such things exist.
What he is saying is that believing in the resurrection has a great effect upon you. It will change your life.
It will make you do things that you would not otherwise do, and one of the things is that you will be concerned about the salvation of others.
30And why do we stand in jeopardy every hour?
31I affirm, by the boasting in you which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die daily.
2 Corinthians 1:8,9
32If, in the manner of men, I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantage is it to me? If the dead do not rise, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die!”
That is the point. To believe that God raises the dead is a tremendous encouragement to endure suffering and even physical affliction now.
The fact that the apostle understood this enabled him to bear up in a time of great physical pressure, when, as he put it, I think figuratively, he “fought with beasts at Ephesus.”
It was almost like going into the arena to fight wild beasts.
I do not think he actually did that, because he was a Roman citizen and no Roman citizen could be compelled to fight in the arena with wild beasts or gladiators.
But, in a figurative way, this is what he went through, and he says the hope of the resurrection strengthened him.
Are you, perhaps, wearing out your life in some obscure corner?
Do you think you will never be heard of, that nobody will ever know the punishment you have had to take?
Well, have no fear. Paul says this “light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory,” {2 Cor 4:17 KJV}.
The resurrection is the ample recompense for all human suffering, no matter how bad it maybe.
If the dead do not rise, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die!”
That was the philosophy of Epicureanism in that day, and it is widespread today. “Live it up. Get it all now. Don’t bother with giving yourself and wasting your time on doing things for God. Enjoy yourself. Spend all your free time having fun and pleasure.” But, he says:
If there is no resurrection, then there is no future judgment to consider–life is only “under the sun,” as is considered in Ecclesiastes
33Do not be deceived: “Evil company corrupts good habits.”
34Awake to righteousness, and do not sin; for some do not have the knowledge of God. I speak this to your shame.
Many Christians there were giving way to this “live it up” philosophy.
Instead of making themselves available to spread the word of truth, instead of giving themselves to the Spirit of God to be used in ways that would plant the seed of righteousness and love and truth in areas where people were hurting and suffering, they were giving way to the idea, “Enjoy yourself; that is what life is for.”
And they were running with people who thought that way.
Paul reminds them, quoting a proverb of that day. “Bad company ruins good morals.”
So he says, “Come to your right mind; begin to face life realistically; stop kidding yourselves.
This is a battle, and we have the privilege of living in this time of history and affecting the world of our day. The time is rapidly passing.
Make the proper use of it,” he says, “for some are even professing to be Christians and have no real knowledge of God at all because they are living just like everyone around them.”
So the apostle closes this section with this note:
We are not the creatures of time. We are immortal beings.
When we gather at the throne of God, the greatest privilege we will claim for ourselves is that we had the opportunity to labor for his namesake here in this life.
Make the most of it, Paul says.