1 Corinthians 15:36 - Homiletics

Man: his birth, death, and resurrection.

"Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die." I shall take the verso as suggesting three great facts in man's existence.

I. MAN 'S BIRTH . The text suggests—I do not say it was intended to teach—that man's birth is a sowing of his existence in the earth. The sowing of the grain of which the apostle speaks is not, I think, so analogous to the burial of his body as to the birth of his existence. The sowing of the grain takes place before its death. It dies after it is sown. But in the burial of the body the man has previously died. Birth, and not burial, then, must be considered as sown. Man, at birth, is sown into the earth like seed, in two respects.

1. He has a self-formative power. The germs of all other life run into forms by the necessity of their nature. The grain has no power of determining what shape it shall take in its growth; man has. Man has the power of determining whether he shall grow into a beast, a fiend, or an angel.

2. He has boundless possibilities. All other germinant existences on earth exhaust themselves in their growth. The time comes when they reach their culmination and decay sets in. Not so with man. He is a seed that shall grow forever. At birth, then, we are sown into this world—immortal seeds we all are which the hand of the great Husbandman scatters over the earth.

II. MAN 'S DEATH . His death is here represented as a reduction of the body to earth, not the reduction of himself. "That which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die." In the grain it is not the germ, but the husk, the shell, which dies. The wrappage of the germ was made to rot. Nothing was necessary to the development of the life which it contained. The human body is the mere shell and wrappage of the man. It was made to die. Death is an essential element in the constitution of the world. It is in all material existences. It has been said that one-seventh of our earth's crust is comprised of limestone, and limestone contains the sepulchres of departed existences. We feed on death, and by our own death become food for future existences. The husk is not the germ, the body is not the man. It is his house that must crumble, it is his garment that must wear out.

III. MAN 'S RESURRECTION . What is his resurrection? A springing up of his being from the earth. After the death of the grain there is a resurrection of the seed that comes forth into new forms of life and beauty. It is not the husk that rises, but the germ. After the burial of the body the man comes forth into new life. The body rots, the man rises. Whether Paul refers here to the resurrection of the body from the grave or not, one thing is clear, that at death there is a real resurrection of the soul. As when the husks of the seed rot in the earth the seed itself is quickened, so when the body falls into the dust the soul springs forth into new life—a life of woe or bliss, according to its moral character. There is a resurrection, a standing up of every soul at death. "The dust returns to dust., the soul to God who gave it." Will the body itself rise from the grave after it has gone to dust? It may, and we see some evidence to enable us to cherish the cheering hope. Whether this be a delusion or not, one thing is certain—the soul rises up at the fall of the body to its dust, and this is a most real and solemn resurrection. We "know that when the earthly house of this our tabernacle is dissolved, we have a building of God above, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens."