Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 360 · December 26
If This Life Only
“If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.”
Even if none of it turns out to be true, the argument runs, look what it does for people: steadier families, kinder neighbours, something to say at a graveside. Faith earns its keep either way. That defence gets offered to Christians constantly, usually kindly, and it has one obvious merit. It cannot be disproved.
Paul is handed that defence and will not take it. He runs the consequences out instead, and the list is brutal. If there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: and if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Then worse: Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God. He would be a man who told lies about God in public. Your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished, which takes the graveside comfort away entirely. Then the verse. And a few lines on he says what he would do with his own life on those terms, in a line as old as Isaiah: let us eat and drink; for to morrow we die.
What is stated here is a faith that can be checked and is worthless if it fails. The kindness, the steadier family, the thing said at the graveside, all of that runs downstream of one claim about one man on one morning, and Paul refuses to let it be sold separately. The alternative he has just laid out is left standing, unsoftened, and then answered with a fact: But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 360 is He Will Not Fail You (1 Chronicles 28:20).