2. Ye are saved, if ye hold fast - Your salvation is begun, and will be perfected, if ye continue in the faith. Unless ye have believed in vain - Unless indeed your faith was only a delusion.
3. I received - From Christ himself. It was not a fiction of my own. Isaiah liii, 8, 9.
4. According to the scriptures - He proves it first from scripture, then from the testimony of a cloud of witnesses. Psalm xvi, 10.
5. By the twelve - This was their standing appellation; but their full number was not then present.
6. Above five hundred - Probably in Galilee. A glorious and incontestable proof! The greater part remain - Alive.
7. Then by all the apostles - The twelve were mentioned ver. 5. This title here, therefore, seems to include the seventy; if not all those, likewise, whom God afterwards sent to plant the gospel in heathen nations.
8. An untimely birth - It was impossible to abase himself more than he does by this single appellation. As an abortion is not worthy the name of a man, so he affirms himself to be not worthy the name of an apostle.
9. I persecuted the church - True believers are humbled all their lives, even for the sins they committed before they believed.
10. I laboured more than they all - That is, more than any of them, from a deep sense of the peculiar love God had shown me. Yet, to speak more properly, it is not I, but the grace of God that is with me - This it is which at first qualified me for the work, and still excites me to zeal and diligence in it.
11. Whether I or they, so we preach - All of us speak the same thing.
12. How say some - Who probably had been heathen philosophers.
13. If there be no resurrection - If it be a thing flatly impossible.
14. Then is our preaching - From a commission supposed to be given after the resurrection. Vain - Without any real foundation.
15. If the dead rise not - If the very notion of a resurrection be, as they say, absurd and impossible.
17. Ye are still in your sins - That is, under the guilt of them. So that there needed something more than reformation, (which was plainly wrought,) in order to their being delivered from the guilt of sin even that atonement, the sufficiency of which God attested by raising our great Surety from the grave.
18. They who sleep in Christ - Who have died for him, or believing in him. Are perished - Have lost their life and being together.
19. If in this life only we have hope - If we look for nothing beyond the grave. But if we have a divine evidence of things not seen, if we have “a hope full of immortality,” if we now taste of “the powers of the world to come,” and see “the crown that fadeth not away,” then, notwithstanding” all our present trials, we are more happy than all men.
20. But now - St. Paul declares that Christians “have hope,” not “in this life only.” His proof of the resurrection lies in a narrow compass, ver. 12-19. Almost all the rest of the chapter is taken up in illustrating, vindicating, and applying it. The proof is short, but solid and convincing, that which arose from Christ’s resurrection. Now this not only proved a resurrection possible, but, as it proved him to be a divine teacher, proved the certainty of a general resurrection, which he so expressly taught. The first fruit of them that slept - The earnest, pledge, and insurance of their resurrection who slept in him: even of all the righteous. It is of the resurrection of these, and these only, that the apostle speaks throughout the chapter.
22. As through Adam all, even the righteous, die, so through Christ all these shall be made alive - He does not say, “shall revive,” (as naturally as they die,) but shall be made alive, by a power not their own.
23. Afterward - The whole harvest. At the same time the wicked shall rise also. But they are not here taken into the account.
24. Then - After the resurrection and the general judgment. Cometh the end - Of the world; the grand period of all those wonderful scenes that have appeared for so many succeeding generations. When he shall have delivered up the kingdom to the Father, and he (the Father) shall have abolished all adverse rule, authority, and power - Not that the Father will then begin to reign without the Son, nor will the Son then cease to reign. For the divine reign both of the Father and Son is from everlasting to everlasting. But this is spoken of the Son’s mediatorial kingdom, which will then be delivered up, and of the immediate kingdom or reign of the Father, which will then commence. Till then the Son transacts the business which the Father hath given him, for those who are his, and by them as well as by the angels, with the Father, and against their enemies. So far as the Father gave the kingdom to the Son, the Son shall deliver it up to the Father, John xiii, 3. Nor does the Father cease to reign, when he gives it to the Son; neither the Son, when he delivers it to the Father: but the glory which he had before the world began, John xvii, 5; Heb. i, 8, will remain even after this is delivered up. Nor will he cease to be a king even in his human nature, Luke i, 33. If the citizens of the new Jerusalem” shall reign for ever,” Rev. xxii, 5, how much more shall he?