Read part 1 ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒.
But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. / For since through man came death, through man also came the resurrection of the dead. / For just as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive. / But each one in his own order: the firstfruits, Christ; then those who are Christ’s at His coming… (1 Cor. 15:20-23)
1 Corinthians 15 shows us Paul’s understanding of the resurrection life: while he was facing those who denied the resurrection — a generation of religious people and worldly philosophers alike — Paul insisted that we be recovered back to the essential experience of the Bible, and that we enter into the reality of the resurrection, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep: Christ. Without this experience, our faith is futile (v. 17). As true believers, the life we are living is a regenerated life that has been processed through the cross into new creation! Through the experience of the cross, we believers are joined to Christ, our Firstborn and Firstfruits.
But this is not only a personal experience of salvation; it is an experience of the Body of Christ — today, the church life. The church was born in this nature, with vitality, strength and a regenerated sense of life. This vitality, strength, and life is in every believer who has been born anew and regenerated into this resurrection life, solidifying the confidence — the faith — that upholds every believer and attracts, multiplies, and propagates. Joined to Christ in His death and resurrection, the life of a believer is a life of propagation. Just as Christ as the first grain of wheat brought forth the many through His death and resurrection (John 12:24), His life within regenerated believers is for fruit bearing in the new creation.
Anything that is of life spontaneously puts forth fruit, and in the church, when we exercise this very life that has been born in us, there is a tangible vitality and strength for fruit bearing. We see this life of propagation lived out through our dear brother Paul. While Paul was in Rome, he had a vital church life in oneness with Priscilla and Aquila as well as Epaenetus, whom Paul describes as his firstfruits of Asia unto Christ (Rom. 16:5). In his first epistle to the Corinthians, Paul also calls the household of Stephanas the firstfruits of Achaia (1 Cor. 16:15). Why did Paul specifically use the term “firstfruits” and what does that mean to us today? The firstfruits have everything to do with the Body of Christ. Paul never treated the Body of Christ as an organization or a community; he understood it and experienced it as a living body — as something to be nurtured, something that can bear fruit.
Through his experience of the vital church life in resurrection, Paul indeed bore fruit; in the Bible, one outstanding example is Timothy, who was Paul’s genuine child of faith (1 Tim. 1:2). Timothy was the continuation and fruit of life from Paul’s gospel; he was an organic fruit of this outlived resurrection life. In life, Paul and Timothy were organically and deeply linked. In his epistles to Timothy, Paul urged him as a father to progress, to be manifested, to charge and teach others — to exercise godliness, to teach God’s economy, to aspire to the overseership, and to serve the church of the living God (1 Tim. 1:4; 3:1, 15). From these, we see that Paul took Timothy as his genuine child, wanting him to grow, to mature, and to be useful, cultivating his sense of life organically in the practical church life. As a result, Timothy was this true, organic fruit and continuation of Paul’s labor, someone who was joined in soul as a fellow worker in the New Testament ministry.
Paul’s fruitfulness was the organic result of his daily pursuit of the out-resurrection (Phil. 3:11). A believer, being joined to Christ Himself organically through this process, comes to full maturity, function, and reality through the resurrection, which is to know Christ Himself, to gain Him, and to be found in Him — especially in the aspect of His death and resurrection. In the proper church life, we have ears to hear, eyes to see, and mouths to speak; these are not just physical ears, physical eyes, or physical mouths, but spiritual ones, for in the Body life of resurrection, our senses also are resurrected. This is how the members of the Body, being one with this living being, grow spontaneously, are developed in the matters of life, and become mature in the new creation from the resurrection of Christ. This sense of life makes us “full-grown”; it enables us to be real, substantial and productive (Phil. 3:15). Paul could be substantiated by the out-resurrection life. The overflow of the resurrection life — the out-resurrection — generates in us this offshoot of life, an organic flow that quickens the growth of the Body, that constrains and informs our serving one another. This out-resurrection is a life that bears fruits — that grows out and develops into a vital and organic church life.
Through Christ, we — the vital, genuine believers — are the ones who have experienced Christ’s death and resurrection to become one with Him. Christ’s resurrection is the way for believers to enter into the promise — through this man, Jesus Christ, came the solution. He is the last Adam who has brought to us the resurrection power from the dead. Through this One, the Firstfruit of all, we are saved from a destiny of death to a destiny of eternal life. In this way, we are the fruits of this resurrection life! We are His enlargement, His many fruits as His Body, the church.
Paul not only encourages us to be conformed to His death but also tells us that, eventually, our destination is to be transfigured and conformed to the “body of His glory” (Phil. 3:21). This indeed is our pursuit and goal. Christ’s death on the cross afforded the way of many fruits to follow — and we are along that genealogy in pursuit of the resurrection life, to die to the old and be born into the new as part of the Body of Christ. This very specific Body cannot have any element that is old — that hasn’t gone through the process of death and resurrection; the Body is nothing else but new creation — the firstfruits — born anew into the eternal life. The physical things will pass away, but in the church life we are only concerned with those things that will remain (Matt. 6:19-20). This is why the resurrection is the essential, core experience of the believer. Where worldly people only have “today,” genuine seekers have a higher living through the new creation. In the church life today, whenever we touch the saints, it has to be from this very sense of life in the new creation. Whenever and wherever we serve, we need to serve the new creation, and to exercise the faculty — the function — of life. Only this exercise of the organic function of life can bear eternal fruits — fruits in the new creation.
(Above is part 2 of a series compiled from notes of fellowship taken from a gathering 3/21/2021, not reviewed by the speaker.)