The Resurrection—Foundation of the Christian Faith - All The LORD is near Daily Devotionals for 2025

If Christ is not raised, then, indeed, vain also is our preaching, and vain also your faith.
1 Corinthians 15:14

The Resurrection—Foundation of the Christian Faith
Many, in looking at the Church's hope in Christ, have seen the importance of the doctrine of the resurrection. But the more we search the Scriptures, the more we perceive, in this doctrine, the fundamental truth of the gospel—that truth which gives to redemption its character, and to all other truths their real power. For instance, who does not know that Christianity has its root and its foundation in that solemn and all-important event, the death of our blessed Savior? But if it had been possible that death could have held the Savior in its power, death, instead of being the foundation of joy and the certainty of salvation, would have been the source of a black despair which nothing could have dissipated.

It is the resurrection which throws its bright beams even into the dark tomb of Christ, the tomb of the only righteous One, and the trophy of the apparent victory of the prince of this world. It is the resurrection which explains the reason of that momentary submission to the power of the devil, and subjection to the necessary judgment of God. We see also how this truth characterizes the preaching of the apostles (Acts 4:2).

Paul says, "If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins" (1 Cor. 15:17); and the whole chapter shows us the importance of the resurrection of believers as well as that of Christ Himself—two truths indissolubly united and developed in the New Testament. It is the resurrection, and it is by the glory which shall follow the resurrection itself, that the foundation and the hopes of the Christian faith are bound together. And it is by this same doctrine that justification and sanctification—that which is the power of the Christian life—are necessarily united.

J. N. Darby