The First Fruits of HOPE
Rev. Res Spears
Road to the Cross • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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Some of y’all know my friend Ryan Williams, who owns and manages Faith Farms here in Suffolk.
I had known Ryan the farmer from my time at the Suffolk News-Herald, but our friendship really grew after we spent a week together in Haiti during my six-month service there in 2018.
We were there supporting Supply and Multiply’s ministry to the elderly in the little coastal town of Montrouis.
But Ryan never likes to sit still and hadn’t allowed himself to be confined either to our ministry housing or service sites in previous visits. And he’d made friends with an English-speaking Haitian man who ran an orphanage and agricultural program nearby.
So, whenever there was a break in Supply and Multiply’s work, Ryan would head over to the other compound, where his friend had built a little dormitory and a tiny school and had filled every other available space with banana trees and mangoes and lots of other fruit and vegetable plants he was experimenting with.
The man had a plot of land in the mountains, and he hoped eventually to grow enough produce there to make the orphanage/school self supporting.
It was interesting to listen to these two farmers from two different climates compare growing notes. Ryan had brought seeds and tools from America, and there was a lot of discussion about climate zones and growth periods and the like.
It turned out the Haitian guy was self-taught as a farmer, and Ryan had become his latest resource. It was amazing to watch him absorb this Suffolk farmer’s knowledge and wisdom.
And as I was listening to them one day, I heard Ryan talking to his Haitian friend about the doctrine of firstfruits.
I was pleasantly surprised to hear him teaching his young protégé such an important biblical concept.
The doctrine of firstfruits is that Christians should plan to give to God FIRST, rather than taking care of their other needs and wants and then giving God what’s left over.
The idea is that every good thing we have comes from God, and it all belongs to Him anyway as our creator and king. And so, we should honor Him in faith that He who provided the first fruits of our labors will continue to provide through the harvest.
And the doctrine comes straight out of the Old Testament. In Leviticus, chapter 23, God tells the people of Israel that a firstfruit offering should take place each year on the Sunday following the start of the seven-day Feast of Unleavened Bread, which itself started each year on the day after Passover.
Now, in the year that Jesus was crucified, Passover fell on a Friday — Good Friday, as we Christians call it.
We’ve talked the past several Sundays about the significance of various events in Passion Week. Many of the things the Gospel writers record Jesus doing during that week were done so He could reveal something important about Himself.
Some of you will recall He revealed Himself as Israel’s true king; as the prophet greater than Moses; as the just judge and righteous priest; and as the Son of the Living God, who was perfectly submitted to His Father’s will.
But there is a particular thread of revelation that hinges on the dates when things took place that week.
On the 10th of the Hebrew month of Nisan, the Jews chose unblemished lambs and brought them into the city and their homes to prepare them for the Passover sacrifice. That’s the same day Jesus entered Jerusalem and the temple.
A couple of days later, back in the temple, He was examined by the Jewish religious leaders — the same ones who would examine those lambs for blemishes — and they could find no fault in Him.
And yet, they wanted Jesus dead because of His claim to be the Son of God, but even more because He had taught strongly against their theology of self-righteousness.
He had taught that none of us is righteous, that we all are spiritually bankrupt and that we all are desperate for God’s grace and unfit for His kingdom without it.
And the Pharisees hated this teaching, because it meant God didn’t owe them anything for all their showy self-righteousness. They were just as lost as the prostitutes and tax collectors and the other outcasts of society they looked down upon with such arrogance.
What Jesus taught was that the only way to God was through faith in HIM. And that kind of faith requires a humility that was in short supply among the Jewish religious leaders of the time.
And so, they plotted to silence Jesus by killing Him, and their plot was completed that Friday, on the 14th of the Jewish month of Nisan.
By long tradition that stemmed from God’s commands, the Passover lambs were slain at 3 p.m. that day. And, significantly, that’s the hour that Matthew tells us Jesus died as He hung on the cross.
He had presented Himself as Israel’s Passover lamb — the sinless Lamb chosen by God to be slain so that all who are covered in His blood — in other words, all whose sins are washed clean by faith in Him — will be passed over when God exercises His just judgment and mighty wrath over sin.
He had been examined by the religious leaders and found to be without fault — in other words, they found no reason He couldn’t qualify to give Himself as this sacrifice.
And so, Jesus went to the cross. There, He who knew no sin took upon Himself the sins of all mankind — and their just punishment — so that we who follow Him in faith can have eternal life — life everlasting, the way it was always meant to be, in the presence of and in fellowship with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The innocent died for the guilty. HE took upon Himself the punishment that every one of us deserves for our sins, for all the many ways we rebel against the righteous and holy God who created us to be like Him. He died so that we could be forgiven.
And THAT’S the message of Good Friday. That’s the message of God Himself talking on human flesh in the person of His Son, who lived a life of perfect obedience to His Father so He could give Himself to atone for our sins.
God’s perfect righteousness was satisfied in the sinless life of His Son. And God’s perfect justice was satisfied in the sacrificial death His Son made for us and on our behalf.
But the truth is that if the cross were the end of the story for Jesus, then we wouldn’t have the New Testament.
There would be no memory of Jesus except from a few historical accounts. And He’d be remembered simply as a great teacher who did some marvelous things that are hard to explain.
But the story DOESN’T end at the cross, praise God. The story doesn’t end on Friday. Sunday was still coming.
His tomb would be found empty, and on the 15th of Nisan — the day when the people of Israel made their firstfruit offerings to God — He would reveal Himself as the firstfruits of the resurrection.
Friday’s sacrifice was important. Without it, none of us could be forgiven for our sins, because there would be no way for God’s justice to be satisfied.
But without the hope of Sunday’s resurrection, forgiveness would be cold comfort for we who could look forward only to death.
This is why the resurrection event is the single most important doctrine of Christianity. Because it gives us hope.
It gives us the confident assurance that we who follow Jesus in faith will be raised to eternal life, just as He promised. It gives us hope that our faith in Jesus brings us new LIFE.
The Apostle Paul talks about all this in a passage from 1 Corinthians, where he also mentions this idea of first fruits.
I want to spend the rest of our time this morning looking at a portion of this passage, beginning in verse 20. If you’d like to follow along, you can turn there now.
To give you some context, Paul has spent the first part of this chapter giving the people of the church in Corinth some of the evidence of the crucifixion and resurrection.
Now, you should understand that the crucifixion is attested by both Christians and non-Christians who were alive at the time. There is almost no significant debate among contemporary historians that this man named Jesus was executed on a Roman cross.
On the other hand, we often take Jesus' resurrection as an article of faith. But the Bible presents it as a simple statement of fact.
The faith to which the Bible calls us as followers of Christ is faith in His promise to raise US the way that He was raised. In fact, in light of the compelling evidence of Jesus' resurrection, faith in that event might even be said to be unnecessary.
If your car is in working order, for instance, and you've turned the key, and you hear the engine running, and the lights are on, you don't need faith to tell you that it's on.
You simply conclude, based on all the evidence, that it's on and ready to go. Your faith in that situation is in the proposition that if you then put it into gear, your car will GO.
I don’t have time this morning to go into all the evidence of the resurrection, but it IS compelling.
It’s so compelling that Paul, who had been one of the most vehement persecutors of the early church, became one of the greatest evangelists for the gospel. And his conversion is ITSELF one of the great pieces of evidence for the resurrection.
And so, as we pick up in verse 20 of the 15th chapter of 1 Corinthians, we’ll see Paul pivot from presenting evidence of the resurrection to describing its significance to us.
20 But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who are asleep.
21 For since by a man came death, by a man also came the resurrection of the dead.
22 For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive.
This is a passage I often use at funerals. And the reason I do so is because I want to remind folks who have lost a believing loved one that they have reason for hope.
Jesus is the first fruits of those who are asleep, the first fruits of the dead. God raised His Son from the dead because He loved Him.
But He also raised Jesus in order to show that His Son’s sacrificial death on the cross was acceptable as the payment for mankind’s sins.
He raised Jesus to show us that, for we who follow Him in faith, our sin debt has been wiped clean, and we can trust in His promise of eternal life for all who believe.
The first fruit offering of Old Testament times signified trust that the God who had provided the first fruits would also provide the later harvest.
Similarly Jesus’ position as the first fruits of the resurrection gives us reason to trust that we who place our faith in Him will be harvested as those who are made alive in Him.
Through the sin of Adam in the Garden of Eden, death entered the world. But through the resurrection of Jesus, there is the promise of life.
But this isn’t to be seen as a claim for universal salvation. Not all will be made alive this way.
As Paul puts it in verse 22, “in Christ all will be made alive.” In other words, all who are IN CHRIST will be raised to eternal life.
And that phrase, “in Christ,” is Paul’s way of saying, those who have repented from their sins and placed their trust in Jesus for salvation.
It’s important to note here that there is ALSO a resurrection coming for unbelievers. We all were made for eternity.
Our souls are eternal, and the Bible tells us that believers and unbelievers, alike, will be eventually raised from the dead and reunited with their physical bodies.
But the resurrection of unbelievers will differ from that of believers in one important regard: By putting their faith in Jesus, believers trust in His sacrificial death at the cross as their only means of being reconciled to God, and God accepts His Son’s sacrifice as full payment for the debt created by our sins.
But for unbelievers — for those who reject the offer of forgiveness by rejecting the Son who paid for that forgiveness with His own life — THEIR resurrection will be to judgment.
They will have to pay the cost for their sins. Having chosen to stand before a perfectly righteous and holy God in their own self-righteousness, they will find themselves totally unworthy. And having rejected the cross as satisfaction of God’s perfect justice, they will experience His justice themselves.
The resurrection for unbelievers will be to judgment and eternal suffering in hell, a place without God. A place without His love and His grace and His mercy and His light. A place of utter, complete, and eternal hopelessness.
Without the cross, this would be the fate for all of us.
But God loves us, and so He sent Jesus to live a sinless life as a man. To give Himself as a sacrifice in our place and on our behalf. To take upon Himself the sins of all of us and their just punishment, so that all who follow Him in faith could be forgiven.
And then, to be raised on the third day as the first fruits, so that all who believe in Him can know they’ll be raised like He was — to LIFE everlasting.
But there is an order to how all this will take place. Look at verse 23.
23 But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, after that those who are Christ’s at His coming,
24 then comes the end, when He hands over the kingdom to the God and Father, when He has abolished all rule and all authority and power.
25 For He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet.
26 The last enemy that will be abolished is death.
Raised from the dead at the Feast of First Fruits, Jesus is now the first fruits of the resurrection. He is the offering to God in faith that God will provide a great harvest of believers.
And there’s a sense, too, in which He is God’s offering to us — a reminder that God is good and that He keeps His promises, including the promise to believers of resurrection to LIFE.
So, Jesus was raised first. And when He returns in the clouds, coming with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet of God, the dead in Christ will also be raised, just as Jesus was.
He will have brought with Him the souls of all who have followed Him in faith from all times and all places.
And when that trumpet sounds, whatever is left of their bodies will be raised, and they’ll be transformed into bodies no longer subject to decay or to the enticement of sin. And they will join their souls in the air and return with Jesus to heaven.
Paul tells us in another of his letters that any believers who are alive at this time will join the resurrected believers with Jesus in the clouds and that they, too, will receive glorified bodies.
And then, after a period of God pouring out His just wrath over sin upon the earth, Jesus will return as King, and He will reign for a thousand years. And the world will see peace and prosperity as it has never seen before.
But even after this millennium of peace, there will be many who reject Jesus, and so they and the earth will be finally judged. This is the end that Paul speaks of in verse 24.
At this time, all of Jesus’ enemies will have been vanquished. All those who have rejected Him will have been sent to eternal suffering in Hell. And then, the last enemy of all — the enemy OF us all — death itself, will be abolished.
And what remains when death is out of the picture? LIFE!
Life the way God always intended for it to be: in the physical presence of and in perfect fellowship with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
THIS is the bountiful harvest for which we can hope because of our trust in the God who made His own Son to be the first fruits of the resurrection. THIS is why the empty tomb is the pivotal event in all of earth’s history.
He is RISEN! And because He is risen, we have hope.
But if you are not a follower of Christ, this is not your hope.
If you have never confessed that you are a sinner and unable to save yourself from the just punishment you deserve for rebelling against the God who created you to reflect His character — If you have never turned to Jesus in faith that He alone provides a way for you to be reconciled to God — If you have never given your life to the one who gave HIS life for you, then real hope is still something you lack.
But there is good news for you today. Jesus still calls people to follow Him today. He still calls you to the cross, where you can find forgiveness.
And He still calls you to see that the tomb is empty, that He has conquered death, and that He is the first fruits of God’s promise of LIFE for all who place their trust in Jesus.
Unless He returns very soon — and He could come at any moment — the grave is the destiny of us all. None of us can do anything about that.
But your physical death is not the end. And what you CAN do something about is what comes after.
Will you be raised to forgiveness and LIFE in Christ? Or will you be raised to judgment and suffering? The choice is yours to make, and the time to make it is now.
I beg you today to choose life.
He is RISEN! He is risen indeed!