“¹Now I make known to you, brethren, the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received, in which also you stand, ²by which also you are saved, if you hold fast the word which I preached to you, unless you believed in vain.”

This passage begins the final corrective in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. We have seen him address divisions in the church due to pride, carnality, and disrespect for God’s servants (chapters 1–4) and disorders involving tolerance of sin, lawsuits, and sexual immorality (chapters 5–6). Then in the third section of his letter he has so far addressed difficulties concerning marriage, Christian liberties, worship, and diversity and unity (chapters 7–14). Now comes the final issue, their misunderstanding of the resurrection—which was part of “the things about which you wrote” (1 Cor. 7:1).

Paul expands on his central theme, the core of the gospel message: “For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. (1 Cor. 2:2).” What he knew, they needed to know—not just a mental awareness of the facts of Christ’s resurrection, but entrance into the full realization of that message.

Here we discover that “Christ and Him crucified” encapsulates a large message that includes the reality of His resurrection. It is a necessary corollary, an indispensable part of the message. To summarize 1 Corinthians 11, if Christ had only been crucified and died, without a resurrection, then we are nothing more than fools to believe the message of the gospel; Christ and Him crucified is only an interesting historical occurrence.

The “gospel” message Paul preached is what the Corinthians had received, and it was still true and worthy of building their lives upon. That gospel message is what effected their salvation; it is the truth “by which also you are saved.” The message was as true at the time of Paul’s writing as it did at the time the Corinthians first believed.

Five times in this chapter Paul uses the term “vain,” calling on the Corinthians to consider whether their faith has been vain. If they were not holding “fast the word which I preached to you,” that is if their faith now was vain, then the initial step of faith was likewise vain. In other words, either their faith was real, based squarely on objective truth, or it was useless—useless to save, and also useless to give their lives meaning and order thereafter. Their current lifestyle called this all into question. And the same holds true today: if we are not embracing our faith now with all its realities, then possibly our first “faith” was just that—marked with quotations because of its uselessness.

Lord, I do believe; help my unbelief. May my faith be proven true.