but thanks to God, who gives us the victory by our Lord Jesus Christ.
Paul has just described the moment when God raises and changes the bodies of believers, and death is swallowed up. His answer to that scene is not analysis but thanksgiving — and one word carries it: God gives this victory.
Verse 56 explains why death is dreadful, and why the law offered no escape. One writer follows both, then names what does produce holiness:
It is sin which gives death not only its occasion but its sting; and the law, however righteous, could work no deliverance for the guilty. In effect the law proves to be the strength of sin, because it stirs up rebellious will even more against God's commands. His grace, not the law, is the strength of holiness, as we learn from Romans 6:14. That is why the apostle breaks out into thanksgiving here. He sees God giving us the victory fully and for ever, through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Verse 56 names two things: sin and the law. Christ Himself dealt with both, which is why the thanks runs "through our Lord Jesus Christ":
The apostle reminds us that "the sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law." But God gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. He bore the sting when He was made sin on the cross, and He "redeemed us from the curse of the law, becoming a curse for us" (2 Corinthians 5:21; Galatians 3:13). With the blessedness of this truth filling his soul, the apostle breaks out into praise to God.
God took no shortcut. He won this victory in the same arena where the human race lost:
The victory has been achieved by Man in the person of Jesus, just as the ruin came in by man in the person of Adam. God did not shift the contest onto entirely fresh ground, and He did not settle everything by one stroke of pure Deity. Instead — if one may put it that way — He met the foe on the old battleground the enemy first chose in the garden of Eden, and there reversed everything. Man comes out of the contest in resurrection, covered with glory and not the shame of defeat.
The victory is God's own, yet the verse calls it ours. The same writer notes the handover:
One thing more. Though the victory is God's victory, He gives it to us who believe, as it is written: "Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."
Christ rose first, and that changes how we should now describe death:
The great king of terrors has had to yield to One greater than himself. Death has met its Master. It is now a crownless king, without a sceptre and without a throne. Now Christ is risen, and death is defeated. The power of the devil is annulled, the grave has been robbed of its victory, and Christ has become the Firstborn from the dead. His being the Firstborn means that others are to follow and share in His triumph.
The full public proof of this victory is still future, yet the verb in verse 57 is present tense. One writer holds both together:
Resurrection is the public declaration of victory over death and the grave. When the saints stand in their risen condition, the saying "Death is swallowed up in victory" will be fulfilled in triumph. For this we wait; but while we wait we are already rejoicing in it, for God "gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ" (v. 57).
Another writer describes what that early rejoicing sounds like — praise that honours Christ before the day when His triumph is seen to be theirs as well:
Such is the present and eternal strain that they are taught to raise who sing with the spirit and with the understanding also. Knowing the truth as it is revealed to them in Jesus, they already celebrate the great triumph He has personally won, and whose honours He now wears in heaven, while waiting for the moment when His victory will openly become their own. They declare their own glory by praising Him.
Verse 57 does not end the chapter; verse 58 turns it into daily work:
What a deliverance! "Thanks be" indeed "to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!" Meanwhile, the result of thinking on this is to turn with energy to the work of the Lord that lies in our hands. Every shadow has been removed from our path. Only the sure reward for everything done for Him remains for us.
- Cause. Death stings because of sin. The law was righteous, but it rescued no one; it stirred up rebellion and made sin stronger.
- Cost. Christ bore the sting when He was made sin. He took the curse of the law. He answered both powers behind death.
- Gift. The victory is God's. A Man won it on the ground where man fell, and God hands it to those who believe.
- Now. The verb is present tense. The full display waits for resurrection, but believers rejoice now, and death is already a crownless king without a throne.
- Result. Thanks does not stop at feeling. The chapter sends the thankful back to the Lord's work, with every shadow gone from the path.
So then, my beloved brethren, be firm, immovable, abounding always in the work of the Lord, knowing that your toil is not in vain in [the] Lord.
Paul has just been unfolding the truth of resurrection, and he closes the chapter with a command about daily work. It joins two things that rarely sit together — standing firm and working hard — and rests both on one word: therefore.
The call to stand firm is not a call to defend personal opinions. One writer traces the word "therefore" back to what the chapter has just proved:
"Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable." The "therefore" throws the soul back on the solid foundation laid earlier in the chapter. There Paul unfolds the greatest and most precious truth that can fill a Christian's heart. That truth lifts the soul above the dark, cold fog of the old creation and plants it on the solid rock of resurrection. On this rock He tells us to be steadfast and immovable. This is not stubborn attachment to our own ideas, or to a pet theory, or to one school of teaching. It is a firm grasp and faithful confession of the whole truth of God, and a risen Christ is its everlasting Centre.
This verse commands both standing still and moving forward. Each one guards against the failure of the other.
There are some who are so afraid of doing harm that they do nothing, and others who would rather do wrong than do nothing at all. The verse corrects both. It teaches us to stand like flint where truth is at stake. It also sends us out with a large heart, throwing all our energy into the work of the Lord.
Being unmovable in conviction does not make a person rigid in service. It produces the opposite:
The Christian who is most unmovable in faith and character will be the most mobile in service for the Lord's interests. He will not wander in the zig-zag way of a butterfly. He will move with the steady, purposeful line of a bee.
Paul writes this to people he had been correcting hard, and the name he calls them is striking.
He urges the believers at Corinth to "abound in the work of the Lord," because such labour can never be in vain in Him — never! He appeals to them as his beloved brothers... the very ones who had caused him such deep sorrow, and whom he had to rebuke and correct so unsparingly. He calls them his beloved brothers, hoping they will recover. Despite their past failures and sins, he urges them to give themselves to the only work of lasting value: "the work of the Lord."
One phrase both widens and limits what we take on.
The field of service is wide. Only one phrase limits it: "the work of the Lord." The Christian worker must not take on anything that will not fit under that holy and all-important heading. Before he starts any service he must ask one great practical question: "Is this really the work of the Lord?"
Paul's guarantee is not that our labour will look successful. One writer weighs man's verdict against God's:
For every believer who truly abounds in the work of the Lord, we often find half a dozen who abound in talk. They know how things ought to be done, but they do not do them. Yet we have the strongest reason for hard work in the Lord's interests. We know that "in the Lord your labor is not in vain." It may look useless to man and his little world. But in the Lord, and in the new order that resurrection has set up, it is not in vain.
The same certainty covers the smallest and most ordinary acts of service:
You visit a sick man. Before you go, get in touch with your Lord, then visit him, and simply be in His hand; say what He gives you to say and commit it to Him. Do you think the Lord will ever forget that visit?... Perhaps it all seemed to be in vain. But so far as your visit was in the Lord, you will see that visit again in glory... Not one word spoken in the Lord, not one thing done in the Lord, at home or abroad, will go without God's answer in resurrection.
The verse points forward to the moment when hidden labour is finally displayed.
No toil, no testing, no suffering gone through in faith for the Lord will be lost. God stores it all up. At the resurrection, when our Lord Jesus Christ is revealed, it will come out as praise and glory and honour.
- Ground. The "therefore" rests the whole command on a risen Christ — not on our opinions or a favourite school of thought.
- Balance. The same verse cures two opposite failures: doing nothing for fear of doing wrong, and doing wrong rather than nothing.
- Scope. The field is wide but bounded by one test question — can this honestly be called the work of the Lord?
- Certainty. Work that looks wasted by man's measure is never wasted in the Lord's — and Paul says this to the very people who had failed.
- Harvest. Nothing done in the Lord is forgotten; it is stored up and shown at His revelation, to praise and glory and honour.