What did Paul mean when he said, "I die daily" in 1 Corinthians 15:31?

The Corinthian saints were his boast and joy, whatever their faults, which no one had such reason to feel as the apostle; but he had it in Christ Jesus, which gave it force and permanence. Thus does he protest his dying day by day. It is not a doctrinal standing; there he could say, I died. Death with Christ is a fact; for faith it is never a mere and slow process going on, as mystics dream. Here it is a constant exposure to physical death. So he served the Lord, and boasted in His saints: how absurd if there be no resurrection! But it was not only joy in the saints spite of daily dying; what a spring for endurance in the world outside! "If after man I fought with beasts in Ephesus, what [is] the profit to me?" Faith is not fanatical; it reasons as soundly as it feels loyally and works by love.

349 "To die and live with you," is not to die to sin first. Scripture never says we have to die to sin. "I die daily" is a dying in an outward sense every day. Paul's life was not worth sixpence, as men speak. Then we have a beautiful expression, "God that comforteth them that are cast down." God lets us be cast down that we may be comforted of Him. It is not a cold dead thing. People speak of the apostles as if they were like vultures soaring above the heads of others, and pouncing down when they were obliged to do it; but it is not so. "Though I made you sorry with a letter, I do not repent though I did repent." Paul said he "did repent," and when writing an inspired letter! The power of the Holy Ghost makes him write it, and then, when he looks at his own heart, Titus was so long coming, that he thought the Corinthians would not have him; and that was his sorrow. Such is the human side of Paul, and is very instructive.

Secondly, continuing his argument of verse 19, that if there is no resurrection we, believers, are of all men most miserable, he asks, “Why stand we in jeopardy every hour?”. What folly to run the risk of death if there is no resurrection. He then refers to his own life of suffering, for Christ's sake, and that the saints might share with him in his joy in Christ. This constantly brought him face to face with a violent death, so that, in the spirit of his mind, he died daily. So violent was the opposition at Ephesus that he despaired of his life (2 Cor. 1:8). Men behaved like beasts and to speak figuratively, after the manner of men, he had fought with beasts at Ephesus. But what sense was there in enduring all this suffering, and endangering his life, if the dead rise not? Would he not have been wiser, if there is no resurrection, to act on the principle of those who say, “Let us eat and drink; for to-morrow we die”?

Verse 31. "I protest by your rejoicing which I have in Christ Jesus, I die daily." There is a double significance in these words. First, they express forcibly, in confirmation of his previous question, the readiness with which he at all times tempted mortal hazard for the gospel's sake; and in this sense his language carries with it something of reproach to those addressed. But, secondly, it declares the true secret of his constancy, and the sustaining spring of the martyr-spirit that was in him, by thus referring them to death as a daily experience of his soul. For how should he, or they, be rejoicing truly in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh, if they did not daily bring to their remembrance their death as natural men, and the manner of that death, by feeding, by faith and in the Spirit, on the flesh and blood of the crucified Son of man? Had these Corinthian saints been thus habitually nourishing their souls, they would have been less entangled in vain and fruitless questionings, and less open to the large, yet loving, censure of him who watched thus for their souls.

(4) We now come to a passage as to which there is great difficulty in the minds of many, and which has, therefore, furnished occasion for a multitude of opinions. It does not seem really so difficult after all. The apostle, in speaking of the character of the Christian life as a life of trial, of suffering from persecution, gives the endurance of this as a proof of a common faith in the resurrection of the dead. With regard, therefore, he says, to those "who are being baptized for the dead," (or in place of the dead,) "what will they do if the dead rise not at all? Why are they then baptized instead of the dead? and why do we too stand in jeopardy every hour?" An old belief interpreted this as a mere superstitious baptism of the living in place of those who might die unbaptized. This is worth mentioning as being founded upon a mistake so prevalent, that baptism has in some way to do with the future life instead of being entirely for the present. Baptism is the mark of discipleship. It is no introduction to heaven, but simply to the kingdom of heaven, that is, to the company of disciples upon the earth. The thought of baptizing child or adult to carry them safe through to heaven is one of those false ideas which so early tended to build up the Romish system. The sacrament was supposed to minister in some way the grace of which it spoke. All this is destroyed to the root by simply keeping baptism in the place for which God has designed it, — a remission of sins indeed on the part of men, not necessarily on the part of God at all, a salvation in figure, not in fact. It is a New Testament type, and to be treated like all other types, as that which of necessity is infinitely lower than the thing of which it speaks, — yet it had and has its place as a confession of Christ, His title to Lordship over His people; that is, it introduces into the kingdom, and thus we can understand without much difficulty the text here. Christians were dying in how many different ways, and living, as the apostle speaks of himself, in constant view of death, — in that sense, "dying daily." What advantage was it to him, he says, to have fought (as after the manner of men, one might say,) with beasts at Ephesus, as a gladiator in the arena, if there was to be no resurrection of the dead? Yet men crowded into the ranks that were thus being thinned, took their place by baptism among those who were soldiers in this warfare. Was it all a dream, or were they justified in this faith in resurrection? The apostle has already identified the resurrection with Christianity itself. If there were no resurrection of the dead, Christ were not risen, and if Christ were not risen, those who had faith in Him were deceived and were yet in their sins. Thus we are not to think simply of the one point of doctrine, but of that as implying all else. The resurrection spoke, of necessity, with tremendous power, to those facing death all the time. Even the very body that dropped in the struggle would be taken up again, and taken up in a more glorious fashion. To weaken here would be to weaken all the power over sin, all the energy of the Christian life. "Let no one deceive himself," says the apostle. These things are not to be tolerated. They are not to be thought lightly of; for "Evil communications corrupt good manners." He quotes the heathen poet Menander in this last saying. That was the truth, and they must take heed to it. They must come to sobriety in righteousness and not sin. There were amongst them, evidently, some who had not the true knowledge of God. It was their shame that such should be in their midst. We see, in fact, how, in the decline of Christian vigor, the world comes in.

"And what advantage would it have, if there were no resurrection, by dying daily, denying self, passing through all kinds of trials, suffering persecution and fighting, as Paul had done at Ephesus, with wild beasts? If there were no resurrection, then man is like the beast: let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. That which looks so merely lifeless has, nevertheless, in itself the determination of its future life. No seed produces anything else, but its own kind, and yet how different is that which springs out of it from the seed out of which it springs!" (Numerical Bible)

"To be baptised for the dead," then, means to begin the Christian career, as the successors of persons whom some of them held to have died never to rise again. To be baptised for such, with any view or reference to them, was folly, if they were not to rise. To stand in jeopardy every hour, to die daily, to pass through such a conflict as the apostle had had with his Ephesian enemies, was to persist in madness, "if the dead rise not." But if the dead are to rise and reign, if all outside them are merely enjoying the pleasures of sin for a season, which will give place to sure and stern eternal judgment, the only wisdom was to enter their ranks, come what might to mow them down or harass in this life. God is only rightly known as the God of resurrection. Sin — this present evil world — tends to confuse and falsify all just thoughts of God, of His character, and His counsels. Resurrection, as revealed of Him, puts everything in its true place and light, and amongst others the suffering place of the Christian, from its commencement to its close here below. Resurrection is its key, its encouragement, and its reward.

Yet the second argument is worse. Where does the apostle speak of the principle of the practice of "baptism for the dead"? Nowhere. He argues, if anything, for the practice itself: "Else what shall they do who are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? why are they then baptized for the dead? And why stand we in jeopardy every hour? I protest… I die daily" (1 Cor. 15:29-31). If this is not approving the practice, I know not what is. Fancy the apostle urging in his argument for resurrection, "Else what shall they do who are (so superstitiously!) baptized for the dead." As for the principle, he says nothing about it. What was the principle? What was the practice even? Dr. Farrar evidently refers to a suppositious ceremony "never adopted except by some obscure sects of Gnostics, who seem to have founded their custom on this very passage," the practice of submitting to baptism for some person who had died unbaptized. Dr. Farrar owns it as a "superstitious custom"; yet thinks the apostle does not reprove the principle of it, — a principle which must have implied the need of baptism to free from the penalties of sin, and the possibility of the living making up the deficiencies of the dead! a thing too gross to be accepted by the ritualistic Christianity which so soon succeeded the apostolic.

Yet in the light of the context the difficulties of the passage are not insuperable. Why cannot the ordinary rite be styled — for it is evident there was no special one — "baptism in place of the dead," simply because those freshly receiving it were filling up the ranks in what was then indeed "the noble army of martyrs" — of men "appointed unto death." The verses following show that in this track the apostle's thoughts were running. "I protest I die daily. If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not?" Why should it be so very strange an expression for him to use, "baptism in place of the dead," under such circumstances and in such a connection? Especially when the choice is between this and the apostle's sanction of "so superstitious a practice" as Dr. Farrar owns the other to have been — a practice which there is no evidence ever existed?

In plain contrast with this, we read of the Corinthian saints reigning without the apostle, who speaks there also of God's setting forth "us the apostles" last of all, as men doomed to death (1 Cor. 4:8-9). Christ knew the death of the cross as none ever did or could; and Paul was yet to know death, as His faithful martyr. All for him was true. With the Corinthians alas! how much was false. They had slipped in heart from sharing His rejection. Indeed as yet they had scarcely known it. They had received Christ for eternal life and redemption; they as yet knew nothing of dying daily (1 Cor. 15:31).

So the epistle to the Romans taught us that grand truth of Christianity as to the flesh, that I am entitled, nay bound, to regard it as dead. I am never called to die to it. This is natural, pietistic, mystic, but not at all the truth revealed in Christ. I am never called to die to the flesh. Dying, of course, to nature and the world is practically spoken of — dying daily. But it is another thought altogether, and is a question of exposure to trial and death for Christ continually. But as to the flesh, I am entitled by grace to say that I have died already; and I am called on to reckon myself henceforth and always dead. Mysticism is an effort to become dead in oneself, and sounds well; but grace gives me the title of Christ to believe in the power of His death for me, and of my death in Him; so that I may, without presumption, reckon myself dead unto sin, but alive unto God in Christ Jesus.