1 Corinthians 15:36

36. Thou fool The italic thou is furnished by the translators. Similar was Solomon’s fool, who said in his heart, There is no God.

Thou Yet here, as in Romans 9:0, the apostle has a conceptual opponent face to face. This thou would be more emphatic in Paul’s Greek than in our English, for the Greek can omit the pronoun, and inserts it only for the keen point. As Dr. Poor (in Lange) pertinently says, “It is the pointed finger aiming at the objector present to the author’s mind thou.” And fool belongs to this thou, just because his own planting a seed refutes him. When you yourself put a seed in the ground, you know what follows.

Quickened Made alive in the future plant.

Paul here, be it noted, is not dealing in the secrecies of science, but with the bare facts presented to the eye of the seed planter. The three patent ocular facts are, a burial, a death, and a reappearance. The seed goes into the ground, dies, and is “resurrected” in a plant above ground. To Paul’s conception the plant is the same seed reappearing; the same matter in a new form. Yet this sameness is not what he is now illustrating; he is now only showing the Gnostic that as matter is not necessarily inglorious, so the materiality of our present body is no reason for objecting to its future remodelling in glory. Paul’s view is, that the same materiality rises re-organized, and endowed with new properties. It is idem et alter; the same in substance, but different in phenomena; just as the same carbon may be first a charcoal and then a diamond.

Except it die Is it strange to you that corruption, decay, and death should be the antecedent of immortal life? Lo, the seed you plant cannot live until it die. Death is the necessary condition to future life.