I recently saw a movie, Downfall, about the last days of Adolf Hitler. The setting is Hitler’s bunker beneath the streets of Berlin. The Russian army is closing in. The situation for Hitler and all the people in the bunker is hopeless. 

It is depressing. People are committing suicide rather than face the wrath of the Russians, who are out for vengeance because of the way the Nazis treated Russian women and civilians. Hitler is becoming increasingly insane. All the soldiers in the bunker know they will die in the next few days. 

But there is a group of soldiers who are not depressed or terrified at all. They have set up a large table. They still have food and lots of alcohol. There are some female soldiers and secretaries. They spend the last few days dancing to music, drinking, and feasting on food while the people above them in the streets are being shelled by Russian artillery. Occasionally, a bomb will shatter part of the bunker, spraying debris on the partiers. It disrupts their festivities, but they resume their drinking and dancing as soon as possible.  

Even though Hollywood might have twisted some of the facts, I assume something like that happened in that bunker. We might look at the partiers and call them crazy. But I think they were the only sane ones in the bunker. 

Alcohol numbed their senses. It allowed them to forget the horror that awaited them. In the movie, they were all laughing, while people around them were terrified. In a room adjacent to the party, Joseph Goebbels and his wife killed their six young children because they saw the future as hopeless and didn’t want their daughters violated by enemy soldiers. 

If you were to find yourself in such a terrible situation, why not make the most of it? If you knew you were going to die within the next forty-eight hours, why not enjoy them if you could? How would it help to be in terror for those hours if you were going to die, anyway? If you were in a drunken stupor, maybe you would luck out and be asleep when the Russians killed you. You wouldn’t know what hit you. 

Paul suggests that those partiers acted rationally. He writes to believers who were being told that the physical bodies of believers who had died were not going to rise from the dead. They were probably being taught that Christians only rise spiritually. Paul shows that because Christ rose from the dead, believers’ bodies, too, will rise.  

The doctrine of the resurrection of the dead is intimately connected with the doctrine of rewards. If we are going to be rewarded, our bodies must rise. To deny the resurrection of the body is to deny that there will be rewards in Christ’s kingdom. 

If our bodies don’t rise and there are no rewards for good works, then why does what we do with our bodies matter? This life is full of troubles, and all we would have to look forward to is death. Why not go out partying? 

Paul tells the Corinthians: “If the dead do not rise, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die’” (1 Cor 15:32). Paul is quoting part of Isa 22:13, where the prophet speaks of the joy and gladness found in a party atmosphere. 

Many church members reject the doctrine of rewards while maintaining the view that they should perform good works. But this makes no sense. Death is right around the corner—nothing we do matters. If our resurrection is nothing but a spiritual thing, the sooner death gets here, the better. 

The wise decision, if that were the case, would be to gather your friends, play some music, eat, and get drunk.ⁱ That’s what the most intelligent people in Hitler’s bunker did. Paul quotes from Isaiah, where the prophet says the same thing. Enjoy yourself until your miserable earthly existence ends and your spirit can float up to heaven. 

In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul says we should not act that way. Our bodies will rise and be rewarded for what we have done with them. Paul even points out that if Christ did not rise from the dead, all of Christianity is a lie. There won’t be an eternal kingdom of any kind. Those speaking of a spiritual kingdom did not know what they were saying. Serve the Lord with your bodies (1 Cor 15:58). When it comes to Christian living, the doctrine of rewards is a crucial aspect.