1 Corinthians 15:26

1 Corinthians 15:26, in plain English

Death itself—the final enemy—will be destroyed. Everything else gets dealt with first, but death is the last thing to go.

Why it's here

For the Corinthians living in a city where disease and suffering were common, this was profoundly hopeful. Death wasn't some inevitable, unconquerable force—it was an enemy that would be genuinely defeated.

Who's speaking

Paul

Where it sits in the story

This fulfills what Paul said back in verse 21—death came through Adam, but it will be undone through Christ. The resurrection isn't a workaround for death; it's death's complete abolition.

The scholarly reading

Death—the ultimate enemy that seems unconquerable—will be the last to fall; its final destruction marks the true end of God's enemies.

Language and setting

Death haunted the Corinthian imagination as an absolute power, perhaps bolstered by Greek philosophical assumptions about mortality's inevitability. Paul personalizes death as an enemy — not a natural law but a hostile power, what the rabbis would call the 'king of terrors.' By naming it as 'last enemy,' Paul creates narrative climax: all other dominions fall, but death persists until the final moment. This reflects the historical sequence of 1 Thessalonians 4 — believers will face death until the parousia.

Voice

Paul, personalizing death as a conquered enemy whose defeat marks history's culmination

Significance

Death, which entered through Adam's sin (verse 21), becomes the final barrier to complete resurrection. Its destruction is not incidental but central to redemption's narrative arc.

24Then the end will come, when He hands over the kingdom to God the Father after He has destroyed all dominion, authority, and power.

25For He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet.

26The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

27For “God has put everything under His feet.” Now when it says that everything has been put under Him, this clearly does not include the One who put everything under Him.

28And when all things have been subjected to Him, then the Son Himself will be made subject to Him who put all things under Him, so that God may be all in all.

Read all of 1 Corinthians 15 — If Christ has not been raised, Paul says, everything falls apart. But He has — and that changes everything.