The First Victory That Promised the Last

In May 1796, Edward Jenner made a daring wager against humanity's deadliest scourge. In a cottage garden in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, he took fluid from a cowpox lesion on the hand of dairymaid Sarah Nelmes and scratched it into the arm of eight-year-old James Phipps. Weeks later, Jenner exposed the boy to smallpox itself. James never fell ill.

That single moment of immunity was a firstfruit. Smallpox had terrorized civilization for millennia, killing pharaohs and peasants alike, claiming an estimated 300 million lives in the twentieth century alone. Yet Jenner's quiet triumph in that English garden guaranteed the harvest to come. By 1980, the World Health Organization declared smallpox completely eradicated from the face of the earth — the first human disease ever destroyed.

Paul understood this logic of firstfruits. When Christ walked out of that borrowed tomb, He was not simply one man brought back to life. He was the first sheaf waved before the Almighty — the down payment on a harvest no one can number. "For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive." And then the end will come, when every hostile power — even death itself — is laid beneath His feet. Just as Jenner's first victory made smallpox's total destruction certain, Christ's resurrection has sealed death's fate once and for all. The last enemy will be destroyed, because the Firstfruits has already risen.