Eternal Dwelling

2 Corinthians 4:13-5:5

Welcome! Today we return to our series in 2 Corinthians. Let me briefly remind you a bit of where we have been. Three weeks ago we looked at chapter 3 and learned how there is the very glory of God in us, through His Spirit. We saw this glory compared to the glory of God made visible through the glowing face of Moses. After Moses spent time with God, the result was that his face would glow. After telling the Israelites what God had told him, Moses would cover his face with a veil, because the glow was distracting, if not blinding. Over time, however, the glow would fade until which time Moses came back into the presence of the Lord. Our earlier passage in 2 Corinthians explained that the glory that is now in us, as believers in Christ, sealed with the Holy Spirit, is so much greater than that glory that it is not even worth comparing the two. So that is part of what we learned about three weeks ago.

Two weeks ago we looked at the first part of Chapter 4, which described us as “jars of clay.”

But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. – 2 Corinthians 4:7

I mentioned that jars of clay were cheap and common, much like plastic grocery store bags are today. We are nothing special – that is, the part of us that is us is nothing special – because it helps people see how truly special is that part of us that is not us but God.

We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that His life may be revealed in our mortal body. So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you. – 2 Corinthians 4:8-12

That "so" that in the next to last sentence is so important! For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake so that His life may be revealed in our mortal body. This goes along with the jars of clay analogy and takes it further. If you really want to see what is inside a clay pot, go break off a piece of it so you can look inside. If you really want to look inside a grocery store bag, tear a hole in the side of it. The analogy isn’t perfect – yes, you could just take the lid off the pot, or open up the bag, but the idea here is of dying or dying a little at a time so that the glory inside can be revealed.

Another good analogy for this is the piñata; you have to beat it with a stick for the treasure (the candy) inside to fall out. We who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake; that is, we pots are broken, so that His life may be revealed in our bodies.

These are not necessarily pleasant thoughts – who wants to become a smashed pot? Who wants to be a human piñata? Well, as Paul continues, as we look at today’s passage, we will see that, believe it or not, these really are pleasant thoughts, if we have the perspective that Paul presents, if we have an eternal perspective, if we have God’s perspective on our lives.

Let’s continue on with our passage.

It is written: "I believed; therefore I have spoken."With that same spirit of faith we also believe and therefore speak, because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you in His presence. All this is for your benefit, so that the grace that is reaching more and more people may cause thanksgiving to overflow to the glory of God. – 2 Corinthians 4:13-15

Let’s look at this passage. The phrase, “I believed; therefore I have spoken” comes from Psalm 116, verse 10. This psalm is primarily a psalm of thanksgiving, and of committing oneself to the Lord. In the first 9 verses, the psalmist praises God because He has delivered him from death. In verse 3, he says, “The cords of death have entangled me; the anguish of the grave came upon me.” In verse 8, he says, “For You, O Lord, have delivered my soul from death.” Now, I believe this psalm is speaking of someone who has literally been rescued before death could take hold of them; after all, dead people don’t write psalms. But, as is often the case, there are deeper meanings here as well, and this deeper meaning is the point of these verses in 2 Corinthians.

We are going to die, unless the Lord returns before then. But assuming that we will die first, will we not also say, “The cords of death have entangled me; the anguish of the grave has come upon me”? Death will come. But death will not take our soul. Like the psalmist, but in a deeper way, we will be able to say, “For You, O Lord, have delivered my soul from death.” Like the psalmist we can say this because of our faith, because we believe. With that same spirit of faith we also believe and therefore speak, because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you in His presence.

Do you believe this? I mean, do you really believe it? We will die, but our souls will be delivered from death to eternal life. Your homework for this week is to read I Corinthians 15, the whole chapter, at one sitting. It is 58 verses. Early in the chapter Paul talks about how Christ rose from the dead and then he lists various people who saw the risen Christ, including a group of 500. He does this to anchor down the fact – and it is a fact, the surest fact there is – that Christ really rose from the dead. Most of the rest of the chapter deals with the coming resurrection of the dead. Souls will be delivered from death. After talking about how absolutely central the resurrection of the dead is to the entire gospel, he talks a bit about what the new resurrection bodies will be like. He explains how it will not just be us, Version 2.0, but something not even comparable to what we were. In verse 42-44:

The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. – I Corinthians 15:42-44

Be sure you understand what these words mean – imperishable means eternal, and not just lasting forever, but lasting forever without even a hint of degrading. The KJV uses incorruptible, and that is a good word for it. Let me be nerdy for a second and go with the computer analogy. If our resurrected bodies were just us, Version 2.0, we would still need to be afraid of viruses and all that other bad stuff. We would still need medical treatment – security patches – from time to time. Eventually we would become “corrupted,” little by little, slowing down, losing functionality. But that isn’t going to happen. That is what we were, but that is not what we will be! We will be imperishable, incorruptible.

The Greek word for dishonor is atimia, a word that could be translated disgusting, as in something gross you would see in a horror movie. It is used in Romans 1 to describe the fruits of people’s unbridled lusts. Outside of scripture it was frequently used to describe dead bodies left unburied. That is how Paul describes us now. But the resurrected us will be raised in glory, doxa. Here are some synonyms for doxa: splendor, brightness, magnificence, excellence, preeminence, dignity, grace, majesty, a most glorious condition, a most exalted state.

The Greek word for weakness also refers to sickness, being in a state of dying. The Greek word for power here is dynamis, a word we have seen multiple times in the past. This is the word from which we derive dynamite. It often refers to the full power of God. That is how we will be – strong, not just physically, but strong in every way, in character, in speech, in will, in everything good. Jesus will raise us up from the dead like this! Not as me, Version 2.0, but as something that cannot even be compared with the original, something more like Jesus than like me and you.

Returning to our passage, "All this is for your benefit, so that the grace that is reaching more and more people may cause thanksgiving to overflow to the glory of God." I love the picture of overflowing thanksgiving. I picture people bringing cups of praise to a giant pool, cup after cup after cup, countless people upon people, until the pool is full, and then overflows, flooding the area around it. But that doesn’t stop people from coming; the cups keep coming forever. This is what I picture when I think of thanksgiving overflowing.

Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. – 2 Corinthians 4:16-18

"To lose heart" is the same phrase Paul used back in Chapter 4, verse 1. There he talked about the surpassing glory of the Spirit in us that blows away the glory of the Spirit reflected on Moses’ face. He said that because he had the ministry of telling the people this glorious truth, and this is but one piece of the gospel – that such glory is available to anyone who turns to Christ, who believes in Him and lets Him have the driver’s seat of his life, he did not lose heart. Now, he says, because of the hope – the solid, certain hope – of the coming resurrection and all that it meant, he did not lose heart.

This was an eternal perspective, a perspective that does not look at your present circumstances, no matter how bad they are. Paul talks about wasting away – on the outside – but inside, he is being renewed. He describes all the horrible things he had gone through and would continue to go through, things we have talked about in the past, and will talk about some more in the future, as later parts of this letter go into details, those things, are, with an eternal perspective, only light and momentary troubles.

I want to be clear hear – Paul is not saying, and I am not saying, that we should be in denial about our problems! Our troubles are real, and although they are not the same as Paul’s, they can be every bit as heartrending, as devastating. Paul is not pretending his problems don’t exist! Again and again in this letter he almost too openly lays them out for all to see.

No, Paul is not pretending they don’t exist, or doing any other kind of mental gymnastics. He is making a comparison. He is comparing his present to his future. And when you make that kind of comparison, light and momentary are the perfect adjectives for our troubles, no matter how serious, no matter how awful, they are.

Paul has an eternal perspective. What percentage of your life will be in this fallen world, in corrupted bodies, Version 1.0? What is 1 divided by infinity? Zero! Zero percent. I have just told you a few hints about what our resurrected bodies will be like. I haven’t even begun to talk about life in heaven, life in Jesus’ presence, beholding Him fully, seeing His full glory, experiencing direct and unfiltered the full power of the love of God. How can I talk about these things? All I can say is that any analogy will fall totally short.

One of my earliest memories is of having a badly scraped knee with a band-aid stuck on the wound, and my parents saying they needed to take it off. I worried about it all day. I tried to take it off a little myself, but it was so completely stuck, I couldn’t even begin to peel the edges. My Dad gave me the choice of whether to have it taken off slowly (in which case my Mom would do it) or quickly (in which case my Dad would do it). Both choices seemed awful. The thoughts of this consumed me. I finally chose quick. And in less than a second, it was off. It hurt for maybe a minute – although I doubt it really hurt for more than a few seconds. And then it was over. It was a light and momentary trouble, but I sure didn’t know it. What will it be like for us a million, a billion years from now? What will we think of our few brief years in Version 1.0? We will see this time for what it really was. What Paul is doing, by faith, is looking at his life like that now. And this is what we can do if we truly embrace the eternal perspective.

Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked. – 2 Corinthians 5:1-3

I love this tent analogy. By the way, there is a pretty strong irony here. Paul is dismissing tents as, well, yucky. As all that Version 1.0 is about – from I Corinthians 15, perishable, dishonorable (like dead and decaying bodies), weak. And what was Paul’s occupation? How did he make a living? As a… tentmaker!

By the way, tents in Paul’s time were not these nice, aluminum framed, waterproof breathable fabric, all-the-comforts-possible conveniences that we have today. Tents were frail, decaying, inferior, lowly, fragile, in constant need of care. Tents were made from animal skins. Cleaning, drying, and curing the skins was part of the tentmaker’s job. It was smelly, disgusting, hard work. A tentmaker was constantly dealing with decaying flesh and skin. There was skill to this process, as to the tying ropes through the skins so as to make them strong and unlikely to rip. But they would still rip, and so people often needed them mended. Eventually the skins just became too old, and they had to be discarded.

But, irony aside, Paul is not talking about tents here. He is talking about our bodies, Version 1.0. Again, he is making the comparison – our current bodies are like tents, quick to decay. They are temporary. But our new bodies, our new “homes” are permanent structures, eternal. And they are not imperfect, built by humans, with their imperfections in skill and labor – including Paul’s own labor of his hands – but they are perfect, without fault, without error. That is what awaits us.

But I think there is another sense in which Paul’s metaphor of the tent is appropriate. What is tent life like? Nomadic. You don’t really have a home. Everyplace you go, you are only passing through. You can never really get comfortable. I think of the Israelites wandering through the desert for 40 years. Is this not an apt picture for us? We are never truly at home here on earth; if you have become so accustomed to the creature customs of our modern life that you disagree with me, your perspective needs some adjusting. This place is not our home. We are strangers here. We are not staying here. We are passing through.

But when we are resurrected with our new bodies, when we arrive in Jesus’ presence in Heaven, as the GPS units all like to say, “You have arrived.” This will be home. We will never move again. Never. Ever. Forever. That nesting instinct that is in us, that desire to make a place our home, will finally find its fulfillment. God put that in us, I believe, to make us long for our eternal homes.

I think you find a pretty powerful parallel passage in Romans 8.

I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. – Romans 8:18-21

It’s amazing, is it not, what this is saying? Not only do we long for the day we put aside our tents and take up our “homes,” but all of creation is waiting for this moment too. Remember that the curse in Genesis didn’t just affect us, but it affected all of creation. When we “fold up our tents for the last time,” which is a valid alternate translation of what the 2 Corinthians 5:1 passage says, and are resurrected into all that God has ever meant for us to be, all of creation will rejoice, because it, too, will experience everlasting freedom from the curse. All of creation will rejoice on that day.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. – Romans 8:22-25

The Greek word for groaning is the same word used in our passage in 2 Corinthians 5. It is a sighing, longing, wishing intently for what you cannot now have. Forgive me for making the analogy, but I picture a teenager with their first crush, and the object of their crush walks down the hall, and for a second the person thinks that the object of their crush is smiling, looking at them, but soon they realize that the person is looking at someone behind them. The person doesn’t notice them at all. Oh! Sigh! For some of you, if you are on a diet, perhaps the thought of ice cream or chocolate elicits the same response. For me, it is grapefruit. I love grapefruit! I am allergic to grapefruit. Oh! Sigh! In heaven, though, there will be something better than grapefruit, and I will not be allergic to it!

Back to our passage:

Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked. – 2 Corinthians 5:1-3

This longing, this groaning, goes beyond our physical bodies. We long to be no longer at war with our flesh. We long to be no longer fighting temptation. We long to be no longer living lives defined by our weaknesses. We long for minds that no longer naturally wander to base thoughts. We long for hearts that no longer default to selfishness. We long for patience. We long to no longer fight the pride, or the countless other faults that are always waging war within us. We are tired of these tents, these tents that never want to do what they should do.

And when we are resurrected, these tents will be left behind. But we won’t be naked. We won’t have no shelter. We will be clothed with our new selves, selves that are humble, kind, unselfish, loving, patient. Our days of battle with broken and breaking tents will be forever over. But meanwhile, we groan. Meanwhile, we continue to fight. Meanwhile, we run the race despite all that transpires against us, including ourselves.

For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. Now it is God who has made us for this very purpose and has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come. – 2 Corinthians 5:4-5

Now why does Paul talk about not being naked, not being unclothed, but being clothed? It is because he wants to be crystal clear that we really do get resurrected bodies. We don’t just become ghosts, any more than the resurrected Jesus was a ghost. Remember, Jesus ate fish. Remember, doubting Thomas touched His hand and His side. But Jesus also floated up into heaven. Jesus also just suddenly appeared. Jesus also could disguise His appearance. Will this be what our resurrected bodies will be like? I have no idea. But I am certain that they will truly be bodies. This is what Paul is saying. We will be clothed with our heavenly dwelling; we will not be naked, disembodied ghosts.

Also, we will not merge to lose our identity. We will not become one with the universe. We will not achieve Nirvana, nothingness. We will not transcend into a higher state, one that goes beyond the self-aware. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that is what Christianity teaches. That idea is not in the Bible. And the reason for I Corinthians 15 (the longest chapter of I Corinthians) is that Paul, inspired by the Holy Spirit, is led to be crystal clear that the resurrection is physical and that we maintain our identity, although it becomes an identity no longer corrupted by sin.

Many of the Greeks at the time of Paul would have agreed with Paul about the desire to throw of their tents, their physical bodies. But they would have said that it was the very tent, the physical body that was the cause of all their problems. One of the major Jewish sects at that time, the Sadducees, also denied the idea of resurrection. Paul took advantage of that fact, as recorded in the book of Acts (Chapters 23 and 24), in a very creative way.

What about today? What do people believe? Well you have a minority of people who believe that our physical bodies are all that we are, and that when we die, that’s the total complete end of us. But you have many more people who think we have souls but have all kinds of mixed-up ideas about what happens when we die. Generally speaking, though, this idea that we will be something more evolved, higher, beyond the need for bodies, is very prevalent in our culture. No doubt this has been fueled by countless movies and TV shows, from Star Wars, to Avatar. I don’t bring this up to say that you shouldn’t ever watch such movies, but so as to be aware what the message is that these sources of entertainment bring. These cultural influences as well as countless religions throughout the world all seem to tap into our built-in desire to connect with God but instead turn it into something false and dangerous, dangerous because it can taint our view of God.

My final thoughts are for the younger people here today. All this talk about dying, and broken-down worn-out bodies may not seem to relate to you. But I think it does. Every believer in Christ, no matter how young, will very quickly realize that that the Apostle Paul is right about everyone when he says, “The things I don’t want to do – those things I do.” We often refer to this part of people, as Scripture does, as our “flesh,” our “body.” Understand that this is a figure of speech. Yes, our physical bodies do contribute to our sinful desires, but our real problem, the real reason we do the things we don’t want to do, is up in our heads. Our bodies are not evil, but they are corrupted and they are decaying. But our souls, our minds, our heads, our hearts, whatever you want to call it, this is the part of us that, one moment, seeks to obey our parents and the next, seeks to please ourselves, even though we know what we are doing is wrong. The more you come to know God and love Him, the more you will do the right thing and the less you will do the wrong, but you will never, not in this life, ever totally win victory over that part of you that seeks to do its own thing. Not in this life.

To put it another way, you will never get to the point that you never battle yourself up “here.” But in the life to come, in our resurrected bodies, with minds free from what we symbolically call our “flesh,” the battle will be over. As it says in Revelations, we will be called those “who overcome.” We will be at peace in our souls, in our minds, in our hearts, in our new bodies. And our love for God, our love for Christ, will be so deep that – I believe – it will hurt. But it will be a good hurt.

Resurrection is real. We will have eternal dwellings, not broken down tents, but something incorruptible, something undecaying, something wonderful. We will not be naked, ghostlike, but we will be clothed with our “heavenly dwellings,” real resurrected bodies. The resurrected Jesus was first. He proved it will really happen. We will follow Him, when the time is right, and we will be like Him. We will not be absorbed by Him, but we will still be “us,” the better part – the part that desires to love and worship God, not the part that desires to sin. And we will be with Him and enjoy Him forever.