Paul remained stout and confident
in the face of trails and hardship because he saw life as transient. He knew
that this earthly life would deteriorate and come to an end eventually.
However, he maintained that life would still go on after death. For Christians,
the life after death is permanent and far more glorious. To help them see the value
of life after death, Paul then compares the present body with the future
eternal body. He saw the present body as only a house. Using a tent he said
that our present body is earthly, transient, made with hand and could be
destroyed. Whereas the life after death is a permanent secure building. It is
from heaven and from God and therefore it is eternal.
What Paul was saying is this: a tent
is temporary and unstable whereas a building is more stable and permanent. In saying that the present body is made with
human hand, Paul was not excluding God. For after all human life is God’s
design. He was merely saying that no life could come into this world without
human involvement. Whereas the life after death has no human involvement. It is
entirely God. Besides it is eternal and in the heaven.
What’s more puzzling is the part
about “…longing to be clothed…” and “…not found naked….” Here Paul was
correcting a first century wrong Greek philosophical thought. They taught that
the body is essentially evil and man’s goal was to be without a body. To them
the spirit of a man was trapped or imprisoned in the body and needed to be
freed from its limitation. This is unthinkable to a Christian. Man and his body
cannot be separated. A man without the body would have no personality. Man is a
combination of spirit and also the body. In fact when this old life is over we
will be further clothed, our mortal body will put on immortality. The Greeks
would look to a time when they would be unclothed, when their bodies no longer
imprison their spirits. To be unclothed from the body means to have no body. To
be naked means to be without a body. For us Christians we don’t look forward to
a time not without a body but a time when we will have a new body.
Paul says that in this present earthly
body, we groan because we experience the problems of this life. We long to be
clothed with the new heavenly body. He was pointing to the fact that in death one
is not naked as the Greek had thought. In death, we adorn a new life, a life of
immortality. As far as we are concerned, we do not seek death to escape from the
difficulty we encounter in life, we seek to be transformed by the Lord through
them.
Paul tells us that God had made us
to have a body both now and in eternity, although the nature of the body may not
be the same. Instead of seeking to have no body, we should seek to have a
transformed body. And it is God Who has made us for this purpose. He had given
us the Holy Spirit as a pledge to us to prepare us for what’s to come in
heaven. He is here to prepare us for the kind of existence in eternity.
Let’s learn to look at our troubles
and difficulties in life as instruments placed alongside us to prepare us for
heaven. We don’t seek to escape them. Instead through them, we seek to
collaborate with the Spirit to make us the kind of people fit for eternal
living. All glory to God!
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