2 Corinthians 5:1-5

Butler's Commentary

SECTION 1

Frailty of the Human Body (2 Corinthians 5:1-5)

5 For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, 5 we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. 2Here indeed we groan, and long to put on our heavenly dwelling, 3so that by putting it on we may not be found naked. 4For while we are still in this tent, we sigh with anxiety; not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. 5He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee.

2 Corinthians 5:1-3 Provokes: The problem of perspective (outlook, view, vista) is as old as man! It began in the Garden of Eden. When God created man, he gave (or revealed) to man his divine perspective. This divine perspective (outlook) was to be applied to every human experience. But Satan (the rebel from heaven) came to earth and seduced man into rejecting the divine perspective. Man prostituted his viewpoint and perverted God's creation. At that point, for the sake of wooing man back to himself. God subjected the creation to futility (see Romans 8:18-25). This was a part of God's plan to redirect man's perspective. God intended to reclaim man's viewpoint so that it would become divinely oriented.

Part and parcel with the futility of creation is the frailty of the human body. As a result of man's sin, his physical body was condemned to dissolution and death. That very mortality of the body has presented a constant problem for man in the matter of perspective or viewpoint. The ultimate problem of human philosophy remains: there is no satisfactory metaphysical system (perspective, or viewpoint). The mortality of the human body frustrates all human metaphysical systems! And that is precisely where God wants all human metaphysical systems! The frailty of man provokes him to cry out for a perspective that is superhuman.

The Bible bears witness that perspective is a problem that may plague preachers and saints. The cry for a divine viewpoint for mortal man is the essential focus of the wisdom literature of the Old Testament (Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon). The O.T. prophets were sent by God to call Israel to think and act according to the divine perspective revealed in the Law of Moses and in the messianic prophecies. Jesus, God incarnate, came to live the divine perspective as a human being thus proving it is possible for man to do so. Jesus saw, heard, thought, lived everything from God's viewpoint, and he did it all as a human being within the human experience. All the epistles, and especially the book of Revelation, are revelations of the Holy Spirit directing and guiding man toward the divine perspective.

Loss of divine perspective was the crucial problem with the Christians at Corinth and Paul dealt with it pointedly in I Corinthians, chapter 15. Here, in 2 Corinthians 5:1-21, Paul admits that his own mortality gives him occasion to groan and sigh with anxiety and struggle with the need for a constant divine perspective. Christians, preachers, missionaries are not immune from this problem. They, too, are mortal.

Unlike unbelieving philosophers, Paul knew where to find and how to appropriate a divine perspective. Paul could look beyond human mortality to a perfect and eternal existence by faith based on the historical death and resurrection of Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 5:14-15).

The word For in 2 Corinthians 5:1 connects what follows to Paul's statement of the Christian perspective in 2 Corinthians 4:16-18. Christians are to see their total experience in this life from the perspective of the eternal weight of glory which is beyond all comparison. And that includes the mortality of the human body. The Greek word oidamen is present tense meaning, We are continuing to know.. In other words, the divine perspective needs to be a continuing experience. The Christian needs to remind himself every day to look at everything and every person from God's viewpoint. The only place to find God's viewpoint is in the Bible. The mind of Christ is revealed no place else (see comments, 1 Corinthians 2:1-6). Christians are to look to the Bible for God's viewpoint on every aspect of life. Paul's knowledge went beyond human philosophy or logic for he knew everything from a divine perspective, that is, from divine revelation.

The Greek phrase, he epigeios hemon oikia tou skenous, would be literally translated, ... our dirt-house, this tent.. The word epigeios is translated, earthly and is a compound of epi (down) and ge (soil, land, ground). The human body is emphatically of the soil! It is marvelously fashioned, but essentially dirt. It is bound to and inseparable from the soil. The word skenous (tent or tabernacle) is poignant. Our human bodies are like tentstemporary and uncomfortable. Nomads and pilgrims live in tents. They are always looking for permanent dwelling places (see Hebrews 11:8-16).

The Greek word kataluthe is the very word which was used by the ancients for striking down a tent in preparation for moving on. When Paul said For we know that if this earthly tent we live in is destroyed. , he meant when this earthly tent is destroyed (or, struck down). He had no doubt that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God (1 Corinthians 15:50), and this human body of dust must perish and/or be changed (1 Corinthians 15:51-54).

Taking his stand on the revelation of God, Paul's viewpoint (perspective) transcended earth and time. He saw eternity! Thus he was able to say, We have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. The Greek word echomen is a present tense participle. We now have an eternal building. The word oikodomen means a strong edifice in contrast to a temporary tent. God has already prepared our heavenly body (building) and it is there waiting for us when we strike our tent in this pilgrim-land. We do not know what we shall be (1 John 3:2); just what our eternal body will be is yet a mystery (unrevealed), but it will be somewhat like the body put back into the earth at death (like the plant resembles the seed), and it will be glorious, imperishable, powerful, spiritual, immortal, and eternal (1 Corinthians 15:35-54). The phrase, not made with hands is simply an idiomatic way of saying our eternal body is spiritual, not physical. It is the best human language can do in trying to describe something outside the human experience. What words would one use to depict a human body that is not flesh and blood? It is a forever body, and it is located in the other world (in the heavens).

In 2 Corinthians 5:2, Paul is very careful to explain the need for a divine perspective in light of the frailty of the present body of dust. He does not want to be misunderstood. When he writes about the heavenly dwelling he is not writing about a disembodied, ghostly existence. We are in this body of the earth now. And we know it will soon be going back to the dust from whence it came. So we groan (Gr. stenazomen, complain, grieve) and greatly desire (Gr. epipothountes, long) to put on our heavenly building or dwelling.

Paul keeps switching metaphors of our eternal existence between building and clothing. Man envisions himself as naked (Gr. gumnos, bare, exposed, Matthew 25:36; Acts 19:16; 1 Corinthians 15:37; Hebrews 4:13; Revelation 3:17), dispossessed, insecure, without a body. Man fears the death of this body because of the anticipation of disembodiment. So Paul repeatedly affirms in this text (and in 1 Corinthians 15:1-58) that the Christian should not view death as a time of exposure, dispossession or disembodiment. When the Christian's earthly body dies, he immediately (see notes on 2 Corinthians 5:6-13) becomes further clothed.

2 Corinthians 5:4-5 Pressures: The word anxiety is a translation of the Greek word baroumenoi, which more literally means, burdened, or pressed down. Paul used it to describe the anxiety and pressure the Christian feels as he anticipates the dissolution (death) of this physical body. No Christian, not even the apostle Paul, is in such perfect command of his emotions that he is completely unafraid of death. All Christians feel some anxiety as they anticipate death and the next lifeespecially anxiety about the next body, about consciousness, about where they will be and who they will recognize. The prospect of death is not pleasant for any one, and to insist that the Scriptures require believers to face death without anxiety or fear is a false interpretation of the Bible. Paul's faith was sure; his confidence was firm. Yet, he shrank from the idea of being without a body and naked. This is what burdened Paul. But again, Paul was able to bear this anxiety (burden, pressure) because he had the divine perspective. Those without the divine perspective are devastated by this pressure.

Paul reveals here an immediate embodiment for Christians who die. He knew nothing of some disembodied spiritual existence, or soul-sleep, or intermediate temporary-body existence after death. For Paul, the state of existence for the Christian immediately after the death of this earthly body was one of being further clothed (Gr. ependusasthai). For Paul, the instant the Christian puts off this earthly tent, his life is swallowed up (Gr. katapothe, absorbed, overwhelmed, consumed, devoured) by eternal life and by victory (1 Corinthians 15:54). Later, Paul will describe the next existence for the Christian as at home with the Lord (2 Corinthians 5:8).

There is even the hint here that Paul was anxious to die and put off this earthly body because he knew he would not be naked at death, but rather abundantly clothed at home with the Lord. He expresses just such anticipation in Philippians 1:22-23, ... Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better.

Ray C. Stedman says of this passage, in his book, Expository Studies in 2 Corinthians, Power Out of Weakness:

What Paul means, of course, is that when we leave this body we also leave time. It is not easy to re-train our thinking along these lines, because we project time into eternity, assuming eternity is simply time going on forever, but it is not.. In time we are all locked into the same rigid sequence of events.. But in eternity there is no past or future; there is simply one great present moment. Therefore, the events we experience in eternity are never anything we have to wait for, they are always what we are ready for, what we are spiritually prepared for.. The Scriptures clearly teach that when a believer dies, he experiences immediately the coming of the Lord for his own.

So in 2 Corinthians 5:5 Paul says that God has been preparing (Gr. katergasamenos, moulding, fitting, working, shaping) us for this very thing. That thing for which we are being moulded in this existence is the building from God, the house not made with hands, our heavenly dwelling, with which we shall be further clothed and swallowed up. And this shall be the state of the believer immediately after being unclothed from this earthly body, for he will never be naked.

1 Thessalonians 4:16-18 says that when Jesus comes again, he will be accompanied by all those who have been dead in Christ. But it will only appear to those left alive on earth that the dead have been raised first, when in actuality we are all raised together, to be always with the Lord. That is the way it will appear to men because of their finite conception of eternity! The believer goes immediately to be with the Lord in a conscious, embodied state when he sheds this earthly body at death (see 1 Samuel 28:14 ff; Luke 16:19-31; Luke 23:43; Revelation 6:9-11; Revelation 7:9-12). His existence after death is very far better (Philippians 1:23), and therefore could not be a disembodied state.

God prepares us for this very far better existence by these slight, momentary afflictions (see Romans 8:18; Romans 8:28; 2 Corinthians 4:16-18), and by forming Christ in us (Galatians 4:19). In face, God's Spirit in us is his guarantee (Gr. arrabona, down-payment, earnest) that we shall have a very far better clothing in the next existence (see Romans 8:23; Ephesians 1:13-14; 1 Peter 1:3-5). The Spirit, living in our minds through his Word (John 6:63; 1 Peter 1:22-24) gives us a foretaste of the very far better life and creates in our spirits a longing for the full redemption (Romans 8:18 ff). And if God guarantees it, who can prove it otherwise (see Romans 8:31-39).

While the frailty of the human body provokes and pressures, and makes us fear the possibility of dispossession after it dies (and it is certain to die), Christians may know with abiding assurance that God is preparing them for an elegant (glorious) body beyond all imagination. They need not fear dispossession or nakedness, because when they are absent from this body, they are immediately at home with the Lord. That is the divine perspective. Without the divine perspective there remains only a fearful prospect of judgment, and a fury of fire which will consume the adversaries (Hebrews 10:27).