2 Corinthians 5:1 Commentary and Bible Study

We are looking in this chapter at the soul’s final triumph. Well here in 2 Corinthians 5, the apostle writes as a man physically old and you might think worn out, but he still has much to do. His desire is to honour and to obey the Lord no matter what, and he is ready for any amount of difficulty, rigours, and hostility against himself; he is willing to face persecution, and the effects of the weakness of the body. He will do all that Christ calls him to do, and what we find here is his most powerful incentive to holiness and service: ‘For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.’ It is about the certainty and the nature of the future of the soul.He starts with the failure of the body. The apostle Paul sees his body as a tent. The word in our King James Version is tabernacle, a tent. He knew about tents. His secondary profession was that of a tentmaker. All Jewish people had to have a trade to follow: even the intellectuals and the clergy had to have a trade to fall back on. Paul, though he was a great intellectual, was also a tent maker, and he pursued this trade, wherever he went, to earn his keep, that people should never think that he made money or gained from preaching the gospel to them. Why does he call it an earthly tent? Because it came from the earth, and it will return to the earth. We are to understand that is all it is – just particles out of the earth, and one day it will completely disintegrate and be gone. It is the present house of the soul, but it is a very temporary thing, like a tent, here for so many years, shorter or longer. Soon it will be ‘dissolved’ as our translation says, ‘loosened’ is the Greek. The apostle perhaps had in mind the loosening of the guys and suddenly the rigid canvas collapses. The final guy that gives it its tension is loosed and it collapses suddenly when you strike tent. This body is the home of the sin nature. It is not intrinsically evil but we are fallen and it is full of downward drives. The Christian will be so glad one day to be rid of it. It has an inherent love of the material and the earthly and the fleshly, but it is going to be loosed and suddenly collapse. This present body will be ended, life lost, no more consciousness on earth. No more love. No more movement in limb, no more seeing or hearing anything on earth. No more strength, no more knowledge on earth to be expressed. But God has provided a new home of the soul. ‘We have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens’, fashioned entirely by the power of God, an eternal home. Do these words apply to the resurrection body or to the state that awaits us immediately after death, known as the intermediate state? The apostle certainly speaks as though this is something that happens immediately at death, not at the Lord’s return. This was the view of Calvin and Reformed tradition right up to more recent times. The soul will be so accommodated after death so that it will not be found naked. Calvin said that the blessed condition of the soul after death is the commencement of this building, and the glory of the final resurrection is the consummation of it.