This week's Bible study will be 2nd Corinthians chapter 5, verses 1-10

Home Is Where The Heart Is

This week we will move on to 2^nd Corinthians chapter 5. We'll be breaking this chapter into two parts since this is one of the deepest books in Second Corinthians. So let's go directly to the Word as we continue our study of the apostle Paul's letters to the early churches in their order of appearance in the New Testament, beginning at verse 1.

“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. 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, guaranteeing what is to come.” (2 Cor. 5, verses 1-5, NIV)

Here we see a clear comparison of a tent to a human body. You go camping, you put up the tent, and when the trip is over, you take it back down again. I agree with Paul's analogy. You put up the tent that your spirit, or your soul, dwells in, which is your physical body. You leave the tent up for the duration of the camping trip we call life until, some 70+ years later if we're both lucky and wise, the trip is over and we go back home, except that 'home' is eternal life with the Lord. Jesus said to his apostles, “I go and prepare a place for you. In my Father's house there are many mansions...”, and this is exactly what Paul is referring to in the first couple of verses.

Then Paul writes something else in the very next sentence that again hearkens back to Christ and His ministry. He wrote, “Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked.” Paul was referring to what is now a passage in the gospel of Matthew in chapter 22 known as 'The Parable of the Wedding Feast'. It starts at verse one, but I want to go down to verses 11-14, which read as follows: “But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing wedding clothes. 'Friend', he asked, 'how did you get in here without wedding clothes?' The man was speechless. Then the king told the attendants, 'Tie him hand and foot and throw him outside into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.' For many are invited, but few are chosen.” Since the Bible as we know it today did not yet exist, Paul's referral to one of Jesus' parables was based on what he had heard from the original surviving apostles.

No doubt this occurred during the time when Paul received his sight back after being struck down on the road to Damascus in the book of Acts, at the very beginning of his ministry. At any rate, I think it's more than just incidental that Paul was quoting Christ in this passage. Like Paul, we too are blind until we receive Jesus into our hearts. But when we let Him in, we acquire a Spiritual vision that we could not have had previously without Him. God, Paul writes, has made us for this very purpose. Let us now continue at verse 6.

“Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away in the Lord. We live by faith, not by sight. We are confidant, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So we make it our goal to please Him, whether we are at home in the body or away from it. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive what is due him for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.” (2 Cor. 5, verses 6-10, NIV)

Although we are all currently “at home in the body”, as the apostle Paul put it, he – and all of us who are followers of Jesus – would rather be “away from the body and at home with the Lord”. If we become too comfortable and complacent while in our physical bodies, we can lose sight of the Spiritual aspects of life and drift away from God. That's why Paul wrote in the very next sentence that “we walk by faith and not by sight”. Do not rely on only what you can see, touch and feel, nor rely only on what you hear, because we can be deceived by our human perception. Walk by the faith in Jesus that will save and protect you, and do not trust your feelings or your intellect, judging only by what you can see and touch. That way, even when we are “at home in the body”, we are maintaining a connection with the Holy Spirit through Jesus Christ our Lord, and we “make it our goal to please Him”. It is in our best interest to do all these things since we will all have to stand before the judgment seat of Christ when the end finally comes and give an account of ourselves and how we lived our lives, with special emphasis on what we did for others from within and outside of our families, particularly strangers.

It would be in all our best interest to not only begin learning how to better live our lives this way, but to do so with the understanding that living our lives this way brings us closer to Christ as it prepares us for eternal life with Him forever in Heaven, a place where time as we know it stands still. Only then will we be “at home in the Lord”, and home with the Lord is the place we are intended to be when our physical lives are over. That does not include those who do not inherit eternal life through Jesus Christ. Those who refuse to believe, together with the majority of the religious establishment of its time, will be spending eternity in hell instead, another place where we know time also stands still. And so we find ourselves faced with a stark choice here in the early 21^st century, as the age of the American Empire is winding down while the highly vaunted capitalist economic system continues on the path to self-destruction. Will we place our faith in only what we can see around us, or do we place our faith in that which is unseen, relying only on things that come directly from God for our sustenance? We may as well go ahead and rely on God, because in the end He is going to be the only thing left standing. The dollar may be devalued, the price of gold, silver, copper and other semi-precious metals may crash, and the stock market may evaporate into the same thin air from which it was conceived more than 200 years ago. In a worst case scenario, World War 3 could even break out at any time in the Middle East. But God will still be on His throne, and Jesus will still be seated at His right hand, for all eternity. Nothing about Him has changed because He is the same today, tomorrow and forever.