Eternal Home

Paul made tents for a living, and that is worth knowing before you read the picture he uses here.

Paul knew the cloth, he knew what weather does to it, and he knew that a tent is something you put up expecting to take down again. He calls the body "our earthly house of this tabernacle," and tabernacle is the old word for a tent. "Dissolved" is the word for breaking camp: pulling up the poles, folding the cloth and moving on.

Against that tent he sets "a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." Each word is chosen to stand against the tent. A building lasts. It is "not made with hands," the same idea Jesus' accusers used against Him at His trial, when they claimed He would build a temple "made without hands." It is eternal, unlike a thing that wears out. And the verb is in the present: "we have." Paul never describes the building as still being got ready. He says it is already there.

Three verses later, Paul does not let it stay neat: "For we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened: not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon." He is not calm about dying. He does not want to be a soul without a body; he wants the better body put on. The groaning is in the text, just as loud as the confidence.

Maybe this year your knees told you something the calendar has not caught up with yet. Or a scan did, or watching a parent showed you the road a little early.

So which do you really fear, the tent coming down or being left without one? Paul answers that second fear right there. He groans "that mortality might be swallowed up of life," and he says God "hath given unto us the earnest of the Spirit." An earnest is a deposit, paid now as a pledge that the rest is coming. You will not be left without a home.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 57 is A Stream That Holds (Amos 5:24).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna