2 Corinthians 5

There is something to the simplicity of the gospel that the messengers of Christ need to consider, We are too easily moved away from the facts and meaning of the cross and resurrection of Christ. Those who have preached for years may begin to think that they have already said what needs to be said about Jesus. In order to please their audiences they may begin to turn to other topics that they imagine to be of more practical concern to their hearers. Before long the entire character of the ministry begins to shift away from God, seeking a more intriguing focus somehow in man.

We do have something to say about man that is very interesting, but we discover it only by first seeing the truth of the Son of God. What we discover about ourselves in light of Christ, is that when our earthly tent (our body) is destroyed, there is a new building from God for us that is eternal in the heavens.

Books like Ecclesiastes are a wonderful exploration of the human condition in our brief life under the sun. In the thoughts of Solomon recorded for our consideration, we hear the groans of one who searched out things about life, and continually ran into the vanity, or fleeting nature, of life here and now after sin and death have entered into the world. Now our hearts yearn for eternity, for God has put eternity somehow within us in our immortal souls. We long to put on our heavenly dwellings.

Only in God can we find something that lasts. We do not long for some imagined Nirvana of extinction or nothingness. We long for the eternal substance of heavenly life upon a renewed earth. We want to be further clothed in a better body, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. God has prepared us for this, and has given us the Holy Spirit, as a guarantee of the new life that is coming for us.

All of this good teaching is the best news of humanity, but we can never find it without Christ, the Son of God. He was in the body, but then His body was given up for us when He laid it down as a sacrifice to satisfy divine justice in His death. He was away from that body for three days, and He was with the Lord, as He told the thief on the cross, “Today you will be with me in Paradise.” Then He took up that body again in a great act of new creation. We now are in the body, but the day may soon come when we are away from these exact bodies, and we will be with the Lord. As He is, we shall be, for we will see Him. These things we know now, not by sight, but by faith. When faith is based on God’s Word it is better than our current eyesight. Our eyes can be too easily deceived, but God’s Word is sure and true. Therefore we have courage.

As we begin each day, we do not know where that day will end. We will be at home with the Lord by the end of the day? That would be wonderful, but whether we stay or go, we trust the Lord, and make it our aim to please Him in all things. One day we will stand before the judgment seat of Christ, and then it will be very evident that our labor in the Lord was not in vain. The deeds of our lives, whether good or evil, will make a difference in heaven, though our salvation itself could only come through the deeds of our Redeemer.

In all of our godly decision-making and sacrificial living in the present hour, we are persuaded that the proper perspective for holy living is a heavenly one. We are to keep the fact of the coming day of the Lord before our hearts always, and we are to live for the glory of God and the good of His family. In this we are governed by the prime directive of Christianity, the love of Christ, which Paul says controls the church. Here the message of love from First Corinthians and the message of the apostolic ministry from Second Corinthians come together. The true ministry preaches, teaches, and lives toward this end: that the Lord’s beloved would be controlled by the love of Christ, and that we would therefore abound in true gospel good works.

What is this love of Christ that has captivated our hearts? One died for all, therefore all have died to self in the One that we might no longer live for self but for him who died for our sake and was raised from the dead as the Man of the new creation. We keep this truth ever before us, lest we look at people according to the way of the old man, only seeing the sin and the trouble. If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; he has the life of the resurrection Man in him.

Therefore we are able to move forward with a word of reconciliation from our King. The simplicity of the gospel is in our hearts and on our lips. God made Him who knew no sin, Jesus, to be a sin offering for us, a sin offering covered with our sin, so that we might become counted as the righteousness of Christ in Him. We are no longer viewed as far-off sinners, but as reconciled sons of God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

This is the most important truth of the Christian faith. Because of the truth of the cross of Christ, we have come to believe that something old and decaying within us has passed away, and that something new and full of life has been born in the resurrection of our Lord. This is what we have heard from those who have proclaimed the truth to us as ambassadors of Christ, and this is what we have believed. This is what we live, however imperfectly and inconsistently, and this our single message of hope to the world.