leaving controversy out of sight, solemnly weighs against each other
time and eternity, the seen and the unseen, and claims his inheritance
beyond? "Our light affliction, which is for the moment, worketh for us
more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory; while we look
not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not
seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which
are not seen are eternal." One can imagine that he was dictating quick
and eagerly as he began the sentence; he "crowds and hurries and
precipitates" the grand contrasts of which his mind is full.
Affliction in any case is outweighed by glory, but the affliction in
question is a light matter, the glory a great weight: the light
affliction is but momentary--it ends with death at the latest, it may
end in the coming of Jesus to anticipate death; the weight of glory is
eternal; and as if this were not enough, the light affliction which is
but for a moment works out for us the weight of glory which endures
for ever, "in excess and to excess," in a way above conception, to a
degree above conception: it works out for us the things which eye hath
not seen, nor ear heard, nor man's heart conceived, "all that God has
prepared for them that love Him" (1 Cor. ii. 9). If Paul spoke fast
and with beating heart as he crowded all this into two brief lines, we
can well believe that the pressure was relaxed, and that the pen moved
more steadily and slowly over the contemplative words that follow:
"while we look not to the things which are seen, but to the things
which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal, but
the things which are not seen are eternal." This sentence is sometimes
translated conditionally: "provided we look," etc. This is legitimate,
but unnecessary. The Apostle is speaking, in the first instance, of
himself, and the looking is taken for granted. The look is not merely
equivalent to vision; it means that the unseen is the goal of him who
looks. The eye is to be directed to it, not as an indifferent object,
but as a mark to aim at, an end to attain. This observation goes some
way to limit the application of the whole passage. The contrast of
things seen and things unseen is sometimes taken in a latitude which
deprives it of much of its force: psychology and metaphysics are
dragged in to define and to confuse the Apostle's thought. But
everything here is practical. The things seen are to all intents and
purposes that tempest-tossed life of which St. Paul has been speaking,
that daily dying, that pressure, perplexity, persecution, and
downcasting, which are for the present his lot. To these he does not
look: in comparison with that to which he does look, these are a light
and momentary affliction which is not worth a thought. Similarly, the
things unseen are not everything, indefinitely, which is invisible; to
all intents and purposes they are the glory of Christ. It is on this
the Apostle's eye is fixed, this which is his goal. The stormy life,
even when most is made of its storms, passes; but Christ's glory can
never pass. It is infinite, inconceivable, eternal. There is an
inheritance in it for all who keep their eyes upon it, and, sustained
by a hope so high, bear the daily death of a life like Paul's as a
light and momentary affliction. The connexion between the two is so
close that the one is said to work for us the other. By divine
appointment they are united; fellowship with Jesus is fellowship all
through--in the daily dying, which soon has done its worst, and then
in the endless life. We may say, if we please, that the glory is the
reward of the suffering; it would be truer to say that it was its
compensation, truer still that it was its fruit. There is a vital
connexion between them, but no one can imagine he is reading Paul's
thought who should find here the idea that the trivial service of man
can make God his debtor for so vast a sum. The excellency of the power
which raises the earthen vessel to this height of faith, hope, and
inspiration is itself God's, and God's alone.
Distrust of the supernatural, insistence on the present and the
practical, and the pride of a self-styled common sense, have done much
to rob modern Christianity of this vast horizon, to blind it to this
heavenly vision. But wherever the life of Jesus is being manifested in
mortal flesh--wherever in His service and for His sake men and women
die daily, wearing out nature, but with spirit ceaselessly
renewed--there the unseen becomes real again. Such people know that
what they do is not for one dead, but for One who lives; they know
that the daily inspirations they receive, the hopes, the deliverances,
are wrought in them, not by themselves, but by One who has all power
in heaven and on earth. The things that are unseen and eternal stand
out as what they are in relation to lives like these; to other lives,
they have no relation at all. A worldly and selfish career does not
work out an exceeding and eternal weight of glory, and therefore to
the worldly and selfish man heaven is for ever an unpractical,
incredible thing. But it not only comes out in its brightness, it
comes out as a mighty inspiration and support, to every one who bears
about in his body the dying of Jesus; as he fastens his eye upon it,
he takes heart anew, and in spite of daily dying "faints not."
FOOTNOTES:
[40] Σὺν Ἰησοῦ is the true reading: sameness of kind is meant, not of
time.
[41] Διὰ τῶν πλειόνων is construed in the R.V. with πλεονάσασα (so
Meyer): De Wette takes it as above; in the A.V. the διὰ is made to
govern τὴν εὐχαριστίαν. There is no grammatical decision certain here.
[42] The Hebrew Psalm cxvi. 10 is at this precise point practically
unintelligible, but that does not justify any one in saying that the
fine thought of the Apostle is utterly foreign to the original text.
The open confession of God, as a duty of faith, pervades the psalm
from this point to the end (the verses beginning Ἐπίστευσα διὸ ἐλάλησα
make a psalm by themselves in the LXX.).
XIII
_THE CHRISTIAN HOPE_
"For we know that if the earthly house of our tabernacle be
dissolved, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands,
eternal, in the heavens. For verily in this we groan, longing to be
clothed upon with our habitation which is from heaven: if so be that
being clothed we shall not be found naked. For indeed we that are in
this tabernacle do groan, being burdened; not for that we would be
unclothed, but that we would be clothed upon, that what is mortal
may be swallowed up of life. Now He that wrought us for this very
thing is God, who gave unto us the earnest of the Spirit. Being
therefore always of good courage, and knowing that, whilst we are at
home in the body, we are absent from the Lord (for we walk by faith,
not by sight); we are of good courage, I say, and are willing rather
to be absent from the body, and to be at home with the Lord.
Wherefore also we make it our aim, whether at home or absent, to be
well-pleasing unto Him. For we must all be made manifest before the
judgment-seat of Christ; that each one may receive the things _done_
in the body, according to what he hath done, whether _it be_ good or
bad."--2 COR. v. 1-10 (R.V.).
That outlook on the future, which at the close of chap. iv. is presented
in the most general terms, is here carried out by the Apostle into more
definite detail. The passage is one of the most difficult in his
writings, and has received the most various interpretations; yet the
first impression it leaves on a simple reader is probably as near the
truth as the subtlest ingenuity of exegesis. It is indeed to such first
impressions that one often returns when the mind has ceased to sway this
way and that under the impact of conflicting arguments.
The Apostle has been speaking about his life as a daily dying, and in
the first verse of this chapter he looks at the possibility that this
dying may be consummated in death. It is only a possibility, for to
the end of his life it was always conceivable that Christ might come,
and forestall the last enemy. Still, it _is_ a possibility; the
earthly house of our tabernacle may be dissolved; the tent in which we
live may be taken down. With what hope does the Apostle confront such
a contingency? "If this befall us," he says, "we have a building from
God, a house not made with hands, eternal, in the heavens." Every word
here points the contrast between this new house and the old one, and
points it in favour of the new. The old was a tent; the new is a
building: the old, though not literally made with hands, had many of
the qualities and defects of manufactured articles; the new is God's
work and God's gift: the old was perishable; the new is eternal. When
Paul says we have this house _in the heavens_, it is plain that it is
not heaven itself; it is a new body which replaces and surpasses the
old. It is in the heavens in the sense that it is God's gift; it is
something which He has for us where He is, and which we shall wear
there. "We have it" means "it is ours"; any more precise definition
must be justified on grounds extraneous to the text.
The second verse brings us to one of the ambiguities of the passage.
"For verily," our R.V. reads, "in this we groan, longing to be clothed
upon with our habitation which is from heaven." The meaning which the
English reader finds in the words "in this we groan" is in all
probability "in our present body we groan." This is also the meaning
defended by Meyer, and by many scholars. But it cannot be denied that
ἐν τούτῳ does not naturally refer to ἡ ἐπίγειος ἡμῶν οἰκία τοῦ
σκήνους. If it means "in this body," it must be attached specially to
σκήνους, and σκήνους is only a subordinate word in the clause.
Elsewhere in the New Testament ἐν τούτῳ means "on this account," or
"for this reason" (see 1 Cor. iv. 4; John xvi. 30: Ἐν τούτῳ πιστεύομεν
ὅτι ἀπὸ Θεοῦ ἐξῆλθες), and I prefer to take it in this sense here:
"For this cause--_i.e._, because we are the heirs of such a hope--we
groan, longing to be clothed upon with our habitation which is from
heaven." If Paul had no hope, he would not sigh for the future; but
the very longing which pressed the sighs from his bosom became itself
a witness to the glory which awaited him. The same argument, it has
often been pointed out, is found in Rom. viii. 19 ff. The earnest
expectation of the creation, waiting for the manifestation of the sons
of God, is evidence that this manifestation will in due time take
place. The spiritual instincts are prophetic. They have not been
implanted in the soul by God only to be disappointed. It is of the
longing hope of immortality--that very hope which is in question
here--that Jesus says: "If it were not so, I would have told you."
The third verse states the great gain which lies in the fulfilment of
this hope: "Since, of course, being clothed [with this new body], we
shall not be found naked [_i.e._, without any body]." I cannot think,
especially looking on to ver. 4, that these two verses (2 and 3) mean
anything else than that Paul longs for Christ to come before death. If
Christ comes first, the Apostle will receive the new body by the
transformation, instead of the putting off, of the old; he will, so to
speak, put it on _above_ the old ἐπενδύσασθαι; he will be spared the
shuddering fear of dying; he will not know what it is to have the old
tent taken down, and to be left houseless and naked. We do not need to
investigate the opinions of the Hebrews or the Greeks about the
condition of souls in Hades in order to understand these words; the
conception, figurative as it is, carries its own meaning and
impression to every one. It is reiterated, rather than proved, in the
fourth verse:[43] "For we who are in the tabernacle groan also, being
burdened, in that our will is not to be unclothed, but to be clothed
upon, that what is mortal may be swallowed up of life." It is natural
to take βαρούμενοι ("being burdened") as referring to the weight of
care and suffering by which men are oppressed while in the body; but
here also, as in the similar case of ver. 2, the proper reference of
the word is forward. What oppresses Paul, and makes him sigh, is the
intensity of his desire to escape "being unclothed," his immense
longing to see Jesus come, and, instead of passing through the
terrific experience of death, to have the corruptible put on
incorruption, and the mortal put on immortality, without that trial.
This seems plain enough, but we must remember that the confidence
which Paul has been expressing in the first verse is meant to meet the
very case in which this desire is _not_ gratified, the case in which
death _has_ to be encountered, and the tabernacle taken down. "_If_
this should befall us," he says, "we have another body awaiting us,
far better than that which we leave, and hence we are confident." The
confidence which this hope inspires would naturally, we think, be most
perfect, if in the very act of dissolution the new body were assumed;
if death were the initial stage in the transformation scene in which
an that is mortal is swallowed up by life; if it were, not the
ushering of the Christian into a condition of "nakedness," which,
temporary though it be, is a mere blank to the mind and imagination,
but his admission to celestial life; if "to be absent from the body"
were immediately, and in the fullest sense of the words, the same
thing as "to be at home with the Lord." This is, in point of fact, the
sense in which the passage is understood by a good many scholars, and
those who read it so find in it a decisive turning-point in the
Apostle's teaching on the last things. In the First Epistle to the
Thessalonians, they say, and indeed in the First to the Corinthians
also, Paul's eschatology was still essentially Jewish. The Christian
dead are ὁι κοιμώμενοι, or ὁι κοιμηθέντες ("those that sleep");
nothing definite is said of their condition; only it is implied that
they do not get the incorruptible body till Jesus comes again and
raises them from the dead. In other words, those who die before the
Parousia have the soul-chilling prospect of an unknown term of
"nakedness." Here this terror is dispelled by the new revelation made
to the Apostle, or the new insight to which he has attained: there is
no longer any such interval between death and glory; the heavenly body
is assumed at once; the state called κοιμᾶσθαι ("being asleep")
vanishes from the future. Sabatier and Schmiedel, who adopt this view,
draw extreme consequences from it. It marks an advance, according to
Schmiedel, of the highest importance. The religious postulate of an
uninterrupted communion of life with Christ, violated by the
conception of a κοιμᾶσθαι, or falling asleep, is satisfied; Christ's
descent from heaven, and a simultaneous resurrection and judgment,
become superfluous; judgment is transferred to the moment of death,
or rather to the process of development during life on earth; and,
finally, the place of eternal blessedness passes from earth (the
Jewish and early Christian opinion, probably shared by Paul, as he
gives no indication of the contrary) to heaven. All this, it is
further pointed out, is an approximation, more or less close, to the
Greek doctrine of the immortality of the soul, and may even have been
excogitated in part under its influence; and it is at the same time a
half-way house between the Pharisaic eschatology of First
Thessalonians and the perfected Christian doctrine of a passage like
John v. 24: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth My word,
and believeth Him that sent Me, hath eternal life, and cometh not into
judgment, but hath passed out of death into life."
There is no objection to be made in principle to the idea that the
Apostle's outlook on the future was subject to modification--that he
was capable of attaining, or even did attain, a deeper insight, with
experience, into the connexion between that which is and that which is
to come. But it is surely somewhat against the above estimate of the
alleged change here that Paul himself seems to have been quite
unconscious of it. He was not a man whose mind wrought at unawares,
and who passed unwittingly from one standpoint to another. He was
nothing if not reflective. According to Sabatier and Schmiedel, he had
made a revolutionary change in his opinions--a change so vast that on
account of it Sabatier reckons this Epistle, and especially this
passage, the most important in all his writings for the comprehension
of his theological development; and yet, side by side with the new
revolutionary ideas, uttered literally in the same breath with them,
we find the old standing undisturbed. The simultaneous resurrection
and judgment, according to Schmiedel, should be impossible now; but in
chap. iv. 14 the resurrection appears precisely as in Thessalonians
and in chap. v. 10 the judgment, precisely as in all his Epistles from
the first to the last. As for the inconsistency between going to be at
home with the Lord and the Lord's coming, it also recurs in later
years: Paul writes to the Philippians that he has a desire to depart
and to be with Christ; and in the same letter, that the Lord is at
hand, and that we wait for the Saviour from heaven. Probably the
misleading idea in the study of the whole subject has been the
assumption that the κοιμώμενοι--the dead _in Christ_--were in some
dismal, dreary condition which could fairly be described as
"nakedness." There is not a word in the New Testament which favours
this idea. Where we see men die in faith, we see something quite
different. "_To-day_ shalt thou be with Me in Paradise." "Lord Jesus,
receive my spirit." "I saw the souls of them which had been slain for
the Word of God ... and there was given them, to each one, a white
robe." When Paul speaks of those who have fallen asleep, in First
Thessalonians, it is with the express intention of showing that those
who survive to the Parousia have no advantage over them. "Jesus Christ
died for us," he writes (1 Thess. v. 10), "that, whether we wake or
sleep, we may live together with Him." And he uses one most expressive
word in a similar connexion (1 Thess. iv. 14): "Them also that sleep
in Jesus will God _bring_ [ἄξει] with Him." _Suave verbum_, says
Bengel: _dicitur de viventibus_. May we not say with equal cogency,
not only "de viventibus," but "de viventibus _cum Iesu_"? Those who
are asleep are with Him; they are in blessedness with Him; what their
mode of existence is it may be impossible for us to conceive, but it
is certainly not a thing to shrink from with horror. The taking down
of the old tent in which we live here _is_ a thing from which one
cannot but shrink, and that is why Paul would rather have Christ come,
and be saved the pain and fear of dying. With death in view he
mentions the new body as the ground of his confidence, because it is
the final realisation of the Christian hope, the crown of redemption
(Rom. viii. 23). But he does not mean to say that, unless the new body
were granted in the very instant of dying, death would usher him into
an appalling void, and separate him from Christ. This assumption, on
which the interpretation of Sabatier and Schmiedel rests, is entirely
groundless, and therefore that interpretation, in spite of a
superficial plausibility, is to be decidedly rejected. It is to be
rejected all the more when we are invited to see the occasion which
produced Paul's supposed change of opinion in the danger which he had
lately incurred in Asia (chap. i. 8-10). Paul, we are to imagine, who
had always been confident that he would live to see the Parousia, had
come to very close quarters with death, and this experience
constrained him to seek in his religion a hope and consolation more
adequate to the terribleness of death than any he had yet conceived.
Hence the mighty advance explained above. But is it not absurd to say
that a man, whose life was constantly in peril, had never thought of
death till this time? Can any one seriously believe that, as Sabatier
puts it, "the image of death, with which the Apostle had not hitherto
concerned himself, [here] enters for the first time within the scope
of his doctrine"? Can any one who knows the kind of man Paul was
deliberately suggest that fear and self-pity conferred on him an
enlargement of spiritual vision which no sympathy for bereaved
disciples, and no sense of fellowship with those who had fallen asleep
in Jesus, availed to bestow? Believe this who will, it seems utterly
incredible to me. The passage says nothing inconsistent with
Thessalonians, or First Corinthians, or Philippians, or Second
Timothy, about the last things: it expresses in a special situation
the constant Christian faith and hope--"the redemption of the body";
_that_ is the possession of the believer ἔχομεν; it is ours; and the
Apostle is not concerned to fix the moment of time at which hope
becomes sight. "Come what will," he says, "come death itself, _this_
is ours; and because it is ours, though we dread the possible
necessity of having to strip off the old body, and would fain escape
it, we do not allow it to dismay us."
The Apostle cannot look to the end of the Christian hope without
referring to its condition and guarantee. "He that wrought us for this
very thing is God, who gave us the earnest of the Spirit." The future
is never considered in the New Testament in a speculative fashion;
nothing could be less like an apostle than to discuss the immortality
of the soul. The question of life beyond death is for Paul not a
metaphysical but a Christian question; the pledge of anything worth
the name of life is not the inherent constitution of human nature, but
the possession of the Divine Spirit. Without the Spirit, Paul could
have had no such certainty, no such triumphant hope, as he had;
without the Spirit there can be no such certainty yet. Hence it is
idle to criticise the Christian hope on purely speculative grounds,
and as idle to try on such grounds to establish it. That hope is of a
piece with the experience which comes when the Spirit of Him who
raised up Christ from the dead dwells in us, and apart from this
experience it cannot even be understood. But to say that there is no
eternal life except in Christ is not to accept what is called
"conditional immortality"; it is only to accept conditional glory.
The fifth verse marks a pause: in the three which follow Paul
describes the mood in which, possessed of the Christian hope, he
confronts all the conditions of the present and the alternatives of
the future. "We are of good courage at all times," he says. "We know
that while we are at home in the body we are away from home as far as
the Lord is concerned--at a distance from Him." This does not mean
that fellowship is broken, or that the soul is separated from the love
of Christ; it only means that earth is not heaven, and that Paul is
painfully conscious of the fact. This is what is proved by ver. 7: We
are absent from the Lord, our true home, "for in this world we are
walking through the realm of faith, not through that of actual
appearance."[44] There _is_ a world, a mode of existence, to which
Paul looks forward, which is one of actual appearance; he will be in
Christ's presence there, and see Him face to face (1 Cor. xiii. 12).
But the world through which his course lies meanwhile is _not_ that
world of immediate presence and manifestation; on the contrary, it is
a world of faith, which realises that future world of manifestation
only by a strong spiritual conviction; it is through a faith-land that
Paul's journey leads him. All along the way his faith keeps him in
good heart; nay, when he thinks of all that it ensures, of all that
is guaranteed by the Spirit, he is willing rather to be absent from
the body, and to be at home with the Lord.
"For, ah! the Master is so fair,
His smile so sweet on banished men,
That they who meet it unaware
Can never turn to earth again;
And they who see Him risen afar,
At God's right hand to welcome them,
Forgetful stand of home and land,
Desiring fair Jerusalem."