I haven’t camped in years, but I love tent-camping! In spite of cold and rain, I do love it; but it’s sure nice to get home!
Interestingly, Scripture frequently uses tents as images of the human body. Old man Peter, in 2 Peter 1:13-14, speaks of soon putting aside his tent (not “body” as the ESV mistranslates); and John 1:14 says (concerning Jesus), “The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us [more literally, ‘pitched his tent among us’].” Which is weird, since the Jews had a negative history with tents! After leaving Egypt, the Hebrews spent forty years in the wilderness…living in tents! They wanted to be “home” in the Promised Land. Yet “tent” became symbolic of the body. Why?
Our human form is very tent-like: frail, easily damaged and anything but permanent, due to our inevitable death. We long to go “home”, to get rid of these failing tents, to be free from these pain-prone bodies!
Yet this miserable state wasn’t God’s original intention. Adam and Eve were created never to die: our spirits weren’t meant to be divorced from our bodies. Our body was created not to be a tent but a permanent home!
Amputation is required when something goes horribly wrongwith a limb. “Death” has entered that limb. Likewise, something has gone terribly wrong with a previously perfect world: sin and death entered through our rebellion against God; and at our death, body and spirit are separated. That’s why we grieve when someone dies: death, in terms of God’s original creation, is unnatural! This wasn’t supposed to happen!
A person who’s living in a tent doesn’t really want to give up that tent….if it means having no other shelter! He wants a home, not homelessness! Pain (emotional or physical) makes us want to leave our body; but what we really want is a better home, a better body, a home without sin, death and decay.
The apostle Paul has good news:
We know that if the tent, which is our earthly home, is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent, we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling…While we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened—not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. (2 Corinthians 5:1-4)
He’s talking about the resurrection body, a home to replace the tent. Paul doesn’t want to be “unclothed” (bodiless); he wants a new and improved body! For the Christian, dying and being “away from the body and at home with the Lord” (v. 8) is good; but our final goal is being free from death in a new resurrected body. Death swallows up everything; it even swallowed up Jesus. But then Jesus physically rose, and swallowed up death! And the same applies to us when Jesus returns:
If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortalbodies through his Spirit who dwells in you. (Romans 8:11)
Yes, tent-camping can be great; but give me a home, where death and sin don’t roam, and the skies aren’t cloudy all day!
Come quickly, Lord Jesus!
~ Andrew
