2 Corinthians 5:1-10 Pastor Nathan P. Kassulke
“An Eternal House”
Build on the Rock Summer Series 15 September 9, 2018
Fifteen weeks ago we began this summer worship series by listening to Christ’s encouragement to build on the rock. We looked at the way he encouraged his disciples to hear God’s Word and to put it into practice—that this was like building on a solid foundation of rock rather than building on sand. And in the weeks since, we have spoken about many different buildings. We’ve talked about buildings that were begun but never finished, we’ve talked about buildings that people could think about building. We’ve talked about the temple being built in Jerusalem twice. And we’ve even talked about buildings in a more figurative sense, buildings like that of the Christian Church. Throughout our whole summer worship series, the lessons that we have learned have been connected to each other, to the good news of Jesus Christ, and very directly to the last lesson we are discussing as part of that series, a lesson about eternity. It is hopefully obvious, but worth pointing out anyway, that all of the physical buildings we have spoken about as part of this series have been destroyed. You can’t travel around the world to find the foundation of the Tower of Babel. You can’t go to Jerusalem to see the Temple, even though you can find there some very ancient remnants of the area that surrounded the Temple. Buildings like these have long since been torn down and destroyed. Sure, we can go many places in the world and view buildings with long histories and incredible significance, but the fact is that we live in a world where things simply do not last forever. Buildings that last a long time do so because they are maintained and treated carefully to extend their lives. And even with that sort of effort and care, they will eventually be gone. While that is true of the physical buildings, we have also spoken about what we might call spiritual buildings. And God’s promise to us is that these buildings last forever. The foremost example of this, of course, is the building we spoke about last week, a spiritual house built up of living stones. As God calls people to faith in Jesus as their Savior, he forms them into this spiritual house. We are connected to Christians throughout the world and throughout history because of what God has done for us. This week’s lesson, the final one of our summer series, comes from Paul’s second letter to the Christians in the city of Corinth, and it invites us to remember that this spiritual house lasts forever. So we can look at our own individual lives, or we can look collectively at the Christians around us, and we can be comforted to know that God builds us an eternal house. One of the lessons that we learn from these words of God is that we need the eternal house that God builds. Saying it a different way, what we have now is not permanent. That is an easy truth to say. It is an easy truth to agree with, but it is not always an easy truth to really take to heart. Paul begins this section by writing, “For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed…” He compares our earthly existence to living in a tent. Tents are temporary. We use them on vacation or for a getaway. We use them for a short time. And then we return to our houses and the firm walls and comforts that they offer to us. That is this life. It is not permanent. It is a tent, and it will be destroyed. The Corinthians to whom Paul first wrote these words probably had a different perspective on this than we do. They were actively being persecuted. They were facing physical consequences for being Christians. People like Paul who brought God’s Word to them were routinely beaten and abused. I can only imagine that when Paul wrote to them about their earthly tents being destroyed that they might have thought about these hardships. They could easily agree that at any point their earthly lives could be threatened. But we don’t always think that way, do we? Persecution of that sort doesn’t happen to us, it happens to people far away and out of our sight. Even death comes to us in our loved ones in a different way than it once did. That is not to say that death has changed, but our experience of it has. At many, perhaps most, times in history, people dealt with death among their extended families and in their neighborhoods in a much more close and visible way. Perhaps a grandmother or grandfather would be living in the same