About two months ago, my wife Elisabeth and I were talking about a good friend who is battling cancer. The conversation turned toward the mysteries of life and questions about eternity. We decided to read 1 Corinthians 15 together. Wow. More on that in a moment.
Sometimes I think "life down here" is just short enough to feel really short, and just long enough for us to not pay much attention. The Bible says "teach us to number our days" with the implication that in so doing we will begin to have a proper perspective of it all. Hard to do. At certain times in life, the days seem to go by so fast that we hardly know where they went. To some degree then, it seems that we're wasting our days.
Remember when you were 10 years old, and fifty seemed inconceivable? Then in the blink of an eye it seems, fifty is here.
This makes it clearer to us that heaven is our home and earth isn't. But if we believe this, why do we plant our roots on earth so deep? Why do we work so hard to acquire and "get the goods" when it really is a short lived proposition? Why do we spend so much energy on our physical bodies - when they are only uniforms that we wear for a brief period of time?
In Corinthians, the apostle Paul refers to our bodies as "tents." Tents are temporary dwellings, places that shelter us only for a short time. We want to stay dry in our tent, but to furnish it out with a roof and an hvac system doesn't make much sense. It's not worth that investment, it's not made for that. But we seem quite intent on trying to make our tent permanent. The apostle Paul had no such concept.
When we pay so much attention to our body, we tend to pay little attention to our soul. This is unfortunate really, we're like investors who bet everything on a short term gain with no regard for the long term. C.S. Lewis said, "You do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body."
Yes - these bodies we have are a short term housing arrangement. A uniform for our earthly life. They don't last forever, but our souls do.
