As he continues his written contemplation of the renewal and restoration that is implied by the Gospel and the Resurrection, Paul writes, “Now the one who prepared us for this very purpose is God” (2 Corinthians 5:5a). This purpose, by way of reiteration, is being clothed with a “heavenly dwelling,” a renewed body that is suited for an existence in the to-be-consummated kingdom of heaven on earth. This purpose is to live beyond despair, instead, living in the light of that “eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison” (4:17b).
How has God prepared His people for this? Paul says that we are prepared because He “gave us the Spirit as a down payment” (5:5b). That is, the activity of the Holy Spirit, gifting us with faith and causing us to believe in the Gospel and the renewed life to come, is the down payment, or guarantee, of God accomplishing a final redemption through a thorough and complete rescue from the power of death (spiritually and physically). In this state of belief, as we believe in the very thing that is the power of God unto salvation, we can trust that we experience a foretaste of the power of the Resurrection to come. Our union with Christ allows us to share in the power of an indestructible, eternal life. That power, of course, is the same power, by the same Spirit, that raised Christ from the dead, again echoing the eighth chapter of Romans, reminding us that God “will also make your mortal bodies alive through His Spirit Who lives in you” (8:11b). Yes, the activity of the Holy Spirit, by which God brings us into His covenant, is what serves as a reminder that God has a complete work to do for all of His anointed ones. God will accomplish for His people what He accomplished for Jesus---a physical Resurrection into a world that is drastically changed by the presence of His power. In this time and in this world, that power operates as a down payment, but we trust in the full payment to come.
The Apostle Paul firmly believes that “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; what is old has passed away---look, what is new has come” (5:17). Though we know that our physical bodies are still subject to corruption, to disease, to decay, and yes, to death, Paul makes this declaration. This is what it means to “live by faith, not by sight” (5:7). This is a looking forward to our blessed hope. Paul stands firm on his insistence that the new creation, because of Christ, is something more than merely spiritual. God did not make a deal with death that would allow the grave to keep the bodies of His people, while God gets the souls. That would mean that Christ’s work was incomplete. In light of that, Paul insists that it will be physical, and that both God’s people and God’s creation groans for it. In the midst of any and all evidence to the contrary, as death was a daily experience for those that were putting their faith in Jesus, Paul allows his mind to flee to the refuge of our great hope, with a reminder that “we are not looking at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen. For what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal” (4:18).
Because this was his firmly entrenched belief, rooted in a faith that he believed to have been gifted by God, through His Spirit, because of Jesus’ Resurrection, Paul was constrained to preach this message of the Gospel. Because he actually believed that there was a power of God at work, and because he actually believed that the Holy Spirit could work in hearts and minds and lives in order to shape men and women into the image that God desired them to bear, he writes, “Therefore, because we know the fear of the Lord, we try to persuade people” (5:11a). Paul knew that the message of the Gospel was to be spread through preaching. More than that, he knew that the persuasiveness was to be found in the message itself. Why? Well, because Paul did not give lip service to God’s power and the work of the Holy Spirit, but as has been said, he firmly believed that the Gospel itself was the power of God.
The Apostle Paul stood in reverential awe (fear) at what God had done, was doing, and would do through Christ, His Resurrection, and through the preaching of the message. “Therefore,” Paul goes on to write, “we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making His plea through us” (5:20a). Paul knew that God was not making His plea through those that carried the message, but that the message of power made its own plea. Paul, knowing that he himself had undergone such a radical transformation, had a keen understanding of the power of the testimony of Jesus as Lord. He knew himself to be a new creation in which the old had passed away. He believed in a God that was faithful to His covenant promises, so the fifth chapter closes with Paul writing about Jesus, saying that “in Him we would become the righteousness of God” (5:21b). He knew that in union with Christ, carrying His Gospel message into the world, believers themselves become the manifestation of God’s covenant faithfulness, and the source of God’s blessing of restoration and renewal for the world.
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