Renewed (part 2)

In the renewal, what the believer receives from the covenant God will be enduring, rather than temporary.  As Paul insists, it will be like a building or a house, as opposed to a tent (Temple imagery at play here?).  It is a house not built by human hands, in that it is not something that is or can be produced through the course of nature.  It requires the action of the Creator God.  It requires a great transformation.  It requires the application of God’s power in the same way that the body of the Lord Jesus Christ was transformed from a tent that could be dismantled, to a building that would endure.  His body was transformed into a form that would be eternal, and more than that, would be suited for the kingdom of heaven, which has been inaugurated here in this world, and which will ultimately be consummated here in this world when the Christ finally ushers in the completion of God’s kingdom. 

This is what the believer is to be expecting because of union with Christ.  The believer has a taste of it day by day when he or she experiences God’s power flows through them to deal with the effects of sin that is to be found all around them.  As the body of the Christ was transformed by the delivery of Resurrection power, so too are believers transformed (present and future) into the image that the Creator God would have them to bear day by day.  Indeed, those that live in an allegiance to Jesus will be transformed by that same Resurrection power, so as to be provided with a body, a building from God, that will be suited for His glorious and eternal new creation.      

As Paul moves on to the second verse of the chapter, he causes his hearers to encounter a powerful and interesting word that he uses to great effect elsewhere in his writings.  It is said, “For in this earthly house we groan, because we desire to put on our heavenly dwelling” (2 Corinthians 5:2).  Upon reading the word “groan,” one cannot help but be forced to contemplate the eighth chapter of Romans, where Paul writes, “For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers together until now.  Not only this, but we ourselves also, who have the first-fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we eagerly await our adoption, the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:22-23). 

In both letters, the groaning is linked, while also calling to mind the groaning of Israel in Egypt and the response of their God to that groaning, which was to intervene to provide deliverance.  Just as the creation groans in anticipation of being “set free from the bondage of decay into the glorious freedom of God’s children” (Romans 8:21), so, as Paul says in speaking for the body of believers, we too groan with the same desire.  That desire, which comes as “the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with inexpressible groaning” (8:26b), is to move past the age in which physical bodies that wear away--- in this age of fallen man and a cursed earth in which “the creation was subjected to futility” (8:20a)---so as to put on a heavenly dwelling.  That heavenly dwelling is the physical body that will be suited to exist in God’s new creation.  That heavenly dwelling is that same body that Christ put on through Resurrection power, in which He walked this earth for a brief period in the God of Israel’s newly inaugurated new creation. 

Just as Jesus was raised up with that new body from out of the grave, so too shall those who have believed upon Christ and His Gospel (He is Lord of the entirety of the creation), be raised up with that new body when the final resurrection comes to pass and all things are restored.  Speaking to that entity over which Jesus is Lord and which also experiences the impact of the Resurrection, the creation itself does not groan after a disembodied spiritual existence as its final hope.  How could this be the case?  The creation groans for a renewal, and a time when all thorns and thistles will disappear and the lion will lay down with the lamb.  The creation does not have heaven as its final hope, and neither do those in union with Christ.  Since the believer groans in the same way as the creation (and vice versa), the believer then also groans for a renewal which extends beyond heaven, to the other side of heaven, as the ultimate hope.