Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 2 Corinthians · About this commentary
A Building from God
2 Corinthians 5:1-5
1 For we know that if the earthly house of our tent is dissolved, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal, in the heavens. · WEB
The hope is for more covering rather than less, and the thing Paul flinches from is being found without a body at all.
For we know that if the earthly house of our tent is dissolved, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal, in the heavens.
Two structures, and the contrast is in how they are built. A tent is pitched, moved, and struck; it is temporary by design, which is what the previous chapter said about the outward person 2 Corinthians 4:16. A building is not made with hands and does not come down.
What follows is often read as a preference for being rid of the body, and the text says the opposite in the plainest terms it has.
Groaning is admitted twice — in this we groan, and we who are in this tent do groan, being burdened. Paul does not describe the present state as satisfactory.
But the object of the longing is named with care: longing to be clothed with our habitation which is from heaven, and then, decisively, not that we desire to be unclothed, but that we desire to be clothed.
The metaphor changes from housing to clothing precisely so that this distinction can be made. Unclothed is the condition he refuses to want. What he wants is to be clothed, and the earlier clause names the alternative he shrinks from — we will not be found naked.
So the hope is for addition rather than subtraction. Nothing here treats the body as the problem or its loss as the solution, and the final clause states the outcome as a swallowing rather than an escape: that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. Mortality is not shed; it is absorbed by something larger.
And the guarantee is the same one given in chapter 1: he who made us for this very thing is God, who also gave to us the down payment of the Spirit 2 Corinthians 1:22. A deposit is the first part of the sum, not a substitute for it — which fits a hope described as more life in a real body rather than release from one.
settled What this mark means