Today, I am reading and commenting on  2 Corinthians 5-8.

Throughout his letters Paul references how our resurrected bodies will be different from our current bodies.  Here he compares our current bodies to a tent, contrasting that with an eternal house which will serve as our permanent homes after our resurrection.  I think his metaphor here does a wonderful job of making his point.  A tent can certainly be home, and a place where we have great comfort.  But a permanent building, a house, has much greater possibilities for comfort.  In the same way, we have a certain comfort living in our bodies, but we should desire the much greater comfort of living in the bodies which God will give us.  We should seek to live as Paul did, eagerly awaiting leaving our home in this physical body to be at home with Christ.  That means living in this body so as to prepare ourselves to spend time with Him.

In this passage Paul tells us not to be yoked together with unbelievers, a passage which when I was young was interpreted to me as meaning that a Christian should not marry a non-believer.  While the idea that a Christian should not marry a non-believer is correct, I have come to realize that is not what Paul is writing about here.  Rather, Paul is warning us against partnering with unbelievers to accomplish the ministry which God has given us.  One example of what he was writing about comes to my mind.  Many years ago, when I was still a young man, some young women I knew became active in an organization of Christian women who were fighting against pornography.  Some time after they became active in this group and had risen to leadership positions within it, they were approached by a secular feminist group which also was working to oppose pornography for the two organizations to work together.  The two organizations made common cause to combat pornography.  Because the two organizations were composed primarily of women (perhaps entirely, it has been too many years for me to remember one way or the other), their focus became the ways in which pornographers exploited women.  After another period of time the secular feminist group began using the partnership to advocate for abortion.  The Christian women failed to recognize that the secular feminists with whom they had partnered did not care about the immorality of pornography and opposing it was merely one more way of promoting their ideology.  This is but one example of where a group of Christians made common cause with non-believers to work on a goal which served God’s will only to have the cause coopted to for other purposes.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.