I. So my text mainly sets before us very strikingly the Christian certitude as to the final future.

I need not dwell, I suppose, upon that familiar metaphor by which the relation of man to his bodily environment is described as that of a man to his dwelling-place.  Only I would desire, in a word, to emphasise this as being the first of the elements of the blessed certitude in which Christian people may expatiate—­the clear, broad distinction between me and my physical frame.  There is no more connection, says Paul, between us and the organisation in which we at present dwell than there is between a man and the house that he inhabits.  ‘The foolish senses crown’ Death and call him lord; but the Christian’s certitude firmly draws the line, and declares that the man, the whole personality, is undisturbed by anything that befalls his residence; and that he may pass unimpaired from one house to another, being in both the self-same person.  And that is something to keep firm hold of in these days when we are being told that life and consciousness are but a function of organisation, and that if the one be annihilated the other cannot persist.  No; though all illustrations and metaphors must necessarily fail, the two which lie side by side here in my text and its context are far truer than that pseudo-science—­which is not science at all, but only inference from science—­which denies that the man is one thing and his house altogether another.

Then again, note, as part of the elements of this Christian certitude, the blessed thought that a body is part of the perfection of manhood.  No mere dim, ghostly future, where consciousness somehow persists, without environment or tools to act upon an outer world, completes the idea of God in reference to man.  But the old trinity is the eternal trinity for humanity, body, soul, and spirit.  Corporeity, with all that it means of definiteness, with all that it means of relation to an external universe, is the perfection of manhood.  To dwell naked, as the Apostle says in the context, is a thing from which man shudderingly recoils; and it is not to be his final fate.  Let us take this as no small gain in reference to our conceptions of a future—­the emphatic drawing into light of that thought that for his perfection man requires body, soul, and spirit.  And now, if we turn for a moment to the characteristics of the two conditions with which my text deals, we get some familiar enough but yet great and strengthening thoughts.  The ’earthly house of this tabernacle is dissolved,’ or, more correctly, retaining the metaphor of the house, is to be pulled down—­and in its place there comes a building of God, a ‘house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.’

Now the contrast that is drawn here, whilst it would run out into a great many other particulars, about which we know nothing, and therefore had better say nothing, revolves in the Apostle’s mind mainly round these two ‘earthly’ as contrasted with ‘in the heavens’; and ‘tabernacle,’ or tent, as contrasted, first of all with a ‘building,’ and then with the predicate ‘eternal.’