Do you know so fully all the possibilities of creation as that you are warranted in asserting that such a thing as a body which is the fit organ of the spirit, and is incorruptible like the heavens in which it dwells, is an impossibility?  Surely the forms of matter are sufficiently varied to make us chary in asserting that other forms are impossible, to which there may belong, as characteristics, even these glorious ones of my text.  The old story of the king in the tropics, who laughed to scorn some one who told him that water could be turned into a solid, may well be quoted in this connection.  Let us be less confident that we know all that is to be known in regard to the sweep of God’s creative power; and let us thankfully accept the teaching by which we, too, in all our ignorance, may be able to say, ’We know that ... we have a building of God ... eternal in the heavens.’

Now there is only one more remark that I wish to make about this part of my subject; and it is this, that the teaching of my text and its context casts great light—­and I think by many people much-needed light—­on what the resurrection of the dead means.  That doctrine has been weighted with a great many incredibilities and I venture to say absurdities, by well-meaning misconceptions and exaggerations.  We have heard grand platitudes about ’the scattered dust being gathered from the four winds of heaven,’ and so on, but the teaching of my text is that the contrast between the present physical frame and the future bodily environment is utter and complete; and that resurrection does not mean the assuming again of the body that is left behind and done with, but the reinvestiture of the man with another body.  And so the Scriptural phrase is, not ’the resurrection of the body,’ but ‘the resurrection of the dead.’  It is a house ’in the heavens.’  It comes ‘from heaven.’

We leave the tent.  Life and thought

    ... have gone away, side by side,
  Leaving doors and windows wide;
  Careless tenants they!

And they may well be careless, because in the heavens they have another mansion, incorruptible and glorious.

We leave the ‘tent’; we enter the ‘building.’  There is nothing here of some germ of immortality being somehow extricated from the ruins, and fostered into glorious growth.  Or, to take another metaphor of the context, we strip off the garment and are naked; and then we are clothed with another garment and are not found naked.  The resurrection of the dead is the clothing of the spirit with the house which is from heaven.  And there is as much difference between the two habitations as there is between the grim, solid architecture of northern peoples, amidst snow and ice, needed to resist the blasts, and to keep the life within in an ungenial climate, and the light, graceful dwellings of those who walk in an atmosphere of perpetual sunshine in the tropics, as there is between the close-knit and narrow-windowed and narrow-doored abode in which we now have to pass our days, and that large house, with broad windows that take in a mightier sweep and new senses that have relation with new qualities in the world then around us.  Therefore let us, whilst we grope in the dark here, and live in a narrow hovel in a back street, look forward to the time when we shall dwell on the sunny heights in the great pavilion which God prepares for them that love Him.