2 Corinthians 5

Today’s Passage: 2 Corinthians 5

Paul has just said that though the outer self is wasting away the inner self is being renewed day by day, and that our light and momentary affliction is producing an eternal weight of glory. Chapter five is where he tells you why he can talk that way about a body that is falling apart. He begins with a tent. The frame we live in is a temporary shelter, and when it is taken down there is a building from God waiting, an eternal house in heaven not built by human hands. So we groan, and Paul is careful about what the groaning is for. It is not a wish to be rid of the body but a longing to be clothed, so that mortality itself may be swallowed up by life. God has prepared us for exactly this, and He has already put down a deposit on it by giving us His Spirit. Out of that certainty come three settled convictions that carry the rest of the chapter. First, we walk by faith and not by sight, and we would gladly be away from the body and at home with the Lord. Second, we aim to please Him, because we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ. Third, the love of Christ compels us, since One died for all and therefore all died, and those who live now live for Him. And then the ground opens up into the two summits of the letter: anyone in Christ is a new creation, and God has committed to us the message of reconciliation, so that we stand as ambassadors begging a world to come home. The chapter ends on the sentence the whole gospel hangs from.

As you read, hold this: God made the sinless Christ to be sin for us so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God, and everyone reconciled by that exchange is a new creation and an ambassador sent to plead with the world.

2 Corinthians 5:1–5 (BSB)

¹ For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is dismantled, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. ² For in this tent we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, ³ because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked. ⁴ For while we are in this tent, we groan under our burdens, because we do not wish to be unclothed but clothed, so that our mortality may be swallowed up by life. ⁵ And it is God who has prepared us for this very purpose and has given us the Spirit as a pledge of what is to come.

Read that first sentence again and notice the word Paul chooses to open with. “For we know.” Not we hope, not we suppose, not on our better days we manage to feel. He is stating something a believer is entitled to be sure of. The tent will come down. Paul does not pretend otherwise, and he does not use a soft word for it either; the tent is dismantled, taken apart, the poles pulled and the cloth folded. Anyone who has watched a body fail knows the honesty of that. But he sets against it a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, and he adds the phrase that settles the matter: not built by human hands. Nothing we manufacture goes into it. It is already God’s finished work, waiting.

And in the meantime we groan. Paul says it twice, and he will not let us be embarrassed about it. The Christian life is not a performance of serenity. There is an ache in living in a body that wears out, and that ache is not unbelief; it is the correct response of a creature made for more. But look closely at what the groaning wants, because Paul corrects a very natural mistake here. We do not long to be unclothed. The dream of shedding the body as a prison and floating free was in the air in Corinth, and Paul has no interest in it. He wants to be clothed, wrapped in the heavenly dwelling like a garment pulled on over the old one, so that “our mortality may be swallowed up by life.” That is a marvelous phrase. Not mortality patched, not mortality endured, but mortality swallowed whole and gone, the way the sea closes over a stone. The Christian hope has never been escape from the body. It has been the redemption of it.

"Not only that, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies." Romans 8:23 (BSB)

Then verse five sets the whole thing on a foundation outside ourselves, and it is worth stopping to praise God for it. “It is God who has prepared us for this very purpose.” He made us for this. And He “has given us the Spirit as a pledge of what is to come.” The word behind pledge was a plain commercial term in the ancient world, the first installment of a purchase price, money handed over now that both binds the buyer and guarantees that the rest is coming. God has put a down payment on your resurrection, and the down payment is His own Spirit living in you. That is not a small comfort. If you have ever wondered whether you will make it home, the answer does not lie in the strength of your grip. God has already paid earnest money on you, and He does not forfeit deposits.

2 Corinthians 5:6–10 (BSB)

⁶ Therefore we are always confident, although we know that while we are at home in the body, we are away from the Lord. ⁷ For we walk by faith, not by sight. ⁸ We are confident, then, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord. ⁹ So we aspire to please Him, whether we are at home in this body or away from it. ¹⁰ For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive his due for the things done in the body, whether good or bad.

“Therefore we are always confident.” Twice in three verses Paul says it, and both times the confidence is aimed straight at death. He is honest about the cost: while we are at home in the body, we are away from the Lord. That is a real absence and Paul feels it. And so he says the sentence that has become a proverb among believers, and rightly: “For we walk by faith, not by sight.” It is a walking word, not a sitting word. It means we go forward, day after ordinary day, on what God has said rather than on what we can currently see, and that the unseen things are not the doubtful ones. Then in verse eight he says the thing outright. He would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord. Not because the body is bad. Because the Lord is better.

"I am torn between the two. I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is far better indeed." Philippians 1:23 (BSB)

Here we should be careful, and honest with you about where certainty ends. That a believer who dies is at once with Christ is plain, and Paul says it in two letters without a tremor. But exactly what that state is between death and the resurrection, and how it relates to the body we are promised, Scripture does not spell out for us, and thoughtful believers have read these verses in more than one way. Some understand Paul to mean that the heavenly dwelling is received immediately at death, so that there is no interval of nakedness at all. Others take him to mean that the resurrection body comes at Christ’s return, and that the time between is a real but temporary condition of being with the Lord while awaiting the body. Both readings are held by people who love this text and bow to it. Manna Praxis will not hand you a settled answer where the apostle did not, and you should be slow to break fellowship with anyone over it. What is not open to question is the destination: away from the body, at home with the Lord. That is enough to die on.

Out of that comes the aim in verse nine, and it is beautifully simple. “So we aspire to please Him, whether we are at home in this body or away from it.” One ambition, and it works in both worlds. And then the reason, which is the sobering verse of the chapter: “For we must all appear before the judgment seat (βῆμα) bēma, pronounced BAY-mah. Strong's G968, a raised platform, judgment seat, reviewing stand. A bēma was originally just a step, then a raised place a man stood on, and by Paul’s day it meant the official platform where a magistrate sat to hear cases or where a judge at the games sat to review the athletes and award the victor’s wreath. The Corinthians had one in their own marketplace, and Paul had stood on the pavement in front of it while Gallio waved the charges away. So when he says we must all appear before the bēma of Christ, hear what he is and is not saying. This is the reviewing stand, not the dock of the condemned. The question there is not whether a believer belongs to Christ; that was settled at the cross and sealed by the Spirit, and the same Paul wrote that there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. The question is what was done with the life, and what of it will stand. He tells the Corinthians elsewhere that the Day will test each man’s work with fire, that what survives earns a reward, and that the man whose work burns will suffer loss but be saved himself. Let that do its proper work in you. It should sober an idle believer wonderfully. It should never terrify a trembling one into doubting whether Christ will keep him, because the One seated on that platform is the very One who died for him. of Christ, that each one may receive his due for the things done in the body, whether good or bad.” All of us. Not some. The word for appear carries the sense of being made manifest, laid open, and there is no dodging it and no reason to want to.

2 Corinthians 5:11–13 (BSB)

¹¹ Therefore, since we know what it means to fear the Lord, we try to persuade men. What we are is clear to God, and I hope it is clear to your conscience as well. ¹² We are not commending ourselves to you again. Instead, we are giving you an occasion to be proud of us, so that you can answer those who take pride in appearances rather than in the heart. ¹³ If we are out of our mind, it is for God; if we are of sound mind, it is for you.

“Since we know what it means to fear the Lord, we try to persuade men.” Those two halves belong together and we usually keep only one of them. The fear of the Lord here is not cringing dread; it is a man who has just been standing at the judgment seat in his imagination and has come away with a right-sized view of God. And what does that fear produce in him? Not paralysis. Not a retreat into private religion. It sends him out to persuade people. Paul reasons, pleads, argues, and begs, because he has seen what is at stake. A church that has lost the fear of God will always lose its urgency with its neighbors at the same time.

Then he answers the critics again, and you can hear the weariness in it. He is not commending himself; he says so flatly. He is handing the loyal Corinthians something to say on his behalf when the polished newcomers sneer, “so that you can answer those who take pride in appearances rather than in the heart.” That single phrase is the whole quarrel in this letter. Paul’s opponents were impressive in the ways Corinth measured impressiveness, and Paul was not. He had a plain delivery and a battered body and a prison record. And he refuses to compete on that field, because God has never once judged by appearances. Verse thirteen has the sound of a man repeating an insult back to the people who used it. Very well, if they say he is out of his mind, then whatever wild-eyed devotion they have seen in him was between him and God and none of their business. And if he is of sound mind, sober, careful, patient, that is for the Corinthians’ benefit. Either way, notice, nothing is for himself.

2 Corinthians 5:14–15 (BSB)

¹⁴ For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that One died for all, therefore all died. ¹⁵ And He died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died for them and was raised again.

Now we come to the engine of the man’s whole life. “For Christ’s love compels us.” The word means to press in on every side, to hem in and hold together, the way banks hold a river, so that it can only run one direction. Paul is not describing a warm feeling he works up on good mornings. He is describing a pressure he cannot get out from under. And it is not primarily his love for Christ. It is Christ’s love for him, the love that went to a cross, closing in on him and leaving him no other way to go.

And then the logic, and it is worth taking one clause at a time. “One died for all, therefore all died.” That is substitution, plainly stated. He did not die alongside us or in sympathy with us; He died as us, so that when He died, His people died with Him and the account was closed. Paul says the same thing about himself in a single unforgettable line.

"I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me." Galatians 2:20 (BSB)

And the purpose of it all comes in verse fifteen, and it is not what a self-centered heart expects. He died for all so “that those who live should no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died for them and was raised again.” The whole aim of the cross is the death of self-rule. Notice that Paul does not say we should stop living. He says we should stop living for ourselves. A life is going to be spent on something. The gospel does not take the life away, it takes the self off the throne, and it puts there a Man who was raised from the dead and who loved us to the death. If you have found the Christian life a burden lately, ask yourself which of those two you have been living for. There is no third option, and only one of them ever gave anything back.

2 Corinthians 5:16–17 (BSB)

¹⁶ So from now on we regard no one according to the flesh. Although we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. ¹⁷ Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come!

Because of that death and that resurrection, Paul says, our whole way of sizing people up has been broken. “So from now on we regard no one according to the flesh.” No one. Not by wealth, not by polish, not by pedigree, not by usefulness, not by any of the scales Corinth loved. And he includes himself in the indictment with startling candor: “Although we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer.” Saul of Tarsus had looked at Jesus of Nazareth with worldly eyes and seen a discredited provincial troublemaker whose followers should be stamped out. He had been catastrophically wrong. A man who has been that wrong about the Lord Himself will never again trust his own first impressions of anybody.

And then verse seventeen, one of the great sentences of the Bible, and shorter in Greek than in any English version. It runs almost like an exclamation: if anyone in Christ, new creation (κτίσις) ktisis, pronounced KTEE-sis. Strong's G2937, creation, the act of creating or the thing created. Ktisis is the ordinary word for creation, and it can mean either the act of creating or the thing created. Paul uses it in Romans for the whole groaning created order that waits to be set free. So when he writes that anyone in Christ is a kainē ktisis, he has reached for the biggest word available. And the adjective matters too, because Greek had two words for new. One meant recent, freshly made, the next in a series. The one Paul uses means new in kind, of a quality that was not there before. This is not a repaired version of the old thing. It is Genesis 1 language dropped onto a human being. Hold on to that when your own progress looks thin, because Paul does not say a believer feels like a new creation, or performs like one on his best day. He says that is what a believer is, in Christ, by God’s own decree, on the day he first believed and on the days he stumbles. The old has passed away, and God will not be arguing about it. Everything else in the Christian life, all the slow growing and the repenting and the getting up again, is simply the new creation learning to live like what it already is. . “The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come!” Do not shrink this down to a personality improvement. Paul is not saying the believer turns over a new leaf; he is saying that the age to come has already begun in whoever is joined to Christ. The same God who said let there be light has spoken again, and the first outpost of His new world is a forgiven sinner. That is why the behold is there. Paul wants you to stop and look.

2 Corinthians 5:18–19 (BSB)

¹⁸ All this is from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: ¹⁹ that God was reconciling the world to Himself in Christ, not counting men’s trespasses against them. And He has committed to us the message of reconciliation.

“All this is from God.” Before you take one step further, let that sink in, because it is the guard on everything that follows. Not one grain of what Paul has been describing originated with us. We did not start the peace talks. We did not draft the terms. We were the offending party, and God moved first. He “ reconciled (καταλλαγή) katallagē, pronounced kat-al-lag-AY. Strong's G2643, reconciliation, the exchange of enmity for peace. Katallagē comes from a verb that in ordinary Greek meant to exchange one thing for another, and especially to change money, giving what a man brought for coin of another kind. From there it came to mean the exchanging of enmity for friendship, the ending of a quarrel between parties who had been at war. Outside Paul it is almost absent from the New Testament, and he handles it with great care. Notice above all the direction it travels in these verses. It never says that God was reconciled to us, as though He were the one who had to be talked round, nor that we reconciled ourselves to Him by trying harder. God reconciled us to Himself, through Christ. The injured party paid for the peace. And the exchange at the heart of the word is not a figure of speech here; verse twenty-one will name it precisely. Our sin was reckoned to Him, His righteousness reckoned to us, and the enmity was over. If you have ever lain awake wondering whether God is still angry with you, this word is your answer. The war is not being negotiated. It was ended at the cross, by Him, and the message you have been handed is not an offer of terms but an announcement that peace has been made. us to Himself through Christ,” and then, astonishingly, He handed the offenders a job: He “gave us the ministry of reconciliation.”

Verse nineteen restates it and adds the detail that makes the knees weak. God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, “not counting men’s trespasses against them.” There is a ledger, and it is real, and the entries in it are ours. And God does not tear the page out and pretend nothing happened; the next verses will tell you exactly where the entries were charged instead. But hear this first, simply: the account against you is not being run up. And then the same sentence turns and puts something in our hands. “He has committed to us the message of reconciliation.” God could have written it in the sky. He gave it to people. He gave it to a battered tentmaker whose critics thought he lacked presence, and He gives it still to whoever will carry it.

2 Corinthians 5:20 (BSB)

²⁰ Therefore we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making His appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ: Be reconciled to God.

Sit with the dignity and the strangeness of that. “We are ambassadors (πρεσβεύω) presbeuō, pronounced pres-BYOO-oh. Strong's G4243, to serve as an ambassador or envoy. Presbeuō comes from the word for an old man or elder, and it meant to act as an envoy, because the ancient world sent its seasoned men to carry its most important messages. In the Greek-speaking provinces of the empire the presbeutēs was the man who represented Caesar, and in a Roman colony like Corinth everybody understood the office. An ambassador had two features worth noticing. First, he carried no authority of his own whatsoever; his weight came entirely from who sent him, and the moment he began speaking for himself he was nothing. Second, to insult the ambassador was to insult the king, so the office was both humbling and awesome at once. Paul uses this word only twice, and the other time is from a prison, where he calls himself an ambassador in chains. That is the shape of it. Not a diplomat in fine clothes with an escort, but a shackled man with a message that outranks the empire. And that is the standing of any believer who tells a neighbor about Christ. You are not offering a private opinion. You are carrying terms of peace from a throne, and the terms are not yours to soften and not yours to withhold. for Christ.” Paul, who has just admitted that his critics find him unimpressive in person, who has been beaten and jailed and shipwrecked, who was standing in front of a magistrate’s platform in this very city, says that he comes to Corinth as the personal representative of the King of heaven. And then the phrase that ought to make a reader hold his breath: “as though God were making His appeal through us.” When the message of reconciliation is spoken by an ordinary believer, God Himself is appealing. That is not a compliment paid to the speaker. It is a statement about whose word it is.

And look at the tone of the appeal. Not a summons, not a threat, not a set of demands from a conqueror who has already won the war. “We implore you on behalf of Christ: Be reconciled to God.” Implore. Beg. The offended sovereign sends His envoys out to plead with the rebels to accept the peace He has already made at His own cost. There is nothing else like it in the annals of the world. And you should notice that Paul says this to a church, not to a crowd of pagans. He never assumes that everyone sitting in a Christian meeting has personally come home. So the appeal stands open on the page for whoever needs it, whether you have known these words since childhood or have just met them. Be reconciled to God. He is not reluctant. He is imploring.

2 Corinthians 5:21 (BSB)

²¹ God made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.

Take off your shoes here. Everything in this letter, and in some sense everything in the Bible, has been walking toward this sentence, and it will bear all the weight you can put on it. Read it slowly, four movements at a time.

“God made Him.” The Father is the subject. This was not something done to God, and it was not something the world did to Jesus against heaven’s will. Calvary was the deliberate act of God, planned before the foundation of the world, carried out in love. The One who was wronged arranged the payment.

“Him who knew no sin.” Every other man who has ever gone to a gallows had something to answer for. This One had nothing. He was tempted in every way that we are, yet was without sin, and no accusation ever stuck to Him in three years of hostile scrutiny. That matters, because a substitute with debts of his own can pay nobody else’s. Only the sinless One had a life to spare.

“To be sin on our behalf.” Now hold steady, because this is the sentence people try to soften and it must not be softened. Paul does not say God made Him a sinner, for He never became one and never ceased to be the holy Son in whom the Father delighted. Nor does Paul say merely that He was made an offering for sin, though that is gloriously true and the Old Testament words for sin and sin offering stand close together. What Paul says is stark: God made Him to be sin. The sinless One was reckoned before the bar of heaven as though all of it were His, ours charged to His account, and He bore it in His body on the tree and drank the cup down to the bottom. “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me” is not poetry. That is what this verse cost.

“So that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.” And here is the other half of the exchange, and it is every bit as staggering. Not merely forgiven, though we are. Not merely acquitted, though we are. We become the righteousness of God, in Him. His righteousness is credited to our account as truly as our sin was credited to His. The transfer runs both ways, and it is complete on both sides. That is why a believer may stand at the judgment seat without terror and lie down at night without dread. God is not looking at you in your rags. He is looking at you in Christ, and there is nothing lacking there.

He took what was ours and had none of it. We receive what is His and deserved none of it. Blessed be God for the great exchange.