Clothed Over, Not Stripped

It is no surprise that people take their arguments by a trick out of the apostle’s own writings, since “there must be heresies.” But there could be none of them if Scripture were not open to a false reading. So then: the heretics noticed that the apostle had spoken of two “men” — the inner man, meaning the soul, and the outward man, meaning the flesh — and they handed salvation to the soul, the inner man, and destruction to the flesh, the outward man, on the strength of what is written to the Corinthians: “Though our outward man is decaying, still the inward man is renewed day by day.” Now the soul by itself is not “man.” It was put in afterward, into the clay mold that had already been given the name man. And the flesh without the soul is not “man” either: once the soul has gone into exile from it, its title is corpse. So the word man is, in a way, the bond between the two closely joined substances, and under that one name they cannot be anything but natures that hold together. As for the inward man, the apostle would rather have it taken as the mind than as the soul — that is, not so much the substance itself as the flavor of the substance. So when he wrote to the Ephesians about “Christ dwelling in their inner man,” he certainly meant that the Lord ought to be let into their thinking. Then he added, “in your hearts, through faith, rooted and grounded in love” — treating faith and love not as parts with a substance of their own, but only as things the soul conceives. But when he used the phrase “in your hearts,” since hearts are parts of the flesh and have real substance, he at that stroke assigned the actual “inward man” to the flesh, by placing it in the heart. Now consider in what sense he claimed that “the outward man is decaying, while the inward man is renewed day by day.” You would surely not maintain that he meant the rotting the flesh undergoes from the moment of death onward, in its appointed state of unbroken decay. He means the wear and tear it goes through for the name of Christ while its life runs on, and up until death: grinding worries and troubles, and torture and persecution as well. And the inward man, of course, is to be renewed by the prompting of the Spirit, going forward in faith and holiness day after day — here, in this life, not there after the resurrection, where our renewal is not a gradual business from one day to the next but a single thing, finished once for all. You can learn this from the passage where the apostle says: “For our light affliction, which lasts a moment, is working for us a weight of glory beyond all measure and everlasting, while we look not at the things that are seen” — that is, our sufferings — “but at the things that are not seen” — that is, our rewards — “for the things that are seen are for a time, but the things that are not seen are eternal.” The afflictions and injuries that wear the outward man away, he says, are fit only to be thought nothing of, being light and short-lived; he prefers those everlasting repayments, which are also unseen, and that “weight of glory” which will act as a counterweight to the labors in which the flesh here suffers its decay. So what this passage is about is not the destruction they attribute to the outward man — the flesh wiped out altogether — with the aim of canceling the resurrection. He says the same elsewhere: “If we suffer with him, so that we may also be glorified together; for I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed in us.” Here again he shows us that our sufferings are less than their rewards. And since it is through the flesh that we suffer with Christ — being worn down by suffering is what the flesh does — the repayment promised for suffering with Christ belongs to that same flesh. So when he is about to assign afflictions to the flesh as the thing it is especially liable to, in line with what he had already said, he writes, “When we came into Macedonia our flesh had no rest”; and then, to make the soul a fellow sufferer with the body, he adds, “We were pressed on every side; outside were fights” — which of course beat the flesh down — “inside were fears,” which afflicted the soul. So although the outward man is decaying — not in the sense of missing the resurrection, but in the sense of enduring hardship — this scripture shows that it is not exposed to its suffering apart from the inward man. Both, then, will be glorified together, just as they have suffered together. Their share in the troubles must be matched, step for step, by their partnership in the rewards. [a]

It is the same thought he carries on in the passage where he sets the repayment above the sufferings. “For we know,” he says, “that if our earthly house, this tent, is taken down, we have a building not made with hands, eternal, in the heavens.” In other words: because our flesh is being taken apart by what it suffers, we shall be provided with a home in heaven. He remembered the award the Lord hands out in the Gospel: “Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Yet in setting the repayment of the reward over against the suffering like that, he did not deny that the flesh is restored, since the repayment is owed to the very substance the dissolution is charged to — the flesh, obviously. And because he had called the flesh a house, he chose, neatly, to keep the same word in his comparison for the final reward, promising a better house through the resurrection to the very house that is being taken down by suffering. It is the way the Lord too promises us many rooms, as in a house, in his Father’s home. That last comparison could possibly be understood of the dwelling that is this world, on the breaking up of whose frame an eternal home in heaven is promised — since what follows plainly does refer to the flesh, and so looks as though these earlier words do not. For the apostle draws a distinction when he goes on: “For in this we groan, longing to be clothed over with our house that is from heaven, if indeed, being clothed, we shall not be found naked.” Which means: before we take off the garment that is the flesh, we want to be clothed with the heavenly glory of immortality. And that favor is kept for those who are found still in the flesh at the coming of the Lord, and who, under the oppressions of the time of Antichrist, will earn by a shortcut through death — worked by a sudden change — the right to be counted with the saints as they rise. As he writes to the Thessalonians: “For this we tell you by the word of the Lord: we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not go ahead of those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven with a shout, with the archangel’s voice and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we too, we ourselves, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.” [g]

This is the change they are to go through, and it is what he explains to the Corinthians when he writes: “We shall all indeed rise again — though we shall not all be changed — in a moment, in the blink of an eye, at the last trumpet.” For nobody will go through this change except those found in the flesh. “And the dead,” he says, “will be raised, and we shall be changed.” Once you have thought this appointed order through carefully, you will be able to fit what comes next to the sense of what has gone before. When he adds, “This corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality,” that will certainly be the house from heaven we so long to be clothed over with while we groan in this present body — over this flesh, that is, the flesh we shall be caught in at the last. He says we are weighed down while we are in this tent, and that what we want is not to be stripped of it but to be clothed over it, in such a way that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life: by putting on over ourselves, as we are changed, that clothing which comes from heaven. Who is there who would not want, while he is still in the flesh, to put on immortality and to carry his life on by a happy escape from death, through the change he goes through instead of dying — and without having to meet that Hades which will exact the very last quadrans? All the same, the man who has already gone through Hades is due to get the change too, after the resurrection. It is from this that we state flatly that the flesh will most certainly rise again, and that by the change coming over it, it will take on the quality of angels. Now suppose the change had to be gone through only by those who are found in the flesh, so that what is mortal might be swallowed up by life — that is, so that the flesh might be covered with the heavenly and eternal clothing. Then either those who are found in death would not obtain life, being cut off from the material, the food of life you might say, which is the flesh; or else these too must go through the change, so that in them as well what is mortal may be swallowed up by life, since it is appointed that they too should obtain life. “But in the case of the dead, what is mortal has already been swallowed up by life.” No; certainly not in every case. Think how many will very likely be found who had only just died — put in their graves so recently that nothing in them would look decayed. For you do not, of course, count a thing decayed unless it has been cut off, done away with, taken out of reach of our senses, having in every possible way stopped being visible. There are the carcasses of the giants of long ago; it is plain enough that they have not decayed altogether, since their frames of bone are still with us. We have spoken of this elsewhere. Take an instance: only lately, in this very city, when they were laying the foundations of the Odeum right across a good many ancient graves — a sacrilege — people were horrified to find, after some five hundred years, bones that still held their moisture, and hair that had not lost its perfume. It is a matter of fact that not only do bones stay hard, but teeth last for ages without decaying — and both are the lasting seeds of the body that is to sprout back into life at the resurrection. Finally, suppose everything mortal in all the dead were then found decayed — consumed at any rate by death, by time, by sheer age. Is there then nothing to be “swallowed up by life,” nothing to be covered over and dressed in the clothing of immortality? The man who says that what is mortal is going to be swallowed up by life has already granted that what is dead is not destroyed by those other devourers just named. And it will be entirely fitting that the whole thing should be finished and brought about by God’s own working, and not by the laws of nature. So then: since what is mortal has to be swallowed up by life, it must be produced in order to be swallowed up; and it must also be swallowed up in order to go through the final change. If you said a fire was going to be lit, you could not possibly claim that what kindles it is needed in one case and not in another. In the same way, when he puts in the words “if indeed, being unclothed, we shall not be found naked” — meaning, of course, those who will not be found alive and in the flesh on the day of the Lord — he did not say that the people he had just described as unclothed, as stripped, were naked in any other sense than this: that they are to be understood as being clothed again with the very same substance they were stripped of. For although they will be found naked once their flesh has been laid aside, or in some measure broken up or worn away — and that condition may fairly be called nakedness — they will get it back again afterward, so that, clothed again with the flesh, they may be able to put on over it the overgarment of immortality as well. For the outer garment cannot possibly fit anyone except a man who is already dressed. [l]

In the same way, when he says, “So we are always confident, and know well, that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord — for we walk by faith, not by sight,” it is obvious that there is no intention here of running the flesh down, as though it were what kept us from the Lord. What we are being urged to do, and pointedly, is to think little of this present life, since we are away from the Lord as long as we are passing through it — walking by faith and not by sight; in hope, that is, and not in fact. And so he adds: “We are confident, and think it good rather to be away from the body and at home with the Lord” — so that we may walk by sight rather than by faith, in the thing itself rather than in the hope of it. Notice that here too he puts this contempt for the body down to the surpassing worth of martyrdom. For nobody who leaves the body is at once living in the Lord’s presence. That comes only by the privilege of a martyr, who is given lodging in Paradise, not in Hades. Was the apostle at a loss, then, for a word for departing from the body? Or is he using an unfamiliar way of speaking on purpose? Wanting to express our absence from the body as temporary, he says that we are travelers away from it, since a man who goes abroad comes home again after a while. Then he speaks to everyone alike: “So we make it our aim, whether away or at home, to be acceptable to God; for we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ Jesus.” If all of us, then all of each of us; and if all of each of us, then our inward man and our outward man too — our bodies no less than our souls. “So that each one,” as he goes on, “may receive the things done in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad.” Now I ask you: how do you read that sentence? Do you take it to be tangled in its construction, with the words out of their order? Is the question about the things that will have to be received by the body, or about the things that have already been done in the body? Well — if the things to be borne by the body are meant, then a resurrection of the body is certainly implied. And if the things already done in the body are meant, the same follows: the repayment will have to be paid out by the body, since it was by the body that the deeds were done. So the apostle’s whole argument, from the beginning, is untangled in this closing clause, where the resurrection of the flesh is set out plainly; and the argument ought to be understood in a sense that squares exactly with that conclusion. [r]

Now if you will look at the words that come before the passage where the outward and the inward man are mentioned, will you not find the whole truth about both the dignity and the hope of the flesh? He speaks of the “light which God has commanded to shine in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of the Lord in the person of Jesus Christ,” and he says that “we have this treasure in clay pots,” meaning of course the flesh. So which is it? That the flesh is to be destroyed, because it is “a clay pot,” taking its origin from clay? Or that it is to be glorified, as the container of a treasure that belongs to God? If that true light, which is in the person of Christ, holds life in itself, and that life along with its light has been put into the keeping of the flesh, then is the thing that has had life entrusted to it doomed to perish? In that case the treasure will perish too, for perishable things would have been entrusted to what is itself perishable — which is like putting new wine into old skins. And when he adds, “always carrying about in our body the dying of the Lord Jesus Christ,” what sort of substance is this, that after being called the temple of God can now be called the tomb of Christ as well? But why do we carry the dying of the Lord about in the body? So that, as he says, “his life also may be shown.” Where? “In the body.” In what body? “In our mortal body.” In the flesh, then — mortal, it is true, through sin, but alive through grace; and you may see how great that grace is when the purpose of it is “that the life of Christ may be shown in it.” Is it in a thing that is a stranger to salvation, in a substance that is always coming apart, that the life of Christ will be shown — a life that is eternal, unbroken, incorruptible, and already the life of God? And which stretch of the Lord’s life is it that is to be shown in our body? Surely the life he lived up to his suffering, which was not only put on open display among the Jews but has now been shown to all the nations. So the life meant is the one that “broke the adamant gates of death and the bronze bars of the world below” — a life which from that time on has been ours and will be ours. And, lastly, it is to be shown in the body. When? After death. How? By our rising in our body, as Christ also rose in his. But in case anyone should object here that the life of Jesus has to be shown in our body even now, by the discipline of holiness and patience and righteousness and wisdom, in which the Lord’s life was so rich, the apostle’s very far-seeing wisdom puts in this purpose: “For we who live are always being handed over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may be shown in our mortal body.” So he says this is to take place in us even when we are dead. And if so, how can it happen except in our body, after its resurrection? That is why he adds in his closing sentence, “knowing that he who raised up the Lord Jesus will raise us up too with him” — with him who is already risen from the dead. But perhaps “with him” means “like him.” Well then: if it is like him, it is certainly not without the flesh. [u]