I really appreciated Matt’s emphasis last week on the often forgotten importance of Christ’s ascension as it relates to the death of his people. We don’t think about that a lot, but the ascension of Christ is our assurance that a glorified human body, his body, has already entered the presence of the Father, guaranteeing that where he has gone, we will follow. That’s the importance of the ascension.
We’re doing a mini-series – last week, this week, and next week – on the subject of hope and heaven and endurance. Looking forward to Ryan’s message next week.
I know what many are feeling this morning. So many of us were at Karen’s funeral service yesterday, maybe most. There were a lot of people here yesterday as we celebrated her life. Many of you have experienced the loss of friends and family in your own life in the not-too-distant past. Some of you are maybe facing the prospect of doing so soon.
It can feel confusing. There’s both joy and sorrow in a believer’s death. There’s laughter, and there’s tears. You can miss those you love terribly and know with confidence where they are and be thrilled for them. You can ache with loss and certainty all at the same time.
That’s not strange. That’s Christianity. That’s 2 Corinthians 5:1-10, which is our text for today. It’s a message of hope in the face of death. Now hope — not a false hope that many have — but real, genuine hope is not usually a word that many associate with death.
Think about the emotional landscape that surrounds people when they’re thinking about death, the thoughts that arise almost involuntarily when a person is forced to confront their own mortality, or they’re forced to confront the mortality or upcoming mortality of someone that they love. Here are some of the common responses:
Fear
I think the one that probably comes to mind the most is fear, whether that’s fear of the unknown on one side, or thanatophobia, which is an intense, persistent, sometimes irrational fear on the other side.
Denial and Avoidance
There’s denial and avoidance. The modern world has become extraordinarily skilled at keeping personal death out of sight. We fill our lives with distractions and noise so we never have to sit quietly long enough to think about it. We don’t like to think about our own death.
Uncertainty
There’s uncertainty. Even people who hold confident, philosophical positions about death often do not face it with genuine calmness when it becomes personal. What happens to people in general is an easier question to ask than what happens to me.
Clinging
There’s a clinging, very closely related in some ways to fear. It’s the instinct to hold on at any cost. We just want to bargain for some more time, to grasp for just a few more weeks or months. Many people, their deathbed confessions that I read over the course of the past couple of weeks, there were several who were like, “If I could just buy some more time.”
Anger
There’s anger. Dylan Thomas gave this, his most famous expression, when he urged his dying father to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Anger at the seeming unfairness, the untimeliness, the sheer wrongness of death is deeply common, especially when that death happens to somebody who seemed to have so much left to give.
Meaninglessness
If death is final extinction, as many people believe, the unavoidable question is, “What was the point?” Without an answer to death, meaning becomes something we construct rather than something that we get to discover.
Isolation
You know what, no matter how many people are in the room — you could be surrounded by all your family and all your friends — dying is ultimately something a person does alone. There’s a threshold that no one else can cross with you, a door that every person faces in solitude, and that produces a particular loneliness that is real.
Quite a different story from that of Charles Spurgeon, who visited more dying believers than perhaps any other pastor in the 19th century. He observed,
“The very happiest persons I have ever met with have been departing believers. I have come down many times from the sick chamber of those who are now in the upper house, and I have done so with faith confirmed and joy increased.”
So why the radical difference? Paul touches on this reason back in 2 Corinthians 4, just a chapter before, in verse 14,
“knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence.”
Paul’s telling us that we can have confidence because of our union with Christ. We are identified with him.
What does this union with Christ mean? We talk about it. We talk about having our identity in Jesus, or being “in Christ,” or union with Christ. What does that mean? Here’s a good general definition.:
Union with Christ is the intimate, unbreakable bond between the believer and Jesus Christ, a bond so complete that Christ’s life, his death, his resurrection, and ascension are credited to the believer’s account.
I get credit for Jesus’s perfect life. I get credit for that because of my union with him, because I am in him. Every benefit of salvation—from regeneration to future glorification—is the believer’s in him. It’s already mine. It’s already mine because I’m in him. We see the profound impact this truth had on Paul’s posture toward death.
The main idea of our text is this — and it’s a little lengthy. I really tried to bring it down to something very short, but I think every one of these things is important for us to understand from this text, so it’s going to be a little bit lengthy:
Because we are united to the crucified and risen Christ, we have an eternal hope that the world cannot manufacture and death cannot destroy.
And that hope transforms everything.
What naturally produces fear becomes anticipation.
What naturally produces uncertainty and doubt becomes assurance.
What naturally produces despair and meaninglessness becomes holy aspiration.
Three movements. Three things eternal hope in Christ does in the life of the believer:
1. Our eternal hope in Christ awakens our anticipation.
Paul opens chapter five with a very striking word: “We know.” We know. That single word is already a complete refutation of the world’s vocabulary, because the world often faces death with uncertainty. Paul faces it with certainty.
The reason is not that Paul was braver or wiser or more philosophically equipped than everybody else. It comes entirely through Christ, the one who already entered death, conquered it, and then walked out, emerged from the other side. Paul knows what lies beyond death because someone he trusts has already been there.
The tent and the building
Look at the contrast Paul draws in verse one: This earthly house, the tent, that’s one side. The building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.
This is beautiful Old Testament imagery. Moses led Israel through the wilderness, and they worshiped in a tabernacle (a tent, temporary, portable). You took it down when you left an area, and you put it up when you got to your new area. Always vulnerable to the elements.
But the day was coming when the permanent temple was going to be constructed in Jerusalem (established, durable, glorious). So Paul takes that contrast, this Old Testament contrast, and applies it to our bodies:
This body is the tabernacle. It’s temporary. It’s a tent. It’s frail. It’s wearing out. It’s subject to disease and decay. But the resurrection body that awaits every believer is like the temple. It’s permanent, it’s unshakable, it is eternal in the heavens. It’s too glorious to be imagined.
We rightly long for that promise to be fulfilled. I long for it. I look forward to that. So there’s a tension as we are called to live this life to the fullest while genuinely anticipating our future home.
The permission to groan
Then Paul says something in verses 2-4 that is so relevant to where we find ourselves in the moment.
“In this tent,” this temporary earthly body, “we groan.”
He didn’t say, “In this tent we have it all together.” “In this tent, we kind of rise above all of the pain.” He doesn’t ask us to paste on or exhibit some cheerfulness we do not feel. We groan.
There are times when we groan, and Romans 8 tells us that this groaning is not unique to us. The whole creation is groaning. Groaning is woven into the fabric of life in a fallen world.
The Christian worldview both validates the groan and transforms it. It does not ask you to deny the pain. It doesn’t tell you, “Hey, just pull yourself together.” It says groaning is real, and it is also the groaning of anticipation. It’s the ache of people who ultimately belong somewhere else.
In his book, Remember Death, Matthew McCullough writes,
“When we act like death is no problem, we are not just being dishonest about the world as it is. We not only join our culture denial and enable our collective self-deception. We also diminish what Christ came to offer us and rob ourselves of the perspective from which his promises come alive. What we experience now is far from the tearless world we have been promised. Death is the separation of good things not meant to be sundered. It separates a person from family and friends. It separates the soul from the body and the body from the earth. Whatever joy may mark the current state of believers who have died, it is not what it will be, yet. Death is not ok. By avoiding the subject of death, we act like that’s not true. And we shrink down the scale of Jesus’s victory to fit the world we live in now. The Bible’s perspective on death is far more diverse and honest than merely a path to a better place… We have no reason to hide from the truth about death in all its ugliness. If death is not a problem, Jesus won’t be much of a solution. The more deeply we feel death’s sting, the more consciously we will feel the gospel’s healing power. The more carefully we number our days, the more joyfully we’ll hear that death’s day are numbered too. And the more we allow ourselves to grieve the separations death brings into our lives, the more fully we will long for the world in which ‘he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore.’”
Tim Keller echoes these words:
“Death was not part of God’s original design. We were not created to age, weaken, fade, and die. We were not created for love relationships that end in death. Death is an intrusion, a result of sin and our human race’s turning away from God. Our sense even now that we were made to last, that we were made for love without parting, is a memory trace of our divine origins. We are trapped in a world of death, a world for which we were not designed.”
Death is not okay. It’s just not. Paul never says it is. The scriptures never say that it is. 1 Corinthians 15 calls it our last enemy. The fact that it’s not okay is precisely why the victory of Christ over it is so staggering. We think about the range of emotions that we mentioned earlier—fear, clinging, anger, isolation, and others—every one of those is a form of groaning.
Paul is not telling us that faith makes those feelings disappear. He’s telling you that faith reframes them. The groan is still real, but it’s no longer the groan of despair. It is the groin of anticipation. It’s the labor pains of people who know that what is coming is worth the ache of waiting.
So to everybody in this room this morning who’s carrying grief today: You are allowed to groan. Your tears are not a failure of faith. Our ache is not a sign of weakness. Your loss is real, and God does not ask you to pretend otherwise. What he offers us is not the removal of sorrow, but something so much more powerful. It’s the transformation of sorrow into anticipation.
The guarantee of the Spirit
Paul anchors everything so far in verse 5:
“He who has prepared for us this very thing is God, who also has given us the Spirit as a guarantee” (2 Corinthians 5:5).
The word “guarantee” is a down payment. Maybe even more specifically, earnest, the first installment of a purchase. God the Father worked out our eternal hope by sending God the Son to purchase it through his death and resurrection. Now God the Spirit lives in every true believer as the guaranteed deposit that the full inheritance is absolutely and certainly on its way. That’s who the Holy Spirit is to us. He’s the earnest.
Our anticipation does not rest on our ability to hold on. I find no hope in that. It rests on God’s own unbreakable promise, sealed by his own Spirit living within us. This is not wishful thinking. It’s the most certain thing imaginable.
2. Our eternal hope in Christ anchors our assurance.
So we anticipate the glories to come, even though we have to go—unless the Lord returns first—we have to go through death to realize it. It not only awakens our anticipation, our eternal hope in Christ anchors our assurance.
Twice in this short passage, Paul says something that uses a word that sounds almost unrealistic, given the subject matter of death: “We are always of good courage,” in verse 6. And in verse 8, “Yes, we are of good courage.”
Paul was not a man insulated from suffering. We read details in the New Testament about his beatings, and his stoning, and being left for dead, and he was shipwrecked three times. He was imprisoned, hungry, cold, and under constant threat of death. In the passage immediately preceding this one, in 2 Corinthians 4, Paul proclaims,
“We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed… We do not lose heart” (2 Corinthians 4:8-9, 16a).
When a man like that explains the source of his unshakable courage in the face of death, you kind of lean in and you listen.
Paul gives us this source of his courage in verse 7:
“For we walk by faith, not by sight.”
The whole manner of our life, that’s what “walk” means. The whole manner of a person’s life.
For Paul, the ruling reality was not what he could observe with his natural senses. That wasn’t the ruling reality. It is for a lot of people. It tends to be for us, but the ruling reality was not that. It was what he knew to be true about God (his faithfulness, his goodness, his power, his promises, his sovereignty) over every circumstance, including the final one, death, the moment where one feels decidedly out of control.
Walking by faith means that what I know about God is more real to me than what my senses report. It means that even when I stand at a graveside, and everything about my senses says, “This is the end,” I can say with Paul, “I know it’s not the end because Christ has already been through it and come out on the other side.” That’s faith.
When you think about it, Satan’s greatest weapon was what? Not temptation, right? That’s just a means to an end. Not suffering. That’s a tool.
His greatest weapon was death.
Death was the ultimate threat, the final card, the decisive weapon Satan played against humanity in the garden. The wages of sin is death, and Satan knew it. He engineered the fall precisely because death was what stood on the other side of it.
Death was his masterpiece of destruction, the mechanism by which he intended to permanently and irreversibly separate humanity from God. And it was universal. Apart from Christ, every human being who ever drew breath would face it without hope.
Then Christ walked straight into it. He did not defeat death from a safe distance. He didn’t overpower it from the outside. He entered it. He subjected himself fully to it. He allowed Satan’s ultimate weapon to land its full lethal blow against him. He went all the way into the grave, and then he walked out.
Hebrews 2:14–15 is a clear statement of what happened. Please listen carefully.
“Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery” (Hebrews 2:14–15).
The instrument of Satan’s power was death. How did Christ destroy that? By dying. He used the enemy’s own weapon to defeat him. What a staggering reversal. God took the very thing that was designed to destroy his people and made it the instrument of their eternal salvation. But actually, his dominance over it goes even further than that.
Not only has death been defeated, it’s actually been employed. It’s been conscripted. It’s being forced into the service of the very King it was designed to destroy. Death, Satan’s masterpiece, now does the one thing that Satan never intended and never imagined: It carries the beloved children of God safely and immediately into the presence of Christ. Every time a believer dies, Satan watches his greatest weapon accomplish the exact opposite of what he designed it for.
Satan designed death to separate. Christ made it to unite. Satan designed death to destroy. Christ made it to deliver. Satan designed it to be the final word. Christ has made it the first word of the rest of eternity. That’s why Paul erupts in 1 Corinthians 15 with words that sound less like theology and more like a battle cry: “Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?”
That’s not a question born of uncertainty but of assurance. Because Paul says right after that the sting of death was sin. Sin was what gave death its killing power, its ability to separate humanity from God permanently. But Christ absorbed our sin at the cross. He was made to be sin for us who knew no sin, and the sting has been removed.
Absent from the body, present with the Lord
Death can still wound. It hurts. Still separates us temporarily from the people that we love, but it cannot kill what Christ has made alive. It cannot undo what the resurrection has secured. The stinger is gone. This is what gives verse 8 such force:
“Yes, we are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8).
Now, Paul is not suicidal. He’s not minimizing this life or the people in it. What he is saying is this: “My deepest treasure is not my life, it’s not ministry, it’s not freedom, it is not health, it’s not even my closest relationships.” As much as I’m sure he valued all of those things, his deepest treasure was Christ. The moment that takes him from this body and fully places him in the presence of Christ, that moment is gain. It’s not loss. This is Philippians 1:23, which Paul wrote:
“My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better.”
Not merely acceptable or tolerable. It is far better because the worst thing Satan could do to a believer has been transformed by Christ. That truth anchors our assurance.\
Our eternal hope in Christ transforms our anticipation of and our assurance in death, but it doesn’t just affect the “not yet,” that future moment that — unless Jesus returns — we will all experience. It also impacts the now.
Our eternal hope in Christ activates our aspiration.
The first two movements of this passage deal with how we face death. This third movement deals with something equally important: how we live in the light of it.
The word Paul reaches for here is not one, probably, that you might expect. He’s just spent time saying, “Hey, we’re groaning in this tent. Life is hard, and we are groaning.” We might expect him to say, “Hey, just hang on for dear life. Just cope.” Right? Or just reluctantly endure or wait it out. That’s the way we feel sometimes. But what does Paul say? He says your eternal hope should lead you to make it our aim to please him. That’s what this life is all about.
This word “aim” defines someone driven by a single purpose, who rises every morning with this thing on their mind. It is a word of ambition and aspiration and forward-leaning intentionality.
The knowledge of eternity, the eternal hope that Paul had in Christ, did not make him passive. It made him very purposeful. That is exactly what eternity is supposed to do.
There’s a really important paradox here. Paul says that he would rather depart and go be with Jesus. He prefers that. He longs for it. And yet, Paul spends his every day planting churches and enduring suffering and discipling young pastors and other Christians. He’s writing letters that are still shaping the people of God 2,000 years later.
Death may be gained, right? He says that in Philippians 1. Death is gain. But this life that we’ve been graciously given is all about Christ. For me to live, Christ. To die, gain. Paul’s not passive. He’s not escapist. He is not checked out of this world because he has one eye on the next and he’s just hanging on for dear life.
So how do both exist? Because union with Christ transforms our ambitions. Death is not Paul’s goal. He says “to die is gain,” but death is not his goal. Escaping pain and the difficulties/trials of life is not his ultimate goal. Christ is his goal. That means, whether Christ leaves him here or calls him home, his purpose does not change. It’s always the same. He aims to please the Lord, present or absent, here or there, now or then.
Because of this union with Christ, for Paul, this life was all about living for Someone Else (capital letters). He wanted for his entire life to be controlled by the love of Christ, and the peace of Christ, and the word of Christ, and the name of Christ.
That brings Paul to verse 10 of our text:
“For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil” (2 Corinthians 5:10).
Now, there could be some confusion around this idea, so I want to be clear about what this is and what it is not:
For the believer, this is not a criminal court where the verdict is still in question. Romans 8:1 leaves no ambiguity:
“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
Every sin, every failure has been judged at Calvary, paid in full, finished. The debt is gone entirely.
This is more of a family scene, I think. The Judge is also the Savior. The one before whom every believer stands is the one with whom every believer is already united. When God the Father looks at us, he sees his son, Jesus.
This is not a terror of a defendant before an indifferent judge. This is the joy of a servant standing before the master who saw every faithful thing they ever did, those acts of sacrifice that were done in secret, those mornings of wrestling and prayer all alone. Those really hard things done out of love for Christ and others.
Here are some of the last words ever penned by Paul:
“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day,” (2 Timothy 4:7-8a).
That day is the same day that we see in 2 Corinthians 5:10. Not trembling, anticipating, leaning forward with joy toward the moment when the Savior who has seen everything publicly vindicates and rewards what grace alone produced in the life of a servant. In the light of death, this life is not meaningless.
Now, we cannot be approved by God by what we accomplish in this life, right? Only grace can do that. No work of mine. But what we do in this life matters. Who we live for will matter on that day. Our eternal hope in Christ transforms our aspirations and the way that we live this life.
Some of Adoniram Judson’s words — I believe, some of his final words, I think — perfectly illustrate the feelings of 2 Corinthians 5:1-10.
Adoniram Judson left everything comfortable and familiar to spend his life as a missionary in Burma. He was imprisoned. He was tortured for his faith. He buried multiple wives and several of his children on foreign soil. He gave everything he had for the gospel, and this was his testimony:
“I am not tired of my work, neither am I tired of the world. Yet when Christ calls me home, I shall go with the gladness of a boy bounding away from school.”
I love that imagery. Death is not okay, but it has been defeated. We celebrated Karen’s life yesterday, and I think about this every time I have somebody who I know and love who’s a believer: I just try to imagine with them — They’re fully and experientially… They have this knowledge of being away from the body and present with the Lord.
So how do we apply this passage? We divide the world in countless ways: race, nationality, wealth, education, politics, probably a hundred other categories. But scripture cuts through all of it with a single distinction. That’s the only one that’s going to matter in the end. You read about it in Revelation. There are those who are in Christ, and there are those who are not. Every other distinction falls into insignificance standing next to that one.
For those who are in Christ
If you are in Christ this morning, if you have trusted him, been united to him by faith and grace, then this passage is your inheritance. Not because you’re strong enough to face what is coming, not because our faith never wavers or falters, not because you’ve mastered the art of dying well, but because the one who’s already gone there and conquered it holds you fast.
He will not lose you. He will not abandon you at the threshold. He’s already been through that door, and he will bring you safely through it, too. Just as he will with every one of your family and friends who know him.
And you are allowed to grieve. You’re allowed to groan in this tent, in this body. You’re also invited to say with Paul — with full, honest, unashamed confidence — we know, we long, we are of good courage. We do not lose hope. We would rather be present with the Lord. Let the vocabulary of this passage become the vocabulary of your heart.
If you are not yet in Christ
Maybe you have questions this morning about what that even means. If this morning has brought to the surface a fear you’ve been carrying, maybe a question that you’ve been dodging and avoiding, a longing you could not quite name, then I want you to hear this carefully:
Every emotion you feel in the face of death is pointing to something. The fear, the uncertainty, the sense that this cannot really be all there is. The ache of watching someone you love leave and not knowing really where they’ve gone. These are not weaknesses to be overcome. They’re not just problems to be managed. They are your soul telling you the truth about what you need.
You need the One who tasted death, faced it head-on, and made it a doorway into resurrection life. You need the one who walked into that grave and then walked back out. You need the One who says to every person who trusts in him, “Because I live, you also will live.”
His name is Jesus, and his death brings hope. His resurrection secures it. His grace is greater than every fear you have ever carried, and it is available to you today, not because we deserve it, not because we earn it, but because he is offering it.
In just a few moments, we are going to sing, and there will be people down here at the front who will be happy to answer any question that you have or pray with you. If you do have questions, I encourage you to come up and to speak with one of them. If you don’t do that, please grab one of us and ask us every question you have. We would love the opportunity to do that. Let’s pray.
Father, we thank you for your Son, Jesus, who conquered death, who faced it head-on, destroyed the only real weapon that Satan has. We thank you that we can now look at the time of death with anticipation, not just groaning, with assurance because of what your Son has accomplished.
Father, I pray that we will go from this place today and we will take to heart that it is our aim to please your Son, Jesus. Help us not grow weary in well-doing. It is in the name of your Son, Jesus, that we pray these things, amen.
