In the opening section of chapter 5, Paul continues this discussion on his ministry from a heavenly perspective. He knows that death is going to come sooner or later for everybody, and in Paul’s case it is perhaps coming sooner because of the kind of hardships he was enduring. This body is at best a ragged tent. It is going to be folded up and put away one day. But Paul says that the glory of the Christian hope is to know that when that tent is put away, we have an eternal dwelling made by God in heaven (v. 1).
I think he might very well be thinking of the Feast of Tabernacles, which commemorated the days of the Jewish wandering in the wilderness and the tents in which they lived. It was to remind them of that uncertain past before they actually came to possess the Promised Land. If Paul is thinking of that, then he is saying that in each of our individual experiences, we have something like that. The days of this earthly life of ours, and the bodies that we have, are like that wandering in the wilderness. We have bodies, but they are something that is temporary and passing away. That would be a cause for great dismay were it not for the fact that God is leading us to another Promised Land. One day we are going to have a city with permanent dwellings in which to reside.
It may well be that Paul was also drawing on a broader experience of the people in that area of the world. I remember that in the opening chapter of T. E. Lawrence’s great classic, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the author, Lawrence of Arabia, points out something of the nature of the migrations around the Sinai Peninsula that had been characteristic for centuries and are still true in our own day. He said that the best land in that particular area of the world was the highlands of Judah, and especially the land which received the breezes from the Mediterranean, where the rain fell, the crops grew, and where trees existed at one time—a land, as the Bible says, that is flowing with milk and honey.
The strongest tribes would always take that area. But if it should happen that over a period of generations, that tribe should weaken because of famine, plague, or some such thing, there would always be a stronger tribe that would come along. This stronger tribe would then push the weaker tribe out and take the better land. When that happened, the tribe that was pushed out would move a little bit further south to good land, but not quite as good as they had before. They would then displace the people who had been in that area, and they would in turn move on further south and displace the people there. This movement of displacement would continue down around the Sinai area of the great desert and back up the other side until at the very end of this sequence of migrations, the people who were left were virtually forced out into the most arid desert country and became the Bedouins, who lived in tents. Lawrence goes on to say that what lies at the end of that particular course of migration is Damascus, with its rivers, gardens, houses, and flowers.
Like the desert experience that Paul draws on from Old Testament Israel, he is telling us that our world here is not our home. We are only pilgrims in it who are pressing on to the heavenly city, one that is far more wonderful than anything we could ever experience in this life.
