COLLAPSING OUR TENTS FOR OUR UPWARD CLIMB

I used to enjoy back packing in the mountains. We often slept in our tents. The next morning I would fold up the tent and tie it to the backpack. The rule of tent camping is to leave no trace behind as we move on to new heights. Death is like collapsing a tent. Paul writes For we know that, if our earthly house, the tent, is taken down, we have a building from God which is eternal (2 Corinthians 5:1).

The conditional clause (ἐὰν) is a third class condition called a "more probable future condition" (Dana & Mantey, Grammar, p.290). Death is a relatively uncertain future event since Christ could return before we die, but death is certainly more probable than not! Death always involves the loss of our earthly (ἐπίγειος) house (οἰκία). Paul uses the noun οἰκία instead of οἶκος which may imply an intentional distinction. The noun οἶκος was used to refer to the totality of a deceased person's possessions while the noun οἰκία referred to simply the person's residence (TDNT, 5:131). Our physical body is the residence of our soul.

My body is a house which is a tent. The noun for a tent (σκήνους) is a genitive of apposition to the noun for a house (οἰκία). The genitive of apposition is a second noun that describes the material that makes up the first noun, so the tent is the fabric that composes the house (MHT, Grammar, 3:214).

Paul, like a tent maker, knew tents. Tents were used as the cover of a wagon or a shelter on the deck of a ship along with homes used by nomadic people. They were always transitory structures in comparison to houses and even secular writers compared life in this world to a tent "passing by; one comes, sees and departs" as Democritus wrote (NIDNTT, 3:811). A Jewish reader may well have thought about The Feast of Tabernacles or Booths where families constructed tents made of branches to remember life in the wilderness before entering the promised land (R&R, Key, p.466).

Campers "strike" their tents every morning. The verb translated "torn down" (καλυθῇ) is a passive verb referring to the dismantling of a tent by someone other than the tenter so God "strikes" our tents in His time. It is a compound verb made up of κατά, meaning downward, and λύω, meaning to loosen. The sense of the verb is to take down the tent (TDNTT, 4:338). The body where our souls reside is taken down, folded up or dismantled so we can move on to a new life because our physical bodies are temporary and impermanent.

Death means collapsing the tents of our bodies for our upward climb in Christ. Our focus in death is to look forward to life not backward at life. We look ahead not behind like a backpacker eager for his next glorious mountain peak experience.