Psalms 90:10 “The days of our lives are seventy years; And if by reason of strength they are eighty years, yet their boast is only labor and sorrow; For it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”
As we have already mentioned, our bodies (our outward man) are given to us (our inward man) by God to dwell in while we are here on the earth. In other words our earthly bodies are our homes, and in fact our bodies have no life in them unless the inward man is present, for the scripture teaches us that the body without the inward man is dead (James 2:26). This house that we have been given is not a permanent structure however, for as we saw earlier our outward man is perishing, for God has decreed that our natural bodies will expire after a certain period of time. These earthly bodies are well able to function as long as God decrees that they should. For example from the time of Adam until the flood, God allowed the bodies of men to live for approximately one thousand years before they expired (Genesis 5:5-27). So how did God do that? He ensured that the aging process kept pace with the number of years that He ordained man should be allowed to live. And so whereas men reach middle age between thirty-five and forty years today, before the flood men would only reach middle age between four hundred and fifty and five hundred years old. It is for this reason that men only married when they were well over one hundred years old (the youngest recorded was sixty five), because at one hundred years old men looked like twenty years olds do today (Genesis 5:15). After the flood God reduced mans age limit dramatically to one hundred and twenty years (Genesis 6:3). Later, God once again revised man’s age limit down to between seventy and eighty years, as confirmed to us in the above quoted passage of scripture. Nevertheless just as with the previous age limits that God prescribed, there are always exceptions that God allows. And so we see that there are some today that live well into their nineties and some even over one hundred, but the average still remains within the parameters that God has prescribed. Nevertheless even though God does allow some to live beyond the age limits that He has prescribed, their quality of life that they experience does deteriorate significantly as their bodies grow older. And so throughout the ages men have desperately tried to find ways to lengthen their lifespan, but try as they might, that decision remains in God’s domain and there is nothing they can do about it.
2 Corinthians 5:1 “For we know that if our earthly house, this tent, is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.”
In the above quoted passage of scripture the Holy Spirit through the apostle Paul gives us the very clear analogy of these current bodies that we dwell in, as being tents. The apostle Peter confirms that same truth to us when he also referred to his own body as being a tent (2 Peter 1:14). We all know that a tent is not a permanent structure but rather a very temporary one, which is why the Holy Spirit gives us that analogy, to show us just how temporary our earthly bodies are. For even if one were to live for a hundred years, that age is counted as nothing when compared to eternity. But I also want you to notice in this passage that the Holy Spirit refers to our bodies as an earthly house. A house that a person lives in is not the person, that’s just where they live. This world is obsessed with their earthly bodies, i.e. the houses that they live in and what they look like, but as our Lord declares, they completely neglect their inward man and so the inside of their homes are full of all uncleanness (Matthew 23:27). As we will see in the following section, God gives us very clear instructions that we are to observe in looking after our earthly houses, nevertheless as our Lord again declared, it is far more important to first take care of our inward man so that the outward man can then be correctly taken care of (Matthew 23:26). Although our earthly bodies are only temporary structures, the apostle Paul reveals to us in this passage that God has prepared an eternal dwelling for us in the heavens. In context the apostle Paul is referring to our resurrected bodies which we will all receive at the end of the age.
Michael E.B. Maher
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