TENSION BETWEEN THE SPIRIT AND THE FLESH?

 

I have been trying to come up with a way to address through scripture the apparent tension between the Spirit (life, perfection and grace) and the flesh (death, sin and the law). It  strikes me that two parallel passages written by Paul might do the trick.  They are the following:

 1 Corinthians 6:9-11:   ^"Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.  And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God."

 1 Corinthians 15:49-51:  "And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly.  Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption.  Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.  For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality.  When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: 'Death has been swallowed up in victory'.”

 In the first passage we read that wrongdoers cannot inherit the Kingdom of God.  One might ask:  how can that be?  Aren't we all wrongdoers, even after we have accepted Christ as our savior?  See 1 John 1:10, "If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us."  The second passage resolves this apparent contradiction where we read that "flesh and blood" cannot inherit the kingdom of God.  See also Matthew 26:41, "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak."  Thus our old flesh, enslaved by the law and sin, dies, while our spirit, quickened by the free gift of the Holy Spirit through Christ, is fully clothed with a new, heavenly body. 

 See 2 Corinthians 5:1-5:

 "For we know that when this earthly tent we live in is taken down (that is, when we die and leave this earthly body), we will have a house in heaven, an eternal body made for us by God himself and not by human hands.  We grow weary in our present bodies, and we long to put on our heavenly bodies like new clothing.  For we will put on heavenly bodies; we will not be spirits without bodies. While we live in these earthly bodies, we groan and sigh, but it’s not that we want to die and get rid of these bodies that clothe us. Rather, we want to put on our new bodies so that these dying bodies will be swallowed up by life.  God himself has prepared us for this, and as a guarantee he has given us his Holy Spirit."  

 We again read in Romans 8:21-23 that all of creation, including each of us, "groans" and is "in travail" awaiting the "redemption of our body."  At first blush this does not appear to be a comforting message, since it acknowledges the agony of the flesh, which includes not only sickness but worry and discomfort and our broken relationships, and many other torments afflicting all of us in various ways.  The comfort afforded by this passage is not that these pains will necessarily be taken away from us in this life (see, e.g., 2 Corinthians 12:7, where Paul writes of his "thorn in the flesh"), but rather that we can nonetheless live on, with or without these torments, in the firm knowledge that even now Christ is clothing us with our new, eternal bodies, and that these worries and ailments will not get the best of us, that Christ will triumph in the end, and we will triumph with him.  See 2 Corinthians 3:18, "But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord".  

 Thus, our job here on earth is to do the best we can to serve Christ, and He will handle the rest; but even if we don't do our best, (and it may well be that we that we don't do very well at all) He will still handle everything for us, with some admonishment and correction along the way, so long as we continue to believe in Him.  See, e.g., Mark 8:33, where Christ sternly rebukes Peters.