Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered outside the gate. Therefore, let us go forth to him outside the camp, bearing his reproach. For we have no continuing city here, but we seek one to come.
Select a thought to read by choosing a collection, the month, and then the day:
“And in this mountain shall the Lord of hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things, a feast of wines in the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wines on the lees, well refined. And He will destroy in this mountain the face of the covering cast over all people, and the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces; and the rebuke of his people shall he take away from off all the earth: for the Lord hath spoken it.”
Isaiah 25:6-8
From Pastor John’s Old Testament class: “Lessons from Isaiah”, No. 43.
What is the “covering” that God has cast over all people, the “veil” that is spread over all nations? God revealed the answer in Hebrews 10:20, where we are told that Jesus made “a new and living way” for us when he passed “through the veil, that is to say, his flesh.” Every person born into this world is covered with the veil of flesh. That is how we know they are born; they have a body.
But God has promised His people that He will destroy forever their fleshly body and give them new bodies made of better substance than flesh. This is the hope of the saints, to receive such a body from Christ. To receive a glorified body from Christ is salvation itself. God has the power to do this, and He has sworn that He will use it. Paul speaks of this miraculous event in Philippians 3:20-21: “Our homeland is in the heavens, out of which also we eagerly await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body into the likeness of his glorious body by the operation of the power that enables him to bring all things into subjection to himself.”
We can have high-sounding titles here in this life, be the object of admiration, own castles, and be spoken well of by all men, but if in the end we fail to receive a new, glorified body from Christ Jesus, all of that will mean nothing, and compared to the gift of hope that we have in Christ, all of that means nothing now.