2 Corinthians 5:2

2 Corinthians 5:2. For verily in this (tabernacle) we groan, longing to be clothed upon with our habitation which is from heaven viewed as “from heaven,” because the distinguishing properties of the resurrection-body will be the efflux of that resurrection-life which resides in “the Lord from heaven.” And, as Bengel says, if it be “ from heaven,” the thing meant cannot be heaven itself.

It will be observed that a new figure is here introduced; the glorified body, first held forth as a house, is now figured as a clothing. But the one figure is not substituted for the other; the two are combined; and by what in ordinary writings would be called a mixture of metaphors, we are said to be “clothed upon” with a “house.” But besides that the Scripture figures form so light a vehicle for conveying spiritual truths that the thing figured often shines through, and, in fact, absorbs, the figure, it so happens that in the present case the incongruity is only apparent. For “our house which is from heaven” will be no such gross fabric as the word “house” might suggest, but of such refined and subtle spirituality that, to represent it as a clothing of celestial radiance enshrining the perfected spirit, if a figure at all, is one as natural as it is beautiful. [1]

[1] To one accustomed (says Dean Stanley) to make Cilician hair-cloth into tents, the double metaphor of a habitation and of a vesture would naturally occur; and he refers to Psalms 104:2. “Who coverest Thyself with light as with a garment, who stretchest forth the heaven like a curtain ” (of the tent).