Day and Day

The technician turns the monitor toward you, and there it is. Your own spine, the curve of it, the wear at the joints, the places where the years have pressed down. Nothing is hidden.

“Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day” (2 Corinthians 4.16).

Paul essentially validates the X-ray. The verb under “wasting away” is diaphtheiro. Not fading. Being destroyed. The present tense means it happens again and again, day after day, the same wearing down the film just showed you.

On the surface, some take this verse and turn it into a promise that the next scan comes back clean if you believe hard enough. There is a truth buried in that hope. God does heal, and one day he will raise this very body. But that is not the promise Paul makes here, and when we force it on him we hand people a sorrow they never needed to carry. The verse is stronger than that, not weaker.

What the X-ray cannot see is the renewal. Anakainoo, being made new, and the verb is passive because you are not the one doing it. The Spirit is (2 Corinthians 3.18). “Day by day” in the Greek is day and day, day after day, not a slow accumulation you could measure but a fresh mercy handed to you each morning as the trouble comes.

And notice where Paul’s confidence comes from. He does not lose heart because he knows “the one who raised the Lord Jesus will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you”(2 Corinthians 4.14). The outer person belongs to this age that is passing. The inner person belongs to the age to come, already here by the Spirit, who is God’s down payment on the resurrection. This is not body against soul. It is the whole you, seen two ways. What is dying, and what is being raised.

And the last two words. With you. Paul will not stand before God alone. He is one disciple among disciples, and he means to bring us with him. We wear out together and we are renewed together.

“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (2 Corinthians 4.18). So we look. Not away from the film, at the film, and then past it. The curve in your spine is real and it is not the final word. We do not lose heart, not because the body holds up, but because the One who is renewing us does not wear out.

The scan tells you what you are made of. It cannot tell you what you are becoming.

~PW 🌮🛶