A faith essay based on Pastor David Jang’s sermon on 2 Corinthians 5, biblically unfolding our homeland and the hope of heaven, eternal life after death, Christ’s substitutionary atonement and reconciliation, and our responsibility before the judgment seat.
Everyone lives with a
quiet longing for a place to “return to.” Even if we have a house with an
address, the homeland where the heart truly rests and where the roots of
existence touch the ground often seems to lie in another dimension. Pastor
David Jang’s exposition centered on 2 Corinthians 5 brings that sense of
homeland into sharp alignment within a biblical worldview, inviting us to see
what lies after death not as a vague void, but as a doorway leading into
eternal life. As the dense and distinctive language of the Pauline epistles
suggests, faith is not a technique for suppressing real emotions; it is a
fundamental lens for interpreting reality. And the hope of heaven is not an
escape hatch that makes the present world worthless; it is a fixed point that
makes the present more meaningful. Pastor David Jang looks squarely at how,
when this fixed point wavers, the life of faith can easily tilt toward despair
and cynicism. He then weaves together what kind of responsibility and posture a
person who knows the homeland must carry today—binding it to the center of the
gospel itself: the truth of substitutionary atonement and reconciliation.
What first becomes
unmistakably clear in Pastor David Jang’s message is the “tension of two
worlds” that Scripture assumes. We are accustomed to what is seen, but
Scripture does not merely reassure us with comforting phrases that the visible
world is not all there is; it speaks in terms of structure and order. Hebrews 8
implies that earthly institutions and worship are a copy and shadow of heavenly
realities, and Hebrews 9 decisively cuts off “this-world-is-the-end” thinking
with the declaration that “it is appointed for man to die once, and after that
comes judgment” (Hebrews 9:27). When Jesus says in John 14, “I go to prepare a
place for you,” that promise goes beyond soothing grief; it becomes a pledge
that rearranges our entire worldview. Paul, in 2 Corinthians 5, describes this
world as a “tent,” and the eternal world God has prepared as “a building from
God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” A tent assumes
movement and decay; a house assumes dwelling and permanence. Therefore, the life
of faith is not the reckless abandonment of the present, but the steady
alignment of direction—living in a tent while orienting the heart toward the
house. To keep us from losing that direction, the gospel repeatedly turns us
back toward the homeland.
This two-world framework
becomes more tangible through a womb analogy Pastor David Jang often uses. In
the womb, a fetus can feel as though the world of amniotic fluid is all there
is. Yet at birth, the child crosses into an entirely different order of air and
light. If the fetus could imagine that transition as “the end,” birth would be
nothing but terror. The world Scripture describes after death can be understood
in a similar way. Death is not deletion; it is transition—movement into a wider
reality. Through this analogy, Pastor David Jang does not try to erase the
unfamiliarity of death by force, yet he persuasively connects that
unfamiliarity to the truth that God has prepared a homeland beyond it. The key
here is not emotional exaggeration, but the objectivity of Scripture. Within
the order that the body returns to dust while the spirit returns to God, the
human being is not trapped inside biological time alone. Paul’s
confession—“though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being
renewed day by day”—acknowledges human finitude while opening the door to the
possibility of spiritual renewal.
At this point, Pastor
David Jang brings the tension between flesh and spirit into concrete focus. The
flesh chases what is visible: immediate satisfaction, the stability of
possession, the applause of honor. The spirit chases what is unseen: the weight
of truth, the breath of eternity, a longing toward God. The reason human beings
still ask about meaning after hunger is satisfied, still confess emptiness
after success is achieved, and still name a deficit that remains even when
relationships are full, is that we are spiritual beings who exceed the category
of matter. The psalmist’s cry—“as a deer pants for streams of water”—is not a
religious hobby; it is an ontological signal. Pastor David Jang calls that
signal “the memory of homeland,” and he insists that believers should not
suppress that memory but, through the help of the Holy Spirit, discipline it
toward the right direction.
Here, the Holy Spirit is
not a vague mysticism but what Paul calls a “guarantee.” According to 2
Corinthians 5, God has given us the Spirit as a guarantee. A guarantee means
the future reality has already penetrated the present. Thus, the hope of heaven
is not a blurry optimism—“things will get better someday”—but a practical power
that reshapes choices and posture now. This is why Pastor David Jang repeatedly
speaks the language of heavenly citizenship. Citizenship is documentation of
identity, and identity determines the grammar of life. If one possesses the
citizenship of heaven, one cannot keep living as though the values of the world
are everything. Yet that separation is not an extremist hatred of the world; it
is a necessary distance in order to love the world rightly. When an eternal
perspective is secured, we become freer from momentary profit and emotional
surges, and we can hold a moral center even through the long march toward our
homeland.
Pastor David Jang does not
treat the contrast between tent and house as mere rhetoric; he treats it as a
real dividing line that shapes the emotions of life and the decisions of faith.
Tent-life is always close to the anxiety that it might collapse at any moment.
Health, relationships, finances, reputation—everything can shake in an instant,
and we witness this repeatedly in daily news and in the fractures of our own
stories. Many therefore try to soothe anxiety by stacking up more safety
mechanisms and control devices, but Paul leads us in an entirely different
direction. He declares with certainty: “If the tent that is our earthly home is
destroyed, we have a building from God… eternal in the heavens” (2 Corinthians
5:1). This certainty does not deny the pain of loss, but it refuses to let loss
define life ultimately. Pastor David Jang explains courage in faith not as
“groundless positivity,” but as “a grounded shift of vision”—acknowledging the
weakness of the tent, yet allowing that weakness to become a passageway toward
God. This, he says, is the posture of one who knows the homeland.
Likewise, when Paul says,
“For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened” (2 Corinthians
5:4), that groaning is not the failure of faith but the normal breathing of
faith. A believer is not a person who becomes numb to suffering; at times a
believer may be the one who feels the weight of suffering even more keenly. Yet
the reason this groaning does not harden into despair is that God has given the
Spirit as a “guarantee.” The nuance of Paul’s “guarantee” is not mere emotional
assurance, but the sense that the future promise has already been given in the
present like a down payment. Through this assurance of the Spirit, Pastor David
Jang teaches that the hope of heaven is not “a later story” but “the engine
that pulls the life we live now.” Therefore, the believer stands as someone who
groans yet does not lose direction—someone who does not pretend to perfect calm
but keeps walking without surrendering the compass.
Pastor David Jang also
refuses to miss Paul’s balance: the more we speak of heavenly hope, the more
solemn life becomes. The judgment of Hebrews 9:27 is not a device meant to
frighten people into compliance; it is a declaration that restores meaning to life.
When Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:10 that “we must all appear before the
judgment seat of Christ,” to receive what is due for what we have done, whether
good or evil, he is not trying to manipulate the saved with terror; he is
reminding believers that each day carries real weight before God. Therefore,
the life of faith is not a competition of “what did I accomplish?” but is
re-centered on Paul’s question: “Did I please the Lord?” The
confession—“whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him”
(2 Corinthians 5:9)—means living by heaven’s standard even while still inside
the tent.
Paul’s confidence about
what lies after death—his desire to be “away from the body and at home with the
Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8)—functions in Pastor David Jang’s preaching as a
summit of comfort. Death remains unfamiliar, and for those left behind it leaves
an aching absence. Yet Christian faith does not erase the unfamiliarity; it
places beyond it a relational reality: “being with the Lord.” Since the promise
of a place in John 14 is not merely the preparation of a location but an
invitation into life-with-Jesus, heaven is, before it is space, personal
communion. Thus, the hope of heaven is not psychological reassurance—“I’ll go
to a good place”—but theological certainty: “I will dwell with the Lord.” That
certainty becomes a pillar that keeps us from collapsing amid loss. Paul also
longs not to be “unclothed” but to be “further clothed” (the flow of 2
Corinthians 5:4), showing that Christian hope does not shrink into the comfort
of a disembodied soul; it presses toward resurrection and the completion of new
creation. The body decays, but God is not One who discards creation; He renews
it. That expectation rejects nihilistic contempt for the body and instead makes
us hold today’s life with greater responsibility.
Pastor David Jang invites
us to consider what strength this vision of resurrection and new creation
provides in places of mourning and loss. When we send off someone we love, we
encounter an emptiness that the phrase “time will heal” cannot fill. Paul’s language
does not forcibly stitch up grief, yet it presents a greater reality that
swallows grief without denying it. As Paul elsewhere confesses, “If we hope for
what we do not see, we wait for it with patience,” the believer waits not
because one is merely “a person who believes in the unseen,” but because one
has heard the promise that the unseen is more real. Pastor David Jang does not
leave John 14 as a phrase recited at funerals; he reads it as strength for
those who must live on. The truth that the Lord has prepared a place moves the
destiny of the departed from “uncertainty in darkness” to “safety within
promise,” and it transforms the time of the living from “meaningless regret”
into “a pilgrimage that walks by faith.”
What matters here is that
the hope of heaven does not remain confined to personal emotional stability.
Paul says in Philippians that our citizenship is in heaven, and from there we
await a Savior (the flow of Philippians 3:20). Waiting is not frozen time; it
is time with direction. Pastor David Jang finds in 2 Corinthians 5 the grounds
to call this waiting a “rearrangement of life.” Because we will ultimately
stand before the judgment seat of Christ, we remember that today’s choices are
connected to eternity. At the same time, the reality of judgment is not meant
to make salvation unstable; it is an echo that awakens a life begun by grace to
bear fruit worthy of grace. The believer, then, does not cling to fear in order
to protect salvation, but becomes more honest precisely because one does not
want to betray the love that has already reconciled us. The more certain the
reality after death becomes, the less we waste the present—because we know that
today’s word, today’s forgiveness, today’s service will be re-read in the light
of eternity.
Even when Pastor David
Jang refers to Jesus’ parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16, the focus
is not sensational imagery. The parable shows that a reversal of values may
occur after death, and it asks what we loved and how we lived here and now.
Lazarus’ rest is not the result of merit but a revelation of God’s mercy; the
rich man’s torment exposes not merely wealth itself, but the hardened heart
that looked away from another human being. A person who seriously holds the
hope of heaven cannot keep one’s heart closed to the vulnerable on earth. If
one speaks of homeland yet ignores a neighbor, that homeland is not Scripture’s
homeland but a self-centered consolation. Pastor David Jang therefore
emphasizes that believing in heaven must become “the ability to choose
righteousness and good” in present life.
At the center of this
entire movement stands substitutionary atonement and reconciliation. The heart
of the gospel that Pastor David Jang draws from the latter half of 2
Corinthians 5 is the declaration that, through Jesus Christ’s atoning work,
reconciliation between God and humanity has been accomplished. The phrase “one
has died for all” (2 Corinthians 5:14) proclaims more than an ethical example;
it announces the mystery of substitution. Atonement means a price paid—bearing
the debt created by sin in another’s place. God does not demand that humans
build a bridge by good deeds; through the sinless Son, He Himself opens the
way. That is why Paul says the love of Christ “controls” (or “compels”) us. For
love to compel means the gospel is not an ornament applied to life from the
outside; it is a force that changes direction from within. Pastor David Jang
refuses to let the cross be consumed as a mere religious symbol; he calls us to
see it as the place where God’s love condensed into a concrete event in history.
Another core emphasis in
Pastor David Jang’s preaching is that the gospel of reconciliation
fundamentally reconstitutes human relationships. Paul declares an epistemic
revolution: “From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh”
(2 Corinthians 5:16). To know “according to the flesh” is to classify people by
appearance, background, ability, efficiency, profit and loss. But the one who
has experienced reconciliation learns to see others anew in Christ. The
statement “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17)
does not stop at inner change; a new creation gives birth to a new community,
and a new community forms a new grammar of relationships. If the church is torn
by envy and jealousy, factions and boasting, it collides head-on with the
gospel of reconciliation. Pastor David Jang holds up the reality of the
Corinthian church as a mirror and urges the church today not to be satisfied
with words and forms of faith, but to choose forgiveness and reconciliation in
actual relationships.
Paul goes further: God
“gave us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:18–19). Pastor David
Jang reads this as the reason the church exists. Believers cannot remain
consumers who have merely received salvation; they are called as “ambassadors for
Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:20). An ambassador does not represent personal
preferences but the will of the King. Therefore, the church in the midst of the
world is not to become a group that amplifies conflict, but to become a channel
of words and actions that restore relationships. This is not image management;
it flows from the essence of the gospel. In the conclusion—“For our sake he
made him to be sin who knew no sin… so that in him we might become the
righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21)—righteousness is no longer an
abstraction; it becomes God’s character made visible through real choices and
relationships.
When this character takes
shape in community, reconciliation is not a technique for staging emotional
calm; it is a decision to live in the way of the cross. Because we still carry
hearts shaped by the flesh, we are quick to cut off relationships because we
were hurt, to delay love because we fear loss, and to corner others with the
logic of self-justification. Yet the more deeply we understand Christ’s
substitution, the more we learn the way of forgiveness that goes beyond
calculation. This road cannot be walked by human temperament alone. That is why
we need the help of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit translates heaven’s values into
habits of life—slowing the speed of our speech, choosing listening over
accusation, valuing the joy of reconciliation over the thrill of victory.
Pastor David Jang warns against division in the church because such division is
not merely a problem of atmosphere; it is a wound that erodes the credibility
of the gospel.
Pastor David Jang’s
message also implies an important extension: the gospel of reconciliation can
expand beyond individuals and communities into social dimensions. In an era
when opposition and hatred have become ordinary, reconciliation is easily
consumed as a sentimental word. Yet biblical reconciliation is a way that does
not hide truth while refusing to destroy the other; a way that does not ignore
justice while refusing to spiral into revenge; a way that acknowledges wounds
without settling into hatred. Paul’s letter to Philemon shows, through gospel
counsel surrounding Onesimus, how relational restoration can shake even the
cracks of social systems. Just as the single word “brother” rearranged the
world of slave and master, the gospel of reconciliation can reorder
relationships today. In families, the language between generations; in
workplaces, the logic of competition; in churches, the way we handle
difference—all must be examined before the gospel. The one who holds heavenly
citizenship does not escape responsibility in the world; rather, such a person
more clearly awakens to the calling to live as a mediator of peace.
There is a work of art
that helps us imagine this inner landscape of the gospel as a single image.
Rembrandt’s 17th-century masterpiece, The Return of the Prodigal Son,
depicts with quiet yet overwhelming depth the moment a son who has lost
everything returns and is embraced by the father. The worn shoes, the ragged
clothing, the bowed posture, and the father’s two hands covering him—these
details speak of “returning” not as mere movement but as the restoration of
relationship, symbolizing that the homeland human beings ultimately long for is
the father’s embrace. The gospel of reconciliation Pastor David Jang proclaims
resembles that scene. The homeland is not merely a heavenly address; it is the
place where relationship with God has been restored. Atonement is the road that
brings us back to that place, and reconciliation is the way the returned one,
now on the road again, invites others to come home.
To long for the homeland
also means practicing, here and now, the habit of living with God. When Paul
says, “we walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7), that faith becomes
not just an idea but a way of life. Prayer is not an escape toward heaven; it
is breathing that acclimates the heart to the air of the homeland. Meditation
on Scripture is the refining process that re-forges values worn down by the
world’s language. Worship is not an event that briefly pauses a week’s
emotional consumption; it is the time when we reaffirm heaven’s kingship and
order and re-center ourselves as ambassadors. These practices do not become
merit, but they become channels through which we more deeply enjoy reconciling
grace and translate that grace into the places we actually live. This is why
the life of faith Pastor David Jang emphasizes is not a burst of one-time
passion, but sustained direction.
As Pastor David Jang
highlights through 2 Corinthians 5, the gospel gives us a biblical worldview,
and that worldview changes the choices we make in relationships. When conflict
arises, instead of branding the other as an “enemy” and attacking online, we
open once more the possibility of conversation in Christ. When misunderstanding
accumulates, rather than venting through backbiting, we confirm truth and speak
responsibly. When a community shakes, rather than applying the logic of winners
and losers, we remember the ministry of reconciliation and choose humility.
These small decisions are the very “reality” that 2 Corinthians 5 demands.
Reconciliation is not an ideal; it is a discipline. And the help of the Holy
Spirit is the breath of grace that makes that discipline sustainable.
This direction is also
highly practical in how we prepare for what comes after death. Standing before
the judgment seat is not a threat meant to control people through fear; it is a
gracious alarm that awakens what should not be delayed. To say “I’m sorry” now,
to untangle unresolved misunderstanding now, to extend a hand toward
reconciliation now, to choose small acts of good toward the weak now—this is
the wisdom of preparing for the homeland. At the same time, Pastor David Jang
places beside this a warning: the more we talk about heaven, the more humble we
must become. If we use “knowing the homeland” as a reason to condemn others, or
if we use judgment as an excuse to postpone love, our hope of heaven becomes
not Paul’s gospel but a mask of self-righteousness. Reconciliation is possible
only in the way of the cross. The cross is the sign of victory and the sign of
self-emptying; Christ’s substitution grants me the freedom to bear some loss
for the sake of another. When that freedom is used as love, the believer
begins—even while living inside the tent of earth—to carry the fragrance of
heaven.
Just as Paul contrasts
death in Adam with life in Christ (the logic of Romans 5), Pastor David Jang’s
sermon teaches that “who you are in” determines both destiny and ethics. To be
“in Christ” means more than the declaration of forgiven sin; it means the
center of life has moved. Therefore, even in failure, the believer can return
and be restored; even in success, the believer need not settle into
pride—because one reads one’s story within the grammar of eternity.
In the end, the conclusion
Pastor David Jang leaves through his sermon on 2 Corinthians 5 is simple. The
person who knows the homeland does not place life’s center in earthly
achievement, yet neither does that person abandon the present irresponsibly. Living
a day that is tent-like, the believer remembers the house in heaven, holds
Christ’s substitutionary atonement with gratitude, is reconciled to God,
and—according to the ministry of reconciliation—invites neighbors and community
into peace. The Spirit’s guarantee enables the present to be lived on the
credit of the future; the light of the judgment seat gives meaning to every
choice; and the hope of heaven turns a trembling heart back toward the
homeland. Faith, then, is not a technique for leaving the world, but a way of
loving the world anew—placing the entire journey toward the homeland under the
light of restored relationship. Following this gospel path Pastor David Jang
sets forth from 2 Corinthians 5, we do not imagine what lies after death only as
fearful darkness, but live today with courage within the promise of eternal
life and dwelling with the Lord. And that courage bears fruit not in arrogance
but in humility; not in avoidance but in responsibility; not in division but in
reconciliation. As we live this way, we hear the homeland calling at every
moment, endure the tent’s anxieties by the Spirit’s guarantee, and walk as
ambassadors of reconciliation, held by the love of Christ. When the home we
will return to is certain, the steps we take today become certain as well.
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