What Does 2 Corinthians 5:6 Mean?
So we are always bold, knowing that while we are at home in the body, we are away from the Lord.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Therefore we are always confident, knowing that, whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord:THE KEY
Confidence can remain present while the verse names a real distance from the Lord.
THE MEANING
You are at home in the body, and this verse also names your absence from the Lord. These realities sit side by side: confidence remains even as the distance is acknowledged.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
This undoes the belief that distance from the Lord automatically cancels confidence.
THE ROOT
ἐνδημοῦντες
endēmóuntes
GROWS FROM
δῆμος
Dēmos means a people or community; these compounds describe being at home within one’s sphere or away from it.
“at home in the body” in this verse is endēmóuntes. English makes “at home” and “absent” sound unrelated, but the Greek builds both around the same home-and-community image: dwelling within one’s sphere and being away from it. The verse holds bodily dwelling and absence from the Lord together without letting the distance erase confidence.
ALSO GROWS
endēmeō: To dwell at home, or be present in one’s home sphere.
ἐνδημέω
This is the word behind being “at home in the body”; it makes embodied life a present dwelling place.
Absent: To be away from home, or away from one’s own place.
ἐκδημέω
This shares the same δῆμος (dēmos) element, showing that the verse describes two locations through one home-and-community image.
THE PATTERN
Confidence can remain while a real absence is named.
I would faint, were I not steady in seeing the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living.Now trust is the footing beneath things hoped for, the proof of things unseen.Jesus said to him, Thomas, because you have perceived me, you have leaned your full weight. Flourishing are those who have not perceived, and yet have leaned their weight.THE THREAD
We are bold, and we are pleased rather to be away from the body and at home with the Lord.The same two Greek compounds return, now with their locations reversed: away from the body and at home with the Lord. That reversal opens the distance in verse 6 as a real but changing relation, not the end of confidence.
Read the SDV Bible.
Every verse has a Deep Dive in the app.
The iPhone Bible app with the Selah Decoded Version.
Does something in this reading look wrong? Tell us