The Things Which Are Not Seen Are Eternal

This world is not as real as the next world.

The next world is eternal. This world is temporal. The physical is not as real as the spiritual. This physical reality is not the ultimate reality.

The things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.

Or as Morpheus told Neo in the 1999 film The Matrix,

Morpheus: “You’ve felt it your entire life. That there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind driving you mad… It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”

Neo: “What truth?”

Morpheus: “That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch.”

There are certainly shadows of biblical truth in that script. The Bible says we are born into this temporal world in bondage to sin. While we were children we were held in bondage under the elemental things of the world. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.

Our bodies will change from perishable to imperishable bodies. It was sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.

This fallen world will pass away. The elements will be destroyed with intense heat, and the earth and its works will be burned up. But the next world will last forever.

Since all these things are to be destroyed in this way, what sort of people ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness.

All flesh is like grass,
And all its glory like the flower of grass.
The grass withers,
And the flower falls off,
But the Word of the Lord endures forever.