Philippians 3:1

It seems the church of the Philippians, though a faithful and flourishing church, was disturbed by the judaizing teachers, who endeavoured to keep up the law of Moses, and mix the observances of it with the doctrine of Christ and his institutions. He begins the chapter with warnings against these seducers.

I. He exhorts them to rejoice in the Lord (Phi 3:1), to rest satisfied in the interest they had in him and the benefit they hoped for by him. It is the character and temper of sincere Christians to rejoice in Christ Jesus. The more we take of the comfort of our religion the more closely we shall cleave to it: the more we rejoice in Christ the more willing we shall be to do and suffer for him, and the less danger we shalt be in of being drawn away from him. The joy of the Lord is our strength, Neh 8:10.

II. He cautions them to take heed of those false teachers: To write the same thing to you to me indeed is not grievous, but for you it is safe; that is, the same things which I have already preached to you; as if he had said, "What has been presented to your ears shall be presented to your eyes: what I have spoken formerly shall now be written; to show that I am still of the same mind." To me indeed is not grievous. Observe, 1. Ministers must not think any thing grievous to themselves which they have reason to believe is safe and edifying to the people. 2. It is good for us often to hear the same truths, to revive the remembrance and strengthen the impression of things of importance. It is a wanton curiosity to desire always to hear some new thing. It is a needful caution he here gives: Beware of dogs, Phi 3:2. The prophet calls the false prophets dumb dogs (Isa 56:10), to which the apostle here seems to refer. Dogs, for their malice against the faithful professors of the gospel of Christ, barking at them and biting them. They cried up good works in opposition to the faith of Christ; but Paul calls them evil workers: they boasted themselves to be of the circumcision; but he calls them the concision: they rent and tore the church of Christ, and cut it to pieces; or contended for an abolished rite, a mere insignificant cutting of the flesh.

III. He describes true Christians, who are indeed the circumcision, the spiritual circumcision, the peculiar of people of God, who are in covenant with him, as the Old Testament Israelites were: We are the circumcision, who worship God in the spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh. Here are three characters: - 1. They worshipped in the spirit, in opposition to the carnal ordinances of the Old Testament, which consist in meats, and drinks, and divers washings, etc. Christianity takes us off from these things, and teaches us to be inward with God in all the duties of religious worship. We must worship God in spirit, Joh 4:24. The work of religion is to no purpose any further than the heart is employed in it. Whatsoever we do, we must do it heartily as unto the Lord; and we must worship God in the strength and grace of the Divine Spirit, which is so peculiar to the gospel state, which is the ministration of the spirit, Co2 3:8. 2. They rejoice in Christ Jesus, and not in the peculiar privileges of the Jewish church, or what answers to them in the Christian church - mere outward enjoyments and performances. They rejoice in their relation to Christ and interest in him. God made it the duty of the Israelites to rejoice before him in the courts of his house; but now that the substance has come the shadows are done away, and we are to rejoice in Christ Jesus only. 3. They have no confidence in the flesh, in those carnal ordinances and outward performances. We must be taken off from trusting in our own bottom, that we may build only on Jesus Christ, the everlasting foundation. Our confidence, as well as our joy, is proper to him.

Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible (1708–1710) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.

III.

[6. Original Conclusion of the Epistle (Php_3:1).

“FINALLY BRETHREN, FAREWELL IN THE LORD.”]

(1) Finally.—The same word is used in 2Co_13:11; Eph_6:10; 2Th_3:1 (as also in this Epistle, Php_4:8), to usher in the conclusion. Here, on the contrary, it stands nearly in the middle of the Epistle. Moreover, the commendation above of Timothy and Epaphroditus is exactly that which, according to St. Paul’s custom, would mark the final sentences of the whole. Again, the words “rejoice in the Lord” may, according to the common usage of the time (although certainly that usage is not adopted in other Letters of St. Paul), not improbably signify farewell in the Lord; and even if not used in this formal and conventional sense, yet certainly hold the position of final good wishes, which that sense implies. The resumption of them in Php_4:4, where the actual conclusion now begins, is striking. It seems, therefore, highly probable, that in this place the Letter was originally drawing to an end, and that some news was at that moment brought which induced the Apostle to add a second part, couched in language of equal affection, but of greater anxiety and more emphatic warning. Of such a break, and resumption with a far more complete change of style, we have a notable instance at the beginning of the tenth chapter of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians; as also of the addition of postscript after postscript in the last chapter of the Epistle to the Romans.

[7. Words of Warning (Php_3:1 to Php_4:3).

(1) AGAINST THE JUDAISERS.

(a) Warning against confidence “in the flesh,” illustrated by his own renunciation of all Jewish privileges and hopes, in order to have “the righteousness of Christ” (Php_3:1-9).

(b) Warning against confidence in perfection as already attained, again illustrated by his own sense of imperfection and hope of continual progress (Php_3:10-16).

(2) AGAINST THE ANTINOMIAN PARTY.

Contrast of the sensual and corrupt life of the flesh with the spirituality and hope of future perfection which become citizens of heaven (Php_3:17-21).

(3) AGAINST ALL TENDENCY TO SCHISM (Php_4:1-3).

To write the same things to you.—These words may refer to what goes before, in which case the reference must be to “rejoice in the Lord.” Now, it is true that this is the burden of the Epistle; but this interpretation suits ill the following words, “for you it is safe,” which obviously refer to some warning against danger or temptation. Hence it is far better to refer them to the abrupt and incisive warnings that follow.

These, then, are said to be a repetition; but of what? Hardly of the former part of this Epistle, for it is difficult there to find anything corresponding to them. If not, then it must be of St. Paul’s previous teaching, by word or by letter. For the use here of the word “to write,” though it suits better the idea of former communication by writing, cannot exclude oral teaching. That there was more than one Epistle to Philippi has been inferred (probably, but not certainly) from an expression in Polycarp’s letter to the Philippians (sect. 3), speaking of “the Epistles” of St. Paul to them. It is not in itself unlikely that another Epistle should have been written; nor have we any right to argue decisively against it, on the ground that no such Epistle is found in the canon of Scripture. But however this may be, it seems natural to refer to St. Paul’s former teaching as a whole. Now, when St. Paul first preached at Philippi, he had not long before carried to Antioch the decree of the council against the contention of “them of the circumcision;” and, as it was addressed to the churches “of Syria and Cilicia,” he can hardly have failed to communicate it, when he passed through both regions “confirming the churches” (Act_15:41). At Thessalonica, not long after, the jealousy of the Jews at his preaching the freedom of the gospel drove him from the city (Act_17:5). When he came to Macedonia on his next journey, the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, written there and probably at Philippi, marks the first outburst of the Judaising controversy; and when he returned to Philippi, on his way back, he had just written the Epistles to the Galatians and Romans, which deal exhaustively with the whole question. Nothing is more likely than that his teaching at Philippi had largely dealt with the warning against the Judaisers. What, then, more natural than to introduce a new warning on the subject—shown to be necessary by news received—with the courteous half-apology, “To write the same things to you, to me is not grievous (or, tedious) but for you it is safe,” making assurance doubly sure?

A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Ch. Php_3:1-3. Let them cultivate Joy in the Lord, as the true preservative from the Dangers of Judaistic Teaching

1. Finally] Lit., “For the rest”; “For what remains.” See Eph_6:10, and note in this Series. In 2Co_13:1; 1Th_4:1; 2Th_3:1; below Php_4:8; and (in a slightly different form) Gal_6:17; the phrase appears to mean “in conclusion.” But it is plainly elastic, and in 1 Thess. we have an example, as here, of its use (and of course of its retention by the writer on review of his writing) some time before the actual farewell. As a fact the Apostle is just about to open the last large topic of his letter, the topic of the difference between a true and a false Gospel; all else in the remaining paragraphs is only accessory. Hitherto he has been dealing, in effect, with the duty and blessedness of unity, secured by humility and watchfulness; bringing in some all-important doctrinal statements, but only by the way. He will now close with a definite and solemn message of spiritual truth, in a matter of present urgency.

The connexion of this passage has been much debated, and particularly the bearing of the phrase “to write the same things unto you.” What does he refer to? To a previous Epistle? To a previous similar statement in this Epistle? But there is no other hint whatever of a previous letter; and in this present letter there is no previous injunction to rejoice. The solution offered by Bp Lightfoot is as follows:—“The same things” are the exhortations to unity so often made already, and which the Apostle was about to reinforce. But he was interrupted in his work, and not till after an interval of days, perhaps, did he resume it. He then dropped the intended appeal, and turned instead to the yet more serious subject of doctrinal error.

This ingenious suggestion offers, however, a serious difficulty, by assuming that St Paul, with his scribe beside him, would have sent out an Epistle in a state so disjointed, simply for lack of revision. No view of Divine inspiration demands it; and certainly all considerations of thoughtful authorship are against it.

We offer the following theory:—The Apostle sees before him, as he thinks of Philippi, the danger of doctrinal error; error which in one way or another undervalues Christ and Him crucified. The true antidote to such error is a developed and rejoicing intuition into Christ and His work, such as had been granted to himself. This he will now make his theme. But he has, in a sense, done so already, by the oft-repeated allusions to the Lord’s sovereign and vital connexion with His people (“in the Lord,” “in the heart of Christ,” &c.), and above all by the opening passages of ch. 2. So he is “writing the same things” when he writes now “finally” about “rejoicing in the Lord” as their righteousness, life, glory, strength, and peace. All “other Gospels” were obscurations of that great joy.

Thus the special injunction to “rejoice” has regard to the past and coming context at once. In particular, it anticipates Php_3:3 below, (“glory in Christ Jesus”).

A suffrage in one of the Litanies of the venerable Church of the Unitas Fratrum (“the Moravians”) is in point here:—“From the loss of our glory in Thee, preserve and keep us, gracious Lord and God.”

rejoice] R.V. margin, “or, farewell.” But the evidence of Php_4:4, which plainly takes this phrase up, and adds the word “always,” is altogether for the text R.V., and A.V. “Farewell always” is an impossible formula of conclusion; we are constrained to render “Be glad always” there. And already Php_2:18 he has used the same Greek word in that sense beyond doubt. See the last note.

in the Lord] See last note but one, and that on Php_1:8.

To write the same things] See last note but two, for a reference of this to “the things” already written in this Epistle about the glory and fulness of Christ.

to me indeed … safe] The Greek words form an Iambic trimeter, a verse corresponding in the Greek drama to our blank heroic, and may thus be a quotation by the way[22]. In 1Co_15:33 we almost certainly have such a quotation from a Greek dramatist, Menander or perhaps Euripides; “Ill converse withers fair morality.” We may render here, with a view to the rhythm, To me not irksome, it is safe for you.— St James (Php_1:17) appears similarly to adopt a Greek hexameter; “Every giving of good and every boon of perfection.”

[22] I owe this remark to a friend.

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Php_3:1-11

Finally, my brethren

Prideless pride

1.

What were the things not irksome and safe?

(1) Counsels in some lost Epistles.

(2) Messages delivered by word of mouth through his delegates.

(3) Earlier verbal communications.

(4) Something in the Epistle.

The latter probably referring--

(a) to the main topic of the letter--rejoicing, or making their boast in Christ; or

(b) to their dissentions, a reference in the making of which he was interrupted. Each supplies a good sense. In the first case he proposes to dwell once more on that which will be the sure antidote to false pride, in the other he will add some further counsels respecting their dissensions.

2. Since the apostle seems to be about to conclude, what occasioned the interruption? Probably some outbreak of Jewish proselytism respecting which he warns the Philippians in plain language. At the word concision he enters on a fresh line of thought which occupies the rest of the chapter.

I. He affirms that he and his gentile brethren have the most valid claim to what the Jews so dearly prized. We are the circumcision. He justifies his assertion by describing--

1. The nature of their worship. The one essential thing in worship is its spirit. The kind of worship the proselytizers offered rested largely on forms. If the form were only according to their pattern it was enough. The apostle, on the contrary, takes his stand on the requirement of our Lord: God is a spirit, etc. Heart, not hand, lip, knee worship was the main thing, and in this respect they and he were more in harmony with the purpose of circumcision than those who submitted to the rite.

2. The ground of their trust. They rested in position rather than privilege. Circumcision was the sum of Jewish privilege. It was the main thing about which the Jews boasted. But their high privilege had not led them to a high morality, but had been made a cloak for sin. In contrast with this Paul puts Christian conduct. Christians rejoiced, or made their boast, in Christ Jesus, and had no confidence in the flesh. They looked to Him as the fulfiller of all righteousness for us and the example of all righteousness in us. Theirs was a prideless pride.

II. He argues with the Jew on his own ground. The ground of their boasting might well be his as regards--

1. Inherited privileges.

(1) The Jews make much of circumcision and the time of its performance. If before the eighth day it is nothing; if after, of less value. That, then, which the strictest Jews demand is true of me.

(2) They also talk of the old stock. I belong to it.

(3) They pride themselves on their tribe. What will compare with mine?

(4) Nay, more; scattered among the Gentiles, exposed to taint, to loss of language and custom, yet my ancestors remained pure in every sense. I am a Hebrew of the Hebrews.

2. Personal acts.

(1) What of the law? I belonged by choice to the separated sect.

(2) What of zeal? These men are making much of that; but did not I persecute the Church?

(3) And as for righteousness, when was I a defaulter?

3. Here surely was ground for boasting had he been so disposed. But--

III. The whole of these most coveted things he now counts loss. He relinquished them all to win Christ. He changes the figure. He had been speaking of gain and loss; he now speaks of entering on a race.

1. He divests himself of all self-righteous robes. He felt himself disqualified for the contest in any such dress.

2. He desires to lay firmest hold of Christ.

3. He seeks to feel the full meaning of the resurrection power, the propulsion to a higher and nobler purpose.

4. He asks to share the sufferings of Christ. Note this, inasmuch as many talk as though the sufferings of Christ had dispensed with their own.

5. He would be fashioned to the likeness of His death.

6. And so he would reach the goal--resurrection, i.e., complete newness of life through Christ Jesus. Conclusion:

This delineation has its practical bearing on ourselves.

1. It puts privileges in their true place. They increase our obligation to serve God.

2. External religiousness is put in its right place.

3. We are shown where we shall only find the true safeguard against modern delusions on religious questions--in Christ. (J. J. Goadby.)

Rejoice in the Lord--

Grounds of Christian rejoicing

He who would rejoice in the Lord must--

I. Beware of error (verses 1-3).

II. Renounce all and trust in Christ only (verses 4-8).

III. Embrace the fulness of Christ (verses 9-11). (J. Lyth, D. D.)

I. Rejoice in the Lord is the text of the whole chapter. After a long chapter on the suppression of self and the absorption of every faculty in the service of Christ, here seems to be the reward. Observe--

1. It is in the Lord. There are two estates of men, in the flesh, and in the Lord. To be in the latter estate is to possess all that can minister to happiness. So we are here reminded that we can command our own happiness. It is enforced as a duty. Joy is a feeling that ranges over all life and time. It remembers from what it has been rescued; it rejoices in present security; it hopes for more than it can conceive in the future.

2. But if the Christian is seduced from Christ the joy departs, and gives place to a deeper desolation than the soul has ever known. It was this danger that the apostle dreaded, arising from two errors; one doctrinal, which would teach them to cease to trust in Christ alone: another practical, which would make them selfish and carnal, and so enemies of the Cross.

II. Christian rejoicing defended against its judaizing enemies. The apostle bids the Philippians beware of the dogs, evil workers, concision, suggestive phrases, the last implying that circumcision having served its purpose had become dishonoured as well as disused; the word was now but a synonym of a Christian profession (Col_2:11; Rom_2:29). Those were the true circumcision who--

1. Worship God in the spirit, i.e., they offer a worship which is ordered, prompted, released from ceremony and made acceptable by the Spirit of God.

(1) The Holy Ghost is the Master of all Christian worship.

(2) The object of that worship or service is included in the term and not expressed (Rom_9:4; Act_26:-7; Rom_12:1).

(3) The worship presented is in spirit and in truth, because the communism of mans spirit with God through the indwelling spirit (Rom_8:26; Jud_1:20) is His own temple. But this must be external also. The word circumcision indicates the fellowship of those who, by this symbolic rite, were dedicated to God. And Christian public worship is the common spiritual homage of men who are serving God in their spirits while they are serving Him in His house.

(4) But the Spirit unites no human spirit to God which is not holy; and so the cutting off of sin was what circumcision always signified (Rom_2:29).

2. Rejoice in Christ Jesus, i.e., confide or glory. They have learned that circumcision has given place to baptism; but they put trust in neither. They trust only in Christ, and as they trust they glory.

3. Have no confidence in the flesh.

(1) In the fleshly ordinance which cannot be retained without dishonouring Christ.

(2) In the fleshly, i.e., personal and national prerogatives of the circumcised members of the old covenant. They renounced Judaism with all its advantages.

(3) In anything that human nature can do to win the Divine favour. (W. D. Pope, D. D.)

It is Gods will that we should rejoice in Him

I. What is it to rejoice? Delight is the souls acquiescence, or resting itself, in what it apprehends to be good. There is a two-fold delight.

1. Bodily or sensitive called pleasure, which proceeds from some impression made by a suitable object upon the senses. Of which note--

(1) This in itself is not sinful, because both the sense and the object and the suitableness of them were all made by God.

(2) Hence it is permitted by God (Ecc_3:22; Ecc_5:19).

(3) But corrupt man is too apt to sin in these sensitive pleasures, either--

(a) in the unlawful object (Psa_62:4),

(b) or in the manner by excessiveness (Jud_1:12).

2. Rational or spiritual joy, seated in the soul itself.

II. What is it to rejoice in the Lord?

1. God was pleased at first to order the soul of man so that it bad a natural tendency and suitableness to the nature of God.

2. But the soul being disordered by sin is apt to rejoice in nothing but externals.

3. It is therefore Gods will that we labour after our primitive perfections and joys, so as to delight ourselves--

(1) In Him as God and our God (Psa_28:7; Deu_12:12; Deu_12:18).

(2) In His--

(a) works (Psa_104:31);

(b) Word (Psa_1:2; Psa_119:103);

(c) properties; goodness (Luk_18:19); mercy; justice; power (Psa_63:5-7); wisdom; truth; omnipresence.

III. How doth it appear that we ought and may thus rejoice?

1. From Scripture.

(1) God commands it (Psa_32:11; Php_4:4).

(2) Christ prays for it (Joh_17:13).

(3) This is one great end of His promises (Rom_15:4).

(4) It is one great end of the ministry (Isa_52:7; Rom_10:15; 2Co_1:24).

(5) It is the end of Christs sending the Spirit (Joh_16:7). The Spirit comforts us by--

(a) Renewing us.

(b) Convincing us it is our duty (Joh_16:9).

(c) Witnessing our adoption (Gal_4:6).

(d) Blessing His ordinances to us.

(e) Bringing and directing us to Christ for it (Joh_14:26).

(f) Weaning us from fleshly delights.

(g) Powerfully working comfort in us (Gal_5:22).

2. From reason. We should rejoice because--

(1) God hath given us that power.

(2) There is nothing in this world that we can have any solid joy in, because not suitable to the soul.

(3) There is none but God we can rationally rejoice in.

3. But doth not God sometimes command us to mourn? (Ecc_3:4; Isa_22:12; Joe_2:12-13).

(1) This sorrow consists not in abstaining from spiritual but natural joy.

(2) It maketh way for spiritual joy.

(3) It should be accompanied with it (Psa_2:11).

IV. Uses.

1. Information.

(1) Observe Gods goodness to His creatures in making it their duty to rejoice.

(2) The privilege of Christians above all others (Joh_16:22).

(3) The false calumny that is laid on holiness as depriving us of joy (Joh_14:1).

(4) Our misery is all from ourselves (Hos_13:9).

(5) In the excellency of Christian joy above all others; it is in the Lord.

2. Exhortation: Rejoice.

(1) Consider the necessity. God commands it for His glory and the credit of religion.

(2) Consider the excellency, above all other joy.

(a) It is spiritual, the joy of the soul (Psa_33:21).

(b) Pure and unmixed (Pro_14:13).

(c) Easy and cheap.

(d) Real and true

(e) Universal in respect of time, place, and condition.

(f) Surpassing (Hab_3:17-18).

(g) Well grounded; on Gods mercy and Christs merits (1Pe_1:8).

(h) Full and satisfying (Joh_17:13; Psa_16:11; Psa_17:15).

(3) Consider this excellency in its nature.

(a) In the cause: God; the Father, the Son (Joh_17:13), the Spirit (Gal_5:22).

(b) In the subject; the soul (Luk_1:46-47).

(c) The object; the chiefest good.

(d) The end: the glory of God as the ultimate, the good of man the subordinate.

(e) The effects. It will destroy our sinful joy (Psa_16:11); lessen our esteem of the world (Psa_4:7); enlarge our hearts and make them more capacious of heavenly things; facilitate all duties (Neh_8:10; Deu_28:47); make us long more alter heaven (Psa_119:20); support us in our afflictions (1Pe_1:6-8); defend us against temptations.

V. Means and directions.

1. Labour after a right know ledge of God (Psa_9:10).

2. Endeavour to get an interest in Him.

3. Get thy evidences clear and keep them so (Job_19:25; Psa_27:1).

4. Convince thyself it is thy duty to rejoice.

5. Live above the temperature of the body.

6. Study well the nature of justification (Rom_4:5; Rom_5:1).

(1) Christ was made sin for us;

(2) and we righteous in Him.

7. Have frequent recourse to the promises (Heb_13:5-6).

8. Let the eye of faith be constantly fixed on the attributes of God (Isa_45:24; Psa_57:1; Psa_57:7).

9. Have a care of what will damp thy joys.

(1) Wilful sins.

(2) Nice questions about election.

(3) Dark providences (Ecc_9:1).

10. Often meditate on a Christians privileges.

(1) That He hath God for His Father and portion.

(2) Christ for his Advocate (1Jn_2:1).

(3) All things working for His good (Rom_8:28).

(4) A kingdom provided for him (Joh_14:1-2).

VI. Objections.

1. My sins are many and great. Answer:

(1) Gods mercies are more and greater (Isa_55:7).

(2) So are Christs merits (Heb_7:25).

(3) So are the promises (Eze_18:21-22).

2. My corruptions are strong. Answer:

(1) They are not too strong for God.

(2) Christ came to subdue them.

(3) God has promised to subdue them (Heb_10:16; Eze_36:2; Eze_36:5-27).

3. The devil oft tempts me. Answer:

(1) So he did Christ.

(2) He can tempt thee no farther than God sees good.

(3) Gods grace shall be sufficient for thee.

4. God hath forsaken me. Answer:

(1) It is only for a while.

(2) He will again receive thee (Isa_49:13-15; Psa_42:11).

5. I have many losses and crosses. Answer:

(1) That is no new thing to saints (1Pe_4:12-13).

(2) It is often a sign of Gods love (Heb_12:6-7; Amo_3:2).

(3) Their end is good (Heb_12:10).

(4) And their effect (2Co_4:17; Psa_42:11). (Bishop Beveridge.)

I. Rejoice in the Lord as your savior. When Candaces treasurer found that Jesus had suffered for him on the cross, he went on his way rejoicing. Our acceptance with God makes heaven rejoice--the return of the prodigal affords the greatest happiness to himself and all others.

II. Rejoice in the Lord as your guide. They were journeying on in comparative fear. In tribulation even the saints rejoice because their Saviour will deliver them.

III. Rejoice in the Lord as your reward. (Weekly Pulpit.)

Christian joy

I. Its nature. The joy of faith--felt not seen--yet real and solid.

II. Its source and security. Christ supplies--sustains it.

III. Its perpetuity it is an apostles last injunction--must endure forever. (J. Lyth, D. D.)

The joy of Christian brethren

The chapter contains a general exhortation to several duties. This verse tells you how to do them--rejoicing.

I. The appellation--Brethren. By loving compellation he labours to enter into their hearts. If exhortation comes from the pride of man, the pride of man will beat it back. Why are Christians brethren?

1. They have the same beginning of life from the same Father; the same common brother Christ; the same food, the Word of God; the same promises and inheritance.

2. The word is indicative of equality. This should fill up the valleys of hearts dejected here in regard to mean estates; as also pull down the mountains of proud hearts.

3. It is a name of dignity belonging to the heirs of heaven.

4. It is a word of love.

II. The exhortation.

1. It is the Christians duty to rejoice. It is commanded here.

2. It is reasonable that they should rejoice. They are free from the spiritual Egypt; why should they not sing as the delivered Israelites. They have peace with God and an assured hope.

3. It belongs only to Christians to rejoice. Others have neither cause nor commandment to do so.

III. The limitation--In the Lord.

1. In whom? Christ is our Lord--

(1) By gift. God has given us all to Him.

(2) By conquest. He hath gotten the victory over Satan for us.

(3) By marriage.

2. How?

(1) By adherence to Him. We must rest contented with Him as our only and sufficient joy.

(2) Obedience to His laws; delighting in them.

IV. The means.

1. Faith. It is the sense of our reconciliation that makes us rejoice (Rom_5:2; 1Pe_1:6). Whatever strengthens or weakens faith, strengthens or weakens joy.

2. Peace. Whatever disturbs our peace disturbs our joy.

3. Prayer. Pray that your joy may be full.

4. Christian communion. As the two disciples hearts did burn within them when they talked with Christ.

V. Questions.

1. Why, then, are Gods children sorrowful?

(1) Their sorrow proceeds from the want of the perfections necessary to make them absolute Christians indeed.

(2) They do not adorn their profession, and so God hides the comfortable presence of His Spirit.

(3) The sorrow may only be apparent, for their joy is a hidden joy. The feast is kept in the conscience and not always manifest.

(4) While they live here they have ever a mixture of joy and grief to temper one another.

2. Is not the Christian fuller of sorrow than of joy? If so, it arises from ignorance of the grounds of comfort or from want of application of them. Let him then--

(1) Compare all discomforts with the joy he may have, and he will find that it countervails a world of sorrow, for it is endless, and one day will be full.

(2) Take heed of the hindrances of this joy. Sins committed and not repented (1Ch_2:7).

(3) Take heed of negligence in good duties and to do them thoroughly. (R. Sibbes, D. D.)

Joy in the Lord

Evangelical religion is often charged with making men gloomy, averse to sharing the innocent pleasures of life, and thus has been made repulsive to the young especially. The charge finds some support in the demeanour of many Christians in whom, from defective views of duty, the gospel is not permitted to exert its sweetening power. By such religion is grievously misrepresented. Jesus was the man of sorrows because He bore the worlds guilt; but when the bitter work was over He was anointed with the oil of gladness. Christians ought to share this. Being in the Lord they should be full of gladness.

I. To the unregenerate man Christian joy is unintelligible. It belongs to a sphere with which he has no acquaintance. He sees the restraints which religion imposes, but of its blessed communion with God he sees nothing. Its hopes to him are visionary. He cannot think the yoke of Jesus to be easy.

II. To the true Christian this joy is reasonable, and even when he is not happy he feels he ought to be.

1. It springs from love to Christ. Out in the world we find Marahs; its springs are full of bitterness. In Christ. with joy we draw water from the wells of salvation.

2. The citizens of the spiritual Zion may well be joyful in their King. What city is like ours? Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth. God hath called her walls Salvation and her gates Praise. Prosperity is within her palaces. Through her midst flows the river of life, and there is the tree of life whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. The King abides amongst us. To all our petitions His ear is open; to all our wants His bounteous hand. His service is glorious liberty.

3. We have perfect security. No power can pluck us out of our Saviours hand; for with His infinite goodness is conjoined an infinite grossness.

4. In the contemplation of providence there is an unfailing source of joy. The natural satisfaction which outward comforts bring is pervaded and glorified by the thankfulness of hearts rejoicing in their Fathers goodness. Anxiety, pain, and bereavement may be appointed to us, but that they are a Fathers appointment will prevent despondency and maintain peace.

5. Innocent enjoyments have a new charm in the Lord. He who began His miracles by contributing to social pleasure, changes the common into the noble and refreshing. Friendship has one added sweetness, nature a new and glorious beauty, and study a satisfaction altogether peculiar, now that intellectual improvement is felt to be polishing a shaft for the Masters quiver.

6. Next to the ineffable delight of seeing Jesus as His Saviour is the delight which fills the believers heart in helping others to see Him as theirs.

III. The reasons why many Christians have little of this joy are various. In some it is due--

1. To temperament. Of this class the Apostle Thomas may be taken as a type. In many, the nervous tendency to religious melancholy developes insanity, as in the case of Cowper. The care of a physician and the watchful love of friends may be of service to joyless Christians.

2. To defective apprehension of the fulness and freeness of the gospel. The glorious liberty has been so little understood that while living in the air of freedom many have fallen back into the spirit of bondage again to fear.

3. To feeble spirituality and indulgence in sin. Worldliness, like a killing parasite, has wreathed itself round the energies of the soul. The pleasures of life have stolen away the time from duty. Mists rise from a mind cherishing sinful desire and hide the face of God. We know why David had to pray, Restore unto me the joy of Thy salvation. And all that is well, and it is to be hoped that this gloom is the harbinger of repentance, and the opening of his heart to the Sun of Righteousness. (R. Johnstone, LL. B.)

Joy in the Lord

The greatest painter--at least one of the greatest painters--of the devoutest period of the Middle Age, a man who, as men said, used to kneel and pray till the angels came to him to be painted, whose works, as they adorn the walls of Florence, open up to us a world we had hardly dreamt of before,--that greatest of painters--Fra Angelieo da Fiesole--in some of his most beautiful pictures, has, amidst a multitude of exquisitely pencilled faces combined in groups, made each face of varying expression, but each expressive gaze of joy and thankfulness steadily fixed upon one central figure--the figure of the Redeemer. (Knox Little.)

The elevating power of joy

You go out on a bright spring morning into the green fields, you hear above you a voice that thrills you through with pleasure; you dont see anything distinctly; but from the clouds there comes a warbling note, a rising splendour of music, as the lark ascends towards heaven. There is in every cadence the outwelling of an unconscious, yet real, joy. It is a parable of Gods working. The little creature, as she ascends and sings, sings and ascends, is simply proclaiming the truth that was seen in the life of Jesus: joy is a power to exalt. (Knox Little.)

Joy is not always ecstasy

We ought not to seek too high joys. We may be bright without transfiguration. The even flow of constant cheerfulness strengthens; while great excitements, driving us with fierce speed, both rack the ship, and end often in explosions. If we were just ready to break out of the body with delight, I know not but we should disdain many things important to be done. Low measures of feeling are better than ecstasies for ordinary life. God sends his rain in gentle drops, else flowers would be beaten to pieces. (H. W. Beecher.)

The importance of Christian joy

The duty is an important one. The tone of the apostle here and elsewhere brings this out very clearly. Nothing is more calculated to commend the gospel to those around us, than proof that its influence on the hearts which receive it is to make them bright and happy. This commendation is, of course, specially impressive where outward circumstances are of a kind naturally tending to sadden. When, in deep poverty, or on a bed of pain, a Christian is contented, calm, joyous, there is here an epistle of Christ written in letters so large and fair, that even careless observers can hardly help reading its testimony to the reality and potency of Divine grace. Where the lights of this world have been in so large a measure withdrawn, it must be plain that such brightness of heart can come only through a beam of sunshine straight from heaven to that heart. For the spiritual progress of the believer himself, too, it is of very much moment that he rejoice in the Lord. Nehemiahs statement holds true for all time: The joy of the Lord is your strength. We know the power of happiness, of a genial, buoyant spirit, in carrying forward the ordinary work of life. In the work of the spiritual life--resistance to temptation, and earnest labour for the Master--there is no sustaining power to be compared with joy. Walking in darkness, enveloped in spiritual gloom, we move slowly, stumble, fall. In the sunshine, we press forward with bounding step in the way of Gods commandments, running, and net weary; wherefore, O house of Jacob, come ye and let us walk in the light of the Lord. (R. Johnstone, LL. B.)

To write the same things to you--

Repetition

That can never be too much taught which cannot be too well learned. By learning the same things often--

I. Dull and unexpert understandings are much helped.

II. You are stirred up into greater wariness than otherwise ye would. (H. Airay, D. D.)

Dwelling on the same things is necessary even for the best Christians, because--

I. Truth is supernatural, and our minds are carnal. That therefore which is to keep our changeful minds must be assiduous, or else our minds will sink into their first estate.

II. We often disregard the truth at the first, second, or third presentation (Job_33:14).

III. There is such a breadth and depth in the word of God, that although we often hear the same thing we never come to understand the full extent. Our souls are narrow. Spiritual meat requires digestion, and therefore repetition.

IV. Corruptions and worldly business tend to thrust out the consideration of the truth. We cannot have two things in our mind at the same time in strength. Whence it comes to pass that the better being ever subject to be thrust out needs to be hammered in with often repetition.

V. Our memories are very weak to retain anything that is good. Good things sink through them as water through a sieve; there is need therefore of remembrances. After this manner God hath dealt with man in renewing the promises, and Christ in His parables (Mat_13:1-58), although with variety, teaching ministers to avoid tediousness. Conclusion:

1. Let it not be grievous to ministers to do what is for the safety of Gods children. Peter cast often and got nothing, yet at Christs word he cast again. God, that blesseth not every cast, may bless the cast to the catching of many.

2. If we hear the same things often, let us hear them as an impression which may carry force and work upon our hearts more strongly than before. (R. Sibbes, D. D.)

The usefulness of repetitio

n:--

1. A story we have often heard or read, however fascinating at first, will gradually lose much of its interest. If read for amusement it would be quite out of the nature of things that a book should please us so much on the second or third perusal as on the first: but if read for instruction the case is somewhat altered. We are conscious that many parts are imperfectly mastered, and we do not hesitate to apply ourselves again and again to the study. But even when instruction is the object, a truth which has once settled in our minds will lose its power of gaining our attention.

2. When we pass from human literature to Divine, we carry our dispositions and habits with us, and we shall be tempted to reckon ourselves so well acquainted with certain portions of the Bible as to reckon further study of them superfluous. Now there is no truth of Christianity that will not repay further outlay of time and attention. Whatever our progress, we are only beginners. Yet while the text sets itself against that craving for novelties in religion which is the mark of a mind diseased, it does not circumscribe the range of inquiry. The same things were confined to no narrow groove.

I. The nature of scriptural truth demonstrates that repetition can never be useless. It is a property of the truths of the Bible that the simplest involve the most difficult, while the more sublime and mysterious prove, under some shape or another, the plain and the elementary. It is a simple truth, e.g., that the Eternal Son of God died as the Surety of the lost human race, but you introduce with it a whole library of divinity, for there is not one truth of our religion that is not contained in it--the guilt of sin, the love of God, the Trinity, etc. And if the most elementary doctrine is virtually a summary of the Bible, then to ply men with it is virtually to ply men with the whole system of Christianity. And then if I have the fact that Christ died for sin put continually before me, it is a mistake to suppose that it will always call up the selfsame idea. I shall sometimes view the atonement as demonstrative of Christs love; sometimes of the greatness of mans sin, etc., etc. And these doctrines derived from the atonement will gain power and clearness from their association with it. And so with the rest.

II. The agency by which scriptural truth is expounded proves the usefulness of repetition. That agency is the Spirit of God. Hence it comes to pass that a text may have been read or heard a hundred times without making any impression, and yet on the next occasion it may seem charged with electric light and the whole mind within disturbed. And what holds good in conversion holds good for the whole course of Christian experience, and thus the Bible, however diligently studied, is always a new book, and its best known portions instead of being exhausted will often seem to have been indicted again. We have, therefore, an incontrovertible reason why the same things should be always useful. (H. Melvill, B. D.)

The repetition of old truth is

I. Often necessary. Men let it slip--fail to improve it.

II. Never wearisome. It is precious to those who believe it--who deliver it.

III. Always safe. It quickens memory--stirs the heart--provokes effort--and helps to secure salvation. (J. Lyth, D. D.)

Repeating the same teaching

It was the Sophists who scoffed at Socrates because he was always teaching the same things, and in this their mockery of the great heathen teacher they but disclosed their own folly. It was the Romanists in Reformation times who frequently laid to the charge of the Reformers that they were always harping upon the same string. It is a mark of the present day still to show a craving for what is new, and to find that craving too eagerly met and administered to; but as Paul knew, so do all preachers of the doctrines of grace know, that if the Divine Word Himself chose to utter the same truths ofttimes in the same form, they have their ample justification in that example of His which to them is also of necessity precept. (J. Hutchison, D. D.)

The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Php 3:1. Finally — Or rather, as το λοιπον should be here rendered, As for what remains; or, what I have further in view in writing this epistle. For the expression cannot here signify finally, as our translators have rendered the word, since the apostle is only entering on the main subject of his letter. Properly, it is a form of transition, and is translated besides, 1Co 1:16. It is as if he had said, Whatever may become of me, or of yourselves, so far as any worldly interest or prospect is concerned, rejoice in the Lord Christ — In the knowledge you have of him, and of the truths and promises of his gospel; in the faith you have in him; the union you have with him by that faith; the relations in which you stand to him as his friends, his brethren, his spouse; in the conformity you have to him in heart and life, and in the expectations you have from him of felicity and glory eternal. These are sufficient causes for rejoicing, whatever circumstances you may be in, and whatever your trials and troubles may be in this present short and uncertain life. Reader, hast thou these reasons for rejoicing?

Then thou mayest well bear without impatience or discontent the light afflictions which are but for a moment, 2Co 4:17.

To write the same things — Which you have heard from me before, or which I have written to other churches, and which I have desired Epaphroditus to tell you; to me indeed is not grievous — Nothing was accounted grievous or troublesome by him which was for the edification of the church; but for you it is safe — It will tend to preserve you from the errors and sins in which you might otherwise be insnared. The condemnation of the errors of the Judaizers, which the apostle was about to write in this chapter, he had already written in his epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians. But as they were matters of great importance, he did not grudge to write them in this letter; because, if they were only communicated to them verbally, by Epaphroditus, or others, all the Philippians might not have had an opportunity of hearing them, or they might have misunderstood them. Whereas, having them in writing, they could examine them at their leisure, and have recourse to them as often as they had occasion. St. Paul, we may observe further, wrote most of his epistles, partly at least, with a view to confute the erroneous doctrines and practices of the Judaizing teachers, who in the first age greatly disturbed the churches chiefly by their affirming, that unless the Gentiles were circumcised, after the manner of Moses, they could not be saved — But as these teachers artfully suited their arguments to the circumstances and prejudices of the persons whom they addressed, the controversy hath a new aspect in almost every epistle. And what the apostle advances in confutation of their doctrine, and for explaining and establishing the genuine doctrines of the gospel, comprehends a variety of particulars highly worthy of the attention of Christians in every age.

Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Dangers and Hopes of the Present Situation

V. Interjected Warnings (Php_3:1-21)

§ 11. Php_3:1-6. Finally (lit. 'For the rest'), my brethren, brings the close of the letter in sight (see Intro.); the Apostle has only a few supplementary counsels to give—prefaced by the Rejoice in the Lord, which is the prevalent note of the Epistle (Php_1:4, Php_1:18, Php_1:26; Php_2:2, Php_2:17-18)—and to make acknowledgment of the contribution sent through Epaphroditus. But the admonition of Php_3:2 strikes a chord of feeling in his breast which vibrates too strongly to be soon arrested. From Php_3:4 onwards, Philippians 3 is a diversion in the Epistle, but such as answers its underlying purpose, since it opens St. Paul's heart to his readers and makes them more than ever 'partakers of' his 'grace' (Php_1:7).

The observation of Php_3:1; relates to Php_3:2-3; St. Paul is writing the same things about the seductions of Judaism that he has said or written before: this was a chronic danger to his Churches. Though Philippi contained few Jewish settlers, its situation (see Intro.) exposed this Church to the visits of Jewish emissaries. The dogs, the evil workers, the concision (mutilation) form one class of adversaries, who receive the last epithet by way of scornful play upon the boasted name of 'the circumcision.' The Abrahamic covenant-seal has become null and void for rejecters of Christ, and no better than any other 'cutting' of the body; so the Apostle transfers its name to the Church, upon which the OT. inheritance devolves: see Rom_2:25-29; Rom_4:12; Rom_11:17; Gal_3:7; Gal_6:16; Eph_2:11-19; Eph_3:6; Col_2:11-13 also Mat_21:43. These same men are dogs, raging against and ready to devour the Apostle of the Gentiles (cp. Psa_22:16, Psa_22:20). ill-workers, because of their mischievous and unscrupulous activity: cp. 2Co_11:13. As in 1Th_2:14-16, unbelieving Jews are here intended, radically opposed to the gospel; not, as in Galatians and 2 Corinthians, Christian Jews who pervert it. Jewish hostility was violent beyond measure in Macedonia: see Acts 17.

3. By contrast with anti-Christian Jews, we are the circumcision, who worship by the Spirit of God (whose worship is inspired by the Holy Spirit), and glory in Christ Jesus (not in Moses, the Temple, etc.), and have no confidence in flesh (in any external privilege or performance). Here the Apostle strikes into the current of his own experience, which carries him away for the rest of the chapter

4. Though I (one of the emphasised 'we' of Php_3:3) might have confidence indeed in the flesh—who had a better right to presume upon outward prerogative? Amongst the seven points of superiority enumerated in Php_3:5-6, four came to Saul by birth, three by acquisition. The eighth day was the proper date for the infant's circumcision (Gen_17:12); Israel, the covenant-name of Jehovah's people; Benjamin, the tribe eminent as supplying the first king of Israel, and subsequently remaining faithful to the throne of David; a Hebrew sprung from Hebrews, one whose family preserved the home-language: see Act_21:40. The fact that he had been a persecutor of the Church, combined with his Pharisaic professions and legal blamelessness, raised Saul's reputation to the highest pitch: cp. 2Co_11:22; Gal_1:13-14; Act_22:3-5.

§ 12. Php_3:7-11. The treasured gains of Saul of Tarsus, Paul the Apostle has counted loss because of the Christ, content to lose them if he might gain Christ (cp. Gal_6:14); there is no treasure that he would not hold cheap in this exchange—I count all things to be loss for the surpassing worth of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord (Php_3:8). And this is no untried vaunt: For whose sake I have suffered the loss of all things—home, ease, honour, everything that men count dear (cp. Act_20:24)—and count them refuse! So contemptible had the world's wealth become to him through knowing Christ; he wins infinite riches in exchange for dross!

The last clause of Php_3:8 is completed by Php_3:9, which unfolds St. Paul's distinctive conception of the believer's relation to his Saviour: that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own, that which comes of law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is of God, resting upon faith. These words sum up the doctrine of salvation taught in Romans and Galatians: the Apostle has not 'gained Christ' as an outward possession, but so as to be planted in Him and recognised as one with Him; so that even his 'righteousness'—the moral worth that gives value to his existence—is not claimed for his own, as though it had been won by law-keeping, for it accrues to him through faith in Christ, and thus has its fountain in God; it is built not, like the Pharisee's righteousness, upon human efforts and strivings, but upon faith in God and Christ.

Php_3:10-11 are parallel to Php_3:9, setting forth objectively, as that defined subjectively, the Apostle's 'gain' in Christ. As Php_3:9 expanded the for whom of Php_3:8, so Php_3:10-11 take up and enlarge upon the foregoing phrase, the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord; the entire sentence (Php_3:8-11) is symmetrical:

I count all things to be loss, for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, For whom I suffered the loss of all things, etc., That I may gain Christ, and be found in Him, etc., So that I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, etc.

10, 11. Three points are specified in St. Paul's 'knowledge of Christ': (a) The power of His resurrection, which came on Saul in the Damascus revelation. The resurrection of Jesus Christ which manifested Him as the Son of God, at the same time revealed in Him 'the power of God' working 'unto salvation': see Rom_1:4, Rom_1:16; Rom_4:24-25; Eph_1:19, Eph_1:20. The whole faith of the gospel turned upon Christ's resurrection (see 1Co_15:1-4, 1Co_15:12-25; Rom_10:9); the new life of the believer springs from His opened grave (Rom_6:4-11; 1Co_15:20-21, 1Co_15:45-49). (b) In contrast with the power of the Lord's resurrection-life stands the fellowship of His sufferings (2Co_13:4), to which St. Paul was admitted from the outset: see Act_9:16. The present situation sets his ministry in this light: see Col_1:24; Eph_3:13; 2Co_4:10; 2Ti_2:11-12, and cp. Mat_16:24; Mat_20:22, Mat_20:23. This fellowship goes to the length of being conformed to His death (a continued process); for the disciple is following his cross-bearing Master (Mat_10:38, etc.), and his daily course is as a march to Calvary: cp. 1Co_15:3; 2Co_4:10; Gal_2:19-20; Gal_6:14. (c) St. Paul's knowledge of Christ will culminate in his attaining unto (arriving at) the full (or final) resurrection from the dead; hitherto he 'knows in part,' then he will 'know as' he 'is known' (1Co_13:9-11). If by any means bespeaks humility rather than misgiving; St. Paul cannot look with steady eye on the dazzling prospect: cp. Gal_3:20; 1Jn_3:2. For 'resurrection' a unique intensive Gk. compound is here used, signifying completeness, finality—a resurrection that leaves mortality for ever behind: cp. 2Co_5:4.

§ 13. Php_3:12-16. The goal of the Apostle's career lies beyond this world; hence he proceeds: Not that I have already obtained the 'gain' secured to me in Christ (cp. Php_1:21), or am already made perfect; but I am pressing on, if so be that I may apprehend (lay fast hold of) that for which I was apprehended (laid fast hold of) by Christ Jesus. In this disclaimer, emphatically resumed in Php_3:13, St. Paul contrasts himself with Christians holding mistaken notions of perfection similar, probably, to those attributed to 'Hymenæus and Philetus' in 2Ti_2:16-18, who taught that 'the resurrection is already past' (scil. in the regeneration of the soul) and denied 'the redemption of the body' with all that this implies: see Rom_8:18-23 cp. 1Co_15:12. Challenging these perfectionists, who imagined that Christ in their present state had reached the goal of His work of redemption, St. Paul protests: Brethren, for my part I do not reckon myself as yet to have apprehended; but one thing—! (Php_3:13) Here he breaks off; 'one thing I do' (AV) supplies the aposiopesis: forgetting the things behind and straining out unto the things before, I press on towards the mark, to reach the prize of the upward calling of God in Christ Jesus (Php_3:14): cp. Heb_3:1; 1Th_2:12. 'The prize' is the heavenly life of the redeemed (Php_3:11, Php_3:20-21),—'our perfect consummation and bliss both in body and soul'; 'God calls' men to this in Christ Jesus, since Christ conveys the call and supplies in His person its mark (Php_3:21 cp. Rom_8:29). The Apostle depicts himself as a racer straining every nerve to reach the goal and wasting not an instant in looking backward.

The Gk. adjective perfect (i.e. 'fullgrown,' 'mature': see 1Co_14:20; Eph_4:13) appearing in Php_3:12 and Php_3:15, was used of initiates into the religious 'mysteries' of the time, at the final stage of qualification; the party in view claimed, under this designation, to have acquired an esoteric 'knowledge' of Christianity going deeper than simple 'faith': see Col_2:4, Col_2:8; 1Ti_6:20, 1Ti_6:21. This Gnosticising tendency, so strongly evidenced by the Colossian heresy, was widespread and manifold in form; it greatly exercised the Apostle's mind at this time.

15. Let us, so many as be perfect (the true 'initiates,' in contrast with those alluded to in Php_3:12), be thus minded—as much as to say, 'Those really deep in Christian knowledge will think in this way' (Php_3:10-14). The perfect recognise the distance of the goal; they are the last to count themselves perfect: cp. the treatment of Gk, conceit of wisdom in 1Co_2:6-16; 1Co_8:1-2; 1Co_14:37, 1Co_14:38.

15b, 16. Some members of this Church are otherwise minded—unable to follow what St. Paul has just said; knowing their loyalty, he can wait confidently for their enlightenment—God will reveal this also unto you (cp. 1Co_2:10-15)—provided that they faithfully practise the truth already grasped: whereunto we have attained, by that same rule let us walk (RV): cp. Gal_6:16; Joh_7:17. Omit 'let us mind,' etc. (AV).

§ 14. Php_3:17-21. Against the third class of opponents (see Intro.)—in some instances identical with the second, for spiritual conceit and moral depravity may be found together (see 1Ti_6:3-5)—St. Paul adduces his example and that of others of like behaviour, as against the two former he cited his religious experience.

18, 19. Their character is notorious: the Apostle has spoken of them often, and weeps over them as he writes now. These are peculiarly the enemies of the cross of Christ—not Jews who 'stumble at' the cross (Gal_6:12; 1Co_1:23), but professed Christians whose walk tends to its subversion; men whose end is perdition—like that of 'the adversaries' of Php_1:28; (see 2Co_11:15; 2Pe_2:1-3)—for their god is the belly (they honour sensual appetite like a god: see Rom_13:13-14; Rom_16:18; 2Ti_3:4), and their glory is in their shame (they pride themselves on sensuality: see Eph_4:19; Rom_1:32; 2Pe_2:13-14); who mind earthly things! (cp. Rom_8:5-7)—the delineation ends in amazement. These men are Antinomians, accepting Paul's gospel only to 'continue in sin that grace may abound,' and 'using liberty for an occasion to the flesh' (see Rom_6:1, Rom_6:12; Gal_5:13; Jdg_1:4). They were the reproach and grief of the Apostle's ministry. One hardly supposes that the writer has such enemies amongst the Philippians (see Php_1:3-8); but libertine Christians were numerous, and might travel that way.

20, 21. Against the earthly is set the heavenly mind and walk, described by a word appealing to the Philippian civic consciousness (see Intro., and cp. Php_1:27): our citizenship (AV 'conversation') is in heaven! (cp. Rev_21:2). As the distant Philippian 'colonus' belonged to Rome, so the Christian sojourning on earth is a citizen of heaven; his home lies 'where Christ is' (Col_3:1-3; Eph_2:19; 2Co_5:1-9; Heb_11:13-16; Mat_6:21; Joh_14:2-3). From this region, ours already by affinity, we await a Saviour (see 1Th_1:10; 1Th_4:16-17; 1Co_1:7; 1Co_15:23).. who will refashion the body of our humiliation ('vile body,' AV, is a mistranslation), that it may be conformable to the body of his glory. The Gk. adjective rendered 'conformable' appeared in Rom_8:29;—'conformed to the image of God's Son': conformity of bodily state completes conformity of character. Upon this metamorphosis, see 1Co_15:51-54 and 1Th_4:14-17. The Apostle keenly felt the 'humiliation' of man's mortal state: see 2Co_4:7 to 2Co_5:5. The idea of 'the body of glory' was given him by the form of heavenly splendour in which he had seen the Lord Jesus on the Damascus road: cp. 2Co_4:4-6, also Rev_1:13-17.

This transformation of the saints will be the supreme act of that mighty working in which Jesus displays His power, as Lord of God's kingdom, to subjugate all things unto Himself: cp. Php_2:10-11 and Mat_28:18. The human body is, from first to last, the object of His miracles. Read 1Co_15:24-28 this connexion.

J. R. Dummelow, A Commentary on the Holy Bible (Macmillan, 1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

V. COUNSELS AGAINST PERILS, Php_3:1 to Php_4:1.

1. Warning against Judaizing teachers, Php_3:1-2.

1. Finally—The apostle seems to have been about closing the epistle with a caution against the Judaizers, but at the mention of them as the concision, he goes off into the discussion which follows.

Rejoice—This is the keynote of the whole epistle, but it is to be in the Lord.

The same things—Namely, this frequent mention of joy. See Php_1:18; Php_1:25-26; Php_2:2; Php_2:17-18; Php_2:28; Php_4:4; Php_4:10. It was not irksome to him, while it would certainly tend to their safety, if it should lead them to seek their happiness in Christ.

Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

CRITICAL AND EXPLANATORY NOTES

Php_3:1. Finally.—Lit. “as to the rest.” The apostle had intended to bring his letter to a close, but something of which We have no information leads him to warn his readers against Judaizers and their methods. He resumes his farewell at Php_4:8, yet lingers there. To write the same things.—Whatever they may have been, they concerned the security of his readers. His hand had so often written up in bold letters the Cave canem to warn his unsuspecting children, that we may be allowed to think that is what he means to do again.

Php_3:2. Beware of dogs.—Who would “turn again and rend you.” If the term is a retort on “Gentile dogs,” and looks like “railing for railing,” we may explain it by the directness of the metaphor. Dogs and Judaizers have this in common—that they tear flesh. The savage delight of having inflicted a wound is shown in Gal_6:13. Beware of the concision.—A bitter play on the name by which the Jews thought themselves distinguished (Eph_2:11). St. Paul changes the prefix, and stigmatises them as “the mutilation party.” Lightfoot gives illustrations of this toying with words, e.g., in the complaint of an ambassador that he had been sent, not to Spain, but to Pain.

Php_3:3. For we are the circumcision.—How completely Paul had sloughed his Rabbinic literalism this verse clearly shows (Rom_2:28-29). Which worship God in the Spirit.—See our Lord’s words to the woman of Samaria, prophetic of the day when worship shall be set free from its trammels and cerements (Joh_4:23-24).

MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.—Php_3:1-3

The False and the True in Religion.

I. The false in religion evident in the character of its advocates.—“Beware of dogs, beware of evil workers, beware of the concision” (Php_3:2). “Dogs” was an epithet expressive of great contempt, and indicative of impurity and profanity. It was a term applied to the Judaizers, or, as Chrysostom calls them, “base and contemptible Jews, greedy of filthy lucre and fond of power, who, desiring to draw away numbers of believers, preached at the same time both Christianity and Judaism, corrupting the gospel.” They were “evil workers “causing much spiritual mischief. They were of “the concision”—mere cutters or slashers of the flesh. “The same men are described in each clause as impure and profane, as working spiritual mischief, and as taken up with a puerile faith in flesh-cutting. In the first clause you have their character, in the second their conduct, and in the third their destructive creed. Men who insisted on circumcision as essential to salvation made the rite ridiculous—Judaized ere they Christianised. To circumcise a Gentile was not only to subject him to a rite which God never intended for him, but it was to invest him with a false character. Circumcision to him was a forgery, and he carried a lie in his person. Not a Jew, and yet marked as one, having the token without the lineage, the seal of descent and not a drop of Abraham’s blood in his veins. To hinge salvation, especially in the case of a Gentile, on circumcision was such a spurious proselytism, such a total misappreciation of the Jewish covenant, such a miserable subversion of the liberty of the gospel, such a perverse and superstitious reliance on a manual rite, that its advocates might well be caricatured and branded as the concision” (Eadie). The false in religion stands exposed and condemned by the character and methods of its propagators.

II. The true in religion has definite characteristics.—

1. In the spirituality of its worship. “For we are the circumcision, which worship God in the Spirit” (Php_3:3). There is a great difference between the derisive use of the term “concision” and the use of the circumcision in this verse. There is a Christian circumcision, which is a “putting off the body of the sins of the flesh”; and this is not a manual but a spiritual act. All that the old circumcision typified the Christian enjoys. “The spiritual offspring of Abraham have nobler gifts by far than his natural seed—blessing not wrapped up in civil franchise, or dependent upon time, or restricted to territory.” The Christian has learnt that true religion consists, not in forms and ceremonies and temporal privileges, but in a right state of heart towards God, in a loftier worship, and a more intense spiritual life.

2. In making Christ the basis of confident exultation.—“Finally, my brethren, rejoice in the Lord … rejoice in Christ Jesus” (Php_3:1; Php_3:3). Christ, and Christ only, is the Christian’s plea, and the joyous theme of his unending song: Christ, the divine, all-glorious Son of God. Theodosius, in the fourth century, at one time so far favoured the Arians as to let them open their places of worship and labour to undermine the divinity of Christ. Soon after this he made his son Arcadius, a youth of sixteen, an equal partner with him in his throne; and the noblemen and bishops were invited to come on an appointed day to congratulate him. Among the number was Amphilocus, a famous old bishop who had bitterly suffered in the Arian persecution. He made a very handsome address to the emperor, and was about to take his leave, when Theodosius exclaimed: “What, do you take no notice of my son? Do you not know that I have made him partner with me in the empire?” Upon this the good old bishop went up to young Arcadius, and, putting his hand upon his head, said, “The Lord bless thee, my son.” The emperor, roused into rage by this apparent neglect, exclaimed: “What, is this all the respect you pay to a prince that I have made of equal dignity with myself?” Upon this the bishop, with the grandeur of an angel and the zeal of an apostle, looking the emperor full in the face, indignantly said: “Sire, do you so highly resent my apparent neglect of your son because I do not give him equal honours with yourself! And what must the eternal God think of you who have given leave to have His co-equal and co-eternal Son degraded in His proper divinity in every part of your empire?”

3. In distrusting the supposed virtue of outward rites.—“And have no confidence in the flesh” (Php_3:3). No confidence in the supposed good conferred by externals. Birth and lineage, family, tribe, and nationality on the one hand, and the moral character determined by them on the other, Paul reckons together as excellencies and gifts of the same kind, and holds them in slight esteem compared with what he has in Christ. The morality of men belongs to the province of the natural life; it depends on birth, family, position, culture, time, and circumstances, and gives reason, as does every favour, for humble thankfulness, but not for proud boasting. Such, as contrasted with the concision, is the circumcision; the children of believing Abraham and blessed with him; serving God by His Spirit in a higher and more elastic worship; glorying in Him who has won such privileges and blessings for them, and having no trust in any externals or formalities on which the Judaizer laid such stress as securing salvation or as bringing it within an available reach (Lange, Eadie).

III. Against the false in religion it is necessary to faithfully warn.—“Beware … beware … beware!” (Php_3:2). Like three peals of a trumpet giving a certain blast do the three clauses sound, and the repetition reveals the intense anxiety and earnestness of the alarmed apostle. It is the duty of the minister to warn his people of whatever endangers their spiritual life and eternal welfare. News came to a certain town, once and again, that the enemy was approaching; but he did not then approach. Hereupon in anger the inhabitants enacted a law that no man on pain of death should bring again such rumours as the news of an enemy. Not long after the enemy came indeed, and besieged, assaulted, and sacked the town, of the ruins of which nothing remained but this proverbial epitaph—“Here once stood a town that was destroyed by silence.”

Lessons.—

1. Genuine religion is self-evident.

2. Falseness in the garb of religion works serious mischief.

3. True religion demands constant watchfulness.

GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES

Php_3:1. Safeguards against Error.—

1. To rejoice in Christ—to be constantly and with delight making recourse to Him—is a choice guard against any error contrary to the truths relating to Him.

2. Often repeating and inculcating truths that are most for edification ought neither to be burdensome to a minister nor yet wearied of by the people.

3. Temptations to error are covered over with such pious pretences and lovely baits that there is need of many guards and frequent warnings.—Fergusson.

Php_3:2. Emphatic Warnings against False Teachers—

I. Because of their snarling methods and insatiable greed.—“Beware of dogs.”

II. Because of their wicked and destructive policy.—“Beware of evil workers.”

III. Because their zeal is wholly misdirected and injurious.—“Beware of the concision.”

Php_3:3. Spiritual Circumcision—

I. Is an inward and conscious spiritual change.—“For we are the circumcision.”

II. While reverently using outward forms of worship is superior to them.—“Which worship God in the Spirit.”

III. Finds its joy in living union with Christ.—“And rejoice in Christ Jesus.”

IV. Repudiates all ordinances that divert from Christ.—“And have no confidence in the flesh.”

The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary (gen. ed. Joseph S. Exell; Funk & Wagnalls, c. 1892) — public domain (pre-1929). A full-Bible homiletical/sermon-outline anthology covering 65 of 66 books (2 John is absent from the source module). Text from a community e-Sword module.

V. SECTION FOURTH

Warning against Judaistic teachers and wicked deceivers

Php_3:1 to Php_4:1

1. The disposition of these teachers in contrast with that of the Apostle

(Php_3:1-16)

(1) The Apostle warns his readers against the disposition of these false teachers, especially their pride (Php_3:2-7); points out plainly the opposition between righteousness which is of the law and that which is of faith (Php_3:8-11); declares with humility that he is yet striving after perfection (Php_3:12-14), and concludes by exhorting them to unity (Php_3:15-16).

1Finally, my brethren, rejoice in the Lord. To write the same things to you, to 2me indeed is not grievous, [irksome] but for you it is safe. Beware of [the] dogs, beware of [the] evil workers, beware of the concision. 3For we are the circumcision, who worship (God) in the Spirit [of God1] and rejoice [glory] in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh. 4Though I might [can] have confidence (also) in the flesh. If any other man thinketh that he hath whereof he 5might trust in the flesh, I more: circumcised2 the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, an Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law, a Pharisee: 6concerning zeal,3 persecuting the church; touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless. 7But what things were gain to me, those I [have] counted 8loss for Christ. Yea, doubtless, and I count all things (but) loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them (but) dung [refuse] that I may win Christ, 9and be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by [upon] faith; 10that I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable 4 [being conformed] unto his death: 11if by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead.5 12Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect: but I follow after, that I may apprehend [lay hold upon] that for which also I am apprehended 13[was laid hold upon] of [by] Christ Jesus. Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended6 [to have laid hold upon] but (this) one thing: (I do,) forgetting 14those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. 15Let us therefore, as many as be perfect, be thus minded: and if in anything ye be otherwise minded, God shall reveal even this unto you. 16Nevertheless, whereto we have already attained, let us walk by the same rule,7 let us mind the same thing [in the same let us walk].

EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL

Php_3:1. Finally (τὸ λοιπόν) as formula progrediendi begins (Bengel) as in Php_4:8; Eph_6:10; 2Co_13:11; 1Th_4:1; 2Th_3:1), a section usually near the end. Hence in the glow of feeling the Apostle always adds “my brethren” (ἀδελφοί μου or ἀδελφοί). It does not conclude what immediately precedes (Schenkel), nor does it so necessarily indicate the end, that Php_3:2 follows as a digression (Meyer).—Rejoice in the Lord (χαίρετε ἐν κυρίῳ). This is of the first importance, and corresponds with the ground-tone of the letter (see Introd. § § 1, 2, p. 4; and comp. Php_4:4; Php_2:17-18; Php_2:28; Php_1:18; Php_1:25). Their joy should have its origin and element in Christ (Rom_14:17; 1Th_1:6). That the emphasis falls upon this expression is shown by the final exhortation (Php_4:1) στήκετε ἐν κυρίῳ (Php_4:2), which lies at the foundation of that given here, and appropriately follows the warning against the false teachers who would separate them from the Lord.—To write the same things to you, to me indeed is not irksome but for you it is safe (τὰ αὐτὰ γράφειν ὑμῖν, ἐμοὶ μὲν οὐκ ὀκνηρόν, ὑμῖν δὲ ἀσφαλές). We infer from ὀκνηρόν (from ὄκνος ‘sluggishness,’ ‘delay,’ like πονηρός, qui aliis πόνους facit), which in Mat_25:26; Rom_12:11, signifies ‘slothful,’ that an unpleasant task is meant, and that may consist in a formal repetition of his words. Ἀσφαλές (from σφάλλω, labo, vacillare facio), properly “firm, secure,” (Heb_6:19; Act_21:34; Act_22:30; Act_25:26), or ‘adapted to secure,’ ‘make safe,’ presupposes warnings against imminent dangers. It is clear that Paul, ‘who writes the same things’ (τὰ αὐτὰ γράφει), only for the sake of the Philippians, would prefer not to be compelled to do so; it is, therefore, no feeling or confession of poverty of thought (Baur). It is also evident that τὰ αὐτὰ γράφειν does not refer to consolation, exhortation, which would not be to him burdensome (ὀκνηρόν). Hence it is not the preceding exhortation to rejoice that is meant (Bengel, Wiesinger, and others). Both adjectives lead us to think of the warning as directed against false teachers in Philippi. But in this letter Paul as yet has written nothing about these teachers, since those mentioned in Php_1:15; Php_1:17 sq. are in Rome and may be endured, whereas those here are of the most dangerous character. It is most natural to think of another letter of Paul’s to Philippi, especially as Polycarp says of Paul (Philippians 3): ἀπὼν ὑμῖν ἔγραψεν ἒπιστολάς, εἰς ἃς ἐὰν ἐγκύπτητε δυνήσεσθε οἰκοδομεῖσθαι. He also says in another passage (Philippians 2), preserved only in a Latin translation.: Ego autem, nil tale sensi in vobis vel audivi, in quibus laboravit beatus Paulus, qui estis in principio epistolæ ejus, de vobis enim gloriatur in omnibus ecclesiis. The meaning of this is not: “Ye are in the beginning of his letter,” but according to 2Co_3:1-3 : “Ye are from the beginning, in the beginning, his letters, letters of recommendation.” Why may not an epistle to the Philippians have been lost, as well as that to the Laodiceans (Col_4:16), and one to the Corinthians (Bleek, Studien und Kritiken, 1830, p. 625; Winer’s Realw.; p. 673)? The view that quæ præsens dixeram should be supplied (Pelagius, Erasmus, and others) is untenable; for he does not say καὶ γράφειν, nor can we suppose, with Heinrichs and Paulus, that from τὰ αὐτὰ γράφειν to Php_4:20, we have an esoteric letter to his more intimate friends, while the remainder is an exoteric letter to the church. This is an arbitrary notion, and does not help us at all to explain the language; “it is a manifest historical and psychological misconception,” says Meyer, “if we only think of Paul’s relations to the Philippians.” [Paul had been at Philippi twice after his founding of the church there (Act_20:1-2) where this city must have been among “those parts” mentioned in that passage, and again on his return to Macedonia after the three months in Greece, (Php_3:3; Php_3:6); and on these occasions he must have given to the Philippian Christians much and varied oral instruction. The γράφειν as present will bear the emphasis—“to be writing as I now do”—and this could be opposed to the warnings which they had heard from his lips, when among them. The act of dictating and writing to them would thus be tacitly opposed to the easier task of merely speaking to them. He would submit cheerfully (οὐκ ὀκνηρόν) to the trouble of repeating his instructions in every form, with the pen or the voice, if he could only by such or any other means secure them against the dangers to which they were exposed. So, among others, Calvin and Wiesinger. Prof. Lightfoot understands the expression as referring to the Apostle’s reiterated warnings against dissension in this letter, and Bishop Ellicott of his exhortations, expressed or implied, to rejoice in the Lord.—H.] In χαίρετε ἐν κυρίῳ we see Paul’s aim, in οὐκ ὀκνηρόν his readiness, in ἀσφαλές the church’s danger and want, and in τὰ αὐτά (not τὸ αὐτό) the variety or compass of his teachings.

Php_3:2. Beware of [the] dogs, beware of [the] evil-workers, beware of [the] concision. Βλέπετε, followed as here by a direct accusative, strictly means ‘behold,’ ‘fix your eye upon;’ and so in 1Co_10:18; 1Co_1:26. See Winer’s Gram., p. 223. The proper Greek for ‘beware of, would require ἀπό With the genit. after βλέπετε (Mar_8:15; Mar_12:38). The one sense here involves the other; videte et cavebitis (Bengel). The threefold repetition marks the Apostle’s earnestness and the importance of the warning (Winer’s Gram., p. 609), while it corresponds gradatione retrograda (Bengel) to the three clauses (Php_3:3) which describe only a single class of teachers, and hence not three different kinds of false teachers (Van Hengel). The first substantive (τοὺς κύνας) was a term of reproach with heathen and Jews, and implies ‘impudence, shamelessness’ (in Mat_15:26, τοῖς κυναρίοις, less severe); among the Jews it (κύνας) implied also uncleanness (Mat_7:6; Rev_22:15), and among the heathen that of ferocity and malevolence. It is most natural to retain here the biblical idea, viz., profane, impure, shameless, thereby indicating the moral character of the teachers in question. Hence it is not to be understood of mere shamelessness (Chrysostom), or this together with covetousness (Grotius), or ferocity or violence (Rilliet), and least of all a special class: homines a Christi professione ad Judæorum superstitionem reversi, imitatores canum ad vomitum suum redeuntium (Van Hengel). Τοὺς κακοὺς ἐργάτας designates their activity, not as πονηρόν, evil to others, but as evil in itself, unprofitable, injurious (comp. δόλιοι ἐργάται, 2Co_11:13). See the contrast in 2Ti_2:15. Van Hengel is incorrect: qui se a Christo quidem non avertunt, sed superstitione illa divinam corrumpunt doctrinam. Τὴν κατατομήν, paranomasia nam gloriosam appellationem περιτομῆς vindicat Christianis Php_3:3, κατατὲμνα de concisione vetita, Lev_21:5; Leviticus 1 Reg. Lev_18:28; non sine indignatione loquitur (Bengel). See Winer’s Gram., p. 638. The language here states the result of their activity; with their circumcision they effect only an outward mutilation. This ironical and sarcastic paranomasia (found often in Paul as well as in Luther) marks only the quality, not the quantity (Baur), of the circumcision, and is to be taken passively in its concrete sense, i.e., the mutilated, not the mutilators. The reference is not to idolatry (Beza, et al.), or to a separation of faith from the heart (Luther), a sundering of the church (Calvin, et al.), and still less to a class of teachers: Judæi, fiduciam suam in carnis circumcisione potentes atque ita ad Christum venire nolentes, sed illum contemnentes et spernentes (Van Hengel). It is certain that they were Judaists, as in Galatia, and were active at Philippi, and though they had no success and no adherents at Philippi, yet were dangerous opponents of Paul’s view of Christianity. The severity of the Apostle’s language contrasts strongly with his joy and friendliness with reference to the Philippians, but was justified by the fact that a spiritual field so fair and hopeful was threatened and endangered by such disturbers. The condition itself of the church furnished a reason for his sharpness against them. The contrast in Php_3:3 sheds further light on this point.

Php_3:3. For we are the circumcision (ἡμεῖς γάρ ἐσμεν ἡ περιτομή). Causa, cur, Php_3:2, alios tam longe secludat (Bengel). [Paul justifies here (γάρ) his refusing to recognize the Judaists as the advocates of true circumcision. They are destitute of the marks of those who answer to that character. They substitute an outward form for the spirit of true worship, and rely upon their own works for acceptance, instead of the righteousness offered to them in the gospel; whereas the circumcision that God accepts is that of the heart and not of the letter (Rom_2:29), and is the seal or evidence of the justification which man obtains by faith and not by deeds of the law (Rom_4:11 sq.). Christians fulfilled both of these requisitions for obtaining the favor of God, and hence they also were entitled to be called the circumcision.—H.] Ἡμεῖς precedes with emphasis. The Apostle means himself and his beloved church, which was composed for the most part of Gentiles. Hence ἡ περιτομή is to be understood in the purely spiritual sense, that is, Christians who have received circumcision of the heart (Col_2:11; Rom_2:25-29). Comp. 1Co_7:19; Gal_3:28; Gal_5:6; Gal_6:15.—These are further characterized: who worship in the Spirit of God (οἱ πνεύματι θεοῦ λατρεύοντες). The verb is used absolutely, as Heb_9:9; Heb_10:2; Act_26:1; Luk_2:31, of the worship of God which the instrumental dative defines more fully as spiritual, and the genit. θεοῦ refers to the Holy Spirit in opposition to the human spirit. It is contrasted with the σάρξ in its moral sense. Comp. Joh_4:23-24; Heb_9:14; Gal_3:3; Rom_12:1 (τὴν λογικὴν λατρείαν). Hence the dative does not designate the rule (Van Hengel). Winer’s Gram., p. 216. Comp. 1Co_9:7.—And rejoice [glory] in Christ Jesus (καὶ καυχώμενοι ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ). For the form of expression see Rom_2:17; Rom_5:11; 1Co_1:31; 1Co_3:21; 2Co_10:17. They are here contrasted with the κακοὶ ἐργάται.—And have no confidence in the flesh (καὶ οὐκ ἐν σαρκὶ πεποιθότες) denotes their moral position as οpposed to the κύνας, the impure, insolent, while that which precedes marks their religious sphere. Οὐκ implies a direct negative: qui non confisi sunt, whereas μή would have made it hypothetical (si non confisi sunt). See Winer’s Gram., p. 485.

Php_3:4. Although I might have (more strictly am having = have) confidence also in the flesh. Καίπερ is restrictive here only in Paul, more frequently in the Epistle to the Hebrews (Heb_5:8; Heb_7:8; Heb_12:17). Ἐγώ singled out from ἡμεῖς, Php_3:3 (the truly circumcised whether outwardly or not), places the Apostle, who is a Jew as the false teachers were (Php_3:2), not one of the heathen as was the greater part of the Philippian Church, in contrast with these teachers, as having confidence in the flesh (ἔχων πεποίθησιν ἐν σαρκί) de jure, not de facto. His actual confidence is based not upon the flesh, upon outward advantages, but upon Christ (hence καί before ἐν σαρκί i.e., also in it as well as Him), though not without his reasons for that other confidence and a right to it. Hence the participle does not denote the past (Van Hengel), nor is it to be resolved into ‘could have’ (Schenkel), nor is πεποίθησις merely argumentum fiduciæ (Beza, Calvin, et al.). In σαρκί special reference is made to circumcision. [This rite is named because it was the watchword, as it were, of those who, in their system of salvation, exalted good works above the merits of Christ (see Gal.) —H.]—If any other man thinketh that he hath whereof he might trust in the flesh, I more, introduces a comparison between Paul’s condition and that of the others. Ἐι τις ἄλλος is entirely general, leaving his readers to apply it to the Judaists. Δοκεῖ denotes the subjective, arbitrary judgment, as in Gal_6:3; 1Co_3:18; 1Co_8:2. No appeal can be made to Gal_2:6; Gal_2:9 (Schenkel), for there the meaning is ‘to be found such by others, to have that repute.’ Πεποιθέναι ἐν σαρκί denotes the actual πεποιθησιν ἔχειν, contained in the perf. With ἐγὼ μᾶλλον we are to supply δωκῶ πεποιθέναι ἐν σαρκί; comp. 2Co_11:23.

Php_3:5. Now follow the specifications which justify this claim. His first advantage is: Circumcised the eighth day (περιτομῇ ὀκταήμερος). The dative (not nominative, as if the abstract were used for circumcisus (Bengel), which is true only in the collective sense) denotes the respect in which (Eph_2:3 : τέκνα φύσει ὀργῆς). Winer’s Gram., p. 215. The adjective designates Paul in contrast with proselytes, as a Jew by birth, who had been circumcised on the eighth day, according to the law (Gen_17:12; Lev_12:3).—In censum nunc venit splendor natalium (Van Hengel), the second advantage: Of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, an Hebrew of the Hebrews (ἐκ γένους Ἰσραήλ, φυλῆς Βενιαμίν, Ἑβραῖος ἐκ Ἑβραίων). These all belong together according to the sense and the construction, for the preposition is not repeated before φυλῆς. As Schenkel well remarks: The theocratic full-blood (Rom_11:1; 2Co_11:22) is contrasted with the Idumean half-blood. Comp. Eph_2:12. The tribe of Benjamin enjoyed and conferred a distinction, because unlike the Ephraimites it had remained faithful to the theocracy. Besides this his Jewish extraction (εὐγένεια) was also perfect: his mother also was a Jew, and not a foreigner. It is incorrect to understand this of Hebrew-speaking parents (the Greek interpreters), which the context does not support, or of a tota majorum series ex Ebræis (Grotius), which would be unnecessary if he sprung from the people of Israel, from the tribe of Benjamin.—The third advantage: As touching the law a Pharisee. Κατά denotes the reference, as τὰ κατ’ ἐμέ (Eph_6:21). Winer’s Gram., p. 401. Comp. Act_22:3; Act_26:5. His religious position, his relation to the law, is marked as strict, rigorous; for the Pharisees observed it conscientiously and scrupulously. Νόμος is not = αἴρεσις, disciplina, θεσμοί (Grotius and others).

Php_3:6. The fourth advantage: Concerning zeal, persecuting the Church (κατὰ ζήλος διώκων τὴν ἐκκλησίαν) describes his moral conduct in the relations above mentioned. The participle is to be taken substantively as οἱ ζητοῦντες in Mat_2:20. It is not equivalent to διώξας (Grotius). That which is the greatest sin of the Apostle’s life, in his own estimation (1Co_15:8-9; 1Ti_1:13-16), he reckons by a sort of irony in this controversy with the Judaizers, as a glory to himself.—The fifth advantage: Touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless (κατὰ δικαιοσύνην τὴν ἐν νόμῳ γενόμενος ἄμεμπτος) presents the moral result. The righteousness referred to here (as the result of his conduct) is that which rests in the law, is based upon and determined by it; hence essentially that which is ἐκ νόμου (Php_3:9), and not ‘righteousness under or in the condition of law’ (De Wette). In this respect he is ‘blameless’ (ἄμεμπτος) according to men’s judgment (communi hominum existimatione, Calvin). It does not fully embrace Paul’s meaning to say: se nihil fecisse, quod morte aut verberibus castigandum esset (Grotius). Γενόμενος, put for emphasis before the adjective, signifies ‘becoming, striving himself to be,’ upon which, as the context teaches, he places value in the presence of God, but only when he opposes the carnal pride of these false teachers. To find here an obvious, though weak and lifeless imitation of 2Co_11:18-27, and to call this passage tame and without interest (Baur), indicates a perverted taste (Meyer).

Php_3:7. But what things were gain to me, presents forcibly Paul’s own position in contrast with (ἀλλά) that of these teachers. In ἅτινα, quæcunque, which is emphatic as the following ταῦτα shows, are included the preceding privileges and others of the same class.—These formerly ἦν μοι κέρδη, were actually gains, as the verb, emphatic by position, indicates. By μοί Paul means himself, as when he was Saul of Tarsus, and there is no need of weakening the sense by taking the pronoun (μοί) as the dative of judgment (Erasmus, et al.) The plural κερδή is used ob rerum varietatem, but there is no reason for supplying non vera lucra, sed opinata (Van Hengel) which is no more implied in the plural than in μοί, since ἧν precedes.—These [have] I counted loss for Christ (ταῦτα ἥγημαι διὰ τὸν Χριστὸν ζημίαν). The perfect, after the emphatic ταῦτα, denotes an actio præterita, quæ per effectus suos durat, and implies the inward decision which has resulted in action. It does not refer to the act in itself, but to the act as a result of conscious freedom. Hence it is not abjeci, repudiari (Van Hengel), which Php_2:3 does not confirm. Both the collocation and the signification of the words are to be observed. As to the order, we notice that διὰ τὸν Χριστόν stands between ἥγημαι and ζημίαν: Christ must first be known, then the ταῦτα are esteemed ζημία. With respect to the words we remark the following: (1) that with the accusative διά marks the reason (Winer’s. Gram., p. 398); (2) that τὸν Χριστόν denotes the well known, historical Christ, and (3) that ζημίαν calls to mind Act_27:10 (πολλῆς ζημίας οὐ μόνον τοῦ φορτίου καὶ τοῦ πλοίου, ἀλλὰ καὶ τῶν ψυχῶν ἡμῶν), and Php_3:21, where reference is made to what had been thrown into the sea. Hence it is jactura, after the figure of a merchant who throws his κέρδη overboard, as ζημίαν, in order to save his life. The various kinds of gain (κέρδη) are esteemed as one loss of life, so far as these (ταῦτα) separate and keep one away from Christ.

Php_3:8. Yea, doubtless, and I count all things loss. Ἀλλά contrasts the present (ἡγοῦμαι) with the perfect (ἥγημαι). Mev rem præesentem confirmat, οὐ̄ν conclusionem ex rebus ita comparatis conficit, (so also Meyer) and καί connects the present with the preceding perfect. Winer’s Gram., p. 442. [The stricter translation according to this view, is: ‘But therefore also I count,’ etc. The present (ἡγοῦμαι) reaffirms his former judgment: He has still the same view of the worthlessness of all reliance on outward forms and privileges.—H]. The contrast does not lie in πάντα (Rilliet), for this only embraces the ἅτινα in its widest scope.—The reason why he thus holds all things to be ‘loss’ (ζημίαν εἶναι) the subsequent clause unfolds: For the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord (διὰ τὸ ὑπερέχον τῆς γνώσεως Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ τοῦ κυρίου μου). The explanation which belongs to διὰ τὸν Χριστὸν does not lie in the relation defined by the preposition (that being simply repeated), but in that with whom it effects the relation. The substantive participle (τὸ ὑπερέχον) designates in comparison with those gains (κέρδη) one of far surpassing value, which results from a knowledge (τῆς γνώσεως) of the Redeemer both in His Person (Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ) and in His relation to each individual (τοῦ κυρίου μοῦ). Calvin wrongly takes it ad exprimendam affectus vehementiam.—For whom I have suffered the loss of all things. [It is the aorist in Greek, ‘suffered,’ which refers to the definite epoch in Paul’s life when he experienced the change in his views and relations which he here describes.—H]. In διʼ ὅν he returns again to the person of Christ, on which, after all, everything depends, not on the subjective knowledge. Τὰ πάντα, where the article recalls πάντα just mentioned, is the limiting accusative after the passive ἐζημιώθην, which states a result consequent on this altered view of his character and wants. Luther incorrectly renders it: ‘I have counted loss;’ and Van Hengel: cujus causa factum est, ut me illis privarem omnibus.—But the Apostle has not merely endured this passively, for he adds: And do count them refuse that I may win Christ. Καὶ ἡγοῦμαι indicates his activity, conviction, knowledge, the ground of which is still for whom (διʼ ὅν). Σκύβαλα (from κυσὶ βαλεῖν) εἶναι marks the absolute worthlessness more strongly than ζημίαν εἶναι which concedes a relative value: ζημία, jactura fit æquo animo, σκύβαλα properi abjiciuntur, posthac neque tactu, neque adspectu dignanda. (Bengel). [Another derivation is that from σκῶρ, σκατός, ‘dung,’ ‘filth,’ which some good etymologists adopt, though the other is generally preferred.—H]. The aim and purpose of such a judgment is ἵνα Χριστὸν κερδήσω, that I may gain Christ, who replaces all losses.—The future does not exclude present possession, but yet implies a fuller appropriation, which the present does not satisfy. Χριστόν is stronger than simply Christi favorem (Grotius).

Php_3:9 attaches itself closely to that which precedes.—And may be found in him, καὶ εὑρεθῶ ἐν αὐτῷ. Bengel well observes: qui omnia, ne se ipso quidem excepto, amittit, Christum lucrifacit et in Christo lucrifit; Christus est illius et ille est Christi. Plus ultra loquitur, Paulus quasi adhuc non lucrifecerit. It is incorrect to take the objective gaining of Christ. (ἰνα κερδήσω) placed emphatically after the subjective, i.e., the being found (εὑρηθῶ) opposed to ἡγοῦμαι, as equivalent to sim, (Grotius) or to restrict it to judicum dei (Beza). How he will be found is stated in what follows.—Not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law. Μή is used with ἔχων in the first place, because it belongs to a final clause, but also because it expresses a judgment concerning Paul: ‘as one who does not have.’ See Winer’s Gram., p. 482 sq. Van Hengel incorrectly joins it closely with εὑρέθω: ut deprehendar in ejus communione non meam qualemcunque habere probitatem, while Rheinwald and others explain it as ‘holding fast.’ It is habens as a specific modal-limitation of εὑρέθω ἐν αὐτῶ.—Ἐμὴν δικαιοσύνην τὴν ἐκ νόμου describes the righteousness (δικαιοσύνην) under two aspects: first, ἐμήν, emphatic by position, corresponding to τὴν ἱδίαν δικαιοσύνην (Rom_10:3) ‘his own,’ ‘self-acquired,’ to which is opposed ἡ ἐκ θεοῦor ἡ τοῦ θεοῦ (Rom_10:3); secondly, τὴν ἐκ νόμου with reference to the medium, as in like manner δίκαιος ἐκ πίστεως (Rom_3:26) and answering to τὴν διὰ πίστεως (comp. Rom_3:21-22; Rom_3:26; Rom_4:5; Rom_9:32; Rom_10:3; Rom_10:5-6).—Hence he at once adds to the latter the opposite characteristic. But that which is through the faith of Christ, ἀλλὰ τὴν διὰ πίστεως Χριστοῦ. Here righteousness (i.e., of faith) is described as the causa apprehendens or means of securing the benefits of Christ’s work.—But for the sake of completeness he now adds still under the antithetic ἀλλά: The righteousness which is of God upon faith (τὴν ἐκ θεοῦ δικαιοσόνην ἐπὶ τῆ πίστει). It is not a righteousness proceeding from the subject, but from God (causa efficiens), which rests on faith as its basis. The article τῇ renders the gen. objecti (Χριστοῦ or εἰς Χριστόν), and the article τήν before ἐπὶ τῇ πίστει unnecessary, because this limitation is immanent in the conception as the faith-righteousness. Winer’s Gram. p. 135. Meyer incorrectly connects this clause (τὴν ἐκ θεοῦ, etc.) with ἔχων, and Schenkel, with εὐρέθω ἐν αὐτῷ. So remote a connection is itself against both views. We reject also the following: In fide (Vulg.), per fidem(Grotius), propter fidem (De Wette), conditione hujus ipsius fidei posita (Van Hengel).

Php_3:10. That I may know him (τοῦ γνῶναι αὐτόν). This knowing of Christ is what the righteousness of faith proposes, without which such knowing is impossible, in the possession of which therefore he would be found, that he may be able to know Christ. In like manner in Rom_6:6, one clause with ἵνα is joined to another with τοῦ and the infinitive. Thus the process of the knowledge of Christ (Php_3:8) is given. Calvin, Bengel, and others, join this clause incorrectly with ἐπὶ τῇ πίστει. The excellence of this knowledge lies first of all in its object, the person of the Lord, a practical, experimental acquaintance with Him. What follows αὐτόν is epexegetical.—And the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings (καὶ τὴν δύναμιν τῆς ἀναστάσεως αὐτοῦ καὶ τὴν κοινωνίαν τῶν παθημάτων αὐτοῦ). The first denotes the vis et efficacia which the resurrection of Christ has upon those who know Him, which they experience when they embrace by faith the resurrection of the Lord; whereby God declared Him to be the author of justification and righteousness to all and every one who believes, (Rom_4:25; Rom_8:11; 1Co_15:17; 2Co_2:14; 2Co_4:10-11; Col_3:1-2). Hence the new life, the striving for that which is above, the conversation in heaven (Php_3:20), spring up in and with the righteousness of faith. Hence ἀνάστασις is not to be regarded as exortus (Bengel); or δύναμις to be understood as the power which effects the resurrection (Grotius); nor is reference had to the certainty of our resurrection and exaltation (Hölemann, et al.) The other expression, τὴν κοινωνίαν τῶν παθημάτων αὐτοῦ, indicates a participation in the sufferings of Christ, a συμπάσ̣χειν (Rom_7:17. See Gal_2:20 : Χριστῷ συνεσταύρωμαι; 2Ti_2:11) a suffering for Christ’s sake and in fellowship with Him. Thus suffering alone does not lead to glory as dying does not save or make us blessed. With Him! But as there is no resurrection without death, so also is there none without suffering (Wiesinger). Hence this thought, which logically should come first, takes the second place, emphatically intimating that the second is something not to be overlooked if one desires the first. The reference is not merely to a similar disposition in suffering (Van Hengel), or to an appropriation by faith of the merit of Christ, (Calov), nor is it to be explained as if it were written τὴν δύναμιν τῆς κοινωνίας (Hölemann), These two things, the power of the resurrection of Christ and the fellowship of His sufferings, are objects of the knowledge which only the righteous by faith possess. Hence such knowledge transcends all other advantages (Php_3:8).—Being conformed unto his death, συμμορφιζόμενος τῷ θανά τῳ αὐτοῦ. The nominative with τοῦ γνῶναι, without its relation to the subject being more closely defined is unusual. It would properly be the accusative of the subject, but is a constructio ad sensum, as if it had been ἵνα γνῶ. Comp. Joh_8:54; and for the opposite construction Act_27:10. Winer’s Gram., p. 572; see on Eph_4:2. The present participle points to an incipient present accomplishment, which the verb shows to be outwardly similar to the death of Christ. Paul had been exposed in the cause of the gospel more immediately to a violent death, at the hands of the heathen in league with the Jews; he might at length die a martyr’s death. It is not therefore to be carried forward beyond the nearer clause, to which it actually belongs, to one more remote, which has its own limitations; nor does it denote a condition yet to be attained, or an inward ethical relation of likeness to the death of the sinless Redeemer (Schenkel).

Php_3:11. If by any means or perchance, εἴ πως, si forte, denotes a hope which naturally connects itself with what has been said of the power of the resurrection of Christ, of fellowship with His sufferings, and of the Apostle’s, own impending death by martyrdom. The problematical form of the expression shows his humility in view of the glory which is the object of this hope. We are not to suppose any hesitation, or doubt, but only the exclusion of moral certainty.—I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead. Καταντήσω as in Act_26:7. Εἰς τὴν ἐξανάστασιν τὴν ἐκ νεκρῶν is simply the resurrection of the righteous to blessedness. The first preposition in the substantive ἐξανάστασις, found only here, (the verb ἐξαναστῆσαν in Mar_12:19; Luk_20:28; Act_15:5), points to the place whence the dead come forth (ἐκ τῆς γῆς). Bengel hypercritically refers ἐξανάστασις to the resurrection of Christians, and ἀνάστασις to Christ’s resurrection. Our passage gives no support to the distinction between a first and second resurrection. Comp. 1Co_15:23; 1Th_4:16. [“The general resurrection of the dead,” says Prof. Lightfoot, “whether good or bad, is ἡ ἀνάστασις τῶν νεκρῶν (e.g, 1Co_15:42); on the other hand, the resurrection of Christ and of those who rise with Christ, is generally [ἡ] ἀνάστασις [ἡ] ἐκ νεκρῶν (Luk_20:35; Act_4:2; 1Pe_1:3); the former includes both the ἀνάστασις ζωῆς and the ἀνάστασις κρίσεως (Joh_5:29); the latter is confined to the ἀνάστασις ζωῆς.” To infer that the righteous only are to be raised at the last day would contradict the express declaration of Christ in Joh_5:26-29; and of Paul in Act_24:14; Act_24:16.—H]. Van Hengel’s view is singular: si forte perveniam ad tempus hujus eventi, hence: live to the time when the dead shall rise.

Php_3:12. Not that I have already attained [laid hold of] or am already [or have become] perfect. Οὐχ ὅτι guards against the error of supposing that Paul would say of himself ἥδη ἔλαβον ἤδη τετελείωμαι. The object of ἔλάβον is not named, hence is to be drawn from the context: τὸ γνῶναι αὐτὸν (Php_3:10), τὸ ὑπερέχον τῆς γνῶσεως Χριστοῦ Ιησοῦ (Php_3:8). Ἔλαβον naturally denotes complete, secure possession; as if he were entirely penetrated by such knowledge, and it had entirely penetrated him, as if it had accomplished in him its perfect moral effect. The explanatory τετελείωμαι defines the meaning. With this modest literal account of his experience we are not to connect the figurative βραβεῖον in Php_3:14, which does not come forward till after the intervention of several other clauses (the Greek interpreters, Bengel, Meter, and others); and also not τὴν ἀνάστασιν (Rheinwald), jus ad resurrectionem beatam (Grotius), καταντᾶ̣ν (Matthies), all of which belong to the future, or Χριστόυ (Theodoret), moral perfection (Hölemann). Bengel well remarks: in summo fervore sobrietatem spiritualem non dimittit apostolus.—But I follow after if I may also apprehend [lay hold of] that (διώκω δὲ, εἰ καὶ καταλάβω). Διώκω means (as in Rom_9:30; 1Co_14:1; 1Ti_6:21; 2Ti_2:22) studiosi appeto, in contrast with (δέ) ἕλαβον, and having the same object. The εἰ shows the striving to be with humility. Καί points back to ἕλαβον; καταλάβω is stronger: cum quis plene potitur (Bengel); laying hold firmly (Meyer), Comp. Rom_9:30; 1Co_9:27.—Because also I was apprehended [laid hold of]. The ground on which he hopes to lay hold of (ἐφ ᾦ), as in Rom_5:12; 2Co_5:4 (Winer’s Gram., p. 394), hence equivalent to διότι. It is inappropriate to supply τοῦτο as the object of καταλάβω, for which, καὶ κατελήμφθην ὑπὸ Χριστοῦ (Rilliet, Wiesinger, and others); for the Apostle’s thought relates not so much to the reciprocal acts of ‘laying hold,’ and ‘being laid hold of,’ as to the effectual initiative which Christ has taken; and equally out of place is the idea of ‘being laid hold of for Christian perfection.’ The tone of the passage, which is not dialectic, reflective, speaks against such interpretations as: ‘under the condition,’ (Matthies), quo ut pervenire possim (Grotius). Luther’s rendering is unphilological. ‘After that,’ and Calvin’s quem adn modum. We are to recognize a suggestive and fine allusion in κατελήμφθην to the manner of Paul’s conversion (Act_9:3 ff.). [This reference appears to me doubtful.—H.]

Php_3:13. Brethren, ἀδελφοί. Familiariter fatelur (Bengel). I count not myself to have laid hold of, ἐγὼ ἐμαυτὸν οὐ λογίζομαι κατειληφέναι. A repetition of Php_3:12, which emphatically excludes himself (Act_26:9; Joh_5:30; Joh_5:32; Joh_7:17; Joh_8:54). The perfect as distinguished from καταλαβεῖν, denotes the having laid hold and kept hold. He resolutely discards all certainty and self-conceit, not so much on account of his readers and of their conduct (Php_2:2-4), as Wiesinger thinks, but for their sakes in view of false teachers among them, or who might appear among them.

Php_3:14 answers to Php_3:12 b. But one thing, ἕν δέ, introduces the antithesis of οὐ λογί ζομαι; hence we are to supply λέγω (Luther), or λογἱζομαι κατεληφέναι brought forward; for what follows he maintains to be true of himself in opposition to what he has denied to be so. There is no ground for inserting ποιῶ (Bengel, Winer’s Gram., p. 620, et al.); nor διώκω (Van Hengel). Ἕν refers to the whole following sentence, not merely to one member of it, viz., the two participial clauses (Meyer).—Forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark, (τὰ μὲν ὀπίσω ἐπιλανθανόμενος, τοῖς δὲ ἔμπροσθεν ἐπεκτεινόμενος κατὰ σκοπὸν διώκω). The finite verb, as in Php_3:12, is first of all defined more closely by two participles, which stand emphatically before it. The first clause is negative: ‘forgetting that which lies behind;’ the second is positive: ‘reaching out to what lies before;’ the first designates a purely spiritual act; the second describes a spiritual act by the posture of the body. Ἐπεκτεινόμενος indicates the bent-forward posture of one stretching himself out towards an object. Bengel: Oculus manum, manus pedem prævertit et trahit. The concrete expressions (ἔλαβον, διώκω, καταλάβω, τὰ ὀπίσω, τὰ ἔμπροσθεν, ἐπεκτεινόμενος, σκοπόν) gradually pass over more and more into the figure of a runner who in view of the goal before him and in thinking of the prize, forgets the space that lies behind. At first these expressions are such as readily attach themselves to the figure—perhaps it already lay at the bottom of them—in the end they are borrowed directly from the figure, so that τὸ βραβεῖον naturally follows as a part of the description. Hence in τὰ ὀπίσω the reference is not to the advantages mentioned, Php_3:5-6 (Pelagius, et al.), for these as attributes of the flesh (σάρξ) must be given up before the race begins, nor is it to the labors of the apostleship (Theodoret), but to the past attainments of the Christian life (Meyer). Τὰ ἔμπροσθεν, according to the figure the space yet to be traversed, is the life: future experience, not the goal itself, which is pointed out by κατὰ σκοπόν. The dative (τοῖς ἔμπροσθεν) shows upon what the gaze is fixed, while the preposition (κατά) indicates the direction, so that the goal is always thought of beyond the intermediate steps: it is thus = goalward (Meyer), versus metam (Winer’s Gram., p. 400).—For the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. Εἰς τὸ βραβεῖον presents now the object towards which his thoughts and efforts are directed. See 1Co_9:27; comp. Col_3:15. How the genitive τῆς ἄνω κλήσεως τοῦ θεοῦ ἐυ Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ is to be understood, a due attention to the subject and the figure shows. By ἡ ἄνω κλῆσις is meant the heavenly calling (Heb_3:1 : κλῆσις ἐπουράνιος) in opposition to τὰ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς (Col_3:2), and as usual κλῆσις denotes an action (Eph_1:18; Eph_4:1; Eph_4:4; Rom_11:29; 2Ti_1:9; 2Th_1:11; 1Co_1:26; 1Co_7:20). If its nature and character are thus determined, so now is its author (τοῦ θεοῦ). Comp. 1Th_2:12. The medium is presented by ἐν χριστῷ Ιησοῦ (Winer’s Gram., p. 135 sq. Comp. Col_1:4.) To connect this clause with διώκω (Chrysostom, Meyer) is against both the sense and the construction. Accordingly τῆς κλήσεως is genitive of the subject, which holds forth to τὸ βραβεῖον, but not the genitive of apposition (Schenkel). [On the games of the Greeks and Romans, from which the Apostle has drawn his illustration, see Games in Dr. Smith’s Dictionary of the Bible.—H].

Php_3:15. Let us therefore, as many as be perfect, be thus minded. Ὅσοι οὖν τέλειοι begins the practical application as an inference (οὖν) from the preceding. Τέλειος is to be distinguished from τετελειωμένος: ille, cursui habilis, hic, brabeo proximus, jam jam accepturus (Bengel). The first word designates a character or condition objectively determined without measuring its subjective development or degree; whereas the second determines the measure of that growth or progression. It designates like ἅγιος (Eph_1:1) the Christian state of which the context treats, Php_3:12 (τελείωσις), Heb_7:11. See 1Co_14:20; Mat_5:48; Col_4:12; Jam_1:4; Jam_3:2; Heb_5:14. “As the ἅγιον εἶναι is the strongest obligation to ἁγιωσμός, so the τέλειον εἴναι presents the strongest incentive to strive after the τελειοῦσθαι” (Wiesinger). The nature or extent of the perfection (τέλειοι) appears in Php_3:9-10. The question is one not of absolute, but only of relative perfection. Οὖν points back to the entire passage (1–14), not merely to 12–14 (Meyer). By ὅσοι each individual is left to judge for himself whether he belongs to the τέλειοι or not. There is no reason for understanding the expression as ironical, and since he includes himself, as self-irony (Schenkel). Nor can the Apostle refer to intelligence only (Grotius, et al.), for the point under remark is the righteousness of faith. Hence, too, a comparison with immature believers or beginners in the Christian life, νήπιοι (1Co_2:6; 1Co_3:1; 1Co_14:20; Heb_5:13-14) as Meyer supposes, is irrelevant. Τοῦτο φρονῶμεν has reference to the moral disposition. Bengel: hoc unum (Php_3:14). Unlike the false teachers the church should be of the same mind as the Apostle. The reference is not to τὸ βραβεῖον (Van Hengel); the point in question is the true way of striving after the βραβεῖον.—And if in anything ye be otherwise minded, (καὶ εἴ τι ἑτέρως φρονεῖτε) supposes a case in which the members of the church differ among themselves in their views or spirit in regard to points which are incidental or formal, and not essential, (it is ἑτέρως, not ἕτερον, as if to distinguish between form and substance), but Still not rightly, as surely might be the case according to Php_1:9-11. The context does not indicate in any way how this has taken place.—Those of whom Paul speaks are not νήπιοι (aliter ac perfecti, Bengel) nor those who have been led astray (Grotius); nor yet are the errors entirely indifferent (Schenkel), for ἀποκαλύψει authorizes hope of correction or recovery; nor is it: si quid boni per aliam viam expetitis (Van Hengel).—God shall reveal also this unto you (καὶ τοῦτο ὁ θεὸς ὑμῖν ἀποκαλύψει is a confident hope, not a wish (Luther). Καί also points to other things that He has already revealed. The verb indicates an immediate disclosing to the human spirit by the Spirit of God, which next to the teaching (διδάσκειν) of the church men need in order to understand ethical truth. See Eph_1:17.

Php_3:16. Nevertheless, whereto we have already attained, let us walk in the same. [For the rendering of this verse, see remarks on the text.—H]. Πλήν (as in Php_1:14; and Php_4:14) limits the hope by a conditio sine qua non, which is εἰς ὃ ἐφθάσαμεν τῷ αὐτῷ στοιχεῖν. The infinitive as in German: ‘nur—wandeln!’ is to be construed as an imperative (Winer’s Gram. p. 316), but not connected with ἀποκαλύψει (Œcumenius), or with what follows (Rilliet). The verb, according to its derivation from στοῖχος, row, order, (from στέχω, to ascend), signifies ‘to walk with and after one another,’ and is construed with the dative (Gal_5:25, πνεύματι; Gal_6:16, τῷ κανόνι τούτῳ; Rom_4:12, τοῖς ἴχνεσιν). Hence the meaning of τῷ αὐτῷ στοιχεῖν is: ‘to walk together with each other according to or in the same.’ Τῷ αὐτῷ is more closely defined by εἰς ὃ ἐφθάσαμεν. This verb means to arrive at, to reach, hence has to do with an act completed at a definite time, which the tense marks as belonging to the past, while the act denoted by στοιχεῖν is continuous, reaching from the present into the future. The common rule by which they are to act is that which they have experienced or gained in the Christian life—the gospel, truth, Christ, God’s Spirit and life—and indeed in its entire range as the indefiniteness of the expression indicates. Thus there is no reference to the βραβεῖον, or any single thing, and the sense is: Should energy become even violence; mildness, softness; earnestness, stubbornness; reserve, exclusiveness; fidelity, narrowness; freedom, laxity; in any one point (all which is τὶ ἑτέρως φρονεῖν), only hold fast to the gospel, the Lord and His word, to the essential truth of the same, to that of which we have become partakers.

DOCTRINAL AND ETHICAL

1. Christianity plants and nourishes essentially and chiefly joy, true joy, joy in the Lord, in His word and work, His life and gifts, His excellence and glory.

2. Irony and humor in sacred things (Php_3:2 : κατατομή—περιτομή)hold almost the same place that the imprecatory Psalms hold among the prophetic; the former invoke on the enemies of God and His kingdom what the latter predict. Irony and humor are an expression of the difference which exists between reality and truth, a difference sharply recognized and as sharply uttered, without mercy for the delinquent, but with a tender regard for those who are to be instructed. They occur especially in the style and thoughts of genial men distinguished for faith, at the same time full of deep earnestness as well as tender love, like Paul and Luther (whose Drecket Drecketal, instead of Dekret Dekretal, Meyer compares here with Paul’s sarcastic paranomasia). They are to be distinguished from ridicule which only seeks to provoke laughter against one, and thus to achieve a petty triumph, and from derision and scorn which have their origin in contempt. It is not an allowed ridicule or scorn—allowed to an Apostle, even a duty, but in general to be condemned (Schenkel)—that is here employed. The greatness of the danger and of the interests at stake, the hot struggle at an endangered post, a true and lively sense of justice, the deepest sympathy with those for and around whom the contest is raging, and great spiritual keenness, sagacity, and depth of feeling, occasion the hard, telling, crushing expression (see Php_3:3).

3. Two things are as important as they are difficult: to determine the extent of one’s advantages and gifts, and the worth and relation of the same. Birth and lineage, family, tribe and nationality on the one hand, and the moral character determined by them on the other, Paul reckons together as excellencies and gifts of the same kind, and holds them all in slight esteem compared with what he has in Christ. The morality of men belongs to the province of the natural life; it depends on birth, family, position, culture, time and circumstances, and gives reason, as does every favor for humble thankfulness, but not for proud boasting (Php_3:3-5).

4. The righteousness of faith has its advantage over righteousness of the law in the author to whom it owes its origin, that is God Himself; in the medium through which it is wrought, faith which embraces and clings to the Mediator; and in the experiences which it works, and which reach into the eternal glory, that is, Christ’s life and sufferings, with whom the believer has sympathy (Php_3:10).—The worthlessness of the righteousness of the law does not consist in this, that law and advantages, such as birth, family, nation, morality, are in themselves valueless, but in the fact that man of himself, the natural man, without Christ, in his perverseness, does not rightly estimate them (Php_3:7-9, and Rom_7:7-24).

5. Progress consists in advancing from the possession of faith to that of knowledge, which is not merely an intellectual thing, but an experience of the whole man, a transforming of impressions into views or judgments, and then onward through suffering with Christ to glorification with Him who perfects His servants even as He completed His own course. The first points out the material or means of progress, the second its form or sphere, while the end is the permeating of the entire man by the dead and again risen Lord (Php_3:11-14).

6. The progress of the Christian to eternal glory has its origin in the fact, that he has been called from above by God in Christ, and has been laid hold of by Him; its continuance in the fact, that he holds firmly to Christ without contentedly looking back upon what has been already won, but with his face earnestly set towards the goal with the feeling that he has not yet reached it; and its end in the fact, that the exalted Lord receives him into His glory. It is thus an onward movement in one direction, without elation or depression, or a deviation to the right or left (Php_3:13-14). To him belongs the χαίρετε ἐν κυρίῳ who obeys the στήκετε ἐν κυρίῳ (Php_4:1).

7. He who has the truth-loving heart will never want the helping guidance and revelation of the Spirit of truth; and as certainly will he have his waverings and his need of this help (Php_3:15-16).

8. [It seems appointed that much of the highest instruction should come to us (even in the Bible) through the sufferings and struggles of individual men. Perseverance in the Christian life is, after all, the basis of St. Paul’s character. “I therefore so run, not as uncertainly; so fight I, not as one that beateth the air; but I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection; lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway.” “Not as though I had already attained, but I follow after. This one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” (Dr. Howson’s Lectures on the Character of St. Paul, p. 212 f.)—H].

HOMILETICAL AND PRACTICAL

Warn thy hearers constantly by holding up before them first of all what the Lord commands, and by leading them to observe what they have lost, and by whom they have been deprived of it.—Never glory in the gifts of the Lord, but only in the Lord of the gifts.—Do not leap over the valley of sorrows through which the way to the heights of glory passes.—Thou art never complete, never think thyself complete; what thou hast and art is ever less than what thou shouldest have and be.—Far-seeing, circumspect, self-inspecting, watch all waverings in thyself, that thou mayest not depart from the one way of salvation.

Luther:—Thoughtless, full, surfeited souls, if they have once heard a word of God’s, act as if it were an old thing, and yawn for something new, as if they were able to do all that they have heard. This is a dangerous plague and wicked artifice of the devil, who thereby renders men confident, secure, over-curious, and ready for every error and schism; and they are guilty of the vice of slothfulness (ἀκηδία) in the service of God (Php_3:1).—Flesh and blood say: Something new, else it becomes tiresome. Nay, says Christ, but think of me. The word of God rightly received into the heart, produces neither fulness nor satiety, but greater desire the longer it is known (Php_3:1).

Jerome Schurf:—Sic mutatam et corruptam esse ecclesiæ doctrinam, quia concionatores existimarint gloriosum esse, non repetere eadem, sed alia et nova afferre redeuntibus iisdem festis.

Starke:—God has no respect of persons; before Him the slave has as much worth as the master, the peasant as the noble, the subject as the prince. We see this, indeed, in death, which is God’s provost, who uses even justice, and punishes the master with the slave.—It is a humility which becomes those to whom God has lent many talents, and who have also increased them by usury, to act as if they knew it not, and so to give God all the glory.—To boast of one’s race, lineage, rank, and external advantages, is a vain ostentation; but we may well praise those on account of their family and descent, who also possess the faith and virtues of their ancestors.—False prophets may perhaps be blameless in their outward walk; but without circumcision of the heart, it is only a coat of whitewash over an old, unsightly wall.—Righteousness of the law is good, but it does not merit blessedness, which is bestowed as a gift only through faith in Christ.—Whoever fancies that he has advanced so far in Christianity that he needs nothing more, may perhaps in God’s school hardly sit upon the lowest form. Christians have ever to be learning, and cannot finish their education during their entire life (Php_3:15).—In religious matters we ought not to depart a hair’s breadth from the prophetic and apostolic doctrine; and thus many errors may be prevented.

Rieger:—As with the two scales of a balance, when one rises the other falls; and what I add to one, diminishes the relative weight of the other; so as one adds to himself he takes away from the pre-eminence which the knowledge of Christ should have. what he concedes to Christ makes him willing to abase himself, to resign all confidence in his own works. Therefore the sharp expressions, ‘to count as loss, as dung,’ become in experience not too severe; for to reject the grace of Christ, to regard the great plan of God in sending His Son, as fruitless, were indeed far more terrible (Php_3:8).

Gerlach:—The inner and outer life of the Christian upon earth, is a life of suffering in the sorrow which he feels for the sins of others, for his own, and for the distress of others, and for the oppression, conflicts, and even apparent defeats of the children of God. These sufferings are the sufferings of Christ Himself, not merely similar to His; He bears them with His members. His conflicts and their conflicts are the same; it is one cause for which, and one strength in which, they strive; it is one victory and one crown which He has won, and which He gives to them (Php_3:10).—‘What is behind’ signifies in this figure not merely the world and sin, which we have forsaken, but also our own virtue, the actual progress which we have made, on which we are prone to dwell with self-complacency, and so to become unmindful of our great deficiencies and sins (Php_3:14).—True Christian perfection, therefore, in this world, the token of a mature Christian, is that, certain of his election in Christ he yet does not regard himself perfect, but painfully perceives the wide space which still intervenes between the righteousness imputed to faith and the sanctification of his entire heart and life, and unceasingly strives to reach the goal.

Schleiermacher:—Are now the expression of the Apostle John, “Little children, love one another,” as he explains it, and the expression of the apostle Paul, “Rejoice in the Lord,” one and the same? And are both such that one can say of them with confidence, that they never weary the speaker, and that they always strengthen the hearer?

Menken:—The ever recurring exhortation of the apostle to rejoice in the Lord, was adapted to assure them that Christianity is something bright, cheerful, and joyful, to make them certain, confident in their knowledge and walk in opposition to those who imagine that one must mix a bitterness, narrowness, and legal servitude with the mildness, breadth and freedom of the new covenant and its gospel.—There is no one among us, however limited his powers may be, whose weakness and incapacity may not be changed into wisdom and knowledge; his timidity into firmness and fearlessness; his hardness and unloveliness into gentleness and amiability, through our Lord Jesus Christ, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption. Hence the Christian religion is vastly different from human morality.—The choice of the best part is never repented of.—As in the life of the body the question is not, whether the man will breathe or not, whether he will make use of the light that is in the world to see or not; but as it is understood, that according to the laws of nature he must breathe, if he will live, and must open his eye to the light, if he will see; and as there is no way of supporting life outside of the atmosphere, and no medium for perceiving the world of matter, except the light; so is there no other way of becoming partakers of the divine light and life except Christ, and no room for the question whether man can do without Christ or not.—All men are under sin and death, and no one comes to the divine light and life, to his own source and end—to God, except through Christ.—The forgiveness of sins is not indeed deliverance from sin, but it is the sure pledge and earnest of future complete deliverance, and is necessary, and must form the beginning.

Heubner:—The preacher should not be ever thinking of something new, but of what is useful, edifying. The Sophists made it a charge against Socrates that he repeated the same things.—Lavater’s principle of saying at least something in every sermon, which he was certain he had never said before, i.e., something that he had never before spoken either so plainly, or so urgently, or with such a particular application (though the kernel of the sermon must always be the same) is not at variance with that of the Reformers; for they also do not exclude variety in the contents, or diversity in the form of the sermon.—Spiritual sloth may creep over even the converted, so that the Bible becomes dull to them. Bunyan himself complained of this.—What a vast difference between blamelessness before God, and legal blamelessness before men! How can one deceive himself therein!—How many an ecclesiastic buries himself in his studies, while he might be sowing seed for eternity by oral instruction, visits, and the teaching of children. The more earnest in conversion and sanctification, the humbler is our state of mind, and clearer our knowledge of our imperfections, because we then first see and understand how lofty and distant is this goal of perfection, and how great is the work of sanctification. The Christian does not please himself with the conceit that he has already laid hold of, or attained it; this folly is far from him.—The influence of grace is mighty, but not irresistible.—The most advanced Christian thinks least of himself.—The Christian is not yet in quiet possession; he should not rest on his laurels.—The Christian knows that he is ever in arrears, and so long as there are debts still remaining, so long must he also work.—I look not back like Lot’s wife towards the Sodom I have left, nor long like the Israelites after the flesh pots of Egypt. Both kinds of looking back are idle and ruinous, for they make us slothful, they lead to unfaithfulness.—Perfect Christians, in the proper sense of that language, are those who know the goal and the way thither, i.e., Christ, and have begun with earnestness to press towards it.—The hope of spiritual growth is conditioned on fidelity, conscientiousness, and adherence to known truth.

Passavant:—Every one who will not deceive God or himself knows in his own heart out of what darkness the light broke forth with him, and out of what darkness old and new, it has long continued to break forth.—Paul forgets what is behind, viz., three things: 1) those objects of pride which he formerly regarded as gain and glory; 2) the sins of his past life in general, and especially the many and great sins which he had committed as a persecutor and blasphemer of the Church; and 3) his progress hitherto in the new divine way of life.

Ahlfeld:—The genuine warrior of Christ may not stand still: 1) he knows that he has not yet obtained the prize; 2) in the pursuit of it he never becomes weary; 3) he journeys towards the city of God, having the same mind as his brother.

Harless:—Three great foes of Christian and social virtue; 1) the conceit of being perfect; 2) the weakness of looking back; 3) obstinacy and destructiveness of self-will.

Lehmann:—True progress in the Christian life. 1) From what origin must it proceed? Laid hold of by Christ! 2) By what rule must it shape itself? I have not yet obtained! 3) What end must it seek? The prize of the heavenly calling (Php_3:12-14).

[Robert Hall:—As every person either has, or expects to have some spring of joy or source of consolation, there is nothing which so much determines our character as that from which we expect this to rise. So if we wish to know ourselves we must examine where this spring or source lies.—We see from the Apostle’s account of his experience, that it is very possible for a person to have great zeal for modes, and forms, and ceremonies, and yet be totally ignorant of the spirit of true religion. Real religion is one thing; an attachment to forms and ceremonies another. We may be very zealous for one particular creed, opinion, sect or denomination, and with the credit and conceit of our wisdom yet be very defective in the Christian spirit. This temper leads to malignity of feeling. There may be sufficient in such religion for us to hate one another, but not enough to cause us to love each other. Let us “worship God in spirit, rejoice in Christ Jesus,” and be taught to value the great truths and promises of the Gospel as all in all (Php_3:1-2; Php_3:6).—H].

Footnotes:

[1]Php_3:3. Θεοῦ is found in א A B C, and most of the authorities, whereas θεῷ has but slight support, and is evidently a correction. [The evidence, says Tischendorf, is clearly on the side of the former.—H].

[2]Php_3:5. [The approved text is περιτομῇ and not the nominative περιτομή. See the notes below.—H].

[3]Php_3:6. ζῆλος has the support of א A B D* F G, et al. A few manuscripts have ζῆλον. Is it a copyist’s error (comp. 2Co_9:2. Meyer)? The passage here would seem rather to require τὸ ζῆλος in 2Co_9:2, [instead of ὁ ζῆλος, masculine. See Winer’s Gram. p. 65].

[4]Php_3:10. Συμμορφιζομενος is found in א A B, et al. On the other hand, συμμορφούμενος (E K L, et al.) and συνφορτειζόμενος (F G, et al.), cooneratus, have but slight support.

[5]Php_3:11. Τὴν ἐκ νεκρῶν, is well attested by א A B D E et al., better than τῶν νεκρῶν, and need not appear strange after ἐξανάστασις, though Paul has elsewhere ἀνάστασις τῶν νεκρῶν. [See the exegetical notes infra.—H.]

[6][Apprehend meant formerly “to take in the hand,” or “by the hand” (a Latin sense of the word). Thus Jeremy Taylor (Holy Living, ii. 6) says: “There is nothing but hath a double handle, or at least we have two hands to apprehend it.”—H].

[7]Php_3:16. Στοιχεῖν, for which συνστοιχεῖν also occurs, has after it κανόνι, τὸ αὐτὸ φρονεῖν, in א C, but in some other copies has the worlds before it, while in others again the words appear only in part. No doubt Php_2:2, and Gal_6:16, have led the copyists to change the text for the sake of uniformity.

Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures (Critical, Doctrinal, and Homiletical), ed. John Peter Lange, English translation edited by Philip Schaff (1864–1880) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Philippians

PREPARING TO END

Php 3:1-3 {R.V.}.

The first words of the text show that Paul was beginning to think of winding up his letter, and the preceding context also suggests that. The personal references to Timothy and Epaphroditus would be in their appropriate place near the close, and the exhortation with which our text begins is also most fitting there, for it is really the key-note of the letter. How then does he come to desert his purpose? The answer is to be found in his next advice, the warning against the Judaising teachers who were his great antagonists all his life. A reference to them always roused him, and here the vehement exhortation to mark them well and avoid them opens the flood-gates. Forgetting all about his purpose to come to an end, he pours out his soul in the long and precious passage which follows. Not till the next chapter does he get back to his theme in the reiterated exhortation {iv. 4}, ‘Rejoice in the Lord alway; again I will say, rejoice.’ This outburst is very remarkable, for its vehemence is so unlike the tone of the rest of the letter. That is calm, joyous, bright, but this is stormy and impassioned, full of flashing and scathing words, the sudden thunder-storm breaks in on a mellow, autumn day, but it hurtles past and the sun shines out again, and the air is clearer.

Another question suggested is the reference of the second half of verse 1. What are ‘the same things’ to write which is ‘safe’ for the Philippians? Are they the injunctions preceding to ‘rejoice in the Lord,’ or that following, the warning against the Judaisers? The former explanation may be recommended by the fact that ‘Rejoice’ is in a sense the key-note of the Epistle, but on the other hand, the things where repetition would be ‘safe’ would most probably be warnings against some evil that threatened the Philippians’ Christian standing.

There is no attempt at unity in the words before us, and I shall not try to force them into apparent oneness, but follow the Apostle’s thoughts as they lie. We note--

I. The crowning injunction as to the duty of Christian gladness.

A very slight glance over the Epistle will show how continually the note of gladness is struck in it. Whatever in Paul’s circumstances was ‘at enmity with joy’ could not darken his sunny outlook. This bird could sing in a darkened cage. If we brought together the expressions of his joy in this letter, they would yield us some precious lessons as to what were the sources of his, and what may be the sources of ours. There runs through all the instances in the Epistle the implication which comes out most emphatically in his earnest exhortation, ‘Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice.’ The true source of true joy lies in our union with Jesus. To be in Him is the condition of every good, and, just as in the former verses ‘trust in the Lord ‘ is set forth, so the joy which comes from trust is traced to the same source. The joy that is worthy, real, permanent, and the ally of lofty endeavour and noble thoughts has its root in union with Jesus, is realised in communion with Him, has Him for its reason or motive, and Him for its safeguard or measure. As the passages in question in this Epistle show, such joy does not shut out but hallows other sources of satisfaction. In our weakness creatural love and kindness but too often draw us away from our joy in Him. But with Paul the sources which we too often find antagonistic were harmoniously blended, and flowed side by side in the same channel, so that he could express them both in the one utterance, ‘I rejoiced in the Lord greatly that now at the last your care of me hath flourished again.’

We do not sufficiently realise the Christian duty of Christian joy, some of us even take mortified countenances and voices in a minor key as marks of grace, and there is but little in any of us of ‘the joy in the Lord’ which a saint of the Old Testament had learned was our ‘strength.’ There is plenty of gladness amongst professing Christians, but a good many of them would resent the question, is your gladness ‘in the Lord’? No doubt any deep experience in the Christian life makes us aware of much in ourselves that saddens, and may depress, and our joy in Him must always be shaded by penitent sorrow for ourselves. But that necessary element of sadness in the Christian life is not the cause why so many Christian lives have little of the buoyancy and hope and spontaneity which should mark them. The reason rather lies in the lack of true union with Christ, and habitual keeping of ourselves ‘in the love of God.’

II. Paul’s apology for reiteration.

He is going to give once more old and well-worn precepts which are often very tedious to the hearer, and not much less so to the speaker. He can only say that to him the repetition of familiar injunctions is not ‘irksome,’ and that to them it is ‘safe.’ The diseased craving for ‘originality’ in the present day tempts us all, hearers and speakers alike, and we ever need to be reminded that the staple of Christian teaching must be old truths reiterated, and that it is not time to stop proclaiming them until all men have begun to practise them. But a speaker must try to make the thousandth repetition of a truth fresh to himself, and not a wearisome form, or a dead commonplace, by freshening it to his own mind and by living on it in his own practice, and the hearers must remember that it is only the completeness of their obedience that antiquates the commandment. The most threadbare commonplace becomes a novelty when occasions for its application arise in our own lives, just as a prescription may lie long unnoticed in a drawer, but when a fever attacks its possessor it will be quickly drawn out and worth its weight in gold.

III. Paul’s warning against teachers of a ceremonial religion.

It scarcely seems congruous with the tone of the rest of this letter that the preachers whom Paul so scathingly points out here had obtained any firm footing in the Philippian Church, but no doubt there, as everywhere, they had dogged Paul’s footsteps, and had tried as they always did to mar his work. They had not missionary fervour or Christian energy enough to initiate efforts amongst the Gentiles so as to make them proselytes, but when Paul and his companions had made them Christians, they did their best, or their worst, to insist that they could not be truly Christians, unless they submitted to the outward sign of being Jews. Paul points a scathing finger at them when he bids the Philippians ‘beware,’ and he permits himself a bitter retort when he lays hold of the Jewish contemptuous word for Gentiles which stigmatised them as ‘dogs,’ that is profane and unclean, and hurls it back at the givers. But he is not indulging in mere bitter retorts when he brings against these teachers the definite charge that they are ‘evil workers.’ People who believed that an outward observance was the condition of salvation would naturally be less careful to insist upon holy living. A religion of ceremonies is not a religion of morality. Then the Apostle lets himself go in a contemptuous play of words, and refuses to recognise that these sticklers for circumcision had themselves been circumcised. ‘I will not call them the circumcision, they have not been circumcised, they have only been gashed and mutilated, it has been a mere fleshly maiming.’ His reason for denying the name to them is his profound belief that it belonged to true Christians. His contemptuous reference puts in a word, the principle which he definitely states in another place, ‘He is not a Jew who is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision which is outward in the flesh.’

The Apostle here is not only telling us who are the truly circumcised, but at the same time he is telling us what makes a Christian, and he states three points in which, as I take it, he begins at the end and works backwards to the beginning. ‘We are the circumcision who worship in the Spirit of God’--that is the final result--’and glory in Christ Jesus’--’and have no confidence in the flesh’--that is the starting-point. The beginning of all true Christianity is distrust of self. What does Paul mean by ‘flesh’? Body? Certainly not. Animal nature, or the passions rooted in it? Not only these, as may be seen by noting the catalogue which follows of the things in the flesh, in which he might have trusted. What are these? ‘Circumcised the eighth day, of the tribe of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews’--these belong to ritual and race; ‘as touching the law a Pharisee’--that belongs to ecclesiastical standing; ‘concerning zeal persecuting the church’--that has nothing to do with the animal nature: ‘touching the righteousness which is in the law blameless’--that concerns the moral nature. All these come under the category of the ‘flesh,’ which, therefore, plainly includes all that belongs to humanity apart from God. Paul’s old-fashioned language translated into modern English just comes to this--it is vain to trust in external connection with the sacred community of the Church, or in participation in any of its ordinances and rites. To Paul, Christian rites and Jewish rites were equally rites and equally insufficient as bases of confidence. Do not let us fancy that dependence on these is peculiar to certain forms of Christian belief. It is a very subtle all-pervasive tendency, and there is no need to lift up Nonconformist hands in holy horror at the corruptions of Romanism and the like. Their origin is not solely priestly ambition, but also the desires of the so-called laity. Demand creates a supply, and if there were not people to think, ‘Now it shall be well with me because I have a Levite for my priest,’ there would be no Levites to meet their wishes.

Notice that Paul includes amongst the things belonging to the flesh this ‘touching the righteousness which is in the law blameless.’ Many of us can say the same. We do our duties so far as we know them, and are respectable law-abiding people, but if we are trusting to that, we are of the ‘flesh.’ Have we estimated what God is, and what the real worth of our conduct is? Have we looked not at our actions but at our motives, and seen them as they are seen from above or from the inside? How many ‘blameless’ lives are like the scenes in a theatre, effective and picturesque, when seen with the artificial glory of the footlights? But go behind the scenes and what do we find? Dirty canvas and cobwebs. If we know ourselves we know that a life may have a fair outside, and yet not be a thing to trust to.

The beginning of our Christianity is the consciousness that we are ‘naked and poor, and blind, and in need of all things.’ Men come to Jesus Christ by many ways, thank God, and I care little by what road they come so long as they get there, nor do I insist upon any stereotyped order of religious experience. But of this I am very sure: that unless we abandon confidence in ourselves, because we have seen ourselves in the light of God’s law, we have not learned all that we need nor laid hold of all that Christ gives. Let us measure ourselves in the light of God, and we shall learn that we have to take our places beside Job, when the vision of God silenced his protestations of innocence. ‘I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth Thee; wherefore I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes.’

That self-distrust should pass into glorying in Christ Jesus. If a man has learned his emptiness he will look about for something to fill it. Unless I know myself to be under condemnation because of my sin, and fevered, disturbed, and made wretched, by its inward consequences which forbid repose, the sweetest words of Gospel invitation will pass by me like wind whistling through an archway. But if once I have been driven from self-confidence, then like music from heaven will come the word, ‘Trust in Jesus.’ The seed dropped into the ground puts out a downward-going shoot, which is the root, and an upward-growing one, which is the stalk. The downward-going shoot is ‘no confidence in the flesh,’ the upward-going is ‘glorying in Christ Jesus.’

But that word suggests the blessed experience of triumph in the possession of the Person known and felt to be all, and to give all that life needs. A true Christian should ever be triumphant in a felt experience, in a Name proved to be sufficient, in a power which infuses strength into his weakness, and enables him to do the will of God. It is for want of utter self-distrust and absolute faith in Christ that ‘glorying’ in Him is so far beyond the ordinary mood of the average Christian. You say, ‘I hope, sometimes I doubt, sometimes I fear, sometimes I tremblingly trust.’ Is that the kind of experience that these words shadow? Why do we continue amidst the mist when we might rise into the clear blue above the obscuring pall? Only because we are still in some measure clinging to self, and still in some measure distrusting our Lord. If our faith were firm and full our ‘glorying’ would be constant. Do not be contented with the prevailing sombre type of Christian life which is always endeavouring, and always foiled, which is often doubting and often indifferent, but seek to live in the sunshine, and expatiate in the light, and ‘rejoice in the Lord always.’

‘Glorying’ not only describes an attitude of mind, but an activity of life. Many things to-day tempt Christian people to speak of their religion and of their Lord in an apologetic tone, in the face of strong and educated unbelief; but if we have within us, as we all may have, and ought to have, the triumphant assurance of His sufficiency, nearness, and power, it will not be with bated breath that we shall speak of our Master, or apologise for our Christianity, but we shall obey the commandment, ‘Lift up thy voice with strength; lift it up, be not afraid.’ Ring out the name and be proud that you can ring it out, as the Name of your Lord, and your Saviour, and your all-sufficient Friend. Whatever other people say, you have the experience, if you are a Christian, which more than answers all that they can say.

We have said that the final result set forth here by Paul is, ‘We worship by the Spirit of God.’ The expression translated worship is the technical word for rendering priestly service. Just as Paul has asserted that uncircumcised Christians, not circumcised Jews, are the true circumcision, so he asserts that they are the true priests, and that these officials in the outward temple at Jerusalem have forfeited the title, and that it has passed over to the despised followers of the despised Nazarene. If we have ‘no confidence in the flesh,’ and are ‘glorying in Christ Jesus,’ we are all priests of the most high God. ‘Worship in the Spirit’ is our function and privilege. The externals of ceremonial worship dwindle into insignificance. They may be means of helping, or they may be means of hindering, the ‘worship in the Spirit,’ which I venture to think all experience shows is the more likely to be pure and real, the less it invokes the aid of flesh and sense. To make the senses the ladder for the soul by which to climb to God is quite as likely to end in the soul’s going down the ladder as up it. Aesthetic aids to worship are crutches which keep a lame soul lame all its days.

Such worship is the obligation as well as the prerogative of the Christian. We have no right to say that we have truly forsaken confidence in ourselves, and are truly ‘glorying’ in Christ Jesus, unless our daily life is communion with God, and all your work ‘worshipping by the Spirit of God.’ Such communion and worship are possible for those, and for those only, who have ‘no confidence in the flesh’ and who ‘glory in Christ Jesus.’

Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture (1904–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

III. CHRIST, THE OBJECT AND THE GOAL

CHAPTER 3

1. The true circumcision (Php 3:1-3)

2. Paul’s past experience (Php 3:4-7)

3. The one passion (Php 3:8-11)

4. Pressing towards the mark (Php 3:12-16)

5. The goal of glory (Php 3:17-21)

Php 3:1-3

Finally (or, for the rest), my brethren, rejoice in the “Lord.” Rejoicing in the Lord, not merely in the salvation which is ours, nor in His mercies, in His gifts or in our service, but in Him, is what gives strength and victory down here. He rejoiced in Him because He knew the Lord was controlling all and that he was in His hands; he followed the same path in humiliation, which he knew would lead him to the glory where He is. And the prisoner of the Lord enjoying the blessedness of fellowship with Christ, following Christ, looking to Him and not to earthly circumstances, exhorts the beloved Philippians to find their joy in nothing less than the Person Christ. It was not a grievous thing for him to write them the same things, but it was safe for them. They needed the exhortation in the midst of spiritual dangers, for nothing else keeps from evil as heart occupation with the Lord Jesus Christ. He warns “beware of dogs, beware of evil workers, beware of the concision.” By these terms the same false teachers are meant which disturbed the Galatian churches, which did such evil work also among the Corinthians. He speaks of these perverters of the gospel in severe terms, but not too severe. They boasted of religiousness, of righteousness by the observance of ordinances and the keeping of the law; they trusted in the flesh and set aside Christ. They, with their religion of the flesh, are branded by the apostle as dogs, unclean and outside, therefore unworthy of fellowship. They called the Gentiles dogs, but now the Spirit of God shows that they are not better than the Gentiles. (See Gal 4:8-10.) They were evil workmen who led souls away, as the havoc they had wrought shows. They gloried in ceremonies, the circumcision of the flesh; in reality they were the concision, the mutilators of the flesh, who knew nothing of the true separation through the cross of Christ and union with a risen Christ in whom the believer is complete.

Dogs, evil workers and the concision, are terms which fit the many cults today, including “Christian Science,” the “new thought,” the “new religion and modern theology,” all of which deny the gospel of Jesus Christ. True believers are the circumcision, not a circumcision made by hands, but a spiritual circumcision, the putting off of the body of the flesh by the death of Christ (Col 2:11). The cross of Christ separates the believer from the flesh, the religious forms, and self-improvement, and separates him unto God. And knowing that Christ is all, glorying in Him with no more confidence in the flesh, the believer worships by the Spirit of God, and no longer in ordinances. The indwelling Spirit fills the heart with Christ, glorifies Him, and true worship by the Spirit is the result. To have no more confidence in the flesh, to expect nothing whatever from ourselves, to glory only in Christ Jesus is true Christian attainment and experience.

Php 3:4-7

And this blessed servant of the Lord Jesus speaks of his experience as a Hebrew. He might have had abundant reason to place confidence in the flesh. We had something as a natural, religious man to glory in. What fleshly advantages were his! He was circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, an Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law a Pharisee; concerning zeal persecuting the Church; touching the righteousness which is in the law blameless. He had indeed, as he testified before, “profited in the Jews’ religion above many my equals in mine own nation, being more exceedingly zealous of the traditions of my father” (Gal 1:14). He was a very religious man, for he belonged to the most religious sect of his day, with a blind zeal which led him to persecute the church, yet touching the righteousness in the law, he knew himself blameless.

And all this religiousness and zeal for God, his law keeping and blamelessness he looked upon as being of value and gain for him, though they did not give him peace or fellowship with God. A change came. The things which were religious gain to him he now counted loss for Christ. On the road to Damascus he had seen the glorified Christ and that vision had laid him in the dust so that he saw himself as the chief of sinners.

Php 3:8-11

From that moment when it pleased God to reveal His Son to him the self-righteous Pharisee could say, “I count all things* loss on account of the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I suffered the loss of all things, and do count them refuse that I may win Christ and be found in Him.” What had been gain to him he cast aside. He had seen Christ and that was enough, he would have nothing else after that. Christ had become his all. The excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, whom the erstwhile persecutor now blessedly calls “my Lord,” made it a joy to suffer the loss of all things, yea, to count them refuse. How he suffered the loss of all things, things needful in life, suffering, hunger, stripes; giving up all earthly distinction and advantage, we know from his own testimony (2Co 11:22-31). He suffered the loss of all things and counted them refuse. “This is the marvelous estimate of one who had all the advantages in the world; and then had known all sufferings from it in behalf of Christ, looking upon the former as worse than nothing, as a detriment, and the latter to be nothing, because the knowledge he had already gained of Christ outweighed them all.” All earthly things, all human attainments, everything which exalts man were counted as loathsome things in comparison with Him whom He had beheld in the glory light.

*”He does not say: When I was converted I counted all things loss. When a person is truly converted, Christ becomes and is everything; the world then appears as nothing. It has passed from the mind and the unseen things fill the heart. Afterwards as the convert goes on with his duties and with his friends, though Christ is still precious, he does generally not continue to count all things loss. But Paul could say, ‘I count all things loss’ not ‘I did.’ It is a great thing to be able to say that.”

But what does he mean when he expresses the desire “that I may win (or gain) Christ and be found in Him”? Did he not possess Christ already? Was he not in Him and Christ in him? He possessed Christ. He was in Him. Nor does the apostle mean that he reaches out, as some teach, after a “deeper life” experience or some such thing. He had perfect assurance of his standing before God in Christ; no doubt whatever as to that could be in the apostle’s heart. Nor did he need some kind of an experience, as some claim, a holiness-perfection experience, to give him greater assurance. His wish to win Christ, to gain Christ, is his longing desire for the actual possession of Christ in glory. Christ in glory is the great object and goal for the believer down here. This object and goal must ever be before the heart in the Christian’s race. Like the racer who has no eyes for his surroundings, but whose eye is steadily fixed upon the goal, so the believer is to look to the glorified Christ and press forward toward the mark. This is the truth unfolded in this chapter.

Paul knew that Christ belonged to him, that his destiny was to be forever with Him, and then his passion was to be worthy of all this. And when Christ is gained in glory and the goal is reached then he would be “found in Him, not having mine own righteousness which is of the law (the righteousness which is nothing but filthy rags), but that which is through faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith.” How he emphasizes this righteousness in which he delighted! And this great servant of the Lord, who knew Him so well, wants to know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His suffering “being made conformable unto His death, if by any means I might arrive at the resurrection from among the dead.” The power of His resurrection he desires to know is more than a spiritual power, for he knew that power in practical experience. Of this he had written to the Ephesians (1:15-2:10). It is again the goal of the Christian’s life towards which he reaches out. He wants to arrive at the resurrection from among the dead by any means and to get there though it means fellowship with His suffering being made conformable to His death. And this was before him in the Roman prison. He wanted to be with Christ, and to arrive there he desired to be like Christ in participating in His suffering even to be made conformable to His death.

It is important to note here the difference between “resurrection of the dead” and “the resurrection from among the dead.” The latter is the correct translation of Php 3:11. There is a resurrection of the dead, of all the dead. But there is a resurrection from among the dead, which elsewhere in the Word is called the first resurrection. The Lord Jesus was raised from the dead. When the Lord spoke to His disciples of His resurrection from among the dead they were astonished and spoke among themselves “what the rising of the dead should mean.” They did not know what it meant. When the Lord was raised He became the first fruits of them that slept, that is, the righteous dead. And God raised Him from the dead, because His delight was in Him, for He had glorified Him and finished the Work the Father gave Him to do.

The first resurrection, the resurrection from the dead, is the expression of God’s delight and satisfaction in those raised; it is His seal on Christ’s work. Because He finished that great work which glorified God, all who are in Christ will be raised from among the dead, while those who live when the Lord comes, will not die, but be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye (1Co 15:51-52). But it is not on account of the believer’s attainment, but because of Christ that the power of God will take His own out. The rest of the dead will be left until the second resurrection.

The Apostle knew that through grace he belonged to this out-resurrection from among the dead. He had an absolute certainty of it. But in divine energy he presses on towards it. All in him wants to get there where the grace of God in Christ had put him. He reaches out for this blessed goal and when he speaks of attaining “by any means” he gives us to understand that nothing shall hinder him in the race. May the cost be what it will, I want it; I want it because I have it in Christ and through Christ and I want to be worthy of it. And therefore he despised the loss of all things and was ready to suffer and die the martyr’s death.

Php 3:12-16

The words which follow show that this is the true meaning of the desire he expressed. “Not as though I had already attained (obtained), or am already made perfect, but I press on if so be that I may apprehend that for which also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus. Brethren, I do not count myself yet to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting the things which are behind, and stretching forward to the things which are before, I press towards the goal for the prize of the calling on high of God in Christ Jesus.” The goal had not yet been reached, he was still on the way and had not yet obtained nor was he made perfect. He constantly presses on towards the goal, Christ in glory. He knew that he had been apprehended, taken possession of, by Christ Jesus and for Christ and therefore he also wants to take possession, to apprehend it. He forgets what is behind and even stretches forward to the things which are before, the blessed goal. This was his constant attitude, ever occupied with the Lord Jesus Christ to be like Him and with Him in glory.

“The whole of Paul’s life was founded on that and completely formed by that. The Son of God was forming his soul day by day, and he was always running towards Him and never doing anything else. it was not merely as an apostle that he entered into the fellowship of His sufferings, and conformity to His death, but every Christian should do the same. A person may say he has forgiveness of sins. But I say, What is governing your heart now? Is your eye resting on Christ in glory? Is the excellency of knowledge of Christ Jesus so before your soul as to govern everything else, and make you count everything loss? Is that where you are? Has this excellent knowledge put out all other things? Not only an outwardly blameless walk, but has the thought of Christ in glory put out all other things? If it were so, we would not be governed by everyday nothings” (J.N. Darby). Some teach that these words of Paul, speaking of attaining and not yet perfect, mean that he was still in doubt as to having a share in the first resurrection. We quote the words of a leading advocate of this interpretation:

But what was the goal towards which Paul was thus directing his efforts? ‘if by any means,’ he continues, ‘I may attain to the select (?) resurrection out from among the dead.’ In other words, his aim was to be numbered with those blessed and holy ones who shall have part in the first resurrection. But we must notice that he had, at the time, _no _certain _assurance (italics ours) that he would compass the desire of his heart.... Just before his death, however, it was graciously revealed unto him that he was one of the approved.--Pember, The Church, the Churches and the Mysteries.

Think of it! The prisoner of the Lord who suffered joyfully the loss of all things, who counted all but dung, who walked in such separation and devotion, still uncertain about his share in the first resurrection! This interpretation is not only wrong, but it denies the grace of God in the Lord Jesus Christ, by making the first resurrection a question of attainment when it is purely the matter of divine grace. This teaching aims at the very vitals of the gospel of grace and glory.

An exhortation follows. He exhorts all who are perfect to be thus minded. What does the word perfect mean and who are the perfect? Above, when he said he was not yet made perfect, it applies to Christ-likeness in glory by being conformed to His image. True Christian perfection will be reached when the Lord comes and we shall see Him as He is and be like Him. Now those are the perfect down here who have no confidence in the flesh, who glory in Christ and who know He is all in all, that by one offering He has perfected forever them that are sanctified, that they are accepted in the Beloved and complete in Him in whom the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily. And they are all to be “thus minded” like he was, ever occupied with Christ in glory, doing this one thing--pressing on towards the goal for the prize of the calling on high of God in Christ Jesus.

Php 3:17-21

“Brethren, be followers (imitators) together of me, and mark them which walk so as ye have us for an ensample.” What a blessed thing that Paul could write this! Grace had enabled him to follow Christ fully. But even then there were those over whom Paul wept because their walk showed that they were the enemies of the cross. “For many walk, of whom I have told you often, and now tell you even weeping, that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ, whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.” Were these real believers? The statement “whose end is destruction” answers this question. They could not be true children of God, but were such who had professed Christianity, having the form of godliness, but denying the power thereof (2Ti 3:5). They turned the grace of God into lasciviousness. “Their god was really their belly; that is to say, the fleshly craving in them had never been set aside by any satisfaction that they had found for themselves in Christ. The craving of the old nature led and governed them.” Instead of minding heavenly things, seeking the things which are above where Christ sitteth, they minded earthly things, showing thereby that they had never really known Christ. If there were “many” then among God’s people who were enemies of the cross, who had with all their profession no desire for the heavenly calling, how much larger is their number now at the end of the age. They are religious, yet they cling to the world, love the world and thus deny the cross of Christ, which makes them the enemies of the cross.

“There is nothing like the cross. It is both the righteousness of God against sin, and the righteousness of God in pardoning sin. It is the end of the world of judgment, and the beginning of the world of life. It is the work that put away sin, and yet it is the greatest sin that ever was committed. The more we think of it, the more we see it is the turning point of everything. So, if a person follows the world, he is an enemy of the cross of Christ. If I take the glory of the world that crucified Christ, I am glorying in my shame” (J.N. Darby).

“They walked according to the flesh, minding earthly things instead of the heavenly, the heavens being the proper and only sphere of spiritual life, demonstrated that they knew nothing of the matter as to the heart, and for the truth of resurrection and life in a risen Christ, were walking according to their own religious feelings, making this their god. And surely there is enough of this everywhere, a bringing down revelation of the truth to the standard of human feelings and experiences, making these the umpire instead of God. It is a religious appetite ruling and hungry, and satisfied with its own sensations when filled. Israel was charged to take heed lest when they had eaten and were full, they should forget Jehovah (Deu 8:14) and the prayer of Agur in Pro 30:9 is, ‘lest I be full and deny Thee.’ The grand object, Christ Himself, is ignored, and religious excitement, like any other intoxication, displaces Him and occupies the soul to its damage and peril. It is the belly, not Christ. It is religious emotion, it is not Christ. It is perfection in and of the flesh; it is having no confidence in the flesh. The flesh may find its satisfaction and growth as much in religion as in the lower passions and the more secular world. The cross came in to put all this to death. Hence these are enemies to the cross of Christ, even though much mention may be made of the cross, and even continual prostrations before it practiced” (M. Taylor).

In the last two verses the blessed goal itself is fully revealed. “For our conversation is in heaven (or commonwealth-citizenship) [‘conversation’, or ‘commonwealth-citizenship’ -- The Greek word is “politeuma,” from which we have our English “politics.” Hence one might say “Our politics are in heaven.”] from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall transform our body of humiliation into conformity to His body of glory, according to the working whereby He is able even to subdue all things unto Himself” This is the blessed hope and the blessed goal. All we have as Christians, our relationships, rights and possessions are in heaven. Some blessed day He, for whom we wait, will come and take us to the place where He is transforming our body of humiliation into conformity to His body of glory. Then we shall have attained that for which down here we hope and pray (1Th 4:1-18).

Arno C. Gaebelein, The Annotated Bible (1913–1922) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Division 3. (Php 3:1-21.)

Christ in glory the Goal and Prize.

The apostle has already led us up to the blessed Object before him. What he has been just enlarging upon is the example of the Lord’s humiliation, but he is now going to enlarge upon the glory which is his strength for such a path as this; the light which now shines for us upon the path, and shines more and more unto the perfect day. It is beautiful to realize that the very thing that is wanting to him now, as we look at him here, is the very thing which makes him a pilgrim and a racer, -an Object outside himself, something which he has not yet attained, but to which, because of its glory for him, he gives his whole energy to pressing on for its attainment. This is what characterizes all that we have here. His look is forward only. A racer does not look at the road on each side. He looks at what is before him; and so it is that in everything here, the principle is "forgetting that which is behind, and pressing on to that which is before." This is true of all attainment and experiences by the way, as it is of other things. It is not merely the world which is left behind, -that surely; but he himself, whatever up to the present he might be, is still left behind. It is Christ before him that gives oneness of purpose and character to his present life.

1. The thing, therefore, that he would press upon them now, as if it was all he wanted to say, was, "Rejoice in the Lord." He might seem to be insisting upon this in almost a needless manner, but it was not needless; nor for those who realized what Christ was to them, irksome either. There was opposition also. There were "dogs," evil workmen, men of the concision, just, surely, the judaizing spirit that we have seen active in the other epistles. He gives them the same title that they would apply to Gentiles. They were dogs, unclean, ferocious creatures. They were workmen it is true, but evil workmen, and busy for no good end. They were the "concision," the mutilators of the flesh, as we may say, but which left it still with real strength for hindrance. After all, it was flesh they trusted in. The law, as we have seen many times, has to do with the man in the flesh and no other. Ascetic severity may be practised even to any extent, as the apostle has told us in Colossians, while the flesh gets real satisfaction by this. He will not call them the circumcision, the title they would have given themselves; for, now that Christianity has come, true circumcision is no more in the flesh, but is spiritual. There had indeed always to be what was spiritual in connection with it, to make it true for God; but now the characteristics of the circumcision are spiritual altogether. We are that, he says, who worship in the Spirit of God, who glory in Christ Jesus, and who have no confidence in the flesh. Manifest it is that this "no confidence in the flesh" applies as much to the flesh in the Christian as to any other. Confidence in self, of any kind, is confidence in the flesh. The opposite to it here, the Object of all glorying, is Christ Himself. The knowledge of the new man is, as we have seen, Christ is all; and this it is that makes worshipers in the power of the Spirit of God, for Christ alone is He whom the Spirit glorifies, and with whom He occupies the heart. Beautiful it is to see how here the lesson of Romans, as already said, has been learned. There is no mention all the way through the epistle by the apostle, on his own part, of conflict with the flesh. His heart is there where the flesh can have no place. "The law of the Spirit, of life in Christ Jesus, has set" him free from the law of sin and death." This Object beyond himself has made him master of himself. There is a real attainment which is the very opposite of that self-conscious sanctification which so many are seeking now. On the contrary, he sees self in such a way as that he can trust it no longer, and Christ, not self, (good or bad either,) is the One before his eyes. He does not turn back to tell you of his own experience. He is not thinking of his own attainments. He has attained nothing yet, as it were, until he is with Christ in glory. This is the genuine Christian spirit, as far removed from the helpless misery of the bondage which some would persuade us is normal for the Christian, as it is, on the other hand, far from all Pharisaic self-satisfaction or comfort in one’s own condition.

2. He does indeed now tell us what ground of comfort he might have, if any, in the flesh; but only to dismiss it all as unworthy; as that which, if it were gain to him, were all the more, on account of the Christ before him, loss indeed. Anything which gave value and importance to himself would be but loss. It is in Christ that he finds all; and there is no separate interest, no treasure of any kind apart from Christ; but it is of use for him to show that he is not despising things which were not his. On the other hand, he had all that the proudest Jew could boast himself of, -a Jew himself, a circumcised man, circumcised. the eighth day, of Israel’s race, of the tribe of Benjamin, -not a descendant of one of Jacob’s handmaids, -a Hebrew of the Hebrews, a thorough, out and out Jew, unmixed with Gentilism in any way. As to the law itself; one of the straitest sect, a Pharisee; as to zeal, (the kind of zeal that goes with law keeping,) persecuting the Church of God; but as to himself also, with regard to such righteousness as could be found in man under law, blameless. Plainly he was one in whom there was no conscious evil indulged to awaken the clamor of conscience in his soul. As he says in Galatians, he was no sinner of the Gentiles. The very things which made him afterwards to realize himself the chief of sinners were, in this way, to him, (in the state of which he speaks,) only things to be credited to him for good. As he has told us in Romans, he had not yet found the power of that commandment which brings about the full detection of man’s natural evil, "Thou. shalt not lust."

All this was gain to him, then. He felt and valued it; but Christ had been revealed, and where was the value now? He does not stop to debate about these things; he does not sift them to show that after all they were not what they seemed. Whatever they were, make them as much as possible, pile them. up mountains high, Christ in glory set them aside altogether. They were not merely slight in gain; they were loss. He wanted nothing but that Christ who had been revealed to him. How blessed and wonderful to remember that this is, after all, not the picture simply of a great apostle. It is substantially the picture of a Christian in his normal character as that. The joy and the power of Christian life are found here, and the joy is the power. The life in its highest character, the spiritual condition in its fullest blessedness, are all found here.

3. It was not merely, however, for him the throwing aside of that which was religious gain to him. He had thrown all things aside. He had suffered the loss of all things and counted. them, not to be some valuable sacrifice that He had made, but mere defilement, for it was Christ who was before him to be gained. He is not, from this point of view, telling us that he has gained Christ, but that he is seeking to win Him. It is the actual possession of Christ in glory that he is thinking of. When there, what would it be as to himself? From that point of view, he may be permitted to think of himself. What will the man find as to himself who has thus won Christ? Not, he says, his own righteousness: that would be the legal principle essentially. He would be found in Christ, in possession of the righteousness which is by faith of Christ, righteousness which, he repeats emphatically, is of God, of His bestowal, through faith, that humblest of principles, which necessarily turns its back upon all that is of self, to lay hold of Another.

This is then the One he wants to know. He knows Him, but does not count this knowledge yet as the knowledge that he seeks. He cannot, of course, set aside this, as he has set aside other things. He would not mean to undervalue it; it was all of Christ that for the present he had; but what, nevertheless, would it be in that day when Christ Himself would be at last before his eyes, the goal of the race he had been running? He wanted to know Him after this manner, to know the power of His resurrection not, as many think, a present power, therefore of resurrection in his soul, -that he already knew. He was risen with Christ and knew it; but it is not a condition to be attained down here, still less a condition that he had attained, that he was thinking of, but that which will put him in the place in which he seeks to be; and as a prisoner of Christ in the Roman dungeon, he is entitled to think here of the sufferings attendant, and of the death which might so easily be before him. What then? That would be his way through to the resurrection from among the dead. Thus, the sufferings themselves, the manner of death, whatever it were, if it were complete conformity to Christ’s crucifixion, he would take it as that which only the more assimilated him to Christ for the present, while it was the way which led on to the apprehension of the power of that resurrection which would at last bring him to Christ in glory. As already said we have to realize, for the apprehension of what is here, that it is Christ Himself before his eyes, an Object outside the world, that is filling them. It is this and not any intervening thing that he is pressing after. It is no spiritual condition apart from this. He wants no halting place, no place to loiter in by the way, no present satisfaction, as it were, except that indeed which is derived from the blessed Object ever drawing nearer, and which is gaining upon his soul with every step he takes.

4. But he insists upon it that he has not attained, he is not already perfected. It is this that makes him pursue, with such stedfastness of aim and purpose, that which is before him. He wants to apprehend, that is, to lay hold of, that for which Christ has already laid hold of him. He is doing one thing, therefore, -how all our lives are spoilt by the desire to do more things than one! He is "forgetting the things behind, stretching out to the things before," pressing ever to the goal "for the prize of the calling on high of God in Christ Jesus;" not simply the high calling, but the "calling above," the calling to a place outside the earth altogether. This is what gave him the stedfastness which was manifestly his. This is what made him the man he was, and this attitude is what indeed he calls "perfection." If men would be perfect, let them be thus minded; and then, as to the details, whatever other minds they might have, God would make all plain to them. Is not this that which we need so much, -not to seek, as it were, to be of the same mind with one another? As to the details of the path, the perseverance in the path is that which only aright can make all details plain. It is manifest that as we press along a road, (one of many roads, let us say, all tending to the same point at last,) we cannot see things where we are just as others see them from their own points of view. We see things from where we are. As we get on further, each one of us, we find of necessity that our view of things is growing to be the same; not exactly because we have sought to have this so, but rather that it is the necessary result of all pressing on together to the one place in which we shall at last see absolutely together, eye to eye. Here it is that the prize awaits us. Christ is both goal and prize at the same time. What a perfect solution it will be of all the difficulties of the way! How the light of the glory of God will make everything absolutely plain, and not merely plain, but bright also!

5. "Nevertheless," he says, "whereto we have already attained, let us walk in the same steps;" that is, whatever may be our convictions at the present, let us act according to these convictions. Let us have truth practical. If we want it to be what the truth should be, we must walk in it to make it real. In this way, also, he could exhort them to follow him as he was following Christ, -to follow any others who were thus walking: not, as is evident, a following of man as man. We have to scrutinize the walk in order rightly to follow it. No man is altogether a model, and therefore Paul must say of himself, giving us the limit in this: "as I follow Christ." This brings us of necessity, to Christ Himself after all, as the one perfect Example for us; while, at the same time, we recognize and are encouraged by the example of those who are following Him. But he has now to warn them that already there were many walking, -of course with a profession, which is argued by the walk, and yet of whom he had told them often, and now even weeping told them, that they were the enemies of the cross of Christ. Not enemies of Christ Himself, exactly; that is not the thing of which he is speaking. They take no place of open adversaries, clearly, and they may even make much of the cross of Christ itself, if it were to shelter themselves by the grace that is in it from the rightful judgment of their unholy ways. It was possible, even then, as we know, to turn the grace of God into fleshly license, but this could not possibly avert the end to which such a course would lead. We have seen again and again that there is a way which leads to a certain end, and which will always lead there, although the mercy and goodness of God are not restricted by this; and there is a way of death from which, if grace works, it must deliver the soul. It cannot save one in it. For these, then, their end was destruction. Their god was really their belly; that is to say, the fleshly craving in them had never been set aside by any satisfaction that they had found for themselves in Christ. The craving of an unrenewed nature, -for he is not speaking of Christians, plainly, -led and governed them. These were their god, as he says, in strong, decisive language; and so deceived could they be as to glory in their shame. Earthly things they valued and secured, -prided themselves upon securing them. How different from that which we have had before us as the apostle’s example!

Here, then, was the awful contrast that could yet be found amongst professing Christians in that day; and they were not few, but many, he tells us, who walked thus. "For our citizenship," he adds In contrast, "is in the heavens." All our interests, all our relationships, all our rights, all our gains are there; and while it is true that that leaves us, in the meanwhile, as it were, perhaps, but scantily provided, we are waiting for the Lord Jesus Christ as Saviour, who shall transform the very body of our humiliation into conformity to His body of glory, according to the working of the power which He has, even to subdue all things to Himself. That is a hope which clearly can never interfere with the pressing on in the path meanwhile, -the very opposite. The power of it is that the Christ who is a the end of the way is thus brought so near us, we may arrive there at any moment; like the disciples who, receiving Christ into the ship, were immediately at the land whither they were going. There is no necessity of so many steps upon this path of which we have been told. Divine grace may cut it short at any time. God may fulfil all our hopes in a speedier way than we can imagine.

F. W. Grant, The Numerical Bible (4th ed., 1903) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Philippians Chapter 3

In chapter 3 Paul resumes his exhortation; but it was not burdensome to him, and it was safe for them (danger being present and his tender love watchful), to renew his warnings and instructions respecting the admixture of Judaising principles with the doctrine of a glorified Christ. It was in fact to destroy the latter and to reinstate the flesh (that is, sin and alienation from God) in its place. It was the first man, already rejected and condemned, and not the second Man. Yet it is not in the shape of sin that the flesh appears here, but in that of righteousness, of all that is respectable and religious, of ordinances which had the venerable weight of antiquity attached to them, and as to their origin, if all had not been done away in Christ, the authority of God Himself.

To the apostle, who knew Christ in heaven, all this was but a bait to draw the Christian away from Christ, and throw him back again into the ruin out of which Christ had drawn him. And this would be so much the worse, because it would be to abandon a known and glorified Christ, and to return to that which had been proved to be of no value through the flesh. The apostle therefore spares neither the doctrine nor those who taught it.

The glory which he had seen, his contests with these false teachers, the state into which they had thrown the assembly, Jerusalem and Rome, his liberty and his prison-all, had gained him the experience of what Judaism was worth as to the assembly of God. They were dogs, evil workers, that is workers of malice and wickedness. It was not the circumcision. He treats it with profound contempt, and uses language, the harshness of which is justified by his love for theassembly; for love is severe towards those who, devoid of conscience, corrupt the object of that love. It was the concision.

When evil without shame, and labouring to produce evil under a disgraceful veil of religion, is manifested in its true character, mildness is a crime against the objects of the love of Christ. If we love Him, we shall in our intercourse with the assembly give the evil its true character, which it seeks to hide. This is real love and faithfulness to Christ. The apostle had certainly not failed in condescension to the weak in this respect. He had carried it far; his prison testified it. And now the assembly, deprived of his energy and that spiritual decision which was full of love to all which is good, was more in danger than ever. The experience of a whole life of activity, of the greatest patience, of four years’ reflection in prison, led to these forcible and urgent words, “Beware of dogs, beware of evil workers, beware of the concision.” The doctrine of the epistle to the Ephesians, the exhortation of that to the Colossians, the affection of that to these Philippians, with the denunciation contained in Php 3:2, date from the same epoch, and are marked with the same love.

But it sufficed to denounce them. Elsewhere, where they were not well known, he gave details, as in the case of Timotheus, who had still to watch over the assembly. It was sufficient now to point out their well-known character. Whatever Judaised, whatever sought to mingle law and gospel, trusting in ordinances and the Spirit, was shameless, malicious, and contemptible. But the apostle will rather occupy himself with the power that delivers from it. We are the circumcision (that which is really separate from the evil, that which is dead to sin and to the flesh), we who worship God, not in the false pretension of ordinances, but spiritually by the power of the Holy Ghost, who rejoice in Christ the Saviour and not in the flesh, but on the contrary have no confidence in it. We see here Christ and the Spirit in contrast with the flesh and self.

Paul might indeed boast, if needful, in that which belonged to the flesh. As to all Jewish privileges, he possessed them in the highest degree. He had outstript every one in holy zeal against innovators. One thing alone had changed it all-he had seen a glorified Christ. All that he had according to the flesh was thenceforth loss to him. It would place something between him and the Christ of his faith and of his desire-the Christ whom he knew. And, observe, that here it is not the sins of the flesh which Christ expiates and abolishes that he rejects; it is its righteousness. It has none, we may say; but even if the apostle had possessed any righteousness of the flesh-as, in fact, he did possess it outwardly-he would not have it, because he had seen a better. In Christ, who had appeared to him on the way to Damascus, he had seen divine righteousness for man, and divine glory in man. He had seen a glorified Christ, who acknowledged the poor feeble members of the assembly as a part of Himself. He would have nothing else. The excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus his Lord had eclipsed everything-changed everything which was not that into loss. The stars, as well as the darkness of night, disappear before the sun. The righteousness of the law, the righteousness of Paul, all that distinguished him among men, disappeared before the righteousness of God and the glory of Christ.

It was a thorough change in his whole moral being. His gain was now loss to him. Christ was become all. It was not evil which disappeared-everything that belonged to Paul as advantage to the flesh disappeared. It was another who was now precious to him. What a deep and radical change in the whole moral being of man, when he ceases to be the centre of his own importance; and another, a worthy of being so, becomes the centre of his moral existence!-a divine person, a man who had glorified God, a man in whom the glory of God shone out, to the eye of faith; in whom His righteousness was realised, His love, His tender mercy, perfectly revealed towards men and known by men. This was He whom Paul desired to win, to possess-for here we are still in the paths of the wilderness-he desired to be found in Him: “That I may win Christ, and be found in him.” Two things were present to his faith in this desire: to have the righteousness of God Himself as his (in Christ he should possess it); and then, to know Him and the power of His resurrection-for he only knew Him as risen-and, according to that power working in him now, to have part in the sufferings of Christ, and be made conformable to His death.

It was in His death that perfect love had been demonstrated, that the perfect ground of divine and eternal righteousness had been laid, that self-renunciation was practically, entirely, perfectly, manifested in Christ, the perfect object to the apostle of a faith that apprehended it and desired it according to the new man. Christ had passed through death in the perfection of that life, the power of which was manifested in resurrection.

Paul, having seen this perfection in glory, and being united (weak as he was in himself) to Christ the source of this power, desired to know the power of His resurrection, that he might follow Him in His sufferings. Circumstances held this as a reality before his eyes. His heart only saw, or wished to see, Christ, that he might follow Him there. If death was on the way, he was only so much the more like Christ. He did not mind what it cost, if by any means he might attain. This gave undivided energy of purpose. This is indeed to know Him, as completely put to the test, and thus to know all that He was, His perfection-of love, of obedience, of devotedness-fully manifested; but the object is to win Him as He is.

Having seen Him in the glory, the apostle understood the path which had led Him there, and the perfection of Christ in that path. Participating in His life, he desired to realise its power according to His glory, that he might follow Him, in order to be where Jesus was, and in the glory with Him. This is what the Lord said in Joh 12:23-26. Who had apprehended Him like Paul by the grace of God? Observe here the difference between him and Peter. Peter calls himself “a witness of the sufferings of Christ and a partaker of the glory that shall be revealed”; Paul, a witness of the glory as it is in heaven (“as he is,” as John says), desires to share his sufferings. It is the special foundation of the assembly’s place, of walking in the Spirit, according to the revelation of the glory of Christ. It is this, I doubt not, which makes Peter say, that in all Paul’s epistles-which he acknowledges moreover as a part of the scriptures-there are some things hard to be understood. It took man clean out of the whole ancient order of things.

Having then seen Christ in glory, there were two things for Paul-the righteousness of God in Christ, and the knowledge of Christ. The first entirely eclipsed everything of which the flesh could boast. This was “mine own,” the righteousness of man according to the law. The other was the righteousness of God, which is by faith; that is, man is nothing in it. It is God’s righteousness: man has part in it by believing, that is to say, by faith in Christ Jesus. The believer has his place before God in Christ, in the righteousness of God Himself, which He had manifested in glorifying Christ, having glorified Himself in Him. What a position! not only sin, but human righteousness, all that is of self, excluded; our place being according to the perfection in which Christ, as man, has perfectly glorified God. But this place is necessarily the place of Him who has accomplished this glorious work. Christ, in His Person and in His present position, [6] is the expression of our place: to know Him is to know it. He is there according to divine righteousness. To be there, as He is, is that into which divine righteousness freely, but necessarily, introduces man-introduces us-in Christ. Thenceforth, having seen the righteousness of God in that Christ is there, I desire myself to know what it is to be there: and I desire to know Christ. But in truth this embraces all that He was in accomplishing it. The glory reveals the power and the result. That which He suffered is the work in which He glorified God; so that divine righteousness has been fulfilled in His exaltation, as man, to divine glory. And here divine love, perfect devotedness to His Father’s glory, constant and perfect obedience, the endurance of all things in order to give testimony of His Father’s love for men, perfect patience, unfathomable sufferings, in order that love might be both possible and perfect for sinners-all in short that Christ was, being connected with His Person, makes Him an object which commands, possesses, delivers, and strengthens the heart, by the power of His grace acting in the new life, in which we are united to Him by the all-powerful link of the Spirit, and causes Him to be the alone object before our eyes.

Accordingly Paul desires to have that which Christ can give, His cup, and His baptism; and to leave to the Father, that which Christ left to Him, the disposal of places in the kingdom. He does not desire, like John and James, the right and left hand, that is, a good place for himself. He desires Christ, he would win Christ. He does not follow tremblingly, as the disciples did in that chapter (Mar 10:1-52); he desires to suffer-not, that is, for the sake of suffering, but to have part in the sufferings of Christ. Instead therefore of going away like the young man in the same chapter, because he had much that could profit the flesh, instead of clinging like him to the law for his righteousness, he renounces that righteousness which he had in common with the young man; and all that he had he counted but as dung.

Here then we have the practical personal experience of the operation of this great principle, which the apostle has set forth in other epistles, that we have part with a glorified Christ. Also, in telling of the result as to himself, he speaks of his own resurrection according to the character of Christ’s. It is not that of which Peter speaks, as we have seen, the simply participating in the glory that was to be revealed. It is that which precedes. Having seen Christ in the glory, according to the power of His resurrection, he desires to participate in that: and this is the force of his word, “if by any means.” He desired to have part in the resurrection from among the dead. If, in order to reach it, it was needful to pass through death (as Christ had done), he would go through it, cost what it might, be it in ever so painful a way-and death was at that time before his eyes with its human terror: he desired fully to take part with Christ.

Now it is the character of this resurrection that it is from among the dead; it is not simply the resurrection of the dead. It is to come out, by the favour and the power of God (as it regards Christ, and indeed us too by Him, by the righteousness of God), from the condition of evil into which sin had plunged men-to come out, after having been dead in sins, and now to sin, through the favour and power and righteousness of God. What grace! and what a difference! By following Christ according to the will of God, in the place where He has set us (and to be content with the lowest place, if God has given it us, is the same renunciation of self as to labour in the highest-the secret of each is, that Christ is everything and ourselves nothing), we participate in His resurrection-a thought full of peace and joy, and which fills the heart with love to Christ. Joyful and glorious hope, which shines before our eyes in Christ, and in that blessed Saviour glorified! The objects of divine favour in Him, we come forth-because the eye of God is upon us, because we are His-from the house of death, which cannot detain those who are His, because the glory and the love of God are concerned in them. Christ is the example and the pattern of our resurrection; the principle (Rom 8:1-39) and the assurance of our resurrection is in Him. The road to it is that which the apostle here traces.

But since resurrection and likeness to Christ in glory were the objects of his hope, it is very evident that he had not attained it. If that was his perfection, he could not be yet perfect. He was, as has been said, on the road; but Christ had apprehended him for it, and he still pressed onward to lay hold of the prize, for the enjoyment of which Christ had laid hold of him. No, he repeats to his brethren, I count not myself to have attained. But one thing at least he could say-he forgot all that was behind him, and pressed on ever towards the goal, keeping it always in sight to obtain the prize of the calling of God, which is found in heaven. Happy Christian! It is a great thing never to lose sight of it, never to have a divided heart, to think but of one thing; to act, to think, always according to the positive energy wrought by the Holy Ghost in the new man, directing him to this only and heavenly object. It is not his sins properly which he here says he forgot-it was his progress that he forgot, his advantages, all that was already behind. And this was not merely the energy that shewed itself at the first impulse; he still counted everything but as dung, because he had still Christ in view. This is true Christian life. What a sad moment would it have been for Rebecca, if, in the midst of the desert with Eliezer, she had forgotten Isaac, and begun to think again of Bethuel and her father’s house! What had she then in the desert with Eliezer?

Such is the true life and position of the Christian; even as the Israelites, although preserved by the blood from the messenger of judgment, were not in their true place till they were on the other side of the Red Sea, a freed people. Then he is on the road to Canaan, as belonging to God.

The Christian, until he understands this new position which Christ has taken as risen from the dead, is not spiritually in its true place, is not perfect or full-grown in Christ. But when he has attained this, it is not assuredly that he is to despise others. “If,” says the apostle, “they were otherwise minded, God would reveal” to them the fulness of His truth; and all were to walk together with one mind in the things to which they had attained. Where the eye was single, it would be so: there were many with whom this was not the case; but the apostle was their example. This was saying much. While Jesus lived the peculiar power of this resurrection life could not be revealed in the same way; and moreover while on earth Christ walked in the consciousness of that which He was with His Father before the world existed, so that, although He endured for the joy that was set before Him, although His life was the perfect pattern of the heavenly man, there was in Him a repose, a communion, which had quite a peculiar character; instructive nevertheless to us, because the Father loves us as He loved Jesus, and Jesus also loves us as the Father loved Him. With Him it was not the energy of one who must run the race in order to attain that which he has never yet possessed; He spoke of that which He knew, and bore witness of that which He had seen, of that which He had forsaken from love to us, the Son of man who is in heaven.

John enters farther into this character of Christ: in his epistle therefore we find more of that which He is in His nature and character, than of what we shall be with Him in the glory. Peter, building on the same foundation as the others, waits however for that which shall be revealed. His pilgrimage was indeed towards heaven, to obtain a treasure which was preserved there, which shall be revealed in the last time; but it is more connected with that which had been already revealed. From his point of view, the morning star on which Paul lived appeared only on the extreme horizon. For him practical life was that of Jesus among the Jews. He could not say with Paul, “Be ye followers of me.” The effect of the revelation of the heavenly glory of Christ, between His going away and His reappearance, and that of the union of all Christiansto Him in heaven, was fully realised in him only who received it. Faithful through grace to this revelation, having no other object which guided his steps, or to divide his heart, he gives himself as an example. He truly followed Christ, but the form of his life was peculiar, on account of the way in which God had called him; and it is thus that Christians possessing this revelation ought to walk.

Accordingly Paul speaks of a dispensation committed to him.

It was not to turn their eyes from Christ; it is on having the eyes constantly fixed upon Him that he insists. It was this which characterised the apostle, and in this he gives himself as an example. But the character of this looking to Jesus was special. It was not a Christ known on earth who was its object, but a Christ glorified whom he had seen in heaven. To press ever forward to this end formed the character of his life; even as this same glory of Christ, as a testimony to the bringing in divine righteousness and to the assembly’s position, formed the basis of his teaching. Therefore he can say, “Be followers of me.” His gaze was ever fixed on the heavenly Christ, who had shone before his eyes and still shone before his faith. The Philippians were thus to walk together, and to mark those who followed the apostle’s example; because (for evidently it was a period in which the assembly as a whole had much departed from her first love and her normal condition) there were many who, while bearing the name of Christ and having once given good hope, so that the apostle speaks of them with tears, were enemies of the cross of Christ. For the cross on earth, in our life, answers to the heavenly glory on high. It is not the assembly at Philippi which is the subject here, but the condition of the outward universal assembly. Many were already calling themselves Christians, who joined to that great name a life which had the earth and earthly things for its object. The apostle did not acknowledge them. They were there; it was not a matter of local discipline, but a condition of Christianity, in which even all were seeking their own interest; and, spirituality being thus lowered, the Christ of glory little realised, many who had no life at all might walk among them without being detected, by those who had so little life themselves and scarcely walked better than they did. For it does not appear that they who were minding earthly things committed any evil that required public discipline. The general low tone of spirituality among the real Christians left the others free to walk with them; and the presence of the latter debased Still more the standard of godliness of life.

But this state of things did not escape the spiritual eye of the apostle, which, fixed on the glory, discerned readily and clearly all that had not that glory for its motive; and the Spirit has given us the divine judgment, most grave and solemn, with regard to this state of things. No doubt it has grown enormously worse since then, and its elements have developed and established themselves in a manner and in proportions that are very differently characterised; but the moral principles with regard to walk remain ever the same for the assembly. The same evil is present to be avoided, and the same efficacious means for avoiding it. There is the same blessed example to follow, the same heavenly Saviour to be the glorious object of our faith, the same life to live if we desire to be Christians indeed.

That which characterised these persons who professed the name of Christ was, that their hearts were set upon earthly things. Thus the cross had not its practical power-it would have been a contradiction. Their end therefore was destruction. The true Christian was not such; his conversation was in heaven and not on the earth; his moral life was spent in heaven, his true relationships were there. From thence he expected Christ as a Saviour, that is to say, to deliver him from the earth, from this earthly system far from God here below For salvation is always viewed in this epistle as the final result of the conflict, the result due to the almighty power of the Lord. Then, when Christ shall come to take the assembly to Himself-Christians, truly heavenly, shall be like Him in His heavenly glory, a likeness which is the object of their pursuit at all times (compare 1Jn 3:2). Christ will accomplish it in them, conforming their bodies of humiliation to His glorious body according to the power whereby He is able to subdue all things to Himself. Then the apostle and all Christians will have attained the end, the resurrection from among the dead.

Such is the tenor of this chapter. Christ, seen in glory, is the spring of energy to Christian life, to win Christ, so that all else is loss; as Christ making Himself of no reputation is the spring of Christian graciousness of walk: the two parts of Christian life which we are too apt to sacrifice one to another or at least to pursue one forgetful of the other. In both Paul singularly shines. In the following chapter we have superiority to circumstances. This also is Paul’s experience and state; for it will be remarked that it is the personal experience of Paul which runs all through his (humanly speaking) faultless experience-not perfection. Likeness to Christ in glory is the only standard of that. As to this third chapter, many have inquired whether the thing aimed at was a spiritual assimilation to Christ here, or a complete assimilation to Him in the glory. This is rather to forget the import of what the apostle says, namely, that the sight and the desire of the heavenly glory, the desire of possessing Christ Himself thus glorified, was that which formed the heart here below. An object here below to be attained in oneself could not be found, since Christ is on high; it would be to separate the heart from the object which forms it to its own likeness. But although we never reach the mark here below, since it is a glorified Christ and resurrection from among the dead, yet its pursuit assimilates us more and more to Him. The object in the glory forms the life which answers to it here below. Were a light at the end of a long straight alley, I never have the light itself till I am arrived there; but I have ever increasing light in proportion as I go forward; I know it better; I am more in the light myself. Thus it is with a glorified Christ, and such is Christian life (compare 2Co 3:1-18).

Footnotes for Philippians Chapter 3

6: Not, of course, as to being at the right hand of God-this was personal.

John Nelson Darby — Synopsis of the Books of the Bible: the New Testament (c. 1857–1862) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Chapter 10

NO CONFIDENCE IN THE FLESH.

Php_3:1-8 (R.V.)

THE third chapter contains the portion of this Epistle in which, perhaps, one is hardest put to it to keep pace with the writer. Here he gives us one of his most remarkable expositions of true Christian religion as he knew it, and as he maintains it must essentially exist for others also. He does this in a burst of thought and feeling expressed together, so that, if we are to take his meaning, the fire and the light must both alike do their work upon us; we must feel and see both at once. This is one of the pages to which a Bible reader turns again and again. It is one of the passages that have special power to find and to stir believing men.

Yet it seems to find its place in the letter almost incidentally.

It would seem, as some have thought, that in the first verse of this chapter the Apostle begins to draw his letter to a close. Cheerful words of farewell begin to shape themselves. At the same time a closing reference is in view to some practical danger that required to be guarded against. Almost suddenly things take a new turn, and a flood of great ideas claim and take their place.

"Finally, my brethren, rejoice in the Lord." Rejoice, be of good cheer, was the common formula of leave-taking. The same word is translated "farewell" in 2Co_13:11 (Authorised and Revised Versions). But the Apostle, especially in this Epistle, which is itself inspired by so much of the Christian gladness, cannot but emphasise the proper meaning of the customary phrase. Rejoice, yes, rejoice, my brethren, in the Lord. The same turn of thought recurs again in Php_4:4. What it is fitted to suggest will be equally in place when we reach that point.

Now he seems to be on the point of introducing some subject already referred to, either in this or in a previous Epistle. It concerned the safety of the Philippians, and it required some courteous preface in touching on it once again; so that, most likely, it was a point of some delicacy. Some have thought this topic might be the tendency to dissension which had appeared in Philippi. It is a subject which comes up again in chap. 4; it may have been upon the point of coming up here. The closing words of Php_3:1 might well enough preface such a reference. The theme was not so pleasant as some of those on which he had written: it might be delicate for him to handle, and it might call for some effort on their part to take it well. Yet it concerned their safety that they should fully realise this element of the situation, and should take the right view of it. Therefore also the Apostle would not count it irksome to do his part in relation to it. People entangled in a fault are in circumstances not favourable to a right estimate of their own case. They need help from those who can judge more soundly. Yet help must be tendered with a certain considerateness.

But at this point a new impulse begins to operate. Perhaps the Apostle was interrupted, and, before he could resume, some news reaches him, awakening afresh the indignation with which he always regarded the tactics of the Judaisers. Nothing indicates that the Philippian Church was much disposed to Judaise. But if at this juncture some new disturbance from the Judaisers befell his work at Rome, or if news of that kind reached him from some other field, it might suggest the possibility of those sinister influences finding their way also to Philippi. This is, of course, a conjecture merely; but it is not an unreasonable one. It has been offered as an explanation of the somewhat sudden burst of warning that breaks upon us in Php_3:2; while, in the more tranquil strain of chap. 4, topics are resumed which easily link themselves to Php_3:1

Still, even if this denunciation of Judaising comes in rather unexpectedly, it does not really disturb the main drift of the Epistle, nor does it interfere with the lessons which the Philippians were to learn. It rather contributes to enforce the views and deepen the impressions at which Paul aims. For the denunciation becomes the occasion of introducing a glowing description of how Christ found Paul, and what Paul found in Christ. This is set against the religion of Judaising. But at the same time, and by the nature of the case, it becomes a magnificent exposure and rebuke of all fleshly religionising, of all the ways of being religious that are superficial, self-confident, and wordly-minded. It also becomes a stirring call to what is most central and vital in Christian religion. If then there was at Philippi, as there is everywhere, a tendency to be too easily contented with what they had attained; or to reconcile Christianity with self-seeking; or to indulge a Christianised arrogance and quarrelsomeness; or in any other shape, "having begun in the spirit to be made perfect in the flesh," - here was exactly what they needed. Here, too, they might find a vivid representation of the "one spirit" in which they were to "stand fast," the "one soul" in which they were to "labour" together. {Php_1:27} That "one spirit" is the mind which is caught, held, vitalised, continually drawn upwards and forwards, by the revelation and the appropriation of Christ.

The truth is that a remiss Christianity always becomes very much a Judaism. Such Christianity assumes that a life of respectable conventions, carried on within sacred institutions, will please God and save our souls. What the Apostle has to set against Judaism may very well be set against that in all its forms.

"Keep an eye on the dogs, the evil workers, on the concision." The Judaisers are not to occupy him very long, but we see they are going to be thoroughly disposed of. Dogs is a term borrowed from their own vocabulary. They classed the Gentiles (even the uncircumcised Christians) as dogs, impure beings who devoured all kinds of meats and were opened to all kinds of uncleanness. But themselves, the Apostle intimates, were the truly impure, shutting themselves out from the true purity, the hearts purity, and (as Dr. Lightfoot expresses it) "devouring the garbage of carnal ordinances." They were also evil workers, mischievous busybodies, pertinaciously busy, but busy to undo rather than to build up what is good, "subverting mens souls." {Act_15:24} And they were the concision, not the circumcision according to the true intent of that ordinance, but the concision, the mutilation or gashing. Circumcision was a word which carried in its heart a high meaning of separation from evil and of consecration to the Lord. That meaning (and therefore also the word which carried it) pertained to gospel believers, whether outwardly circumcised or not. For the Judaising zealots could be claimed only a circumcision which had lost its sense, and which no more deserved the name, -a senseless gashing of the flesh, a concision. All these terms seem to be levelled at certain persons who are in the Apostles view, and are not unknown to the Philippians, though not necessarily resident in that city.

For any full statement of the grounds of the Apostles indignation at the Judaising propaganda, the reader must be referred to the expository writings on other Epistles, especially on those to the Corinthians and to the Galatians Here a few words must suffice. Judaising made the highest pretensions to religious security and success; it proposed to expound the only worthy and genuine view of mans relation to God. But in reality the Judaisers wholly misrepresented Christianity, for they had missed the main meaning of it. Judaising turned mens minds away from what was highest to what was lowest-from love to law, from Gods gifts to mans merits, from inward life and power to outward ceremonial performance, from the spiritual and eternal to the material and the temporary. It was a huge, melancholy mistake; and yet it was pressed upon Christians as the true religion, which availed with God, and could alone bring blessing to men. Hence, as our Lord denounced the Pharisees with special energy-sometimes with withering sarcasm {Luk_11:47} -so, and for the same reasons, does Paul attack the Judaisers. The Pharisees applied themselves to turn the religion of Israel into a soul-withering business of formalism and pride; and Pauls opponents strove to pervert to like effect even the gracious and life-giving gospel of Christ. To such he would give place, no, not for an hour.

Two things may be suggested here. One is the responsibility incurred by those who make a religious profession, and in that character endeavour to exert religious influence upon others. Such men are taking possession, as far as they can, of what is highest and most sacred in the souls capacities; and if they misdirect the souls life here, if consciously or unconsciously they betray interests so sacred, if they successfully teach men to take false coin for true in the matter of the souls dealings with God and with its own welfare, their responsibility is of the heaviest.

Another point to notice is the energy with which the Apostle thinks it right to denounce these evil workers. Denunciation is a line of things in which, as we know very well, human passion is apt to break loose-the wrath of man which worketh not the righteousness of God. The history of religious controversy has made this very plain. Yet surely we may say that zeal for truth must sometimes show itself in an honest indignation against the wilfulness and the blindness of those who are misleading others. It is not always well to be merely mild and placable. That may arise in some cases from no true charity, but rather from indifference, or from an amiability that is indolent and selfish. It is good to be zealously affected in a good thing. Only, we have reason to take heed to ourselves and to our own spirit, when we are moved to be zealous in the line of condemning and denouncing. Not all who do so have approved their right to do it, by tokens of spiritual wisdom and single-hearted sincerity such as marked the life and work of Paul.

The Judaisers put abroad the false coin, and believers in Christ, whether circumcised or not, had the true. "We are the circumcision, who worship by the Spirit of God, and who glory in Christ Jesus, and who put no confidence in the flesh." Such are truly Abrahams children. {Gal_3:29} To them belong whatever relation to God, and interest in God, were shadowed forth by circumcision in the days of old.

No doubt, the rite of circumcision was outward; and no doubt it came to be connected with a great system of outward ordinances and outward providences. Yet circumcision, according to the Apostle, pointed not outwards, but inwards. {Rom_2:28-29} Elsewhere he lays stress on this, that circumcision, when first given, was a seal of faith. In the Old Testament itself, the complaint made by the prophets, speaking for God, was that the people, though circumcised in flesh, were of uncircumcised heart and uncircumcised ears. And God threatens to punish Israel with the Gentiles-the circumcised with the uncircumcised-because all the house of Israel are uncircumcised in heart.

The true circumcision then must be those, in the first place, who have the true, the essentially true worship. Circumcision set men apart as worshippers of the true God: hence Israel came to be thought of as a people "instantly serving (or worshipping) God day and night." That this worship must include more than outward service in order to be a success - that it should include elements of high spiritual worth, was disclosed in Old Testament revelation with growing clearness. One promise on which it rested was: "The Lord thy God will circumcise thine heart, and the heart of thy seed, to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, that thou mayest live." The true circumcision, those who answer to the type which circumcision was meant to set, must be those who have the true worship. Now that is the worship "by the Spirit"; on which we shall have a word to say presently.

And again, the true circumcision must be those who have the true glorying. Israel, called to glory in their God, were set apart also to cherish in that connection a great hope, which was to bless their line, and, through them, the world. That hope was fulfilled in Christ. The true circumcision were those who welcomed the fulfilment of the promise, who rejoiced in the fulness of the blessing, because they had eyes to see and hearts to feel its incomparable worth.

And certainly, therefore, as men who had discovered the true foundation and refuge, they must renounce and turn from the false trust, they must put no confidence in the flesh. Is this, however, a paradox? Was not circumcision "outward, in the flesh."? Was it not found to be a congruous part of a concrete system, built up of "elements of this world"? Was not the temple a "worldly sanctuary," and were not the sacrifices "carnal ordinances"? Yes; and yet the true circumcision did not trust in circumcision. He who truly took the meaning of that remarkable dispensation was trained to say, "Doth not my soul wait on God? from Him cometh my salvation." And he was trained to renounce the confidences in which the nations trusted. Hence, though such a man could accept instruction and impression from many an ordinance and many a providence, he was still led to place his trust higher than the flesh. And now, when the true light was come, when the Kingdom of God shone out in its spiritual principles and forces, the true circumcision must be found in those who turned from that which appealed only to the earthly and the fleshly mind, that they might fasten on that in which God revealed Himself to contrite and longing souls.

The Apostle, therefore, claimed the inheritance and representation of the ancient holy people for spiritual believers, rather than for Judaising ritualists. But apart from questions as to the connection between successive covenants, it is worth our while to weigh well the significance of those features of Christian religion which are here emphasised.

"We," he says, "worship by the Spirit of God." The Holy Spirit was not absent from the old economy. But in those days the consciousness and the faith of His working were dim, and the understanding of the scope of it was limited. In the times of the New Testament, on the contrary, the promise and the presence of the Spirit assume a primary place. This is the great promise of the Father which was to come into manifestation and fulfilment when Christ had gone away. This, from Pentecost onwards, was to be distinctive of the character of Christs Church. According to the Apostle Paul, it is one great end of Christs redemption, that we may receive the promise of the Spirit through faith. So, in particular, Christian worship is by the Spirit of God. Therefore it is a real and most inward fellowship with God. In this worship it is the office of the Holy Spirit to give us a sense of the reality of Divine things, especially of the truths and promises of God; to touch our hearts with their goodness, on account especially of the Divine love that breathes in them; to dispose us to decision, in the way of consent and surrender to God as thus revealed. He takes the things of Christ, and shows them to us. So he brings us, in our worship, to meet with God, mind to mind, heart to heart. Although all our thoughts, as well as all our desires, come short, yet, in a measure, a real consent with God about His Son and about the blessings of His Sons gospel comes to pass. Then we sing with the Spirit, when our songs are filled with confidence and admiration, arising out of a sense of Gods glory and grace; and we pray in the Holy Ghost, when our supplications express this loving and thankful close with Gods promises. It is our calling and our blessedness to worship by the Spirit of God. Much of our worship might fall silent, if this alone should be upheld; yet this alone avails and finds God. Whatever obscures this, or distracts attention from it, whether it be called Jewish or Christian, does not aid worship, but mars it.

It is true that the presence of the Spirit of God is not discernible otherwise than by the fruits of His working. And the difficulty may be raised, how can we, in practice, be secure of having the Spirit whereby to worship God? But, on the one hand, we know in some degree what the nature of the worship is which He sustains; we can form some conception of the attitude and exercise of soul towards Christ and God which constitute that worship. We do therefore know something as to what we should seek; we are aware of the direction in which our face should be set. On the other hand, the presence of the Spirit with us, to make such worship real in our case, is an object of faith. We believe in God for that gracious presence, and ask for it; and so doing, we expect it, according to Gods own promise. On this understanding we apply ourselves to find entrance and progress in the worship which is by the Spirit.

All appliances which are supposed to aid worship, which are conceived to add to its beauty, pathos, or sublimity are tolerable only so far as they do not tend to divert us from the worship which is by the Spirit. Experience shows that men are extremely prone to fall back from the simplicity and intentness of spiritual worship; and then they cover the gap, which they cannot fill, by outward arrangements of an impressive and affecting kind. Outward arrangements can render real service to worshippers, only if they remove hindrances, and supply conditions under which the simplicity and intentness of the worship "by the Spirit" may go on undisturbed. Very often they have tended exactly in the contrary direction; not the less because they have been introduced, perhaps, with the best intentions. And yet the chief question of all is not the more or less, the this or that, of such circumstantials; but rather what the heart fixes on and holds by.

Again, we "glory in Christ Jesus." Christians are rich and great, because Christ Jesus assumes a place in their mind and life, such as makes them partakers of all spiritual blessing in Him. They glory, not in what they are, or do, or become, or get, but in Christ. Glorying in anything implies a deep sense of its wonderfulness and worth, along with some persuasion that it has a happy relation to ourselves. So Christ is the power and wisdom of God, the revelation of the Father, the way to the Father, the centre of blessing, the secret of religious restoration, attainment, and success, and He is ours; and He sets the type of what we through Him shall be. To glory and triumph in Christ is a leading characteristic of Christian religion.

And so, then, we "put no confidence in the flesh." If in Christ, under the revelation which Centres in Him, we have found the way to God arid the liberty to serve God, then all other ways must be for us ipso facto exposed and condemned; they are seen to be fallacious and fruitless. All these other ways are summoned up in "the flesh." For the flesh is human nature fallen, with the resources which it wields, drawn from itself or from earthly materials of some kind. And in some selection or combination of these resources, the religion of the flesh stands. The renunciation of trust in such ways of establishing a case before God is included in the acceptance of Christs authority and Christs salvation. This condemns alike the confidence in average morality, and that in accredited ecclesiastical surroundings. It condemns confidence in even the holiest Christian rites, as if they could transfer us, by some intrinsic virtue, into the Kingdom of God, or could accredit our standing there. The same holds of confidence in doctrines, and even of confidence in sentiments. Rites, doctrines, and sentiments have their place of honour, as lines in which Christ and we may meet. Otherwise they all fall into the category of the flesh. Many things the flesh can do, in worship as in other departments; but it cannot attain to the worship that is by the Spirit of God. Much it can boast of; but it cannot replace Immanuel; it cannot fill the place of the reconciliation and the life. When we learn what kind of confidence is needed towards God, and find the ground of it in the Christ of God, then we cease to rely on the flesh.

At this point the Apostle cannot but emphasise his own right to speak. He appeals to his remarkable history. He knows all about this Judaic religion, which glories in the flesh, and he knows also the better way. The experience which had transformed his life entitled him to a hearing; for, indeed, he, as no man else, had searched out the worth of both the ways of it. So he is led into a remarkable testimony regarding the nature and the working forces of true Christian religion. And this, while it serves the purpose of throwing deserved disgrace on the poor religion of Judaising, serves at the same time a higher and more durable purpose. It sets the glory of the life of faith, love, and worship, against the meanness of all fleshly life whatever; and thus it vividly impresses on all hearers and readers the alternatives with which we have to deal, and the greatness of the choice which we are called to make.

If Paul decries the Jewish glorying in the flesh, it is not because he lacked ground, that had enabled him to cherish it and might enable him still to do so. "I also have material enough of fleshly confidence:-if any other thinks to have confidence in the flesh, I more." Then comes the remarkable catalogue of the prerogatives which had once meant so much for Saul of Tarsus, filling his heart with confidence and exultation. "Circumcised the eighth day"-for he was no proselyte, but born within the fold "of the stock of Israel"-for neither had his parents been proselytes: in particular, for he was one whose pedigree was ascertained and notorious, "of the tribe of Benjamin": "a Hebrew of Hebrews" nursed and trained, that is to say, in the very speech and spirit of the chosen people; not, as some of them, bred up in a foreign tongue, and under alien influences; "concerning the law, a Pharisee"-that is, "of the strictest sect of our religion"; {Act_26:5} for, as a Pharisee, Saul had given himself wholly to know the law, to keep the law, to teach the law. More yet-"as to zeal, a persecutor of the Church"; in this clause the heat of the writers spirit rises into pathetic irony and self-scorn: "This appropriate outcome of carnal Judaism, alas, was not lacking in me: I was not a Judaiser of the half-hearted sort." The idea is that those who, trusting in fleshly Judaism, claimed also to be Christians, knew neither their own spirit, nor the proper working of their own system. Saul of Tarsus had been no such incoherent Jew; only too bloodily had he proved himself thorough and consistent. Lastly, as to "law righteousness," the righteousness of compliance with rules, he had been unchallengeable; not a pharisaic theorist only, but a man who made conscience of his theory. Ah! he had known all this; and more, he had been forced in a great crisis of his life to measure and search out the whole worth of it.

"But what things were gain to me"-the whole class of things that ranked themselves before my eyes, and in my heart, as making me rich and strong -" those I have esteemed" (in a mass) "to be loss for Christ." They ceased to be valuable when they began to be reckoned as elements of disadvantage and of loss in comparison of Christ. Nor these things only, but even all things-"Yea, doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord." "All things" must include more than those old elements of fleshly confidence already enumerated. It must include everything which Paul still possessed, or might yet attain, that could be separated from Christ, weighed against Him, brought into competition with Him-all that the flesh could even yet fake hold of, and turn into a ground of separate confidence and boasting. So the phrase might cover much that was good in its place, much that the Apostle was glad to hold in Christ and from Christ, but which yet might present itself to the unwatchful heart as material of independent boasting, and which, in that case, must be met with energetic and resolute rejection. "All things" may include, for instance, many of those elements of Christian and Apostolic eminence which are enumerated in 2 Co. 11; for which he thankfully received many such things, and lovingly prized them "in Christ Jesus," yet as they might become occasions to flatter or seduce even an Apostle-betraying him into self-confidence, or into the assertion of some separate worth and glory for himself-they must be rejected and counted to be loss.

The difficulty for us here is to estimate worthily the elevation of that regard to Christ which had become the inspiration of the life of Paul.

At the time when he was arrested on the road to Damascus, God revealed His Son to him and in him. Paul then became aware of Jesus as the Messiah of his people, against whom his utmost energies had bent themselves-against whom he had sinned with his utmost determination. That discovery came home to him with a sense of great darkness and horror; and, no doubt, at the same time, his whole previous conceptions of life, and his judgments of his own life, were subverted, and fell in ruins around him. He had had his scheme of life, of success, of welfare; it had seemed to him a lofty and well-accredited one; and, with whatever misgivings he might occasionally be visited, on the whole he thought of himself as working it out hopefully and well. Now on every side were written only defeat, perplexity, and despair. But ere long the Son of God was revealed in his {Gal_1:16} as the Bearer of righteousness and life to sinners - as the embodiment of Divine reconciliation and Divine hope. In this light a new conception of the world, a new scheme of worthy and victorious life, opened itself to Paul-new and wonderful. But the reason of it, the hopefulness of it, the endless worth of it, lay chiefly here, that God in Christ had come into his life. The true relation of moral life to God, and the ends of human life as judged by that standard, were opening before him; but, if that had stood alone, it might only have completed the dismay of the paralysed and stricken man. What made all new was the vision of Christ victoriously treading the path in which we failed to go, and of Christ dying for the unrighteous. So God came into view, in His love, redeeming, reconciling, adopting, giving the Holy Spirit-and He came into view "in Christ Jesus." God was in Christ. The manifold relation of the living God to His creature man began to be felt and verified in the manifold relation of Christ the Son of God, the Mediator and Saviour, to the broken man who had defied and hated Him. Christ henceforth became the ground, the meaning, and the aim of Pauls life. Life found its explanation, its worth, its loving imperative here. All things else that once had value in his eyes fell away. If not entirely dismissed, they were now to have only such place and use as Christ assigned to them, only such as could fit the genius of life in Christ. And all new prerogatives and attainments that might yet accrue to Paul, and might seem entitled to assume value in his eyes, could only have the same subordinate place:-Christ first, whose light and love, whose power to fix and fill and attract the soul, made all things new; Christ first, so that all the rest was comparatively nowhere; Christ first, so that all the rest, if at any time it came into competition with Him, if it offered itself to Paul as a source of individual confidence and boasting, is recognised as mere loss, and in that character resolutely cast away.

This had become the living and ruling principle with Paul; not so, indeed, as to meet with no opposition, but so as to prevail and bear down opposition. Enthusiastically accepted and embraced, it was a principle that had to be maintained against temptation, against infirmity, against the strong tides of inward habit and outward custom. Here lay the trial of Pauls sincerity and of Christs fidelity and power.

That trial had run its course: it was now not far from its ending. The opening of heart and mind to Christ, and the surrender of all to Him, had not been the matter merely of one hour of deep impression and high feeling. It had continued, it was in full force still. Pauls value for Christ had borne the strain of time, and change, and temptation. Now he is Paul the aged, and also a prisoner of Christ Jesus. Has he abated from the force or cooled from the confidence of that mind of his concerning the Son of God? Far otherwise. With a "Yea, doubtless" he tells us that he abides by his first conviction, and affirms his first decision. Good right he had to testify. This was not a matter of inward feeling only, however sincere and strong. He had been well proved. He has suffered the loss of all things; he has seen all his treasures-what are counted for such-swept away from him as the result of unflinching faith and service; and he counts all to be well lost for Christ.

This passage sets before us the essential nature of Christianity-the essential life of a Christian, as revealed by the effect it has on his esteem for other things. Many of us, one supposes, cannot consider it without a sense of deep disgrace. The view here given awakens many thoughts. Some aspects of the subject must be dwelt upon for a moment.

Those things that were gain, all things that can be gain, such are the objects Paul here reckons with. The believing mind concerning Christ carries with it a changed mind as regards all these.

Apparently, in some deep sense, there arises for us in this world an inevitable competition between Christ on the one hand and all things on the other. If we should say some things, we might be in danger of sliding into a one-sided puritanism. But we escape that risk by saying, emphatically, all things. A decision upon this has to be reached, it has to be maintained, it is to be reaffirmed in particulars, in all particulars. For we must remember that the heart of Paul, in this burst of loyalty, is only echoing the call of Christ: "He that loveth father or mother more than Me, is not worthy of Me. Let us repeat it, this applies to all things." Because a certain way of feeling and thinking about these things, and especially about some of them, is present with us all, which asserts itself against this principle, therefore Christian life, however rich and full, however gracious and generous its character truly is, must include a negative at the base of it. "Let a man deny (or renounce) himself, and take up his cross."

That life should be subjected to this severe competition seems hard: we may repine at it, and count it needless. We may ask, "Why should it be so? Why might not Christ take His place in our regard-His first, His ideal, His incomparable place-and, at the same time, all the other things take their place too, each in due order, as the true conception of human life may imply, and as the claims of loyalty to Christ may dictate? Why should not each take its place, more prominent or more subordinate, on a principle of harmony and happy order? Why should life be subjected to conflict and strain?" We may dream of this; but it will not be. We are such persons, and the world about us is so related to us now, that the "all things" are found continually claiming a place, and striving to make good for themselves a place in our heart and life, that will not consist with the regard due to Christ. They can be resisted only by a great inward decision, maintained and renewed all along our life, for Christ and against them. The nearest approach the believer makes in this life to that happy harmony of the whole being which was spoken of just now, is-when his decision for Christ is so thorough and joyful, that the other elements-the "all things"-fall into their place, reduced into obedience by an energy that breaks resistance.

Then, too, in that place, they begin to reveal their proper nature as Gods gifts, their real beauty and their real worth.

But then, in the next place, though the decision cannot be escaped, yet, let us be assured, there is in this no real hardship. To be so called to this decision is the greatest blessedness of life. There is that in Christ for men, on account of which a man may gladly count all else but loss, may count it abundantly well worth his while to make this choice. Christ as binding us to God, Christ as the living source of reconciliation and sonship, Christ as the spring of a continually recruited power to love and serve and overcome, Christ as assuring to us the attainment of His own likeness, Christ as the revealer of a love which is more and better than all its own best gifts-Christ discloses to us a world of good, for the sake of which it is well done to cast, if need be, all else away. It proves reasonable to reject the importunate claim which other things make to be reckoned indispensable. It proves natural, according to a new nature, to hold all else loosely, that we may hold this one interest fast.

Yet this is not to be done or endeavoured by dismissing out of life all that gives character and movement to human existence. Not so; for indeed it is human life itself, with its complex of relations and activities, that is to receive the new inspiration. The decision is to be made by accepting the principle that life, throughout, must be life in Christ, life for Christ; and by setting ourselves to learn from Him what that principle means. Of the "all things" many must continue with us; but if so, they must continue on a new principle: no longer as competitors, certainly not as allowed competitors, but as gifts and subjects of Christ, accepting law and destination from Him. Then, also, they may continue to carry with them many a pleasant experience of our Masters providential goodness. The effort to comply with Pauls example by mutilating human life of some of its great elements has often been a sincere and earnest effort. But it implies a distorted, and eventually a narrowed view of the Christians calling. For, short of suicide, we can never deal with all things on that principle of simple amputation. Now the Apostle says all things: "I count all things to be loss."

Let this, however, be noted, that loyalty requires something more than merely a new valuation of things in our minds, however sincere that valuation might be. It demands also actual sacrifice, when duty or when faithful service calls for it. Pauls Christianity was prompt to lay down, as circumstances in the course of following Christ might demand, everything, anything, even that which, in other circumstances, might retain its place in life, and be counted, in its own place, seemly and welcome. Not only shall a man count all to be loss for Christ: he shall actually, when called upon, suffer the loss of anything or of all things. No Christian life is without its occasions when this test has to be accepted. Most Christian lives include lessons in this department at the very outset. Some Christian lives are very full of them, -full, that is, of experiences in which contented submission to privation, and cheerful acceptance of trouble and danger, must approve the sincerity of the esteem for Christ our Saviour which is the common profession of us all. So it was with Paul. He had suffered the loss of all things.

It is because the "all things," in their infinite variety of aspect and influence, tend so constantly to come into competition with Christ, to our great hurt and danger, that they must be so emphatically repudiated, and counted to be "loss." They are loss indeed, when they succeed in taking the place they claim, for then they impoverish our life of its true treasure. We may suffer this encroachment to take place stealthily-all but unconsciously. All the more fit it is that we should learn to assert loyalty to our lord with a magnanimous vigilance. It becomes us to set His worth and claims emphatically, with a "yea, doubtless," against the poor substitutes for which we are tempted silently to exchange Him. If not, we are likely to come back to that sad stage which has been already brought before us (chap. 2), the condition of those Christians who "all seek their own, not the things which are Jesus Christs."

Let us own, however, that men are trained in different lines of discipline to the same great result. The lesson broke into the life of Paul with astounding force at one great crisis. Some, on the contrary, begin their training in little instances of early life, and under influences working too gently to be afterwards recalled. Gradually they grow into a clearer perception of the gifts Christ offers and of the claims He makes; and each step of decision paves the way to new attainments. The experience of all Christians, however diversified their training may be, is harmonised in the fidelity of each to the light he has, and of all to the Lord who calls them all to follow Him.

William Robertson Nicoll, ed., The Expositor's Bible (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1887–1910) — public domain. 65 of 66 books (1 Corinthians is not separately keyed, as that volume carries no machine-parseable verse references); section-level commentary keyed to the opening verse. Introductory and overview sections not keyed to a specific passage are excluded.

3:1 rejoice in the Lord: This theme is resumed in 4:4 (see also 1:18; 2:17-18, 28; 4:10). • The phrase these things (literally the same things) is ambiguous: it may refer to (1) the immediately preceding encouragement to rejoice in the Lord; (2) the earlier encouragement to follow Christ’s example (2:1-18); (3) Paul’s exhortation in general; or (4) the following warning about threats to their faith.

Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.

Php 3:1. Τὸ λοιπὸν, Furthermore) a phrase used in continuing a discourse, 1Th 4:1. So λοιπὸν and τοῦ λοιποῦ are used.—[28] τὰ αὐτὰ, the same things) concerning joy. [The proper principle on which to rest our rejoicing is presently presented, namely, to be in communion with Christ.—V. g.]—οὐκ ὀκνηρὸν, is not troublesome) For it is pleasant for a person who feels joy to write: rejoice. The contrary is found at Gal 6:17.—ὑμῖν δὲ ἀσφαλές, but for you it is safe) Spiritual joy produces the best safety against errors, especially Jewish errors, Php 3:2.

[28] Χαίρετε ἐν Κυρίῳ, rejoice in the Lord) dost thou thyself rejoice with all diligence (earnestness) and constancy in the Lord Jesus Christ? ch. Php 4:4.—V. g.

Bengel's Gnomon of the New Testament — English translation (T&T Clark, Edinburgh, 1860) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Php_3:1. Τὸ λοιπόν] introduces what is still to be done by the readers in addition to what has been hitherto communicated; see on Eph_6:10. Hence it is of frequent occurrence towards the close of the epistles, as bringing in a further request, exhortation, etc. Comp. Php_4:8; 2Co_13:11; 1Th_4:1; 2Th_3:1. To the closing address thus introduced, but at once abandoned again in Php_3:2, Paul would have attached his giving of thanks for the aid sent to him (comp. Php_4:8; Php_4:10 ff.). This is contrary to the view of Schinz and van Hengel, who, from the fact that Paul has not yet expressed his thanks, conclude that he did not at this point desire to proceed to the closing of the letter. We need not search for a connection with what precedes (Chrysostom: ἔχετε Ἐπαφρόδιτον, διʼ ὃν ἠλγεῖτε, ἔχετε Τιμόθεον, ἔρχομαι κἀγώ, τὸ εὐαγγέλιον ἐπιδίδωσι· τί ὑμῖν λείπει λοιπόν; comp. Oecumenius, Theophylact, Erasmus, Estius, Cornelius a Lapide, Michaelis, and others). The preceding topic is closed, and the exhortation beginning with τὸ λοιπ. which now follows stands by itself; so that we are not even justified in saying that Paul here passes from the particular to the general (Schinz, Matthies), but must simply assume that he is proceeding to the conclusion, which he desired to commence with this general encouragement.

χαίρετε ἐν κυρίῳ] is a summons to Christian joyfulness, which is not κατὰ κόσμον (see Chrysostom), but has its ground in Christ, and is thereby specifically defined, inasmuch as Christthrough the Holy Spiritrules in the believing heart; hence the χαρὰ πνεύματος ἁγίου (1Th_1:6) or ἐν πνεύματι ἁγίῳ (Rom_14:17) are in substance not different from this (comp. Gal_5:22). The subsequent double repetition of this encouragement (Php_4:4) is the result of the apostles special love for his readers, and of the whole tone of feeling pervading the epistle. Moreover, in ἐν κυρίῳ we are not to seek for a new special element, preparing the way for the transition to the explanations which follow (Weiss, Hofmann); for Paul could not in what went before mean any other joy, either on his own part (Php_1:18) or on the part of his readers (Php_2:17 f., 28), and in other passages also he does not add to χαίρετε the self-evident definition ἐν κυρίῳ (2Co_13:11; 1Th_5:16). Another joy in the Christian life he knew not at all.

τὰ αὐτὰ γράφειν] Hic incipit de pseudo-apostolis agere, Calvin. After χαίρ. χ ἐν κ. there is a pause; Paul breaks off. τὰ αὐτά has been erroneously referred to χαίρ. ἐν κ., and in that case the retrospective reference which Paul had in view is either not explained at all (Bengel, Zachariae), or is believed to be found in Php_2:18 (van Hengel, Wiesinger), or in Php_1:27 f. (Matthies, Rilliet), or in Php_1:27 to Php_2:16 (Storr). This view is at variance, not indeed with the plural τὰ αὐτά (see, on the contrary, Stallbaum, ad Plat. Apol. p. 19 D; Mätzner, ad Antiph. p. 153; Kühner II. 1, p. 60), but with the facts, first, that there is no express summons whatever to Christian joyfulness generally, given in the previous portion of the epistle (not even in Php_2:18); secondly, that so simple and natural a summonswhich, moreover, occurs again twice in Php_4:4would certainly have least of all given rise to an apology for repetition; and lastly, that ἀσφαλές, in accordance with its idea (without danger), points not to the repetition of a summons of this kind, but to a warning, such as follows immediately in the context.[145] The accusation of poverty of thought (Baur) is therefore all the more groundless here. And as the altogether vague reference of Theodoret and Erasmus (Annotat.) to the numerous exhortations contained in the epistle generally, or to the fundamental tone of the letter hitherto (Weiss), is simply at variance with the literal import of the words, τὰ αὐτά cannot be interpreted as applicable to anything but the subsequent warning against the false teachers. This warning, however, has not occurred previously, either at Php_1:15 f., or indirectly in Php_1:27, as Lünemann thinks, or in Php_1:27 to Php_2:18, as Ewald assumes. Hence many have caught at the explanation: eadem repetere, quae praesens dixeram (Pelagius, Theodore of Mopsuestia, so also Erasmus, Paraphr., Calvin, Beza, Balduin, Estius, Calovius, Wolf, Schrader, and others; de Wette undecidedly). But this quae praesens dixeram is quite gratuitously imported; it must at least have been indicated by τὰ αὐτὰ καὶ γρ. ὑμ. or in some other way. The same objection applies against Wieseler (Chronol. d. apost. Zeitalt. p. 458 f.), who takes τὰ αὐτά as contrasted with the oral communications, which would be made to the readers by Epaphroditus and especially by Timothy. The only correct explanation, therefore, that remains is the assumption (which, however, is expressly rejected already by Theodoret) that Paul had already written what follows in an earlier epistle to the Philippians [146] which is not preserved, and that he here repeats the same. So Aegidius Hunnius, Haenlein, Bertholdt, Flatt, Köhler, in the Annal. d. ges. Theol. 1834, III. 1, p. 18 f.; Feilmoser, Bleek, Jatho, Schenkel, Bisping, Hilgenfeld, Hofmann; de Wette undecidedly. It must remain uncertain, however, whether this repetition covers Php_3:2 only, or Php_3:3 also, or a still larger portion of the sequel; as also, how far the repetition is a literal one, which seems to be the case with Php_3:2 from its peculiar character.

ὀκνηρόν] irksome, matter of scruple (Dem. 777. 5; Theocr. xxiv. 35; Pind. Nem. xi. 28; Herodian vi. 9, 7; Soph. O. R. 834), comp. οὐκ ὀκνητέον, Polyb. i. 14. 7, also Plat. Ep. II. 310 D: τἀληθῆ λέγειν οὔτε ὀκνήσω οὔτε σἰσχυνοῦμαι.

ἀσφαλές] safe, so that ye will the more firmly rely thereon for the determination of your conduct. Comp. Act_25:26; Heb_6:19; Wis_7:23; Plat. Rep. 450 E; Phaed. p. 100 D E; Dem. 372. 2, 1460. 15. Hofmann, without any precedent of usage, assigns to ὀκνηρόν the sense of indolent cowardice, and takes ἀσφαλές as prudent, which linguistically is admissible (Heind. ad Plat. Soph. p. 231 A), but would be unsuitable to the ὑμῖν. The apostle wishes to say, that the repetition is for himself not irksome (ὄκνος, haesitatio), and is for his readers an ἀσφαλὲς τεκμήριον (Eur. Rhes. 94.) to be attended to.

[145] The expedient to which Wiesinger has recourse is gratuitously introduced, when he connects the χαίρετε ἐν κ. more closely with the warning that follows by imagining that, in χαίρ. ἐν κ., he detects already the idea on which the sequel is based, namely the στήκετε ἐν κυρίῳ, Php_4:1.

[146] Comp. also Credner, Einl. I. p. 333.

NOTE.

This exegetical result, that, previously to our epistle, Paul had already written another to the Philippians,[147] is confirmed by Polycarp,[148] who, ad 3, says: τοῦ μακαρίου κ. ἐνδόξου Παύλου, ὃς γενόμενος ἐν ὑμῖν κατὰ πρόσωπον τῶν τότε ἀνθρώπων ἐδίδαξεν ἀκριβῶς κ. βεβαίως τὸν περὶ ἀληθείας λόγον, ὃς καὶ ἀπὼν ὑμῖν ἔγραψεν ἐπιστολὰς, εἰς ἃς ἐὰν ἐγκύπτητε, δυνήσεσθε οἰκοδομεῖσθαι κ.τ.λ. It is true that the plur. in this passage (ἐπιστολὰς, εἰς ἅς) is usually explained as referring to one epistle (see Cotelerius in loc.; and Fabricius, Cod. Apocr. II. p. 914 f.; Hilgenfeld, Apost. Väter, p. 210; J. B. Lightfoot, p. 138 f.), just as it is well known that also in profane authors ἑπιστολαί (comp. literae) is used of one despatch (Thuc. i. 132. 6, viii. 39. 2), sometimes generally in a generic sense as plural of the category, and sometimes specially of commissions and orders. See Schaefer, Plut. VI. p. 446; Blomf. and Stanl. ad Aesch. Prom. 3; Rettig, Quaest. Phil. II. p. 37 f. But there is the less ground for assuming this construction here, since doctrinal epistles, both in the N. T. and also in the apostolic Fathers, are always described by the singular when only one epistle is intended, and by the plural (as in 1Co_16:3; 2Co_10:9-11; 2Pe_3:16; comp. Act_9:2; Act_22:5) if more than one are meant,a practice from which there is no exception (not even in 1Co_16:3), as, in fact, Polycarp, in regard to ἐπιστολή, elsewhere very definitely distinguishes between the singular and plural. See ch. 13: τὰς ἐπιστολὰς Ἰγνατίου τὰς πεμφθείσας ἡμῖν ὑπʼ αὑτοῦ καὶ ἄλλας ὅσας εἴχομεν παρʼ ἡμῖνʼ ἐπέμψαμεν ὑμῖν, καθὼς ἑνετείλασθε· αἵτινες ὑποτεταγμέναι εἰσὶ τῆ πιστολῇ ταύτῃ. In order to prove that Polycarp in ch. 3. did not mean more than one epistle to the Philippians, an appeal has been made to ch. 4., where, in the Latin version, which alone has been preserved, it is said: Ego autem nihil tale sensi in vobis vel audivi, in quibus laboravit beatus Paulus, qui estis (non-genuine addition: laudati) in principio epistolae ejus; de vobis enim gloriatur in omnibus ecclesiis, quæ Deum solae tunc cognoverant, nos autem nondum noveramus. But epistolae ejus cannot here be the epistle to the Philippians, for the idea: ye are in the beginning of his epistle, would be simply absurd; epistolae is, on the contrary, the nominative plural, and the sense is: Ye are originally his epistles, that is, his letters of recommendation, in which phrase allusion is made to 2Co_3:1 ff.[149] The correctness of this explanation, which Wieseler has substantially adopted, is corroborated by the sequel: de vobis enim gloriatur, etc.

It is, moreover, à priori intelligible and likely enough that Paul should have corresponded with this churchwhich enjoyed his most intimate confidence, and the founding of which marked his entrance on his European laboursat an earlier period than merely now, almost at the close of his life. And Polycarp was sufficiently close to the time of the apostle, not merely to have inferred such a correspondence from our passage, but to have had a historical knowledge of it (in opposition to Hofmann).

[147] Ewald also acknowledges the composition of more than one epistle to the Philippians, but finds traces of them not here, but at Php_2:12, Php_3:18.

[148] I cannot at once accept the view that the passages in question, ch. 3 and 11, are interpolated (Ritschl, altkath. Kirche, p. 588 ff.). The interpolations in the Ignatian epistles are at any rate of another kind. Besides, we have from Polycarp only the one epistle; and we have therefore no sufficient objective standard of comparison, in the absence of which a judgment founded on taste is very uncertain. But even assuming the interpolation, we should still have the result that the interpolator was acquainted with several epistles of Paul to the Philippians. Otherwise he would have had no reason for using the plural, especially as it was already distinction enough for the church to have had one epistle addressed to it by the apostle.

[149] Hofmann also explains the expression from 2Co_3:1 ff., but errs in taking epistolae as the genitive; he makes this epistle to be the whole of the Christians gathered by Paul, and thus represents Polyearp as declaring, in reference to the Philippian church, that it stands first in this epistle, because it is reckoned among his earliest acquisitions. According to this interpretation, a vast aggregate of churches would be depicted as one epistle, in which one church would stand written first, and others after it, each therefore being marked by name in the order of its date. What a different picture this would yield from that presented in 2 Corinthians 3, and one, too, delineated singularly enough! And how unsuitable would such a precedence, as to time, be for the church at Philippi! By how long a period had the establishment of all the churches of Asia preceded it! Hofmanns objection to our view, viz. that the present estis would be unsuitable, does not apply, since Polycarp realizes the state of matters as it stood with the church in principio (ἐν ἀρχῇ, i.e. in the earliest times of the gospel), as present; hence also he subsequently says gloriatur (not gloriabatur). The conception is this: Paul in all the churches of that early Christian age boasts of the excellent Philippian church, and so this church serves him as so many letters of recommendation, which by his gloriari he communicates, and as it were reads before, those other churches.

Meyer — Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament — English translation by Peter Christie, edited by Frederick Crombie (T&T Clark, 1880) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Phi 3:1-3 . A SALUTATION CHANGED INTO A WARNING.

Phi 3:1 . τὸ λοιπόν . Probably A.V. rightly translates “finally” (summing up all his exhortations to them). It must, however, be remembered that in late Greek λοιπόν had come to mean scarcely more than οὖν . Even in Plato, Gorg. , 458 [17] D , there is something very closely approaching this usage. Cf. Mat 26:45 (and on it Aars in Zw. Th [18] . , xxxviii., 3, pp. 378 383), Act 27:20 (where Blass translates by jam ), 2Ti 4:8 . For instances in Epictetus see Class. Review , iii., p. 71. It is used regularly in this sense in Modern Greek. ( Cf. also Schmid, Atticismus , iii., p. 135.) χαίρετε . This is the impression he wishes to leave upon them. Cf. chap. Phi 2:18 , Phi 4:4 . τὰ αὐτά . Alf [19] . , Ws [20] . , P. W. Schmidt and others refer this to his injunctions concerning joy. But that explanation does not seem to accord with the rest of the verse. “To go on writing the same thing is not irksome (tedious) to me, while for you it is safe.” In what cogent sense would it be safe to urge them to rejoice? But an excellent meaning is found when we connect the words with the warning that follows. That warning is expressly given for their safety . Nothing is more probable than that Paul had frequent correspondence with the Philippians. He must, for instance, have thanked them for their various gifts. In all likelihood, then, τὰ αὐ . refers to warnings formerly addressed to them against dangerous teachers apt to lead them astray. He prepares the way for a similar utterance here by a certain tone of apology. Perhaps the slight friction in the Philippian Church, which is hinted at here and there, may have been connected with tendencies in the direction of Judaising. If a connexion is necessary between χαίρετε and the subsequent warnings (which is very doubtful in an informal letter like this), it is obvious that the formation of parties (Jewish and heathen-Christian) would, above all things, mar the spirit of Christian joy. [Clemen ( Einheitlichk. , pp. 139 140) cuts the knot by deriving the latter half of Phi 3:1 from the redactor. The whole section from Phi 3:2 to Phi 4:3 belongs to an old letter to the Philippians. Chap. Phi 4:4 is the continuation of chap. Phi 3:1 a .] Franke, on the occurrence of this strong warning towards the close of the letter, well compares the parallel case of Luther who, in prospect of death, could not depart without wishing for his followers not only the blessing of God but also hatred of the Pope (Myr [21] . , 5 p. 13).

[17] Codex Claromontanus (sæc. vi.), a Græco-Latin MS. at Paris, edited by Tischendorf in 1852.

[18] . Th. Zeitschr. f. wissenschaftl. Theologie .

[19] Alford’s Greek Testament .

[20] . Weiss.

[21] Meyer.

The Expositor's Greek Testament, edited by W. Robertson Nicoll (1897–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

1. Τὸ λοιπόν. “For the rest”; “For what remains.” So below, Php 4:8; and Eph 6:10: τὸ λοιπὸν … ἐνδυναμοῦσθε, κτλ. For St Paul’s use of the phrase see also (λοιπὸν) 1Co 1:16; (ὃ δὲ λοιπὸν) 1Co 4:2; 2Co 13:1; 2Th 3:1, and (τοῦ λοιποῦ) Gal 6:17. On the whole it seems not so much to introduce an immediate conclusion (as “finally” would do) as to mark a transition on the way to it. It “signifies for the rest, besides, moreover, … forming a transition to other things to which the attention of the … reader is directed” (Grimm, ed. Thayer, s.v. λοιπός).

Here the Apostle is approaching the end of his Epistle, entering on its last large topic, the difference between a true Gospel and a false. Hitherto, on the whole, with much accessory matter, he has been dealing with the blessedness of unity. Now he will deliver a definite message about saving truth in view of particular errors; and then he will close. Τὸ λοιπόν fitly introduces this.

The connexion of the passage has been debated; particularly the bearing of the words τὰ αὐτὰ γράφειν ὑμῖν, following on Χαίρετε ἐν κυρίῳ. No previous injunction to rejoice appears in this Epistle; and there is no trace of a previous Epistle, which might have spoken so. Bp Lightfoot’s solution is as follows: “The same things” are the exhortations to unity, often made already, and which St Paul was now just about to reinforce. But he was interrupted, and did not dictate again till, perhaps, some days had intervened. He then dropped the intended appeal, and turned instead to the subject of doctrinal error. Lightfoot accordingly, in his edition, breaks the text at the close of Php 3:1, and regards Php 3:2 as the opening of a new paragraph or chapter.

But can we think it likely that St Paul, with his scribe beside him, would have let the Epistle go forth in a state so disjointed?

The following seems a more probable theory: St Paul sees at Philippi the risk of doctrinal error; error which in one way or another would undervalue “Christ, and Him crucified.” The true antidote would be a developed and rejoicing insight into Christ and His work, such as had been given to himself. This shall now be his theme. And this, in a sense, he has touched on already, by his frequent allusions to the Saviour’s union with His people, and above all by such passages as Php 1:20-23, Php 2:5-18. So in treating now of Christ as their righteousness, life, peace, and glory, and of “rejoicing in Him” as such, he is “writing the same things” as before, only in a more explicit way. All “other gospels,” whatever their details, were alike in this, that they beclouded that great joy. Thus the special injunction to “rejoice” affects both the past context and the following; particularly it leads on to Php 3:3 below, καυχώμενοι ἐν Χ. Ἰ.

“From the loss of our glory in Thee, preserve us” (Litany of the Unitas Fratrum, the “Moravian” Church).

χαίρετε. The R.V. margin has “Or, farewell.” But the rendering “rejoice” (A.V. and text of R.V.) is supported by Php 4:3, which seems to take up this phrase, and adds παντότε. And already in Php 2:18 we have had χαίρειν in (obviously) the sense of rejoicing. The Latin Versions read gaudete in Domino. Chrysostom writes in loc. αἱ θλίψεις … αἱ κατὰ Χριστὸν ἔχουσι χαράν.

τὰ αὐτὰ. See the notes above, on the connexion of the passage.

ἐμοὶ μὲν οὐκ ὀκνηρόν, ὑμῖν δὲ ἀσφαλές. The words form an iambic trimeter[3] of a rhythm frequent in the Comedians. They may be a quotation. In 1Co 15:33 we have almost certainly such a quotation: φθείρουσιν ἤθη χρήσθʼ (or χρηστὰ) ὁμιλίαι κακαί: “Ill converse cankers fair morality[4].” For similar apparent verse-quotations in the N.T. see Act 17:28, ἐκ τοῦ γὰρ γένος ἐσμέν: Tit 1:12, Κρῆτες ἀεὶ ψεῦσται κτλ.: and perhaps Jas 1:17, πᾶσα δόσις ἀγαθὴ καὶ πᾶν δώρημα τέλειον.

[3] I owe this remark to a friend.

[4] The words occur in a fragment of the Thais of Menander; but Socrates (the historian) adduces (Php 3:16, ad fin.) the verse as proof that St Paul was not ἀνήκοος τοῦ Εὐριπίδου δραμάτων. (And cp. Clem. Alex. Strom. i. 14, 59.) “Perhaps Menander borrowed … from Euripides” (Alford). Socrates (ibid.) quotes Tit 1:12; Act 17:28; as proofs of St Paul’s acquaintance with Epimenides and Aratus respectively.

We may render here, rhythmically, “To me not irksome, it is safe for you.”

Cambridge Greek Testament for Schools and Colleges (Cambridge University Press, 1896; 21 vols, various authors incl. Carr, Maclear, Plummer, Farrar, Lumby, Moule, M. R. James, Simcox) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Ch.

3:1-4:1.] Warning against certain Judaizers,—enforced by his own example (1-16): also against immoral persons (17-4:1).

1.] He appears to have been closing his Epistle (τὸ λοιπόν, and reff.), but to have again gone off, on the vehement mention of the Judaizers, into an explanation of his strong term κατατομή. Chrys., al., find a connexion with the foregoing, but it is farfetched (ἔχετε Ἐπαφρ., διʼ ὃν ἤλγειτε, ἔχετε Τιμόθ., ἔρχομαι κἀγώ. τὸ εὐαγγέλιον ἐπιδίδωσι· τί ὑμῖν λείπει λοιπόν;): the sense is evidently closed with ch. 3:30.

τὰ αὐτά] It seems to me that Wiesinger has rightly apprehended the reference of this somewhat difficult sentence. The χαίρετε ἐν κυρίῳ, taken up again by the οὕτως στήκετε ἐν κυρίῳ, ch. 4:1, is evidently put here emphatically, with direct reference to the warning which follows—let your joy (your boast) be in the Lord. And this same exhortation, χαίρειν, is in fact the groundtone of the whole Epistle. See ch. 1:18, 25; 2:17; 4:4, where the πάλιν ἐρῶ seems to refer back again to this saying. So that there is no difficulty in imagining that the Apostle may mean χαίρετε by the τὰ αὐτά. The word ἀσφαλές is no objection to this: because the χαίρ. ἐν κυρ. is in fact an introduction to the warning which follows: a provision, by upholding the antagonist duty, against their falling into deceit. And thus all the speculation, whether τὰ αὐτά refer to a lost Epistle, or to words uttered (γράφειν?) when he was with them, falls to the ground. And the inference from Polycarp’s words in his Epistle to these Philippians, § 3, p. 1008, ὃς καὶ ἀπὼν ὑμῖν ἔγραψεν ἐπιστολάς, may be a true one, but does not belong here.

ὀκνηρόν] troublesome: Mey. quotes from Plato, Ep. ii. 310 D, τἀληθῆ λέγειν οὔτε ὀκνήσω οὔτε αἰσχυνοῦμαι.

Henry Alford, The Greek Testament (1849–1861) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

3:1-3. A WARNING AGAINST FALSE TEACHERS

As for the rest, my brethren, whatever your trials, past, present, or future, continue to rejoice in the Lord. I am not backward about writing to you concerning a matter of which I have spoken in former letters, but I am moved by my anxiety for your safety to refer to it again. Beware of those dogs; those evil workers; those whose boasted circumcision is no better than a physical mutilation without any spiritual significance. It is we Christians who are the true ‘circumcision’; whose service is prompted by the Spirit of God; whose rejoicing is in Christ Jesus as the only source of true righteousness, and who do not trust the flesh.

It is claimed by many that Paul is here about to close the epistle, but that his attention is suddenly diverted, perhaps by some new reports of the doings of his Judaistic adversaries; and that he is thus drawn on to add to his letter what he had not originally intended. Nothing in the text warrants this conclusion. It is, of course, possible that fresh thoughts may have come to the apostle in the course of his writing; but, on the other hand, we are not forced to conclude that the main topics were not in his mind from the first. (See Introd. VII.)

1. τὸ λοιπόν: ‘as to what remains.’ It may mean ‘finally,’ as 2Co 13:11; or ‘henceforth,’ as Mar 14:41; 1Co 7:29; Heb 10:13; 2Ti 4:8; or ‘for the rest,’ ‘besides,’ ‘as to what remains,’ as 1Th 4:1; 2Th 3:1. The formula is common with Paul in cases where he attaches, in a somewhat loose way, even in the midst of an epistle, a new subject to that which he has been discussing. In 1Th 4:1 two entire chapters follow the phrase, and here the special subject introduced by it is followed by several others. If Paul had been intending to close his letter, it is likely that he would have added his thanks for the Philippians’ remittance before he reached τὸ λοιπόν. The formula therefore merely introduces what follows. The preceding topic is closed, and he passes to another.

Ellic., Ead., Lightf., render ‘finally,’ but as an introduction to what remains. ‘For the rest,’ Kl., De W., Lips., Weizs., Beet.

χαίρετε ἐν κυρίῳ: ‘rejoice in the Lord.’ (Comp. 1:18, 2:18, 4:4, 10.)

Not as Lightf., ‘farewell,’ for which there is no sufficient ground. In class. the word is used as a salutation both at meeting and parting; but it does not occur in N.T. in the sense of ‘farewell.’ 2Co 13:11 is more than doubtful.

The exhortation need not be specifically referred either to what precedes or to what follows. There has been a reason for encouraging them to rejoice in the face of their former trials, as there is a like reason in the prospect of coming trials of which he is about to speak. The summons to rejoice is general, in view of all trials, past, present, and future, as well as of the eternal consolations of the gospel.

ἐν κυρίῳ: Comp. 1:14, 2:19, 24. The sphere or element of rejoicing.

Several of the older expositors found in ἐν κ. a contrast of the joy in God with the bitterness of the cross (Calv.); or with all worldly things (Theo., Mop., 5. Lyra); or with works of the flesh and fleshly renown (Ans.); or with the Jewish errors treated in the following verses (Calov., Croc., Pisc.).

τὰ αὐτὰ γράφειν: The reference is probably to a former letter, or to former letters to the Philippians, which are lost. (See Lightf.’s excursus on “Lost Epistles to the Philippians,” Comm. p. 138.) This has been inferred from Polyc. ad Phil. iii. (Comp. 13., and see Lightf.’s Ignatius, iii. pp. 327, 348.) The question turns on Polyc.’s use of ἐπιστολαὶ, whether it means one letter or several.

Lightf. decides for the single letter, and collects in his excursus a large number of passages to show the use of the plu. for ‘a letter.’ Mey. thinks that the plu. in Polyc. indicates several letters, and affirms that doctrinal epistles, both in N.T. and the Apost. Fath., are always described in the sing. where only one letter is intended, and in the plu. where several are meant. There can be no doubt that the plu. is used of a single letter in individual cases; but the question of usage is not definitely enough settled to warrant a decision.

Our conclusion rests rather on the antecedent probability of lost letters. Considering Paul’s connection with so many churches during at least twenty-five years, it is highly probable that he wrote more than thirteen letters, and some of them important. Intimations of such are found in 1Co 5:9; 2Co 10:10, 2Co 10:11; 2Th 2:15, 2Th 3:17. If what have come down to us are his only epistles, we must suppose that he wrote several letters within a short time, while at long intervals he wrote nothing. (See Jowett, Eps. of St. Paul, 3d ed. i. p. 107.) Lightf. refers τὰ αὐτὰ to matter in this epistle concerning divisions or dissensions in the Philippian church; but intimations to that effect in 1:27, 2:2, 3, 4, are too slight to warrant this inference. The reference is probably to the character and work of the Judaising Christians. To refer τὰ αὐτὰ to χαίρετε (Alf., Weiss) would be to make Paul say: ‘It is not irksome for me to write to you to rejoice, but it is safe for you.’

ὀκνηρόν: ‘irksome’; orig. ‘sluggish,’ ‘slothful.’ (See Mat 25:26; Rom 12:11.) Frequent in LXX, in Prov.

ὑμῖν δὲ ἀσφαλές: ‘and for you it is safe.’ Ἀσφ. primarily ‘steadfast,’ ‘stable’; thence ‘trustworthy’; a thing to be relied on as profitable. Not as Luth., Erasm., with an active meaning, ‘that which makes safe or confirms,’ which is contrary to usage.

1. The beginning, the intermediate stages, and the sum of all are Christ (vs. 9).

International Critical Commentary — older volumes (1896–1929), various authors — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Finally [το λοιπον] . Lit., for the rest. Frequent in Paul 's writings in introducing the conclusions of his letters. See 1Th 4:1; 2Th 3:1; 2Co 13:11, note. Evidently Paul was about to close his letter, when his thought was directed into another channel - the Judaizing teachers, and their attempts to undermine his influence.

Rejoice [χαιρετε] . See on 2Co 13:11.

The same things. It is doubtful what is referred to. Possibly previous letters, or the dissensions in the Church.

Grievous [οκνηρον] . Only here, Mt 25:26; Rom 12:11, in both instances rendered slothful. From ojknew to delay. Hence, in classical Greek, shrinking, backward, unready. The idea of delay underlies the secondary sense, burdensome, troublesome. It is the vexation arising from weary waiting, and which appears in the middle English irken to tire or to become tired, cognate with the Latin urgere to press, and English irk, irksome, work.

Marvin R. Vincent, Word Studies in the New Testament (1887–1900) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

Which you have oftentimes heard of me.

A conclusion of those things which have been before said, to wit, that they go forward cheerfully in the Lord.

A preface to the next admonition that followeth, to take good heed and beware of false apostles, which join Circumcision with Christ, (that is to say, justification by works, with free justification by faith) and beat into men’s heads the ceremonies which are abolished: for true exercises of godliness and charity. And he calleth them dogs as profane barkers, and evil workmen, because they neglected true works and did not teach the true use of them. To be short, he calleth them Concision, because in urging Circumcision, they cut off themselves and others from the Church.

Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain. Text via Bolls.life.

CHAPTER III.

The apostle exhorts the Philippians to rejoice in the Lord, 1.

And to beware of false teachers, 2.

Shows that Christians are the true circumcision, who worship

God in the Spirit, 3.

And that himself had more reason to trust in the flesh than any

of the Jews, 4-6.

But that he counted all things loss for Christ, 7-11.

He longs after a conformity to Christ in his death, and presses

onward to the attainment of his high calling, 12-14.

Exhorts them to be like-minded, 15-17.

Warns them against certain persons who were enemies to the cross

of Christ, 18, 19.

Shows the nature of their heavenly privileges, and the

resurrection and glorification of the human body, 20, 21.

NOTES ON CHAP. III.

Verse 1. Rejoice in the Lord.] Be always happy; but let that happiness be such as you derive from the Lord.

To write the same things] He means those which he had formerly preached to them or to other Churches, for he had but one Gospel; and we may rest assured that the doctrine of this epistle was the same with his preaching.

For you it is safe.] It is much better to have these Divine things committed to writing than confided to memory. By the latter they may be either lost or corrupted, by the former they will be preserved.

Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

1 Rejoice in the Lord This is a conclusion from what goes before, for as Satan never ceased to distress them with daily rumors, he bids them divest themselves of anxiety and be of good courage. In this way he exhorts them to constancy, that they may not fall back from the doctrine which they have once received. The phrase henceforward denotes a continued course, that, in the midst of many hinderances, they may not cease to exercise holy joy. It is a rare excellence when Satan endeavors to exasperate us by means of the bitterness of the cross, so as to make God’s name unpleasant , to take such satisfaction in the simple tasting of God’s grace, that all annoyances, sorrows, anxieties, and griefs are sweetened.

To write the same thing to you. Here he begins to speak of the false Apostles, with whom, however, he does not fight hand to hand, as in the Epistle to the Galatians, but in a few words severely exposes them, as far as was sufficient. For as they had simply made an attempt upon the Philippians, and had not made an inroad upon them, it was not so necessary to enter into any regular disputation with the view of refuting errors, to which they had never lent an ear. Hence he simply admonishes them to be diligent and attentive in detecting impostors and guarding against them.

In the first place, however, he calls them dogs; the metaphor being grounded upon this — that, for the sake of filling their belly, they assailed true doctrine with their impure barking. Accordingly, it is as though he had said, — impure or profane persons; for I do not agree with those who think that they are so called on the ground of envying others, or biting them

In the second place, he calls them evil workers, meaning, that, under the pretext of building up the Church, they did nothing but ruin and destroy everything; for many are busily occupied who would do better to remain idle. As the public crier on being asked by Gracchus in mockery, on the ground of his sitting idle, what he was doing? had his answer ready, “Nay, but what are you doing?” for he was the ringleader of a ruinous sedition. Hence Paul would have a distinction made among workers, that believers may be on their guard against those that are evil.

In the third term employed, there is an elegant (προσωνομασία) play upon words. They boasted that they were the circumcision: he turns aside this boasting by calling them the concision , inasmuch as they tore asunder the unity of the Church. In this we have an instance tending to shew that the Holy Spirit in his organs has not in every case avoided wit and humor, yet so as at the same time to keep at a distance from such pleasantry as were unworthy of his majesty. There are innumerable examples in the Prophets, and especially in Isaiah, so that there is no profane author that abounds more in agreeable plays upon words, and figurative forms of expression. We ought, however, more carefully still to observe the vehemence with which Paul inveighs against the false Apostles, which will assuredly break forth wherever there is the ardor of pious zeal. But in the mean time we must be on our guard lest any undue warmth or excessive bitterness should creep in under a pretext of zeal.

When he says, that to write the same things is not grievous to him, he seems to intimate that he had already written on some other occasion to the Philippians. There would, however, be no inconsistency in understanding him as meaning, that he now by his writings reminds them of the same things as they had frequently heard him say, when he was with them. For there can be no doubt that he had often intimated to them in words, when he was with them, how much they ought to be on their guard against such pests: yet he does not grudge to repeat these things, because the Philippians would have incurred danger in the event of his silence. And, unquestionably, it is the part of a good pastor, not merely to supply the flock with pasture, and to rule the sheep by his guidance, but to drive away the wolves when threatening to make an attack upon the fold, and that not merely on one occasion, but so as to be constantly on the watch, and to be indefatigable. For as thieves and robbers (John 10:8) are constantly on the watch for the destruction of the Church, what excuse will the pastor have if, after courageously repelling them in several instances, he gives way on occasion of the ninth or tenth attack?

He says also, that a repetition of this nature is profitable to the Philippians, lest they should be—as is wont to happen occasionally—of an exceedingly fastidious humor, and despise it as a thing that was superfluous. For many are so difficult to please, that they cannot bear that the same thing should be said to them a second time, and, in the mean time, they do not consider that what is inculcated upon them daily is with difficulty retained in their memory ten years afterwards. But if it was profitable to the Philippians to listen to this exhortation of Paul—to be on their guard against wolves, what do Papists mean who will not allow that any judgment should be formed as to their doctrine? For to whom, I pray you, did Paul address himself when he said, Beware? Was it not to those whom they do not allow to possess any right to judge? And of the same persons Christ says, in like manner,

My sheep hear my voice, and they follow me; they flee from, a stranger, and they hear not his voice. (John 10:5, 27.)

John Calvin's Commentaries (1540-1563) — public domain. Text from the Calvin Translation Society English edition (1840s-50s) via the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (ccel.org). Calvin's coverage is partial (roughly two-thirds of the Bible); uncommented books and verses are honest gaps, never fabricated. The 19th-century editor's footnotes and remarks are omitted so the notes are faithfully Calvin's own voice.

Finally, my brethren, rejoice in the Lord,.... The Syriac version reads, "in our Lord", i.e. Christ. The apostle seems as if he was about to conclude his epistle; and therefore, as if he was taking his farewell of this church, and giving his last advice to them, he exhorts them in a most affectionate manner, as his dear brethren in a spiritual relation, that they would make Christ their chief joy; that whatever sorrow they might have on account of his bonds, or the sickness of Epaphroditus, yet, he observes they had reason to rejoice in their Lord and Saviour; and however, it might be matter of rejoicing to them to hear of his hope of coming once more to them, and of the recovery of their minister and his return to them, yet Christ should be the principal object of their joy. A believer has always reason to rejoice in Christ; in the greatness of his person, he being in the form of God, and equal to him, and therefore able to save his to the uttermost by his obedience and death, and has interest enough in heaven to make his intercession prevalent and successful and power to keep safe all that are committed to him; and in the fitness of his person to be a Mediator, and daysman, to take care of things pertaining to the glory of God, and to make reconciliation for sin; and in the fulness of his person, he having all grace in him for his people, which is all theirs, and with joy may they draw water out of the full wells of salvation in him; and in the beauty of his person which surpasses all others, a sight of which fills with joy unspeakable, and full of glory. They may, and should rejoice, as they sometimes do, in his salvation; in the contrivance of it by infinite wisdom; in the impetration of it by himself; and in the application of it by his spirit; and that because hereby justice is satisfied, the law is magnified and made honourable, sin is finished, and an everlasting righteousness brought in. Also they are called upon to rejoice in his resurrection, which is for their justification; in his ascension, seeing he then received gifts for men; and in his session at the right hand of God, which is in their nature; and in his intercession which is to their advantage; and in all the relations he stands in to them, as head, husband, father, brother, friend; and in everything that is his, and that belongs unto him, as his Gospel, ordinances, ways, and worship,

To write the same things to you. The apostle finding he had more time on his hands, or fresh thoughts occurred to him, writes on, and makes an apology for writing the same things, which he had either wrote to other churches, or which he had delivered when first among them, or which he had since wrote to them. For sometimes it is necessary to say and write the same things over and over again, partly that they may be the better understood, and partly that they may be more strongly fixed in the memory; as also, that the saints may be the more established in the present truth: and which he says,

to me indeed is not grievous; or troublesome; he found no backwardness to it, nor sluggishness in it; he was not loath to do it, nor was it wearisome to him; or made him slothful, as the Arabic renders it; nor was he afraid to repeat what he had wrote, or again to warn them against false teachers, of whom he stood in no fear:

but for you it is safe; or "necessary", as the Vulgate Latin version reads, being a means of preserving them from the error of the wicked; for though the saints are safe in Christ, and can never finally and totally be deceived, yet the Gospel, and the frequent ministration of it, are a means of keeping them from the deception of evil men; for as the Syriac version renders it, "they make you more cautious"; when truth is repeated, and afresh confirmed, it guards against falling in with damnable heresies. And so the Arabic version renders it, "is a guard", or "garrison to you".

John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.

1 Finally, my brethren, rejoice in the Lord. To write the same things to you, to me indeed is not grievous, but for you it is safe.

Ver. 1. Rejoice] Or farewell in the Lord. Salutem in sospitatore.

To write the same things to you] So 1Co 5:9; Joh 15:1-5. Some gather out of Mat 5:1; cf. Luk 6:20, that our Saviour preached the same sermon twice over. Men are dull to conceive, hard to believe, apt to forget, and slow to practise heavenly truths, and had therefore great need to have them much pressed, and often inculcated. Neither let any cry out, Occidit miseros crambe repetita magistros. Surfeit not of God’s manna, say not it is a light meat, because lightly come by, or the same again. Austin persuades the preacher so long to pursue and stand upon the beating and repeating of one and the same point, till by the gesture and countenance of the hearers he perceives that they understand and relish it. It was Melancthon’s wish, that men did not only teach the same things, but in iisdem verbis, in iisdem syllabis, in the same words, in the same syllables. He himself went over the Epistle to the Romans ten different times in his ordinary lectures. (Scultet. Annal.) Hippias liked not to have αει παυτα, ever the same things; but Socrates desired to have ου μονον αει ταυτα, αλλα και περι των αυτω, not only always the same words, but about the very same matters; since a good thing cannot be heard too often.

John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Finally, my brethren, rejoice in the Lord - That is, in the Lord Jesus; see Phi 3:3; compare the Act 1:24 note, and 1Th 5:16 note. The idea here is, that it is the duty of Christians to rejoice in the Lord Jesus Christ. This duty implies the following things:

(1) They should rejoice that they have such a Saviour. People everywhere have felt the need of a Saviour, and to us it should be a subject of unfeigned joy that one has been provided for us. When we think of our sins, we may now rejoice that there is one who can deliver us from them; when we think of the worth of the soul, we may rejoice that there is one who can save it from death; when we think of our danger, we can rejoice that there is one who can rescue us from all peril, and bring us to a world where we shall be for ever safe.

(2) We may rejoice that we have such a Saviour. He is just such as we need. He accomplishes just what we want a Saviour to do. We need one to make known to us a way of pardon, and he does it. We need one to make an atonement for sin, and he does it. We need one to give us peace from a troubled conscience, and he does it. We need one to support us in trials and bereavements, and he does it. We need one who can comfort us on the bed of death, and guide us through the dark valley, and the Lord Jesus is just what we want. When we look at his character, it is just such as it should be to win our hearts, and to make us love him; and when we look at what he has done, we see that he has accomplished all that we can desire, and why should we not rejoice?

(3) We may and should rejoice in him. The principal joy of the true Christian should be in the Lord. He should find his happiness not in riches, or gaiety, or vanity, or ambition, or books, or in the world in any form, but in communion with the Lord Jesus, and in the hope of eternal life through him. In his friendship, and in his service, should be the highest of our joys, and in these we may always be happy. It is the privilege, therefore, of a Christian to rejoice. He has more sources of joy than any other man - sources which do not fail when all others fail. Religion is not sadness or melancholy, it is joy; and the Christian should never leave the impression on others that his religion makes him either gloomy or morose. A cheerful countenance, an eye of benignity, a conversation pleasant and kind, should always evince the joy of his heart, and in all his contact with the world around hint he should show that his heart is full of joy.

To write the same things - That is, to repeat the same truths and admonitions. Perhaps he refers in this to the exhortations which he had given them when he was with them, on the same topics on which he is now writing to them. He says, that for him to record these exhortations, and transmit them by a letter, might be the means of permanent welfare to them, and would not be burdensome or oppressive to him. It was not absolutely necessary for them, but still it would be conducive to their order and comfort as a church. We may suppose that this chapter is a summary of what he had often inculcated when he was with them.

To me indeed is not grievous - It is not burdensome or oppressive to me to repeat these exhortations in this manner. They might suppose that in the multitude of cares which he had, and in his trials in Rome, it might be too great a burden for him to bestow so much attention on their interests.

But for you it is safe - It will contribute to your security as Christians, to have these sentiments and admonitions on record. They were exposed to dangers which made them proper. What those dangers were, the apostle specifies in the following verses.

Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

To write. From hence it would appear, says Grotius, that St. Paul had intended to have finished his letter at the end of the preceding chapter; but something new occurring to him, he added the two following chapter; but something new occurring to him, he added the two following chapters.

George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).

Finally; moreover, or as to what remains, i.e. by way of conclusion to the antecedent matter, and transition to the general exhortation, he here premiseth to the subsequent admonition.

My brethren; willingly repeating the title of brethren, to show the respect he had for them, and to sweeten that he was about to subjoin.

Rejoice in the Lord; he moves them (as we, with almost all, do translate it) not as saluting or bidding them farewell, Luk 1:28; 2Co 13:11; but to rejoice in the Lord, as Phi 4:4, either connoting the object matter of their joy, compared with Phi 3:3, or rather the efficient, importing for and according to the will of the Lord, in a manner agreeable to the pleasure of him who affords a ground of rejoicing in the midst of your tribulations and afflictions; considering his mercy, Phi 2:18,27,29, they might taste how good the Lord is, as elsewhere, Psa 37:4; Jer 9:24, with Rom 5:11; 2Co 10:17; 1Th 5:16; 1Pe 1:8; and so not after a carnal and worldly, but spiritual and Christian manner, to cheer up themselves in him, when the world frowns most, Psa 4:6,7.

To write the same things to you; writing of the same things cannot be referred to any other epistles which he wrote to the Philippians, but to those things which, while present with them, he had delivered to them by word of mouth, as Phi 4:9; compare Isa 28:10; Rom 15:15; 2Pe 1:12; 1Jo 2:21.

To me indeed is not grievous; for my part, I do not do it with regret, nor account it tedious, (as some teachers do), as if I were ashamed of it, that I should do any thing superfluous, or not necessary, in writing again the same things for the matter of them, that I had before preached to preserve you from falling, as others have done, Phi 3:18.

But for you it is safe; because this repetition of the same doctrine, though in another way, is pertinent to your edification, (yea, as some read, it is necessary), it is greatly advantageous for your stability in the faith, and to caution and keep you in safety, from the insinuations of false teachers, that I now give you a brief memorial in writing of those things, that you may be cautioned, and they may not, especially in this day of adversity, slip out of your memories, or be lost.

Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

Finally, my brethren, rejoice in the Lord. This word "finally" (to loipon) is frequently used by St. Paul to introduce a practical conclusion after the doctrinal portion of his Epistles: thus it occurs again in Php_4:8, and also in 2Co_13:11 Eph_6:10 1Th_4:1 2Th_2:1. Some render cairete "farewell;" but "rejoice" seems more suitable here. The golden thread of spiritual joy runs through this Epistle. "Rejoice in the Lord" is the oft-repeated refrain of St. Paul"s solemn hymn of praise. To write the same things to you, to me indeed is not grievous, but for you it is safe. "The same things:" does he refer to his oral instructions, to a previous Epistle now lost, to his exhortations to unity, or to his reiterated command "Rejoice"? The words seem most naturally to point to something in the same Epistle rather than to advice given on former occasions. It is true that Polycarp, in his letter to the Philippians (section 3), says that St. Paul wrote Epistles (epistolav) to them; but there is no trace of any other Epistle; and the mere plural number is not sufficient to support the theory of other letters, the plural word being frequently used of a single letter. Bishop Lightfoot suggests the exhortation to unity in Php_2:2. But this topic does not reappear before Php_4:2. And the hypothesis of an interruption, which (as Bishop Lightfoot and others think) suddenly turned the apostle"s thoughts into another channel and prevented him from explaining ta auta (the same things) till Php_4:2, seems forced and unnecessary, notwithstanding the great authority by which it is supported. It seems more probable (Bengel and others) that St. Paul refers to the constant admonition of this Epistle, "Rejoice in the Lord." To repeat this again and again was to him not grievous (rather, with R.V, "irksome"), but safe for the Philippians. Christian joy has a close connection with safety, for it implies unswerving faith, and, more than that, the presence of Christ. Compare the oft-repeated exhortation of Ps 37, "Fret not thyself: it tends only to evil-doing" (ver. 8, in the Hebrew). Possibly, however, asfalev here, as in Act_22:30 and Act_25:26, may mean "certain." The repetition is not irksome to St. Paul, while it makes his meaning and his wishes certain to the Philippians.

Vers. 1-3. Holy joy.

I THE CHRISTIAN"S PRIVILEGE.

1. It is in the Lord. "Rejoice in the Lord," the apostle says. The Lord, who once gave himself for us, gives himself to us now. "Behold," he says, "I stand at the door, and knock." If we listen to his voice, and open the door of our heart, he is ready to enter, to bless us with his sacred presence, to abide with us for ever. In his presence there is fullness of joy. We can know it only by experience.

"The love of Jesus, what it is, None but his loved ones know.

The unspeakable Gift, the gift of Christ, is a gift of abiding joy.

1. It is one of the fruits of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit of God is the pledged possession of all true Christians; and "the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace." "The kingdom of God is righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost." Then holy joy is an evidence of the indwelling of the Spirit; it shows that he is with the saints of God.

2. It is earnest of our inheritance; for it springs from the inworking of the Holy Spirit of promise. It is a foretaste of the joy of the Lord, which is reserved for the good and faithful servant. It is of all forms of joy the truest, deepest, most abiding; for it depends on no external cause, it is not much affected by the chances and changes of this mortal life. It supports the true Christian in trouble, in sickness, in the prospect of death. For it is in the Lord, resting on him, depending on his presence, flowing from communion with him.

II THE CHRISTIAN"S DUTY.

1. Because it is commanded. "Rejoice evermore," is equally binding with the parallel commandment, "Pray without ceasing." In this Epistle especially the apostle reiterates again and again with ever-increasing earnestness the exhortation to rejoice. "Rejoice in the Lord alway; again I will say, Rejoice.

2. Because it is enforced by the example of the saints. "Sorrowing, yet always rejoicing," is the motto of the Christian life. St. Paul with Silas in the dungeon at Philippi sang praises unto God. Now a prisoner at Rome, he could say, "I joy, and rejoice with you all." He was in bonds, encompassed with many hardships and afflictions, in daily danger of a violent death. But his soul was raised above his outward troubles by the blessed presence of the Lord within him. His heart was glad; the crown of righteousness laid up in heaven for all who love the appearing of the Lord was ever before his thoughts; he could rejoice himself; he could bid others rejoice with him. It is indeed a great example of the power of faith, an illustration of the Savior"s words, "Let not your heart be troubled; believe in God, and believe in me.

3. Because to be gloomy and melancholy implies a want of gratitude. The Christian who knows that his Redeemer liveth, that Christ the Son of God died for his sins and rose again for his justification, that he is even now interceding for him in heaven, ought to be bright and cheerful. He has no right to give way to despondent thoughts. The temptation will come sometimes; but it is a matter of duty to struggle against it; for to yield is to dishonor the Lord. "Count it all joy," says St. James, "when ye fall into divers temptations.

III To BE ENFORCED BY CONSTANT EXHORTATION.

1. The gospel is ever fresh, ever new. "It is not irksome to write the same things, says St. Paul." The Christian is never tired of repeating, never tired of hearing, the blessed story of the love of Jesus. The Athenians "spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell or to hear some new thing." The Christian is content with the old, old story the holy life, the blessed death, of Jesus Christ our Lord. It is sometimes the preacher"s temptation to strain after novelty; he should seek simply to save souls.

2. It is hard to rejoice evermore; it is a duty to be frequently pressed. To rejoice in sickness, in distress, in times of anxiety, is very hard; but it is our duty; we must enforce it constantly upon ourselves, upon others. And it is a source of safety; the soul that is learning to rejoice in the Lord, to take delight in communion with him in prayer and praise and holy sacrament, is not easily separated from the love of Christ.

IV CONTRASTS BETWEEN THE TRUE CHRISTIANS AND THE JUDAIZERS.

1. T h ese last rejoice, not in the Lord, but in outward distinctions. They pride themselves on their circumcision, but it is merely outward, in the flesh. They may be clean ceremonially, but they are unclean in heart; for they are workers of evil.

2. The Christian has the true circumcision and the true worship. The true circumcision is "that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter." The true worship, too, is in the highest sense not that of form and ceremony, but inward and spiritual. The Christian worships by the Spirit of God, by his help, by his teaching, by his inspiration; all true prayer is prayer in the Holy Ghost.

3. The Christian glories only in Christ. "God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ." The Christian glories in the Savior"s love, in the atonement wrought by his most precious blood, in his prevailing intercession, in the hope of seeing him face to face in his kingdom. In him is his confidence, not in any outward rite.

Lessons.

1. Pray for the great gift of holy joy: "Ask, and ye shall have.

2. To win that joy we must renounce confidence in the flesh.

3. We must worship by the Spirit of God, with real heart-worship, and thatby the help of God the Holy Ghost.

HOMILIES BY T. CROSKERY Ver. 1. Spiritual joy.

"Finally, brethren, rejoice in the Lord." The key-note of the Epistle still recurs.

I THE NATURE OF JOY IN THE LORD. It is to make him the object of our joy:

1. For what he is in himself, the God of love and light and blessing.

2. For what he is to us:

a. our Preserver; (Psa_46:1, Psa_46:2)

b. our Redeemer; (Heb_2:18 Psa_27:1)

c. our God. (Heb_8:10)

The world rejoices in creation and sees no joy in God, but the believer finds the joy of the Lord to be his strength. (Neh_8:10)

II THE DUTY OF REJOICING IN THE LORD.

1. It is a commanded duty.

2. Christ prays for it. (Joh_17:13)

3. The Holy Spirit works it in us. (Joh_16:7 Gal_5:22)

4. It is necessary to the fullness of our Christian experience.

(1) As lessening our love of the world and of sinful pleasures. (Psa_4:7 Psa_84:10)

(2) As making us more active in the Lord"s service. (Neh_8:10)

(3) As supporting us under the weight of troubles. (1Pe_1:7, 1Pe_1:8)

III HOW WE OUGHT TO REJOICE IN THE LORD.

1. We ought to live above the world. (2Co_4:18)

2. We ought to avoid everything inconsistent with this joy.

a. Gross sins. (2Co_1:12)

b. Unbelieving thoughts.

3. We ought to cherish a constant trust in the Lord. (Heb_13:6 Isa_55:7 Isa_49:13, Isa_49:14. See hints on Php_4:1) T.C.

HOMILIES BY R.M. EDGAR Vers. 1-3. Spiritual Judaism.

Having called upon the Philippians for public spirit, he now speaks, as if about to close the Epistle, about joy in the Lord. Inasmuch, however, as the Judaizers were abroad, he deems it best to insert a parenthesis, which the world could ill spare, about the true people of God and the progress towards the citizenship" of heaven. This third chapter is a magnificent parenthesis, in which the spiritual life is laid bare from its inception to its glorious close. In the verses now before us we have false and true Judaism contrasted.

I CONSIDER THE JEWS FALSELY SO CALLED. (Ver. 2) The custom of the Jews, in their pride, was to regard themselves as children at God"s table and all others as only "dogs" below it. (Mat_15:26) Paul reverses the figure, and has no hesitation in saying that the ritualists of his day, that is, the Jews who were preaching salvation by ceremonies, were only the "dogs" below the table, while believers in Jesus were the children at the feast. Moreover, as the dogs in the East are often captious scavengers, the Jews be here calls dogs were to be avoided by the Philippian converts just as one would avoid dangerous dogs. That he is not too severe in this judgment he shows by asserting that they have been "evil-workers." what had the history of the Judaizers been but that of "marplots"? They had done evil instead of good all through the infant Churches, turning the young converts away from the simplicity that was in Christ. Not only so, but the circumcision which they practiced and sought to enforce was only "concision" (katatomh), i.e. mere mutilation. For once a man assigns a false value to a bloody rite like circumcision, and fancies he can contribute to his salvation by subjecting himself to the knife, he is merely mutilating the body and not benefiting the soul. These are not "the people of God," therefore, they are "Jews" only in name, who go about substituting ceremony-keeping for the faith as it is in Christ.

II CONSIDER WHO ARE THE TRUE JEWS. (Ver. 3.) Paul states very succinctly the characteristics of the true people of God. Those are truly circumcised (peritomh) who have been so circumcised in heart as to worship God in the spirit, rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh. Let us take these up in the reverse order.

1. The true people of God have given up confidence in the flesh. They have seen that no incision in the flesh can render them acceptable to the Supreme; that no physical breeding can secure a prize in the great day of judgment; that nothing that they are or can be or do can win acceptance before God. Self has ceased to be the ground of confidence.

2. The true people of God rejoice in Christ Jesus rejoice in him as their Lord. (Vers. 1, 3) Self having ceased to be a ground of confidence or source of joy, Jesus has became the true Source. Pardon and acceptance are seen to be secured in him, and in his fellowship there is an unfailing fountain of delights. Out of the invisible comes a joy unspeakable and full of glory. We rejoice in him as all our Salvation and all our Desire.

3. The true people of God wors hip the Father in Spirit. This differentiates them from the formalists, whose delight and hope are in ceremonies. The Father, as an infinite spirit, can, we come to see, be approached acceptably only by our spirits. The bodily genuflexions, which go to make up the formalities, cannot be accounted worship. Unless the spirit moves reverentially within, all the formality is vain. The spirit, moreover, as we have just seen, realizes that it cannot be accepted by the Supreme on account of any supposed personal merit, but solely on account of the merit of the Lord Jesus. The worship which pleases the Father is the joyful worship which has its source in his Son. The outcome of felt obligation unto Jesus, it becomes fragrant in the nostrils of the Most High. Thus the spiritual Jews are made manifest. They gather spiritually minded around the feet of the great Father and adore him. R.M.E.

HOMILIES BY R. FINLAYSON Vers. 1-16. The true circumcision.

Contemplated close of the Epistle. "Finally my brethren, rejoice in the Lord." It would seem that, at this point, the apostle contemplated bringing the Epistle to a close. He intimates that, in addition to what he has already said, he has only this further to say. He falls back on what has already been noticed as the key-note of the Epistle. Addressing them as his brethren, he calls upon them to rejoice in the Lord. He recognized no joy but what was in the Lord. We are to rejoice in our earthly blessings, as having them in the Lord. We are to rejoice even in our afflictions, as having them in the Lord. We are to rejoice in any success attending our efforts to bless others, as having it in the Lord. We are to rejoice especially in privileges of adoption, as having them in the Lord. "Howbeit in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you; but rejoice that your names are written in heaven." New start in the Epistle. "To write the same things to you, to me indeed is not irksome, but for you it is safe." The apostle would not have concluded the Epistle without recording his thanks for the contribution and sending salutations. But at this point he seems to have been interrupted, and meantime to have had his attention called to some fresh manifestation of Judaistic zeal. When he takes up his pen it is with this in his mind. And, before writing the words with which he had intended to close, he must sound the note of alarm. He deems it necessary, however, to give his reason for introducing the old theme, he had written as well as spoken much on the subject of Judaism; but it was not irksome to him to repeat what he had said. He had written as well as spoken so much on the subject to the Philippians that he feared it might be irksome to them to have a repetition. The reference would seem to be to a lost Epistle or lost Epistles. To this there is a manifest allusion in the Epistle of Polycarp. Writing to these same Philippians, about the beginning of the second century, he says, "Neither I nor another like me can attain to the wisdom of the blessed and glorious Paul, who, coming among you, taught the word of truth accurately and surely before the men of that day; who also, when absent, wrote letters to you, into which, if ye search, ye can be builded up unto the faith given to you." It did not lie within the design of the Spirit of inspiration to preserve all the words that Paul wrote to the Churches, any more than to preserve all the words that Christ spake in the course of his public ministry. What Paul had previously written during the ten years to the Church of Philippi alone on the one subject of Judaism was so extensive that he was afraid it might be irksome to them to have the same things repeated. But, whether irksome to them or not, he was assured that it would be safe. And on that ground he does not hesitate to repeat.

I HE WARNS AGAINST THE JUDAIZERS. What he had before given at length he now gives in few, but expressive words.

1. Dogs. "Beware of the dogs." As Jesus called Herod a fox, so Paul calls the Judaizers dogs. We have laid hold more on the fidelity of the dog; the Greeks laid hold more on its bad habit of snarling; the Jews laid hold more on its want of niceness, in eating all manner of meats. Prowling about the city and living especially on the offal and refuse, it seemed to the Jews to picture the Gentiles, who, making no distinction of meats, were ceremonially unclean. By means of this appellation of the Gentiles, Christ made trial of the Canaanitish woman. And when John says, "Without are the dogs," he seems to refer generally to exclusion on the ground of moral impurity. In calling the Judaizers dogs, Paul is to be understood as throwing back on them their own term of reproach. They called the Gentile Christians dogs, because they made no distinction of meats, did not observe the washing of cups and platters. They, says Paul, were really the dogs, who, instead of the rich gospel provision, had only the "garbage of carnal ordinances.

2. Evil-workers. "Beware of the evil-workers." They are characterized in another place as deceitful workers. Here they are characterized as coil workers, i.e. where others were sowing the good seed they came and sowed the tares; where others were doing good work they came and tried to have it undone. And that was really their character; they did not seek fields of their own, but fields where the seed of the gospel had already been sown. They were especially workers against Christ, and all who preached Christ as the sole ground of the sinner"s justification.

3. Concision. "Beware of the concision." As pope said of antipope, that he was not consecrated but execrated, and as Coleridge said of the French philosophy, that it was philosophy, or the bare kind of philosophy; so Paul refuses to say of the Judaists that they were the circumcision, he will only say of them that they were the concision, i.e. they cut the body to no purpose, there was no real symbolism connected with it, as when the Mosaic economy had Divine sanction. They were cutters of the body, as the priests of Baal in Elijah"s time, who, with loud crying, cut themselves after their manner with knives and lancets, till the blood gushed out upon them. They had no more reason for continuing the cutting of the body from Mosaism than the heathen had for cuttings in connection with their religion. Therefore he will not allow them to be the circumcision, but only the concision, or mutilators of the body.

II HE DESCRIBES THE TRUE CIRCUMCISION. "For we are the circumcision." Whether circumcised in body or not, simply as Christians they answered to the idea, bore the character of the circumcision. 1: Spiritual worshippers. "Who worship by the Spirit of God." If he had characterized them by their outward mark, he would have said "the baptized;" but he prefers to point to the inward reality. The meaning of the mark of circumcision on the Jew was that he was set apart as a worshipper of God; in his own home and when he went up to the temple, he was to acknowledge God according to the appointed forms. As answering to the circumcision we also are set apart as worshippers of God, and the catholic clement in our worship is that it is by the dynamic influence of the Spirit of God that we worship. There is a power of the Spirit exerted over our carnality by which we are enabled to render an inward and a cordial worship. "The hour cometh, and now is," said Christ, "when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth: for such doth the Father seek to be his worshippers. God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship in spirit and truth.

1. Who have Christ as High Priest to glory in. "And glory in Christ Jesus." As worshippers we cannot approach God without having the services of a high priest. And Jesus is the High Priest of our confession. We glory in him because he has made real and fully satisfying atonement for sin. We glory in him as still making intercession for us. With such a High Priest We can have hope under the consciousness of sin, which is our daily experience. "My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye may not sin. And, if any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and he is the Propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the whole world.

2. And have renounced the flesh. "And have no confidence in the flesh." Glorying in what is outside of us, in Christ and his work, excludes having confidence in the flesh. Even under the Jewish theocracy outward earthly marks were not to be trusted in. One might have a special theocratic mark on him, and yet be untrue to the theocracy like Saul the King of Israel. If natural descent from Abraham had been sufficient to constitute a child of Abraham, then God of the very stories could have raised up children unto Abraham. Only on Christ, ca no fleshly marks, must we place our dependence for justification and adoption.

III HE THINKS OF HIMSELF AS IN A BETTER POSITION FOR HAVING CONFIDENCE IN THE FLESH THAN ANY OF THE JUDAIZERS. "Though I myself might have confidence even in the flesh: if any other man thinketh to have confidence in the flesh, I yet more." He singles himself out from the "we" of the previous verse. He had, in fact, renounced confidence in the flesh; but, for the moment, taking up the same ground with the Judaizers, he challenges comparison with them. He claims to be in a better position for confiding in the flesh than any of them.

1. Four marks connected with inherited privilege.

(1) Circumcision. "Circumcised the eighth day." The heathen were uncircumcised. Proselytes from heathenism were circumcised, but not the eighth day. The rite of circumcision was duly performed on him. He thus could claim to belong to a circle within the circle of the circumcised.

(2) Race. "Of the stock of Israel." There were some who were circumcised the eighth day who were not of pure Israelitish extraction. They were descended from members of an alien race who had been grafted into the stock of Israel. There had been no grafting in of any of Paul"s ancestors; he was of the original stock, he could thus claim within the narrower circle, to belong to a narrower still.

(3) Tribe. "Of the tribe of Benjamin." he also mentions his tribe in writing to the Romans. His original name, Saul, pointed to his being of the same tribe with the first king of Israel. The renegade tribes were represented among the Jews. He was not a Jew of pure extraction belonging to any of the ten tribes, hut he belonged to the tribe of Benjamin, which alone had remained faithful to Judah when the kingdom was rent.

(4) Language and customs. "A Hebrew of Hebrews." Among the many Jews who were scattered abroad there were not a few who, while conforming to the Jewish religion, did not conform to the Hebrew language and customs. These were properly Hellenists. He was born at Tarsus, but he had been as strictly brought up as if he had been born in Judaea. He belonged to a family strict among Jewish families beyond the Holy Land, in which the Hebrew language was spoken and Hebrew customs retained.

2. Three marks involving personal choice.

(1) Law. "As touching the Law, a Pharisee." In a sense he inherited Pharisaism, for he tells us in another place that he was not only a Pharisee, but the son of a Pharisee. To inherited Pharisaism, when he came to the years of reflection, he gave his full assent, especially as against Sadduceeism. "The Pharisees stood in the closest and strictest relation to the Law, as they with their traditions were regarded as the most orthodox expositors, defenders, and observers of it." Paul could thus say, "After the straitest sect of our religion, I lived a Pharisee.

(2) Zeal. "As touching zeal, persecuting the Church." He was not only a strict Pharisee, but a Pharisee of the greatest fervent. he rightly gauged the strength of the Christian Church. He saw that, with its doctrine of a crucified and risen Savior, it had a peculiar power to enchant men"s minds. It seemed to him to threaten the extinction of his loved Law-religion. And so he put himself forward as champion of the Law, and distinguished himself as persecutor of the Church. And that he now strangely puts into the scale as against the Jewish zealots. Regarding it as though it still belonged to him, and not as in Gal_1:23 as what once belonged to him, he claims to be a better persecutor than any of them.

(3) Righteousness. "As touching the righteousness which is in the Law, found blameless." Saul the Pharisee was one of those who went about to establish a righteousness of their own. In his youthful enthusiasm he felt equal to the task, and so successfully did he apply himself to it that, in the judgment of men, he was blameless. There was not the minutest particular in which he did not meet the Law"s requirement. And, when the limitation is made to the judgment of men, we are not to understand that, in his thought at the time, which he now enters into to turn the scale against the zealots, he excluded, but rather that he took to himself justifying merit before God.

IV HE IS IN THE SPIRIT OF THE TRUE CIRCUMCISION.

1. His past reckoning to which he adheres. "Howbeit what things were gain gains to me, these have I counted loss for Christ." The reference is to actual things in his pre-Christian position. Those which he has mentioned and others which he has not mentioned, were gains to him. The plural, which is not brought out in the translation, indicates that they were separate items by which he profited. They were not gains merely in his own judgment or expectation, but they were actually gains. "By means of them he was, within the old theocracy, put upon a path which had already brought him repute and influence, and promised to him yet far greater honors, power, and wealth in the future; a career rich in gain was opened up to him." But he was led to form an altered judgment regarding these things. This was not due to fickleness of judgment. This new judgment was characterized by wisdom. It was because there was discovered to him a greater gain in Christ. As interfering with this newly discovered gain, it seemed to him that he should sit down and write them under one category as loss. The use of the perfect brings down his past judgment to the present moment.

2. His reckoning in view of the present. "Yea verily, and I count all things to be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord." "Yea verily, and" prepares for an outbidding of what he has said. He goes beyond the actual things by which he profited in his past position. He takes things by which there may be profit in their utmost universality. And his present reckoning regarding the wide range of things is that they also are to be written down under the category of loss. The greater gain by which he is attracted in this case is not Christ, but rather the knowledge of Christ as the greatest Gain. If he is actually the greatest Gain, then it behoves us to have an experimental knowledge of him according to what he is. We are especially to have the knowledge of him as Christ Jesus our Lord, i.e. as the Anointed of the Father to be Savior, to whom, as having accomplished salvation, we owe deepest submission. To this saving knowledge there belongs a supereminence, a surpassingness. It would be of no avail that, beyond all that science has reached, we knew all the secrets of nature, that we knew the whole constitution of the human mind, if we did not know Christ for salvation.

3. His past action passing into his present reckoning. "For whom I suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may gain Christ." The reference is to the great crisis of his life. It showed him to be no mere theorist. He carried his judgment out into practice, though it entailed the loss of all things. He renounced the profit they had been to him at the time. And, thinking of them as what might still have been a profit to him, he is in no mood to retract. He adheres to his former renunciation in the strongest terms. His language now is, "I do count them but dung, that I may gain Christ. " This will be considered too depreciatory a view of things. It will be considered too high doctrine by not a few who profess faith in Christ. What an incongruity would be caused by some professed Christians adopting this language! Is it not evident that they count many things as all-important to their existence, other than Christ? It must be admitted, too, that some whose Christian experience, though real, is not clear enough, will find difficulty here, and it is possible that, in the desire to be true to Christ, they may take to some perversion of Christianity. But there is no exaggeration in the apostle"s language.

(1) All things are but as dung compared with Christ. There are certainly good things in the world. Our ingratitude makes us wonder that there are so many, and that our path is not strewed thick with ills. And, of things which are good, some are more desirable than others. We can compare them with one another, as good and better and best. But what can we compare with Christ? Shall we merely call him the best of all things, the highest good, allowing other things to be good alongside of him? No; he is the incomparable good, and, if other things are to be thought of at all in comparison with him, they are dross, refuse; while he alone is entitled to be called good. Excellent it may be in comparison with many other things; in comparison with him they have no positive value, but fall below the point of good. He is incomparable in his moral excellence. Challenged to say what our Beloved is more than another beloved, after exhausting all comparisons, we may well say, "Yea, he is altogether lovely." He is the bright, full manifestation of the beauty of God. He is incomparable, in the blessing he has procured for us. What are all earthly blessings in comparison with the salvation of the soul? If they are to be compared at all, are they not to be put down as dross, perishable, worthless, while the salvation of the soul alone stands the eternal tests?

(2) All things are to be pursued only for Christ. He alone is to be sought as our supreme End. On him alone we are to set our hearts in the full compass of their affection. Christ begins by saying, Lovest thou me more than these?" and, after putting others out of comparison, he still continues to press the question, Lovest thou me?" and again, "Lovest thou me? that our affection may more and more be drawn up toward him. Hear him again saying, "He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me, is not worthy of me." That is to say, our love to father, to mother, to child, is to be subordinated to our love to Christ. Hear him again using startling language, "If any man cometh unto me and hateth not his own father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." That is to say, we are to be so independent of them as even to hate them as coming between us and our supreme End. All things are to be as dross when it is a question of duty to Christ. We are to be willing to part with earthly emoluments and expectations, as though they were utterly worthless, when it is necessary to our obtaining Christ as our Savior, or to our proving our faithfulness to him. We are to be willing even to part with our dearest friends, as having no absolute claim to them, at the call of Christ. Only there is to be noticed, for our comfort, that, when we pursue our earthly calling and love our earthly friends for the sake of Christ, esteeming them as dross in themselves and to be parted with as dross at the call of Christ, then it is true that they are redeemed from their worthlessness and are made to partake of the worthiness of Christ. The true wisdom, then, is to use all things, even our friends, as means, to make Christ alone the End.

V THE GAIN THAT CHRIST IS. "And be found in him." The apostle desired to be regarded by God, and by man too, as within Christ as the sphere and element of his life. Thus it is that Christ becomes gain.

1. Beginning. Not having a righteousness of mine own, even that which is of the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith." His former thought was to have a righteousness of his own, i.e. a righteousness wrought out from his own resources, of which he was the efficient cause, and to which, therefore, he could lay meritorious claim, of which he could boast. In another aspect it was a righteousness which was of the Law, i.e. which proceeded from its commands being followed. And so completely was he considered to have succeeded that, as he says in the sixth verse, he was found blameless. But a new light was thrown in upon this righteousness, which showed it to be utterly worthless. And he was led to abandon it for the sake of another righteousness which was to be found within Christ. This righteousness he laid hold of by faith. The object of his faith was Christ, i.e. as having wrought out a righteousness infinitely worthy and well-pleasing to God, in the possession of which he was at once and fully justified, obtaining eternal covenant standing before God. This is a righteousness which is of God, i.e. of which God is the efficient cause, of which, therefore, he has all the glory. It is only ours by faith, or, as it should be translated, upon faith, i.e. as made over to us it rests upon a basis of faith.

2. Glance forward to the end. "That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection." The object of our justification is that we may know Christ especially in connection with his resurrection. The resurrection was the crowning point of his life. It showed him to be completely victorious over sin and death. It was the Father"s seal upon his work on earth. The power of his resurrection is most naturally regarded as the power which it has to make us personally victorious over sin and death. The "knowing" seems to belong to the present; state, inasmuch as it is followed by suffering and dying. We know the power of his resurrection in our being quickened together with him; but this not by itself. We know it rather as the earnest of a power that will make us completely victorious over sin and death. We think of the resurrection of Christ as a power exercised from the future. It is that by which we are being moulded, up to which we are being drawn.

3. The fact noted that we must suffer and die before coming to the resurrection from the dead. "And the fellowship of his sufferings, becoming conformed unto his death; if by any means I may attain unto the resurrection from the dead." The mere fact of our suffering does not bring us into fellowship with Christ in his sufferings. Our sufferings must have a Christian character. There was a specialty n the apostle"s sufferings. He was notably a sufferer for the cause of Christ, a sufferer in place of others, in some such way as Christ was a sufferer in place of others. It is this element of vicariousness that prominence is given to in his remarkable language to the Colossians, "I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and fill up on my part that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh, for his body"s sake which is the Church." But the language is not to be restricted to vicarious sufferings. Inasmuch as our ordinary sufferings are appointed by Christ, inasmuch as they are to be endured in the spirit in which Christ endured, inasmuch as Christ is to be magnified in them, we also may have fellowship with Christ in his sufferings. We may aspire to drink of the cup that he drank of, to be baptized with the baptism wherewith he was baptized. The apostle thinks of his sufferings as having their consummation in his death. His sufferings made him look forward to death; and the kind of sufferings made him look forward to martyrdom. And how did he contemplate his martyrdom? As a being conformed unto Christ"s death. His ambition was that his death, whenever it happened, should bear the stamp of Christ"s death. The process of conformation was already begun. He was becoming conformed unto Christ"s death. In another place he refers to himself as "hearing about in his body the dying of the Lord Jesus." He protested that he was dying daily. In his sufferings, in the uncertainty as to his life, he was becoming accustomed to die. And he was taking that form which was to be completed in his martyrdom. Our circumstances do not point to our needing to die a martyr"s death. But inasmuch as it is Christ. who appoints our dying, inasmuch as we are called to die in the spirit in which Christ died, inasmuch as we are called to magnify Christ in our dying, we also may cherish the ambition of our having the stamp of Christ"s death on ours. And in our present sufferings, in the constant uncertainty of life, we should already be receiving its form. The apostle wished to be in the closest accord with Christ in his sufferings and death, if by any means he should attain unto the resurrection from the dead. He founds upon our Lord"s language, "But they that are accounted worthy to attain to that world, and the resurrection from the dead." This is what is called the first resurrection. "Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection." This points us to the full manifestation of the power of Christ"s resurrection. It marks the obtaining of (he condition, viz. the reunion of soul and body, upon which our perfected existence depends. It is putting the crown, once and for ever, upon our life. The apostle feels that the object is difficult of attainment. He will try all means of attaining to it. He will even drink of the cup of Christ"s suffering; he will have the stamp of Christ"s death on his, if that will secure its attainment.

VI TWO ELEMENTS IN HIS STRIVING.

1. Stated.

(1) He is humble. "Not that I have already obtained, or am already made perfect." At the root of his striving there was the consciousness that he had not already obtained, i.e. the resurrection from the dead, or was already made perfect, i.e. in the disposition which was necessary for obtaining the resurrection from the dead.

(2) He is intent on his aim. "But I press on, if so be that I may apprehend that for which also I was apprehended by Christ Jesus." The apostle had been apprehended by Christ Jesus at his conversion. The power of a Stronger than he had been laid upon him, arresting him in his sinful career. This was with a view to his obtaining the resurrection from the dead. In sympathy with Christ in this aim he had made it his own aim, and was now pressing on that he might without fail apprehend it, have it safely within his grasp.

2. Illustrated. The illustration of the racer, already suggested, is now distinctly brought out.

(1) He is humble. Brethren, I count not myself yet to have apprehended." There is no greater obstacle to success than self-esteem. The runner who, in his preparation or at any point in the race (which is principally to be thought of), counts that he has apprehended, i.e. makes himself sure of gaining the prize, calculates that he has safely distanced all competitors, is likely in the end to be unsuccessful. Paul was a runner in the Christian race. And he had made great progress from the starting-point toward the goal. He was a very different man in Christian experience, in power of service, from what he was when apprehended on the road to Damascus. But he would have the Philippian brethren know, for their benefit, seeing their danger was self-esteem, that he did not count himself to have apprehended, i.e. did not make himself sure of having all that was needed for grasping the prize. The inevitable effect of such a disposition would have been the relaxation of his energies, which would have made him a loser of the glorious prize within his reach.

(2) He is intent on his aim. "But one thing I do, forgetting the things which are behind, and stretching forward to the things which are before, I press on toward the goal unto the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus." Of the man intent on his aim there is no better illustration than the runner in the race. This one thing he does. For this he has girt up his loins, gathered his scattered energies into a unity. He does not self-contentedly occupy himself with the things which are behind, i.e. the part of the course that has been traversed. That would be to distract his attention and to give away an advantage. Upon the traversed course his back is turned, his eye does not wander back over it and measure its extent, it is even banished wholly from his memory, there is room in his mind for only one thing. He stretches forward to the things which are before, i.e. the part of the course that is yet to be traversed. His eye stretches away over it, and, as Bengel puts it, the eye reaching before draws on the hand, and the hand reaching before draws on the foot. See how his energies are on the stretch and are bent toward their aim. Mark where he is at present, and see him again how he is steadily, unweariedly, pressing on. His thought is to be the first to grasp that pole which is the goal the first to grasp it, then he shall be called forward by the president of the games to obtain the prize, to be crowned with the laurel. Such a runner was Paul. One thing he did. He had a singular unity of purpose, even when he was mistaken in his end. As a Christian runner he girt up the loins of his mind, gathered his scattered energies into a unity, brought them to his one purpose. He did not please himself by dwelling on the past, telling the Philippians and others what he had accomplished. No; his thought was what was yet to be accomplished. What was there yet possible to him of Christian experience, of Christian usefulness? It was over this that his eye was stretched. It was toward this as an earnest runner that his energies were bent. See him when he is writing one Epistle, how earnest he is! See him again when there is taken up another production of his pen, how he is still pressing on! As he comes nearer the goal, with associations of martyrdom, how he increases in eagerness! His thought is to grasp what God had appointed him in his earthly career of Christian perfection. And, grasping that, then he knew that the great President of the games, seated high in heaven, would, in God"s Name, call him forth to receive the immortal prize, to crown him with the unfading laurel.

VII THREEFOLD EXHORTATION.

1. Let us aspire after higher attainment in the future. "Let us therefore, as many as be perfect, be thus minded." There is a distinction to be made between those who are perfect and those who are made perfect. The perfect (as the Greek word suggests) are those who are in sympathy with the end and in the right course, although they have not yet come to the end or are made perfect. There may thus be a kind of perfection from the beginning. But especially are those perfect who, when opportunity has been given, have gone on from the state of babes or mere starters in the race to a certain maturity of Christian experience. Opportunity being given, we should be numbered amongst the perfect, those who have attained to a certain skill in running. "Let us therefore, as many as be perfect, be thus minded." Let us not be satisfied with present attainment. Let us feel the attraction of the goal of Christian perfection. Let our eye stretch forward as over the intervening space up to this goal. Let our energies be bent as toward that which is difficult of attainment, toward that which will require all our singleness and intensity. And, for our own encouragement, let us also feel the attraction of the prize. Let us feel the attraction of the moment when, for faithfulness to him and to his end in apprehending us, the righteous Judge shall call us forward to receive the crown of righteousness.

2. Let us pray against present error. "And if in anything ye are otherwise minded, even this shall God reveal unto you." It is a case which is very likely to occur. We may be earnest in the main, and yet there may be some particular thing in regard to which we are self-satisfied, about which we are not sufficiently enlightened, and so we wander from the right course. Who can understand his errors? Under the consciousness of our own inability to understand, let us have recourse to God. The promise here is that he wilt discover every particular mistake to us. Let us look to God to show us wherein we are in error. "Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me, and know my thoughts; and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

3. Let us learn from past attainment. "Only, whereunto we have already attained, by that same rule let us walk." We may not go to past attainment for self-contentment, but we may go for lessons to be learnt. If we have attained to any skill in the Christian race, it is because we have followed the Bible as our rule. It has prescribed to us our course. Let us hold fast that which we have proved to be good. Let us act on the same principles on which we have hitherto acted in any attainment we have made. Let there be "faith in Jesus Christ, repentance unto life, with the diligent use of all the outward means whereby Christ communicateth unto us the blessings of redemption." Following the rules we shall unfailingly advance up to the goal and receive the prize. R.F.

HOMILIES BY D. THOMAS Vers. 1-3. Rejoicing, eschewing, and imitating.

"Finally, my brethren, rejoice in the Lord," etc. These verses present three subjects for reflection the Being to rejoice in, the men to avoid, the worship to imitate.

I THE BEING TO REJOICE IN. "Finally, my brethren, rejoice in the Lord." "The Lord" means undoubtedly Jesus Christ, the Savior of all men. But why rejoice in him?

1. Because of his-peerless excellence. He is the morally beautiful. Every moral virtue is united, harmonized, and coruscates in his character. Nothing inspires the heart with higher and purer joy than beauty. Admiration is happiness of a high type. The admiration of art is a joy, the admiration of nature a greater joy, the admiration of moral excellence is the highest joy of all. "Rejoice in the Lord.

2. Because of his riled relationship. He is our dearest Friend, cur elder Brother, our all-merciful, and almighty Redeemer. Well might we rejoice in such a relationship. "My Beloved is mine, and I am his.

3. Because of his benevolent enterprise. What philanthropic heart does not rejoice in the enterprise of any man to mitigate the woes and increase the happiness of his species? But what an enterprise is the enterprise of Christ! It is to break every fetter, unlock every prison door, dispel every cloud of ignorance and sorrow; it is to tread all human evils in the dust, hush all sorrows, wipe away all tears from off all faces. Well might the apostle enjoin the Philippians to "rejoice in the Lord." Sad that such an injunction should be required, for it might well have been supposed that all who knew the Lord would "rejoice" in him. This is a command, as truly a command as the command to believe, repent, not to steal, not to murder; and to break this command is as great a sin as to break any command in the Decalogue. To be happy in the Lord and there is happiness nowhere else is a moral obligation.

II THE MEN TO AVOID. "To write the same things to you, to me indeed is not grievous irksome, but for you it is safe." What things does the apostle mean? Manifestly the warning which follows, "Beware of dogs, beware of evil-workers." The apostle here characterizes a class of men as "dogs." In Rev_22:15 this class there also called dogs are described as excluded from the kingdom of heaven. Christ to the Syrophoenician woman spoke of the Gentiles as dogs. (Mat_15:26) He did this, however, in accordance with the usage of his countrymen. Elsewhere the heavenly Teacher speaks of some men as swine. " The temperaments, disposition, and characters of men are widely different. "All flesh is not the same flesh." The men against whom the apostle warns the Philippians here were:

1. Men of a canine spirit. Ill-tempered men, snarling at all who differed from them. Who does not know men of the dog spirit? The querulous tone, the curl of scorn on the lip, the sardonic grin, reveal their canine nature.

2. Men of a canine spirit, who were in connection with the Church. "Beware of evil-workers, beware of the concision." They were Judaizing teachers, who endeavored to turn away men from the simplicity of the gospel by promoting Jewish rites and ceremonies, and thus they were evildoers. Show me the man whose religion is sensuous, ritualistic, and technical, and you will show me the man who in all probability displays this canine spirit. A more ill-natured class of men I have never known than members of Calvinistic, Antinomian, and Ritualistic Churches; and they reveal more of the dog than of the angel. Now, Paul says avoid such, do not argue with them, do not "cast pearls before swine," do not put yourself in their power, stand aloof from them, heed neither their bark nor their grin.

III THE WORSHIP TO IMITATE. "For we are the circumcision, which worship God in the spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh." The worship here is marked by three things.

1. By spirituality. "Worship God in the Spirit.

2. By joyousness. "Rejoice in Christ Jesus." There is no worship without happiness; true worship is happiness.

3. By Divine confidence. "Have no confidence in the flesh. D.T.

HOMILIES BY V HUTTON Ver. 1. Sameness.

I ITS NECESSITY. In ordinary life there must be much of sameness. The same duties, occupations, interests, events, occur from day to day. The same temptations have to be met by the same spiritual weapons. This is very clearly scan when our duties are concerned with the training and teaching of others. The same faults must be rebuked, the same advice given, the same disappointments experienced.

II ITS TEDIOUSNESS. Many feel this keenly and long for a greater variety and a life full of excitement and change.

III ITS SAFETY.

1. For ourselves. Excitement ends in revulsion and exhaustion. Sameness builds up a regulated life. Our characters are formed by the repetition of ideas rather than by experiencing a succession of startling events.

2. For others. In dealing with them it is most important that we should be always the same. There is need of justice, self-control, an even temper, and an absence of caprice and partiality.

IV ITS DIVINE CHARACTER. God is ever the same and works by his own divinely arranged laws. Our moods and our circumstances change, but our Lord is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. Where would be our confidence if he were to change? Blessed to have an unchanging Friend and an unchanging home, where there is rest amidst all the changes of our external lives. VW.H.

HOMILIES BY W.F. ADENEY Ver. 1. (See on Php_4:4) W.F.A.

The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

The same things - Which you have heard before.

John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.

The Dangers of Judaistic Teaching.

A joyful admonition changed to a warning:

v. 1. Finally, my brethren, rejoice in the Lord. To write the same things to you, to me indeed is not grievous, but for you it is safe.

v. 2. Beware of dogs, beware of evil workers, beware of the concision.

v. 3. For we are the circumcision, which worship God in the spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh.

The apostle had made the usual transition toward the close of his letter, in the recommendation of his fellow-workers He probably wanted to add the customary greetings. But there were some other matters that the Philippians needed to be reminded of. The Holy Ghost in the matter of inspiration accommodated Himself entirely to the human manner of writing letters. So Paul takes up a new thought: For the rest, my brethren, rejoice in the Lord. So far as all the rest was concerned, whatever else he may have wished to say to them, that one point, which he made the motto of his letter, should always be before their eyes. That will bear constant repetition, in order to be impressed firmly upon the hearts and minds of all Christians, just as the apostle says: To write the same thing to you is to me not wearisome, to you, however, assuring. Such an admonition, repeated over and over again, is not superfluous, and it should become tedious neither to the teacher nor to the hearers, for the joy over the Christian state, over the fact that they are in the state of faith, is necessary. Christians must be conscious of the love of God in Christ, of all the gifts of His grace and mercy. As Paul did not get tired of proclaiming this message over and over again, so no other pastor will think that the constant repetition of this admonition is a tedious, tiresome work. It is always necessary for the safety of believers to make them more certain of their standing toward Christ and God.

For that reason Paul is constrained to add an emphatic warning: Beware of the dogs, beware of the evil workers, beware of the concision. The apostle uses the very strongest terms of reproach to characterize the false teachers, to portray them in their real colors. There were certain bad, evil, dangerous workers in the very midst of the church, upon whom the Philippians must keep a watchful eye. And in what respect they are dangerous Paul shows by giving a summary of their false doctrine. He had probably thought that he would have an opportunity to attend to the matter of these false teachers in person when he came to Philippi. But the Spirit has now induced him to include the warning in this letter. If there is danger of false teaching in the Church, it is foolish to procrastinate, the warning must be given at once, especially if the evil workers, the false preachers, arise in the midst of the Church. These evil workers were guilty of a most dangerous doctrine. The apostle names and incidentally censures it by designating it as "concision," mutilation. He refers to the rite of circumcision, which their mechanical, unspiritual view reduced to a mere laceration of the body. These men with their Judaistic tendencies insisted upon all the rites and ceremonies of the Jewish law. The fact of circumcision particularly was one upon which they insisted with all their influence. Such Jewish teachers as had not yet learned the freedom of the Gospel, but insisted upon foisting Jewish ways and ceremonies upon the Christians, were found also in other congregations. But if men insist upon the outward works of the Law and parade a form of holiness and righteousness, then there is nothing but hypocrisy in their teaching. Their doctrine is evil and also their life, for which reason the apostle calls them dogs, contemptible people. They were working only for personal gain, personal honor. Of such people the Philippians should beware.

Paul places himself and the true Christians in strong contrast to these men: For we are the circumcision, that are serving God through the Spirit and glorying in Christ Jesus and placing no confidence in the flesh. He means to say: We Christians alone deserve the name of being truly circumcised, of being the true, spiritual Israel, in this instance we Christian teachers specifically that are serving God through the Spirit and glorying in Christ Jesus. As the rite of circumcision made the Israelites outward members of God’s chosen people, as they by faith attained to the dignity of true children of God, so true ministers of Christ are the real circumcision, because they serve God and are members of the true people of God. This true service is not an external, but an internal service, spiritual, through the Spirit. That is the well-pleasing service of God, the ministry of the Word. And the glory of such men is Christ Jesus. That is the external sign of the true pastor, glorying in Christ. He places no confidence in the flesh, in his own ability, nor in any external things or works. His trust and strength is Christ alone.

Paul E. Kretzmann, Popular Commentary of the Bible (1921–1924) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Php 3:3

The Inheritors of the Promises.

I. They who worship God in the spirit are the sons and daughters of the Lord God Almighty.

II. They behold the brightness of the Father’s glory.

III. They inherit great and precious promises.

IV. They are favoured with special Divine revelations.

V. They are a royal priesthood.

VI. They are connected with an ancient and sacred lineage.

VII. While of the Israelites as concerning the flesh Christ came, of those whom Paul here describes Christ comes as a gospel and as a revelation to the world.

S. Martin, Rain upon the Mown Grass, p. 321.

References: Php 3:3.—Homiletic Quarterly, vol. iii., p. 126. Php 3:4-7—Homilist, vol. i., p. 40.

Php 3:7

The Christian Estimate of Gain and Loss.

The Christian man keeps an accurate account-book; he reckons up with an intelligent and enlightened judgment his gains and his losses. And most important is it that those who would be Christian men should be rightly informed and rightly minded upon this great question, this question which takes precedence of other questions, inasmuch as it is preliminary and introductory to all.

I. I need not say what answer the world would return to this inquiry, and I need not say what answer the natural heart would return to this inquiry, and I need not say what answer the religion of many persons would return to this inquiry. You will find health entered as a clear gain, and money as a clear gain; comfort, ease, tranquillity of mind and life, prosperity in business, a sufficient and growing income, all these things will be found at once carried to the side of profit, and no hesitation, and no further question asked concerning them. And you will as surely find sickness, disappointment, contraction of the means of pleasure, sorrow, pain, bereavement, entered in the same reckoning as an undoubted and unmixed loss.

II. St. Paul says that for Christ’s sake he now accounts as loss all that he had once accounted gain. The reason why he calls his apparent gains a loss is that they had too great a tendency to make him trust in them; to make him look to outward things as his passport to heaven; to make him build on a foundation of his own, and not upon the rock of another’s righteousness. What do we know of the thought, Things which were gain to me, these I have accounted for Christ’s sake loss? I say it sorrowfully, but with deep truth, that many of us live and die on the strength of a gospel which has no Christ in it, no demolition of self, whether in the form of self-confidence or self-seeking, and no exaltation of Christ upon the ruins of self either as our Saviour or as our Lord.

C. J. Vaughan, Lectures on Philippians, p. 183.

Php 3:7-8

The Apostle’s Ground of Trust.

I. When such general homage is paid to earnestness as in our own time, what wonder if some people should mistake it for religion; and if a man should imagine that because he is zealous in the activities of benevolence, warmly attached to certain Church organisations, and in some measure sympathetic with the spiritual forces which they embody, he is really a partaker of the undefiled religion of the Bible! It is no marvel if a man accustomed to earthly standards of arbitration should imagine that the goodness which has been so cheerfully acknowledged on earth will be as cheerfully acknowledged in heaven, and that he who has passed muster with the world will not be sent abashed and crestfallen from the judgment-seat of God. You may be early initiated into the ordinances of the Christian Church; you may have come of a long line of spiritually illustrious ancestry; you may give an intellectual assent to the grand harmony of Christian truth; you may be zealous in certain activities of benevolence, and in certain matters connected even with the Church of God itself; and yet you may gain all this world of honour and lose your own soul.

II. Notice the compensating power of the excellency of the knowledge of Christ. This compensation runs through creation; it seems to be a radical law both in the physical and spiritual government of God. Trust that Cross for yourselves; take hold of it; it is consecrated. In all circumstances of your history, in all exigencies of your mortal lot, take firm hold of the Cross.

W. M. Punshon, Sermons, p. 384.

I. Is that man’s normal state—loss in order to gain? Certainly not. In God’s own case it is not so. Has not God perfect and complete happiness? Was there any amount of loss sustained by Adam in order to gain? Was there any progress dependent upon loss? The idea is an absurdity. It was not so. Then how did it come to pass that loss ever came to be sustained in order to gain? I need scarcely say that all loss in the universe is involved in sin, it is sin that has brought loss, and nothing else, and we all feel it and realise it. We have lost paradise, we have lost the image of God, we have lost our inheritance, we have lost everything, by sin. Then comes the question, Is it the law in regard to a sinful being that there is loss in order to gain? Does the suffering of loss bring gain? I say distinctly not, not as a necessary rule. There may be always loss and no gain. Yet, though loss does not bring gain with it, there never can be gain to a sinner but through loss. A man may suffer loss and have no gain, but no sinner can ever get gain but by suffering loss.

II. Look at the first principle in this matter; look at the Saviour and then at the saved. How was it with Jesus? Did not He suffer loss in order to gain? He must needs suffer, if He is to be a Saviour; He must needs sustain loss; He must lay aside the robe of His glory, He must take our nature upon Him, He must die in that nature, He must suffer the curse of that nature, or He cannot be a Saviour. But He did do it. Then the gain of salvation was the gain of Christ. And as regards ourselves, whatever stands between the soul and Christ must go, whether it is what the world calls good or bad; whether it is gross immorality or integrity, honesty, and uprightness; whether it is the love of pleasure or of wealth; whether it is the love of wife, husband, or child. The creature must give way to God; if the heart is to be filled with all the precious things of God’s salvation in Christ, the creature must give way.

A. Molyneux, Christian World Pulpit, vol. iii., p. 120.

References: Php 3:7, Php 3:8.—J. Jackson, Sermons before the University of Oxford, p. 1; Php 3:7-9.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxiii., No. 1357.

Php 3:8

I. "The knowledge of Christ Jesus our Lord"; that is, the knowledge of our wants and of the means by which those wants may be most fully satisfied; the knowledge of sin and of salvation. Men’s eyes in general are equally closed against both, for as none but Christians have anything like a true notion of their own evil, so also none but Christians look forward with any lively hope to the glory that shall be revealed hereafter. When our Lord was foretelling the state of the world in after-times, He more than once declared to His disciples that His Gospel would only in a small degree overcome the wickedness of the world; He says that "as it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man," that as before the Flood men ate and drank, bought and sold, planted and builded, and thought nothing of God till His judgments burst upon them and destroyed them all, so it should be at the time when the Son of man should be revealed. Now how is it that so many of us are living exactly in the manner which Christ described?

II. Very often after baptism children are suffered to remain in complete ignorance of everything that concerns their salvation. The boy grows into manhood with a confirmed unchristian practice and scarcely any relics of Christian knowledge. And what is the issue? In the ordinary course of things, it is a sinful life and a hopeless death, unless God touches the heart with a sense of its danger, and in His power and mercy brings it to true and effectual conversion. Those who have grown up to youth or manhood without having yet fully embraced the offer of salvation through Christ are called upon to turn to Him and to believe on Him; and the threatenings addressed to the unconverted sinner are at present all in their full force addressed to them. Remember that he that doeth righteousness is righteous; that he that committeth sin—that is, who is in the habit of carelessly committing it—hath not seen Christ, neither knoweth Him, but is of the devil, who has been a sinner from the beginning.

T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. i., p. 28.

References: Php 3:8.—J. H. Jellett, Church of England Pulpit, vol. ix., p. 25; Homilist, 4th series, vol. i., p. 68; Spurgeon, Morning by Morning, p. 288.

Php 3:8-9

Christ the Only Gain.

Consider:—

I. What it is to win Christ. (1) To win Christ is to count Him gain. What is gain to me is what puts me on a right footing with God. This I once thought that my personal qualifications of birth, profession, privilege, attainment, might do; now I see that for such purpose they are useless, and worse than useless. In the view of the end for which I once prized them, I now perceive that Christ is gain. (2) Christ is coveted and sought as gain. Are you so thoroughly in earnest in this matter as not merely to perceive that Christ is gain, but to be honestly anxious to possess this gain? (3) Christ is appropriated as gain. "He that seeketh findeth"; he who seeks Christ, willing just as he is to have Christ just as He is, finds Him, and in finding Christ appropriates Him, and in appropriating Christ feels Him to be gain. It is for this, and nothing short of this, that you are asked to count all things but loss that you may win Christ. (4) You win Christ so as to enjoy Him as gain; you win Him, not as the miser hoards his wealth, to keep it, not as the spendthrift gets his property, to waste it. He is yours for profitable use: for peace, contentment, honour, happiness, and whatever else is comprehended in your standing right with God.

II. To be found in Christ is the fitting sequel of winning Christ; it is the double fruit, the twofold good, of winning Christ. (1) For defence I am to be found in Christ, that I may meet every adversary, that I may silence every answer. I have always to present on every side an impregnable front; I have a righteousness, not my own, but wholly Divine, to plead in every emergency; against every adversary who would assail or question my standing, I have the Apostle’s challenge, "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?" (2) But I am to win Christ, so as to be found in Him, not merely to meet and answer every assault of the accusing adversary, but to meet also and obey the high calling of God in Christ. If I am found in Christ, it is that I may die with Him unto sin, and live with Him unto righteousness and unto God; it is that I may grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ; it is that in Him I may go on to perfection.

R. S. Candlish, Sermons, p. 203.

I. St. Paul has consented to the loss of all things; nay, he has transferred to the side of loss in his accounts all that once stood on the side of gain; and if the matter stopped there, we might have pronounced him a bankrupt as much in hope as in possession. But he now says that he is purposed to replace all his cancelled gains by one single item, just one word, just one name, a monosyllable, the name, as some would tell us, of a dead man, the name of One whom rulers and philosophers have agreed in despising and rejecting: "That I may gain Christ." When St. Paul hoped to be able to write the word Christ on the side of his receipts, he hoped to enter there the brief summary of inexhaustible treasures, enough to counterbalance the loss of all things and to replace it by an inestimable and incalculable gain.

II. St. Paul’s second aim is directed to the great day of judgment: "That I may win Christ and be found in Him." St. Paul had submitted to the loss of all things now, in the hope that he might be safe then. While others shall be found in that day standing, as it were, exposed and defenceless while God’s judgments are abroad upon the earth, even like those Egyptians of old who believed not the prediction of the plague of hail and dared its perils in the open field, St. Paul and those who, like him and with him, have believed, will then not be exposed, not be unsheltered; they will be found in Christ. Could any words express more forcibly the safety of the Christian? He will be found enclosed, incorporated, and thus hidden, in Christ Himself, in the Lord, in the Judge of man.

C. J. Vaughan, Lectures on Philippians, p. 199.

References: Php 3:8, Php 3:9.—L. Campbell, Some Aspects of the Christian Ideal, p. 203; Clergyman’s Magazine, vol. iii., p. 83.

Php 3:8-11

The Cross Borne for us and in us.

I. The whole of the Gospel is the doctrine of the Cross, but that twofold: the cross borne for us and the virtue and power of the Cross by the sacraments communicated to us and henceforth to be borne by us. By baptism we are made members of Him who for us was crucified; and our life from baptism to our death should be a practice of the Cross, a learning to be crucified, a crucifixion of our passions, appetites, desires, wills, until one by one they be all nailed, and we have no will but the will of our Father who is in heaven; and in the prospect of each lesser cross, such as are allotted to us, not merely when laid upon us, and we cannot escape them, we, too, should take up our Master’s words, "Not My will, but Thine."

II. The ancient Christians followed this example: they shared each other’s sufferings; they suffered one for another, the rich the poverty of the poor; they saw Christ in the poor, the prisoners, the captives, the sick, as He bade them and as He had told them, and underwent sufferings for them; they laid down their lives for the brethren. So then they well understood the two parts of the doctrine of the Cross, the cross which was borne for us by Christ and the cross which was to be borne by us, in Christ’s strength and for Christ’s sake, and this not for a brighter crown merely, but that they might finally be saved.

III. Every shade of self-denial, from the pettiest denial of our appetites to the martyr’s mangled and scored human form, is all included in bearing the cross, the least because He has commanded it, and He, for His own love’s sake, accepts it. All crosses are preparations for heaven; for though we know not its unspeakable joys or wherein they consist, this we know: that we must learn to do His will on earth as it is done in heaven, to be like the blessed spirits who do His pleasure, swift and instant as the lightning, to count nothing labour, toil, or cross, which is to do His will. This portion of the cross has a blessed privilege, in that it is taken willingly in obedience, not simply borne willingly, as the chastisement of disobedience; it is taken in order, in what little way regenerate man is capable of, to be like his Maker; it is taken out of love to Him and to do His commandments.

Plain Sermons by Contributors to "Tracts for the Times" vol. iii., p. 1.

References: Php 3:9.—Homilist, 2nd series, vol. iv., p. 277; H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. ill., p. 90; J. C. Finlayson, Ibid., vol. xi., p. 342; T. Jones, Ibid., vol. xii., p. 118; T. T. Lynch, Three Months’ Ministry, p. 97.

Php 3:10

I. The great object of the Christian, the great end and aim of the Christian life, is to know Jesus Christ. There is a great difference between "knowing" a person and "knowing about" a person. Many can give an outline of His history, can repeat some of His sayings, and describe His miracles, but not every one knows Him with a personal knowledge and acquaintance, knows what it is to have spiritual communication with Him, knows what it is to understand Him and to sympathise with Him, even as a man understands and sympathises with a personal and human friend. And it was this knowledge that the Apostle asked for, and it is this that every Christian heart desires: to know the personal Jesus Christ with some degree of intimacy, and to advance and grow in that knowledge day by day under the promised teaching and direction of God the Holy Ghost.

II. This personal acquaintance with Jesus Christ becomes an impossibility so long as our dependence for salvation is upon external observance. St. Paul found it to be so. Whilst he was trusting to ceremonies and to what he considered to be good works for salvation, there was a barrier erected between his soul and God; he had no fellowship with God: and it was not until the barrier was thrown down, it was not until the last obstacle of self-trust and self-dependence was removed, that he came to know "the only true God and Jesus Christ, whom He had sent." There is a broad difference between religiousness and religion. There are people who think that all is right with their souls because they are interested in Christian worship, because they feel profoundly moved by an eloquent sermon. This is "religiousness"; this St. Paul had before his conversion. Religion, as Paul found it afterwards, is something very different from this: it is the surrender of the will to God’s will in Christ; it is the suffering Christ so to enter into the soul that every act, every thought and feeling, shall be pervaded by His presence; it is the living for Christ and by Christ.

G. Calthrop, Penny Pulpit, New Series, No. 1010.

Php 3:10

I think many must have felt a kind of disappointment in the language of the collect for Easter Day. It begins grandly, as we suppose an Easter prayer should begin: "Almighty God, who through Thine only-begotten Son hast overcome death and opened unto us the gate of everlasting life." But what is there answering to this invocation in the words which form the substance of the petition? They simply ask the almighty God that "as by His special grace preventing us He does put into our minds good desires, so by His continual grace we may bring the same to good effect." Is not this a sudden and painful fall? In moments of strong, highly braced feeling, when we have regarded Easter as offering at once the greatest gift to the universe and the deepest consolation for individual sorrow, have we not been indignant that we are required to utter words which appear to forget both?

I. We dwell upon the fact of Christ’s resurrection; upon the evidences which establish it; upon the inferences which may be drawn from it. St. Paul also dwelt upon the fact; it was the very ground of his Gospel to mankind; but fact, evidences, inferences, were all inseparably bound up with the idea which is expressed in the words of the text: "The power of His resurrection." The power or energy which quickened the soul and the body of Jesus Christ, which made it impossible that He should be holden of death, is declared to be the selfsame power which works in us who believe, which opens the eyes of our understanding, which reveals to us the hope of our calling. Those who receive the New Testament as a Divine authority cannot shrink from these words; cannot explain them away.

II. Assuredly those who wrote the prayers of which our liturgy is composed did accept it. They connected Easter Eve and Easter Day with Christian baptism; they believed that we are baptised into the death of Christ, that we are buried with Him in baptism, and that we rise to a new life by faith and the operation of God, who raised Him from death; in other words, they looked upon the resurrection-day as the new birthday of the world. And is it then a low and grovelling prayer, unworthy of the Easter season, degrading our thoughts of the victory that has been won for us and for mankind, that He who, by His special grace preventing us, has put into our minds good desires, by His continual help will bring the same to good effect? Could you have a more wonderful, a more practical, test than that which this prayer offers you, and enables you to apply, of the triumph over death, of the opening of the new gate into life? Could any ecstatic language about the state of departed spirits, about the things which eye has not seen nor ear heard, enable us equally to realise our communion with the one, actually to participate in the other? To be governed by Christ in all the movements of his being, in all his purposes, in all the issues of these movements and purposes—is not this the freedom of the most glorified spirit? To be able to do what one longs to do, our longings being first in accordance with the Divinest mind, prompted by the Divinest inspiration—is not this a good thing beyond the grasp of eye or ear, answering to the desires of the heart, but surpassing them all? And this petition, because His risen life is ours, we are to believe that He will begin to answer at once, will answer completely hereafter.

F. D. Maurice, Sermons, vol. vi., p. 1.

The Power of Christ’s Resurrection.

I. The power of the Lord’s resurrection is manifested as furnishing the strongest confirmation of the truth of the Gospel.

II. The power of Christ’s resurrection is exhibited in the effectual comfort which it affords under sorrow and suffering.

III. The power of Christ’s resurrection makes itself felt as an incentive to holiness.

IV. A fourth evidence of the power of Christ’s resurrection is found in the comfort which it gives to us when kindred and friends are carried to the world of spirits.

V. Once more, the power of Christ’s resurrection furnishes an effectual remedy against the fear of death.

J. N. Norton, Golden Truths, p. 226.

Php 3:10

I. That is to say, participate in them. Christ, then, did not suffer what He suffered that we might be discharged from suffering it, did not endure certain pains in our stead, that we might escape them; otherwise St. Paul could not have yearned as he did to be admitted to drink of His cup. He sacrificed Himself to put away sin, and it is only as sin is put away that suffering can diminish and cease. Our emancipation from it depends upon our emancipation from sin. Pain is symptomatic—symptomatic of the want of conformity to law. Nothing can extirpate it from the world but a reduction of the world’s dislocations, which latter is the end and aim of Christ crucified, and not for the sake of our deliverance from the misery of the pain, but because such dislocations are themselves degradation and shame, and their cure grace, and beauty, and eternal life. Let us be thankful that so long as sin remains untaken away more or less of suffering remains. In our as yet unrightened realm, its pricks are serviceable, and cannot be spared.

II. But then, further, according to the Apostle’s view and impression, Christ suffered what He suffered, not that we might be delivered from it, but, on the contrary, that we might be brought into it, that we might come to suffer with Him. His advent and presence did indeed stir up pains, new pains, that had not shaken the sphere of humanity before. The Apostle had no idea that there was virtue or praise in suffering; that to be scourged was a thing to be aimed at or gloried in. He never courted it, or threw himself in the way of it, that it might come upon him, but he rather took measures to escape it when he could; yet here he is yearning to know the fellowship of his Lord’s sufferings. What, then, does he mean? He wanted to enter yet more deeply into that spirit of Christ, that spirit of holy love which in an evil world necessarily involves suffering, to have more of His unselfish devotion to the cause of God and man, to feel more with Him the leprosy and disharmony of sin, and to follow Him more closely in His righteous concern with regard to it and His earnest activity against it. It was not the mere anguish he craved, but the grand moral heart, the grand moral sympathies and affections, which the anguish expressed and implied, and which could not be had without it.

III. It will always be but the few who will be found entering abundantly into the fellowship of His sufferings, giving themselves grandly to the cause of God and man; yet, to know the Lord Jesus at all, we must to some extent feel with Him the pang and burden of His cross. There is no other way of knowing Him, and heaven will not stoop and bend for those who cannot climb, will not lower its price or reduce the terms of admission to let in those who have not wherewith to pay.

S. A. Tipple, Echoes of Spoken Words, p. 57.

The word "fellowship" might startle us in this connection. The sufferings are Christ’s sufferings, and St. Paul speaks of sharing them—"the sufferings." They did not begin on Calvary; the death was but the consummation of the life; His sufferings were of the soul; the Passion was the Atonement; the suffering of sufferings was the sin-bearing, the taking upon Himself by a conscious act, possible because He was God, of the whole loathsome, putrefying mass of a world’s sins, so that henceforth they should lose their condemning voice and also their constraining pang against all who, in deep penitence and unswerving faith, draw nigh to God Himself through the blood of Jesus.

I. At first sight we might regard the sufferings of Christ, and especially those last spoken of, as lying beyond the reach of human fellowship or human communion. There is a great comfort, no doubt, for Christian people in being able to regard the trials and discomforts of this life as a real and integral portion’ of that suffering which Christ Himself undertook and endured below. If it were only of these things, St. Paul might speak of it as a high and holy object to know the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings.

II. This was certainly not the whole of that fellowship of Christ’s sufferings which was St. Paul’s aim and object. The clause which follows the text suggests a further meaning: "Being made conformable unto His death." This introduces us into St. Paul’s characteristic view of the spiritual life. It is the life of one who died when Christ died, rose when Christ rose, ascended when Christ ascended, and lives now a life, not seen and temporal, but hidden with Christ in God. In this way the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings becomes a true sympathy with Christ in His abhorrence and repudiation of sin.

III. The fellowship of Christ’s sufferings is not only sympathy with Christ’s warfare in destroying our sins, but also a true participation with Christ in the anguish, though not in the virtue, of His sin-bearing for the world. St. Paul shared Christ’s yearning over the sin-stained, self-ruined souls of fallen men. There is a vicarious sacrifice still in all who know the fellowship of the sufferings, not to purchase again the purchased possession, but yet to bring the one Ransom and the one Redeemer home to the erring, straying, lost ones, who know not their need or His sufficiency.

C. J. Vaughan, Penny Pulpit, New Series, No. 818.

Php 3:10

St. Paul, a better man than any of us, had found the hollowness of self-trust. He had willingly consented to part with all that he had once thought most valuable in a religious sense for the sake of knowing Christ and the power of His resurrection.

I. For the sake of knowing Christ. In that knowledge, he was aware, lay his eternal life. The words do not refer to a merely intellectual knowledge of Christ; such knowledge as this Paul might have acquired without parting with his all to gain it. (1) Though the intellectual knowledge of Christ is not the whole or chief part of man’s great need, yet it must not be undervalued. We may have it and yet be nothing profited; but, on the other hand, without it the other cannot be. A man must know of Christ by the hearing of the ear, if he would ever know Him for himself by faith. (2) But the knowledge of which St. Paul speaks is a personal knowledge; his acquaintance with Christ (a) reconciled him to the painful vicissitudes of outward circumstances (Php 4:11-13); (b) brought him help under the emergencies of special danger (2Ti 4:16-18); (c) brought him support and comfort amid the special inward trials of his personal life.

II. And the power of His resurrection. The meaning is not so much the power shown in His resurrection, the manifestation of God’s almighty strength in raising Christ from the dead, but rather the power with which resurrection invested Christ; the power upon which He entered as the result and consequence of His resurrection; that power which He still exercises throughout heaven and earth as the risen and exalted Saviour. The power of His resurrection might be expressed perhaps more intelligibly in the form, His resurrection power. Because He lives, His servants live; the risen life of Jesus is daily manifested in their body.

C. J. Vaughan, Lectures on Philippians, p. 213.

Php 3:10

I. There is a fellowship of Christ’s sufferings in relation to pain. The pains of life, inward and outward, are as varied as the bodies and souls on which they fasten. Our sensibilities to pain are very various: one thing hurts one person, and another another; that which is agony to me my neighbour scarcely feels. This is true of the roughnesses of life, and it is true of the calumnies of life, and it is true of the disappointments of life; it is true of those trials which come to us through the affections, and it is true of those trials which come to us through the ambitions of our nature. Thus much we may say with certainty: that no man, and therefore no Christian, passes through life untouched by distress. The cause may vary, and the kind may vary, and the degree may vary, all but infinitely; still the fact is there, the thing is there; the experience must be gained, as alone it can be gained, through suffering; and oftentimes the even tenor of an untroubled life, in its brightest and serenest day, is but the torrent’s smoothness ere it dash below. But in all this there is lacking as yet the essential feature of a fellowship in Christ’s sufferings. For this faith is needed, and devotion is needed, and submission is needed, and the support of a heavenly arm, and the expectation of a heavenly home.

II. There is a fellowship of Christ’s sufferings in relation to sin. As He resisted unto blood, striving against sin, so must we. It is a life-and-death battle for each one of us. We shall never have done with it for long together while life lasts. Sometimes by craft and sometimes by assault, sometimes by ambush, sometimes by feigned flight, sometimes with parade of arms and trumpets, as though secure of intimidation and of triumph, the old enemy attacks again, the old sin rises from its fall, and there is nothing before us yet once more save hard-earned victory or shameful defeat. In the midst of all, let this be our stay: "Greater is He that is with us, than he that is in the world."

C. J. Vaughan, Lectures on Philippians, p. 229.

References: Php 3:10.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. x., No. 552; Ibid., Evening by Evening, p. 329; R. Lorimer, Bible Studies in Life and Truth, p. 377; Church of England Pulpit, vol. v., p. 226; Homilist, 1st series, vol. vii., p. 341; Ibid., 3rd series, vol. iii., p. 159; H. P. Liddon, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxvii., p. 282; Clergyman’s Magazine, vol. iv., p. 87; G. Brooks, Five Hundred Outlines, p. 384; Homiletic Quarterly, vol. iii., p. 240; T. M. Herbert, Sketches of Sermons, p. 32; Parker, Hidden Springs, p. 339; W. J. Knox-Little, The Mystery of Suffering, p. 29; S. Martin, Sermons, No. 15.

Php 3:10-11

The Fellowship with Christ’s Sufferings.

I. It is manifest that there are senses in which we can have no community with our Lord in His sufferings, in which they were peculiar and His own. For they were meritorious sufferings, whereas we have not, and can never have, merit in God’s sight; they were voluntary sufferings, whereas all our sufferings are deserved, being entailed upon us by sin. They were also distinct from ours in degree, as well as in kind. Jesus knew all things which should come upon Him; He saw the whole cup brimming over with woe, and every ingredient of every bitter drop to come was known to Him. This we are spared. That cup is dealt out to us in drops only; we never know whether we are not close approaching its end. In capacity also for suffering He surpassed us equally. It is a token of God’s mercy, as well as of our infirmity, that we are ever benumbed by pain. Beyond a certain point, the anguished eye puts on darkness, the fevered frame subsides into lethargy. But so was it not with Him whom we love. In that long procession of human sorrow of which the world’s history, disguise it as we will, is but the record, His mourning has ever been first, and chief, and unapproachable. Look and see whether there be any sorrow like unto His sorrow.

II. The first point of fellowship with Christ’s sufferings is grief for sin, deep, earnest personal affliction for our own guilt and unworthiness. Enter into fellowship with Christ’s sufferings, learn to know what sin is, and this very knowledge shall relieve you from the bondage of sin. Begin to grapple with the strong man armed that keepeth thine house within by the aid of that stronger one, who shall help thee at last to bind him and spoil his goods. It may, and it will, cost thee suffering; but is it not worth any present loss if we may live freely, and purely, and blessedly, and die without terror, and fulfil in a higher and perfect state all the best ends of our being in the sinless and everlasting service of Him from whom that being came?

H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons, vol. Hi., p. 160.

Conformity to Christ’s Death.

This shaping in the form of Christ’s death is one of the Christian’s earnest endeavours and most cherished objects in life. No advantage of birth, no distinction of rank, no triumph of intellect, no extending and pervading empire of the will, nothing, in short, that tempts ordinary men of the world, can attract him in comparison with this.

I. Christ’s death was a death unto sin; and all conformity to His death must be conformity begun, continued, and completed by death unto sin. Suffering on account of sin is a very different thing from death unto sin. Fellowship with Christ’s sufferings—this is the restless, endless conflict of the believer’s course, ever raging, ever distracting, ever wearing and wearying him; conformity to Christ’s death—this is the deep calm of indifference to sin, and to the solicitations of Satan, and to the allurements of the world, which is ever setting in together with and over against the conflict. This deadness to sin is the first and most essential element of conformity to the death of Christ.

II. Let us follow out this conformity to His death into some of its attendant circumstances. (1) Sin and the devil will not let us alone in its various stages. The nearer we approach in likeness to Him, the more will His enemies treat us as they treated Him. (2) Again, that death of His was a death to all mere human ambition. In conformity to His death we also must read the death-blow to all other ambition. (3) And, once more, all self-righteousness is sacrificed and nailed to His cross in those who are made in the likeness of His death. (4) Nor should we entirely dismiss such a theme without one look onwards. "If we be dead with Christ, we shall also live with Him." The Christian should never end with Calvary, nor with the mortification of the body, nor with deadness to sin, but ever carry his thoughts onward to that blessed consummation to which these are the entrance and necessary condition.

H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons, vol. iii., p. 173.

A Sermon for Easter Day.

I. First of all, what is the event itself, the resurrection of Jesus, of which this day is the joyful commemoration? Of whom is the resurrection? Lazarus was raised from the dead by Christ; wherein did Christ’s own resurrection differ from that of him whom He loved? In two most important particulars. Lazarus underwent no change from suffering, death-doomed flesh and blood to a body of the resurrection. As he entered the tomb, so he came forth from it. Then, which is closely dependent on this, Lazarus died again. His was in some sense a resurrection; but it was no part of the resurrection, of which the Lord is the example and firstfruits. For "Christ, being raised from the dead, dieth no more"; He brought up His body out of the grave changed and glorious, with no more infirmity, no more blight of sin upon it.

II. Need we ask how the resurrection of Christ can extend beyond Himself? If these faithful and careful ones bore into the tomb the dead form of the Son of man, of our collected and concentrated humanity; if there we lay with and in Him, watched by ministering angels during that solemn and mysterious pause in the Life of our life, who can tell what happened when that same form was lit up again with the returned spirit, when the Godhead again entered into its fleshly tabernacle, or rather, having taken down its frail and temporary tent, entered into its new-built and eternal temple, when those lacerated feet began their glorious and onward march of triumph, and those pierced hands unfurled God’s banner of everlasting victory? He rose not alone; we, our humanity, in its whole reach and extent, rose with Him. Thus mankind, and the myriads on myriads of whom you and I are units, burst but from that tomb in and with Him, and stood complete in His resurrection. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. But this power of His resurrection does not begin to be exerted in the next life; does not then first act when the mute clay bursts out into songs of praise. It is acting all through the Christian’s course below, and its action is shown here by the springing up and waxing onward of that new life in His spirit which, expanded and glorified, shall continue its action through eternity.

H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons, vol. iii., p. 187.

References: Php 3:11.—G. Brooks, Five Hundred Outlines, p. 114; E. L. Hull, Sermons, 1st series, p. 28.

Php 3:12

Our Christian Aim.

I. Progress is not identical with growth. In speaking of progress, we take account of human endeavour, and not only of Divine law. It is not only that the minute germ appropriates by some mysterious power the elements which it needs, and clothes itself with beauty. The idea of progress suggests thoughts of conscious effort, resolute will, and obstacles vanquished; of the striving after an ideal; of the presence of an animating desire. Progress is not only a movement guided successfully towards a worthy end; it is movement inspired by a worthy motive. Progress must be guided by reflection. According to a memorable Greek saying, "the God of revelation neither hides the truth nor tells it plainly, but shows it by a sign." God does not dispense with the fullest exercise of our faculties; it is by these, and these only, that we can know Him and serve Him.

II. The Christian aim is, briefly, attainment of the likeness of God, for which man was made. There can be no repose or stationariness in the Christian course while life lasts. We cannot continue the feelings, or habits, or methods of one period into another, because, while our aim remains unchanged, we shall approach it in new ways from each new position. Fresh difficulties and opportunities will be disclosed as we go onwards; we shall gain by the discipline of effort a keener vision and a prompter judgment. The voice of Greek philosophy gave utterance to the last thought of the soul when it proclaimed that the end of man was to be made like to God as far as possible. The end, then, towards which the soul strove, has been brought by Christ within our reach. No life which is directed to self-seeking is easy, and no labour which is spent on transitory objects can bring peace. For us, being of the world, the effort of self-denying service is the one aim to that rest for which we were made, rest on the bosom of God.

Bishop Westcott, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxxiv., p. 104.

References: Php 3:12.—T. T. Lynch, Sermons for My Curates, p. 281; Homilist, vol. i., p. 45; Preacher’s Monthly, vol. ii., p. 96. Php 3:12-15.—H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. ii., p. 317; Ibid., vol. xi., p. 394.

Php 3:13

I. The past has its uses. Not for nothing did God bestow upon us memory; not for nothing do His servants recollect themselves, look back, call to mind, remember. (1) We want the past for purposes of humiliation. We might almost content ourselves, if we desired to humble the pride of any one, with saying to him, Let memory work; think of that shameful fall which you had yesterday or the day before: that broken resolution, that outbreak of temper, that irreverent worship, that omitted duty, and that secret sin thought of, not done. I can scarcely see how he can be proud whose memory is not dormant. We must not entirely forget the things that are behind, so far as our past sins are concerned, if we would be humble as we ought to be. (2) Again, we want the past for purposes of admonition and warning. It is thence that we draw experience. A man cannot live out half his days without becoming wise as to his failings and infirmities. If we were in such a sense new men every morning as that the past were a blank and the future a conjecture, we should be far worse equipped than we are for the work and the conflict of the present.

II. But there are two senses in which we ought all to forget the things that are behind. (1) It is possible that upon some the memory of the past may have an elating influence. There are those who trust too much to a past conversion and look too little to a present consistency. Hear St. Paul utterly disclaiming any such trust; telling how he forgets the things behind, and reaches forth only to the things before; nay, declaring his conviction that he might even preach to others, and yet himself be a castaway. (2) But far commoner is the opposite risk; far more in number are they whom the thought of the past deeply depresses. May it not be said to such persons, Forget the things behind? When the question is of courage or cowardice, of resistance or of flight, then forget the things behind: let past falls be forgotten; let past proofs of weakness be disregarded and dismissed; put your trust in God, and in His name and strength go forward.

C. J. Vaughan, Lectures on Philippians, p. 247.

References: Php 3:13.—H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Waterside Mission Sermons, p. 4; H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xx., p. 141; Homiletic Quarterly, vol. iii., p. 237; F. W. Farrar, In the Days of thy Youth, pp. 51, 275; T. M. Herbert, Sketches of Sermons, p. 290; J. H. Jellett, The Elder Son, pp. 278, 291.

Php 3:13-14

Living in the Future.

I. First, we may take this as the advice commended to us in the example here taught us: Live in the future. Our highest condition in this world is not the attainment of perfection, but the recognition of heights above us which are as yet unreached. From generation to generation, for the individual and the species, the condition of our progress is a distance beckoning us, and a feeling that we have not already attained, neither are already perfect.

II. Let the bright, certain, infinite future dwarf for us the narrow and stained past: "forgetting the things that are behind." (1) Forget past failures; they are apt to weaken you. (2) Be sure to forget past attainments; they are apt to become food for complacency, for every vain confidence. (3) Forget your past circumstances, whether they be sorrows or joys; the one are not without remedy, the other not perfect. "Forget the things that are behind."

III. Let hopes for the future and lessons from the past alike lead to strenuous work in the present. "This one thing I do." Be the past what it may, be the future what it may, I know that I cannot reach the one nor forget the other, except by setting myself with all my might and main to present duties, and by reducing all duties to various forms of one great life-purpose. Concentration of all our strength on a single aim, and that aim pursued through all our days, with their varying occupations—what a grand ideal of life that is! We shall work hard and heartily at various tasks, and yet the good part shall not be taken away from us by outward activity, any more than our possession of it will sequester us from vigorous service of God and man.

A. Maclaren, Sermons in Manchester, 3rd series, p. 39

The text shows—

I. The greatness of Christian hope. Two things are suggested by the context as having been actually attained by Paul: a satisfying religious faith and a sufficient religious purpose. (1) He had attained a satisfying religious faith. This is the portion of all believers in the Gospel. In some it appears almost independently of experience; the reason of it is vouchsafed them in their conversion; they will speak, with no consciousness of exaggeration, of being brought out of darkness into marvellous light: in their joyousness they are new creatures. In others it grows and strengthens along the whole course of Christian fidelity; they have a peace which passeth all understanding. But out of this satisfaction there arises a special danger. Satisfaction with an ideal often so contents us that we make no effort to realise it. We have not attained when we have begun to trust. Faith is the means of Christian living, not the end, not the sum, of Christian life. (2) Paul had also attained a sufficient religious purpose. It was characteristic of him, as of all noble natures, that he valued his faith according to the energy with which it filled him, and that he estimated spiritual energy by the sacrifices it enabled him to make. The power of the Gospel is seen in that it not only inspires a Christlike passion of love and righteousness, but also transforms the passion into purpose. This is the true test of spiritual vigour: the energy of purpose with which we are inspired.

II. The method of Christian endeavour. "Forgetting those things that are behind."—this is one of the conditions of manful Christian endeavour. The habit of brooding over the sins of the past must be laid aside, and also the habit of dwelling on our spiritual attainments. Our only contentment is in aspiration, for our true life and its issues are before us. The bliss of the imperfect is in their efforts after perfection. From the knowledge that we have not attained comes the hope of attain ing; nay, rather, it is the hope of larger blessedness which makes alt we have yet reached appear incomplete. We have not yet fathomed the Divine purpose, nor known the fulness of the grace of Christ.

A. Mackennal, The Life of Christian Consecration, p. 164.

Reference: Php 3:13, Php 3:14.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xix., No. 1114; G. E. L. Cotton, Sermons and Addresses in Mar thorough College, p. 341; C. H. Grundy, Church of England Pulpit, vol. iv., p. 87; H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol; xvi., p. 210; Ibid., vol. xvii., p. 92; H. P. Liddon, Ibid., vol. xxvii., p. 257; Preacher’s Monthly, vol. ix., p. 20; J. J. S. Perowne, Sermons, p. 104; W. M. Punshon, Sermons, p. 26; F. Temple, Rugby Sermons, 1st series, p. 224; F. Case, Short Practical Sermons, p. 43. Php 3:13-15.—W. Hay Aitken, Mission Sermons, vol. iii., p. 236. Php 3:14.—Church of England Pulpit, vol. vii., p. 46; Christian World Pulpit, vol. v., p. 263; H. S. Hird, Ibid., vol. xv., p. 278.

Php 3:15-16

Toleration.

I. In proportion as we really love the Lord Jesus Christ, we shall love those who love Him, be it in never so clumsy or mistaken a fashion, and love those too whom He loved enough to die for them, and whom He lives now to teach and strengthen. We can surely do good together. Together, let our denomination be what it may, we can feed the hungry, clothe the naked, reform the prisoner, humanise the degraded, save yearly the lives of thousands by labouring for the public health, and educate the minds and morals of the masses, though our religious differences force us to part when we begin to talk to them about the world to come.

II. True, there are errors against which we are bound to protest to the uttermost, but how few! The one real enemy we have all to fight is sin, evil-doing. If any man or doctrine makes men worse, makes men do worse deeds, protest then, if you will, and spare not, and shrink not; for sin must be of the devil, whatever else is not. And therefore we are bound to protest against any doctrine which parts man from God, and under whatsoever pretence of reverence or purity, draws again the veil between him and his heavenly Father, and denies him free access to the throne of grace, that he may speak with God face to face and yet live. For this right of access we must protest; for this we must die, if needs be; for if we lose this, we lose all that our reforming forefathers won for us at the stake. Ay, we lose our own souls, for we lose righteousness and strength and the power to do the will of God.

III. Just in proportion as we delight in and live by the great doctrines of Christianity, all controversies will become less and less important in our eyes. The more we value the living body of Christianity, the less we shall think of its temporary garments; the more we feel the power of God’s Spirit, the less scrupulous shall we be about the peculiar form in which He may manifest Himself. Personal trust in Jesus Christ, personal love to Jesus Christ, will keep our minds clear, and sober, and charitable.

C. Kingsley, Sermons for the Times, p. 278.

Reference: Php 3:16.—F. Ferguson, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xii., p. 193.

Php 3:18

The Cross the Measure of Sin.

How is it that every sin, even the very least, makes men enemies of the Cross of Christ?

I. First, because it was sin that, so to speak, created the Cross: sin made a Redeemer necessary. It opened some deep breach in the order of life and in the unity of God’s kingdom which could be no way healed but by the Atonement. If there had been no sin in the world until now, the sin we have committed, each one of us, this day, would have demanded the sacrifice and reconciliation. Such is the intensity of one offence, such its infinity of guilt.

II. And, again, not only does sin both create and multiply this necessity, but, so to speak, it continues to frustrate the work of the Cross and Passion of the Son of God. It demands His death, and it defeats its virtues; it invokes it from the mercies of God, and it wars against it by direct hostility; it first makes it necessary, and then would make it fruitless.

III. And, once more, sin makes men enemies of the Cross, because it is in virtue and spirit a renewal of the Crucifixion; it acts the Crucifixion over again. And therefore our Lord, though He was already in the bliss and glory of the Father, cried saying, "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me?" It is no mere figure of speech, but a very deep and appalling reality, that sin makes every soul that willingly offends an enemy of the Cross of Christ by converting it into a direct spiritual antagonist of the will and intent of our merciful Lord in the mystery of His Passion. Hence we may see (1) the exceeding sinfulness of every act of wilful sin; (2) the sinfulness of every habitual state or temper of mind contrary to the spirit of our Saviour.

H. E. Manning, Sermons, vol. iii., p. 201.

Reference: Php 3:18.—R. D. B. Rawnsley, Village Sermons, 1st series, p. 290; Clergyman’s Magazine, vol. ii., p. 93; H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit, No. 3245. Php 3:18, Php 3:19.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. ii., No. 102; Clergyman’s Magazine, vol. vii., p. 219; Plain Sermons by Contributors to "Tracts for the Times," vol. vi., p. 253. Php 3:19.—Wilkinson, Church of England Pulpit, vol. v., p. 9; Preacher’s Monthly, vol. ii., p. 250.

Php 3:19-20

I. Others, says St. Paul, have their mind set upon things below; appetite is their god; they make the Gospel itself a means of worldly gain; what they pride themselves upon is just what a Christian should be ashamed of; and the end of these things is death. When the world perishes, its children and its subjects must perish too. But we are not of the world. Already, even in this life, our citizenship is in heaven; and thither is our eye ever turned, in expectation of His coming who is even now our King, and shall one day be our Deliverer and our Saviour too.

II. If anything for a moment shows us to ourselves as we are, stripping off the disguise by which we commonly impose not upon others only, but also upon ourselves, does anything strike us so painfully as this one conviction?—that we are predominantly earthly-minded; that, whatever else we may be or may not be, we have things on the earth for our thought and for our feeling. There is a quietude and a self-complacency in worldly success which puts us, as it were, in good humour with both worlds: with God above and man below. But take one world away, and what has become of the other? It is a mistake to suppose that affliction, in any form, drives men to God. It may in time, with pain and prayer and many struggles, make the heavenly-minded man more heavenly-minded; but it might almost be said to have an opposite effect upon the godless and the earthly-minded, at once showing him his state and fixing that state upon him. Depend upon it, he, and he only, who has a country above will ever sit loose to interests below; and if he would ever escape the terrible condemnation of having minded earthly things, it must be because God, in His infinite mercy, has given us the comfort and joy of being able to say from the heart, My home is not here; my citizenship is in heaven.

C. J. Vaughan, Lectures on Philippians, p. 263.

Php 3:20

Heaven the Christian’s Home.

I. "Our conversation is in heaven." Many are the meanings of this word, and every way the Apostle says we are in heaven. For the word, in the language in which God wrote it, means the city or state to which we belong, or citizenship, or the rules and order of a state by which it is governed, or the way of life of the citizens; and in all these ways he places us in heaven. Our home is in heaven. Yet so it might be, so in one sense it is, though we were away from home. For, as the Apostle says, "while we are present in the body, we are absent from the Lord." Yet it is not altogether an absent home of which the Apostle speaks. He speaks not of our home as something separate from us, not as something in space in which we might be and are not, but as something belonging to us, and to which we belong, to which of right and in fact we belong. For the temple of God, the Church, is not made with hands, not a material building. One Church we know it is of all who are, or have been, or shall be in Christ Jesus, all, wherever they are, in heaven or in earth, all, men and angels, knit in one in Him. In soul and spirit we are in heaven already. There our life centres; there we live: to it we belong.

II. But how then if on earth, as we know we are, as the corruptible body presseth down the spirit, is our citizenship, our dwelling-place, yea we ourselves, in heaven? Because our Lord is there. This is the great blessedness of our citizenship, as of every other gift of grace or glory: that we have it not of ourselves, but of and in Christ.

E. B. Pusey, Sermons from Advent to Whitsuntide, vol. i., p. 328.

Our Heavenly Citizenship.

I. There are only three ways on record by which any man ever became a citizen of any state; but not by one only, but by all the three, are we citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem. (1) For, first, we were made citizens by purchase. He who was the King of that beautiful city did actually give up for a season His kingdom, and He was content to become a stranger here, and to forfeit all His dignities, and to be human enough to die and to be buried, that He might by that absence and death buy an admission for you and me to that heavenly city. (2) And, in addition to this purchase by the blood of Christ, it was free for us to take as a gift. (3) And because birth is better than purchase or gift, therefore by the same grace we are born again, that we should change the place of our nativity and have our settlement no longer in a slavish world, but be born free; and this admission by birth is that which lies in the text: "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God."

II. Look, next, at the privileges of citizenship. (1) It is the first privilege of every citizen that he is represented. Accordingly it is the plan of God’s great government that every one who belongs to His Church is represented. Christ is gone into heaven for this purpose, and there at God’s right hand He stands. (2). And the right of a citizen is that he is under the laws of his own state, and no other; he may appeal up to this. The Christian is continually appealing to a grander award than that of this world. (3) The citizen can go in and out. Is he not free of his own state? But it is a holy liberty. There is the same God to all there in the city; He is very near. (4) It is the right or privilege of all citizens to go to the presence of the King. Whatever be their petitions, the access is open. We carry in our hands a white stone, with a new name written; we command entrance by that stone, the proof of our union with Christ. We are His people, and His whole empire is pledged to us; and we may be in that royal presence night and day, and enjoy such elevation and such converse and partake of such favours as it passeth the natural eye to see: "but God has revealed them to us by His Spirit."

J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons, 4th series, p. 233.

References: Php 3:20.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. viii., No. 476; H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Waterside Mission Sermons, p. 27; Ibid., The Life of Duty, vol. ii., p. 197.; Church of England Pulpit, vol. xix., p. 25; vol. xxii., p. 109; Homilist, 3rd series, vol. iv., p. 218; Clergyman’s Magazine, vol. v., p. 31; Preacher’s Monthly, vol. vi., p. 215.

Php 3:20-21

The Reunion of the Saints.

I. "The body of our humiliation." What a word is that! It was not always thus. When God, in the solemn conclave of the Eternal Trinity, said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness," He could not have been speaking only of man’s soul. The record of the Creation which follows is almost entirely corporeal. He must have been speaking of the entire man. In the likeness of Christ’s body, God formed the body of Adam, not in the likeness of Christ’s body as He wore it down upon this earth, but the likeness of that body as it is now, as He ascended into the heavens, the body glorified, so that in all probability the body of our first parents in paradise was the very same body as we shall receive after the resurrection, both being in the likeness of Christ and both glorious. And this is, therefore, one of the points in the fulness of the restitution of all things, and shows how we regain in Christ all, even to the exact bodily form—all that we lost in the Fall.

II. The resurrection body will be a body which we shall glory in, just as in this body we now are humiliated. So the one becomes in some sense a measure of the other; and such as is the degradation of the body now, so will be the exaltation of the body then. For it will be the memorial through all eternity, not of a fall, but of the grace which has raised us to an elevation higher than that from which we fell. Christ will be both admired and reflected in it before the universe. Continually, without cessation, it will be capable of worship and service; and, like Him it mirrors, it will express transparently the whole of the intellect and the love breathed in it, and, like Him, it will never change. A beauty which we see each in the other will never fade away from before our eyes; the satisfaction which we never found in a creature we shall find absolutely and for ever in that new creation: and from the moment of our waking up in that blessed morning, on and on, for ever and ever, the gushing sense of light, and life, and power, and service, and purity, and humility, and love will flow, ever full and ever fresh, out of the freeness of the fountain of the indwelling of God.

J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons, 4th series, p. 225.

The Heavenly Citizenship.

St. Paul had just been speaking of some members of the Church whose god was their belly, who minded earthly things. It is a plausible opinion that in the text he intended to contrast with their state of mind his own and that of the persons who strove to imitate him as he imitated Christ. Our translators probably adopted that notion, or they would scarcely have rendered πολίτευμα by conversation. That word had undoubtedly a more extensive signification in the seventeenth century than it has in ours: it included the whole course and habit of life, and had no special reference to intercourse through the tongue. But it can never have denoted what a word derived from "city" and "citizen" does most naturally denote: a condition and privilege which belonged to certain men, whether they made use of it or forgot it.

I. That natural sense, I apprehend, St. Paul gives to the expression here. He does not contrast his heavenly temper with the earthly temper of those concerning whom he speaks with so much sorrow; but he blames them for that temper because he and they had both alike a Divine πολίτευμα, because a state had been claimed for them and was implied in their acts with which such a temper was wholly at variance. The opposition is not between them and him; it is between them and themselves. It is not, again (as we sometimes state it), between them and their professions, as if they boasted of a high citizenship when, in fact, they were only aliens. They had too low, not too high, an appreciation of their status and of their rights; they would be raised above their grovelling tendencies, yea and above the conceit which no doubt accompanied these tendencies, if they could once really understand what they were: what honours and estates were legally theirs, only waiting to be claimed; under what title these honours and estates were to be held.

II. To say, "Our conversation is in the heavens," would be a bold thing for most of us; but when we say, "Our citizenship is in the heavens," then need we no faltering of the tongue, no timidity in the spirit within. That is declaring God to be true, and us to be liars; that is affirming He has not made our lives to be insincere in solitude or in society, our friendships to be poor in quality and to be shorter than the existence which they glorify. All that is fragile and transitory belongs to us; we have failed to recognise the stamp of His eternity which He has assuredly put upon us and upon all our human attachments. We sever by our sin and unbelief links which He has fastened; our noise has disturbed the great deep of memory which His Spirit broods over; but His blessed order stands firm, however little we abide in it. The affinities in the world of human beings, like the affinities in the natural world, have all been constituted by Him, are all maintained by Him. The unity between the different parts of the frame of man is not so mysterious as the unity between the different members of the body politic. The latter is certainly indestructible, whatever may happen to the former, and this because our polity is in the heavens. We are made one in Christ.

F. D. Maurice, Sermons, vol. i., p. 235.

There are here two practical motives by which the Apostle urges the Philippians to walk so as they have true Christian teachers for an ensample: the energy and loyalty and the inspiration of hope.

I. The energy and loyalty. Loyalty is reverence for law, not mere submission to it, but the glad, free submission which comes from respect for the law and homage for the authority on which it rests. A man may be obedient to his country’s laws from fear of punishment. Not out of any regard for right, but because of the constable and the gaol, he may keep within the bounds of law. The loyal man will not think much of a penalty to be escaped; he honours the principle of law; because it is just and good, he will submit himself to it. You see how loyalty to heaven affected Paul. It was pain to him that there were Christians who were unmindful of their heavenly character. To him the Christian name was something to be regarded with reverence and preserved spotless. The honour of the heavenly citizen is the strong motive by which he appeals to his loved disciples at Philippi. Loyalty to a higher order is an energy to resist degrading circumstances or strong temptation. It is so when the influence is historic only or ideal. St. Paul is putting the Christians on their honour. You are citizens of heaven, and your citizenship abides there. It is a real thing, this heavenly law. You are called by the Christian name; you have felt the Christian consolation; you claim the Christian privilege; you are also under Christian allegiance; the Christian life is the life to which you are bidden, which you are trusted to live.

II. The inspiration and hope. Our body is indeed a body of humiliation; we must have it changed before we can be set free: but we shall be free. He who can subdue all things to Him has energy for our deliverance, and we await His delivering advent; we struggle on, faithful, loyal to Him; and He by the energy with which He is able even to subdue all things unto Him will change the body of our humiliation, that it may be fashioned like unto the body of His glory.

A. Mackennal, Christ’s Healing Touch, p. 250.

The Redemption of the Body.

I. St. Paul valued his privilege of being a citizen of the greatest city upon earth. The Philippians had reason to know that he valued it. He had made them understand by his conduct that citizenship is a great and honourable thing. Men are bound together as citizens of a city, as members of a nation, by God Himself. But St. Paul tells the Philippians that he was the citizen of another country too: "Our citizenship is in heaven." We have friends and fellow-sufferers upon earth; our work is upon earth; we live to do good to the earth; but our home is with God. He has bought us at a great price that we might be freemen of His kingdom, and might always fly to Him and plead our cause before Him; He has made for us a new and living way into His presence through the flesh and blood of His Son; and we have a right to walk in that way, and not to be taking the downward way, the way of death.

II. St. Paul had the greatest reverence for his own body and for the bodies of his fellow-creatures that any man could have. For he believed that the Lord Jesus Christ, the Saviour, had taken a body such as ours, and had eaten earthly food, and had drunk of earthly water and wine, and had given that body to die upon the cross, and had raised it out of the grave, and had ascended with it to the right hand of His Father. Therefore when St. Paul recollected his citizenship in heaven, when he claimed to be a member of Christ’s body and prayed in His name to His Father and our Father, he could not but think how this body, which is so curiously and wonderfully made, has a hidden glory in it, which, when Christ appears in His glory, shall be fully made manifest. Everything seems to be threatening it with death, but Christ, in whom is the fulness of life, has overcome death and is stronger than death. He has raised up my spirit, that was sinking lower and lower, to trust in Him and hope in Him; He will raise up this body too. Nothing shall be lost of all that God has given us, for Christ has redeemed it. Only death and corruption shall perish, for they have assaulted God’s glorious handiwork. What God has created God will preserve.

F. D. Maurice, Sermons in Country Churches, p. 72.

Christian Citizenship.

I. Consider, first, the source of Christian citizenship. At the time these words were written, the Roman empire had attained the culmination of its power. The long clamour of battle was hushed in the reign of Augustus. The Emperor seemed to reign over a consolidated and prosperous empire; and through each subject province or far-off archipelago of isles the man who could say, "I am a Roman citizen," found in the words the surest talisman of safety or the speediest redress for wrong. The source of our heavenly citizenship is not, as in the Roman, by birth or by servitude; it can only be by redemption, purchased for us by One who loves us, who can pay the satisfying price, and can exert the needed power; and this is the marvel of love which has really been wrought on our behalf.

II. That the citizenship thus conferred upon us by the free love of Jesus entails duties upon all its possessors is a consequence which each Christian heart will be prepared very cheerfully to recognise, as indeed it follows from every principle of right. Those whom a state protects and advances owe to it loyalty and patriotism, and if they fail in the discharge of duty, they forfeit all claim upon privilege; those who have received the heavenly citizenship and carefully obey the laws and steadily watch over the interests of the kingdom to which they belong—theirs will be neither stinted obedience nor intermittent devotion.

III. For true-hearted citizens there is abundant consolation in the immunities to which their citizenship entitles them. (1) They have a claim to the protection of the state in all circumstances of difficulty or need; (2) they have a claim also upon the privileges of the city to which they belong: theirs are its security and its freedom, its wealth, its treasure, and its renown. All the treasures of heaven are yours, "for ye are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s."

W. M. Punshon, Sermons, 2nd series, p. 333.

References: Php 3:20, Php 3:21.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xvii., No. 973; E. Blencowe, Plain Sermons to a Country Congregation, p. 105; Church of England Pulpit, vol. viii., p. 293; Homilist, vol. vi., p. 59; Preacher’s Monthly, vol. ix., p. 228. Php 3:21.—Clergyman’s Magazine, vol. ii., p. 213; Preacher’s Monthly, vol. iv., p. 289.

The Sermon Bible, ed. William Robertson Nicoll (1888–1900) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

There is no duty which believers do more willingly hear, or more difficultly observe, than the duty of spiritually rejoicing: had our apostle called upon the blessed angels to rejoice, who have neither sin, nor sorrow, nor fear, nor sufferings, nor enemies to annoy them, that might have seemed agreeable; but is it at all congruous to persuade sinners loaded with guilt, and defiled with corruption, clothed with infirmities, assaulted with temptations, persecuted by the world! To bid them rejoice, may seem strange: but the wonder will cease, if we consider the object which he directs them to rejoice in, and that is the Lord, not in themselves but in the Lord Jesus Christ: My brethern rejoice in the Lord.

Learn hence, 1. That the Lord Jesus Christ is the great, sure, and perpetual joy of his own people; the object of joy is a present good, a precious good, a proportionable good, a perpetual good, such is our Lord Jesus Christ.

Learn, 2. That it is the duty of all sincere and serious christians to joy and rejoice in him. Finally, brethern, rejoice in the Lord, rejoice in his person, in the treasures of wisdom and knowledge that are found in him, which render him an object worthy of evangelical adoration; rejoice in his mediation, in the great things he has done and suffered for you, in the graces of his Spirit conferred upon you, and in the hopes of that glory to which he has entitled you.

To write the same things, that is, not the same things which I wrote before, but the same things which I preached to you before, and which you often heard by word of mouth from me before: though I inculcate and press the same truths upon you by my writing, which I have done by my preaching, it is neither grievous nor burdensome to me, nor unnecessary or unprofitable for you.

Learn hence, That the often repeating and frequent inculcating of such truths as are most useful and necessary for the instruction and edification of the hearers, ought to be esteemed neither burdensome by the minister, nor wearisome by the people.

Learn farther, That we have here St. Paul’s judgment against oral tradition, which the church of Rome prefers before the written word; so did not St. Paul, knowing that what is delivered by word of mouth might soon slip out of the memory, but what is written is remaining: blessed be God for his written word.

William Burkitt's Expository Notes on the New Testament (1700–1703) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

1. Rejoice in the Lord. See 2:5, and 4:4, 10. There might be a little ground for rejoicing in earthly prospects, but they could rejoice in Christ and the blessed hope of the gospel. To write the same things. To repeat exhortations made before, either in person, or sent by messengers to them.

B. W. Johnson's The People's New Testament with Notes (1889–1891) — public domain. Electronic text from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL) ThML edition.

Connecting Statement:

In order to warn his fellow believers about Jews who would try to get them to follow the old laws, Paul gives his own testimony about when he persecuted believers.

Finally, my brothers

"Now moving along, my brothers" or "Concerning other matters, my brothers"

brothers

See how you translated this in Philippians 1:12.

rejoice in the Lord

"be happy because of all the Lord has done"

For me to write these same things again to you is no trouble for me

"It is no trouble for me to write these things again to you"

and it keeps you safe

Here "these things" refers to Paul's teachings. You can add this alternate translation to the end of the previous sentence. AT: "because these teachings will protect you from those who teach what is not true" (See: Assumed Knowledge and Implicit Information)

Watch out for

"Beware of" or "Look out for"

the dogs ... those evil workers ... those who mutilate the flesh

These are three different ways of describing the same group of false teachers. Paul is using strong expressions to convey his feeling about these Jewish Christian teachers.

dogs

The word "dogs" was used by the Jews to refer to those who were not Jews. They were considered unclean. Paul speaks of the false teachers as though they were dogs, to insult them. If you have a different animal in your culture that is considered unclean or whose name is used as an insult, you could use this animal instead. (See: Metaphor and Irony)

mutilate

Paul is exaggerating about the act of circumcision to insult the false teachers. The false teachers said God will only save a person who is circumcised, who cuts off the foreskin. This action was required by the law of Moses for all male Israelites. (See: Hyperbole and Generalization and Metonymy)

For it is we who are

Paul uses "we" to refer to himself and all true believers in Christ, including the Philippian believers. (See: Inclusive "We")

the circumcision

Paul uses this phrase to refer to believers in Christ who are not physically circumcised but are spiritually circumcised, which means they have received the Holy Spirit through faith. AT: "the truly circumcised ones" or "truly God's people"

have no confidence in the flesh

"do not trust that only cutting our flesh will please God"

translationWords

brother

joy

lord

evil

circumcise

worship

Holy Spirit

Jesus

confidence

flesh

unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.