I was reading this earlier on Philippians 3 from the New Bible Commentary edited by John Stott.
3:1-21 Spiritual ambitions
It seems that Paul was about to close his letter here as he uses a word that might be translated ‘finally’. Then, whatever the reason (see the introduction), he feels that he must give a warning about those who wanted all Gentile converts to become Jews. This leads him to speak of his reliance on Jesus Christ alone for acceptance with God and to speak of his greatest ambitions for his spiritual life and also for the lives of his Christian friends at Philippi.
3:1-3 Warning against the circumcision party
To understand what is being said here and in the next few verses we need to go back a little into the life of the early church. The first believers in Jesus were Jews, and as loyal Jews they saw the law of vital importance and emphasized the covenant that Israel had with God, the sign of which was circumcision. These first believers were sent out with a world mission (Acts 1:8), but it was hard for them to reach out to non-Jews (note Acts 10) and it was some time before a true mission to Gentiles began (Acts 11:20). Paul, as apostle to the Gentiles, believed that if non-Jewish people turned to the Lord in repentance and faith they were to be accepted as members of God’s people, without the necessity of their becoming Jews and of males being circumcised. There were Jewish Christians, however, who in Antioch (Acts 15:1) and in Galatia insisted that these Gentile Christians should become Jews. So the Jerusalem Council of Acts 15 was called, and to deal with the same issue Paul wrote his letter to the Galatians. Years later this was still a problem, and so to write about it was a safeguard for the Philippians.
1-2 Paul was so incensed against those who pressed for Gentiles to become Jews that he called them dogs, the name that Jews gave to Gentiles. These people, however, were more deserving of the name than any Gentile because of the way that they liked to ‘prowl round the Christian congregations, seeking to win Gentile converts over to Judaism’ (Beware, Philippians), and so such converts needed to watch out for them. They were ‘evil workers’ (NRSV), turning people aside from truth and freedom (Mt. 23:15; 2 Cor. 11:13; Gal. 1:7-9). Because circumcision had no spiritual value they were just mutilators of the flesh.
3 When the spiritual value of circumcision is no longer there, the practice becomes only an external rite, a matter of confidence in the flesh. It is we who are the circumcision, says Paul. While some think that he may have been speaking just of Jewish Christians, the evidence is that Paul, and the NT writers generally, take up all the titles and privileges of the people of God from OT days and apply them to Christians, whether Jewish or Gentile (e.g. Eph. 2:11-22; 1 Pet. 2:4-10). 3:4-7
Paul’s previous life and aims
4 Paul argues now that he could have the same confidence in the flesh, as these people who wanted to make all Christians become Jews. He could list one by one the things that he formerly, as a devout Jew, thought gave him a credit account with God.
5-6 He lists seven things that he counted as gains in the deeply religious life that he had lived before he met with Jesus.
He was circumcised on the eighth day after his birth as the law required (Gn. 17:12).
He was born and bred an Israelite, a member of the people of God.
He could name his tribe, Benjamin, the tribe of Israel’s first king, and one that had remained faithful when others did not.
He was not only a true Jew, but a Hebrew, an Aramaic—speaker (cf Acts 6:1; 22:2; 2 Cor. 11:22), son of Hebrew parents, not like so many who had lost the use of their native tongue.
Strict in observing the law, he was a devout Pharisee (Acts 23:6; 26:5; cf Gal. 1:14).
His zeal was shown in what he did to persecute the Christians (Acts 8:3; 9:1).
He could say that as far as the external demands of the law were concerned, the Mosaic law by which he had tried to live, he was faultless. That, however, was a matter of legalistic righteousness, of trying to be right with God on the basis of obedience to the law.
7 Now he reckoned all these gains as one great loss. ‘All such assets I have written off because of Christ’ (NEB). He had come to see them as a false basis of confidence and even a hindrance to him. He goes on to describe the infinitely better way he had found.
3:8—14 The old renounced; Paul’s new ambitions
Because of his meeting with the risen Christ on the Damascus road (Acts 9), and also because he came to realize that he had not really kept the law (Rom. 7), Paul had been led to a ‘radical transvaluation of values’ (Hawthorne, Philippians).
8 Because he had found the way of acceptance with God in Christ, Paul reckoned all those things on which he had relied before as loss; he decided that all was ‘far outweighed’ by the single ‘gain of knowing Christ‘(NEB). He had not only counted all those things as loss but he could say that for Christ’s sake I have lost all things-his place in Judaism, among the Pharisees, probably his own home even. Yet he did not grieve, as everything else was ‘useless rubbish compared with being able to win Christ” (Phillips).
9 Now his desire is to be accepted on the basis of the righteousness which is God’s gift, offered on the simple condition of believing (cf Rom. 3:21-4:25; Gal. 2:15-3:29; Eph. 2:4-9), laying aside that so-called righteousness of his own works on which he had relied before.
10 More than that, he wants to live in the knowledge of Christ, that is (as Christian baptism signifies, see Rom. 6:1-4) being identified with Christ crucified and risen. This means knowing the power of his resurrection in daily experience (cf Rom. 8:10-11; 2 Cor. 4:10-11; Eph. 1:19-20) and sharing his sufferings by dying to the self-centred life that is natural to us and being willing to face difficulty and hardship so that the gospel of salvation may go out to all people (cf 2 Cor.-l-:7-12; Gal. 6:17; Col. 1:24-25). These two realities must always belong together in any genuine Christian life.
11 In the light of his new great ambition and longing, Paul thus hopes somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead. These words come strangely to us after what we have read. Does not attaining to the resurrection depend on faith alone? Could the apostle be in doubt about his final salvation? He never lacked the assurance that he was a child of God, accepted by God (Rom. 8:15-17; Gal. 4:6-7), yet he was never complacent or presumptuous. Faith must endure to the end (Mk. 13:13; Heb. 3:14). We should read Paul’s words here as an expression not so much of doubt, as of humility.
12-13 It seems that there were in Philippi those who thought that they had reached the goal of Christian perfection, that they had ‘arrived’. Paul recognized the call to Christians to aspire to the highest standards (cf 2:15; Eph. 4:13-16), as Jesus himself said ‘Be perfect... as your heavenly Father is perfect’ (Mt. 5:48), but he never claimed to have reached that perfection. Rather he will press on, and the word that he uses means literally ‘pursue‘, the word by which he described his persecuting of the early church (6). He wanted to take hold of that great purpose for which Christ had taken hold of him when he confronted him on the Damascus road years before. There are ways in which Christians should remember the acts of God in the past, but Paul knew that he must not dwell on the past; its failures and sins have been forgiven, and its achievements in the service of Christ must not allow him to rest on his laurels. He wanted rather to be found straining towards what lay ahead, and to express this he uses another very strong word, applicable to an athletic context or a chariot race; every fibre of his being was set on the goal and purpose of his Christian life.
14 There was a prize to be won, though we cannot be sure whether Paul saw the prize as Christ himself, ‘God’s call to the life above, or the ‘crown of life’ the gift of God’s grace to those who faithfully persevere in their calling to the end.
15-17 An example to be followed
I5 Being mature or ‘perfect’ (it is essentially the same word in the Greek original) is a matter of thinking in the way of which Paul has been speaking. He trusts that if his Philippian friends think differently, the Spirit of God will reveal the true way and they will be open to that.
16 What is vital always is that we should live by the truth that we have already recognized and accepted. What is translated here ‘let us live up to’ has the sense not just of individually following on but of keeping in line with others. In choosing this verb Paul once again stresses the importance of harmony and mutual co-operation in spite of whatever divergence of opinion may exist’ (Hawthorne, Philippians).
17 Here, as in other places in his letters (e.g. 1 ‘Cor. 4:16; 11:1; 1 Thes. 1:6; 2:10; 2 Thes. 3:7, 4. Paul speaks of his own example as one to be followed. This might seem presumptuous, but we need to realize that before there was a NT for Christians to use, it was vital that there should be role models. It was as much necessary for Paul to live the kind of Christian life that others could follow as it was for him to preach a pure gospel for them to believe.]. B. Phillips paraphrases this verse, ‘let my example be the standard by which you tell who are the genuine Christians among those about you‘. Our situation is not exactly the same today, as the NT is people’s basic guide to Christian life-style, but it:5 still the case (as Paul puts it in 2 Cor. 3:1—3) that the Christian is called to be like ‘a letter from Christ’, ‘known and read by everybody’, including many who would not turn to the Scriptures.
18-21 Call to a heavenly citizenship
From the thought of his own great ambitions fired by the love of Christ, and from the thought of those with a misguided concept of perfection, Paul turns to think of others within the community of the Christian church whose lives he can only contemplate with pain and grief.
18-19 In two ways the cross is at the very centre of Christianity. It is central because we believe that through the death of Christ on the cross we have the way of forgiveness and acceptance with God and thus of eternal life. The cross is also central for our understanding of discipleship. Jesus calls us to take up the cross and follow him (Mk. 8:34; Lk. 9:23), and Paul knew that he must accept ‘the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death. It seems clear that it was in this second way that these people of whom Paul writes were enemies of the cross of Christ. Instead of accepting a self-denying way of discipleship, they had made their physical desires their god, boasted in what was in fact shameful, and set their minds on earthly things. This meant that instead of finding in the cross both their salvation and way of life, they were on a path that could lead only to destruction.
20 The thought of those whose lives are dominated by the desire for earthly things leads the apostle to say that true Christians know that their life and citizenship is even now in heaven with Christ (cf Eph. 1:3; 2:6; Col. 3:1—4). Philippians could be proud of their citizenship in a Roman colony (see the Introduction), just as we all have an earthly citizenship which has its privileges and its obligations. But they, and we, have to value above all the gift of a heavenly life and citizenship, and we live in hope of our future inheritance that we will receive in its fullness in the future. Thus we eagerly await the reappearing from heaven of our Saviour, the Lord]Jesus Christ.
21 Christ’s coming will mean the transformation of our lowly bodies to be like his glorious body (cf. 2 Cor. 4:16 — 5:4; 1 jn. 3:2) by the power of God to whose working there can ultimately be no limitation or hindrance. The body that we have is not despised, but it is a sign of our present lowly condition (the same word is used in Mary’s song in Lk. 1:48). Now our bodies are subject to pain and suffering and weakness; then they will be raised to be immortal and imperishable (see 1 Cor. 15:35-54).
