Citizens of God's Kingdom: The Pursuit of Life Introduction
“Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect: but I follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus. Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but 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. Let us therefore, as many as be perfect, be thus minded: and if in any thing ye be otherwise minded, God shall reveal even this unto you. Nevertheless, whereto we have already attained, let us walk by the same rule, let us mind the same thing. Brethren, be followers together of me, and mark them which walk so as ye have us for an ensample. (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.) For our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ: Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself.” (Philippians 3:12-21)
This is a long and rather complicated passage. In order to get to the truth of it, we are going to have to take a step back and get in our mind a general overview of what Paul is saying, an overall 'lay-of-the-land,' before we move on to look at the individual details.
The first thing to notice about this passage is that it is a warning given to the church against acting in a certain way and, specifically, against acting like certain people. There is clearly an element here of attack against certain people who were not living as they should. Verses 18-19 make this explicit, speaking of those who walk and are enemies of the cross of Christ. The passage before this was a warning against Judaizing teachers who would draw Christians away from the gospel. They were enemies of the cross of Christ because they sought to provide a means of salvation other than faith in the sacrificial death of Christ. But after looking at the passage it seems (and most commentators think the same) that Paul is no longer thinking of the Judaizers.
Instead, he is thinking of those within the church, those who profess to be Christians. Even in the days of early Christianity, when being a Christian was attended with great danger, there were those within the church who were not truly following God and whom it would be spiritually dangerous to imitate. Paul doesn't necessarily say they existed in the Philippian church, but he knew that they existed in many churches. He had already warned the Philippians many times about such people--weeping over the fact that they were acting in such a way and destroying themselves and corrupting the church--and now he warns them again about them.
Who were they exactly? How were they enemies of the cross of Christ? In verse 19 Paul describes four characteristics of them. (1) Their God is their belly. The phrase is deliberately ironic. Obviously, nobody literally worships their own stomach. Back in Ephesians, we talked about this. There Paul calls the covetous man an idolater, because, even though he would deny that money is his god, yet he makes money and the desire for money the end of all his actions, the center of all his plans, and the arbiter of all his decisions. So these people made their “belly”--that is, the self-indulgence of their own personal appetites and desires--their god because they made those desires and the fulfillment of them the center of their life. They lived for their own sake and for the sake of the fulfillment of their own desires. This is reinforced in (2) the fact that they “mind earthly things.” This doesn't just that they pay attention to and care about earthly things. The Bible makes it clear that we ought to care about earthly things because it is here, on earth, that we live as Christians. The more we care about heavenly things, the more we will care about earthly things. The problem with these people is that they cared ONLY about earthly things. They were looking to and thinking about this life only. They never raised their eyes to the eternal horizons. A Christian life is lived in this world, but with all the windows thrown open so that everything is touched by the light of heaven. But these people had shut and bared every window and lived in the darkness of carnal and selfish interests. (3) And they didn't even care. Their “glory is in their shame.” You sometimes hear someone, especially at a revival service, get up and confess that their love for God has grown cold or that they have grown lax in their prayer life. Have you ever heard someone get up and boast: “I haven't prayed for six months. That's a new record for me.” Or, “My love for God is at an all-time low.” No, because we realize that those things are bad, something to be ashamed of, not something to glory in. But these people Paul described were actually glorying, boasting in the things which they should have been ashamed of it. This could mean one of two things. It could mean that, say, they were boasting in their riches rather than being ashamed that they had selfishly amassed such wealth for themselves. But it could mean that they actually boasted in their very selfishness and spiritual coldness. (In a moment, we'll see why they might have had such an attitude.) All of this leads together to (4) “whose end is destruction.” This word end is interesting and we'll come back to it later. It can have the connotation of that which is the proper and natural result of a course of action. It is the full-blown and fully developed conclusion of something, the point that you work towards and aim for. It wasn't just that God was going to arbitrarily visit destruction on them. It was that their course of action would naturally lead to destruction.
And notice the way Paul describes these people. It sounds as if he is describing people who are entrenched and confirmed in a course of action. Not to say they couldn't repent and change, but this was a course that they were fully entered into. These aren't people that are up-and-down spiritually, but those who have chosen, explicitly or implicitly, a certain course of action. This may be implied by Paul's statement that “some walk.” These weren't people who were stumbling and falling. They were walking in a specific direction.
Now, to fully understand what kind of people these were, we have to stop and think about the context. In the first half of chapter 3, Paul was speaking of the Judaizers. He spoke of how he himself had tried, as they tried, to find salvation through the works of the law, through his own efforts. But he came to a point where he realized all that was worthless and useless, was mere garbage so far as salvation was confirmed and he had counted all that as a loss in order to find salvation. But having said, he realized there was a danger that some in the church who would misunderstand this idea.
And that brings us to this word ANTINOMIAN, which literally means against-the-law or lawless. There was a definite antinomian presence in the early church, and we see this especially in Romans. What the antinomians taught was that because we were saved by grace through faith and not through the law, then obedience to the law was no longer necessary. The antinomians said that once you had been saved by grace it didn't matter what you did, because God's grace would cover it all. Some of them even boasted in their sin, as a sign of their liberty as Christians and of God's grace. You could sin as much as you want because grace would abound even more. Paul himself was accused of teaching such a doctrine because of his emphasis on salvation by grace, as was John Wesley (and in both cases, it's really funny if you think about it). Explicit antinomianism has appeared throughout Christianity during the course of its history, though always as a minority position. But even today, within mainstream, American evangelicalism, there is a tendency to emphasize initial salvation by grace to such a degree that it results in practical antinomianism. Particularly the doctrine of “once-saved-always-saved” has this tendency--this tendency of making it seem that once your saved, the way you live is of secondary importance. That seems to be what Paul is trying to combat here. Yes, we are saved by faith and not of works, but that doesn't mean after we're saved we can do anything we want. And again, even though we are saved by faith that doesn't mean we can just sit down and rest after we are saved. That's why Paul in this passage emphasizes this idea of pressing on. If you're trying to start a healthy lifestyle of eating and exercise, you can't say: “I just lost five pounds. I'm going to go eat a big meal to celebrate.” Salvation is the beginning not the end of the Christian walk. Even sanctification is a kind of beginning and not an end.
This then is the overall thrust of this passage. We are saved by grace and not by the law, but that doesn't mean the law becomes completely irrelevant. Salvation begins at a particular time, but when we are saved we must push on forward, not look back.
A keyword to notice in this passage is this word “perfect” in verse 12 and then again in verse 15. The Greek word in 15 is Teleios (and 12 is the verb form of the same word). There are two ideas to keep in mind with this word. One is the idea of having reached a goal or measuring up to a particular standard. According to Strong, this word traces back to a root which means “to set out for a definite point or goal.” (see #5056) The idea is that this is the conclusion of a certain course, the full development of a thing, the end of a certain road. The other is being worthy for a specific purpose. Barclay explains that it means “a kind of functional perfection, adequacy for some given purpose. It means full-grown in contradistinction to undeveloped; for example, it is used of a full-grown man as opposed to an undeveloped youth. It is used to mean mature in mind and therefore means one who is qualified in a subject as opposed to a mere learner. When it is used of offerings, it means without blemish and fit to offer God.” (The Letter to the Philippians, Colossians, and Thessalonians: Revised Edition, 65) Teleios in Greek and Perfect in English do not necessarily mean “without fault, flaw, or mistake,” which is how we most often use the word Perfect today. It can mean that, but it doesn't necessarily mean that. It does mean having reached the conclusion of a certain course or being fit for a certain purpose.
We have to keep this in our mind in order to understand something odd about this passage. In verse 12 Paul makes a point of the fact that he is not already perfect. That is kind of the main idea of the passage. He hasn't arrived yet; he is still pressing forward. Yet in verse 15, he includes himself in the group “as many as be perfect.” There is seemingly a contradiction here. How could Paul specifically say in one breath that he isn't perfect and in the next breath say that he is?
The solution to this paradox is to remember what we learned about the meaning of the word teleios. If you take perfect as meaning completely without fault, flaw, or mistake, then obviously you couldn't be both perfect and imperfect at the same time. But as I said, teleios doesn't necessarily mean that. What it means is having reached a certain goal or being fit for a certain purpose. And when you look at that, it is clear that in our life as Christians there will be points where we can say we have reached a goal, we have completed something, we are 'perfect'--without denying that we still have something to push forward to.
To make this clearer we can think of a couple of analogies. When you're building a house, the first thing you do is put in a foundation. You will reach a point when the foundation is completely laid and completed--but the house still isn't finished. Once the foundation is laid, you put up the frame and finish the outside walls and the roof. You will reach a point where that's done and from the outside, it may look as if the house is finished, but in reality, it is still far from complete. Or, again, when a baby is born, it begins a process of growth which will gradually, over a space of about twenty years, turn them into an adult. There is both a physical and a mental process involved and neither one can be exactly pinned down to a specific time, but we generally recognize that it does in fact happen and that a man of twenty-five is different from a boyof five. There is a point in which one has grown up and reached adulthood. But that doesn't mean that either your mental or your physical growth becomes static. Your body and mind will continue to change for the rest of your life. In other words, when even when the process we call “Growing up” ends, the process of life still continues.
The point is that there are points in our life as Christians in which we can say we have arrived, we have completed something, we have reached a goal, we are, in a Biblical sense, 'perfect', and yet still have more to reach for. When someone is saved, they have been brought out of sin and seated in heavenly places with Christ Jesus. Their salvation is complete. And yet they still have more to reach for. When someone is sanctified, their heart is purified and filled with perfect love. Their sanctification is complete. And yet they still have more to reach for. One may have great experience in the Christian way and have great knowledge of God's word, brought to a point where they may be called mature in faith and competent in knowledge. And yet they still have more to reach for. One may be like the Apostle Paul, a leader in the church, following a sacred call to preach the gospel, willing to go through great persecution for God's sake, in prison for the gospel--and still have more to reach for.
The whole thrust of the passage is summed up in verse 16: “Whereto we have already attained, let us walk by the same rule.” Or as the NET Bible translates it: “Let us live up to the standard that we have already attained.” On one hand, we shouldn't throw aside whatever progress we have made as Christians. That is what the Judaizers would have had people do--throw aside everything they had gained and go back to Judaism. We should hold fast unto the things we have. But we should never rest where we are, but, instead, keep pressing forward. The antinomians thought that as long as they had been saved, they could just sit down and not do anything else. But Paul makes it clear that no matter how far we have gone as Christians, no matter how many experiences we have gone through, no matter what heights we have obtained, what knowledge or revelation we have gained, we must always keep pressing forward. There is no point, at least in this life, where we can stop and say we have no need to go on. We may be perfect or complete in some phase of our Christian life, but God always has something more for us. And some have even suggested that in the resurrection, the same will be true and that through all the endless ages of eternity we will be journeying “further up and further in” in the things of God.
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