Joy commanded from inside a guardroom
The word for joy and the verb for rejoicing run through all four chapters, and every use is written by a man in chains who may be executed. Paul begins with it, 'always in every supplication of mine on behalf of you all making my supplication with joy' (1:4). He applies it to rivals who preach Christ out of bad motives and decides that the preaching is what counts, 'whether in pretence or in truth, Christ is proclaimed; and therein I rejoice, yea, and will rejoice' (1:18). He turns it into a command near the end, 'Rejoice in the Lord always: again I will say, Rejoice' (4:4). The location matters as much as the command, since the joy is placed in the Lord and not in the outcome of the trial. Alongside it stands the sentence about what happens when a worried church prays, 'And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall guard your hearts and your thoughts in Christ Jesus' (4:7). The verb for guarding is a soldier's word, apt for a letter written under military custody.
Philippians 1:4 · Philippians 1:18 · Philippians 4:4 · Philippians 4:7
To live is Christ, and to die is gain
Paul states his own position on a possible death sentence in one line: 'For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain' (1:21). He then does something unusual and works out the arithmetic in public. Death would put him with Christ, 'having the desire to depart and be with Christ; for it is very far better' (1:23), and life would keep him useful to the churches, 'yet to abide in the flesh is more needful for your sake' (1:24). He expects to be released and to see them again (1:25-26). Two things follow for doctrine. The believer who dies is with Christ at once, in a state Paul calls far better than his present usefulness. And the value of continued life is measured by what it does for other people, which is the same measure the hymn of chapter 2 puts on the mind of Christ.
Philippians 1:21 · Philippians 1:23 · Philippians 1:25
The hymn: who Christ is, and what he did with it
The letter's centre is a passage of seven verses that carries as much Christology as anything outside the opening of John. It starts from what Christ already was: 'who, existing in the form of God, counted not the being on an equality with God a thing to be grasped' (2:6). Equality with God is the starting point of the sentence, held rather than reached for. What follows is the descent, 'but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men' (2:7), and then the floor of it, 'he humbled himself, becoming obedient even unto death, yea, the death of the cross' (2:8). Crucifixion was the death Rome reserved for slaves and rebels, and the colony that read this letter knew exactly what it looked like. Then the sentence turns on one word: 'Wherefore also God highly exalted him, and gave unto him the name which is above every name' (2:9). The deity stated at the top of the passage is the deity honored at the bottom of it, and the whole movement is put before the Philippians as a pattern for how members of one congregation are to treat each other.
Philippians 2:6 · Philippians 2:7 · Philippians 2:8 · Philippians 2:9
Salvation worked out because God is working in
The command and its ground are put in consecutive verses. 'work out your own salvation with fear and trembling' (2:12) is followed immediately by 'for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure' (2:13). The reason given for the effort is God's own activity in the person making it, which places the two clauses in a single argument. The verb for working out means to bring something to its finished state, and what is brought out is what God has put in. Paul has already said the same thing about the whole congregation at the start of the letter, 'that he who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ' (1:6). Read together, 1:6 and 2:13 say the work is God's from beginning to end, and 2:12 says the believer is fully engaged in it.
Philippians 1:6 · Philippians 2:12 · Philippians 2:13
A righteousness that is from God by faith
Chapter 3 lists the best credentials a first-century Jew could hold, and then reclassifies them. Paul was 'circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews' (3:5), and 'as touching the righteousness which is in the law, found blameless' (3:6). His verdict on the list is a ledger entry: 'Howbeit what things were gain to me, these have I counted loss for Christ' (3:7), and then a blunter word still, 'do count them but refuse, that I may gain Christ' (3:8). What replaces the list is a standing given rather than earned, '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 from God by faith' (3:9). This is the argument of Romans and Galatians compressed into three verses by a man using his own life as the case study.
Philippians 3:7 · Philippians 3:8 · Philippians 3:9
Not yet arrived, and still running
Paul refuses to claim a finished sanctification. 'Not that I have already obtained, or am already made perfect: but I press on' (3:12), and then the picture of the runner, 'forgetting the things which are behind, and stretching forward to the things which are before' (3:13), 'I press on toward the goal unto the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus' (3:14). What he wants from the running is stated in the verse before, 'that I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, becoming conformed unto his death' (3:10). Resurrection power and shared suffering are named in one breath as one fellowship, which is the hymn's own shape of descent and exaltation appearing in the life of an ordinary believer.
Philippians 3:10 · Philippians 3:12 · Philippians 3:14
Citizens of heaven, in a colony proud of Rome
'For our citizenship is in heaven; whence also we wait for a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ' (3:20). Every reader in Philippi held or lived beside Roman citizenship on Macedonian soil, which is the exact civic arrangement Paul borrows. A colony was a piece of Rome planted abroad, keeping the mother city's law and looking to it. Paul tells a colony of that kind that its real mother city is elsewhere and that its ruler is coming from there. The next verse says what the arrival will do to their bodies: 'who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory' (3:21). The word behind humiliation is the same root the hymn used of Christ humbling himself at 2:8, so the pattern completes itself. He took a body like theirs and they will receive a body like his.
Philippians 3:20 · Philippians 3:21
