I
want to know Christ in his suffering
Philippians 3:1-11*
Key verses 10-11
So far, Paul had written about his imprisonment and its
effects on the people to whom he ministered; above all, he considered it good
to advance the Gospel. He taught the Philippians to live
worthy of the Gospel, and to be one in mind and spirit, following Jesus’
humility. In the last lesson, we learned that believers should not complain or grumble. Paul’s ultimate
hope was for the Philippians to live like this:
Philippians 2:15 – “so that you may become blameless and
pure, "children of God without fault in a warped and crooked
generation." Then you will shine
among them like stars in the sky.””
As the Philippians looked ahead to the time of their meeting with
Christ in his glory, they were to shine like the stars in the dark, night sky. In
order to shine like stars, we are to have two things: joy and confidence in the
Lord.
Today’s passage is about how to protect our joy in the
Lord, through the confidence we have in the blessed hope that God gave us through our faith in Jesus.
1.
We
must rejoice in the Lord.
Paul commanded the Philippians to rejoice in the Lord, as
he had done previously in Ch. 1. He repeats this theme again in Ch. 4. He uses
the word ‘rejoice’ a total of 8 times, almost two times in each chapter, in order to reiterate the importance of having
joy in their hearts. So it meant a great deal to Paul for the Philippians to have joy in their hearts. Joy was a
barometer of their spiritual wellbeing, i.e. whether they were winning the battle or not; it also reflected the soundness of their perspective,
i.e. if they had a true godly perspective or not.
Rejoicing is an expression of deep trust in God’s
provision and love for the present, as well as a deep conviction that we will all
join with Him in His glory. Paul called this a ‘safeguard’ for them, reemphasizing this point in Ch. 4.
Philippians 4:7 – “And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in
Christ Jesus.”
So the peace that God gives to His believers, along with joy
and the ability to stand firm in all our struggles in the world, are closely
interwoven together.
Let’s think about our mind now - if there is no joy, why
do we not have joy? What causes that in you? When B got a notice that his
application for a work permit was rejected, his mind was dark and troubled. When
N got sick, my heart was troubled and burdened with fear and uncertainty. We
start to think, what did I do wrong? What didn’t I do that brought this trouble
upon me? Fear and uncertainty throws us into doubt and confusion. In such times
as these, what speaks to our heart? What
is the most corrosive agent to a believer’s joy? Paul directly addressed
this issue in order to preserve the Philippians’ joy.
2.
The
worst enemy for having joy in the Lord came from legalistic circumcisers (2-6).
Paul suddenly turned his attention to a specific group of
people, called the circumcision group. Paul called them dogs, evil-doers, and
mutilators of flesh. These are not kind words at all for us to use in our
relationships with other people. This
was a bitter attack against those people for what they did; however, this was not aimed to demean or condemn certain kinds of people, but rather, by
exposing their true natures, Paul meant to encourage the Philippians to guard
themselves against the idea of circumcision in their walk with the Lord.
Who was the circumcision group and what were their
assertions?
This group was asserting that belief in Jesus as Lord was not good enough in order for them to
become God’s people, or to become right with God. Their claim is clearly
delineated in Acts:
Acts 15:1, 5 “Certain people came down from Judea to
Antioch and were teaching the believers: "Unless you are circumcised, according to the custom taught by Moses,
you cannot be saved." …Then some of the believers who belonged to the
party of the Pharisees stood up and said, "The Gentiles must be
circumcised and required to keep the law
of Moses."
They believed that circumcision, according to God’s covenant with Abraham, was the ultimate
and final proof of God’s genuine children. God had given them the Law of Moses as
a covenant for His people; so a strict observance of the Law of Moses was a must in order for anyone to be considered
children of God, in addition to circumcision. Behind this was a strong push for conformity to the Judaic
nation, God’s chosen nation. In this way, these were rooted in God’s promise and
covenant, as well as in Israel’s history as a nation.
They were so confident in their own understanding that they felt justified to do anything to
uphold their truth; some of these
people were even determined to kill Paul, thinking that he was the author of
this idea.
But, Paul strongly denounced all of these misconceptions,
based on his personal experience;
Philippians 3:4-6 “though I myself have reasons for such
confidence. If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the
flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of
the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as
for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law,
faultless.”
As he said here, Paul had once shared the same understanding
with these people; he was so proud to be God’s chosen because he had all three of these criteria that the circumcisers
were proud of. He was circumcised on the eighth day, a descendant of Benjamin the child of Jacob’s
beloved wife, and, as a Pharisee, he had kept the Law of Moses more than anyone else. No
matter how good they proposed to be, all these acts were based on the flesh. It
meant that these were men’s efforts by their flesh. When it says ‘flesh’, it
does not mean only the physical body we see, exclusive of the mind or spirit;
it refers to the fallen nature of the entire human being, and men’s
inability to keep up with God’s holiness.
This is noted throughout history.
For instance, soon after the fall, God said to Adam,
Genesis 3:17-19 “To Adam he
said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about
which I commanded you, 'You must not eat from it,' "Cursed is the ground
because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of
your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the
plants of the field. By the sweat of
your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it
you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return."”
As we noted here, our entire being is maintained by what
we eat. We will one day return to the ground as dust. This is what is meant by our whole being is of the flesh and the three
credentials that they were boasting of were of or through that flesh.
This truth is further enforced by what God said in Genesis
6:3
“Then the LORD said,
"My Spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal;
their days will be a hundred and twenty years."”
Their utter inability to keep up with God’s Spirit was
hinted at with the giving of the Law of Moses (Exodus 32). This was further confirmed
in Israel’s history — they violated the Law of Moses and utterly failed to keep
the covenant that God had made with them. Despite their best provisions to keep the law, they
failed to do so; this failure tells us of man’s inability to live right with
God by keeping the law. God Himself confirms this:
Jeremiah 31:31-32
"The days are
coming," declares the LORD, "when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the
people of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors
when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them...
God acknowledged
that, despite His care for Israel like His own beloved wife, they did not keep the Law of Moses or its
covenant. This necessitated a new
measure.
What do all of these elements, including Israel’s entire
history, tell us? They confirm that, even
with God’s best provisions and efforts, men are under the power of sin and cannot
keep up with God’s holiness. No one can be right with God by only doing what is
good or keeping the law.
Paul understood this better than anyone else, because he had
breathed murderous threats against believers and trusted in his prideful achievements as a Pharisee. So he
characterized what the circumcisers were doing in these four ways:
1)
They
are dogs - they are scavengers, scrounging for food in the streets,
unclean animals, ferocious, violent, and treacherous. Among the Jews, dogs were
characterized as unclean.
2)
They
are evil doers - fundamentally, what they do has nothing to
do with God’s law and cannot meet with His standard. They were evil (2 Corinthians 11:13), and “deceitful
workers.” They were like the Pharisees whom Jesus rebuked for their hypocrisy.
These are the true
spiritual realities of law-driven self-righteousness. Is there joy in this? Seeking righteousness in the
flesh is an unending struggle to achieve a goal that we can never achieve; Israel’s history testifies to this truth.
God foresaw this and reminded Israel of their failure to keep the covenant. After
their total and repeated failures, God had to remake His covenant with them.
Further, Paul’s
life provided living proof as the
best example of those who pursued righteousness through the law. Here Paul
listed four things to support that claim:
Philippians 3:4-6
·
He was circumcised eight days after his birth.
·
He was a descendant of Benjamin, the son of
Rachel, Jacob’s most cherished wife.
·
He was also a Pharisee and had studied under
the most prominent scholar and godly man of the day, Gamaliel, living as a
stringent observer of the Law of Moses.
·
(vs. 6) “as for zeal, persecuting the church;
as for righteousness based on the law, faultless.”
As
we have noted, Paul had excellent
credentials, if his success were to be measured by what he had accomplished in
the flesh. As far as his flesh was concerned, he had better credentials than
anyone out there, as far as being a man of righteousness. But even with such qualifications,
he had failed to know Jesus, the Son of God and the Messiah. Actually, he had violently
persecuted Jesus and his followers.
Simply, he was no different from his ancestors who had failed
to keep the law or meet God’s
righteousness. He had been so blinded by
his own righteousness that he could not even
recognize the coming Messiah, the Son of God. He was not right with God! Most
likely, the three characterizations of the circumcisers might be an accurate
description of Paul’s old life.
But Paul took a different course in his life when he met
Christ in His glory.
3.
I now
consider loss for the sake of Christ (Philippians 3:7-11)
“But whatever were gains to
me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider
everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my
Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things” (Philippians 3:7-8).
He considered all those great credentials as loss for the
sake of Christ. What did he mean by this? These
credentials that he had built up were the foundation of his being as a godly
and honorable man who was right with God. With these credentials, he could
and would fit in with all the other authorities and powers. He had a keen sense
of his life’s meaning and purpose. After
all, these were the substance that
supported and boosted his pride as a man of God. Finally, he meant to go up to
meet God Almighty when he died after a righteous life; however, this belief was
totally humiliated when he met the glorious Christ, because he had failed to recognize
the Son of God. So, he no longer counted any of these as the basis of his
righteousness. He considered them as loss
for the sake of Christ; Christ only was his righteousness. Knowing and
believing in him was the only source of his righteousness before God. Nothing
else!
Not only his previously listed credentials, but also everything that he had
formerly counted worthy in his life, he considered all of this a loss. The
reason for this is that knowing Christ Jesus is worth more than anything else
in life. The value, the worth of knowing Christ, is so great that nothing else
in this world can measure up to it and is more worthy of his time and energy.
What does this tell us?
We must go back to the question I raised at the beginning of this discussion:
“Are you right with God?” Do you have a positive relationship with God, where
you can find comfort, peace, and joy?
Once, I too struggled with the void inside me. I feared
for my life, and its meaninglessness. I struggled with sins that I could not accept as a part of myself. All
of this turmoil came about, because I was cut off from God.
These were signs
of their having been cut off from God and
not being right with Him. When we are not right with God, there is no peace and we cannot rejoice! Even
small things bother us, and we become easily filled with anger and frustration;
in order to be right, we must strain hard to do what is right!
Actually, all men strive to be right with God, relying on
their own efforts, like Israel, and like Paul.
Even after we come to know Christ, we often go back to this
same mindset of try to do more and more good to earn God’s favor and gain
credit as men of God.
This is the worst enemy of the Gospel; it is the worst kind
of theology and the worst life principle. The
world is driven along this path in an effort to maintain their righteousness;
the prime example of this is found in the Islamic faith. Muslims pray at specific
times, and are required to do at least
one good thing for others; some of them are so righteous in their own eyes that
they condemn all others who do not do what they do. They take judgment on others into their own hands. The
Muslim faith is at the extreme end of this spectrum. Similar beliefs can be found
in Confucius’ ideals, Hinduism, Buddhism, and many tribal beliefs that are
based on ‘self-righteousness’ and the righteousness found in the flesh. Simply,
entire human races are tied to this thought of the law and men’s efforts to
fulfill that law. Human righteousness, or righteousness that comes from their
own justified selves, enables them to do anything as they see fit. This flaw, or sin, of self-righteousness is
deeply entrenched in the depths of the human mind. I believe that this was the reason why God embedded the truth about
human failure in Israel’s history. What does this mean? This trait is
ingrained in our flesh and minds. We
must understand this and watch out for
this so that we may not fall into it again.
If we fall back into this practice of building on our
flesh and its ability and power, we too will be like dogs, evil-doers, and mutilators
of flesh!!
The
understanding of this truth dawns on us when we meet Christ.
So, this truth is far clearer and crisper
to us, once we become believers; we know Him more clearly than anyone else in
the world, so we must reject any effort to build up our own credit of
righteousness. We must reject any tinge of self-righteousness, which works as the
destroyer of our joy and is the worst
enemy of our faith in the Lord.
Why is coming to know Christ worth more than anything else?
This is because God imparts to us His own righteousness to us only through
Jesus.
Paul was an intelligent man and a biblical scholar. He
was one of the elite of that time; one would have thought that he knew everything about life. When Jesus’ followers
propagated a truth that was completely contrary to his own understanding, Paul did
his best to refute, reject, and persecute Jesus’ followers. Simply, Paul was convinced of his own version of the truth and thought
that he knew it all and understood all there was. But when he met Jesus on his way to
Damascus, Paul came to realize that the knowledge he had had was insufficient, incomplete, and even wrong. How did he come to know this? Because
the knowledge he came to have by knowing Christ was far superior, deeper, and more penetrating to the universal truth
of the gospel and the secret things of heaven. Paul’s direct encounter with Christ in
His glory says far more than anything that he could reason or argue for the
true nature of righteousness as being based on faith.
God demonstrated His will to impart to all sinners the utmost knowledge of life, communicated through knowing Christ. So,
through knowing Christ, Paul could attain the glory that he saw when Jesus appeared to
him.
In the past, Paul had earned his credit by acting and
working in accordance with the law, but now, he threw away any righteousness that
was based on human flesh; it’s garbage, it stinks, and it’s smelly like human
waste. He now wanted to earn Jesus and be found in him. It is an implementation
of the truth that he personally could not attain the righteousness of God on
his own merits. It used to be a decision to earn the necessary credit in Jesus so that Paul
had to gain Jesus’ attention and earn his grace and mercy, in order for Jesus to
look upon him with favor and bestow God’s grace on him.
4.
The
righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith.
Philippians 3:8b-9 “I
consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a
righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through
faith in Christ--the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith.”
Now Paul turned away from his old way of thinking and
wanted to gain Christ and be found in him. Here
is a clear shift in the direction of his life - from gaining credit from
God by his own works to gaining it through Christ. This is the new direction
that we must take until we meet with Christ.
We all need this shift our lives; from
me/myself, to us in Christ. If our gears are still set in a reverse position,
no matter how hard we try, we can never move forward. So we need to think about
where our gears are set , whether on me or us, or on Jesus. May God give us a
decision, will, and a clear sense of direction!
Philippians 3:10-11 “I want
to know Christ--yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in
his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection
from the dead.”
Knowing someone well is to know their entire life, from birth to death. Additionally, we have to recognize according
to what kind of spirit he lives and what works he does.
Towards the middle of his ministry, Jesus announced that
he was going to suffer and die as a ransom for sinners. To those who would not
accept a suffering Messiah, Jesus said, in Mark 10:45, that he did not come to
be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. As he had said,
he gave his life on the cross for sinners like us. He believed God was right in
judging the sins of mankind by death, and Jesus
gave himself to communicate God’s righteousness to them. And God awarded
him resurrection; the process of death and resurrection captures the core truth
of the righteousness that God gives to men. Paul wanted to know that
righteousness. The evidence of that righteousness was Jesus’ glorious appearance.
His top three disciples experienced it
when they went up on a mountain with him. Paul experienced it when this same glorious
Jesus appeared to him. So, to him, all else was like garbage, compared to the glory he saw in Christ.
How could he obtain that glory, the proof of this God-bestowed
righteousness? Paul was keenly aware that Jesus attained to that glory through
his suffering and death on the cross. So, in order to attain to that glory, he
not only accepted Jesus’ life on the
cross as his own, but also wanted to live such a life, by actively
participating in Christ’s suffering. This is the faith that God awards as
‘heavenly blessings’.
This will begin by us shifting our attention from seeking
righteousness on my own or from my personal efforts, to seeking God’s
righteousness as given in Christ. Also, be reminded that we are not making ongoing
efforts to earn righteousness from Christ; we already have it through God’s
grace, from the beginning of our encounter with Christ in faith.
Ephesians 3:12 “In him and
through faith in him we may approach God with freedom and confidence.”
Likewise, from the outset of our life with Christ, we are
given freedom and confidence through the righteousness that God gives us in His
Son. It has been ours ever since. Now, in this confidence and freedom, we set
our sights on knowing Jesus’ suffering and death, so that the righteousness
that God has given may carry us on to the time of our glorification in Christ.
We can focus our efforts on knowing Jesus Christ,
particularly his suffering. When we dare to suffer, we can see God’s glory more
powerfully and vividly, but when we
chicken out of all dangers and sufferings, then our vision for the glory of the
resurrection will be faint and we will
always be wondering and uncertain about what will happen next.
So, dare to suffer along with Christ; God will give you
abundant blessings for the hope you have of glory, along with confidence in His
righteousness and His peace that
transcends all hardships. May God Almighty give us rich blessings through Christ’s
righteousness!
No comments:
Post a Comment