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In the congregation at Philippi two streams of evil coursed among the members, both of which gave occasion to Paul’s tears. Judaist self-justificatory ethics and Hellenistic self-gratificatory ethics fought over the communion’s soul. Paul had sized up the conflictive currents and imminent dangers. Hence, he warned the congregation through the overseers and the deacons to oppose those adversities, the Jewish self-righteousness and the libertine arrogance. By means of deception Judaists and Hellenists under pretensions of Christianity strutted and/or sneaked about as enemies of the Cross; recoiling from the word, hostiles who squashed within the Church at that place the liveliness of the Gospel and stalled reformation according to the Scriptures.
By duplicitous pressures from two streams of Christ-haters, notably the legalistic temptations of the Jews and the carnal temptations of the Greeks, those enemies of the Gospel condoned every day, seven per week, conformity to the world, wherewith they threatened the wholeness of the congregation. Paul’s serious weeping indicated that these movements to synthesize the congregation and the world muffled the communion’s integral voice of faith. The immorality of the pagans and the hostility of the Jews with respect to the Commandments moved the congregation as a whole out of the time-eternity tensions into the world. Paul, militant, exhorted Christ’s members to clarify the dividing-line, which separated the living and the dead, thus illuminating the strains of being in the world while not of the world. The Gospel had to counteract the idolatrous voices. No one, and never in the Church, possessed privileges to confuse Christianity with license, not to the detriment of the Gospel. Therefore, the Apostle’s commendable appeal, ever adaptable, to blunt and block the malice of the fractious.
Since the definitive judgment begins in the Church, Paul fingered the destroyers of the congregation’s wholeness and pointed to the most dreadful of all possibilities awaiting unbelievers, eternal ruin for hypocritical types. Phil 1:28. Whatever pretentions to the contrary, avant-garde lifestyles, Greek or Jewish, Christ Jesus appointed to everlasting punishment all immoral and wicked, first those in one of his congregations. Rom 6:1, 21, 23; 2 Cor 11:15; etc. The Judge of the entire world through the Apostle demonstrated also in the Church at Philippi the universal justice of his condemnatory word, mitigating nothing of continuing torment in eternal death.
Concentrating on the Hellenistic ethics of excess—“their god is the belly”—and on the Jewish ethics of legalism, Paul in Phil 3:17–21 shouldered both diabolical longings to the surface. Such intolerable brands of religiosity and those devotees of ancient idolatries thus faced the inevitable consequences. Rom 16:18. Licentiousness they advocated to subvert Christian liberty? Legalism they endorsed to deflate Christian gratitude? To the predictable detriment of the simple, the converts, the youngsters, and much of Christ Jesus’s reputation, revolutionaries of both sorts crippled the congregation’s missionary capacity. Without control over and supervision of physical and moral appetites, Rom 8:13; 1 Cor 9:27; etc., shapeless living according to the flesh cast aside the self-denial Jesus Christ himself exampled, for one strain the yearnings for the seven deadly sins, for the other the easy rules of the Oral Law. Since the physical bodies and the working minds of Christ’s own constituted temples of the Holy Spirit, 1 Cor 6:19–20, none of the living in that congregation dared contravene the Commandments for moralities other than revealed in the Scriptures for the Church. They who deceptively persisted in alternative ways, the notable Apostle interposed, knowingly suffered ignominy of the worst kind, for denying the headship of the Lord Jesus Christ. Gal 5:1, 13; 1 Pet 1:21; etc. However, while those devotees of the belly and those legalists of the mind misaligned the congregation vis-à-vis the Savior from the inside, the believers caught between obedience and disobedience were enfeebled.
Through sullying the Church’s repute in Philippi and soiling the new life in Christ, those infuriating libertines and irksome legalists gloried in shame. While in the one case they found immorality the way and in the other law-keeping the future force, Paul prophesied ruin for both, adamantly. Sins of the flesh and sins of the mind end in consummate disgrace. Paul, pastorally moved, with tears certified the approaching condemnation in eternity for all who moved off the covenant course.
The Prophetic Way
In contrast to the restrictive in the world living for Hellenists even as for Jews, Paul alerted believers to the prophetic opening of history by emulating him and companions because “love of Christ constrains us,” 2 Cor 5:14. This unsettling in the world/not of the world measurement inaugurated by working out the Commandments vindicated faithfulness in Christ; by moving in both dispensations simultaneously, life on earth, in the world, and in the Commonwealth, not of the world, the Faith rises reliably to adore in Jesus Christ the Father, the whole moved by the Spirit. Thus the concurrent mundane and the heavenly shaped the one legacy for all Christianity.
Longing for the totality of living in the Commonwealth presented no workable evasions from the world, no escape from anguish and anger in the world, and certainly no unsightly running away from responsibilities, personal and/or corporate, but validated generational living in the world. However uncomfortable believers became due to the damaging excesses of Hellenism and its trending into hedonism and however frustrated living members of the congregation became because of Jewish self-righteousness, the deplorable rise of these deceptive worldviews in the congregation moved the hopes of all the redeemed to serve the Lord and Savior; this service stood out prophetically too. Before arriving at the totality of the Faith, what necessity confronted the faithful? To uphold the good confession in the midst of the Commandments, which none in Christ repudiates.
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With mutual surveillance Paul summoned the believers to overcome ancient energies, the Greek and the Pharisaic. Such prophetic living stood out first in the way of Christ-centered self-denial, then in obedience to the Commandments, no matter how painfully reformative.
BELIEVERS ALIVE IN ADORATION
Schooling in perseverance unhinges church-destructive idolatries, at the same time amplifying the trinitarian adoration.
The Eschatological Way
Eschatological forces in the Scriptures as a whole and in the Phil 3:17–21 passage specifically reveal unadorned the Church’s in the world/not of the world integration into the Commonwealth. Christ Jesus’s leading-edge dominion broke through every civilization of man at the time Paul founded the congregation in Philippi large with the strength of the Spirit and in the name of the Christ this Apostle aided by companions gave undeniable evidence of the Kingdom of Heaven, the Recreation. To reclaim his Kingdom in person the LORD God entered the world at Bethlehem as the Son of God. Before the dominant world government of that day he witnessed to his priority in global rule. John 18:36, “My kingship is not of this world; if my kingship were of this world, my servants would fight, that I might not be handed over to the Jews; but my kingship is not from the world.” Therewith the Lord and Savior summoned in every generation of the Church since, as in Philippi, never again to adore any passing power, that is, any ideology or idolatry, each one pointless and inconclusive, except destructive even of the common good.
Christ Jesus’s eternal rule, despite its hidden complexities prophetically foreseen in Eph 2:12’s politeia and based on the opening of history recorded as Gen 3:14–19, Paul called the Commonwealth