Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of Philippians 3:10
That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death;
10. That I may know him ] In order to know Him. For the construction, cp. e.g. 1Co 10:13. Observe the sequence of thought. He embraces “the righteousness which is of God on terms of faith,” and renounces “a righteousness of his own” as a means to the end here stated the spiritual knowledge of Christ and of His power to sanctify and glorify by assimilation to Himself. In order to that end, he thankfully “submits Himself to the righteousness of God” (Rom 10:3; cp. 1Pe 1:2); accepts the Divine justification for the merit’s sake of Jesus Christ alone; knowing, with the intuition of a soul enlightened by grace, that in such submission lies the secret of such assimilation. Welcoming Christ as his one ground of peace with God, he not only enters at the same time on spiritual contact with Christ as Life from God, but also gets such a view of himself and his Redeemer as to affect profoundly his whole intercourse with Christ, and the effects of that intercourse on his being.
Php 3:10 is thus by no means a restatement of Php 3:9. It gives another range of thought and truth, in deep and strong connexion. To use a convenient classification, Php 3:9 deals with Justification, Php 3:10 with Sanctification in relation to it.
“That I may know Him”: the Greek seems to imply a decisive act of knowledge rather than a process. A lifelong process is sure to result from the act; for the Object of the act “passeth knowledge” (Eph 3:19). But the act, the decisive getting acquainted with what Christ is, is in immediate view. A far-reaching insight into Him in His glory of grace has a natural connexion with the spiritual act of submissive faith in Him as our Sacrifice and Righteousness. Cp. Joh 6:56.
On this “knowledge” of recognition and intuition, cp. Php 3:8, and notes.
the power of his resurrection ] A phrase difficult to exhaust in exposition. The Lord’s Resurrection is spiritually powerful as ( a) evidencing the justification of believers (Rom 4:24-25, and by all means cp. 1Co 15:14; 1Co 15:17-18); as ( b) assuring them of their own bodily resurrection (1Co 15:20, &c.; 1Th 4:14); and yet more as ( c) being that which constituted Him actually the life-giving Second Adam, the Giver of the Spirit who unites the members to Him the Vital Head (Joh 7:39; Joh 20:22; Act 2:33; cp. Eph 4:4-16). This latter aspect of truth is prominent in the Epistles to Ephesus and Coloss, written at nearly the same period of St Paul’s apostolic work; and we have here, very probably, a passing hint of what is unfolded there. The thought of the Lord’s Resurrection is suggested here to his mind by the thought, not expressed but implied in the previous context, of the Atoning Death on which it followed as the Divine result.
This passage indicates the great truth that while our acceptance in Christ is always based upon His propitiatory work for us, our power for service and endurance in His name is vitally connected with His life as the Risen One, made ours by the Holy Spirit.
Cp. further Rom 5:10; Rom 6:4-11; Rom 7:4; Rom 8:11; 2Co 4:10; Eph 2:6; Col 3:1-4; Heb 13:20-21.
the fellowship of his sufferings ] Entrance, in measure, into His experience as the Sufferer. The thought recurs to the Cross, but in connexion now with Example, not with Atonement. St Paul deals with the fact that the Lord who has redeemed him has done it at the severest cost of pain; and that a moral and spiritual necessity calls His redeemed ones, who are united vitally to Him, to “carry the cross,” in their measure, for His sake, in His track, and by His Spirit’s power. And he implies that this cross bearing, whatever is its special form, this acceptance of affliction of any sort as for and from Him, is a deep secret of entrance into spiritual intimacy with Christ; into “knowledge of Him.” Cp. further Rom 8:17; Rom 8:37; 2Co 1:5 ; 2Co 4:11; 2Co 12:9-10; Col 1:24 ; 2Ti 2:12; 1Pe 4:13; Rev 3:10.
being made conformable ] Better, with R.V., becoming conformed. The Greek construction is free, but clear. The Lord’s Death as the supreme expression of His love and of His holiness, and the supreme act of His surrender to the Father’s will, draws the soul of the Apostle with spiritual magnetic force to desire, and to experience, assimilation of character to Him who endured it. The holy Atonement wrought by it is not here in direct view; he is full of the thought of the revelation of the Saviour through His Passion, and of the bliss of harmony in will with Him so revealed. No doubt the Atonement is not forgotten; for the inner glory of the Lord’s Death as Example is never fully seen apart from a sight of its propitiatory purpose. But the immediate thought is that of spiritual harmony with the dying Lord’s state of will. Cp. 2Co 4:10.
Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
That I may know him – That I may be fully acquainted with his nature, his character, his work, and with the salvation which he has worked out. It is one of the highest objects of desire in the mind of the Christian to know Christ; see the notes at Eph 3:19.
And the power of his resurrection – That is, that I may understand and experience the proper influence which the fact of his resurrection should have on the mind. That influence would he felt in imparting the hope of immortality; in sustaining the soul in the prospect of death, by the expectation of being raised from the grave in like manner; and in raising the mind above the world; Rom 6:11. There is no one truth that will have greater power over us, when properly believed, than the truth that Christ has risen from the dead. His resurrection confirms the truth of the Christian religion (notes, 1 Cor. 15); makes it certain that there is a future state, and that the dead will also rise; dispels the darkness that was around the grave, and shows us that our great interests are in the future world. The fact that Christ has risen from the dead, when fully believed, will produce a sure hope that we also shall be raised, and will animate us to bear trials for his sake, with the assurance that we shall be raised up as he was. One of the things which a Christian ought most earnestly to desire is, to feel the power of this truth on his soul – that his great Redeemer has burst the bands of death; has brought life and immortality to light, and has given us the pledge that our bodies shall rise. What trials may we not bear with this assurance? What is to be dreaded in death, if this is so? What glories rise to the view when we think of the resurrection! And what trifles are all the things which people seek here, when compared with the glory that shall be ours when we shall be raised from the dead!
And the fellowship of his sufferings – That I may participate in the same kind of sufferings that he endured; that is, that I may in all things be identified with him. Paul wished to be just like his Saviour. He felt that it was an honor to live as he did; to evince the spirit that he did, and to suffer in the same manner. All that Christ did and suffered was glorious in his view, and he wished in all things to resemble him. He did not desire merely to share his honors and triumphs in heaven, but, regarding his whole work as glorious, he wished to be wholly conformed to that, and, as far as possible, to be just like Christ. Many are willing to reign with Christ, out they would not be willing to suffer with him; many would be willing to wear a crown of glory like him, but not the crown of thorns; many would be willing to put on the robes of splendor which will be worn in heaven, but not the scarlet robe of contempt and mockery.
They would desire to share the glories and triumphs of redemption, but not its poverty, contempt, and persecution. This was not the feeling of Paul. He wished in all things to be just like Christ, and hence he counted it an honor to be permitted to suffer as he did. So Peter says, Rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christs sufferings; 1Pe 4:13. So Paul says Col 1:24 that he rejoiced in his sufferings in behalf of his brethren, and desired to fill up that which was behind, of the afflictions of Christ, or that in which he had hitherto come short of the afflictions which Christ endured. The idea is, that it is an honor to suffer as Christ suffered; and that the true Christian will esteem it a privilege to be made just like him, not only in glory, but in trial. To do this, is one evidence of piety; and we may ask ourselves, therefore, whether these are the feelings of our hearts. Are we seeking merely the honors of heaven, or should we esteem it a privilege to be reproached and reviled as Christ was – to have our names cast out as his was – to be made the object of sport and derision as he was – and to be held up to the contempt of a world as he was? If so, it is an evidence that we love him; if not so, and we are merely seeking the crown of glory, we should doubt whether we have ever known anything of the nature of true religion.
Being made conformable to his death – In all things, being just like Christ – to live as he did, and to die as he did. There can be no doubt that Paul means to say that he esteemed it so desirable to be just like Christ, that he would regard it as an honor to die in the same manner. He would rejoice to go with him to the cross, and to pass through the circumstances of scorn and pain which attended such a death. Yet how few there are who would be willing to die as Christ died, and how little would the mass of people regard it as a privilege and honor! Indeed, it requires an elevated state of pious feeling to be able to say that it would be regarded as a privilege and honor to die like Christ to have such a sense of the loveliness of his character in all things, and such ardent attachment to him, as to rejoice in the opportunity of dying as he did! When we think of dying, we wish to have our departure made as comfortable as possible. We would have our sun go down without a cloud. We would wish to lie on a bed of down; we would have our head sustained by the kind arm of a friend, and not left to fall, in the intensity of suffering, on the breast; we would wish to have the place where we die surrounded by sympathizing kindred, and not by those who would mock our dying agonies. And, if such is the will of God, it is not improper to desire that our end may be peaceful and happy; but we should also feel, if God should order it otherwise, that it would be an honor, in the cause of the Redeemer, to die amidst reproaches – to be led to the stake, as the martyrs have been – or to die, as our Master did, on a cross. They who are most like him in the scenes of humiliation here, will be most like him in the realms of glory.
Fuente: Albert Barnes’ Notes on the Bible
Php 3:10
That I may know Him
The path of life
I.
Knowledge.
II. Power.
III. Fellowship with Christ.
IV. Conformity to his death. (J. Lyth, D. D.)
The believers aspirations
It is said that St. Augustine wished to have seen three things before he died; Rome in its glory, Christ in the flesh, and Paul in his preaching. But many have seen the first without being the holier, the second without being happier, and heard the third and yet went to perdition. But Paul, in this and the previous chapters, expresses seven wishes which centre in Christ–that he might know Christ, win Christ, magnify Christ, be conformed to Christ, be found in Christ, rejoice in the day of Christ, and be forever with Christ. Now these correspond perfectly with the desires of every child of God. Here Paul desires–
I. To know Christ. St. Paul appreciated the value of other departments of knowledge. He was a scholar and a theologian; but after he had learned Christ they seemed to fade in interest. This knowledge was the subject of his preaching everywhere, as he told the Corinthians and the Galatians. He wished to know Christ.
1. Increasingly. The more he knew Him the more he wanted to know, and no wonder, for
(1) in Him is everything worthy to be known.
(2) This knowledge never cloys.
2. Experimentally. To know in Scripture is to see and to taste. It is not the speculative knowledge that devils have, nor mere historical knowledge, but such as a hungry man has when he eats, and a thirsty man when he drinks. It is appropriative of Christ–My Lord, My Saviour.
3. Superlatively (verse 8). For what is the widest and most delightful knowledge in the presence of this? but as sounding brass, vanity.
II. The power of his resurrection. The word power makes all the difference between religion in the head and in the heart, between possession and profession. It is one thing to have knowledge, and another to have it vitally and brought into action. Christs resurrection has a vast power.
1. In our justification. His ransom could avail nothing without His resurrection. If Christ be not raised your faith is vain. But by it the Father publicly testified His approval
2. In our sanctification, which is the renewing of our nature and the strengthening of our graces by the Holy Spirit, who is the fruit of the resurrection.
3. In our edification. Every sermon, etc., is vain if Christ be not risen. All the means of Christian growth are dependent upon it (Eph 4:7-14). What power it gave to apostolic preaching.
4. In our glorification. There had been no resurrection for us without Christs. As in Adam, the covenant head, all died; so in Christ, the covenant head of Adams posterity, all shall be made alive.
III. The fellowship of his sufferings. Not in His merits: the crown must be forever on His head. We know this.
1. By partaking of the benefit of His sufferings, pardon, etc.
2. By communion with Him through the channel of His sufferings–His Divine humanity, hanging on the Cross, and commemorated in the sacrament.
3. By enduring for His sake the same sufferings which He endured–the worlds frowns, Satans temptations. Is the servant above his master.
IV. Conformity unto his death. Why not His life? That is not excluded. But His death presents in a condensed form all that we could desire to he on earth. We see in Him–
1. Great patience under suffering.
2. Great faith.
3. Great compassion for dying men.
4. Great filial tenderness.
5. Great love for repenting sinners. (J. Sherman.)
Knowing Christ
He who of mortal men knew Christ best confesses that he knew Him but imperfectly.
1. How much, then, must there be in Him to know. Do we lose a sense of the Redeemers majesty by familiarity with His name? See, then, His chief disciple, after years of contemplation, imitation, and adoration, confessing that the great object of God, manifest in the flesh, seems greater than ever, so that at the last he offers the prayer suitable to a novice.
2. This is true of all the works of God, whether in the material or the spiritual world, and is illustrated by what a climber sees of the starry firmament: from the bottom the mountain tops seem among the stars, but as he ascends they seem to recede, and their vastness and distance are best seen from the summit.
3. What Paul meant is clearer from the following explanations.
I. Knowing the power of His resurrection. Paul laboured and suffered much, and was pursued by great infirmity and frequent depression; but he saw above him the figure of the once suffering but now risen Christ–his brother throned and crowned. Looking up it seems as if he were moved to say, Would that I could be raised out of what I am, and become as He is–victor over sin, sorrow, and death. In this sense we may feel the power of Christs resurrection. In Christ, risen and glorified, is the image in which we may behold what we may become.
II. A share of Christs sufferings the condition of a share in His resurrection. He has just expressed a desire to resemble Christ glorified, but he here checks himself in order to show that what he desires is not an easy and instantaneous change. What he seeks is not simply repose and relief. He is perfectly willing to resemble Christ glorified by passing through the intermediate stages. He, too, would reach the crown through the Cross, remembering that it is enough for the disciple to be as his Master. Whoever then would know Christ must face–
1. Suffering–the suffering of arduous effort, patient resignation, and trust when faith is tempted to fail.
2. Death–the death to much that is attractive here, and especially to sin, as well as to the death of the body. (T. M. Herbert, M. A.)
The experimental knowledge of Christ
I. An experimental knowledge of Christ is so great a blessing that we should count all things but loss to get it. It is sometimes expressed by taste. Sight is the knowledge of faith, taste that of experience (1Pe 2:3; Psa 34:8). When we taste His goodness or feel His power we have an experimental knowledge of Christ. Many know how to talk about Him but feel nothing. Men speak of His salvation from day to day, but have not the effects of it. When we find within ourselves the fruits of His sufferings, the comfort of His promises, the likeness of His death, the power of His resurrection, then we know Christ experimentally. The benefits it confers show its value. Experience–
1. Gives us a more intimate knowledge of things. While we know them by hearsay we know them only by guess and imagination, but when we know them by experience we know them in truth. He that reads about the sweetness of honey may guess at it, but he that tastes it knows what it is (Col 1:6). A man who has travelled through a country knows it better than he who knows it only by a map.
2. Gives greater confirmation of the truth. A man needs no reason to convince him that fire is hot who has been scorched, or that weather is cold who feels it in his fingers. So when the promises of God are verified we see that there is more than letters and syllables (Psa 18:30; 1Co 1:6; 1Th 1:5).
3. Gives greater excitement to the love of Christ and His ways. The more we feel the necessity of Christ and know His usefulness in binding up our broken hearts, the more we shall love Him as our Saviour (1Jn 4:19). We may know the truth of the gospel by other means, but we cannot know that it belongs to us by any other means.
4. Engages us more to zeal and diligence in the heavenly life, which reports and exhortations often fail to do.
(1) Because when, e.g., we have experience of the power of Christs resurrection it begets a new life within which inclines us to heavenly things–there is a principle to work with (Gal 5:25).
(2) When this life is gratified with the rewards of obedience, such as peace and comfort, it is an argument above all others to press for more. The Cauls when they had once tasted the Italian grape must get into the country where it grew. The spies were sent to bring the clusters of Canaan into the wilderness to animate the Israelites to put in for the good land. So God gives us the Spirit not only as an earnest (1Co 1:22) to show us how sure, but as first fruits to show us how good (Rom 8:23).
(3) When this life is obstructed by folly and sin, you find more of Christs displeasure in your inward man (Eph 4:30) than can possibly be represented to your outward condition.
II. Motives.
1. It is a dangerous temptation when the gospel comes in word only (1Co 4:20). It must follow either that you settle in a cold form (2Ti 3:5) or into an open denying of Christ and the excellency of His religion.
2. If you have not this knowledge how will you be able to carry on this spiritual life with any delight, seriousness, or success? (1Jn 5:3-10).
3. Without it you can have no assurance of your own interest (Rom 4:4-5; 1Jn 4:17).
4. Without it you will neither honour Christianity nor propagate it.
(1) By word (Psa 34:8). A report of a report at second or third hand is no valid testimony. None can speak with such confidence as those who feel what they speak (2Co 1:4).
(2) By work (2Th 1:11-12; 1Th 1:4-7).
III. Means.
1. A sound belief of the doctrines of the gospel (1Jn 5:10; 1Th 2:13). We cannot feel the power of the truth till we receive it.
2. Serious meditation and consideration (Psa 45:1; Act 16:14).
3. Close application. Things work not upon us at a distance (Job 5:27). Conclusion:
1. Look for experience rather in the way of sanctification than of comfort. The one is not so necessary as the other, and the Spirit may cease to comfort that He may sanctify.
2. Look to the thing end not to the measure or degree (T. Manton, D. D.)
Experimental knowledge of Christ
1. A man may have a competent and very extensive acquaintance with the whole doctrine of the Christian religion, and yet if he has not an experimental knowledge of Christ it is all vain as to salvation.
2. In the previous verse the apostle deals with his gain in point of justification, here in point of sanctification.
I. What this experimental knowledge is. An inward and spiritual feeling of what we hear and believe, concerning Christ and His truths, whereby answerable impressions are made on our souls (Psa 34:8; Joh 4:42).
1. The Scripture says of Christ that He is the way to the Father (Joh 14:6). Now the man who has tried many other ways and finds no access, at length comes by Christ and finds communion with God. This is experimental knowledge (Rom 5:1-2).
2. Christs blood purges the conscience, etc. (Heb 9:1-28). The experimental Christian knows that sin defiles the conscience and unfits him to serve God. At length he looks to God in Christ and throws his guilt into the sea of Christs blood; then the sting is taken from the conscience and the soul is enabled to serve God as a son with a father.
3. Christ is fully satisfying to the soul (Psa 73:25; Hab 3:17-18). We all know this by report, the Christian knows it by experience. Sometimes in the midst of all his enjoyment he says, These are not my portion, and when deprived of these he can encourage himself in God (1Sa 30:6; 1Sa 1:18).
4. Christ helps His people to bear afflictions and keeps them from sinking under them. The Christian sometimes tries to bear his burden alone and finds it too heavy for him. Then he goes to Christ and lays it on the great burden-bearer and is helped (Psa 28:7; Isa 43:2; 2Co 8:9-10).
5. Christ is made unto us wisdom (1Co 1:20). When the Christian leans to his own understanding he mistakes his way at noonday, but when he gives himself up to be led by Christ as a blind man, he is conducted in a way he knew not, and blesses the Lord who has given him counsel.
6. Christ is made unto us sanctification (1Co 1:30), Apart from Christ the Christian wrestles in vain and his graces lie dead; but when he renews the actings of faith in Christ, and flings down self-confidence, he becomes more than conqueror.
II. Confirmation of the point. Consider–
1. The Scripture testimonies concerning this.
(1) To learn religion in all the power and parts of it is to learn Christ (Eph 4:20-24).
(2) There needs no more to be known, for this comprehends all (1Co 2:2).
(3) It is the sum and substance of a believers life (Php 1:21). Yea, eternal life itself (Joh 17:3).
2. All true religion is our likeness to God. This is impossible without Christ, for He is the only channel of those influences which makes us partakers of the Divine nature (2Co 4:6).
3. Whatever religion a man seems to have that does not come and is maintained in this way, is but nature varnished over: for he that honoureth not the Son, etc.
III. The means. Faith closing with Christ.
1. Belief that Christ is such a one as He is held out in the gospel to be. It is the want of this that mars this knowledge (Isa 53:1).
2. Closure with Christ, to the very end that the soul may so know Him.
3. Union with Christ, so making way for this knowledge which is the happy result of union.
IV. Improvement.
1. Religion is not a matter of mere speculation to satisfy curiosity, but a matter of practice. An unexperimental professor is like a foolish sick man who entertains those about him with fine discourses of the nature of medicines, but in the meantime is dying for the want of application of them.
2. The sweet of religion lies in the experience of it (Psa 63:5; Psa 19:11). Religion would not be the burden it is if we would by experience carry it beyond dry, sapless notions.
3. All the profit of religion lies in the experience of it (Mat 7:22). Painted fire will never burn, and the sight of water will never wash.
4. The experimental Christian is the only one whose religion will bring him to heaven, which is experimental religion perfected. (T. Boston, D. D.)
Do you know Him
I. Let us pass by that crowd of outer-court worshippers who are content to live without knowing Christ. I do not mean the ungodly and profane, these are altogether strangers and foreigners, but–
1. Those who are content to know Christs historic life. These know the life of Christ, but not Christ the life.
2. Those who know and prize Christs doctrine, but do not know him. Addison tells us that the reason why so many books are printed with the portraits of their authors is that the interested readers want to know what appearance the author had. This is very natural Why then do you rest satisfied with Christs words without desiring to know Him who is the Word?
3. Those who are delighted with Christs example. That is well as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. His example will be better understood as we know Himself.
4. Those who are perfectly at ease with knowing Christs sacrifice. This is a blessed attainment, but we should not forget that He was the sacrifice and is greater than it.
5. Those who look for His coming and forget His presence.
6. Those who are satisfied with hearing or reading about Christ: but Paul did not say, I have heard of Him whom I believe, but I know.
7. Those who are persuaded to their ruin that they know Him but do not.
II. Let us draw curtain after curtain, which shall admit us to know more of Christ.
1. We know a person when we recognize him: and to this extent we know the queen, because we have seen her, and so by a Divine illumination we must know Christ who He is and what He was.
2. By a practical acquaintance with what He does. They tell me Christ is a cleanser, I know Him because He has washed me in His blood; that He is a deliverer, I know Him because He has set me free; that He is a sovereign, I know Him because He has subdued my enemies; that He is food, my spirit feeds on Him.
3. We know a man in a better sense when we are on speaking terms with him. I know a man not only so as to recognize him, and because I have dealt with him, but because we are speaking acquaintances. So we know Christ if we pray to Him.
4. But we know a person better when he invites us to his house; we go and go again, and the oftener we go the better we know him. Do you visit Christs banquetting house, and has He permitted you to enjoy the sweets of being one of His family?
5. And yet after frequent visits you may not know a man in the highest sense: you say to his wife, Your husband never seems to suffer from depression, or to change. Ah, she says, you do not know him as I do. That man has grown much in grace who has come to recognize his marriage union with his Lord. Now we have the intimacy of love and delight.
6. But a Christian may get nearer than this. The most loving wife may not perfectly know her husband, yet a Christian may grow to be perfectly identified with Christ. Looking at all this might not Christ well say now, Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known Me.
III. Consider what sort of knowledge this is.
1. If I know Him I shall have a very vivid sense of His personality. He will not be to me a myth, a vision, a spirit, but a real person. Then there must be a personal knowledge on my part, not a hearsay, second-hand knowledge.
2. It must be intelligent. I must know His nature, offices, works, and glory.
3. Affectionate. It was said of Garibaldi that he charmed all who got into his society. Being near Christ His love warms our hearts.
4. Satisfying.
5. Exciting. The more we know the more we want to know.
6. Happy.
7. Refreshing.
8. Sanctifying.
IV. Seek, then, this knowledge.
1. It is worth having. Paul gave up everything for it.
2. There is nothing like this to fill you with courage. When Dr. Andrew Reed found some difficulty in founding one of his orphan asylums, he drew upon a piece of paper the cross, and then he said to himself, What, despair in the face of the Cross; and then he drew a ring round it and wrote, nil disperandum! (C. H. Spurgeon.)
Uses of the knowledge of Christ
Pauls acquaintance with Christ–
I. Reconciled him to the painful vicissitudes of outward circumstances (Php 4:11-13).
II. Brought him help under the emergencies of special danger (2Ti 4:16-18).
III. Secured him support amidst the special inward trials of his personal life (2Co 12:7-10). (Dean Vaughan.)
Characteristics of the knowledge of Christ
The apostle aimed to know Him as being in Him. Such knowledge is inspired by the consciousness–not elaborated by the intellect. It rises up from within; is not gathered from without. It does not accumulate evidence to test the truth–it has the witness in itself. It needs not to repair to the cistern and draw–it has in itself a well of water springing, etc. It knows, because it feels; it ascertains, not because it studies, but because it enjoys union, and possesses the righteousness of God through faith. She that touched the tassel of His robe had a knowledge of Christ deeper and truer by far than the crowds that thronged about Him: for virtue had come out of Him, and she felt it in herself. Only this kind of knowledge possesses the excellency, for it is connected with justification, as was intimated by Isaiah; and it is eternal life, as declared by Jesus (Isa 53:11; Joh 17:3). The apostle could not set so high a value on mere external knowledge, or a mere acquaintance with the fact and dates of Christs career. For it is quite possible for a man to want the element of living experience, and yet be able to argue himself into the Messiahship of the Son of Mary; to gaze on His miracles and deduce from them a Divine commission without bowing to its authority; aye, and to linger by the Cross, and see in it a mysterious and complete expiation, without accepting the pardon and peace which the blood of the atonement secures. (Professor Eadie.)
The knowledge of Christ a personal knowledge
The knowledge about which the apostle speaks is a personal knowledge. It presupposes intellectual knowledge, but is something else. It is the knowledge of which we speak when we say of a man I know him. What do we mean when we say this? Do we not mean, I have seen him, observed him, conversed with him, interchanged thoughts with him, spent time with him, done things with him, have been admitted into his confidence, written to him, and heard from him? These things and such as these are what make up personal knowledge between man and man. We should never say, I know such or such a great man of history–I know Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon–merely because we have read of them, and could give an account of their exploits. We should not say this even of the great men of our own time, its statesmen, generals, or philosophers–no, not even if we had seen them in public, or heard them speak, or read their writings–unless also we had been admitted to their society, and had exchanged with them the confidences which a man gives his friend. Even thus is it with the knowledge of Christ. We have no right to say, I know Christ, merely because we have read of Him in Scripture, or because He has taught in our streets. We have no right to say so unless He has spoken to us, and we to Him. Unless we have access to His privacy, and can tell Him our secrets. Unless we can go in and out where He dwells, and talk with Him as a man talketh with his friend. Unless we have not only read in Scripture that He is wise and merciful, etc., but have also acted on that information, and found Him so for ourselves. Unless in temptation we have cried unto Him, and received strength; unless in trouble we have applied to Him and experienced a very present help. (Dean Vaughan.)
The natural desire of a Christian for the knowledge of his Saviour
Suppose yourself a man condemned to the lions in the Roman amphitheatre. A ponderous door is drawn up, and forth there rushes the monarch of the forest. You must slay him or be torn to pieces. You tremble; your joints are loosed; you are paralyzed with fear. But what is this? A great unknown leaps from the gazing multitude and confronts the monster. He quails not at the roaring of the devourer, but dashes on him till the lion slinks towards his den, dragging himself along in pain and fear. The hero lifts you up, smiles into your bloodless face, whispers comfort in your ear, and bids you be of good courage, for you are free. Do you not think that there would arise at once in your heart a desire to know your deliverer? As the guards conducted you into the open street, and you breathed the cool, fresh air, would not the first question, be, Who was my deliverer, that I may fall at his feet and bless him? You are not, however, informed, but instead of it you are led away to a noble mansion, where your wounds are healed with salve of rarest power. You are clothed in sumptuous apparel; you are made to sit down at a feast; you rest upon the softest down. The next morning you are attended by servants who guard you from evil and minister to your good. Day after day, week after week, your wants are supplied. I am sure that your curiosity would grow more and more intense. You would scarcely neglect an opportunity of asking the servants, Tell me, who is my noble benefactor, for I must know him? Well, but they would say, is it not enough for you that you are delivered from the lion? Nay, say you, it is for that very reason that I pant to know him. Your wants are richly supplied–why are you vexed by curiosity as to the hand which reaches you the boon? If your garment is worn out, there is another. Long before hunger oppresses you, the table is well loaded. What more do you want? But your reply is, It is because I have no wants, that, therefore, my soul longs to know my generous friend. Suppose that as you wake up one morning, you find lying upon your pillow a precious love token from your unknown friend, and engraved with a tender inscription. Your curiosity now knows no bounds. But you are informed that this wondrous being has not only done for you what you have seen, but that he was imprisoned and scourged for your sake, for he had a love to you so great, that death itself could not overcome it, you are informed that he is every moment occupied in your interests, because he has sworn by himself that where he is there you shall be; his honours you shall share, and of his happiness you shall be the crown. Why, methinks you would say, Tell me, men and women, any of you who know him, who and what he is; and if they said, But it is enough for you to know that he loves you, and to have daily proofs of his goodness, you would say, No, these love tokens increase my thirst. If ye see him, tell him I am sick of love. The flagons which he sends me, and the love tokens which he gives me, they stay me for awhile with the assurance of his affection, but they only impel me onward with the more unconquerable desire that I may know him. I must know him; I cannot live without knowing him. His goodness makes me thirst, and pant, and faint, and even die, that I may know him. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
The progressive knowledge of Christ
Did you ever visit the manufactory of splendid porcelain at Sevres? I have done so. If anybody should say to me, Do you know the manufactory at Sevres? I should say, Yes, I do, and no, I do not. I know it, for I have seen the building; I have seen the rooms in which the articles are exhibited for sale, and I have seen the museum and model room; but I do not know the factory as I would like to know it, for I have not seen the process of manufacture, and have not been admitted into the workshops, as some are. Suppose I had seen, however, the process of the moulding of the clay, and the laying on of the rich designs, if anybody should still say to me, Do you know how they manufacture those wonderful articles? I should very likely still be compelled to say, No, I do not, because there are certain secrets, certain private rooms into which neither friend nor foe can be admitted, lest the process should be open to the world. So, you see, I might say I knew, and yet might not half know; and when I half knew, still there would be so much left, that I might be compelled to say, I do not know. How many different ways there are of knowing a person–and even so there are all these different ways of knowing Christ; so that you may keep on all your lifetime, still wishing to get into another room, and another room, nearer and nearer to the great secret, still panting to know Him. Good Rutherford says, I urge upon you a nearer communion with Christ, and a growing communion. There are curtains to be drawn by, in Christ, that we never shut, and new foldings in love with Him. I despair that ever I shall win to the far end of that love; there are so many plies in it. Therefore, dig deep, and set by as much time in the day for Him as you can, He will be won by labour. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
And the power of His resurrection.
The power of Christs resurrection
There are those who think it indicative of an unspiritual state of mind to lay stress on the physical resurrection of Christ. They tell us that the all-important matter is His resurrection in the hearts of His disciples. But Paul regarded it as a fact of transcendent importance. He and the other apostles regarded it as a power.
I. For inspiring faith in Christ as the son of God.
II. For our justification (Rom 4:25). The resurrection was a pledge that God had accepted the sacrifice.
III. For inspiring within us the hope of glory. Death is to the eye of sense a mystery, and the materialistic doctrine darkens what faint hope of immortality may be within us. But Christs resurrection brought life and immortality to light. He conquered death, and to believe that He is the first fruits of them that slept, is to receive power to break the tyranny of death (verse 21).
IV. To sanctify our nature. This is perhaps Pauls leading idea. To identify ourselves with a risen Redeemer must exert a purifying effect on our souls (Col 3:1). (T. C. Finlayson)
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The power of Christs resurrection
I. As seen in Christ himself (Eph 1:17-21).
1. In it Christ as man was invested with all the power and glory of the Godhead. All power is given unto Me.
2. When He returns it will be in the fulness of the resurrection glory.
II. In the justification of the believer.
1. Resurrection implies death, and to know Christ in His resurrection is to know that we died in His death as our surety (Rom 6:7)
2. As judicially one with Christ in His death, the believer is one with Him in His resurrection.
III. In the life of the believer.
1. We who were dead in trespasses and sins are quickened by it into life.
2. This life is sustained by a constant supply from the fountain head.
3. By this power we rise above the world and sit in heavenly places with Christ.
IV. Is the believers service.
1. Observe its acting in the earliest possessors of it.
2. Employ it in testifying to its power.
V. In the believers resurrection.
1. Christs resurrection is the pledge of ours.
2. Ensures the triumph and glorification of the Church. (C. Graham.)
The power of Christs resurrection
I. In relation to sin.
1. The death of Christ, had the redemptive effort ended there, had sealed mans doom forever; the resurrection made it vital, the spring of purifying and renewing for the world. From the ground the blood of Christ, like that of Abel, cries out against humanity. It is from heaven that Jesus preaches peace through His blood, and makes it a power to save.
2. The resurrection brought to man precisely the power he needed for victorious resistance to that by which his higher life was in process of being destroyed. The risen form threw glorious light on the flesh, as completing the incarnation. The body was redeemed by it from degradation, and consecrated as the Spirits organ and shrine forever.
3. When Christ had risen, men saw that the vileness, the curse, the stain, was the work of an alien and intrusive force which might be expelled, and in the might of that belief men for the first time rose in victory over those passions which had defiled the body.
II. In relation to sorrow.
1. The mountains of the world are great or as nothing according as we view them from a valley or from a star, so all the storms and crosses of life dwindle looked at from the height of Jesus and the resurrection.
2. The resurrection maintains the continuity of the life of the man of sorrows and the reigning king. So we need not shrink from our sorrows if we but bear in mind the glory that shall follow.
3. Nay, the men who first realized the power of the resurrection, gloried in tribulations. It made them one with Christ, which guaranteed the ultimate victory.
III. In relation to death.
1. We have little power of realizing the anguish with which the men of old peered into the unseen. This was the world of light, of life–that of shadows and ghosts. To the children of the resurrection it is exactly the reverse. The sorrow and gloom is of time, the light and joy are everlasting.
2. The resurrection wedded the two worlds. Who now dreads to live or to die? Because living or dying we are the Lords. (Baldwin Brown, B. A.)
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The power of Christs resurrection
I. As a fact. That is our faith. Your philosophers who do not believe in miracle do not believe it possible, because they do not allow that God can interfere with, and is above the system He arranged. But we believe that God who made the world administers His own laws and interposes if He thinks fit. The power of the resurrection, proving the truth of Christianity as a whole, proves its exclusiveness as a system of Divine thought which is to constitute the religion of man.
II. As a doctrine. The fact enshrines a thought. Simply considered as a fact, having power over the reason, as a part of the evidence of Christianity, the resurrection of Jesus is the same as that of Lazarus. But as a doctrine it is very different. Jesus died, according to the Scriptures, and according to the Scriptures He rose again. It is the fulfilment of a Divine purpose; and its power is an appeal to our spiritual nature, our conscience, and sense of guilt.
III. As a type. As Christ died and rose, we are to die to sin and live to God, as those who are alive from the dead.
IV. As a motive. Observe how these thoughts interweave. The resurrection as a fact operates upon the intellect and gives assurance of truth; as a doctrine it deepens the truth and touches consciences and expresses reconciliation with God; as a type, we rising from the dead and walking with Christ–that is the developed experience of the Christian man in the life of God. Christ was not glorified immediately. He lived for forty days a different life from His former one. So must we under the power of the resurrection. Christ is risen, therefore Seek those things that are above.
V. As a model (verse 21). Conclusion: These transcendental thoughts, so far from unfitting us for the sober duties of life, ennoble and beautify life. A servant girl may act on a principle which may bring her into harmony with the angels. You need not wait for Sunday to engage in Divine service. You have but to realize in the shop or the market the power of the resurrection. (T. Binney, D. D.)
The power of Christs resurrection
1. We need more and more to look at the facts of the Christian dispensation; the doctrines we are required to believe have their foundations in these facts. Our tendency is to treat Christian doctrines as if they were speculations.
2. The resurrection is an accomplished fact. It is sometimes attributed to Christ alone; sometimes to the Father; sometimes to the Spirit; so that it is brought before us as a blessed manifestation of the power of the redeeming God.
3. The power of the resurrection may signify–
(1) The power which effected it;
(2) the power of the fact itself, or–
(3) the power with which Christ was endowed at it, and these words may include all.
4. To know the power, etc., is–
(1) To recognize it as a reality.
(2) To comprehend and appreciate it in its relation with mans redemption.
(3) To feel its force upon the life. The resurrection of Christ is–
I. An example of the almighty life-giving power of God. To know its power is to be conscious of the working of the same upon ourselves, quickening, renewing, enlightening, invigorating.
II. A confirmation forever of the claims of Jesus of Nazareth. To know its power is to feel assured that the son of Mary is the Son of God. This is essential to our taking full advantage of His riches and resources.
III. The sign and seal of the truth of the gospel. To know its power is to see that truth sealed not by His blood simply, but by His hand in the newness of His glorified life. Why is it we do not declare that truth more constantly and zealously? Because of our unbelief. Those who cordially believe it are constantly repeating it.
IV. Adapted to strengthen our trust in him. To know its power is to feel our confidence strengthened in sorrow and death.
V. Calculated to awake within us the most glorious hopes. To know its power is to become the subjects by its influence of new and enlarged expectations, desires, aspirations and affections.
VI. Fitted to raise us into newness of life. To feel its power is to rise with Him and set our affections on things above. VII. Able to give courage in approaching suffering. To know its power is to feel strengthened to endure all the will of God. VIII. Suited to raise the believer above the fear of death. To know its power is to feel that it is a pledge of immortality. (S. Martin.)
The power of the resurrection
I. As the assurance of immorality (Rom 8:11; 1Co 15:14, etc.).
II. As the triumph over six and the pledge of justification (Rom 4:24-25).
III. As asserting the dignity and enforcing the claims of the human body (1Co 6:13-15; Php 3:21).
IV. Thus stimulating the whole moral and spiritual being (Rom 6:4, etc.; Gal 2:20; Eph 2:5; Col 2:12). (Bishop Lightfoot.)
I. What is intended by the power of Christs resurrection. The influence which that great event has upon the other parts of His mediatorial character and offices, connected with the safety and happiness of His people. This may be traced–
1. In the open and uncontroverted declaration of His Divine Sonship (Rom 1:4; Psa 2:1-12; cf. Act 13:32; Heb 1:3-5).
2. In its influence upon our justification (Rom 4:25).
3. In its effect on our sanctification (Joh 7:39; Joh 16:7-8).
4. In the exaltation of the saints to glory of which it is the procuring cause–Because I live, etc. (1Co 15:21-22).
II. What is it to know that power?
1. Not merely the illumination of the understanding but–
2. The heart felt experience of what is said to be known (Col 2:12-13; Col 3:1; Eph 2:4-22, corresponding to what the resurrection meant for Christ.
(1) Our Sonship–begotten again to a lively hope.
(2) Our freedom from the laws penalties, which He has satisfied.
(3) Our entrance into the glory whither He as our fore runner has gone.
III. Why, as believers, we should desire that knowledge more and more. Because–
1. It is essential to the Christian character.
2. It tends to strengthen faith.
3. It teaches the true estimate of life with all its cares, and death with all its terrors.
Inferences:
1. The religion of Christ in all its parts is intended to be practical and experimental.
2. The Christian should be always pressing onwards to higher attainments of knowledge, faith, and holiness. (C. Neat.)
The power of the resurrection
I. In our justification.
II. In our regeneration. The Divine Agent in this is He of whom Christ said, If I go not away the Comforter will not come. So that the resurrection was essential to our being raised morally from the death of sin to the life of righteousness.
III. In our sanctification. Our continuance and progressive growth in grace begun at regeneration is the work of the same Spirit.
IV. In our consolation and hope (1Th 4:1-18; 1Co 15:1-58).
V. In our anticipation. The moral magnet that draws up the grovelling affections and hopes of a man from earth to heaven is the risen Christ. Conclusion: We must know this power, by being justified, etc., which is the moral proof of Christs resurrection. (H. Stowell, M. A.)
(Text in conjunction with Mar 16:3-4.)
The resurrection is a power
I. To heal conscience. No system of thought that does not admit the fact of sin, or attempt to explain its meaning, or assist us in becoming delivered from its dominion, can hope to satisfy the needs of mankind. In all ages and countries the human heart has had two questions to ask about it, which nothing but the resurrection can completely answer. One is about pardon, and the other about righteousness. The one seeks peace with God, the other His image. And the resurrection is the power for both. It looks back and it points forward. It implies the Cross, and it presumes the Ascension. Why did He die? Not only as a Martyr, but as a Sin-bearer (Isa 53:5; 1Pe 2:24). But if He had only died, while we should have admired the unparalleled sacrifice, we should have mourned its uselessness. But in the resurrection we see the sacrifice accepted, peace ensured, and eternal life given. Sin on the conscience is one stone rolled away, and sin in the will another. His grace helps us to die to sin, and live to God through union with Him who, as He bore our sins, and identified Himself with our misery, is also made righteousness unto us, whereby we through our regeneration grafted into Him, are before God righteous in His righteousness.
II. To ennoble duty. What is life? Is it but as the dipping of an insects wing into the brimming flood of some tropical river–the quick submerging into a devouring sea of one after another of the myriad barks that are ever being launched on it, each with its solitary voyager–a journey between two nights. Then assuredly the saddest mystery about it is that it should ever have been given us at all. But in the light of the resurrection life is seen to be worth living, for the stone of a purposeless existence is rolled away (1Co 15:22); and with its new aims and responsibilities and functions and motives this life has a new meaning and force. There is–
1. Its stupendous responsibility, for some day we shall rise to receive the things done in our body–that is, their results, whether they be good or bad.
2. Its potential grace (Col 3:1).
3. Its majestic consecration (Rom 12:1). (Bishop Thorold.)
The power of Christs resurrection
In it–
I. The unity of doctrine in the Old and New Testaments is illustrated and confirmed.
II. Mans natural yearnings after immortality are met and satisfied.
III. A powerful stimulus is given to Christian character.
IV. We have a pledge of the triumph of the Church, and the coming of the Lord. (Homiletic Monthly.)
The power of Christs resurrection
In every occurrence there are to be considered the fact–that which actually occurs–and the consequences, actual or possible–what St. Paul calls its power. We know the fact of an occurrence when we have handled the proofs which show that it really took place; when we know how it has been described, what were its several aspects; but we know of the power of the fact when we can trace what its effects have been, or what they might have been or might be. It is easier to apprehend a fact than to take the measure of its consequences, its practical meaning, its power. If I throw a stone, I can ascertain the weight of the stone, the moment at which it leaves my hand, the distance of the spot at which it touches the ground. But what is hard to ascertain is the effect of the stones passage through the air; the thousands of insects instantaneously disabled or destroyed by it; the radiation of disturbance caused by the displacement of the atmosphere, and extending, it may be, into regions which defy calculation. All of us understand more or less, at least, the general outline of the succession of recent events in Egypt; but what will be, in the course of time, their import and influence upon the condition and history of our own country and of the world, who shall say? So to apprehend a fact is one thing; it is quite another to feel its power. When then St. Paul utters his prayer he implies that already he has knowledge of the fact. St. Paul, being thus sure of the resurrection as a fact, was not embarrassed by an a priori doctrine forbidding him to ignore it. He was not like those old schoolmen whom Lord Bacon condemned, and who, instead of learning what to think about nature from the facts of nature, endeavoured to persuade themselves that the facts of nature corresponded somehow with what they already thought about it. St. Paul, then, had no need to pray, as have many in our time, that he might be assured of the fact of Christs resurrection; what he did pray for was that he might increasingly understand its power. This power may be observed–
I. In the way is which a true belief in it enables a man to realize habitually the moral government of the world by God. Our age is not one in which men believe, that whatever happens, all is overruled by a Being who is perfectly good and wise. There are circumstances in the modern world which make belief in the Divine government harder than it was for our ancestors. One is our wider outlook. Thanks to the Press, to the railway, to the telegraph, we know a great deal more of what is going on all over the world than did any previous generation of men; and one consequence is this–that human life presents itself to many minds as a much more tangled and inexplicable thing than it ever did before. The disappointments in store for the conscience which is eagerly searching for clear traces of a law of right vigorously asserting itself are so frequent and so great, that men lose heart where heart and purpose are specially needful. Now, here the certainty that Jesus Christ arose from the dead asserts what St. Paul calls its power, for when Jesus Christ was crucified it might have seemed–it did seem–that the sun of Gods justice had gone down, that while all the Vices were being feasted and crowned in Rome, all the Virtues could be crucified with impunity in Jerusalem. But when He burst forth from the grave He proclaimed to mens senses as well as to their consciences that the real law which rules the world is moral and not material, and that the sun of Gods righteousness, if it is at times overclouded in human history, is sure to reappear.
II. In the firm persuasion it should create that the Christian creed is true as a whole and in its several parts.
1. It is a proof that the Christian creed is true. There are many truths of Christianity which do not contribute anything to prove its general truth, although they could not be denied or lost sight of without fatally impairing its integrity. Take, for example, our Lords perpetual intercession in heaven. We believe in this because the apostles have so taught us. We do not believe in the creed as a whole, because we believe in Christs intercession. It is otherwise with the resurrection, which is a proof that the Christian faith is true because it is the certificate of our Lords mission from heaven, to which He Himself pointed as the warrant of His claims (Joh 2:19; Mat 12:39-40; Joh 6:62; Mat 17:9; Mar 9:9-10; Mat 17:21; Mat 17:23; Joh 10:18; Mat 20:17-19; Mar 10:32-34; Luk 18:31-33. Joh 16:16; Mat 26:31-33). The resurrection was thus constantly before Christs mind, because it was to be the warrant of His mission. And when He did rise, He redeemed the pledge which He had given to His disciples and to the world. The first preachers of Christianity understood this. The resurrection was the proof to which they constantly pointed that our Lord was really what He claimed to be (Act 17:18; Act 2:22-24; Act 2:32),
2. What is the true value of this fact among the credentials of Christianity?
(1) Paley makes a great mistake when he rests the whole case of Christianity upon the fact that the resurrection was so certain to its first preachers, that they willingly gave their lives to attest it. This mistake lay not in insisting on this fact–which is, indeed, of the very first importance as an evidence of Christianity–but in insisting on it as if it stood alone, and would of itself and unsupported prove to all minds the truth of the Christian creed; the truth being that the evidences of Christianity are not one and simple, but many and complex. Their strength lies in their convergence. The fabric which its Divine Architect meant to rest upon a group of pillars cannot be safely rested, even by a man of genius, upon one.
(2) Another mistake is, that it is of no value whatever as an evidence of Christianity–Christianity is said to be recommended solely by the moral character of Christ; the supernatural incidents of His earthly life, and notably His resurrection, are treated as an embarrassing addition. This estimate of the evidential value of the resurrection is altogether opposed to the mind of our Lord and His apostles. They did not mean the resurrection to stand alone; but they assigned to it the highest place among the facts and considerations which go to show that Christianity is true: a countersign in the world of Nature to the teaching of our Lord in the court of conscience–the outward miracle assures us through the senses that the Being who is the Author of Nature is the same Being as He who speaks to conscience in the moral law, in the Sermon on the Mount, in the whole character and teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ. If we heard the inward voice of conscience alone we might doubt whether there was really anything external which warranted it; if we witnessed the outward miracle alone we might see in it a mere wonder with no moral consequence. But when the Teacher whose voice pierces, rouses, quickens the conscience is accredited by an interference with the observed course of Nature, the combined evidence is in reason overwhelming.
III. In the spiritual life of Christians. Our Lord is not merely our authoritative Teacher, or Redeemer, but also, through real union with us, the Author of a new life within us. St. Paul teaches us this again and again. Sometimes he speaks of our Lord as though He were a sphere of being within which the Christian lives: (2Co 5:17); sometimes as the inhabitant of the Christian soul (Col 1:27). This union is not metaphor, it is a certain experience. Our Lord, then, dwells in Christians, and, as a consequence, the New Testament teaches us that the mysteries of His earthly life are reproduced, after a manner, in the Christian soul. If Christ is born supernaturally of a virgin mother, the Christian is made Gods child by adoption and grace; apostles are in travail until Christ be formed in their converts. If Christ is crucified on Mount Calvary, the Christian, too, has a Calvary where he is crucified with Christ, crucifies the flesh, with the affections and lusts. If Christ, while apostles behold, is taken up into heaven and sits at the right hand of God, the Christian in heart and mind with Him ascends, with Him continually dwells, is made to sit together with Him in heavenly places. And, in like manner, if Christ rose from the dead the third day, according to the Scriptures, the Christian also has experience of an inward resurrection. Conclusion: Of this power lodged in the Christian soul there are three characteristics.
1. Christ rose really. It was not a phantom that haunted the upper chamber, etc. And our Easter resurrection from sin will be no less real if it is His power by which we are rising (Rev 3:1).
2. Our Lord rose to lead, for the most part, a hidden life. On the day of His resurrection He appeared five times, but rarely afterwards during the forty days. So it is with the risen life of the soul. It is not constantly flaunted before the eyes of men; it seeks retirement, solitude, and the sincerities which these ensure (Col 3:1-4).
3. Our Lord being raised, dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over Him, etc. So with him who shares that risen life. (Canon Liddon.)
The power of the resurrection in sorrow
The letter of condolence written by Sulpicius to his friend Cicero who was mourning the loss of his beloved daughter, beautiful as it is, shows us that the best comfort which sentiment and philosophy can offer, is utterly powerless to bind up the broken heart. Why grieve? asks the sympathizing Roman, doing all that kindness and ingenuity could suggest to comfort his afflicted friend. Surely after seeing your country enslaved, your heart should be indifferent to so small a matter as the loss of a poor, weak, tender woman. And then Sulpicius gravely adds, as if such considerations could console the afflicted, Do not forget that you are Cicero–the wise, the philosophical Cicero, who was wont to give advice to others. Remember those judicious counsels now, and let it not be said that fortitude is the single virtue to which my friend is a stranger. Philosophy had not quite expended itself in these vapid platitudes, but the chief ground of comfort was reserved for the last. In my return out of Asia, the well-meaning Sulpicius goes on to say, as I was sailing from AEgina towards Megara, I amused myself with contemplating the circumjacent countries. Behind me lay AEgina, before me Megara; on my right I saw Piraeus, and on my left Corinth. These cities, once so flourishing and magnificent, now presented nothing to my view but a sad spectacle of desolation. Alas, I said to myself, shall such a short-lived creature as man complain, when one of his race falls either by the hand of violence, or by the common cause of nature, while in this narrow compass so many great and glorious cities, formed for a much longer duration, thus lie extended in ruins? Cold comfort, this! Would such reasoning help you to dry your scalding tears? Does it not seem like a hollow mockery of the hearts great grief? When, however, the power of Christs resurrection is known and felt, with what different eyes we look upon the grassy mounds which cover the remains of the departed! The dismal spot is changed at once into a field sown with the seeds of immortality. The Saviours blood-stained banner, emblazoned with the cross, which is carried before His people, in their triumphal march, bears the cheering inscription, I am the resurrection and the life! (J. N. Norton.)
The fellowship of His sufferings—
The fellowship of Christs sufferings
I. What it implies–a believing appreciation of them–evidenced by suffering in Christs service, for His sake, with and for the benefit of His people.
II. Why an object of ambition. It implies gratitude, honour, hope, union with Christ. (J. Lyth, D. D.)
These sufferings may be considered in two ways.
I. As expiatory of our, sins, borne by Jesus Christ in our stead in His quality of surety. And of these we are partakers, inasmuch as, embracing them by faith, God imputes them to us, and communicates to us the fruit thereof, namely, Divine and perfect righteousness, by which, absolved from all our sins, we become acceptable to God as His dear children, and can never more be called to endure any meritorious or expiatory sufferings as were those of the Saviour.
II. As models, patterns which Jesus has left us to follow, showing us the path by which it is the good pleasure of the Father to conduct us to salvation. And thus we are partakers with Him, being called to suffer after His example. And this fellowship may also be considered–
1. As interior, the mortification of sin within us, the crucifixion of the old nature, transpiercing it with His thorns and nails, drinking of His vinegar, and thus putting it to death by degrees; in which the passion of the Saviour is represented within our hearts (Rom 6:5-6; Gal 2:20; Gal 5:24).
2. Exterior; the part we have in the afflictions and persecutions of the Church, for the confirmation of the truth of God, for the glory of Jesus, for the edification of men (Rom 8:29; 2Ti 3:12.) (J. Daille.)
The fellowship of Christs sufferings
I. Fellowship with Christ generally.
1. In the enjoyment of the Divine favour–This is My beloved Son, We are the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. Behold what manner of love, etc. What a word for
(1) Aliens and outcasts.
(2) Timorous disciples.
(3) Happy believers.
(4) Dying saints.
2. In the possession of the Spirit. To Him the Spirit was given without measure for the perfect fulfilment of all His offices; and because we are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts.
(1) For conversion.
(2) Sanctification.
(3) Enjoyment.
(4) As an earnest of heaven.
3. In His merits.
(1) The righteousness of Christ was perfect in its universality, motive, duration, spirituality.
(2) We may have fellowship in these merits, for Christ is the Lord our righteousness.
4. In His resurrection.
5. In His glory.
II. Fellowship with Christ in His sufferings. This is explained by the following clause.
1. What is there in the saints which should die? Sin. How does this principle of sin manifest itself? In–
(1) Unbelief.
(2) Hardness of heart.
(3) Impenitence.
(4) Alienation from God.
(5) Pride.
(6) Envy.
(7) Earthly-mindedness.
2. How does this principle die, so that we may be conformed to the death of Christ?
(1) Not by a natural death, but a violent one inflicted by an outside hand. It will never die of its own accord, or of disease. It must be mortified, crucified.
(2) Crucifixion was an ignominious death reserved for slaves and rebels, and does not sin merit such a death?
(3) A lingering death. And so sin does not die all at once. This should teach us patience, watchfulness, continued looking unto Jesus.
3. How may we know that we have His fellowship? By
(1) our hatred of sin;
(2) our fervent prayer against it;
(3) our desire for sanctification;
(4) our joyful anticipation of a sinless world. (A. Pope.)
By the fellowship of His sufferings
1. We are not here to understand a participation in those He endured as the substitute for sinners, although in a certain sense we do share them, and that not only in the sense of enjoying their advantages. They are ours because Christ suffered in our room and stead. But here Paul refers to Christs sufferings in general.
2. Nor are we to understand them as metaphorical; that as Christ died, so are we to die to sin; as Christ was nailed to the cross, so are we to crucify our corrupt passions. This is an important truth, and Paul emphasizes it elsewhere. But here it is a real fellowship in positive pain to which he adverts.
3. This was a strange desire, one which few of us would entertain. We wish to have fellowship in joy, and seek how we can pass through life with the least inconvenience. It would not have been surprising had the apostle denied fellowship with Christ in His glory. Yet he did not desire suffering for its own sake, but for its benefit. He knew well that Gods order was first the cross, then the crown; fellowship with Christ, first in suffering, then in glory.
I. In what sufferings can we have fellowship with Christ?
1. Negatively.
(1) Not in His atoning sufferings. These He bore alone, and we cannot partake in them. No man can make atonement for his own or others sins.
(2) Not in sufferings which arise out of guilt. As we cannot be partakers in Christs atoning, He cannot partake of our sinful sufferings. In the accusation of conscience, sense of guilt, fear of wrath, loss of character, evil effects in self and others, He can have no share. He was holy, harmless, etc.
(3) Not in certain forms of bodily affliction. Christ never was sick or unwell. Of course there is an important sense in which He was a partaker of this class of sufferings. His deep sympathy, sensitive tenderness, made Him feel the afflictions of others keenly.
2. Positively. We are partakers in those which arise–
(1) Front persecution for righteousness sake. Such constituted a large portion of our Lords. His whole life was one of persecution, beginning with His birth, closing only with His death. In this respect the apostles were conformed to their Master. It is true, thank God, that we are not now liable to sufferings of the same nature; but a man who maintains a high standard of religion, and condemns the world by his conduct, will meet with persecution in the way of petty annoyances, designed misconceptions, and coldness.
(2) From sympathy with the distressed. Every distress Christ witnessed was photographed on His soul. We have not a High Priest who cannot be touched, etc. In this sense believers must be conformed to Christ. The same loving, sympathizing spirit that was in Him must be in them.
(3) From grief for sin. Much of Christs sorrow arose from unavoidable intercourse with the wicked. When infinite purity comes in contact with impurity, sorrow and moral indignation must be the result. And so it is with true believers. The state of the world around them, drunkenness, Sabbath profanation, etc., must be peculiarly afflictive.
(4) From spiritual distress. This Christ knew well in Gethsemane and on the cross, when He complained of spiritual desertion, and similar sufferings are experienced by believers when the light of Gods countenance is obscured.
II. The benefits arising from this fellowship. Sorrow is better than laughter. Uninterrupted prosperity has a prejudicial influence over our spiritual nature, and tempts us to forget God. Suffering–
1. Purifies the soul. In the furnace of affliction the dross of earth is removed, passions are mortified; pride is humbled, and so our graces are confirmed and strengthened.
2. Draws forth the better qualities of a man. The seeds of virtue germinate in the hotbed of affliction.
3. Enables us to comfort others (2Co 1:4, etc.).
4. Prepares for heaven. Our light afflictions, etc. Conclusion: Suffering by itself will not produce these benefits; only when accompanied by the operation of the Holy Ghost. The fire which melts some substances hardens others: so some are improved by affliction, while others by reason of their own perverseness are made worse. (P. J. Gloag, D. D.)
The fellowship of Christs sufferings
I. This knowledge of Christ and His sufferings here so ardently desired. We may have it–
1. By an actual participation in suffering for His sake. Many persons of affected sensibility feel a sort of delight in following Christ into the judgment hall and to Calvary who have no heart to make sacrifice for His service. Their hearts seem moved, but when persecution arises they walk no more with Him.
2. By the cordial reception of the benefits secured to us by His sufferings in the exercise of a lively faith.
(1) Pardon.
(2) Purity.
(3) Reconciliation and peace.
(4) Life spiritual and eternal.
3. By a tender sympathy with all His followers in the sufferings they endure. All the members of the body feel if one be afflicted, so do all the members of the body of Christ.
II. The grounds of this preference.
1. The knowledge transcends all other as to its importance. All else is earthly and therefore transient; this affects the dearest and eternal interests of men.
2. It is infinitely more valuable than testimony or theory. (T. Raffles, D. D.)
The fellowship of Christs sufferings
Historically the disciples found themselves incapable of entering into the fellowship and sufferings of Jesus till touched by the power of His resurrection. They gathered with Him round the supper table, and gazed into His sorrowful countenance, but could not understand the mystery of His sufferings. There was a veil upon their heart, and a strange indescribable barrier between them and Him. They were amazed as Jesus went before them to Jerusalem, and as they followed they were afraid. They stood beside Him bravely for a moment in the garden, but when they saw Him bound and helpless when they expected miraculous power, they all forsook Him and fled. How different it was when these very men saw things as in the light of the glory that burst from that broken tomb; then they began to understand all that Moses and the prophets had spoken, and their hearts burned within them as they began for the first time to enter into the fellowship of His sufferings. A little further on in their history, and the power of the risen Christ has come down in the flood tide of Pentecost, and what a change is wrought. They who shrank back from suffering–that Peter who was ready to say, That be far from Thee, Lord, and denied his Master–that man gathers his fellows round him, and they lift up the voice of praise, rejoicing that they are counted worthy to suffer persecution for the sake of Christ. And as it was with them historically, so it seems to be doctrinally here. Do we desire that the Lord may nerve us to participate in His sufferings? In pro portion to the tide of new resurrection, life is strong in us. Shall we dare to stretch out our trembling hand to grasp His cup?
I. The fellowship of His sufferings. The word fellowship occurs in the case of the partnership which existed between the fishermen of Galilee, and in the case of the early Christians, who had all things common. So we are not only permitted to sympathize with Christ as the Man of sorrows, but that, just as two partners in a firm are both joint possessors of the capital which belongs to the firm, so that wondrous wealth of sorrow which belonged to the Lord Jesus Christ, so far as it is a source of wealth, belongs in a measure to us, who are partners with Him. As the wealth of the disciples was thrown into one fund, and distributed amongst all, so the wealth of sorrow which belonged to our great Head is thrown into one fund with all the sorrows of those who are His members, and we are partakers with Him of that which is no longer to us a source of loss, but, on the contrary, a perennial source of gain. And to this common fund we are each of us permitted in our measure to contribute (Col 1:24).
II. The fellowship of His sufferings.
1. Fellowship with the sufferer. Mere suffering will do nothing for us. We may torture ourselves if we will, but shall continue as ungodlike as before. What we want is to suffer in the right way, and that is in fellowship with Christ. How did He suffer? Not by entailing suffering on Himself, or courting it for its own sake. He was the Man of sorrows because it was His meat to do His Fathers will. Considerations of pleasure and pain were subordinate. Psa 118:27, is prophetic of the passion.
(1) Gods light–the light of the Divine purpose resting upon the problem of human life–indicated the way that led to Calvary. It led the Son into the darkness; yet it was not the less precious to the heart of the Son for that. And we, too, if we would have real fellowship with Jesus, must see to it that our fellowship is intelligent fellowship. Some of the broken hearted followers of Christ gathered round His cross, and certainly suffered while He suffered. Yet had they no real fellowship in His sufferings, because they had not risen to the discovery of His design. Is it not too often so even with us? We have our sorrows; but the ray of light has not yet entered our souls, and the result is that we have no fellowship with Christ in our sufferings; and this, not so much because God is unwilling to give us the light, as because we shrink, like Peter, from the illumination which reveals the cross, and thus His light becomes obscured, and we lose the moral power which should have raised us into fellowship with His sufferings.
(2) How strong were the cords with which Christ was bound! It was not the brute force of the soldiers, nor the mandate of the governor, nor even the cruel nails that fastened Him to the tree. These He could have broken, but there were other cords, and of how strong, that bound Him there. There was the cord of–
(a) Obedience. The Fathers will had revealed itself, and that was law to Him.
(b) Love, and that glowed with furnace heat towards God and man that proved itself stronger than death. Blessed are they whose love grows with sorrow. It is only thus that we rise to true fellowship with the sufferings of Christ.
(c) Faith. His very enemies bore witness that He trusted in God. His last words upon the cross testified that His trust remained unshaken. If we would rise into fellowship with His sufferings, it must be by stepping forward in the spirit of faith, even though it should be into a burning, fiery furnace. Suffering ceases to be sanctified when it is infected with mistrust.
2. Our privilege of fellowship in the sufferings. Much was borne that we might not have to bear; but as I gaze at yonder cross I interpret the nature of our fellowship in the light of the next clause. Take the voices which sound from the dying Son of Man.
(1) Father, forgive them; they know not what they do! Can I have fellowship in that? I believe there is not one of us that follows our Lord fully, but we shall be more or less misunderstood, misinterpreted, but let us endeavour to enter into sympathy with the heart and mind of Jesus; and then, if a rough word is spoken, or a brother does not seem to understand us, Christs prayer will rise to our lips.
(2) I thirst. Thank God our thirst shall never be what His was. Yet I am reminded, Blessed are they that thirst, etc. And do not be cast down that you have not received the fulness of blessing. Is it not something that your thirst for God and righteousness makes you in a sense partaker of the sufferings of Jesus.
(3) Woman, behold thy son! Son, behold thy mother. In that I see something that I may have fellowship with. In the midst of all His agony He found time to think upon the sorrows of His broken hearted mother and His lonely disciple, and to mingle their griefs with His own. How is human sorrow sanctified by such a revelation as this? Does bereavement come? The same pangs that shot through my Saviours heart are become mine, and I am a partaker with Him.
(4) My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me? He was forsaken in order that you and I might not be forsaken. And yet, let us consider what it was that caused that cry: it was the dark shadow of imputed sin coming between His soul and God. And as we enter into the fellowship of the sufferings of Jesus, our views of sin will become more keen and clear, and also bring along with them a more painful emotion than could otherwise be ours. Let me enter into the fellowship of the sufferings of Jesus, that will make me hate sin.
(5) This day shalt Thou be with Me in Paradise. Parched are His lips, and His heart breaking; yet when that dying malefactors cry reaches His ear, His eye is turned upon that poor dying man, and the word of peace and pardon is spoken; and the suffering Son of Man takes on Himself the burden of the dying sufferer at His side. Oh for a heart to sorrow in all the sorrows of humanity!
(6) It is finished. Oh to be partakers with Christ in the glory of that last cry, which is the triumphant issue of suffering. When the will has been so fully yielded that God has been able to work out His own purpose in us, and to reveal His Son in us, then may it one day come to our turn to exclaim with St. Paul, I have finished my course.
3. Fellowship in the result of His sufferings. He, the Captain of our salvation, was made perfect through suffering. Even so, while there never was a time that the will of the Man Christ Jesus was opposed to the will of the Father, yet there was a time when its obedience was not completed, and thus He learnt obedience by the things which He suffered. If we learn what it is to be conformed to the image of His death, as our wilfulness and waywardness learn to submit themselves to the gentle discipline of suffering, and if in each fresh cross we find a fresh revelation of the loving will of the Father, how calm, how resurrection-like our lives must needs become! (W. M. H. H. Aitken, M. A.)
The fellowship of Christs sufferings
I. There are senses in which we can have no community with our Lord in His sufferings.
1. They were distinct in kind from ours.
(1) They were meritorious, whereas we cam never have any merit in Gods sight.
(2) Voluntary, whereas all ours are deserved being entailed by sin.
2. They were distinct in degree.
(1) In all their bitterness they were foreseen, whereas ours are hidden, and come in drops only.
(2) In absolute magnitude. He bore the whole burden of human suffering. Our sympathies are mighty, but the facts on which they are founded, and the persons they concern, are limited.
(3) In capacity for suffering He surpassed us. It is a token of Gods mercy as well as our infirmity that we are benumbed by pain. The crash which lights on a man and maims him, leaves him feeling for a moment unhurt. And so with great mental suffering. Often in the course of mighty calamities the chief sufferer endures less than those who pity him. But when in the depth of the valley of humiliation Christ was ever awake to each particular of His great load of woe, and when they offered Him the stupefying potion He put it from Him.
(4) In the matter and form and nature of His suffering He surpassed us. What was it that wrung that My soul is exceeding sorrowful. Was it the mere prospect of pain and shame? Can we suppose that that courage which has often borne on the sons of men to torture and ignominy, foreseen and chosen, was not present in Him? No. Death had a sting, but it was not pain, nor shame; it was sin.
II. But here we touch a point where we may enter into the fellowship of His sufferings. If He became sin for us we are the sinners. Imputed guilt crushed Him; shall actual guilt bring to us no similar suffering? Of this the natural man knows nothing. Terror on account of sin may throw over his soul its dark shadow, but this is not fellowship with Christs sufferings.
1. Whence, then, does this fellowship date? When first the Holy Spirit convinces of the hatefulness of sin.
2. This fellowship is an acquirement worthy of our highest ambition. We may avoid it, and live as we think a far more comfortable life. Shall we with the dread of death ever before us? Is it not worth while to get rid of this with all its grievous bondage?
3. The Christian should need no such argument, for the very purpose of his existence is to be conformed to Christ, but this he cannot be without the fellowship of His sufferings. The Captain of our salvation was made perfect through them; so must we be. (Dean Alford.)
The fellowship of Christs sufferings
It seems an awful wish that any mortal should dare to aspire to share the sufferings of the Man of sorrows; stranger still when we remember the actual sufferings of that mortal; stranger still that He should tell us to wish it for ourselves.
I. The nature of this fellowship.
1. It is not any imitation of Christs sufferings. Paul might have had them as had the impenitent thief, without any fellowship with Christ. We, too, may suffer beside Christ without suffering with Him.
2. The sufferings of Christ were peculiarly His own. Every heart knows its own bitterness.
(1) We shall not find them in the outward circumstances of His life. There have been more painful lives and agonizing deaths than His.
(2) We see their intensity in the fact that Christs life was perfectly holy. He loved God perfectly in a world where God was not loved, where His law was broken, and His name defamed. And remember He saw iniquity as none else could see it; and yet He loved the men whose sin He loathed, and because He loved them He bore the awful burden of their sin.
(3) In this our Lords life followed a universal law. It is a law of organic life, that the lowest form of it has least power of suffering; the highest form of it most. The eye that is the quickest to see beauty is most pained by deformity; the ear that most loves harmony is most pained by discord. But give a spiritual eye that loves the beauty of holiness; a spiritual ear that loves the harmony of righteousness, and place them in the midst of disorder and evil, and you have a nature that, just because it is perfect, must be sorrowful.
3. Now we see what is meant by this fellowship. Paul wished to be raised in the scale of being, and he knew that he could not have Christs holiness without Christs sadness, His grace without His grief. Such must be the law of our life. If we would come nearer Christ we must have His sufferings. You may escape them, but only by descending in the scale of being, just as a deaf man escapes the pain of discord, the palsied the pain of touch.
4. Is this a gloomy view of religion? Yes, to those who have mistaken what religion is, to the selfish, the cowardly, and the slothful, whose religion is only a device for getting to heaven as comfortably as they can.
II. Its reward.
1. Those who share the pains of Christ are entitled to His joys. The same capacity for pain that marks the highest nature also shows its capacity for pleasure. The joy of Christ was in the love He bore His Father, although that also made His grief. If He grieved that the world had not known His Father, it was joy to Him to gather those to whom He taught the Fathers love. If it was grief to the Good Shepherd to see the sheep wandering, it was joy to bring it back to the fold. And for this joy He endured the cross. And it may be our joy to do likewise, and to have the brighter fellowship even in the meanness of your toil.
2. In every pain you endure for Christ there is a prophecy of the glory that you shall yet share with Christ. God has made nothing for pain. For every creature God has provided its proper element, and for every desire its lawful gratification. If, then, God has made a new creature in Christ Jesus, He has provided for it an element and gratification for its spiritual desires. The plant that struggles toward the light testifies that light is its proper element; the captive eagle that spreads its wings in vain testifies that its proper home is in the broad fields of air. And when the soul of the Christian pines for the light, and its wings of faith and hope spread themselves, unable to bear him to the home he loves, it is a certain proof that there is a light, a freedom, and a blessedness in the place our Lord has gone to prepare, and he welcomes the pain as preparing him for the place. (Bishop Magee.)
The fellowship of Christs sufferings
I. In what respects a Christian may have fellowship with the sufferings of his master.
1. By comprehending their character, objects, and results.
(1) Those who think of them as chiefly corporeal, or proceeding from the treatment of men, or from natural causes, cannot share this fellowship. The body was tortured, but my soul is troubled. There was no cross in the garden; nor does the prospect of suffering explain the agony there; nor the endurance His cry. God hath put Him to grief, and those who regard His sorrows as those of a martyr can have no fellowship with Him who was wounded for our transgressions.
(2) They who limit the effect of these sufferings to their moral influence can have no fellowship with Him it is true that Christ has set all mourners an example; but He also offered Himself without spot. God setting him forth as a propitiation is something distinct from setting us an example.
(3) But the belief of this is not everything, notwithstanding what doctrinal Pharisees may say. The devils have it but are not better for it, and a man may be sound in his ideas about these things without caring an atom for them.
2. By faith in them as real and efficacious, and by appropriating their fruits to ourselves. When I feel and know that the blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth me from sin I have the highest kind of this fellowship. I may not know all that God has revealed about the blood of Jesus, nor be able to satisfy a theologian, but just as I know that the sun gives me light, and food nourishment, so I may know that Christs blood takes away sin.
3. By suffering as far as possible in His Spirit. There were sorrows into which we cannot follow Him, and His Spirit was so perfect that our imitation must be very imperfect. But we have fellowship thus:
(1) The lowly born and despised disciple may have fellowship with the sufferings of Him whom sinners contemned because He was the carpenters son.
(2) The poor may have fellowship with Him who had not where to lay His head.
(3) The hidden disciple, called to stand and wait, may have fellowship with Him who lived, with but one exception, in the seclusion of Nazareth for thirty years.
(4) The tempted likewise.
(5) The despised.
(6) The forsaken.
(7) The agonized; and
(8) The dying.
II. Wherefore is this fellowship desirable?
1. Our enjoyment of the everlasting benefits of Christs sufferings is dependent on this fellowship.
2. It assists our comprehension of Christs love.
3. We learn to value more highly what has been secured by Christs suffering.
4. It tends to relieve the burden of our sorrows.
5. It extinguishes our love for the world.
III. How may i attain it? Like Paul, you must count all things loss. Such knowledge requires much sacrifice.
1. If you pride yourself on your family you can have no fellowship with Him who endured contempt as the carpenters son.
2. If your great aim is to be wealthy you can have no fellowship with the sufferings of Christ in His poverty.
3. If your object is applause, what communion can there be between you and the despised and rejected of men? (S. Martin.)
The fellowship of Christs sufferings
I. In relation to pain.
1. The pains of life are as various as bodies and souls. Our sensibilities are very various; one thing hurts one person and another another; what is agony to me my neighbour scarcely feels. This is true of the roughnesses of life, its calumnies, its disappointments; of those trials which come through the affections, and those which come through the ambitions of our nature. And those to whom sorrow does not come go in quest of it; they have self-made troubles as hard to endure as those God sends. Nay, there is this compensation, that real suffering drives out imaginary, and where the lot is that of want or anguish the distresses of mere sentiment are excluded. But no Christian escapes distress of some kind.
2. But in all this there is lacking as yet the essential feature of a fellowship in Christs sufferings. For this faith is needful, and devotion, submission, the support of a heavenly arm, and the expectation of a heavenly home. St. Pauls life was Christ. All his desires, interests, objects, were swallowed up in the living to Christs glory. It was in this sort of life that trouble met Him (2Co 6:5). What becomes of us when we drag ourselves into this comparison. But if we suffer no great things on Christs behalf, let us see at least that common life is lived in remembrance of Him, lifes pleasures subordinated to His will, lifes anxieties, sorrows, sicknesses, endured patiently in His strength.
II. In relation to sin. In the highest sense we cannot share Christs sufferings, and, thank God, need not. He has done all. We can add nothing. But that conflict with sin, with its assaults, wiles, contradictions, and perversenesses, temptations which He waged, every one of His servants must have his share, and that conflict means suffering, as every man who has had to do battle with a besetting sin will bear witness. He carries its scars yet, and will carry them to his grave. As Christ, the Captain of our salvation, resisted unto blood, striving against sin, so must we, and in the midst of the conflict remember that He is with you (1Jn 4:4; 2Ki 6:15-17). (Dean Vaughan.)
Christ suffering in His members
Some two hundred years ago, there was a dark period of suffering in Scotland, when deeds of bloody cruelty were committed on Gods people, not out done by Indian butcheries. One day the tide is flowing in Solway Firth, rushing like a race horse with snowy mane to the shore. It is occupied by groups of weeping spectators. They keep their eyes fixed on two objects out upon the wet sands. There, two women, each tied fast by their arms and limbs to a stake, stand within the sea mark; and many an earnest prayer is going up to heaven that Christ who bends from His throne to the sight would help them now in their dreadful hour of need. The elder of the two is staked furthest out. Margaret, the younger martyr, stands bound, a fair sacrifice, near by the shore. Well, on the big billows come, hissing to their naked feet; on, and further on they come, death riding on the top of the waves, and eyed by these tender women with unflinching courage. The waters rise and rise, till, amid a scream and cry of horror from the shore, the lessening form of her that had death first to face, is lost in the foam of the surging wave. It recedes, but only to return, and now, the sufferer gasping for breath, her death struggle is begun; and now for Margarets trial, and her noble answer. What see you yonder? said their murderers as they pointed to her fellow confessor in the suffocating agonies of a protracted death. Response full of the boldest faith, and brightest hope; she firmly answered, I see Christ suffering in one of His own members. (T. Guthrie, D. D.)
The fellowship of Christs sufferings
A dear suffering Christian on a bed of sickness, which has now proved the portal of heaven, shrank for a while from the prospect of prolonged anguish which opened before her. In the vision of the morning there appeared to her a minute crown twined here and there with thorns, and by the side of this tiny ensign of the Saviours deep, abounding love, lay another crown, composed wholly of thorns, large murderous spines, such as doubtless composed the wreath of painful mockery that bound the brow of the Son of God. I thought, said she, the angels might have brought it; for some one seemed to say, pointing to the large heavy crown, I wore this for thee; wear thine for Me, and meekly she bent her head, and wore the wreath, and now she has laid it by for the crown which she wears. (Anna Shipton.)
Sweetness of fellowship with Christ
Oh! how sweet a cross it is to see a cross betwixt Christ and us; to hear our Redeemer say, at every sigh, and every blow, and every loss of a believer, Half mine! (S. Rutherford.)
Fellowship with Christs suffering
An intimate friend of Handels called upon him just as he was in the middle of setting the words of He was despised to music, and found the great composer sobbing with tears, so greatly had this passage and the rest of his mornings work affected the master. (Musical Anecdotes.)
Vicarious suffering common
Suffering in human life is very widely vicarious. Every man feels this in himself; one part of his being paying anothers penalty. If he loves overmuch, it is not love that suffers, but conscientiousness. If his passions are unduly excited, it is his moral nature that feels the transgression. If the brain be overwrought, the body feels it. The first lesson of life is one of vicarious suffering. As we go to the ship to see friends depart, and leave them with cheers and benedictions, and wafted kisses; so, when a young spirit is about to be launched into this earthly life, one would think that troops of angels would attend it, and with hope and gladness see it on its way. But no. Silently it passes the bounds of the unseen land; and the gate which opens to admit it to this is a gate of tears and moans. Through the sorrow of another is it ushered into existence. Love cannot clasp all it yearns for in its bosom, without first suffering for it. The child lives upon its parents life. The child which has no one to suffer for it is a miserable wretch. And from this point onward, in every relation of life, one man suffers for anothers benefit. It is the law of social life; and I do not see why we should think it strange that Christ obeyed the same law, only in a grander way. (H. W. Beecher.)
Fellowship with suffering longed for
Thuanus tells, that a Gallic lord being led forth to martyrdom in company with some equally faithful, though plebeian professors, saw that out of regard to his rank the officers put on him no chains, while each of his brethren bore them; upon which he cried, Let me, I pray you, be clipped of none of my honours; I, too, for love of Jesus, would wear a chain! (S. Coley.)
Being made conformable unto His death–The death of Christ is presented to us in three different lights.
1. As the noblest expression of Divine love for man; as the infinitely meritorious price of our redemption; as the only safe ground of a trembling sinners hope.
2. As the strongest and most endearing motive to holiness of life–constraining us.
3. As a suitable pattern for imitation, which is the meaning here.
I. Let us analyse this eminently distinguishing feature of Christian attainment. There is conformity–
1. To the principles involved in the Saviours death. It was not merely an affecting and mysterious historical event. It represents the principles which lie at the foundation of Gods moral character and government, and are most vitally connected with mans hopes as a guilty and helpless being.
(1) These principles are–
(a) That Jehovah is a just and holy Being, and that evil cannot dwell with Him.
(b) That the Divine administration implies the punishment of sin as well as the reward of righteousness.
(c) That the moral law of God is a transcript of His own character, and as such, must be vindicated in all its honours and claims.
(d) That God has an unalterable right to the obedience of His creatures.
(e) That satisfaction must he given to the demands of the perfect law before transgressors can be admitted to mercy.
(f) That without shedding of blood is no remission of sins.
(2) To these principles the mind of the believer must and will be conformed.
(a) He acquiesces in them as essential and worthy of God.
(b) He looks on man as a guilty being and on God as a righteous judge.
(c) He adores and admires the holiness as well as the love of Jehovah.
(d) He contemplates with delight at the foot of the Cross the harmony of the Divine attributes.
(e) And in opposition to the infidel who derides the scheme, the Socinian who extracts from it all its value, the Pharisee who seeks to achieve a salvation for himself, he exclaims, God forbid (Gal 6:16; 1Co 2:2).
2. In the motives which prompted to it.
(1) Love to God and man; the former because God s honour required vindication; the latter because man needed mercy. This love, of course, passeth knowledge, and in a sense cannot be imitated; but still in the experience of its benefits we may be conformed to it and cherish a corresponding feeling towards God and man, by giving to our Creator and Redeemer the highest place in our affections and service, and by devoting ourselves to the welfare of mankind.
(2) A holy desire to glorify God in the destruction of sin and the advancement of universal holiness. We are conformed to this when the Divine glory is the end of all our actions, and when we wage war against sin.
3. In the ends for which He died.
(1) As a witness for truth; and we must conform ourselves to this by acknowledging the reality and Divine original of truth thus attested.
(2) To expiate the guilt of sin: to conform to this we must repent, believe, and accept His salvation fully, and seek the salvation of others.
4. In the temper and spirit of His death. He suffered–
(1) Voluntarily and cheerfully–do we suffer willingly?
(2) With patience and resignation–are we stubborn?
(3) With meek benevolence–are we revengeful?
(4) In the exercise of lively faith–do we give way to despair?
II. We shall deduce from the subject those illustrations of the scheme of practical Christianity it is fitted to unfold. We have an illustration of–
1. The practical character of the doctrine of the atonement. Having for one of its main objects deliverance from the power of sin and the promotion of universal holiness, it is fitted to cherish a love of practical godliness.
2. The inseparable connection between faith and holiness. Without faith, the principles and motives which most powerfully prompt to holiness could not gain access to the mind: without holiness, there can be no genuine faith, for the graces of holiness are its effects and fruits.
3. The subject enters deeply into the essentials of Christian experience and life. Religion does not consist in the use of means; the ordinances of religion are only the means of leading the soul to God and holiness, of being conformable to Christs death. (R. Burns, D. D.)
Conformity to Christs death
The participle being made is present, and implies a process that is going on and will continue through life–not an act like justification, simultaneous with the exercise of faith. Made conformable means being cast in the same form, being brought into such a community and likeness that one sketch, outline, shape, will represent both.
I. This shaping in the form of Christs death is one of the Christians earnest endeavours and most cherished objects. No advantage in life, nothing that tempts ordinary men can attract Him in comparison of this. Here is a text for us to try ourselves by. What is the shape that we must be like. Christs death was a death unto sin. In that He died He died unto sin. The suffering of the previous verse is a different thing from this, yet it co-exists with this in the spiritual life. Fellowship with Christs sufferings is the endless conflict of the believers course, ever wearing and wearying Him. Conformity to Christs death is the deep calm of indifference to sin with all its allurements, ever setting in together with and over against the conflict. The two are in different portions of His being. The conflict with sin is carried on at the surface, and also very much beneath the surface–even in the region where the two wills, the old and the new, are ever struggling and wrestling for the mastery; and sometimes its more terrible paroxysms seem to penetrate, and shake, and threaten to carry away the whole man: but there is an inner depth, in which the peace which passeth understanding has its hold and reign: and there, in that centre of his being, is this death to sin going on. As Christ died to sin, passed out from the penalty and imputation of sin, He had no more to do with it. So each of the brethren who are being made like Him are losing part and interest in sin, weaned from its power, alienated from its motives and objects; the distance ever widening between it and them; the breach becoming ever more and more irreconcilable.
II. The method by which this is brought about.
1. Not by any mere strong action of the will–any acquired philosophical indifference to sin and temptation. Sin is too strong for any resolve.
2. No; in our Christian life, Christ is first and midst and last: and no mere moral strength or determination can be reckoned on as accessory to Him in his great work. This being conformed to Christs death is brought in, is carried on, is completed, by faith. When I first see Christ linked to me by the bonds of Gods everlasting covenant, then faith begins its work within me; then, the first utter dislike to sin, as sin, is bred in my heart.
3. But faith in what? In Christs death, in its atoning efficacy and its necessity. Then alone does sin appear in its proper hatefulness when I see that this was what helped to nail Him there; when I enter into my Redeemers woe and understand what it was that caused it. I become knit to Him and weaned from it–crucified with Him, so that though the motions towards it are yet felt in my body, yet I have no disposition in its favour.
III. Let us follow out this conformity into some of its attendant circumstances.
1. We have seen it in its total severance from sin and sinners. But where were they meantime? Did they rest quiet? Did they allow this ever lasting protest against the pollution, the selfishness, the hatefulness of sin before God, to be lifted up in peace? Ah no: there they were beneath His cross, scoffing at Him and aggravating His death pangs. And so it will be with us. Sin and the devil will not let us alone in its various stages. The nearer we approach in like ness to Him, the more will His enemies treat us as they treated Him. No longer by the scourge, and the crown of thorns, and the cross–but by mockery and scorn, by coldness and alienation, which in our present state of ripened social order are weapons as powerful as any outward persecution was then.
2. He died to all human ambition. Whatever projects His followers may have formed for Him were defeated by it. Just so thy fondly cherished hopes of earthly distinction must be laid down at the foot of His cross; thou must be content, so far as they are concerned, to be stripped and nailed to the cross of shame, and made a spectacle to men.
3. All self-righteousness is nailed to the cross, His was the only meritorious death. If I am being conformed to it I am nothing; nothing as ground of hope, or as cause of fear.
4. Nor should we entirely dismiss such a theme without one look onwards. If we be dead with Christ, we shall also live with Him. The Christian should never end with Calvary, nor with the mortification of the body, nor with deadness to sin; but ever carry his thoughts onward to that blessed consummation, to which these are the entrance and necessary conditions. (Dean Alford.)
The martyr spirit
A Chinese convert, when trying to persuade his countrymen to give up their idols and believe in Christ, was ridiculed and scorned, and at last pelted with mud and stones till his face was red with the blood that flowed from the cuts in his temples. Mr. Johnson, the missionary, meeting him, said, You have had bad treatment today. He smilingly replied, They may kill me if they will love Jesus.
Fuente: Biblical Illustrator Edited by Joseph S. Exell
Verse 10. That I may know him] To be the true and promised Messiah, and experience all that salvation which he has bought by his blood.
The power of his resurrection] In having this body of my humiliation raised from death, and made like unto his glorious body. This seems to be the sole meaning of the apostle; for it is in virtue of Christ’s resurrection that we are to be raised incorruptible and immortal.
And the fellowship of his sufferings] Christ died, not only as a victim for sin, but as a martyr to the truth. No creature can have fellowship with him in his vicarious sufferings; as a martyr to the truth, St. Paul wished to imitate him. Not only in the apostle, but in the primitive Christians generally, there seems to have been a strong desire after martyrdom.
Fuente: Adam Clarke’s Commentary and Critical Notes on the Bible
That I may know him; as consequent upon the former he had by winning of Christ, he doth here insist upon sanctification, which would result from faiths exerting itself in a further saving, experimental knowledge of Christ, to be found in whom, he undervalued all besides coniformity to Christ in holiness, being to have communion with him in righteousness, 1Co 1:30; God having appointed those who are found in Christ, to be conformed to his image in holiness, Rom 8:29; 2Co 3:18. This saving knowledge is expressed elsewhere in Scripture by the senses, Joh 10:4; 2Co 2:14; 4:6; Eph 1:18; 1Pe 2:3. All and only those found in Christ, do so know him, Joh 5:20; 6:46,69; Heb 8:11; and desire so to know him, Phi 1:9, that they may have a lively sense of his power, communion, and conformity.
The power of his resurrection; the power of his resurrection in us; i.e. from the death of the soul, under a privation of spiritual life, and the image of God, unto newness of life, by the effectual working of the same Spirit which raised Christ himself from the dead, Rom 6:4,10; Eph 1:20; 2:5,6; called the first resurrection, Rev 20:5; when the soul is raised from under the dominion of sin where it lay.
The fellowship of his sufferings; by communion of Christs sufferings, is not meant of bearing a part in the merit of his personal sufferings, but of being partaker of his sufferings in his members, or mystical body, whether inward or outward, (though this chiefly), Mat 20:23; Act 9:4; Rom 8:17; 2Co 1:7; 4:10,11; Ga 5:24; Col 1:24; 2Ti 2:11,12.
Being made comformable unto his death; some read, while made conformable to his death, not only in dying to sin, Rom 6:5,6, but in being conformed to his image in suffering, Rom 8:29; dying daily, or always living ready to be delivered to death for Jesus sake upon his call, Rom 8:18; 2Co 4:11. Such was his Christian temper, that he could cheerfully go through sufferings by reason of some communion and conformity he had in them with Jesus Christ.
Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole
10. That I may knowhimexperimentally. The aim of the “righteousness”just mentioned. This verse resumes, and more fully explains, “theexcellency of the knowledge of Christ” (Php3:8). To know HIM ismore than merely to know a doctrine about Him. Believers arebrought not only to redemption, but to the Redeemer Himself.
the power of hisresurrectionassuring believers of their justification (Rom 4:25;1Co 15:17), and raising them upspiritually with Him, by virtue of their identification with Him inthis, as in all the acts of His redeeming work for us (Rom 6:4;Col 2:12; Col 3:1).The power of the Divine Spirit, which raised Him from literal death,is the same which raises believers from spiritual death now (Eph 1:19;Eph 1:20), and shall raise theirbodies from literal death hereafter (Ro8:11).
the fellowship of hissufferingsby identification with Him in His sufferings anddeath, by imputation; also, in actually bearing thecross whatever is laid on us, after His example, and so “fillingup that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ” (Col1:24); and in the will to bear aught for His sake (Mat 10:38;Mat 16:24; 2Ti 2:11).As He bore all our sufferings (Isa53:4), so we participate in His.
made conformable unto hisdeath“conformed to the likeness of His death,”namely, by continued sufferings for His sake, and mortifying of thecarnal self (Rom 8:29; 1Co 15:31;2Co 4:10-12; Gal 2:20).
Fuente: Jamieson, Fausset and Brown’s Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible
That I may know him,…. The Ethiopic version reads “by faith”; and to the same sense the Syriac. The apostle did know Christ, and that years ago; he knew whom he had believed; he knew him for himself; he knew his personal interest in him; nor did he know any but him in the business of salvation: but his knowledge of Christ, though it was very great, it was, imperfect; he knew but in part, and therefore desired to know more of Christ, of the mystery and glories of his person, of the unsearchable riches of his grace, of his great salvation, and the benefits of it, of his love, which passes perfect knowledge, and to have a renewed and enlarged experience of communion with him. The apostle here explains what he means by winning Christ, for the sake of which he suffered the loss of all things, and counted them but dung; it was, that he might attain to a greater knowledge of the person and grace of Christ:
and the power of his resurrection; not that power which was put forth by his Father, and by himself, in raising him from the dead; but the virtue which arises from it, and the influence it has on many things; as on the resurrection of the saints: it is the procuring cause of it, they shall rise by virtue of union to a risen Jesus; it is the firstfruits, which is the earnest and pledge of their resurrection, as sure as Christ is risen, so sure shall they rise; it is the exemplar and pattern of theirs, their bodies will be raised and fashioned like to the glorious body of Christ; and this the apostle desired to know, experience, and attain unto. Christ’s resurrection has an influence also on the justification of his people; when Christ died he had the sins of them all upon him, and he died for them, and discharged as their public head and representative, and they in him: hence it is said of him, that “he was raised again for our justification”, Ro 4:25. Now, though the apostle was acquainted with this virtue and influence of Christ’s resurrection, he desired to know more of it, for the encouragement of his faith to live upon Christ, as the Lord his righteousness. Moreover, the regeneration of men is owing to the resurrection of Christ; as to the abundant mercy of God, as the moving cause, so to the resurrection of Christ, as the means or virtual cause; and therefore are said to be “begotten again by the resurrection of Christ from the dead”, 1Pe 1:3. This power and virtue the apostle had had an experience of, yet he wanted to feel more of it, in exciting the graces of the spirit to a lively exercise, in raising his affections, and setting them on things above, and in engaging him to seek after them, and set light by things on earth, and in causing him to walk in newness of life, in likeness or imitation of Christ’s resurrection, to all which that strongly animates and encourages; see Col 3:1.
And the fellowship of his sufferings; either his personal sufferings, and so signifies a sharing in, and a participation of the benefits arising from them; such as reconciliation for sin, peace with God, pardon, righteousness, nearness to God, c. or the sufferings of his members for him, and with him, and which Christ reckons his own: these the apostle was willing to take his part in, and lot of, knowing, that those that are partakers of his sufferings in this sense, shall reign with him, and be glorified together. What the Jews deprecated, the apostle was desirous of namely, sharing in the sorrows and sufferings of the Messiah, and which they reckon the greatest happiness to be delivered from.
“The disciples of R. Eleazar y asked him, what a man should do that he may be delivered , “from the sorrows of the Messiah?” he must study in the law, and in beneficence.”
And elsewhere they say z,
“he that keeps the three meals on the sabbath day shall be delivered from three punishments, , “from the sorrows of the Messiah”, and from the damnation of hell, and from the war of Gog and Magog.”
But our apostle rejoiced in his sufferings for Christ, and was desirous of filling up the afflictions of Christ in his flesh, for his body’s sake, the church:
being made conformable unto his death; either in a spiritual sense dying daily unto sin, 1Co 15:31, having the affections, with the lusts, crucified, Ga 5:24, and the deeds of the body mortified, Ro 8:13, and so planted in the likeness of his death, Ro 6:5; or rather in a corporeal sense, bearing always in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, 2Co 4:10, and being continually exposed to death for his sake, and ready to suffer it whenever called to it.
y T. Bab. Sanhedrin, fol. 98. 2. z T. Bab. Sabbat, fol. 118. 1. See Cetubot, fol. 111. 1.
Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible
That I may know him ( ). Genitive of the articular second aorist (ingressive) active infinitive (purpose) of , to have personal acquaintance or experience with. This is Paul’s major passion, to get more knowledge of Christ by experience.
The power of his resurrection ( ). Power (Lightfoot) in the sense of assurance to believers in immortality (1Cor 15:14; Rom 8:11), in the triumph over sin (Ro 4:24f.), in the dignity of the body (1Cor 6:13; Phil 3:21), in stimulating the moral and spiritual life (Gal 2:20; Rom 6:4; Col 2:12; Eph 2:5). See Westcott’s The Gospel of the Resurrection, ii, 31.
The fellowship of his sufferings ( ). Partnership in (objective genitive) his sufferings, an honour prized by Paul (Co 1:24).
Becoming conformed to his death ( ). Present passive participle of , late verb from , found only here and ecclesiastical writers quoting it. The Latin Vulgate uses configuro. See Ro 6:4 for in like sense and 2Co 4:10. “The agony of Gethsemane, not less than the agony of Calvary, will be reproduced however faintly in the faithful servant of Christ” (Lightfoot). “In this passage we have the deepest secrets of the Apostle’s Christian experience unveiled” (Kennedy).
Fuente: Robertson’s Word Pictures in the New Testament
That I may know Him [ ] . Know is taken up from knowledge, ver. 8, and is joined with be found in Him, qualified by not having, etc. That I may be found in Him not having, etc., but having the righteousness which is of God so as to know him, etc.
The power of His resurrection [ ] . Power of His resurrection and fellowship of His sufferings furnish two specific points further defining the knowledge of Him. By the power of Christ ‘s resurrection is meant the power which it exerts over believers. Here, more especially, according to the context, in assuring their present justification, and its outcome in their final glorification. See Rom 4:24, 25; Rom 8:11, 30; 1Co 14:17; Col 3:4; Phi 3:21. Fellowship of His sufferings. Participation in Christ ‘s sufferings. See Mt 20:22, 23; and on Col 1:24. Compare 2Co 1:5; 1Pe 4:13. Faith makes a believer one with a suffering Christ.
Being made conformable [] . Explaining the previous clause : by my becoming conformed, etc. Rev., becoming conformed.
Compare 2Co 4:10; Rom 6:5. For conformed see on Mt 17:2, and on form, ch. 2 6. The most radical conformity is thus indicated : not merely undergoing physical death like Christ, but conformity to the spirit and temper, the meekness and submissiveness of Christ; to His unselfish love and devotion, and His anguish over human sin.
Fuente: Vincent’s Word Studies in the New Testament
1) “That I may know him” (tou gnonai auton) to know him personally, practically, and experimentally in life.
2) “And the power of his resurrection” (kai ten dunamin tes anastaseos) “And the power of the resurrection” of him, Rom 6:3; Col 3:1-2.
3) “And the fellowship of his sufferings” (kai koinonian pathematon autou) “And the common fellowship of his sufferings” 1Pe 4:13; 2Ti 2:11.
4) “Being made conformable unto his death” (summorphi-zomenos to thanato autou) “being conformed, patterned according to, his death”, in purpose, devotion, and commitment.
Fuente: Garner-Howes Baptist Commentary
10 That I may know him He points out the efficacy and nature of faith — that it is the knowledge of Christ, and that, too, not bare or indistinct, but in such a manner that the power of his resurrection is felt. Resurrection he employs as meaning, the completion of redemption, so that it comprehends in it at the same time the idea of death. But as it is not enough to know Christ as crucified and raised up from the dead, unless you experience, also, the fruit of this, he speaks expressly of efficacy. (188) Christ therefore is rightly known, when we feel how powerful his death and resurrection are, and how efficacious they are in us. Now all things are there furnished to us — expiation and destruction of sin, freedom from condemnation, satisfaction, victory over death, the attainment of righteousness, and the hope of a blessed immortality.
And the fellowship of his sufferings Having spoken of that freely-conferred righteousness, which was procured for us through the resurrection of Christ, and is obtained by us through faith, he proceeds to treat of the exercises of the pious, and that in order that it might not seem as though he introduced an inactive faith, which produces no effects in the life. He also intimates, indirectly, that these are the exercises in which the Lord would have his people employ themselves; while the false Apostles pressed forward upon them the useless elements of ceremonies. Let every one, therefore, who has become through faith a partaker of all Christ’s benefits, acknowledge that a condition is presented to him — that his whole life be conformed to his death.
There is, however, a twofold participation and fellowship in the death of Christ. The one is inward — what the Scripture is wont to term the mortification of the flesh, or the crucifixion of the old man, of which Paul treats in Rom 6:0; the other is outward — what is termed the mortification of the outward man. It is the endurance of the Cross, of which he treats in Rom 8:0 of the same Epistle, and here also, if I do not mistake. For after introducing along with this the power of his resurrection, Christ crucified is set before us, that we may follow him through tribulations and distresses; and hence the resurrection of the dead is expressly made mention of, that we may know that we must die before we live. This is a continued subject of meditation to believers so long as they sojourn in this world.
This, however, is a choice consolation, that in all our miseries we are partakers of Christ’s Cross, if we are his members; so that through afflictions the way is opened up for us to everlasting blessedness, as we read elsewhere,
If we die with him, we shall also live with him; if we suffer with him, we shall also reign with him. (2Ti 2:11,)
We must all therefore be prepared for this — that our whole life shall represent nothing else than the image of death, until it produce death itself, as the life of Christ is nothing else than a prelude of death. We enjoy, however, in the mean time, this consolation — that the end is everlasting blessedness. For the death of Christ is connected with the resurrection. Hence Paul says, that he is conformed to his death, that he may attain the glory of the resurrection. The phrase, if by any means, does not indicate doubt, but expresses difficulty, with a view to stimulate our earnest endeavor (189) for it is no light contest, inasmuch as we must struggle against so many and so serious hinderances.
(188) “ De l’efficace ou puissance;” — “Of the efficacy or power.”
(189) “ Afin de nous resueiller et aiguiser a nous y addonner de tant plus grande affection;” — “That it may arouse and stimulate us to devote ourselves to it with so much greater zeal.”
Fuente: Calvin’s Complete Commentary
THE MOST ESSENTIAL KNOWLEDGE
Php 3:10
I HAVE spoken to you touching a part of this text, namely, the power of His resurrection. But, since that time, the whole verse has been in the process of illumination for me, and the truths, which it so evidently contains, have been becoming more and more precious to me, until I must speak to this text, that I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable unto His death.
As Phillips Brooks has said, It is one thing to know a fact and another to know the power of that fact. It is one thing to stand on shore and see the great waves and say there is a storm, and it is a very different thing to be out in its waves, tossed every way by them, fighting for your life. On the shore, you know of them. In their midst, you know them. You know their power. The first is information! The second is experience!
Some men are content with knowing facts. Other people will be content only with knowing powers. An unfelt fact is nothing at all to these last. There is no truth, to them, that does not take their nature and their lives into its hands and change them. Of this last class was Paul, who prayed that he might know the power of Christs resurrection. And Paul also prayed that he might know the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable unto His death.
It is a prayer that not many people make. Some might join in his petition to know Christ, and they might also desire to know the power of His resurrection, but, oh, how few pray to enter into the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable unto His death!
And yet we doubt if any man will ever know Christ as He is; ever know Christ as one might know Him. We doubt if one will ever understand the power of His resurrection, unless he also willingly enters into the fellowship of His sufferings. This morning, then, I want to set the points of this petition in order before you.
The first thing for which Paul prayed was to know
JESUS, THE PERSON
I think the Apostle wanted to know Him as a Friend.
Did it ever occur to you that one must see in Jesus, a Friend, as the very first step to any better knowledge of Him? When we make an acquaintance in this world, we do not attempt to win his love at first. We seek to inspire friendship instead! That must have been a great day with Christs disciples when He delivered to them the wonderful discourse in the fourteenth and fifteenth chapters of John. When were students ever privileged such a teacher and such teaching as they were privileged that day? Their enthusiasm must have risen to its climax when Christ said to them, Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of My Father I have made known unto you (Joh 15:15).
When a man takes the deepest secrets of his heart and bares them before your eyes, it gives one of the best proofs possible of his friendship for you, and, when on this day Jesus let His disciples know some things that He had never spoken to mortal man before, namely, the coming of His death, the circumstances attending it; and, at the same time, gave them promise of the Holy Spirit, and whispered into their ears what He would expect of them as His followers, it proved beyond doubt that He regarded them as His friends, and that He gave His friendship to them.
I confess to you that I long to know Jesus as a Friend; to know Him sufficiently to sit with Him in the Heavenly places; to feel in Him that confidence that I know toward a few of the choicest of men, namely, the confidence of heart-exposure, the laying bare before His eyes of every secret of life; and then to have the sweet experience of having Him tell me His secrets as well, of having Him initiate me into the mysteries of His life, and of hearing Him say in so many words, I love you.
In the secret of His presence,How my soul delights to hide!Oh, how precious are the lessons Which I learn at Jesus side!Earthly cares can never vex me,Neither trials lay me low;For when Satan comes to tempt me,To the secret place I go.
When my soul is faint and thirsty,Neath the shadow of His wingThere is cool and pleasant shelter,And a fresh and crystal spring;And my Saviour rests beside me,As we hold communion sweet;If I tried, I could not utterWhat He says when thus we meet.
A while ago a dear friend of many years was visiting me, a man in whose integrity of character I had perfect trust, and one day as we knelt to pray together over a matter of common interest, when we reached the Amen and rose from our knees, each with tears in his eyes, he put his arms kindly about me and said, I love you. Oh, to know Christ in that way. It was Pauls prayer. It ought to be your longing and mine.
I sometimes wonder how Catholic Christians get any comfort or inspiration whatever out of bowing before images painted on canvas, or carved in marble. I cannot forget Edith Mary Norriss poem, The Stone Christ, in which she paints her picture by these words:
She drew her rags more closely,As she passed through the biting sleet;And the stones on the pave were icy To her bare and bleeding feet;But none of the passers noted Her anguish, or turned with scorn,And she passed through the open portals Of the house of God, forlorn.For she thought in cloistered precincts,The sacred haunt of prayer,To lose for a while her burden Of sorrow and want and care.Above, from the niche in the pillared aisle,A stone Christ looked with a pitiless smile.
She thought of her lover and husband,The swart bread-winner, slain While earning the pittance doled him For a toil that was almost pain;Great-hearted he was, and tender,And over her soul in a wave Broke the waves of deep affliction,As she thought of his paupers grave,And thought of his little children In a garret crying for bread,While down on the pavement splashing,Fell the heart-wrung tears she shed.Above, from the niche in the pillared aisle,A stone Christ looked with a pitiless smile.
O Christ, who was born of woman,Give ear to a mothers prayer,Who asks of Thee bread for her children;Dear God, in Thy mercy spare From the pangs of cold and hunger My darlings, whose hair of gold Makes tangled thickets of sunshine In my attic bare and cold;Whose smiles, as I break and give themThe hard and mouldy crust,Tear my breaking heart with anguish;Dear God, dost Thou hear? Thou must! Above, from a niche in a pillared aisle,A stone Christ looked with a pitiless smile.They came on the morrow thronging,And they filled the holy place With the pomp of wealth and fashion, Proud priests in linen and lace,With singers following after,Passed stately up the aisle,While the mellow organ thundered Triumphant strains the while;And the air was rich with incense,From golden censers flung;And a song like that of the angels The white-robed singers sung!Above, from a niche in a pillared aisle,A stone Christ looked with a pitiless smile.
They sang with a silken rustle,On their knees, Thy will be done;Come Thy Kingdom on earth as in Heaven, They prayed in unison.Then, when the prayers were ended,The preacher took the word;They settled themselves to listen,But never the sense they heard.He spoke in cultured accents Of love and charity:Who doeth it unto the least of these,Lo, he doeth it unto Me!Above, from a niche in a pillared aisle,A stone Christ looked with a pitiless smile.
They found on that Sunday morning,In the wretched garret bed,A mother and little children,Lying cold and stark and dead.Lo, her prayer had been heard and answered,She had entered into her rest,The poor heart-broken motherWith the wee gold hearts on her breast.They brought them into the chancel,And chanted a requiem song,Too, late, O Christian brethren!They will stand and accuse ere long.And still, from a niche in the pillared aisle,The stone Christ looked with a pitiless smile.
Any system that shuts up the Word of God against the study of the people takes away the true Christ presented in its revelations, the Christ whose , heart-beats are felt in its sentences, and gives to them only a stone Christ, instead.
Oh, how grateful we ought to be this morning because the Bible has been open before us. Some of us have found in Christ a Friend, whose life touches our lives, whose words have been to us true wisdom and whose heartbeats we have felt as we have listened to Him speak to us through the Scriptures in expressions of love. It was through Pauls study of the Word that he expected to know Christ as his Friend.
I think Paul wanted to know Him also as His Saviour. Sin had played havoc with Sauls life. At the very time when he supposed himself to be approved of God, he was engaged in a course which he eventually came to see to have been most criminal so that he was compelled to speak of himself as the chief of sinners. One day he was writing to the Church at Rome, and, when he had reached the seventh chapter of his Epistle, he uncovered his past and told them how sin had wrought in him all manner of concupiscence; how sin had deceived him and even slew him, and he concluded by saying, I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. And then he cried, 0 wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?
A moments silence and then he answers, I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. He was coming to know Christ as a Saviour from his sin, and that is how he wants to know Him. That is how you and I need to know Him.
A while ago a young woman in Chicago had fallen into sin and was living in a place of shame. One of the workers in the Moody Institute, a beautiful Christian man, hearing through friends of her whereabouts, went after her, and, by process of law, brought her away from the place. He led her to Christ. He put her into the Moody School as a student, and later he took her unto himself as his own wife And I have often thought that that is just what Jesus does for those who really come to know Him. He delivers us out of our evil association. His love toward us woos us from our bad habits, and, in order to utterly remove our reproach and redeem us from our shame, He weds us unto Himself; and then, like the beloved Husband He is, He shares His own honors with us, and, better than all, He uses His strength against the enemy, and by a constant deliverance, He enables us to stand.
Oh, I want to know Him as Saviour! There are so many sins that I cannot overcome myself, but when I shall know Him as I ought, His intimate presence and His instant help will be the end of them. That is what Paul meant when he said, that I may be found in Him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the Law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith.
Then I think the Apostle wanted to know Him as Sanctifier.
I know there are a great many people in the church who are afraid of that term; but Paul did not belong to that class. In almost every one of his Epistles you will find him employing the term, and, in that wonderful Letter to the Hebrews, he says (Heb 2:11) of Christ, Both He that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are all of one: for which cause He is not ashamed to call them brethren.
Dr. A. B. Simpson has a little tract on Himself that I wish every Christian might read. In that tract he says, I prayed a long time to get sanctified, and sometimes I thought I had it. On one occasion I felt I had something, and I held on with a desperate grip for fear I should lose it, and of course I did. I lost it because I did not hold onto Him. I had been taking a little water from the reservior, when I might, all the time, have received from Him the fullness of the Fountain itself. I went to meetings and heard people speak of joy, and I even thought I had the joy, but I did not keep it because I had not Himself as my joy. At last He said to me, oh, so tenderly, My child, just take Me and let Me be in you the constant supply of all this, Myself. And when at last I got my eyes off my sanctification and just placed them on the Christ in me, I found I had my sanctification in Him, and oh, it was such rest. It was all right and right forever.
It must be so to those who know Christ if He that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are all of one.
The next thing for which Paul prayed was to know
THE POWER OF HIS RESURRECTION
Since we have given an entire sermon to this sentence, I may be pardoned for passing it over today, with but brief discussion. It is evident to me the Apostle longs to know the power of Christs resurrection in two respects.
First, in that regeneration which means death to sin and a new life in Christ.
To him, baptism was a perfect figure of this first. In writing to the Romans he said,
Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into His death?
Therefore we are buried with Him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.
For if we have been planted together in the likeness of His death, we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection.
Ernest Gordon, in the life of his renowned father, tells the story of the conversion at the Clarendon Street Church of an Irishman by the name of Patrick Daley. Being saved himself, Patrick went after a friend of his, Peter Murphy, who lived in the upper story of the same tenement, and he got this drinking Irishman to sign a Total Abstinence pledge, and then he told him that he must have Jesus to help him keep it. They prayed together and Murphy was saved. Things went on well all the week, but when Sunday morning came around, Joe Healey came over to pay Peter his usual visit, and Murphy, in speaking of it, said, This was the worst yet, for Healey used to come to see Murphy as regular as Sunday, always bringing a bottle of whiskey with him, and the two would spree it all day until they turned the whole house into a bedlam.
So, said Daley, when I went to the door to let him in, he said, Good morning, Pat, is Murphy in? I said, No, Murphy is out! He does not live here any longer! Now, Dr. Gordon, he said, did I tell a lie? What I meant was that the old Murphy did not live there any more, for you know Mr. Moody told us that when a man is converted, he is a new creature, and that is what I meant. Did I tell a lie?
If one will turn to 2Co 5:17 he will be compelled to admit that Patrick Daley told the truth, for Paul said, Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.
If Pauls teaching Nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me, is true, the Murphy that Joe Healey knew was dead, and a new man in Christ Jesus dwelt in that upper tenement, through the power of Christs resurrection.
Then the Apostle Paul wanted to know the power of Christs resurrection as exercised against the grave! He says, If by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead.
It is in that power that we have the promise of redemption for our bodies. I believe with a recent writer that those who have not watched the trend of opinion on that point have little idea of the extent to which, even in Orthodox ranks, the Swedenborgian notion of elimination has supplanted the primitive doctrine of resurrection. Instead of holding that at the sound of the last trump God will quicken our mortal bodies by His Spirit that dwelleth in us, it is becoming very common to maintain that at death a spiritual, incorporeal substance is released from the body; thus ones death is his resurrection, since in that event an imprisoned spiritual body breaks its shell and comes forth like the butterfly from the chrysalis. If that were true, it would not be the angels trump calling the dead from the grave that ushers in the resurrection, but the sextons bell tolling the dead to the grave.
Paul did not believe that. Read the fifteenth chapter of I Corinthians, or the fourth chapter of I Thessalonians, and find that the Apostle Paul believes in that power of resurrection which would bring back to us the bodies of our loved ones, changed only in the elimination of corruption, dishonor, weakness, and nature, and the implantation of incorruption, glory, power and spirit.
I went one week to Lakewood with a family who laid away a beautiful daughter. She had seen but twelve summers, and I confess to you, as I looked upon their tearstained faces, and realized the agony they had known in having this girl snatched from health to the grave by three days of indescribable suffering, I should have been silent before them, and compelled, if I spake at all, to speak as one who was without hope, could I not have told them that one day the graves would give up their dead and the house broken here by the claims of the cemetery would be perfected there by Christs resurrection power.
The third thing for which Paul prayed was to know
THE FELLOWSHIP OF HIS SUFFERINGS
There are two or three respects in which the Apostle might enter into that fellowship.
In the lowliness of Christs station. In his Epistle to the Philippians, Paul speaks of how Christ Jesus who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself (Php 2:6).
It was not a humility of station merely; it was that true humility of spirit that ever characterizes the unselfish. When He had His choice between sharing the Throne with God and the lowest estate with men, He was moved by the very spirit of love that was in Him to accept the latter. You cannot share the low estate of men without suffering. You cannot go down on a level with the social outcast and stand at his side, and pour your sympathy into his ear, and let him feel the pulse of an honest heart, without suffering. It will bring you social ostracism as it brought it to Christ; and, it will burden your heart, because it will take on the poor mans woes, and you will be compelled to groan in spirit, as Jesus groaned at the sight of suffering Mary and Martha.
Phillips Brooks was right when he said, True humility on the part of a disciple is one in nature with Christs own humility.
Here is a delicate woman who is impelled by His Spirit within her to go into the worst wards of a hospital and serve the lowest and most loathsome there! But when you ask her why she makes such a sacrifice, she answers with a smile, Sacrifice? It is a sweet service. She has entered into the fellowship of His humiliation.
Years ago my friends, Mrs. Rileys University chum and her husband, young people just graduated, surrounded by a host of close relatives and admiring friends, picked up and set off into Western China, and there in a city of filth and squalor, and among an uncouth and unkempt people, put in their years and found pleasure in the ministry. They entered into the fellowship of Christs humiliation. Paul wanted that same spirit to possess him, hence the prayer of our text. Can you pray it? Can I?
In the strength of His temptation. Did you ever think of what that wilderness temptation meant to Christ? Did you ever sit down to contemplate how, in a few sentences, Satan swept every key of human nature, to find if a one were out of tune with God? If Thou he the Son of God, command that these stones he made bread. Christ was hungry. The appeal to Christ was an appeal to employ His Divine power to satisfy Himself. And, oh, how strong that appeal must have been, because for forty days and nights He had not tasted food. There may be men in Minneapolis today who are hungry and who, like Jean Val Jean, are ready to break the laws of the land that the appetite maybe appeased. And yet to go hungry, when one cant do other righteously, is to come into fellowship with Christs sufferings.
Again, the devil took Him up into the Holy City, and set Him upon a pinnacle of the Holy Temple, and said unto Him, Cast Thyself down: for it is written, He shall give His angels charge concerning Thee: and in their hands they shall hear Thee up.
Oh, what a temptation to come into prominence through an appeal to the eyes. And when you are tempted by gaudy dress, or sensational behaviour, to call attention to yourself, and get a reputation, just remember that to yield to it is to miss the fellowship of Christs sufferings in that for years He walked among men unnoticed, and would have died without coming into prominence, rather than do it in any other way than in defense of the right. Jesus longed to have the popular ear. Jesus took pleasure in seeing the multitudes assemble about Him, for such was His mission of mercy to them that it must have been so, but never once did He descend to any clap-trap suggestions of Satan, to accomplish that prominence and its consequent power. And then see how Satan again sheweth Him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them, and says, All these things will I give Thee, if Thou wilt fall down and worship me. Jesus longed to have these kingdoms. Jesus had been promised these kingdoms. Here was a plan by which He could come into possession of them without suffering on His part, without the exercise of patience, through thousands of years of waiting; and the price to be paid for that coveted privilege was only a single bending of the knee! Sometime when you see a chance to make a few hundred dollars by a dishonest word, by a deceiving look, by silence even, and yet you know that to come into possession of it would please Satan, and, in fact, would be for the moment a prostration of yourself at his feet, just remember that Christ has gone before you there, and when the worlds were offered Him for a single yielding; when all the kingdoms and the glory of them might have been His, by setting conscience aside for one moment, He turned from those possessions to the direst poverty possible, and answered, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve; and you will spurn the tempting profit and go your way clean-conscienced, having entered into the fellowship of Christs sufferings.
In the extent of His sacrifice! The Apostle Paul saw that Christ had laid down everything for him, and so he says, I want to lay down everything for Christ. The things that were gain to me I want to count as sacrifice for Him. The world has never realized as yet what Christs offering of Himself meant. We have never dreamed the crucible in which Christ lived out His days! When He was an innocent babe, Herod, animated by Satan, attempted His slaughter. Doubtless His appearance at 12 years of age excited antipathy in the hearts of some of the scribes and Pharisees from which they never recovered. From the day that His public ministry began until the day that He died on the Cross, every indignity, every suffering that Church and State could heap upon Him, He had to endure. Holman Hunt has painted a picture entitled The Shadow of Death. It represents Christ in His carpenter shop. At the close of the day He rises from His task and wearily stretches Himself, and, as He stands there with His arms uplifted, His mother, who has come into the shop for some utensil, lifts her eyes a moment, and, lo, the setting sun strikes His form in such a way that the shadow He casts on the shop wall is a perfect cross. Instantly she is filled with a strange fear, lest it portend His coming agony. Hunts conception is in wonderful keeping with the whole teaching of the Word of God. There was never an hour, after Christ began His public ministry, in which it was not possible to see that the Cross was His destiny. He could not compromise the truth and consequently the church which had departed from it would not accept His words. He could not praise the existing civilization; consequently the state, seeing that His teaching would overturn the very foundations and expose its sinfulness, set its officers on His track. He never spake but He was misunderstood, because men were so sunken in sin that they could not appreciate His high principles of righteousness. Every act of His life was misrepresented. Every point of His conduct maligned. Daily He was face to face with the question, Shall I compromise with wickedness, or shall I continue my plea for the right and perish on the Cross? To this question there was but one answer possible with Himothers He might save, Himself He could not save. Today, every man, who will, may enter into the fellowship of His sufferings at this point. God save us from drawing back from the experience. If preaching the Truth brings persecution, may God help the men of this hour to enter into the fellowship of Christs sufferings. If obedience to the plain teachings of the Word of God means giving of our silver and gold to the point where, like Christ, we also shall be poor, God help us to enter into the fellowship of His sufferings. If living the Spirit-filled life means for us the crucifixion of the old self, by the putting down of every iniquitous desire, and a perfect surrender of every power, God help us at whatever cost to enter into the fellowship of His sufferings, for If we suffer, we shall also reign with Him.
Fuente: The Bible of the Expositor and the Evangelist by Riley
(10) Inseparably connected with the possession of this righteousness of God is the knowledge of Christ, or more exactly, the gaining the knowledge of Christ (see Php. 3:8), by conformity both to His suffering and death, and also to His resurrection. This conformity to the image of Christ (Rom. 8:29-30)with which compare the having Christ formed within us of Gal. 4:19)is made by St. Paul the substance of the gracious predestination of God, preceding the call, the justification, the glorification, which mark the various epochs of Christian life.
Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)
(10, 11) The order of these verses is notable and instructive. (1) First comes the knowledge of the power of the Resurrection. What this is we see by examining it as historically the main subject of the first apostolic preaching. There it is considered, as in St. Peters first sermons, as giving the earnest of forgiveness, or blotting out of sins, and the gift of the Holy Ghost (Act. 2:38; Act. 3:13; Act. 3:26), or, as St. Paul expresses it, of justification from all things (Act. 13:38-39). This same idea is wrought out fully in his Epistles. Thus, for example, without it (1Co. 15:17) we are still in our sins. It is the pledge of our justification (Rom. 5:1), and the means of our being alive unto God (Rom. 6:11). Hence the power, or efficacy, of His resurrection is the justification, and regeneration inseparable from it, which lie at the entrance of Christian life. (2) Next comes the partaking of His sufferings and conformity to His death, which are the taking up the cross, and following Him, in the obedience even unto death. This fellowship of sufferings, coming partly from the sin of others, partly from our own, is the constant theme of the New Testament. (See 1Pe. 4:13; Rom. 8:17; 2Co. 1:5; Col. 1:24; 2Ti. 2:11.) The conformity to His death is the completion of the death unto sin, described as mortification of sin (Col. 3:5); as bearing about in the body the dying (or, properly, mortification) of the Lord Jesus (2Co. 4:10); or more frequently as being crucified with Christ, the world to us and we to the world (Gal. 2:20; Gal. 5:24; Gal. 6:14). (3) Lastly comes the attainment to the resurrection of the dead, properly, the resurrection from the dead, which is (see Luk. 20:35) the resurrection unto life and the glorification in Him, so nobly described below (Php. 3:20-21). If we have been planted together in the likeness of His death, we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection (Rom. 6:5). For of our resurrection (see 1Co. 15:12-23) His resurrection is not only the pledge, but the earnest. Note how in 1Th. 4:14-18, and 1Co. 15:51-57, the whole description is only of the resurrection unto life, and compare the first resurrection of Rev. 20:6. This is the completion of all; St. Paul dared not as yet anticipate it with the confidence which hereafter soothed his dying hour (2Ti. 4:7-8).
Php. 3:12-16 lead us from the warning against trust in human merit to deprecate the supposition of a perfection here attained even in Christ. The transition is natural. The same spirit which shows itself undisguisedly in the one pretension, comes out half-concealed in the other.
Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)
10. Know him Freely justified, and in union with Christ, the great aim was to know him in the soul’s ever-deepening experience of his love, giving that inner knowledge of him which is realized only in union with him. Additional to this, the apostle would also know the power which Christ’s resurrection possesses, in the fullest experience of the new and holy life which the risen Christ through the Holy Spirit effects in them that believe; and, still more, he would in his union with his Lord know a participation in his sufferings as well as in his love, being made like him even in death. If he wished for martyrdom, he found it; yet this conformity to Christ’s death was not future but present, and was the characteristic of his sufferings. “I die daily,” (1Co 15:31,) and “Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus,” (2Co 4:10,) are parallel declarations.
Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments
‘To know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the sharing in common of his sufferings, becoming conformed to his death,’
In these words Paul’s whole desire is summed up, to know Christ and the power of His resurrection and the sharing in common of His sufferings, being made conformable to His death. In other words he wants to have the mind of Christ (Php 2:5) more and more in such a way as to be a continual partaker with Him of what He Himself experienced, recognising that by setting his mind in this way he will continually experience the effective power of God (Php 2:6-11), in the same way as having the mind of the Spirit goes along with having the work of the Spirit within. This is ‘knowing Christ’ in the ultimate way, by entering in to all that He has provided and made possible. It is walking in intimate fellowship with Him. It is growing in the knowledge of the love of Christ which passes all knowledge (Eph 3:19). And it is recognising and desiring more and more of the power that was revealed in His resurrection so that it might be effective through him (Gal 2:20). This is the power that has made him alive when he was dead in trespasses and sins and a child of disobedience (Eph 2:1-4). It is the power that has given him newness of life (Rom 6:4). It is the power that seeks constantly to maintain possession of his life so that he might live fully for Christ and enjoy all the fullness of God (Eph 3:14-18). It is the power of the resurrection. And he wants more and more of it as he comes to know Christ in a deeper and deeper way.
But it is power that comes with a cost, for it involves sharing with Him in His sufferings and being conformed to His death. From now on he must see himself as crucified with Christ, so that he no longer lives but Christ lives through him (Gal 2:20; Eph 3:15-18; Joh 14:23). He must reckon himself as dead to sin and alive to God through Jesus Christ his LORD (Rom 6:11). He must put off the old man and put on the new, which is created in the likeness of God, in righteousness and holiness of truth (Eph 4:22-24; Col 3:10). He must be ready to ‘fill up that which is behind in the sufferings of Christ’ (Col 1:24), not a lack in sufficiency for salvation, but a requirement for the spread of the Gospel. For all who follow Christ truly, and would preach the Gospel, will in one way or another share His sufferings. It is through much tribulation that we must enter under the Kingly Rule of God (Act 14:22; compare Heb 12:3-13).
‘The power of His resurrection.’ This phrase includes both the power of Christ by which He was able to raise Himself from the dead (Joh 10:18, compare Joh 2:19), the power of the Holy Spirit by which He was ‘declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead’ (Rom 1:4), and the ‘mighty power’ of ‘the God of our Lords Jesus Christ, the Father of glory’, ‘which He wrought on Christ when He raised Him from the dead’ (Eph 1:17-20; compare Act 2:24; Act 2:32; Act 3:15; etc. Act 13:33; Act 13:37; 1Co 15:15). It represents the total power of the Triune God at work through the resurrection.
‘To know Him (tou gnownai).’ The article with the infinitive can indicate purpose ‘in order that I might know Him’ or consequence ‘so that I might know Him’. Others suggest that it often indicates only a loose connection with what has preceded. This last idea might be appropriate here as the previous sentence has been concentrating on the obtaining of imputed righteousness. Thus here we are entering into a new realm of ideas, the knowing of the Christ experience, which does not result from being accounted as righteous, but rather results in it. Any link back is rather then to Php 3:8 where he speaks of ‘the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my LORD’, but here there is an advancement of thought as he visualises entering genuinely and fully into Christ’s own experience (as detailed in Php 2:5-11). We may see the aorist as signifying that this knowledge is on the one hand once for all, for once having known Him He cannot be unknown, and yet is a knowledge that will expand and grow as he knows Him more and more. More and more he will experience the power of His resurrection and the sharing in common with His sufferings, being made more and more conformable to His death as the old man within slowly expires.
Fuente: Commentary Series on the Bible by Peter Pett
His Knowing Of Christ Involves Participation With Him In The Power Of His Resurrection, And Equal Participation With Him in His Sufferings, By Himself Recognising That He Has Died With Christ. And His Aim Is To Participate In The Resurrection From The Dead ( Php 3:10-21 ).
In The New Testament the power of Christ’s resurrection is seen as an effective transforming power. It is through that power that in Christ God will, from start to finish, bring about the whole salvation of the whole body (‘the church’) of true believers (Eph 1:18 to Eph 2:10). It was by the power of the Spirit of holiness that Christ was raised from the dead (Rom 1:4), and it is that same Spirit Who gives us renewed life and makes us ‘new creatures’ (Rom 6:4; Rom 6:8-11 ; 2Co 5:17; Eph 4:24; 1Pe 1:3-4), united with Him in the likeness of His resurrection (Rom 6:5). It is through His life that we receive eternal life (Rom 6:23; 1Jn 5:12-13).
And it only as a result of knowing Him and the power of His resurrection, that we can truly enter into His sufferings and death and as a result ‘attain to the resurrection from the dead’. Having experienced resurrection life (Joh 5:24) it is through suffering and death to ourselves that we must enter into the full experience of resurrection life, which will culminate in the final resurrection. Some see this ‘resurrection from the dead’ in Php 3:11 as indicating the new life that is ours once we have died with Christ and risen with Him (Rom 6:3-4; Eph 2:1-10). It is then seen as the ‘first resurrection’ of Joh 4:24. Others see it as the final resurrection as described in Joh 4:28-29, and described here in Php 3:21. Whichever be the case both are true. Here indeed we are having the mind which is in Christ Jesus (Php 2:5)
Analysis.
a
b If by any means I may attain to the resurrection from the dead (Php 3:11).
c Not that I have already obtained, or am already made perfect, but I press on, if indeed I may lay hold on that for which also I was laid hold on by Christ Jesus (Php 3:12).
d Brothers, I count not myself yet to have laid hold, but one thing I do, forgetting the things which are behind, and stretching forward to the things which are before, I press on toward the goal unto the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus (Php 3:13-14).
e Let us therefore, as many as are perfect, be thus minded: and if in anything you are otherwise minded, this also will God reveal to you (Php 3:15).
d Only, whereunto we have attained, by that same rule let us walk. Brothers, be you imitators together of me, and mark them that so walk even as you have us for an example (Php 3:16-17).
c For many walk, of whom I told you often, and now tell you even weeping, that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ, whose end is perdition, whose god is the belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things (Php 3:18-19).
b For our citizenship is in heaven, whence also we wait for a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ (Php 3:20).
a Who will fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, according to the working whereby he is able even to subject all things to himself (Php 3:21).
Note that in ‘a’ his aim is to know the power of His resurrection and the sharing in common with him of His sufferings, and in the parallel the body of our humiliation will be fashioned to be like unto the body of His glory by His sovereign power. In ‘b’ his aim is to attain to the resurrection from the dead, and in the parallel our citizenship is in Heaven from where we await our Lord Jesus Christ. In ‘c’ he is aware that he is not perfect, but presses on towards the goal, while in the parallel others fall short and their destiny is perdition. In ‘d’ he describes his intention to press on towards the goal of the prize of the high calling of God, and in the parallel he calls on others to follow his example. Centrally in ‘e’ he calls for all to be ‘thus minded’.
Fuente: Commentary Series on the Bible by Peter Pett
Php 3:10. And the power of his resurrection, The resurrection of Christ is one of the strongest confirmations of our holy religion; and therefore yields the greatest encouragement to the hopes and expectations of genuine Christians. Hence God is said to have begotten them again to a lively hope, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. 1Pe 1:3. Some may perhaps imagine that St. Paul had not here a due regard to order in placing his words, because he speaks of Christ’s resurrection first, and then of his sufferings; but his reason for this probably was, because a lively hope, effected by the consideration of Christ’s resurrection, was absolutely necessary to make men willing to be conformed to him in his suffer
Fuente: Commentary on the Holy Bible by Thomas Coke
Phi 3:10 . Telic definition of the relation expressed by . . . in Phi 3:9 . Paul has not the righteousness of the law, but the righteousness of faith, in order to know , etc. This knowledge would fail him if, on the contrary, instead of the righteousness of faith, he had that of the law. So he reverts to a more detailed illustration of ., Phi 3:8 , expressing, in the first place, again generally the great personal contents of the knowledge accruing from the righteousness of faith ( ), and next, more particularly, the most important especially to the apostle in his position infinitely important matters which were its objects ( . . .), developing them from his own richest experience, which had thus brought home to his deepest consciousness the . The might also be conceived as dependent on (Wiesinger, Schneckenburger, Schenkel); but the more precise definition of this by . . . is so important, earnest, and solemn, that it most naturally carries with it also the statement of aim which follows. Chrysostom joins to Phi 3:10 : ; , . So also Theodoret and Erasmus, and recently Hofmann (comp. also his Schriftbew . I. p. 618), who, in doing so, takes in and by itself correctly as on the ground of faith. But such cases of emphatic prefixing, while they are certainly found with (see on Gal 2:10 ; Eph 3:18 ), are not found before the genitive of the infinitive with the article, which represents the expression with , but in such infinitive clauses only between article and infinitive; hence Paul would have written . Comp. Rom 8:12 ; 1Co 16:4 . Hofmann improperly appeals, not any longer indeed to Rev 12:7 , but, doing violence to the position of the words in the LXX., to 2Sa 6:2 ; Isa 10:32 . According to Castalio, Calvin, Grotius, Bengel, and others, the genitive . is meant to depend on ; “describit vim et naturam fidei , quod scilicet sit Christi cognitio” (Calvin). But is never joined with the genitive of the infinitive with the article; and, besides, not the nature, but the object of the faith (Phi 3:9 ) would be denoted by the genitive (Col 2:12 ; 2Th 2:13 , et al .). Nor is to be regarded as parallel with . . . (Estius, Storr, Heinrichs, and others, including Rheinwald, Hoelemann, Rilliet, de Wette, Winer), since it is in itself arbitrary to despise the appropriate dependence on what immediately precedes, and to go back instead to ; and since in . . two elements are given, a subjective and an objective one, so that thus there would be presented no parallel corresponding with the subjective . . . Moreover, Paul is in the habit of introducing two parallel clauses of design with a double (Rom 7:13 ; Gal 3:14 ; 2Co 9:3 ).
The , which both conditions the faith and also in fuller development follows it (see on Phi 3:8 ), is not the discursive, or generally theoretical and speculative knowing, but the inwardly salutary, experimental becoming-acquainted-with (“qui expertus non fuerit, non intelliget ,” Anselm), as is plain from . . . Comp. 1Co 2:8 ; 1Co 8:2 ; Gal 4:9 , et al.; frequently so used in John. See also Weiss, bibl. Theol . p. 421, Exo 2 .
. . . . . .] and (that is, and especially) the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings . The . . . . is not the power by which He has been raised (Vatablus, Grotius; comp. Matthies), which would be quite unsuitable to the context, but the power which the resurrection of Christ has , its vis el efficacia in respect to believers. The special point that Paul has in view, is supplied by the context through what is said immediately before of the righteousness of faith, to which . . . refers. He means the powerful guarantee of justification and salvation which the resurrection of Christ affords to believers; see Rom 4:25 ; Rom 5:10 ; 1Co 15:17 ; Act 13:37-38 . This power of the resurrection is experienced, not by him that is righteous through the law, but by him that is righteous through faith, to whom the resurrection of the Lord brings the constant energetic certainty of his reconciliation procured by Jesus’ death and the completion of eternal life (Rom 8:11 ; 1Co 6:14 ; Col 3:1 ff.; Phi 3:21 ). Comp. also Rom 8:34 , where this . is triumphant in the apostle. As a matter of course, this power, in virtue of which the resurrection of Christ, according to 1Co 15:17 , Rom 4:25 , might be described as “complementum redemtionis” (Calvin), is already in regeneration experimentally known, as is Christ generally ( ); but Paul speaks from the consciousness that every element of the regenerate life, which has , is an ever new perception of this power. The view which understands it of the moral power of awakening (Beza and others, also van Hengel; comp. Rilliet), according to Rom 6:4 , Col 2:12 , or the living power of victory , which lies for the believer in the resurrection of Christ, according to 2Co 4:10 , Gal 2:20 , Phi 4:13 , by means of which the Christian, “through his glorified Lord, himself also possesses an infinite new power of acquiring victory over the world and death” (Ewald, comp. de Wette, Schneckenburger, Wiesinger, Schenkel; substantially also Hofmann), does not accord either with the words themselves (for so understood it would be the power of the risen Christ , not the power of His resurrection ), or with the following . . , which, in a logical point of view (comp. 2Co 4:10-12 ), must either have gone before, or have been expressed by . . . The certainty of our own resurrection and glory (Estius, Cornelius a Lapide, Storr, Heinrichs, Hoelemann, and others; comp. Pelagius, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret, and Theophylact) is necessarily included also in the , without, however, being exclusively meant. By the series sermonis Bengel (comp. Samuel Crell) has allowed himself to be misled into explaining , not of the resurrection at all, but of the exortus or adventus of the Messiah. References of various kinds are mixed up by Rheinwald, Flatt, Schinz, Usteri, and others.
. . ] In these words Paul intends to express and he does so by the repetition of the article with a certain solemnity a second, highly valuable relation, conditioned by the first, to the experimental knowledge of which the possession of the righteousness of faith was destined to lead him, namely, the fellowship of the sufferings of Christ , in which he sees a high proof of divine grace and distinction (Phi 1:29 , Phi 2:17 f.). Comp. Col 1:24 . Suffering for the sake of Christ’s cause is a participation in Christ’s sufferings (a , Rom 8:17 ), because, as respects the characteristic kind and way of suffering, one suffers the same that Christ suffered (according to the ethical category, drinks of the same cup which Christ drank, Mat 20:22 ). Comp. 1Pe 4:13 , and see on 2Co 1:5 , Col 1:24 ; also on , 2Co 4:10 . The explanation which makes it: suffering with such a disposition of mind as He suffered (as stedfastly, etc.), given by Flatt and others, is imported from a rationalistic point of view; and the view which takes it in the sense of: the believing appropriation of the merit of Christ (Calovius, Rheinwald, and others), is opposed to the words, and at variance with the habitual conception of a real with Christ, under which the sufferings of Christian martyrs were regarded. Chrysostom, Theodoret, Theophylact, have already in substance the correct view. Observe, moreover, that Paul has not written . . . (Hoelemann: “vim ac pondus;” de Wette: “all that this fellowship involves;” comp. Corn, a Lapide: “dulcedinem ac sanctitatem”); the , on the contrary, relates to the matter itself , to the knowledge of which only those righteous by faith can attain, whilst to those righteous by the law it remains an unknown element; the subjectivity for it is wanting to the latter, though the objective suffering is present. It was otherwise with the previous element; for the resurrection of Christ in itself the fact as such is known also by him who is righteous through the law, but not so its , of which only the righteous through faith is aware. The knowledge of this , in virtue of which he experiences in the resurrection of Christ the abiding divinely effectual guarantee of his justification and eternal life, makes him capable also of recognising in his sufferings for the sake of the gospel a fellowship in the sufferings of Christ; the latter knowledge is conditioned by the former; he would not have it without the former, because he would be driven to look upon his faith as vain and idle, and upon himself, so far as he suffers, as (1Co 15:14 ; 1Co 15:17 ; 1Co 15:19 ). The enthusiastic feeling of drinking the cup of Christ is not possible, unless a man bears in his heart the mighty assurance of salvation through the resurrection of the Lord.
] denotes the corresponding situation (comp. 2Co 4:10 ), in which Paul was conscious that he should know, as one righteous by faith, the . : inasmuch as I am made like to His death; for his position then was such that he saw himself threatened with martyrdom , consequently (comp. Phi 2:17 ) his state of suffering developed itself into similarity to the death of Christ. This present state of development of the being made like to Christ is indicated by the present participle. The interpretation, which takes it of the fellowship in suffering generally , which is here more precisely described (Calvin, Estius, and others; also Wiesinger and Weiss), does not satisfy the progression from the general to the definite . And the sense: “ non detrectando mortem ejus morti similem” (Vatablus; comp. Matthies and de Wette) is imported into the words, which by Grotius, van Hengel, Rilliet, Schneckenburger, and others, are interpreted quite in opposition to the context, as referring to the ethical dying to the world, its lusts, etc. (Rom 6 ; Gal 2:19 ). The nominative ., which is to be explained as dependent, not in a clumsily complicated fashion on (Grotius, Hoelemann, Hofmann, and others), but on . . ., refers to its logical subject. See Eph 4:2 .
Fuente: Heinrich August Wilhelm Meyer’s New Testament Commentary
DISCOURSE: 2154
THE POWER OF CHRISTS RESURRECTION
Php 3:10. That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection.
MANY think that religion is not an object of choice, but rather of compulsion and constraint: and hence they frequently suggest to the godly, that the measure of piety to which they aspire is not necessary. But true Christians do not regard God as a task-master, standing over them with a rod; but as a Father, delighting in the happiness of his children: and they desire to act the part of duteous children, fulfilling his will to the utmost of their power. They are not satisfied with winning Christ, and being found in him: they would serve him, and honour him, and resemble him: and, like St. Paul, they desire to know him, and the power of his resurrection.
To elucidate this truth, I will shew,
I.
What is meant by the power of Christs resurrection
As the death of Christ has an efficacy, so his resurrection also has an influence,
1.
On our justification
[The death of Christ was not of itself sufficient. Under the law, the high-priest must not only offer sacrifice, but must take the blood of that sacrifice, and enter with it into the holy of holies, and sprinkle it there upon the mercy-seat and before the mercy-seat, and offer incense also there: nor, till these things were done, was he authorized to deliver his blessing to the people [Note: Lev 16:11-15.]. So the Lord Jesus must not only offer himself a sacrifice for sin; but must enter into heaven with his own blood, there to present it, in our behalf, before his God and Father [Note: Heb 9:24.]: nor without this would his work have been complete. Hence our justification is not only ascribed to his resurrection in conjunction with his death [Note: Rom 4:25.], but even in preference to his death [Note: Rom 8:34.]; since it was the completion of that which by his death was only begun.]
2.
On our sanctification
[None but the Spirit of God can sanctify the soul. But the Spirit would never have been given, if Jesus had not risen [Note: Joh 16:7.]. At his ascension to heaven, he received the Holy Spirit as the promise of the Father [Note: Act 2:38-39.], and received him for the express purpose of sending him down into the hearts of his people [Note: Psa 68:18.]. That he might begin and carry on his work in their hearts, he ascended to heaven; as it is said, To this end Christ both died, and rose, and revived, that he might be the Lord both of the dead and living [Note: Rom 14:9.].]
3.
On our exaltation to glory
[If Christ had not risen, neither should we have risen [Note: 1Co 15:21.]: for he burst the bands of death for us, and thereby destroyed its power to retain us under its dominion. He, in his resurrection, was the first-fruits; and his people will be the harvest [Note: 1Co 15:20.]. Whilst he was yet with his Disciples, he pointed out to them the connexion between his removal from them, and their exaltation to heaven: In my Fathers house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you: and if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also [Note: Joh 14:2-3.]. In a word, he was the Forerunner of his people: and all of them shall follow him in their season [Note: Heb 6:20.].]
Let me now proceed to shew,
II.
What it is to know Christ as exercising this power
It is not a speculative knowledge that is here spoken of, but a knowledge that is practical and experimental, and that enters into the very essence of true and vital religion. To know Christ as the Apostle desired to know him, we must have such views of him in his risen state as shall operate,
1.
To confirm our faith
[Certainly the proper ground of faith is Gods revealed word: but an experience of that word in our own souls gives a degree of assurance that never is, or can be, attained without. I believe, from the testimony of Scripture, that Jesus is an almighty and all-sufficient Saviour. But I find, from the peace which he has infused into my soul, and the power he has given me to mortify my lusts, and from the delight which he has enabled me to feel in communion with himself, that there is a reality in the Gospel, which a mere speculative believer has no conception of. A man, who has heard mens testimony respecting the existence and influence of the sun, may be fully assured that such an orb does really exist. But the man who beholds its light, and feels its genial rays, will have a widely different conception of it. The former may argue better respecting it; but it is the latter alone who is really competent to appreciate it aright. And, in like manner, he alone knows Christ fully, who knows him experimentally, by the actual enjoyment of him in his own soul.]
2.
To animate our hope
[There is a full assurance of hope, which he alone who knows Christ experimentally can possess. I see him dying for me; risen for me; interceding for me; and carrying on his work within me. Can I doubt his love, his power, his grace, his truth, and faithfulness? Has he done so much for me, in order to forsake me at last, and to abandon me to deeper ruin? Has he done so much for me when I was living in direct hostility to him; and will he leave me, now that I seek his face, and desire to glorify his name? No: I can trust him, and I will. Well do I know my own sinfulness: but I know also the virtue of his blood. I know my weakness also: but I know also the sufficiency of his grace to save me even to the uttermost. I know, too, the treachery of my heart: but I know how sure his promise is; and that where he has begun a good work, he will carry it on, and perfect it to the end [Note: Php 1:6.]. And therefore will I hope, even against hope, and hold fast my confidence firm unto the end.]
3.
To sanctify and transform the soul
[I see my Lord. I call to mind what he has designed in all the wonders of his love. He desires to have a holy and peculiar people, zealous of good works. Now, shall I counteract all his gracious designs? Shall I crucify him afresh, by continuing in my sins? Shall I not rather desire him to accomplish in me all the good pleasure of his goodness; and to sanctify me throughout, in body, soul, and spirit? Yes, for him will I live; and to him will I devote all the powers of my soul. There was nothing which he declined to do or suffer for me: and there is nothing which, with his help, I will not do and suffer for him.]
Thus we see,
1.
What a practical thing religion is
[Had there been any one truth in it that was merely speculative, methinks the doctrine of the resurrection might have been supposed to come under that particular class. But it has been seen how extremely practical this doctrine is; not merely as affording ground for faith and love, but as generating in the soul all that is amiable and praiseworthy. If then, any one object to religion, as consisting in abstract notions, or in any peculiar tenets, let its true nature be remembered, and its intrinsic excellence be extolled ]
2.
That, in the practice of religion, the true Christian will know no limits on this side of absolute perfection
Of the Apostles attainments none can doubt: yet did he desire to know Christ, and the power of his resurrection, as much as if he had lived an entire stranger to piety even to that very hour. And so will every true Christian, like one in a race, forget all the ground that he has passed, and be intent only on that which is before him: nor will he ever be content, till he is holy as God himself is holy, and perfect as his Father which is in heaven is perfect. Then only will he be fully satisfied, when he shall awake up with the perfect likeness of his God [Note: Psa 17:15.].]
Fuente: Charles Simeon’s Horae Homileticae (Old and New Testaments)
10 That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death;
Ver. 10. And may know him ] Not notionally only (for so a man may do out of every catechism), but practically; not apprehensively only, but affectively; not with that knowledge that is cognoscitiva, only standing in speculation, but that is directiva vitae, as the apostle here expounds himself. A natural man may have a disciplinary knowledge of Christ, that is, by hearsay, as a blind man hath of colour, not an intuitive, i.e. per speciem propriam, &c.
Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
10 .] (aim and employment of this righteousness, taking up again the , Phi 3:8 . De W., al., treat . as parallel with , . . . But as Mey. remarks, it is no real parallel, for there is more in . &c. than in &c. Besides, thus the process of thought is disturbed, in which, from to answers to above, and from . to answers to . . See a similar construction, Rom 6:6 ), in order to know Him (know, in that fulness of experimental knowledge, which is only wrought by being like Him), and (not = ‘ that is to say :’ but additional: His Person, and and ) the power of His resurrection (i.e. not ‘ the power by which He was raised ,’ but the power which His resurrection exercises on believers in assuring them of their justification, Rom 4:25 ; 1Co 15:17 ; mostly however here, from the context which goes on to speak of conformity with His sufferings and death, in raising them with Him , cf. Rom 6:4 ; Col 2:12 ), and the participation of His sufferings (which is the necessitating condition of being brought under the power of His resurrection, see as above, and 2Ti 2:11 ), being conformed (the nominative is an anacoluthon, belonging to , and referring, as often, to the logical subject) to His Death (it does not appear to me that St. Paul is here speaking, as Mey., al., of his imminent risk of a death of martyrdom, but that his meaning is general, applying to his whole course of suffering and self-denial, as indeed throughout the sentence. This conformity with Christ’s death was to take place by means of that perfect self-abjuration which he here asserts of himself see Rom 8:29 ; 2Co 2:14 ; 2Co 4:10 ff.; 1Co 15:31 , and especially Gal 2:20 ), if by any means (so Thucyd. ii. 77, , . : Herod. vi. 52, , . It is used when an end is proposed, but failure is presumed to be possible: see Hartung, ii. 206; Khner, ii. 584. . . , , . Chrys.) I may attain (not future, but subjunctive aorist. On the sense, see Act 26:7 ; from which alone, it is evident that it does not signify ‘ live until ,’ as Van Hengel) unto the resurrection from the dead (viz. the blessed resurrection of the dead in Christ, in which shall rise , 1Co 15:23 , see also 1Th 4:16 . But the – in . does not distinctively point out this first resurrection, but merely indicates rising up , out of the dust; cf. the verb Mar 12:19 [1] L., Act 15:5 , and the word itself in ref. Polyb.).
[1] When, in the Gospels, and in the Evangelic statement, 1Co 11:23-25 , the sign () occurs in a reference, it is signified that the word occurs in the parallel place in the other Gospels, which will always be found indicated at the head of the note on the paragraph. When the sign () is qualified , thus, ‘ Mk.,’ or ‘ Mt. Mk.,’ &c., it is signified that the word occurs in the parallel place in that Gospel or Gospels, but not in the other or others .
Fuente: Henry Alford’s Greek Testament
Phi 3:10-11 . CONFORMITY TO CHRIST’S DEATH AND RESURRECTION.
Fuente: The Expositors Greek Testament by Robertson
Phi 3:10 . . This infinitive of purpose or motive is frequent in N.T. and later Greek. Among classical authors it is chiefly found in Thucyd., who favours it (see Goodwin, MT [50] . , p. 319; Viteau, Le Verbe , p. 169 ff.). It is perhaps connected with the use of the genitive after verbs of aiming, hitting, etc. Paul has already spoken in Phi 3:8 of the of Christ. This thought again appeals to him, but now as being the natural development of winning Christ and being found in Him. For with Paul this Christian Gnosis is the highest reach of Christian experience. Cf. Wordsworth, Excursion , Bk. iv.:
[50] . Moods and Tenses (Burton, Goodwin).
For knowledge is delight, and such delight
Breeds love: yet suited as it rather is
To thought and to the climbing intellect,
It teaches less to love than to adore;
If that be not indeed the highest love.
is the necessary result of intimate communion with Christ. No better comment on the thought can be found than Eph 1:11-20 . Cf. , as a most instructive parallel, Joh 17:3 . The precise force of as opposed to . . . is admirably brought out by Lft [51] . on Gal 4:9 , where he shows that . (1) has in view “an earlier state of ignorance” or “some prior facts on which the knowledge is based,” and (2) contains “the ideas of thoroughness, familiarity, or of approbation”. . emphasises “the process of redemption”. . . . . . As to readings, must be omitted (with the best authorities) before ., because the latter forms one idea with the preceding clause. In the case of it is more difficult to decide. But the evidence, both external and internal, is, on the whole, against it. is clearly right, having unassailable attestation. In this passage we have the deepest secrets of the Apostle’s Christian experience unveiled. Qui expertus non fuerit, non intelliget (Anselm). Two experiences are described which cannot be separated: the experimental knowledge of the believer embraces (1) the power of Christ’s resurrection, (2) the fellowship of His sufferings, conformity to His death. Paul puts the resurrection first, because it was the Risen Christ he came to know; it was that knowledge which gave him insight into the real meaning of Christ’s sufferings and death. But here he thinks altogether of a spiritual process which is carried on in the soul of him who is united to Christ. He has no idea of martyrdom before him (so, e.g. , De W., Myr [52] . ). Nor is any earthly suffering present to his mind except, perhaps, as a discipline which overcomes sin. Thus Col 1:24 is not a true parallel (so also Hpt [53] . ). The passages which illuminate his meaning are especially Rom 6:3-12 ; Rom 8:29 , Gal 2:19-20 ; Gal 6:14 . Christ, in Paul’s view, carries the man who clings to Him in faith through all the great crises which came to Him on the path of His perfecting. The deepest of men’s saving experiences run parallel, as it were, to the cardinal events of the Christian revelation, more especially to that atoning death accomplished once for all for the remission of sins. Cf. Rom 6:5 , . This is the “crucifying of the flesh” in fellowship with Christ, which results in “newness of life” (Rom 6:4 ). On the Cross Christ died, i.e. , the earthly part in Him died His human flesh. But that was the only element in Him that could be tempted. And, as regards that element of His being, He died victorious, able to offer up His human life without spot unto God. They that are Christ’s are enabled, by His power communicated to them, through a process of overcoming, to die to earthliness and the appeals made to their fleshly nature. But in dying on the Cross Christ identified Himself with the sin of the world, acknowledging that God’s judgment upon sin was righteous and true, as the Head of mankind representing sinners and bearing the burden of their transgression. So, in the Apostle’s view, they that are Christ’s have the firm assurance that in Him the Crucified they have made full confession of their sin to the holy and gracious God. They know, by the witness of the Holy Spirit, that God accepts that confession and forgives them freely and joyfully. For they know that Holiness has accepted Love, and that Love has acknowledged Holiness, or rather, that the holy love of the Father and the Son is revealed in its unity on the Cross of Christ. The result of death with Christ is life in Him. This new life depends on Christ’s resurrection. “Because I live, ye shall live also.” The power ( ) of His resurrection as experienced by the believer is the effect of His victory over death and sin; that victory which has given Him all power in heaven and earth; which enables Him to impart of His own life to those who are in His fellowship. It is not they who live but “Christ liveth in” them. The organic connexion between Christ and the Christian is the regulating idea for the Apostle. Christ is, as we have said, the Head and representative of humanity. Hence conformity to Christ (Rom 8:29 , ) all along the line, both in living and dying, is a return to the divinely-purposed type, for man was made in the image of God (see loc. cit. , ). “In this appropriation of the death and rising of the Lord Jesus there are three stages, corresponding to the Friday, Saturday and Sunday of Eastertide. Christ died for our sins: He was buried: He rose again the third day. So, by consequence, ‘I am crucified with Christ: no longer do I live: Christ liveth in me’ ” (Findlay, Galat. in Expos. Bible ; p. 159). On the whole thought of this passage, see Pfleiderer, Paulinism , i., pp. 169, 192 207; Denney, Expos. , vi., 4, p. 299 ff.
[51] Lightfoot.
[52] Meyer.
[53] Haupt.
Fuente: The Expositors Greek Testament by Robertson
Philippians
SAVING KNOWLEDGE
Php 3:10-11 R.V..
We have seen how the Apostle was prepared to close his letter at the beginning of this chapter, and how that intention was swept away by the rush of new thoughts. His fervid faith caught fire when he turned to think of what he had lost, and how infinitely more he had gained in Christ. His wealth is so great that it cannot be crowded into the narrow space of one brief sentence, and after all the glowing words which precede our text, he feels that he has not yet adequately set forth either his present possessions or his ultimate aims. So here he continues the theme which might have seemed most fully dealt with in the great thoughts that occupied us in the former sermon, but which still wait to be completed here. They are most closely connected with the former, and the unity of the sentence is but a parallel to the oneness of the idea. The elements of our present text constitute a part of the Apostle’s aim in life, and may be dealt with as such.
I. Paul’s life’s aim was the knowledge of Christ.
That sounds an anti-climax after ‘Gain’ and ‘Be in Him.’ These phrases seem to express a much more intimate relation than this, but we must note that it is no mere theoretical or intellectual knowledge which is intended. Such knowledge would need no surrender or suffering ‘the loss of all things.’ We can only buy the knowledge of Christ at such a rate, but we can buy knowledge about Him very much cheaper. Such knowledge would not be worth the price; it lies on the surface of the soul, and does nothing. Many a man amongst us has it, and it is of no use to him. If Paul had undergone all that he had undergone and sacrificed all that he had given up, and for his reward had only gained accurate knowledge about Christ, he had certainly wasted his life and made a bad bargain. But as always, so here, to know means knowledge based upon experience. Did Christ mean that a correct creed was eternal life when He said, ‘This is life eternal to know Thee, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom Thou has sent?’ Did Paul mean the dry light of the understanding when he prayed that the Ephesians might know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, in order to be filled with all the fulness of God? Clearly we have to go much deeper down than that superficial interpretation in order to reach the reality of the New Testament conception of knowledge. It is co-extensive with life, and is built upon inward experience. In a word, it is one aspect of winning Jesus. It is consciousness contemplating its riches, counting its gains. As a man knows the bliss of parental or wedded love only by having it, or as he knows the taste of wine only by drinking it, or the glory of music only by hearing it, and the brightness of the day only by seeing it, so we know Christ only by winning Him. There must first be the perception and possession by sense or emotion, and then the reflection on the possession by understanding. This applies to all religious truth. It must be possessed ere it be fully known. Like the new name written upon the Apocalyptic stone, ‘No one knoweth but he that receiveth it.’
The knowledge which was Paul’s life’s aim was knowledge of a Person: the object determines the nature of the knowledge. The mental act of knowing a proposition or a science or even of knowing about a person by hearing of him is different from that of knowing people when we have lived beside them. We need not be afraid of attaching too familiar a meaning to this word of our text, if we say that it implies personal acquaintance with the Christ whom we know. Of course we come to know Him in the first instance through the medium of statements about Him, and we cannot too strongly insist, in these days of destructive criticism, on the absolute necessity of accepting the Gospel statements as to the life of Jesus as the only possible method of knowing Him. But then, beyond that acceptance of the record must come the application and appropriation of it, and the transmutation of a historical fact into a personal experience. We may take an illustration from any of the Scriptural truths about Jesus:–For instance, Scripture declares Him to be our Redeemer. One man believes Him to be so, welcomes Him into his life as such, and finds Him to be such. Another man believes Him to be so, but never puts His redeeming power to the proof. Is the knowledge of these two rightly called by the same name? That which comes after experience is surely not rightly designated by the same title as that which has no vivification nor verification of such a sort to build on, and is the mere product of the understanding. There is nothing which the great mass of so-called Christians need more than to have forced into their thoughts the difference between these two kinds of knowledge of Christ. There are thousands of them who, if asked, are ready to profess that they know Jesus, but to whom He has never been anything more than a partially understood article of an uncared for creed, and has never been in living contact with their needs, nor known for their strength in weakness, their comforter in sorrow, ‘their life in death,’ their all in all.
To deepen that experimental knowledge of Jesus is a worthy aim for the whole life, and is a process that may go on indefinitely through it all. To know Him more and more is to have more of heaven in us. To be penetrating ever deeper into His fulness, and finding every day new depths to penetrate is to have a fountain of freshness in our dusty days that will never fail or run dry. There is only one inexhaustible person, and that is Jesus Christ. We have all fulness in our Lord: we have already received all when we received Him. Are we advancing in the experience that is the parent of knowing Him? Do new discoveries meet us every day as if we were explorers in a virgin land? To have this for our aim is enough for satisfaction, for blessedness, and for growth. To know Him is a liberal education.
II. That knowledge involves knowing the power of His Resurrection.
The power of His Resurrection is an expression which covers a wide ground. There are several distinct and well-marked powers ascribed to it in Paul’s writings. It has a demonstrative force in reference to our Lord’s person and work. For He is by it ‘declared to be the Son of God with power.’ That rising again from the dead, taken in conjunction with the fact that He dieth no more, but is ascended up on high, and in conjunction with His own words concerning Himself and His Resurrection, sets Him forth before the world as the Son of God, and is the solemn divine approval and acceptance of His work.
It has a revealing power in regard to the condition of humanity in death. It is the one fact which establishes immortality, and which not only establishes it, but casts some light on the manner of it. The possibility of personal life after, and therefore, in death, the unbroken continuity of being, the possibility of a resurrection, and a glorifying of this corporeal frame, with all the far-reaching consequences of these truths in the triumph they give over death, in the support and substance they afford to the else-shadowy idea of immortality, in the lofty place which they assign to the bodily frame, and the conception which they give of man’s perfection as consisting of body, soul, and spirit–these thoughts have flashed light into all the darkness of the grave, have narrowed to a mere strip of coast-line the boundaries of the kingdom of death, have proclaimed love as the victor in her contest with that shrouded horror. The basis of them all is Christ’s Resurrection; its power in this respect is the power to illuminate, to console, to certify, to wrench the sceptre from the hands of death, and to put it in the pierced hands of the Living One that was dead, and is Lord both of the dead and the living.
Further, the Resurrection is treated by Paul as having a power for our justification, in so far as the risen Lord bestows upon us by His risen life the blessings of His righteousness. Paul also represents the Resurrection of Christ as having the power of quickening our Spiritual life. I need not spend time in quoting the many passages where His rising from the dead, and His life after the Resurrection, are treated as the type and pattern of our lives: and are not only regarded as pattern, but are also regarded as the power by which that new life of ours is brought about. It has the power of raising us from the death of sin, and bringing us into a new life of the Spirit. And finally, the Resurrection of Christ is regarded as having the power of raising His servants from the grave to the full possession of His own glorious life, and so it is the power of our final victory over death.
Now I do not know that we are entitled to exclude any of these powers from view. The broad words of the text include them all, but perhaps the two last are mainly meant, and of these chiefly the former.
The risen life of Christ quickens and raises us, and that not merely as a pattern, but as a power. It is only if we are in Him that there is so real a unity of life between Him and us that there enters into us some breath of His own life.
That risen life of the Saviour which we share if we have Him, enters into our nature as leaven into the three measures of meal; transforming and quickening it, gives new directions, tastes, motives, impulses, and power. It bids and inclines us to seek the things that are above, and its great exhortation to the hearts in which it dwells, to fix themselves there, and to forsake the things that are on the earth, is based upon the fact that they have died, and ‘their life is hid with Christ in God.’ Without that leaven the life that we live is a death, because it is lived in the ‘lusts of the flesh,’ doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind. There is no real union with Jesus Christ, of which the direct issue is not a living experience of the power of His Resurrection in bringing us to the likeness of itself in regard to our freedom from the bondage to sin, and to our presenting ourselves unto God as alive from the dead, and our members as instruments of righteousness unto God. It is a solemn thought which we all need to press upon our consciences, that the only infallible sign that we have been in any measure quickened together with Christ and raised up with Him is that we have ceased to live in the lusts of our flesh, doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind. The risen life of Jesus may indefinitely increase, and will do so in the measure in which we honestly make it our life’s aim to know Him and the power of His Resurrection.
III. The experience of the power of Christ’s Resurrection is inseparable from the fellowship of His sufferings.
We must not suppose that Paul’s solemn and awful words here trench in the smallest degree on the solitary unapproachableness of Christ’s death. He would have answered, as in fact he does answer, the appeal of the prophetic sufferer, ‘Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow’ with the strongest negative. No other human lips have ever tasted, or can ever taste, a cup of such bitterness as He drained for us all, and no other human lips have ever been so exquisitely sensitive to the bitterness which they have drunk. The identification of Himself with a sinful world, the depth and closeness of His community of feeling with all sorrow, the consciousness of the glory which He had left, and the perpetual sense of the hostility into which He had come, set Christ’s sufferings by themselves as surely as the effects that flow from them declare that they need no repetition, and cannot be degraded by any parallel whilst the world lasts.
But yet His Death, like His Resurrection, is set forth in Scripture as being a type and power of ours. We have to die to the world by the power of the Cross. If we truly trust in His sacrifice there will operate upon us motives which separate and detach us from our old selves and the old world. A fundamental, ethical, and spiritual change is effected on us through faith. We were dead in sin, we are dead to sin. We have to blend the two thoughts of the Christian life as being a daily dying and a continual resurrection in order to get the whole truth of the double aspect of it.
It may be a question whether the Apostle is here referring to outward or inward and ethical sorrows, but perhaps we should not do justice to the thought unless we extend it to cover both of these. Certainly if his theology was but the generalising of his experience, he had ample material in his daily life for knowing the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings. One of his most frequently recurring and most cherished thoughts is, that to suffer for Christ is to suffer with Christ, and in it he found and teaches us to find strength to endure, and patience to outlast any sorrows that may swoop upon us like birds of prey because we are Christians. Happy shall we be if Christ’s sufferings are ours, because it is our union with Him and our likeness to Him, not to ourselves, our sins, or our worldliness, that is their occasion. There is an old legend that Peter was crucified head downwards, because he felt himself unworthy to be as his Master. We may well feel that nothing which we can ever bear for Him is worthy to be compared with what He has borne for us, and be the more overwhelmed with the greatness of the condescension, and the humility of the love which reckon our light affliction, which is but for a moment, along with the heavy weight which He bore, and the blessed issue of which outlasts time and enriches eternity.
But there is another sense in which it is a worthy aim of our lives that our sufferings may be felt to be fellowship with His. That is a blessed sorrow which brings us closer to our Lord. That is a wholesome sorrow of which the issue is an intenser faith in Him, a fuller experience of His sufficiency. The storm blows us well when it blows us to His breast, and sorrow enriches us, whatever it may take away, which gives us fuller and more assured possession of Jesus.
But when we are living in fellowship with Jesus, that union works in two directions, and while on the one hand we may then humbly venture to feel that our sufferings for Him are sufferings with Him, we may thankfully feel, too, that in all our affliction He is afflicted. If His sufferings are ours we may be sure that ours are His. And how different they all become when we are certain of His sympathy! It is possible that we may have a kind of common consciousness with our Lord, if our whole hearts and wills are kept in close touch with Him, so that in our experience there may be a repetition in a higher form of that strange experience alleged to be familiar in hypnotism, where the bitter in one mouth is tasted in another.
So, what we ought to make our aim is that in our lives our growing knowledge of Christ should lead to the two results, so inexorably intertwined, of daily death and daily resurrection, and that we may be kept faithful to Him so that our outward sufferings may be caused by our union with Him, and not by our own faithlessness, and may be discerned by us to be fellowship with His. Then we shall also feel that He bears ours with us, and sorrow itself will be calmed and beautified into a silent bliss, as the chill peaks when the morning strikes them glow with tender pink, and seem soft and warm, though they are grim rock and ice-cold snow. Then some faint echo of His history ‘who was acquainted with grief’ may be audible in our outward lives and we, too, may have our Gethsemane and our Calvary. It may not be presumption in us to say ‘We are able’ when He asks ‘Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of’? nor terror to hear Him prophesy ‘Ye shall indeed drink of the cup that I drink of,’ for we shall remember ‘joint-heirs in Christ, if so be that we suffer with Him, that we may be also glorified together.’
IV. The end attained.
The Christian life as here manifested is even in its highest forms manifestly incomplete. It is a reflected light, and like the reflected light in the heavens, advances by imperceptible degrees to fill the whole silver round. It may be ‘e’en in its imperfections beautiful,’ but it assuredly has ‘a ragged edge.’ The hypothetical form of the last words of our text does not so much imply a doubt of the possibility of attaining the result as the recognition of the indispensable condition of effort on the part of him who attains it. That effort forthcoming, the attainment is certain.
The Revised Version makes a slight correction which involves a great matter, in reading ‘the resurrection from the dead.’ It is necessary to insist on this change in rendering, not because it implies that only saints are raised, but because Paul is thinking of that first resurrection of which the New Testament habitually speaks. ‘The dead in Christ shall rise first’ as he himself declared in his earliest epistle, and the seer in the Apocalypse shed a benediction on ‘him that hath part in the first resurrection.’ Our knowledge of that solemn future is so fragmentary that we cannot venture to draw dogmatic inferences from the little that has been declared to us, but we cannot forget the distinct words of Jesus in which He not only plainly declares a universal resurrection, but as plainly proclaims that it falls into two parts, one a ‘resurrection of life,’ and one a ‘resurrection of judgment.’ The former may well be the final aim of a Christian life: the latter is a fate which one would think no sane man would deliberately provoke. Each carries in its name its dominant characteristic, the one full of attractiveness, the other partially unveiling depths of shame and punitive retributions which might appal the stoutest heart.
This resurrection of life is the last result of the power of Christ’s Resurrection received into and working on the human spirit. It is plain enough that if the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in us there is no term to its operations until our mortal bodies also are quickened by His Spirit that dwelleth in us. The ethical and spiritual resurrection in the present life finds its completion in the bodily resurrection in the future. It cannot be that the transformation wrought in a human life shall be complete until it has flowed outwards into and permeated the whole of manhood, body, soul, and spirit. The three measures of meal have each to be influenced before ‘the whole is leavened.’ If we duly consider the elements necessary to a perfect realisation of the divine ideal of humanity, we shall discern that redemption must have a gospel to bring to the body as well as to the spirit. Whatever has been devastated by sin must be healed by Jesus. It is not necessary to suppose that the body which dies is the body which rises again, rather the Apostle’s far-reaching series of antitheses between that which is sown and that which is raised leads us to think that the natural body, which has passed through corruption, and the particles of which have been gathered into many different combinations, does not become the spiritual body. The person who dies is the person who lives through death, and who assumes the body of the resurrection, and it is the person, not the elements which make up the personality, who is spoken of as risen from the dead. The vesture may be different, but the wearer is the same.
So that resurrection from the dead is the end of a supernatural life begun here and destined to culminate hereafter. It is the last step in the manifestation of our being in Christ, and so is being prepared for here by every step in advance in gaining Jesus. It should ever be before every Christian soul that participation in Christ hereafter is conditioned by its progress in likeness to Him here. The Resurrection from the dead is not a gift which can be bestowed apart from a man’s moral state. If he dies having had no knowledge by experience of the power of Christ’s Resurrection, there is nothing in the fact of death to give him that knowledge, and it is impossible to bring ‘any means’ to bear on him by which he will attain unto the ‘resurrection from the dead.’ If God could give that gift irrespective of a man’s relations to Jesus, He would give it to all. Let us ask ourselves, then, is it not worth making the dominant aim of our lives the same as that of Paul’s? How stands our account then? Are we not wise traders presenting a good balance-sheet when we show entered on the one side the loss of all things, and on the other the gaining of Christ, and the attaining the resurrection from the dead, the perfect transformation of body, soul, and spirit, into the perfect likeness of the perfect Lord? Does the other balance-sheet show the man as equally solvent who enters on one side the gain of a world, and on the other a Christless life, to be followed by a resurrection in which is no joy, no advance, no life, but which is a resurrection of judgment? May we all be found in Him, and attain to the resurrection from the dead!
Fuente: Expositions Of Holy Scripture by Alexander MacLaren
know. App-132.
power. App-172.
resurrection. App-178.
sufferings. Compare 2Co 1:5-7. 1Pe 4:13.
being made conformable. Greek. summorphoomai. Only here. See Php 3:21.
unto = to.
Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics
10.] (aim and employment of this righteousness,-taking up again the , Php 3:8. De W., al., treat . as parallel with , … But as Mey. remarks, it is no real parallel, for there is more in . &c. than in &c. Besides, thus the process of thought is disturbed,-in which, from to answers to above, and from . to answers to . . See a similar construction, Rom 6:6), in order to know Him (know, in that fulness of experimental knowledge, which is only wrought by being like Him), and (not = that is to say: but additional: His Person, and and ) the power of His resurrection (i.e. not the power by which He was raised, but the power which His resurrection exercises on believers-in assuring them of their justification, Rom 4:25; 1Co 15:17;-mostly however here, from the context which goes on to speak of conformity with His sufferings and death,-in raising them with Him,-cf. Rom 6:4; Col 2:12),-and the participation of His sufferings (which is the necessitating condition of being brought under the power of His resurrection, see as above, and 2Ti 2:11), being conformed (the nominative is an anacoluthon, belonging to , and referring, as often, to the logical subject) to His Death (it does not appear to me that St. Paul is here speaking, as Mey., al., of his imminent risk of a death of martyrdom, but that his meaning is general, applying to his whole course of suffering and self-denial, as indeed throughout the sentence. This conformity with Christs death was to take place by means of that perfect self-abjuration which he here asserts of himself-see Rom 8:29; 2Co 2:14; 2Co 4:10 ff.; 1Co 15:31, and especially Gal 2:20), if by any means (so Thucyd. ii. 77, , . : Herod. vi. 52, , . It is used when an end is proposed, but failure is presumed to be possible: see Hartung, ii. 206; Khner, ii. 584. . . , , . Chrys.) I may attain (not future, but subjunctive aorist. On the sense, see Act 26:7; from which alone, it is evident that it does not signify live until, as Van Hengel) unto the resurrection from the dead (viz. the blessed resurrection of the dead in Christ, in which shall rise , 1Co 15:23, see also 1Th 4:16. But the – in . does not distinctively point out this first resurrection, but merely indicates rising up, out of the dust; cf. the verb Mar 12:19 [1] L., Act 15:5, and the word itself in ref. Polyb.).
[1] When, in the Gospels, and in the Evangelic statement, 1Co 11:23-25, the sign () occurs in a reference, it is signified that the word occurs in the parallel place in the other Gospels, which will always be found indicated at the head of the note on the paragraph. When the sign () is qualified, thus, Mk., or Mt. Mk., &c., it is signified that the word occurs in the parallel place in that Gospel or Gospels, but not in the other or others.
Fuente: The Greek Testament
Php 3:10. , that I may know) The genitive, , is connected with , faith; and resumes the mention of , knowledge, made at Php 3:8, and now to be more fully explained.-) Him.-, the power) Rom 1:4.- ) It is consonant to the order of the discourse that the verbal noun should be taken, not for the resurrection from the dead, which is expressed in Php 3:11 with a change of the word [], but of the rising of Christ, Heb 7:14 [The Lord sprang out of Juda], as the verb is used in Act 13:32, where see the note [ -quum suscitavit et nobis prsentem exhibuit; adding that this absolute suscitatio is distinct from the suscitatio e mortuis]. For is not always put for the resurrection of the dead, Luk 2:34 [ , the spiritual rising again, etc., not their actual resurrection], (Luk 7:16); Lam 3:63; Zep 3:8; and truly the very rising or coming of the Messiah has its own power, on the knowledge of which believers depend, 2Pe 1:16.- , the fellowship) Gal 2:20.-, being conformed [made conformable]) The nominative case after the infinitive is frequent with the Greeks, although here it may be construed with the following finite verb []. Believers are conformed by faith. Imitation is not excluded, but most assuredly follows after [conformation by faith], Gal 3:1, note; comp. , conformed, fashioned like, Php 3:21.
Fuente: Gnomon of the New Testament
Php 3:10
Php 3:10
that I may know him,-In seeking the righteousness which comes through faith in Christ, led him to trust and obey him, to do his will, and in so doing he sought to know Christ, to trust and obey him. He longed to go deeper and know more of Christ by inner experience.
and the power of his resurrection,-To gain the presence of that Spirit by which Jesus was raised from the dead, he ever kept before his mind that his own deepest spiritual experience must correspond with the vital facts in the scheme of redemption. He must die to sin and be raised to newness of life, and the power that raised Jesus from the dead was the power to raise him from spiritual death to the new and abiding life in and through the exalted Christ. [Paul is here not thinking so much of the historical facts of the resurrection of Christ, nor of his own resurrection after death, but rather of his own experimental knowledge of the power or force in Christs resurrection in its influence on his own inner life. He felt the grip of this truth in its appeal to sacrifice for the Lord in doing acts of kindness to others and denying self to help the poorest and stand out faithfully for the most unpopular of his teaching.] It is the heroic spirit in man that responds to this. It admires and responds to the appeal to do and sacrifice for the welfare of others. The strength and vigor of the hero is that the spirit is tested by its capacity to labor, to deny self, and to suffer for the good of others. Like many other things, this heroic spirit looks beautiful in others; but when we come to a personal test, we fail to prove our love and fidelity. We are not willing to deny self, and to suffer for the good of others. The spirit is strong to see, the spirit is weak to stand.
and the fellowship of his sufferings,-He desired to know so as to have the benefit of the fellowship in the sufferings of Christ, because he wished to share them. If we endure, we shall also reign with him. (2Ti 2:12). [Being in Christ involves fellowship with him in all points-his obedient life, his spirit, his sufferings, his death, and his glory. He was thinking of the spiritual process which is carried on in the soul of him who is united to Christ. As he understood the power of Christs death and resurrection, he was able to understand his sufferings and to enter into them with sympathy and spiritual blessing.]
becoming conformed unto his death;-Through these sufferings he would be brought into conformity to his death-to die for Christs sake like that which Christ suffered for man. Paul so gloried in persecution and affliction for the sake of Jesus that he was ambitious to die for Jesus sake. [If we are to share in the glory of Jesus, we must also share in his suffering. (Rom 8:17-28). So he rejoiced to fill up on his part the sufferings of Christ. In dying on the cross Christ was regarded as sin (2Co 5:21), and identified himself with the sin of the world. So now we are identified with Christs sufferings and death.]
Fuente: Old and New Testaments Restoration Commentary
The Power of His Resurrection
That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, becoming conformed unto his death; if by any means I may attain unto the resurrection from the dead.Php 3:10-11.
1. Pauls first sight of Christ was a sight of the risen Lord. On the way to Damascus he first knew Christ, and it was in the power of His resurrection. And this first sight gave a direction to all the thoughts he had about Him; and, like all men who have profound experiences and a mental history, he started from that which made the crisis in his own life, and put the resurrection in the forefront of his preaching. Among the philosophers on Mars hill he preached the resurrection,an idea so foreign to Greek speculation that they could not understand him. They thought resurrection was a deity which he wished to introduce; and in some perplexity they canvassed his sermon, saying, He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods. With the Corinthians, who were inclined to doubt the bodily resurrection, he could come to no compromise. He pushed the question to the extreme. He showed how if this was lost all was lost. If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Ye are yet in your sins.
Kingsley once questioned Turner as to his source of inspiration for his masterpiece of colour and arrangement, The Storm at Sea. I painted it, replied Turner, under the stimulus of a personal experience. I was, at my own desire, lashed to the mast of a ship in a gale off the coast of Holland that I might study every incident in detail.1 [Note: B. Wilberforce, Following on to Know the Lord, 121.]
2. Now there is no doubt that in the midst of afflictions, such as Paul then endured, a very special knowledge of Christ might be attained. In the ordinary life of preaching, with the necessity lying on the preacher of finding what in Christ was applicable on each occasion, and with the many hardships and persecutions which this life entailed, he must have attained to a profound knowledge of Christ through both the channels of reflection and experience. But in his two years imprisonment he had opportunity for long, continuous, connected thought on Christ, and to while away the tedium of the weary hours this must have been his chief resource; and he had also, in his tribulation and bonds, long experience of what resources of consolation and strength were in Him. But all this knowledge did not satisfy him. It rather spurred him on to long for more. There were treasures of wisdom and knowledge not yet opened up to him; there was a depth of feeling to which he had not yet attained. And his prayer was that he might know Christ in a more all-sided waypenetrate further into Him by his thoughts, and feel Him more profoundly in his emotions: That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings.
A stranger, watching the countenance or actions of your chosen friend, may misinterpret expressions or deedsmay classify his manifestations under false categoriesmay see irreverence in his playfulness, harshness in his fidelity, excess in his generosity; but you, knowing the heart thus severely criticized, can see veneration in its lightness, and from its every string can evoke the music of an unsuspecting and self-oblivious love. The illustration may be applied to the Saviour. He is the best interpreter of Christ who knows Christ best. The child, not the alien, can best expound the fathers utterances. Sympathy is the true exponent. The man who is out of sympathy with Christ will never excel as a commentator on the New Testament. Sympathy can remove difficulties before which a heartless criticism can only tremble.1 [Note: J. Parker, Hidden Springs, 340.]
I
To Know Christ
1. The knowledge that Paul sets his heart upon is not a bare historical knowledge of Christ. To know Christ is not to know what is taught about Him, or what He did; it is to have the spiritual experience of His personal presence with the soul; and knowing Christ is here expressed under the particulars of knowing the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings. That power, therefore, has its sphere of operation in the most vital processes of spiritual life, and the resurrection of Christ is thus set in the most intimate relations with Christian experience.
It is one thing to stand on the shore and see the great waves and say, There is a storm; it is a very different thing to be out in the midst of those waves, tossed every way by them, fighting for your life. On the shore you know of them; in their midst you know them, you know their power. The first is information, the second is experience. Some men are content with knowing facts; other people will be content only with knowing powers. An unfelt fact is nothing at all to these last. There is no truth to them that does not take their nature and their lives into its hands and change them. Of this last class was Paul, who prayed that he might know the power of Christs resurrection.1 [Note: Phillips Brooks, Sermons for the Principal Festivals, 270.]
When some early navigators, of whom Herodotus tells us, coasted round Africa, and returned with the story that they had reached a region at which their shadows at noonday pointed toward the south, their report was treated as ludicrous by the inhabitants of the Mediterranean seaboard, and among them, by the great historian himself; since the constant experience of their own neighbourhood furnished them, as they thought, with ample reason for thinking that nothing of the kind was possible. When asserting the fact of the Resurrection, St. Paul planted his foot upon the rock of experience; he was proof against the seductions of the idols whether of the den or of the cave. He had no need to pray, as have many in our time, that he might be assured of the fact of Christs Resurrection. What he did pray for was that he might increasingly know its power.2 [Note: H. P. Liddon, Easter in St. Pauls, 124.]
2. What Paul covets is a deep personal experimental knowledge of his Lord. His faith rested not on testimony, not even on his own vision at Damascus, except in so far as it was the outward and visible sign expressive of the inward manifestation to his inmost being. Otherwise the hour of depression might have robbed him of all. Testimonies might be false, the vision at Damascus an optical delusion of over-strained hours, and he would have been of all men most miserable; but by faith he could look into the unseen and put Christ there at any moment, and St. Paul had found Him and taken Him as the Master of his life, and as a result his whole life had been changed; and now his great desire is to know more of Christ.
Who knows a country bestthe man who has passed through it with all the rapidity of modern locomotion, or the man who has spent years amid its hills and dales, its woods and rivers? Whose verdict on an individual character is most trustworthyhis who has had but a superficial acquaintance with the individual in question, or his who has seen that individual in all the mutations of poverty and wealth, grief and joy, disappointment and realization? Those inquiries admit of but one reply. So in relation to Christ: he who knows Christ can best explain His words, trust His promises, reveal His nature. In proportion as you know Christ, can you understand His most mysterious and His most awful utterances.1 [Note: J. Parker, Hidden Springs, 339.]
II
To Know the Power of Christs Resurrection
1. The expression to know him, and the power of his resurrection, does not mean to know Him, even the power of His resurrection; as if it were not He strictly that was known, but only the effects of certain things about Him that were felt, such as His resurrection. The meaning is rather the reverse, namely, to know Him in the power of His resurrection, to attain, through knowing the power of His resurrection, to a knowledge of Him, to be brought close to Him through all that He has done and all that has happened to Him, so as to know Himself.
As one comes on the diary of his dead mother and reads how she loved him, bore with him, prayed with him, suffered for him, the past is interpreted; she rises out of her grave in a new and deathless beauty. What was seen only in gleams and flickerings is known for a great fire of love that never ceased to burn. The heart discerned only through narrow chinks and apertures is revealed in its completeness; the sacred and pure image passes among the treasures of the soul.1 [Note: W. Robertson Nicoll, Ten-Minute Sermons, 120.]
2. What was Pauls conception of the power of Christs resurrection? To Paul the resurrection was a new departure in the history of mankind. It gave him the ideal and the reality of a new man, not an earthy man, such as Adam was, before he fell, or even as Christ was upon the earth, but a heavenly and spiritual man.
It is only the spiritual man that can have perfect fellowship with Godflesh and blood cannot enter into the kingdom of God. Now Christ on earth was not wholly a spiritual man. He had a body of flesh. But on His resurrection He became wholly spiritual; He assumed a spiritual body. Then He was wholly, in mind and body, the spiritual man, the new manhead of the new humanity, and the second Adam. Then, too, He was constituted Son of God in power by the resurrection from the dead. He was the new man, the Lord from heaven; and being elevated on high, was in a position as new man to put forth all His power to save menHis power, which was the power of His resurrection. And it is this power that the Apostle desires to know. Therefore, when he says the power of His resurrection, he means all the power which He now puts forth, and all the power which thinking of Him, as He now is, exerts on mens minds.
The student of science tells us that all energy is convertible into kindred forms. Light, heat, electricity, sound, may perhaps be degrees of the same force which is addressing men in different ways, and through varied senses. More than one inventor asserts that he is able to change the rays of light which come from the sun into electrical energy. Life, suggests a popular writer, is built up of atoms which have the power to attract and repel each other, and death is such a loss of that power that their vibrancy ceases, and they fall inert into space. Whatever is seen, heard, tasted, felt, may be a modification of one original substance, for all forces are convertible, and chemical elements are being resolved into simpler elements. Whether this theory is correct or not, the forces which asserted themselves in Christs resurrection reappear in many forms in the life of His redeemed people. That resurrection transmutes itself into a power through which I am taken out of condemnation and brought into newness of life. It is the source from which I receive my baptism of spiritual power. In the deliverance from peril and death vouchsafed to the Church and its members, this sublime event of which the Apostles were the witnesses asserts itself anew. And in the last day the Lords own rising will prove itself the germinal movement in the resurrection of His servants.1 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Alienated Crown, 277.]
That so many thousands of human beings have assembled to worship our Lord and God beneath the dome of this Cathedral Church this Easter night, is a statistical fact which, if it were ascertained, would have no particular interest if it were not that linked to that fact is the idea of its vast, its complex, its humanly speaking unascertainable power. So many intelligences enlightened by the truth of Christ, so many hearts warmed by the love of Christ, so many wills braced by the grace of Christ, so many souls brought face to face with truth yet without spiritual benefit, and therefore most assuredly not without spiritual loss; this is the power of the fact before us, not the less certain because its precise measure cannot be taken, not the less interesting assuredly because its import reaches far beyond the present moment, far beyond the confines of time to the distinct horizons of eternity. And St. Pauls meaning in the text is that, so far as he may, he would, in respect of a far more momentous fact, measure at least some departments of its power, make some progress in discoveries which as man he could never hope to exhaust.2 [Note: H. P. Liddon, Christs Conquest, 58.]
3. The resurrection was the crowning blow at sin, and carries with it a justifying power. If Christ be not risen, there has been no victory over sin and no annulment of the law; and there can be no evidence for the sinner that the death of Jesus stands in any such relation to his faith as that the righteousness of God, which is by faith, is become his; or that, even though he died with Christ, he has a new and spiritual life in the soul. Paul traversed precisely this road in his religious experience. Jesus appeared to him as risen and glorified. Then he knew that His death had not been that of a malefactor or of a pestilent deceiver, but was the one offering for sin which was adequate, and that Jesus whom he persecuted was his Lord and Saviour. Peter testifies to the same effect, when he tells us that, from the despair and sadness of the disciples at the crucifixion, and the disappointment of their hopes that followed, they were begotten again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. And the Jews, who could not receive the doctrine of a suffering Messiah, and to whom His ignominious death was an absolute bar to His claim, when they accepted Peters testimony that He had risen, again saw also in His death their atonement, and repented and were converted. We see the power of His resurrection for justification.
Several years ago, a picture exhibited in the Royal Academy was based upon the story that Oliver Cromwell, on the night following the execution of Charles the First, stole into the room at Whitehall to look upon the body of his former foe. The painting shows him in the act of drawing aside the sheet that had been cast over the dead king. Into the lines of that intent face the artist has skilfully combined inexorable firmness and a faint touch of pity: but there is no sign of scattering clouds. The features of the Protector seem to say: Alas, poor king! it must needs be so. And perhaps the end is not yet. Not quite sure is he that the scaffold will mark the end of the trouble. More heads may need to fall. The execution about which historians and jurists are still debating was looked upon as inevitable. No Cavalier could have read in those strongly-lined features licence for a new opposition to the rights of the Parliament. No friend of Charles could have read encouragement in the face that was looking upon the havoc of block and scaffold. But if the Protector could have undone the day, and have freed the captive of death, such an act might have been read into an assurance of peace. If a resurrection could have been brought to pass, that would have been a pledge of amnesty.1 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Alienated Crown, 281.]
Across the page, in the old archives of France, on which the taxes of the Department of Domremy should have been enumerated, was written the sentence of remission, Free for the Maids sake. It was there that Joan of Arc was born, the Maid who died for her country. God has His archives, where my sins should be commemorated and my penalty set down. His Son has blotted out, by love and death, the dark record. But I must be sure that He is risen, and that my holy Judge has accepted His substitution, before I can read the new writing on the page, Forgiven and free for the Redeemers sake.2 [Note: A. Smellie, In the Secret Place, 359.]
4. The power that Paul has specially in view is a renewing and sanctifying power. Christ is not only a Redeemer from sin, but the author of a new life in them that believe. He so comes to men through their trust in Him, through their self-surrender and their clinging to Him as for their life, that He and they become identified in a most real and living union. He is the vine, they are the branches. If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature. If any man will identify himself in his inmost soul, in his will, in his affections, in his heart, with Jesus Christ, surrendering to Him the government of his life, he becomes thereby a new creature. For him old things are passed away, and all things become new. He is like a child born into a new world. He is alive from the dead; he is risen as Christ was raised. So close, indeed, is the identification that in their measure the mysteries of Christs earthly life are reproduced in the spiritual experience of the believer. He is crucified with Christ, with Christ he is buried, he is raised, he is set in the heavenly places, he walks in newness of life. He knows, in short, the power of the resurrection, which is just the power of the risen Christ Himself, that power by which He reproduces in all who surrender themselves to His love the characteristic qualities of His own perfect manhood.
When Christ rose from the dead, He was henceforth free from all the conflict, separated from all the struggle: the sacrifice was over, the victory won; and as the world had done its worst with Him, He had done with the world. When He rose, His home was in Heaven. And as we submit our spirits to the spirit of the risen and living Christ, He bears us away with Himself to the heaven of holiness and purities which is His home, consecrates us with Himself to all that is good, and holds us fast to it by His might. When we realize our Lords living power, and lose our natures in it, He Himself lives out the ideals of holiness within us. If only we could so realize His living power, and so lose ourselves in it, that His life might enfold ours utterly, and every movement of our life might be but the manifestation of His life through us, the purest and the best would be revealed in us. He Himself would reveal it in us, were we abandoned to Him. Union with the risen and living Christ brings us into goodness, because it brings the Christ, who lives in goodness, into us.1 [Note: H. W. Clark, Meanings and Methods of the Spiritual Life, 38.]
A great critic has said that David Cox was the first painter to put the wind into his trees. He made men see the movements of the air in the undulating branches, the upturned leaves, the swaying masses of foliage. Men should see the wind of the Spirit in my life, shaking off the dust and grime of sin, stirring me to what is highest and purest and tenderest, bending me before my unseen Lord, who does with me whatever He will. And it is from the throne to which He has risen that He imparts His Spirit to me, and that He communicates Himself.1 [Note: A. Smellie, In the Secret Place, 359.]
I thought His love would weaken
As more and more He knew me;
But it burneth like a beacon,
And the light and heat go through me.
5. The resurrection has a subtle, pervading and diffusive power, exercised in great part unconsciously, affecting character in its very earliest stages, entering into the currents of thought, feeling, example, and influence in all Christian households, and, to a great extent, in every Christian community. In all growth space is an essential element. The kernel of wheat sown in a shallow vessel shoots up into a green blade, which withers and dies before it comes to flower. The acorn planted in a thick-set grove never exceeds the stature of a shrub. In like manner the soul shapes itself by the space in which it expects to grow. Bounded by the span of this earthly life, it is narrowed, dwarfed, belittled in every direction. It is conscious of small room and brief time for increase, and instinctively adapts itself to its mean and limited conditions. It strikes its tendrils into the ground, because it has no heaven towards which it can climb. It becomes sordid, because its future has in it nothing great, or lofty, or enduring. But the very child who is taught from his earliest years to believe himself immortal, though nothing may be farther from his distinct consciousness than living for immortality, yet has his infant being enlarged, exalted, strengthened by the thought. His aspirations transcend the measure of earthly possibility, nor are they checked by the fear or darkened by the shadow of death. His ideal of character takes on, without his knowing it, much of the heavenly element, and is immeasurably larger and higher than if he had never heard of a life to come.
I never go into the pulpit on Easter morning without being thrilled by the remembrance that all Western Christendom is exulting and triumphing in the resurrection of our Lord. In the presence of the Cross and the open Sepulchre all the differences which separate those who are conscious of having been redeemed through Christ are forgotten.1 [Note: Life of R. W. Dale, 329.]
III
Fellowship in Suffering
1. What does the Apostle mean by the fellowship of Christs sufferings? He is speaking of his own sufferings and self-denials, endured for Christs Gospel, and he says that he counts them as the merest refuse if he can win Christ and know the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, becoming conformed unto His death. He alludes here, not to union by faith with the death and sufferings of Christ, but to the making up that which is lacking of the sufferings of Christ for His bodys sake, which is the Church. And in all active labour and personal self-denial which is to be endured in the great work, the power of His resurrection sustains and energizes and consecrates. Human life is become all sacred through this power; human nature glorified, because Christ was a man; the body honoured because of the resurrection; suffering consecrated, death vanquished, the soul made pure and loving, the grave a peaceful and holy resting-placeall by means of the working of this holy life, which is in all who believe.
No one can read St. Pauls Epistles thoughtfully without seeing what a prominent thought was this one of union with Christ in His life and death and resurrection. One cannot but be struck with the way in which he takes it for granted, writing to the Colossians, that Christs resurrection was their resurrection, and that henceforward their life is changed; cannot fail to see how all his perils and sufferings and persecutions he accepted as a necessary corollary from the fact that he shared that Christlike life which could not be perfect without fellowship in Christs sufferings and death.2 [Note: A. L. Moore, From Advent to Advent, 144.]
When all went well with St. Paul and he felt his powers sufficient for the task he had in hand, he could not realize the presence of the unseen Partner of his labours. But when he was swept off his feet in some storm like that which overwhelmed him in Jerusalem when the mob tried to murder him, or when he had to face the Csars judgment seat, absolutely alone, without a single friend by him, then he felt an inrush of Divine Power which made him realize that the Lord was standing by him and strengthening him. Such an experience was worth a hundred tumults.1 [Note: Bishop G. H. S. Walpole, Vital Religion, 94.]
Charles Kingsley, speaking of some dark and awful days he had experienced, tells us that he challenged our Lord in such earnest prayer to fulfil His promise that he almost expected Him to appear visibly; but though He did not do this, He gave him a sufficient answer in the still small voice which brought peace to his soul.2 [Note: Bishop G. H. S. Walpole.]
2. How can we realize the fellowship of Christs sufferings? We can meditate lovingly on His awful sufferings, till our deepest sympathies are aroused. And then, taking our own sufferings, we can unite them with His, and so get Him to share them with us. When St. Paul wished that he might suffer as His master suffered, doubtless it was because in partaking of Christs sufferings, he would get great good which could be got in no other way. And this for two reasons easily thought of. For one thing, the wise and good man knew that the very best, noblest, kindest, sweetest, that is in human nature or that can be got out of it, the most heavenly character and disposition, the things that make man or woman look but a very little lower than the angels, are brought out by sanctified sorrow, as never by anything else. And for another thing, he, who knew human nature so well, knew that there is nothing that draws so close together as the great tie of common sufferingsuffering which people have with a patient mind endured together: and thus that there was something in the fellowship of his sufferings that would seem to unite him very nearly with his Lord, by the bond of a brotherly sympathy.
On the one hand, those who have keenest sympathy are those who look closest and pierce deepest and hold securest; and on the other, those who have so pierced and seen the melancholy deeps of things are filled with the most intense passion and gentleness of sympathy.3 [Note: Ruskin, Modern Painters (Works, iv. 257).]
Experience alone completely teaches; it is participation in a particular situation that brings true comprehension of it, and so gives the Divine capacity of sympathy. There is a universal priesthood of man apart from anything official, a Divine feeling for human infirmity, the glow of a heart that sorrows and joys because it loves. Nothing will teach this so powerfully as experience. The unerring appreciation of an event comes to the man who himself has felt the force of it. Experimental knowledge is of the lasting sort, and the sort which brings comprehension. The world is made kin by a touch of nature, and nature teaches with irresistible force by facts. Actual community of sorrow or of joy will dissolve all conventionalities, when nothing else could. The recognition of natures bond will then come in a flash, a gleam of intuition. It brings sympathy; and sympathy will unite men as no written bond could do, though it were attested and secured by every legal means. It is stronger than any deed of contract; for it is a compact written in flesh, and signed with blood.1 [Note: Hugh Black, Comfort, 130.]
3. To know Him and the fellowship of His sufferings must be to suffer as He suffered, and to have the same mind amidst suffering that He had; and while suffering, to remember that He also suffered, and thus, like the three children in the furnace, to feel beside us another like the Son of God. That is what Paul means in this passage. He refers principally to external sufferings, to persecutions and probable martyrdom which lay before him, and which at the last overtook him. In his trials he was knowing Christ and the fellowship of His sufferings; in his martyrdom he was made conformable unto His death. But, though not exactly in the same way, every Christian in his life partakes of the sufferings of Christ, and in dying is made conformable unto His death. We must go over again what Christ went through. It is given us not only to believe in Him, but also to suffer because of Him, having the same conflict which we saw in Him,to bear in our body the marks of the Lord Jesus.
Water has no power to generate electrical energy as it lies in the still, tideless lake, the sluggish river which moves placidly through a flowered landscape, or in the dikes and canals of Holland, the land of tulips and dairy farms. The engineer puts his turbines and his dynamos where torrents come thundering through the frowning chasms and rushing out of the gloomy valleys. In the dim mountain defiles, and amidst the sheer precipices where giant waterfalls are at play, light awaits the call of science, which can change the midnight darkness of great empires into noonday. And the power of the resurrection, the glory of its unknown forces, its mystic possibilities are not always known in the quiet scenes of life and amidst its pastoral serenities. It was Pauls tribulations that made luminous the force through which the shadows of death and the grave were dispelled. It is through stress and danger, through turmoil and conflict, that the glory of Him who raised up Jesus from the dead manifests itself afresh.1 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Alienated Crown, 291.]
4. And there is another step. To know the fellowship of His sufferings is to suffer for others as He did.
From early childhood we have known and appreciated the sweet German legend of the robin redbreasts crimson feathers. The fable runs that, touched perhaps by that secret attraction which draws all that lives to the Maker of all life, the tiny bird lit upon the Cross of Calvary, and strove with all his force to withdraw one thorn from the crown that was tearing His sacred brow. When success rewarded his efforts, the gush of blood that followed crimsoned his breast, and, in recognition of his action, he was permitted to bear, ever in his body, the marks of the Lord Jesus. Absolutely certain is it that those who draw forth but one thorn from His brow, by faithfulness, submission, courage, perseverance, self-denial, sympathy, seeking and saving His lost, are lessening His burden, lengthening His arm, rejoicing His heart, sharing in the mystery of His Divine distress, and fulfilling the aspiration of the text, That I may know him, and the fellowship of his sufferings.2 [Note: B. Wilberforce, Following on to Know the Lord, 127.]
Blessed, thrice blessed, are ye to whom your Lord has fitted your cross, as He in His righteous but tender love saw best for you. Blessed are ye, if ye but learn your blessedness, whatever cross by nature or by the order of His government He has placed upon you. Ye will not seek high things on whom the lowly cross has been bestowed. But treasure it up for yourselves in your secret hearts, there is no form of it which is not healingbury it deep there, it will heal you, first through His precious Spirit, and when it has healed you, will through you heal others. Only yield yourselves to His Fatherly hand who gave it to you, to do to you, in you, through you, His loving and gracious will. To be by suffering made meet for doing well, and to do well and suffer for it, and to suffer in order that we may do well, this is our calling: and if God finds in us thus any secret resemblance to the Son of Man, He may also lift us up towards heaven, and draw men unto us by suffering.1 [Note: E. B. Pusey.]
Yea, through the shadow of an Agony
Cometh Redemptionif we may but pass
In the same footprints where our Master went,
With Him beside us.
5. How far can one enter into the fellowship of Christs sufferings? St. Paul says, to the point of deathbecoming conformed unto his death. The reference is not to the impending death of martyrdom, but to that daily dying unto self and the world which the Apostle exhibited in the heroic self-denials of his resplendent life. This is the climax of what he has said as to fellowship in Christs sufferings. The last and worst of our Lords sufferings were in His death. And in this too, St. Paul desired to be made like his Saviour. The plain meaning of his words is, that he would be thankful if, being supported through it all by his Lords presence and the Blessed Spirit, he were appointed to die by just such a cruel death as Christ died! But there is another conformity to our Redeemers death, which was not absent from His Apostles mind, and which is more like us. We are made conformable to Christs death when we die to sin, when we are dead to sin. And if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection. Our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin. Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. And Paul had attained a real conformity to his Masters deathwhich yet is within the reach of those whose hands will never be pierced by the nails, and whose limbs will never be stretched upon the Cross when he wrote, I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.
When Christ let fall that sanguine shower
Amid the garden dew,
Oh, say what amaranthine flower
In that red rain upgrew?
If yet below the blossom grow,
Then earth is holy yet:
But if it bloom forgotten, woe
To those who dare forget!
No flower so healing and so sweet
Expands beneath the skies;
Unknown in Eden, there unmeet;
Its name? Self-sacrifice!
The very name we scarce can frame
And yet that flowers dark root
The monsters of the wild might tame
And heaven is in its fruit.
Alas! what murmur spreads around?
The news thereof hath been:
But now no more the man is found
Whose eyes that flower have seen:
Then nobles all! leave court and hall,
And search the wide world oer:
For whoso finds this Sancgreall,
Stands crowned for evermore.1 [Note: Aubrey de Vere.]
IV
Attaining to the Resurrection
1. When he says, If by any means I may attain unto the resurrection from the dead, St. Paul does not express doubt as to his actually attaining to it. What he expresses is wonder, and awe, and joy before the grandeur of such a prospect, and the feeling how alone such a joyful grandeur is to be reached, which is only through fellowship in the sufferings of Christ, and by being conformed unto His death. Perhaps we should think of it in this way. Christ, in that He died, died unto sin. His death was for sin, unto sin. But He put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself. When He died to sin, His connexion with sin was over. And He rose by virtue of His own native life. He could not be holden of death. His dying was, one might say, a special thing; it was unnatural. His rising was natural, it was a rebound; it was the life in Him asserting itself.
And so the believer, having died to sin, having in death put it away, rises in virtue of his new life. The body, indeed, is dead because of sin, but the spirit is life because of righteousness. Being conformed to Christ in death, we attain unto the resurrection of the dead. Sin is altogether put off, and the spirit of life asserts itself, and draws the body to itself.
2. It is an identification in will and in life. If Christ has so identified Himself with us as to make His life strictly, and in all aspects of it, a true representation of human life; if when I look on Christ I can say, That is the ideal, the model of every true mans life, then it follows, undoubtedly, that whatever step Christ has taken, I shall be justified in feeling that that also belongs to my existence and is mine, as a follower of my Lord and Saviour. Or to put it in another light; if Christ, in His life here, has shown me the life I am to livethe life I shall live, as one of His disciples; and if then His resurrection is a necessary sequel to His life, my resurrection is, for the same reason, an equally necessary sequel to my life; the conclusion then assumes a moral certainty.
This is just how the Apostles all regarded it. They had so intense a feeling of the identity of life in Christ and in usof the fact that Christ had been the true Man, living the true human lifeof the fact that Christianity meant nothing less than entering into that life in every aspect and particular of it, that they would not have understood Christs being anything that they might not; that Christ having won and attained any good was a morally certain reason for their sharing the same. Moreover the resurrection of Christ was to them the sequel, the moral necessity, of His life. To have lived Christs life, and not to rise from death, appeared to them an impossibility.
Conceive a mans dead body lying horizontally on the ground. Conceive that by some imparted power, the head of that body begins to move, to rise, to assume a perpendicular position, to raise itself on the earth, to mount, to ascend. It is clear that as the head does this, all the limbs, following its motions, necessarily do the same, in their proper order. They rise; they are upright; they mount; they soar. Just so it is with the rising Saviour. His people are drawn by Him, with an attraction stronger than all the laws and affinities of the material world. They are held to Him by fibres and strong cords, faster than the ligaments of our physical frame. And so, if you only be in Christ you are risen: you cannot choose but rise. It is in your unity with Christ. It is part of your identity with the Head in which you live. It is the power of his resurrection.1 [Note: James Vaughan, Sermons, ii. 7.]
The same flood of sunshine which frees the Rhone from its glacier-prison opens the bloom in the cleft of the rock that smiles like a babe just refreshed with sleep. And the same tide of power which unlocked the sealed tomb where Jesus lay opens the pitiless heart of the persecutor and brings the vernal tenderness of the evangel into the quiet life of Lydia. We are planted in the likeness of the resurrection, and the elemental correspondence which is to issue in glorified sonship must assert itself within us more and more.2 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Alienated Crown, 289.]
3. The resurrection is a present experience. We are so apt to think of the resurrection as a remote truth, to be realized in some distant future, when some day we shall die and live again, that the very idea of attaining to such a resurrection now is not easy to grasp. But here we have a resurrection which can be attained any day. I have not already attained, says St. Paul, but I press on. It is possible, that is to say, for a man to-day, who seems perfectly healthy, to be dying or dead, and for a man to rise from the dead to-day and attain to the resurrection.
The process is now going on. The spiritual body is silently being formed in the depths of our present inner existence. The thoughts, words, and deeds of the present are all mysteriously contributing to its future manifestation and development. That clothing upon, as the Apostle speaks of the completion of the future body, is now being prepared for; it will be beheld and realized when, as the same Apostle says, we shall all be made manifest before the judgment seat of Christ. That final investiture of all souls according to the deeds done in the body is indisputably reserved for that last great day when, not man only, but the whole waiting creation, will be sharers in the long promised restitution. The completion will be then, but the process within each one of us is going on now. Each day, perhaps, adds some lineament; each deed some real, though unperceived, impress; each habit some trace and configuration. Often are we permitted to trace even in the mortal and the perishable the holy outlines of that spiritual body which will be the wedding garment of the soul when the Lord returns again to His own, and all things become known. Do we not sometimes even in this life see faces in which we seem to ourselves to behold the light, as it were, of another world; brows on which the very peace of God seems gently to rest; eyes, with their indefinable far-off look, which seem to be beholding Him who is invisible? And, as we see this, do we not sometimes feel a vague consciousness that we are looking on what will be hereafter, and are merely catching glimpses of the power of the Lords resurrection revealing itself behind the veil of the mortal and the perishable?
Our life is like the life of a tree, which is always full of immediate apparent failure, which is always dropping back after each rich summer to the same bareness that it had last winter, which keeps no leaves or fruit, and stands again and again stripped of every sign of life that it has put forth, and which yet has gathered, as we see when we watch it with a larger eyehas gathered all those apparent failures into the success of one long, continuous growth; has not lost the strength of those old summers, but gathered them into its own enlarged girth and sturdier strength. What seemed to perish and die has really been only grown in, and makes the mature life of, the noble tree. And so it is with our hopes and plans and endeavours and resolutions and thoughts, which seem to fade and perish, but which, if we have the Christian vitality about us, have been really grown in and make the new life, which is not merely a thing of the future but a thing of the present.1 [Note: Phillips Brooks, Sermons for the Principal Festivals, 277.]
4. The full consummation is in the future. It is plain enough that if the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in us there is no term to its operations until our mortal bodies also are quickened by His Spirit that dwelleth in us. The ethical and spiritual resurrection in the present life finds its completion in the bodily resurrection in the future. It cannot be that the transformation wrought in a human life shall be complete until it has flowed outwards into and permeated the whole of manhood, body, soul, and spirit. The three measures of meal have each to be influenced before the whole is leavened. If we duly consider the elements necessary to a perfect realization of the Divine ideal of humanity, we shall discern that redemption must have a gospel to bring to the body as well as to the spirit. Whatever has been devastated by sin must be healed by Jesus. It is not necessary to suppose that the body which dies is the body which rises again; rather the Apostles far-reaching series of antitheses between that which is sown and that which is raised leads us to think that the natural body, which has passed through corruption, and the particles of which have been gathered into many different combinations, does not become the spiritual body. The person who dies is the person who lives through death, and who assumes the body of the resurrection; and it is a person, not the elements which make up the personality, who is spoken of as risen from the dead. The vesture may be different, but the wearer is the same.
We shall have known by anticipation some of the phantoms that haunt the dark valley of the shadow of death, and perhaps seen also in the experience of others that He is always there; seen, perhaps, what Archbishop Benson saw when he sat by the bedside of his dying son. That he saw Christ, is the Archbishops witness, we who watched him are as certain as of anything we know at all. The dark paths and deep valleys are not wholly strange, and as we enter them it is with the sense of wonder that accompanied Charles Kingsleys descent: I wonder what it will be like! i.e., what will it be like at the other end, when, having left our friends here, He takes us by the hand, round that bend of the path hidden from the living, which none but those He guides have ever seen, that turn where He reveals Himself in His full glory, and we at last know what it is to know the Lord?1 [Note: G. H. S. Walpole, Vital Religion, 100.]
The grave is only the moat around the inner castle of the King, across which they who have long been His loving and loyal retainers on the farther side enter it, sure of a welcome to the heart of His hospitality. Far above any morbid or affected, unnatural, unhuman pretence of a wish for death there towers this calm Christian confidence, ready to die, yet glad to stay here until the time comes; knowing that death will be release, and yet finding life happy and rich with the power of the resurrection already present in it; counting both worlds Gods worlds, and so neither despising this nor dreading the other. That is the Christian light on the dark river and the fields beyond, that streams forth only from the opened door of Jesus tomb.2 [Note: Phillips Brooks, Sermons for the Principal Festivals, 279.]
What think you, fatheris death very sore?
My boy, the father answered, we will try
To make it easy with the present God.
But, as I judge, though more by hope than sight,
It seems much harder to the lookers on
Than to the man who dies. Each panting breath
We call a gasp, may be in him the cry
Of infant eagerness; or, at worst, the sob
With which the unclothed spirit, step by step,
Wades forth into the cool eternal sea.
I think, my boy, death has two sides to it
One sunny, and one darkas this round earth
Is every day half sunny and half dark.
We on the dark side call the mystery death;
They on the other, looking down in light,
Wait the glad birth, with other tears than ours.1 [Note: George MacDonald, A Hidden Life.]
The Power of His Resurrection
Literature
Alford (H.), Quebec Chapel Sermons, iii. 187.
Bainbridge-Bell (W.), Repentance and Perseverance, 71, 87, 100, 112, 124.
Baring-Gould (S.), The Mystery of Suffering, 97.
Brooks (P.), Sermons for the Principal Festivals, 269.
Clark (H. W.), Meanings and Methods of the Spiritual Life, 27.
Davidson (A. B.), Waiting upon God, 277.
Davies (J. A.), in Sermons by Welshmen in English Pulpits, 306.
Dix (M.), Christ at the Door of the Heart, 144.
Dyke (H. van), Manhood, Faith, and Courage, 73.
Ellicott (C. J.), Sermons at Gloucester, 120.
Fairweather (D.), Bound in the Spirit, 67.
Gibson (J. G.), Stepping-Stones to Life, 188.
Hodge (C.), Princeton Sermons, 260.
Hull (E. L.), Sermons, 1st Ser., 28.
Liddon (H. P.), Easter in St. Pauls, 122.
Moore (A. L.), From Advent to Advent, 140.
Peabody (A. P.), Kings Chapel Sermons, 305.
Selby (T. G.), The Alienated Crown, 275.
Stowell (H.), Sermons, 309.
Talbot (E.), Sermons Preached in the Leeds Parish Church, 187.
Walpole (G. H. S.), Vital Religion, 89.
Wilberforce (B.), Following on to Know the Lord, 115.
Christian World Pulpit, viii. 373 (Brown); lxxiii. 285 (Robinson).
Church of England Pulpit, xxviii. 246 (Field); lix. 26 (Crawford); lxiii. 283 (Robinson).
Fuente: The Great Texts of the Bible
I: Phi 3:8, 1Jo 2:3, 1Jo 2:5
and the power: Joh 5:21-29, Joh 10:18, Joh 11:25, Joh 11:26, Act 2:31-38, Rom 6:4-11, Rom 8:10, Rom 8:11, 1Co 15:21-23, 2Co 1:10, 2Co 4:10-13, 2Co 13:4, Eph 1:19-21, Col 2:13, Col 3:1, 1Th 4:14, 1Th 4:15, 1Pe 1:3, 1Pe 4:1, 1Pe 4:2, Rev 1:18
and the fellowship: Mat 20:23, Rom 6:3-5, Rom 8:17, Rom 8:29, 2Co 1:5, Gal 2:20, Col 1:24, 2Ti 2:11, 2Ti 2:12, 1Pe 4:13, 1Pe 4:14
Reciprocal: Isa 26:19 – my dead Isa 51:7 – ye that Mar 6:54 – knew Mar 8:34 – take Rom 6:5 – For 1Co 6:14 – God 1Co 15:43 – in power Eph 1:20 – he wrought 2Ti 1:8 – be thou 2Ti 1:12 – for I Heb 12:1 – and let us 1Jo 1:3 – our fellowship
Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
THE KNOWLEDGE OF CHRIST
That I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection.
Php 3:10
St. Paul tells us what he meant by the knowledge of Christ. It is personal knowledge, the knowledge of a person, the acquaintance of one person with another. Let this be our aspiration, namely, to know Him, not only to know about Him.
I. We live in an age of doubt.We must expect to hear every belief rudely challenged, roughly criticised, and too often hastily rejected. Hollow beliefs are giving way; men are forsaking the old paths in which their fathers walked in safety through this world. Our own preservation must be sought in something more than an intellectual grasp of creeds and doctrines. We must know what it is to have fellowship with the living Christ, and to hold close communion with Him.
II. The power of His resurrection.The words speak to us of a mighty current of forces which the resurrection of our Lord set in motion, forces which had not hitherto been exerted in the world. Thence has come the power which has turned the world upside down; a power which has been overcoming the world ever since in the hearts and lives of Christs people; a power which had its rise, as a river has its springs, in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
III. St. Paul knew this to be the mightiest of all moral and spiritual forces which could be brought to bear upon human life. He knew it as a fact of experience. It had been at work in his own heart; it had revolutionised his life and transformed it.
Rev. F. K. Aglionby.
Illustration
When Saul of Tarsus knew Christ in His risen might and majesty, the saying became true of him which had been uttered concerning the great King of Israel whose name he bore, to whose tribe he belonged, whom he has been thought by a great writer to resemble in his natural temperament, he became another man. From a persecutor and a blasphemer, he became thenceforward the devoted slave of Him Whose followers he had hitherto pursued with relentless fury and bitterness. We have ears to hear when a man tells us of a transformation in his own history at once so marvellous and so momentous.
(SECOND OUTLINE)
RESURRECTION POWER
All facts in Gods universe have some kind of power, but the one central fact in the history of the world is the resurrection of Christ. Well might the Apostle speak of the power of His resurrection. I desire to speak of this power under four different aspects.
I. Evidential power.The resurrection is the one fundamental fact which satisfies the Christian of the absolute truth of the religion of Christ. It was the experimental knowledge of this fact which caused a small band of teachers, for the most part unlettered peasants, to be equal to nothing less than the moral and intellectual conquest of the world. The resurrection of Christ guarantees the absolute truth of Christs teaching and mission.
II. Moral and spiritual power.The salvation which is by Christ Jesus offers to man not only pardon, but renewal and restoration; a new heart, a new life, a new supreme attraction drawing men ever by its sweet but resistless constraints into close and holy fellowship with the life of God. I live, yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me. The same power that raised Christ from the dead quickens and sanctifies the people of God.
III. The power to which the resurrection led.The incarnation of Christ was the birth of a Priest after the order of Aaron, a Priest Who was to bleed and die. His resurrection was the birth of a Priest after the order of Melchisedec, Who was for ever to live and reign. The resurrection of Christ was the visible enthronement of the righteous and eternal King. All power is given unto Me in heaven and on earth. The music of His coronation anthem seemed to stream down along the path by which He passed up to the throne. Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever; the sceptre of Thy kingdom is a right sceptre. No sooner was Christ seated at the right hand of God than He at once assumed kingly power.
IV. This power asserts the dignity and enforces the claims of the human body.The relationship of Christ as Head to His peoplethe bodydemands that when He already lives His members should not continue in death. Yea, His Spirit is already in the believing heart, the pledge that He Who raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken their mortal bodies. Christs incarnation was the budding of a branch in the tree of humanity; His resurrection was the quickening of the root. Admit the Deity of Christ, and His death and resurrection are no longer of the individual but of the race.
Rev. Canon J. W. Bardsley.
Illustration
In an age of scepticism we thank God for the evidential power of the resurrection of Christ! At the time of the French Revolution, in 1789, atheistic France sought to banish Christianity by the secular arm; but, as man must have a religion, a committee was formed to invent one. They found this most difficult. One of these so-called inventors of a new faith called upon Talleyrand and stated their position. Talleyrand smiled and said, sceptic as he was, It is most easy to found a religion. The man said, How? Get yourself crucified, and only rise again the third day from the dead, and you will without doubt found a religion, was the reply.
(THIRD OUTLINE)
RESURRECTION ASSURANCE
The assurance which the power seals within the soul makes the resurrection of the body the most certain of all the certitudes of the future.
I. The power that flows from Christs resurrection is a power of reassurance in its widest application. It quickens the soul by the inward assurance of justification and acceptance; it quickens by the inward assurance of union with Him Who, in His glorified body, is now sitting at the right hand of God; but its fullest potency is perhaps to be felt in the assurance to the faithful that the life of the future is to be an embodied life.
II. The spiritual body is silently being formed in the depths of our present inner existence. The thoughts, words, and deeds of the present are all mysteriously contributing to its future manifestation and development. That clothing upon, as the Apostle speaks of the completion of the future body, is now being prepared for; it will be beheld and realised when, as the same Apostle speaks, we shall all be made manifest before the judgment seat of Christ.
III. What we need in these days, especially in relation to the doctrine of the last things, is a firmer hold on the fundamental revelations of Holy Scripture. One of these revelations is the power of the Lords resurrection.
Bishop Ellicott.
Illustration
While, on the one hand, we bless and adore our Heavenly Father for having given to us this sure and certain hope of the full, complete, and perfected existence after death of our true and veritable selfyea, and has made it realisable by the blessed circumstances, the great object lesson (if we might with reverence so speak) of the Lords resurrectionlet us never fail, on the other hand, to recognise the profound seriousness of the revelation of all that is involved in this continuity of an embodied existence.
(FOURTH OUTLINE)
WHAT IS POWER?
The power of His resurrection! What is that? Who can fathom the depth of those mysterious words?
I. Power over temptation and sin.The power of His resurrection means a steady rise over temptation and sin. In some parts of England on Easter Day they have a strange but beautiful superstition that the bright sun dances for very joy, and surely we may excuse that superstition when we remember that on Easter Day we begin to know something of the power of His resurrection.
II. Power over conscience.The resurrection of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has a wonderful power over conscience. If Christ had died, and only died, we should have been grateful for the unparalleled sacrifice; but it would end there. If Christ died upon the Cross merely to exemplify human goodness, He has no power to heal our consciences, to give us rest and peace. The resurrection of Jesus Christ teaches us that the sacrifice which was made by the Lord on Calvary has been accepted by God; and so, when we stand before His open grave we see that this conscience of ours can be healed.
III. Life for evermore.Look once again into the empty tomb of our Saviour Jesus Christ. He has risen from the dead. We have strange ideas of death! We think of it in quite a wrong way; but the resurrection shows us that death is a phase of life, and not an abrupt close of life. Death is merely a passage, and we pass into the other world to live for ever and ever. In that other life there will be ample leisure.
Rev. C. W. Gib.
Illustration
Power is a word exceedingly familiar to the mind of St. Paul. It occurs more than sixty times in his writings. It suited exactly with his strong and energetic mind. For he was not like many who are content with the letter, or with the surface, or even with the facts of a subject. He investigated depth: he penetrated into power. How forcible and emphatic are all the thoughts in this one single passage. See what a reality Christ was to St. Paul. That I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable unto His death; if by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead.
Fuente: Church Pulpit Commentary
(Php 3:10.) -So that I may know Him. The construction beginning with is here changed into the infinitive-no uncommon change in the style of the apostle. Rom 6:6; Col 1:9-10. Bernhardy (p. 357) shows that the proper meaning of the genitive is preserved in such a construction. But what is the connection?
1. Some take the phrase as parallel with , and as if it simply stood for . Such is the view of Estius, Storr, Flatt, Rheinwald, Rilliet, van Hengel, De Wette, and Hoelemann. But the very change of construction argues a peculiarity, and seems to connect the sense, not as a thought parallel with the previous , but rather as the result of an intermediate statement.
2. The Greek Fathers connect it with , and so do Calvin, Grotius, and Bengel. It is thus supposed to describe the source or the nature of faith-faith in order to know Him. But the syntax does not seem to warrant such a narrow connection.
3. Rosenmller, followed to some extent by Matthies and Peile, joins it to , as if the meaning were-felicitatem, inquam, cognoscendi eum. This exegesis is wrong, both in its syntax and in the meaning assigned to .
4. Meyer connects it with the clause , and Wiesinger inclines to join it to . We prefer connecting it with both, that is, with primarily, but as modified and explained by the clause . The apostle reckons all but loss to gain Christ, and be found in Him-found in Him possessed of a peculiar qualification, divine righteousness, and all this so as to know Him and the power of His resurrection. His object was not simply to be found in Christ so as to know Him, but to be found in Him, divinely justified by faith in Him, so as to know Him. The excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus is still before his mind, and he does not revert formally to what he had stated as to the superior excellence of this knowledge, for the idea has never left him; and now he avows the design of being in Christ, and of being justified by faith in Him, and that is, to know Him. Not that to this knowledge two prerequisites are asserted to be equally necessary-union to Christ, and the possession of the righteousness of faith. No: union with Christ is the great qualification, that union giving righteousness, and both leading to the knowledge of Christ. The realization of this union to Christ, and the possession of this righteousness, bring one to the inner knowledge of Him in whom we are, and by faith in whom this righteousness is received.
From this statement, and from the following clauses, it is plain that this knowledge is that of a deep and deepening experience. It is not historical insight, nor general and theoretic information. The apostle aimed to know Him as being in Him. Such knowledge is inspired by the consciousness -not elaborated by the intellect. It rises up from within -is not gathered from without. It does not accumulate evidence to test the truth-it has the witness in itself. It needs not to repair to the cistern and draw-it has in itself a well of water springing up unto everlasting life. It knows, because it feels; it ascertains, not because it studies, but because it enjoys union, and possesses the righteousness of God through faith. She that touched the tassel of His robe had a knowledge of Christ deeper and truer by far than the crowds that thronged about Him; for virtue had come out of Him, and she felt it in herself. Only this kind of know ledge possesses the excellency, for it is connected with justification, as was intimated by Isaiah; and it is eternal life, as declared by Jesus. Isa 53:11; Joh 17:3. The apostle could not set so high a value on a mere external knowledge, or a mere acquaintanceship with the facts and dates of Christ’s career. For it is quite possible for a man to want the element of living experience, and yet to be able to argue himself into a belief of the Messiahship of the Son of Mary; quite possible for him, without a saving interest in the themes of his study, to stand at the manger and prove the babe’s true humanity; to gaze on His miracles, and deduce from them a divine commission, without bowing to its authority; ay, and to linger by the cross, and see in it a mysterious and complete expiation, without accepting the pardon and peace which the blood of atonement secures. Still further-
-and the power of His resurrection. It is an odd notion of Bengel that is not resurrection, but exortus sive adventus Messioe. The power of His resurrection is not, as Grotius and Matthies say, the power which caused His resurrection, or which was put forth upon Him, or was experienced by Him when He rose again. It is the power which belongs to His resurrection; that is, the power which His resurrection has or puts forth on those who are in Him, and who are justified by faith in Him. But what is its sphere of operation? Meyer confines it to justification, and the evidence which it affords of it, as in Rom 4:25; 1Co 15:17; Act 13:37-38. Storr, De Wette, and Schinz restrict it especially to triumph over death-2Co 4:10; while Wiesinger takes it to be that power which the apostle aims at experiencing in himself, by the renunciation of all that belongs to the old man and the flesh, so as to attain to the object indicated in Php 3:11. Lastly; others, as van Hengel, identify it with the spiritual power of regeneration.
If the phrase be connected closely with the previous context, then each of these views is more restricted than that context warrants. The knowledge which the apostle coveted is allied to his previous purpose to gain Christ, and to be found in Him, possessed of a righteousness accepted by faith. The power of Christ’s resurrection will therefore have respect to those prior points of character or state. The apostle counted all things but vile refuse, that he might gain Christ -Christ in contrast with elements of proud and self-righteous Jewish confidence. May it not be inferred, that the apostle refers to the power of His resurrection in vindication of His Christship? It proved Him to be the promised Messiah. He also coveted to be found in Him-in union with Him; and His resurrection may be viewed in its vivifying power. At least the resurrection of the Lord is viewed in that aspect in the two epistles written about the same period- that to the Ephesians, Eph 1:19-20, and that to the Colossians, Col 2:11-12. To be in Christ is to enjoy newness of life; and to know the power of His resurrection may be to feel more vividly the pulsations of this existence, or, as Wiesinger says, this manifestation of the life of Jesus. Then there is no doubt that the apostle refers to the power of His resurrection as giving a warrant for our justification; for it not only proved his mission to be divine, but it proclaimed the success of His mediatorial work.
But perhaps the phrase is in closer connection with what succeeds-fellowship with his sufferings, and conformity to His death. The idea of suffering and death naturally precedes that of resurrection. Christ suffered and died and rose again, and the apostle covets to know the participation of his sufferings, being conformed to His death. In referring to his own experience, he reverses the order of the historical facts-points to the result so dear to him, before he alludes to the previous stages-
-and the fellowship of His sufferings, that is, and to know the fellowship of His sufferings. It is plain that fellowship does not mean fruition, as it would if the idea of Calovius were sustained, that the fellowship of His sufferings is the appropriation of their atoning merits. Nor is it a spiritual participation, as Bengel and Zanchius suppose, and take from Gal 2:20. Nor is it, as Matthies and van Hengel assume, suffering endured for Christ’s sake-cruciatibus Christi causa subeundis. Nor is there any necessity, on the part of Hoelemann and others, to throw in any expression corresponding to in the preceding clause-neither vim et pondus, nor dulcedinem ac sanctitatem, nor honorem, as is done by Am Ende and Jaspis; nor yet, as Bengel puts it-und einsehen dass Ich wie Christus Leiden erdulden muss-the perception that I, like Christ, must endure suffering.
The general idea is much the same as that which occurs in Col 1:24. A share in Christ’s actual sufferings was impossible to him. But the sufferings of Christ were not ended -they are prolonged in his body, and of those the apostle desired to know the fellowship. He longed so to suffer, for such fellowship gave him assimilation to his Lord, as he drank of His cup, and was baptized with His baptism. It brought him into communion with Christ, purer, closer, and tenderer than simple service for Him could have achieved. It gave Him such solace as Christ Himself enjoyed. To suffer together creates a dearer fellow-feeling than to labour together. Companionship in sorrow forms the most enduring of ties,-afflicted hearts cling to each other, grow into each other. The apostle yearned for this likeness to his Lord, assured that to suffer with Him was to be glorified with Him, and that the depth of His sympathies could be fully known only to such as through much tribulation must enter the kingdom. Christ indeed cannot be known, unless there be this fellowship in His sufferings.
. This form of the participle has higher authority (such as A, B, D1) than , or than the of F and G. The participle is connected with , and not with . The present participle, dependent on , carries the idea -while I am being made conformable to His death. The use of the nominative makes an anacolouthon, and this form of syntax is frequent with the apostle. Winer, 63, I.2, a. Wiesinger virtually denies that there is any reference to the apostle’s martyrdom; at least he thinks that the phrase can be explained without any such allusion. Others, with van Hengel and Rilliet, take it in a spiritual sense, the last saying -en subissant dans sa propre vie le changement qui doit rsulter pour le chrtien l’appropriation qu’il se fait a lui-mme de la mort de son Matre. But perhaps what he has already said in the previous chapter may bring us to an opposite conclusion. Nor can the phrase be explained simply by the language in Mat 10:38; Mat 16:24, where our Lord uses a striking figure; nor by the diction of the apostle in Rom 6:3; Rom 6:5. The clause has a closer connection with the declaration made by the apostle in 2Co 4:10-11. This conformity to His death accompanies the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings. The death of Jesus was ever before the apostle’s mind, and he died daily. The process of conformity was advancing;-like Him in suffering, like Him in death-a violent and bloody death as a servant of God. It mattered not what its external form was-whether by the sword or the cross, at the stake or on the arena; whether it was the fate of Stephen or the end of James, the similarity desired was one of spirit and state. In all things Paul coveted conformity to His Lord-even in suffering and death. Assured that Christ’s career was the noblest which humanity had ever witnessed, or had ever passed through, he felt a strong desire to resemble Him-as well when He suffered as when He laboured-as well in His death as in His life. Christ’s death was a sacrifice, and his own was contemplated in the same light-I am now ready to be offered. Christ’s decease at Jerusalem was characterized by unfaltering submission to the will of God, complete devotion to the welfare of humanity, and generous forgiveness of His murderers; so, no doubt, the apostle gained his wish, and the martyrdom at Rome was signalized by a similar calmness and faith-met with a serenity which the apparatus of death could not disturb, and accompanied with such intercession for his executioners as Jesus had offered, and the first martyr had imitated.
Fuente: Commentary on the Greek Text of Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians and Phillipians
Php 3:10. The word know means more than a mere acquaintance of one’s identity; it includes a personal realization of whatever is being considered. Paul wanted to know what it means to have experimental knowledge of Christ by serving Him wholeheartedly. Power of his resurrection. That power first demonstrated itself by inducing man to repent of sin and follow a spiritual life in Him. It will be finally demonstrated when it brings the “dead in Christ” from the grave to die no more. Fellowship of his sufferings. A faithful Christian will suffer persecution for the sake of Christ, and in so doing he is a partner (having fellowship) with Him In his tribulations. Conformable unto his death. Christ died for sin, and if Paul serves Him faithfully even with the possibility of dying in the Cause, his experience would partake of a like death.
Fuente: Combined Bible Commentary
Php 3:10. That I may know him. The verb know, when used in the Old and New Testament of God and Christ, has a very full sense, and implies a full comprehension of the Divine nature and will, and also of the duties and obligations which men should yield to the Deity. All this the apostle would here comprehend in the word, for he immediately proceeds to explain that both the divine and the human in Christ is to be known by His followers: of the former they are to feel the help, of the latter they are to follow the example.
and the power of his resurrection. This is the divinity of Jesus demonstrated to mankind. But not only is the power of Christ known to Christians from His own rising, but from the sense and assurance which that gives them of their own resurrection. Thus this power of Christ fills them with hope, for this world is not the end of their being, and gives them courage in afflictions, for they shall reap in due time if they faint not.
and the fellowship of his sufferings. In a later letter (2Ti 2:12) the apostle says, If we be dead with Him, we shall also live with Him; if we suffer, we shall also reign with Him. To the Philippians he puts most prominently forward the necessity of a share in the sufferings of Christ He himself has found the truth of the Masters saying: He that will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me. For Christians the order is as in the life of Christ: the power of the resurrection is not known apart from or before the fellowship of the sufferings. For us, however, the comfort and support of our knowledge comes unto us in the midst of our sufferings, and gives us strength to bear them.
becoming conformed unto his death. It will not perhaps be a death in character like Christs which the apostle will have to bear, but of that he is not sure. But he knows that he will ever be in danger of such a death, and he is prepared to lay down his life in that manner, if God so ordain. In this way he is brought by his present trials and threatened end into such resemblance as the servant may bear unto his Master.
Fuente: A Popular Commentary on the New Testament
Our apostle had, in the foregoing verse, expressed his earnest desire to be found in Christ, with respect to his justification; in this verse, with respect to his sanctification, he desires to know Christ, as the Messiah and Mediator, that he might experience the power of his resurrection, raising him from the death of sin to a life of grace and holiness, and taste something of that comfort and joy which is found in suffering with him and for him, and to be made conformable to his death, by a daily dying unto sin: knowing, that if he were conformed to him in the likeness of his death, he should be also in the likeness of his resurrection.
Here note, 1. What it is that a person justified by the righteousness of Christ doth most desire; namely, a spirit of holiness and sanctification flowing from Christ, to enable him to live unto him.
That I may know the power of his resurrection, that is, experience that divine power in my soul, quickening me to a life of grace, which Christ experienced in quickening his dead body when it lay in the grave. “It is as great a work of the Spirit to form Christ in the heart of a sinner, as it was to fashion him in the womb, or to raise him from the grave,” (says the pious bishop Reynolds upon the place.)
Note, 2. That such as are justified and sanctified by the Spirit of Christ are willing to have fellowship with him in his sufferings, not ambitious to share with him in the merit of his sufferings, but desirous to participate with him in the benefit of his sufferings, and also to be conformed to him in their own sufferings; the members think it an honour to be like their head, their suffering head, as well as their glorified head; and well they may, for in and under all their sufferings, especially for him, they have his presence with them, his compassion to moderate them, his strength to bear them, his intercession to preserve from falling away in them; and his crown, after they have suffered awhile, to reward them for them.
Fuente: Expository Notes with Practical Observations on the New Testament
The Ultimate Goa1: Knowing Christ
Paul recognized the danger of failing to remain faithful ( Heb 3:14 ; 1Co 9:27 ), so he used the word “if”. He knew all would be raised ( 2Co 5:10 ; Joh 5:28-29 ). His goal of attaining the resurrection must refer to his longing for the resurrection of the righteous to go be with the Lord ( Php 3:11 ; 1Th 4:13-18 .)
Fuente: Gary Hampton Commentary on Selected Books
ARGUMENT 10
PAULINE EXPERIENCE
10. To know him. Paul, standing in the front of the ministry, enjoying the most gigantic intellect, highest culture, and greatest human honors, was utterly ignorant of God till that wonderful introduction on the Damascus road. In a similar manner all souls, who ever reach the kingdom, must become personally acquainted with Christ. And the dynamite of his resurrection. In regeneration the very same power that raised the dead body of Christ into life must resurrect your dead soul. When Lazarus had been raised from the dead, he knew it better than anybody else. Hence, the Lords salvation is the most knowable thing in all the world. And the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable to his death. In regeneration, we are raised from the dead; in sanctification, we die. None but disciples ever go to heaven. We must not only follow Christ to the manger, and be born of the Spirit in utter obscurity, but we must follow him to Gethsemane, and there make our complete and final consecration, enduring the agony of the bloody sweat, when our human will gives up the world, and consents to die. Then you must see Barabbas go up, and you go down. If you get sanctified, you must consent to be misunderstood; yes, and misjudged by all the influential people in the world. You need not be surprised if the community look upon the saloonkeeper as a better man than yourself. You must also be nailed to the cross between two thieves;. i.e.., you must consent to render yourself scandalous for Christs sake. They will consign you a place with the slumites, rustics, and outlandish of the earth, when you get saved from jewelry, style, needless ornamentation, foolish fashions, and all sorts of worldly conformity. You must die so dead to everything but God, that when a non-sympathizing world plunges the spear of persecution or scandal into your heart, you will not kick. The Lord needs an army of dead people to conquer the world for Christ. You can plug a dead man full of bullets; instead of hurting him, you will only lose your ammunition. You can not depend on the unsanctified to stand in front of the battle. They are all afraid of getting hurt. You can make breastworks of dead men, and they will never flicker. It was Pauls privilege, like Jesus, to seal his faith with his blood. You and I may not enjoy this honor; but we must certainly have the experience which qualifies us for it.
Fuente: William Godbey’s Commentary on the New Testament
Php 3:10-16. Aim and Aspiration.In exchange for the proud Jewish privileges that he has renounced, Paul has a new pursuit. His aim is to know Christ and the power that comes from His resurrection, the energy of the glorified, risen Christnot the power which raised Him from the deadtogether with a sympathetic union with Christ in suffering by his own endurance of suffering like Christs, so that he may hope also for a resurrectiona privilege only for Christs people. Writing towards the end of his career, he seems himself still imperfect and he presses forward to a better future. Comparing himself to a runner in the games, he fixes his gaze on the goal, where he sees the prize, to win which he had been called to aspire. Though actually imperfect, in another sense Paul claims for himself and for his readers that they are perfect. Here he uses the word as it is employed in the Greek mysteries to designate the initiatedas we might say, fully fledged members. All such should live in accordance with the same high aspirations.
Fuente: Peake’s Commentary on the Bible
Verse 10
Know–the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings; experience the powerful influences of his resurrection, and share his sufferings.–Being made conformable unto his death;–ready to follow him in his death.
Fuente: Abbott’s Illustrated New Testament
3:10 {5} That I may {i} know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the {6} fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death;
(5) This is the end of righteousness by faith with regard to us, that by the power of his resurrection we may escape from death.
(i) That I may indeed feel him, and have an experience of him.
(6) The way to that eternal salvation is to follow Christ’s steps by afflictions and persecutions, until we come to Christ himself, who is our mark at which we aim, and receive that reward to which God calls us in him. And the apostle sets these true exercises of godliness against those vain ceremonies of the Law, in which the false apostles put the sum of godliness.
Fuente: Geneva Bible Notes
This verse resumes the thought of knowing Christ in Php 3:8. The tense of the Greek infinitive tou gnonai ("to know") is aorist, probably an ingressive aorist, which sums up the action of the verb at the point where it begins.
"It suggests that for Paul just the coming to know Christ outweighs all other values, that for him the significance of Christ, ’in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge’ (Col 2:3), is so vast that even to begin to know him is more important than anything else in all the world." [Note: Hawthorne, p. 143.]
Compare the implication of intimate, complete knowledge in the clause "the man [Adam] knew his wife, Eve" (Gen 4:1).
"I’ll never forget a letter I read from a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary, where I serve as chancellor. He wrote of his gratitude for his years at our fine institution. What troubled me was that he also lamented that when he arrived, he was deeply in love with Jesus Christ; but when he left, he had fallen more in love with the biblical text. For all the right reasons, our professors did their best to teach him the Scriptures, but he left loving the Bible more than he loved His [sic] Savior. To use Paul’s words, ’the serpent seduced him.’ After a few tough years in ministry, he came to realize that he needed to love Christ. I don’t remember his using these precise words, but he admitted that he had to look intently at his schedule, to face the truth of his drift, and to carve out time to get back to a simple devotion to Christ." [Note: Charles R. Swindoll, So, You Want to Be Like Christ? p. 40. This whole book deals with Philippians 3:10.]
Among all the other things that Paul wanted to learn in His relationship with Christ, he mentioned first the power of Christ’s resurrection. Paul probably did not mean that he wanted to experience resurrection supernaturally as Jesus Christ had done. He knew that if he died he would experience such a resurrection. He probably meant that he wanted the power that resurrected His Savior and was within himself because of the indwelling Christ to manifest itself in his life for God’s glory (cf. Rom 6:4; Col 3:1; Eph 2:5-6).
Paul also wanted to grow in his experiential knowledge of the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings. He did not mean that by suffering in the service of His Lord he could add to the merit of Christ’s sufferings. Such an idea is completely foreign to biblical teaching (cf. Heb 10:14). Rather he saw suffering for the sake of Christ as only fair since the Savior had suffered so much for him. The Christian who suffers because of his or her faithful testimony for Christ can enter into Jesus’ feelings when He suffered for faithfully obeying His Father. There is a fellowship in that kind of suffering (cf. Rom 6:8; Gal 2:19-20). A believer who never suffers for the Lord’s sake cannot do that.
The last phrase in this verse modifies the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings. Complete dedication to the will of God, which resulted in Jesus’ sufferings and which will result in the believer’s suffering, means death ultimately. It means death to one’s own agenda for life (Rom 6:4-11), and it may result in physical death. Death is a grim prospect, but Paul did not have a morbid, unhealthy fascination with suffering and death for its own sake. He so loved Jesus Christ that he wished to share all aspects of His life, to know Him as intimately as he could. He even was willing to follow Him into the valley of the shadow of death.
"Christian life is cruciform in character; God’s people, even as they live presently through the power made available through Christ’s resurrection, are as their Lord forever marked by the cross." [Note: Fee, Paul’s Letter . . ., pp. 334-35.]
Fuente: Expository Notes of Dr. Constable (Old and New Testaments)
Chapter 13
RESURRECTION LIFE AND DAILY DYING.
Php 3:10-11
WE have still other aspects to consider of that “gain” which the Apostle descried in Christ, for the sake of which he had cast so much away.
To prize the righteousness of faith was an element in the true knowledge of Christ; but it was so far from exhausting that knowledge that it only opened a door of progress, and brought near the most stirring possibilities. For, indeed, to be found in Christ having that righteousness meant that God in Christ was his, and had begun to communicate Himself in eternal life. Now this must still reveal itself in further and fuller knowledge of Christ. According to the Apostles conception, that which Christ means to be to us, that which we may attain to be by Christ, opens progressively to the soul that has been won to this pursuit; it comes into view and into experience in a certain growing knowledge. It is a practical historical career; and the Apostle was set on achieving it, not by strength or wisdom of his own, but by the continual communication of grace, responding to desire and prayer and endeavour.
We must not forget, what has more than once been said, that this earthly life of ours is the scene in which the discipline goes on, in which the career is achieved. It is the calling here and now, not at some other stage of being, that the Apostle is thinking of for himself and for his disciples. And as earthly life is the scene, so earthly life also furnishes the occasions and opportunities by which the knowledge of Christ is to advance. Any other way of it is for us inconceivable. This life in all the various forms which it assumes for different men, in all the changing experiences which it brings to each of us-life on the earth we know so well-with its joy and sorrow, its labour and rest, its gifts and its bereavements, its friends and foes, its times and places, its exercise and interest for body and mind, for intellect and heart and conscience, with its temptations and its better influences, -life must furnish the opportunities for acquiring this practical knowledge of Christ. For that which falls to us, if we are in Christ, is a certain blessed well-being (itself an unfolding of Christs wisdom and grace). And this must impart itself, and reveal itself, in our actual experience, but in an experience which we pass through under the guidance of Christ.
This familiar life, then, is the scene; it alone can furnish the opportunities. And yet what the Apostle apprehends, as coming into possession and experience, is a life of a higher style, a life set on a nobler key: it is a life that has its centre and source and true type elsewhere; it belongs to a higher region; indeed, it is a life whose perfect play pertains to another, coming world. Capacity for such a life is not something superhuman; it is congenital to man, made in the image of God. And yet, if these capacities unfold, mans life must, in the end, become other than we know it now; with a new proportioning of elements, with a new order of experience, with new harmonies, with aptitudes for love and service and worship that are beyond us now. Only now, they begin and grow; they are now to be aimed at, and realised in earnest and first-fruit, and embraced in hope. For they are elements in the knowledge of Christ, who is ours to know.
This is indicated in the Apostles aspiration after knowing Christ in the power of His resurrection, and his yearning if by any means he might attain to the resurrection of the dead.
The resurrection of Christ marked the acceptance of His work by the Father, and revealed the triumph in which that work ended. Death and all the power of the enemy were overcome, and victory was attained. For one thing, the resurrection of Christ made sure the righteousness of faith. He rose again for our justification. So every passage of the Apostles life which proved that his confidence in that respect was not vain, that God in Christ was truly his God, was an experience of the power of Christs resurrection. But the resurrection of Christ was also His emergence-His due emergence-into the power and blessedness of victorious life. In the Person of Christ life in God, and unto God, had descended into the hard conditions set for Him who would associate a world of sinners to Himself. In the resurrection the triumph of that enterprise came to light. Now, done with sin, and free from death, and asserting His superiority to all humiliation and all conflict, He rose in the fulness of a power which He was entitled also to communicate. He rose, with full right and power to save. And so His resurrection denotes Christ as able to inspire life, and to make it victorious in His members.
When, then, Paul says that he would know Christ in the power of His resurrection, he aims at a life (already his, but capable of far more adequate development) conformed to the life which triumphed in the risen Christ, one with that in principle, in character, and in destiny.
This was, in the meantime, to be human life on the earth, with the known elements and conditions of that life; including, in Pauls case, some that were hard enough. But it was to be transformed from within, inspired with a new meaning and aim. It was to have its elements polarised anew, organised by new forces and in a new rhythm. It was, and was to be, pervaded by peace with God, by the consciousness of redemption, by dedication to service. It was to include a recoil from evil, and a sympathy with goodness, -elements these which might be so far thought of as a reverting to the unfallen state. But it had more in it, because it was based on redemption, and rooted in Christ who died and rose again. It was baptised with the passion of gratitude; it was drawn into the effort to build up the Redeemers kingdom; and it aimed at a better country.
So while the life we know so well was the sphere in which this experience fulfilled itself, the longings it included pointed to an existence higher up and further on-to an existence only to be reached by resurrection from the dead, an existence certainly promised to be so reached. All the effort and the longing pointed to that door of hope; Paul was reaching on to the resurrection of the dead. For that blessed resurrection would consummate and fulfil the likeness to Christ and the fellowship with Him, and would usher into a manner of being where the experience of both should be unimpeded. The life of “knowing Christ” could not be contented here, could not rest satisfied short of that consummation. For indeed to be with Christ and to labour for Christ here on earth was good; yet so that to depart and be with Christ was far better.
We have here to do with the active and victorious aspect of Christian life, the energy in it that makes it new and great. It holds by a title and it draws from a source which must be looked for, both of them, high up in heaven. Something in it has already triumphed over death.
It may be felt, however, that there is some danger here lest the great words of Paul may carry us off our feet, and divorce us from terra firma altogether. Some one may ask, But what does all this mean in practice? What sort of life is it to be? Apostles can soar, perhaps; but how about the man in the workshop or in the counting-house, or the woman busied in family cares? A life in “the power of a resurrection” seems to be something that transcends earthly conditions altogether. These are perfectly fair questions, and one should try to meet them with a plain reply.
The life in view is first of all goodness in its ordinary sense, or what we call common morality-common honesty, common truthfulness, common kindness. “Let him that stole steal no more, but rather let him labour”; “Not slothful in business”; “Lie not one to another, seeing ye have put off the old man with his deeds.” But then this common morality begins to have an uncommon heart or spirit in it, by reason of Christ. So a new love for goodness and a new energy of rejection of evil begin to work; also a new sensitiveness to discern good, where its obligation was not felt before, and to be aware of evil which, before, was tolerated. Moreover, in the heart of this “common morality” the man carries about a consciousness of his own relation to God, and also of the relation to God of all with whom he meets. This consciousness is very imperfect, sometimes perhaps almost vanishes. Yet the man is aware that an immense truth is here close to him, and he has begun to be alive to it. This consciousness tends to give a new value to all the “moralities”: it awakens a new percipiency as to good and evil; in particular, the great duty of purity in relation to the man himself, and to others, acquires a new sacredness. The place and claims of self also begin to be judged by a quite new standard. In all directions possibilities of good and evil in human life are descried; and the obligation to refuse the evil and to choose the good presses with a new force. So far, the remark made a little ago is justified, that the Christian life of Paul was a life that had begun to point practically towards sinlessness, towards what we call an unfallen state; however far off it might be, as yet, from that attainment. But this would be a very limited account of the matter. The whole region of duty and privilege Godwards is lighted up now by the faith of redemption in Christ; that not only awakens gratitude, but inspires a new passion of desire and hope into all moral effort. And the man, being now aware of a kingdom of goodness set up by Christ, which is making its way to victory against all the power of evil, and being aware of the agencies by which it works, must give himself in his own place to the service of that kingdom, that he may not hurt, but help, the cause which it embodies. The new life is therefore to be an energetic life of the plainest goodness. Only faith places it in relation to the world of faith, and inspires it with the passion of love and gratitude, and amplifies it by the new horizons that fall back on all sides, and gives it a goal in the hope of life eternal.
Returning to the instance of the Apostle Paul, one observes from his account of it that the regard of the believer to Christ, such regard as may actually be attained and operative in this life, ought to fructify into desires and prayers that point beyond this life, and reach out to the resurrection of the dead. There is a contentedness with life here that is not Christian. It would agree well with a thankful use of earthly comforts, and a cheerful serenity amid earths changes, that we should feel our home and our treasure to be in another place, and the enjoyment of them to lie in a coming world. Not otherwise shall we know how to make a right Christian use and have a right Christian enjoyment of this life. We are not prepared to get the full good of this world until we are ready and willing to go out of it.
Let it be observed, also, how the Apostle strove to “attain” the resurrection of the dead. The great things of the Kingdom of God are exhibited in various connections, none of which is to be overlooked. One of these connections is here exhibited.
We know that in Scripture a distinction is made between the resurrection of the righteous and the resurrection of the wicked. A solemn obscurity rests on the manner and the principles of the latter, the resurrection to shame. But the resurrection of the just takes place in virtue of their union to Christ; it is after the example of His resurrection; it is to glory and honour. Now this resurrection, while it is most obviously a crowning blessing and benefaction coming from God, is represented also as having the character of an attainment made by us. The faith in which we turn to God is the beginning of a course leading to the “end of our faith, the salvation of our souls.” This end coincides with the resurrection. Then the hour comes which completes, then the state arrives in which is completed, the redemption of the man. The resurrection rises before us, therefore, as something which, while on the one hand promised and given by God, is, on the other hand, “attained” by us. Our Lord {Luk 20:35} speaks of those who shall be “counted worthy to attain that world, and the resurrection of the dead.”
The resurrection is promised to believers. It is promised to arise to them in sequel to a certain course-a history of redemption, made good in their lives. How shall the disciple verify his expectation of this final benefit? Not surely without verifying the intermediate history. The way must point towards the end-at least, must point towards it. A resurrection state, if it be like Christs, how much must it include! What purity, what high aptitudes, what delicate congenialities! The desires of the true Christian life, its aspirations and efforts, as well as the promises which animate and the influences which sustain it, all point in this direction. But how if in any case this prove unreal, deceptive; how if it be ostensible only? How if no real changes take place, or if they die out again? What if soul and body rise unchanged, the soul polluted, and so the very body bearing the stamp of old sins? What if the murderous eye of hate, or the lurid eye of lust, shall look into the eyes of Him whose eyes are as a flame of fire? Accordingly this connection of things is impressed upon us by our Apostle: {Rom 8:11} “If the Spirit of Him that raised up Christ from the dead dwell in you, He that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal body by His Spirit which dwelleth in you.” While we live here, our body, however disciplined, must still be the body of our humiliation (Php 3:21); and sin continues to beset even renewed souls. But if the Spirit of grace is even now bringing all into subjection to the obedience of Christ, enabling us to die to sin and to live to righteousness, that points forward to the completion of the work, in the resurrection to glory.
This, then, is one view in which the Apostle realises the solemnity and interest of Christian life. It is the way that leads up to such a resurrection. The resurrection rises before him as the consummate triumph of that life for which he came to Christ, the life which he longs perfectly to possess, perfectly to know. The success of his great venture is to meet Him in the rising from the dead; his course, meanwhile, is a striving onwards to it. How was it to be reached? In order to that, much must still be brought into experience of the resurrection power of Christ. Only in that strength did Paul look to be carried to the point at which, ending his course, he should lie down (if he died before Christ come) in the blessed hope of the rising from the dead. For this he looked to Christ to work mightily in him; for this he owned himself bound, under the grace of Christ, to strive mightily, if “by any means” he might attain to it. So great is this consummation; so great are those things which fitly lead up to it. Is it not a great view of Christian religion that it sends men onward in a life in which they “attain” to the resurrection of the dead? Must not that be a great history of which this is the appropriate close?
Paul, then, was eager to go forward in a life intense and mighty, drawing on a great power to sustain it, and rising into splendid effects and results. But yet, in respect of some of its aspects, it rather seemed to the Apostle to be a certain deliberate and blessed dying. At least, the life must fulfil and realise itself along such a dying; and this also, this emphatically, he pressed on to know-“the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable to His death.”
Our Lords life on earth, strong and beautiful though it was, was really at the same time his procedure towards death. He lived as one laying down His life, riot merely in one great sacrifice at the close, but from step to step along His whole earthly history. With no touch of the morbid or the fanatical, yet His course, in practice, had to be one of self-impoverishment, of loneliness, of acquaintance with energetic hostility of sin and sinners. It had to be so if it was to be faithful. He knew not where to lay His head; He endured the contradiction of sinners against Himself; He came unto His own, and His own received Him not. Even His friends, whom He so loved, and who loved Him in their imperfect way, did not love Him wisely or magnanimously, and constantly became occasions of temptation which had to be resisted. Pain and trial were the inevitable characters of the work given Him to do. It lay in His calling to put a strong and faithful negative on the natural desire for safety, for happiness, for congenial society and surroundings, for free and unembarrassed life. All this He had steadily to postpone to a period beyond the grave, and meanwhile make His way to the final crisis, at which, under a mysterious burden of extreme sorrow, accepted as the Saviours proper portion, He died for our sins. By this sacrifice He did, no doubt, relieve His followers of a burden which they never could have borne. But yet in doing so He made it possible for them to enter, happily and hopefully, on a life so far like His own. Their life, too, comes to be governed by a decision, maintained and persisted in, for Gods will, and against the impulse, in their case the impure and treacherous impulse, of their own will. They also, in their turn, but under His influence and with His loving succour, have so to live as in that life to die. They learn to say “No” for their Masters sake to many objects which strongly appeal to them. They consent to postpone the period of perfectly harmonious life, free and unimpeded, to the time which lies beyond death. They must count their true life to be that which, perfectly conformed to and associated with their Masters life, they shall live in another scene of things. Meanwhile, as to the elements of this world, the life which stands in these must die, or they must die to it, growing into the mind of their Lord.
It is difficult to speak of this without, on the one hand, conveying a strained and unreal view of the Christians attitude towards the present life, or, on the other hand, weakening too much the sense of “conformity to His death.” In the first place the Christians dying is mainly, and certainly it is first of all, a dying to sin, a mortifying the flesh with the affections and lusts. It is the practical renunciation of evil, along with the maintenance of the watchfulness and self-discipline needed in order to be ready to renounce evil when it comes. Evil has to be rejected, not merely by itself, but at the cost of those earthly interests which are involved in the surrender to it, however dear or constraining those interests may seem to be; so that conformity to Christs death, if it covered no more, would still cover a great deal of ground. But it seems to cover something more-namely, a general loosening of the grasp upon this life, or on the temporary and sensible elements of it, in view of the worth and certainty of the higher and the better life. This life, indeed, as long as we are in it, can never lose its claims upon us, as the sphere of our duty, and the scene of our training. Here we have our place to fill, our relations to sustain, our part to play, our ministries to perform. In all these ways of it we have some good to do, of lower or loftier kinds; in all, we have many lessons to learn, which crowd upon us to the last; through all we have to carry the faith of the unseen Kingdom and the unseen Lord; and in all these aspects of earthly life, if God gives us any cheering experience of earthly brightness, surely it is to be taken most thankfully. It is a poor way of construing the conformity to Christs death, to renounce interest in the life of which we are a part, and the world which is the scene of it. But the interest should fasten more intently on the things which interest our Lord, and eagerness of spirit about earthly good for ourselves must give place and subside.
And yet, when one thinks of the beauty and sweetness of much that pertains to our earthly existence, and of the goodness of God in material or temporal gifts, and of the thankfulness with which Christian hearts are to take these when they are given, and are to walk with God in the use of them, one feels the risk of involving oneself here in extravagance or in contradiction. We are not going to maintain that the Apostle would shut himself out, or us, from interest or delight in the innocent beauty or gladness of the earth. But yet is it not true that we are all passing on to death, and in death are to be parted from all this? Is it not true that as Christians we consent to dying; we count it the good discipline of Christs people that they should die, and pass so into the better life? Is it not true that our life as Christians should train us to maintain this mind deliberately and habitually, calmly and gladly? For indeed this life, at its purest and best, still offers to us a vision of good that is apt to steal our hearts away from the supreme good, the best and highest. Now that best and highest rises before us, as practically to be made ours, in the resurrection.
Meanwhile, it is well, no doubt, that we should cherish a frank and thankful gladness in all earthly good and earthly beauty that can be taken as from the Fathers hand. Yet there should grow upon us an inward consent, strengthening as the days go by, that this shall not endure; that it shall not be our permanent possession; that it shall be loosely held, as erelong to be parted from. Such a mind should grow, not because our hearts are cold to the present country of our being, but because they are warming towards a better country. These earthly things are good, but they are not ours; we have only a lease of them, terminable at any time. Who shall bring us to that which is, and shall eternally be, our very own?
So Christ our Master passed through life, with an open eye and heart for the fair and the lovable around Him, for flowers and little children, and for what was estimable or attractive in men, even in a natural way. Surely all was dear to Him on which he could see the trace of the Creators holy hands. Yet He passed on and passed by, going forward to death and consenting to die, His face set steadfastly to a joy before Him which could not be realised by lingering here.
Now let this be especially observed, that while we may here recognise a practical lesson to be learned, the wisest of us may also recognise it as a lesson we could not undertake to teach to ourselves. To oppose sin, when conscience and Gods word warn us of its presence, is at least something definite and plain. But how to take the right attitude and bear the right mind towards this various, manifold, engrossing, wonderful human life, as it unfolds for us here-how shall that be done? Some have tried to answer by amputating large sections of human experience. But that is not the way. For, indeed, it is in human life itself-in this present, and, for the present, the only form of our existence-that we must take the right view of human life, and form the right mind about it. Moreover, our conditions are varying continually, from the state of the little child, open to every influence that strikes the sense, to the state of the old man, whom age is shutting up in a crippled and stunted existence. The just equipoise of soul for one stage of life, could it be attained, would not be the just equipoise for the next.
The truth is, there is no ready-made theory here for any of us. All our attainments in it are tentative and provisional; which does not hinder, however, that they may be very real. When we believe in Christ we become aware that there is a lesson in this department to be learned, and we become willing, in a measure, to learn it. But we should learn little were it not for three great teachers that take us in hand.
The first is the inevitable conflict with sin and temptation. The Christian must, at all events, strive against known sin, and he must hold himself ready to resist the onset of temptation, watching and praying. In this discipline he soon learns how sin is entangled for him with much that in other respects seems desirable or good; he learns that in rejecting sin he must forego some things which on other accounts he gladly would embrace. It is often a painful conflict through which he has to pass. Now in seeking help from his Lord, and entering into the fellowship of the mind of Christ, he is not only strengthened to repel the sin, but also learns to submit willingly to any impoverishment or abridgment of earthly life which the conflict entails. He is taught in practice, now in one form, now in another, to count all things but loss-to lower the overweening estimate of earthly treasure and let it go, dying to it with his dying Lord.
Then, besides, there is the discipline of suffering. Sorrow, indeed, is not peculiar to Christians. Of it, all are partakers. But Christian endurance is part of a fellowship with Christ, in which we learn of Him. In the warm air of prosperity a hot mist rises round the soul, that hides from view the great realities, and that deceives and misleads us with its vain mirage. But in suffering, taken in Christs way and in fellowship with Him, in the pain of disappointment and of loss, and especially in the exercise of submission, we are taught feelingly where our true treasure is; and we are trained to consent to separations and privations, for the sake of Christ, and under the influence of the love of Christ.
And, lastly, the growth of Christian experience and Christian character deepens our impressions of the worth of Christs salvation, and gives more body and more ardour to Christian hope. As that world with its perfect good draws the believer, as it becomes more visible to faith and more attractive, his grasp of this world becomes, perhaps, not less kindly, but it becomes less tenacious. Knowledge, such as the schools of earth afford, we still feel to be desirable and good. Love, under the conditions which earth supplies for its exercise, we still feel to be very dear. The activities which call out courage and resource, we still feel to be interesting and worthy. Yet knowledge proves to be but in part. And love, if it does not die, needs for its health and security a purer air. And in the problems of active life failure still mingles with success. But the love of God which is in Jesus Christ grows in worth and power; so that, in new applications of the principle, we learn afresh to “count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ.”
In a word, then, that we may grow into the mind of Christ, sufferings and self-denials are appointed to come into experience. He sets them for us; we should not unwisely set them for ourselves. They come in the conflict with sin or in the ordinary discipline of life. Either way they become for believers the fellowship of Christs sufferings; for they are taken in Christs way, under His eye, endured in the strength of His truth and grace and salvation. So believers become more conformable to His death. Hence this discipline of trial is indispensable to all disciples.
Some such view of the ends of Christ in regard to separation from sin and disengagement from the life which is doomed to die, we suppose to have been before Pauls mind. He had come to Christ for life, abundant and victorious, such as should be answerable to the power of Christs resurrection. But he saw that such life must fulfil itself in a certain dying, made good in a fellowship of Christs sufferings; and it must find its completeness and its peace beyond death, in the resurrection of the dead. Did he flinch or shrink from this? No: He longed to have it all perfectly accomplished. His knowledge of Christ was to be not only in the power of His resurrection, but in the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable to His death.
Whatever mistakes have been made by followers of the ascetic life, it is a mistake on the other side to neglect this element of Christianity. He who is not self-denied, and that cheerfully, to the danger and seduction of lawful things, is one who has not his loins girt nor his lamp burning.
It is worth our while to mark the thoroughgoing sincerity of the Apostles Christianity. Not merely did he in general embrace Christ and salvation: but with the utmost cordiality he embraced the method of Christ; he strove after fellowship, with Christs mind in living, and also in dying; he did so, though the fellowship included not only the power of His resurrection, but the fellowship of His sufferings. He longed to have it all fulfilled in his own case. So he strove toward the resurrection of the dead.
In parting from these great Christian thoughts we may note how fitly the power of Christs resurrection takes precedence of the fellowship of His sufferings and the being made conformable to His death. Some have thought that, as death comes before resurrection, the order of the clauses might have been inverted. But it is only through the precedent virtue of Christs resurrection that such a history is achieved, either in Paul or in any of us. We must be partakers of life in the power of Christs resurrection, if we are to carry through the fellowship with the suffering and the death.