Philippians 1:2

Grace] is God's forgiving and redeeming love to men: see Romans 4:24 to Romans 5:2; Romans 5:17; Ephesians 1:6; Ephesians 2:7, etc.

I. Act of Praise and Prayer (Philippians 1:3)

§ 2. Philippians 1:3. The characteristically Pauline Thanksgiving, Philippians 1:3, runs into a chain of participial sentences loaded with adverbial clauses, the connexion of which is not always certain. Philippians 1:5 accounts for the joy attending St. Paul's supplications for his readers as due to their unbroken fellowship with him; and Philippians 1:6 declares the assurance of complete success that animates his prayers. The rendering of this very thing, in Philippians 1:6, is difficult to justify; say rather, 'being confident on this very account—viz. because of your steadfast fellowship with me—that God will consummate in you what He has so signally begun.'

That ye be of the same mind (Philippians 2:2) imports oneness of sentiment and aim, to be realised in having the same love—i.e. cherishing a uniform reciprocal affection—as men conjoined in soul ('of one accord,' RV; cp. Philippians 1:27, 'with one soul'), minding the one thing (cp. Colossians 3:2 RV). In rendering the last clause of one mind, AV ignores the Gk. definite article: St. Paul's 'one thing needful' (cp. Luke 10:42) is nothing else than 'the gospel' (see Philippians 1:5; Philippians 1:8; Philippians 1:27); concentration upon this is the guarantee of unity.

3, 4. Such oneness of soul means doing nothing in a factious or vainglorious way, each man in lowliness of mind counting the other better than himself, and keeping an eye not for his own interests but for those of his neighbour. In short, love and humility together overcome all divisive influences, and bring about the perfect socialism of the Spirit.

Philippians 2:5 goes on to say that this altruism is the proper Christian way of thinking: Have this mind in you, which is indeed (the mind) in Christ Jesus—i.e. the mind grounded in Him. The Pauline phrase 'in Christ Jesus' signifies the mystical union: not the Jesus Christ who 'was' (the verb of AV is wanting in the Gk.), but the Christ Jesus who 'is,' inspires this way of thinking.

Philippians 2:6 lead back from the present to the past, exhibiting the Christian altruistic mind as it wrought first in the Founder; St. Paul relates the experience of the Head to teach the members a lowly, self-renouncing love. For this purpose he must show how much Christ had to forgo and to what lengths His abnegation went. The difficult expressions of this profound passage are, especially, the synonymous connected phrases form (of God, of a bondman), on an equality (with God), likeness (of men), in fashion (as a man), which denote resemblance in different aspects or degrees. The first signifies essential form, the mode of existence proper to the person in question; the second, the footing on which he stands, or might stand; the third, his visible features; the fourth, the guise, or habit of life, in which he moves. The verbs of Philippians 2:7—emptied (RV), and humbled Himself—affirm respectively a negative self-deprivation or depotentiation, and a positive self-humiliation based upon the former; the latter act has its antithesis in the exalting of Christ by God spoken of in Philippians 2:9, and the former in the granting to Him of the name above every name. The rare verbal noun of Philippians 2:6, (counted it not) a prize (RV; AV 'robbery'), meant first 'the act of grasping' or clutching,' and then 'a thing to be clutched.' We take the sense of the passage to be, that Christ, while divine in His proper nature, did not, when the call came to serve others, hold fast in self-assertion His God-like state, but divested Himself of this by assuming a servant's form (adding to His divine a human being, which eclipsed the Godhead in Him) and leading an earthly life such as our own (Philippians 2:6; Philippians 2:7). But He went lower still; having stooped from His Godhead to man's condition, He traversed all the stages of obedience down to the humiliation of death (cp. Philippians 3:21), and of death in its uttermost shame (Philippians 2:7). Such was the devotion of the Son of God to men; and every man who is in Christ Jesus shares this mind.

The verb 'emptied' in Philippians 2:7 supplies the theological term kenosis for the deprivation of divine attributes or powers involved in the incarnation of our Lord. However far this diminution went—and we cannot pretend to define its limits—since it was a self-emptying, an act of our Lord's sovereignty, it involved no forfeiture of intrinsic Deity.

At Philippians 2:8 the illustration properly ends; but St. Paul cannot leave his Master on the cross, nor have it supposed that self-abnegation is real loss: cp. Matthew 10:39; John 12:24. By a divine recompense, Christ was lifted up from the death of the cross to the Messianic dominion, with glory added to His primal glory (Philippians 2:9): Wherefore indeed God more highly exalted him, and granted to him the name that is above every name: cp. Ephesians 1:20. This 'name' is the completed title, the Lord Jesus Christ, under which our Saviour will be adored throughout the universe. Things under the earth was a Gk. euphemism for the dead: cp. Romans 14:9; Ephesians 4:9.

Philippians 2:10 appropriate for Jesus the language of Isaiah 45:23, which foretold the worship to be paid to Israel's God by all mankind. The glory of the Father will be realised in the universal acknowledgment of the Lordship of the Son whom He enthroned: cp. 1 Corinthians 15:24.

§ 8. Philippians 2:12. The connexion of the third exhortation, to thoroughness in the pursuit of salvation (Philippians 2:12), with the two foregoing paragraphs may be brought out thus: And so, my beloved—since Christ's triumph, won by self-forgetting love, is sure (§ 7), and since you are my fellow-soldiers in His war (§ 6)—as you have always answered to my challenge, I expect that now in my absence—when you depend on yourselves—much more than in my presence, with fear and trembling yon will prosecute the work of your salvation; for God is he that worketh in you both the willing and the working (contrast Romans 7:18), for his good-pleasure's sake (Philippians 2:13). God's working in the Philippians is alleged not to enforce the fear and trembling (which St. Paul assumes and approves in them), but as a strong encouragement: 'Whatever human aid is wanting, God is with you—in you!' cp. Philippians 1:6; Philippians 1:28 also Ephesians 3:20; Colossians 1:29; Acts 20:32. That God is thus working in the readers in the interests of His good pleasure, implies that their life-work is taken into God's plan for the kingdom of His Son; see Philippians 2:9; Philippians 1:29 also Luke 12:32; 2 Thessalonians 1:11; 2 Thessalonians 1:12.