Philippians iii. 10, 11
‘That I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable unto His death ; 11 If by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead.’
Philippians iii. 10, 11
THE connection of these words with the preceding verses is obviously intimate. They exhibit further objects of desire, which the apostle had in view in longing to be ‘found in Christ, not having his own righteousness, which was of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith.’ As were the aspirations of this great Christian, such, in the measure of their faith, are those of all true believers. The subject for our consideration now, then, is the Christian’s chief aims.
I do not know that there is any passage of Scripture which, more clearly and strikingly than this, exhibits the peculiarities of vital religion, as contrasted with the views and purposes of man by nature. The transcendentalism, as we may call it, of genuine Christianity its passing out beyond the range of merely natural thought and desire into a totally new and strange sphere—is here very prominent. Speak to a non- Christian man of any intelligence and elevation of sentiment about the benefit you obtain from Christ’s moral teaching, and of your aim, as a Christian, to diminish the crime and wretchedness which abound around us; and he will understand, and, to some extent, sympathize with you. But say that your aims are to ‘know Christ, and the power of His resurrec-
tion, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable to His death,’ and that you believe this knowledge to be ‘life eternal ;’ then worldly wisdom can but stand by and wonder that sane men should thus babble in an unknown tongue. The man who can intelligently and sincerely say things like these has evidently undergone a radical change of mind and heart. It is plain that, while zz this world, yet in some most important respects he is not of it. His own feeling is, that previously he had seen everything in a false and distorting light,—that the highest things had seemed to him but shadows, and only the lowest things real; as, to one looking ~ down from a hill-side into the mirror of a lake’s calm bosom, the world appears inverted, the heaven with its glories below him and unreal, and the earth on which he stands the highest thing of all. Now, lifting his eyes, he sees things as they are, —the heaven above the earth, and as real. Faith brings us out into God’s light, and by it we see the proportions and relations of objects truly. Every real Christian is in some degree, the exact degree in which his religion has gained control over him, a sfizvitual man, as distinguished from a carnal or sensual. The highest of his faculties are in exercise,— those by which we are enabled to know and hold fellowship with God. The nobler affections have obtained mastery in him over the lower, making these their servants, their ‘ hewers of wood and drawers of water.’ We pass into this state of mind and heart above nature by the action upon us of a power above nature. Of ourselves, we have no moral energy to step or to stay beyond the sphere of carnality. By nature we revel in it, and cannot indeed conceive of any higher type of life. We become and are kept spiritual by the inworking and indwelling of God’s Spirit. ‘Ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you: if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His.’
The spiritual man’s aim, then—the aim to which the gracious working of the Holy Ghost impels—is ‘¢o know Christ. This
may be regarded as the sum of the believer’s aims, of which the other statements that follow but present special aspects.
The Apostle Paul was a man of extraordinary abilities, and evidently also a devoted student. His temperament was such as to lead him to interest himself in knowledge of every kind ; and probably no line of intellectual research followed by any in his day was altogether strange to him. Now in the earlier part of this paragraph we have the judgment to which the Divine Spirit guided him, as to the most important department of knowledge. Such, he says, is ‘the excellency’—the pre- ~ eminence—‘ of the knowledge of Christ,’ that, in comparison with it, all other knowledge, and indeed everything else in the world, is to be regarded as worth nothing. Everything else, in so far as it keeps a man back from this, is to be regarded as a positive ‘loss.’ However interesting or useful any knowledge may be, looked at by itself, yet here it ‘has no glory, by reason of the glory that excelleth.’ These little lights fade away from view, like the stars at the advent of the sun. Real knowledge of all kinds is, when wisely used, good and profitable to men; real knowledge of all kinds may be tributary, too, in a high degree, to our advancement in this knowledge: but, stating the case in the simplest and barest form, to know everything else and’ not to know Christ brings infinite loss; whilst to know Christ, even if nothing else be known, brings infinite gain, for he who knows Christ knows the great secret, the secret of the chief good. He has found the ‘pearl of great price,’ and ‘to sell all that he hath, and buy it,’ is true wisdom.
That knowledge of Christ of which the apostle here speaks as his aim is, I need hardly say, distinct from knowledge about Christ—distinguished as a whole from its part, as a temple from its foundation. As there can be no temple without a foundation, but may easily be a foundation on which no temple is reared ; so we cannot know Christ without knowing the truth about Him. But it is possible—alas, one cannot but fear that it is sadly common—to know much truth about Christ, and yet
not to know Him as Paul did and strove to do always more perfectly. Saving knowledge of Christ has heat as well as light. It fills and influences the whole soul,—not the mind only, but the affections. ‘The excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord,—there you have its nature set forth. It is essentially appropriating. ‘To know Jesus as mine, my Saviour, my Elder Brother, my Prophet, Priest, and King ; whose promises are bread of life to me; whose laws are of absolute and sweet obligation to me; whose grace is my constant trust,—this is what Paul means.
Such knowledge brings with it moral excellence ; because to Him whom thus we know we grow like in character, through the transforming power of love. ‘ Beholding the glory of the Lord, we are changed into the same image, from glory to glory, as by the Spirit of the Lord.’ It brings with it happiness too; for, knowing the excellences of his Saviour—holding communion by faith with a Friend infinitely faithful, and wise, and powerful, who says to him, ‘I will strengthen thee, I will help thee, I will uphold thee with the right hand of My righteousness ’—it cannot but be that the believer will ‘ rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.’
It is reasonable, then,—and, as a matter of fact, it belongs to the essence of vital religion,—that the great aim of the disciple of Christ should be ‘to know Him’ experimentally and growingly. Saving faith is simply spiritual knowledge of Christ. ‘By His knowledge,’ says Jehovah—that is, ‘ by the knowledge of Himself’—‘shall My righteous Servant justify many.’ One element in the new state of spirit produced by the beginning of this knowledge, in the cordial belief of the gospel, is always strong longing to know more of Him, to have ever fuller experimental acquaintance with His character. And as the glory of that character ‘passeth knowledge,’ the joyous study of the saints throughout eternity will still be ‘ to know Christ.’
Proceeding to describe his aim somewhat more in detail, the apostle speaks of his longing ‘ ¢o know the power of Christ’s
resurrection.’ It is plain from the connection in which these last words occur, that they do not mean what, taken by themselves, they might mean, ‘the divine power shown in the Saviours resurrection, —as we read in the Epistle to the Ephesians of ‘the working of God’s mighty power, which He wrought in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead’ (Eph. i. 19, 20). The reference here is plainly to the ‘ power exerted ὧν Christ’s resurrection,’ or, as the older English versions have it, ‘the virtue of His resurrection.’ This ‘virtue’ or ‘ power’ is manifold, present and future. According to the apostle’s line of thought, however, his reference must be supposed to be to what is experienced in the present life. Now we read that, as Christ ‘was delivered for our offences,’ so He ‘ was raised again for our justification’ (Rom. iv. 25). In His resurrection the divine seal was attached to the charter of grace, attesting the completeness of the great work of mediation. The risen and glorified Saviour still discharges needful functions as our High Priest, too, presenting the blood of atonement in the Most Holy Place, and interceding for His people. When God forgives our sins, and accepts us as righteous, then we experience as really the power of the Saviour’s resurrection as the power of His death. Justification, however, was spoken of by the apostle in the preceding verse, whereas we appear to be here at a further stage, amid the spiritual aims and efforts of the Christian life, the life of a man already justified. Paul’s thought, I doubt not, in ‘knowing the power of His resurrection,’ is personal experience, through growing holiness and consequent happiness, of the fulfilment of the Saviour’s gracious declaration, ‘ Because I live, ye shall live also.’
When Jesus rose, and ascended to sit down at His Father’s right hand, He ‘received gifts for men,’ and ‘all power over all flesh, to quicken—give life to—whom He would.’ This life of holy blessedness which He bestows is kindred to His own,—nay, it is in truth the life of the Head stirring in the members. ‘ We live,—yet not we, but Christ liveth in us.’
The power of Christ’s resurrection is to give resurrection to the spirits of His chosen now, as well as to their bodies by and by. To the eye of faith, how vivid a picture, or rather, how dark and gloomy a shadow, is a dead body of a dead soul,—a soul which in the midst of a world where myriads of agencies are appealing to us from every side on behalf of God, to contemplate Him, to learn His will, to pray for His help, yet sees not, hears not, breathes not,—a soul which is utterly insensible alike to the tender touch of divine love, and the stern stroke of divine anger,—a soul ‘ dead in trespasses and sins!’ Very varied is the aspect of the spiritually dead. Sometimes we see moral corruption so gross, and manifest, and repulsive, that we hurry away from the loathsome sight ; sometimes, on the other hand, such a sweet tenderness and lovingness of nature, such a fulness of generous impulses and manly energies, that one finds it all but impossible to believe that aspiration after God’s glory, the only breath of true life, can be wanting there. ‘
He who hath bent him o’er the dead, Ere the first day of death is fled, Before decay’s effacing fingers Have swept the lines where beauty lingers ; And marked the mild angelic air, The rapture of repose that’s there, — The fixed, yet tender traits that streak The languor of the a cheek ;
Sena μα ay, one ieicieardine ΟΝ He still might doubt the tyrant’s power,— So fair, so calm, so softly-sealed, The first—last—look, by death revealed.’
Yet this is death, no less really than where the sad ravages of corruption are obvious to the senses. So is it with the soul. Wherever love to God is not the ruling motive of action, there is death ; and life can be seen there only through a resurrection. Blessed be the Prince of Life, dear friends, who is willing to quicken us into ‘newness of life’ with Himself!
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y an earthquake, it may be—a shaking of the nature—a convulsion of the whole man—the ‘great stone’ of prejudice, of careless unconcern and carnal security, with which depravity has closed the door of our sepulchre, and which the world and the world’s prince have sealed with their signet, is rolled away ; the heavenly light of conviction ‘of sin, and righteousness, and judgment,’ pierces the darkness of the tomb ; Jesus cries with a loud voice, ‘Come forth ;’ and he who was dead comes forth, bound hand and foot, indeed, with grave-clothes, yet alive, through the quickening energies of the Spirit of Christ, who has already taken up His abode within him. Such is the soul’s resurrection. A life has begun which, by the terms of the covenant, can never end,—the life which is sustained by spiritually ‘eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the Son of man.’ The soul of the regenerate man enjoys peace with God, and his desires and efforts are directed towards likeness of character to God. This is real life. As yet, however, the spiritual resurrection is imperfect, for ‘the law of sin in the members wars with the law of the mind.’ But the energy of the life already received is seen in such strong longings as the _ apostle breathes out here for more complete fellowship in the spirit of life with Him who said, ‘I seek not Mine own will, but the will of the Father.’ We long, if we be Christians, to have all our faculties exercised to discern and to accomplish whatever may redound to the glory of our Creator and Redeemer ; to give up to His service, in the sphere in which He has placed us, our wealth, our talents, our time, our influence ; to have our whole life, in all its relations, pervaded by religion. To advance towards this attainment is to experience ever more fully ‘the power of Christ’s resurrection,’ by having fellowship with Him in His life.
Further, the apostle longs “29 know the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable unto His death’ ‘The rendering ‘being made conformable’ has scarcely that exquisite felicity which usually characterizes our wonderful translation,
The particular word here found in the original does not occur anywhere else in the New Testament ; but a closely-allied form does twice,—in the 29th verse of the 8th chapter of Romans, where it is translated ‘conformed,’ and in the 21st verse of this present chapter, where the rendering is ‘fashioned like unto.’ Either of these is decidedly preferable for exactness to ‘ made conformable.’
It is not easy to determine with precision the idea intended in this part of the verse,—the condensation of the language in ‘fashioned like unto His death’ rendering it obscure. The construction of the original, however, shows this at least distinctly, that the ‘knowing the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings,’ and the ‘being fashioned like unto His death,’ stand in the closest connection with each other—the latter seemingly being almost equivalent to the former, only that the thought is expressed with more intensity. On the whole, I think that the longing of the apostle set forth here is somewhat to this effect, —that he may be cast in that Christ-like mould of feeling and character with which, through its antagonism to the wickedness of the world, suffering is necessarily connected—that character,’ the natural result of the exhibition of which, in its perfect beauty in the midst of sinners, was their murder of God’s Holy One. For suffering, looked at simply by itself, the apostle does not long. Such aspirings belong to the spirit of pure fanaticism and folly. But he longs for the character of which, in this world, sufferings are an inseparable adjunct,—ay, and the sufferings themselves, in so far as they evince the growing possession of this character, he will welcome with thankfulness, —a martyr’s death itself, if God so appoint.
Now here, you see, brethren, we have one of those paradoxes, or apparent self-contradictions, which meet us everywhere in religion. We have just had the believer’s yearning for fellowship of fe with Christ ; and now we have substantially the same yearning thrown into the form of a desire for fellowship in suffering and death, But you see how it is. The .* ε” aa SP
| Christian, brought out of darkness into God’s marvellous light, was, as he presented himself to us in the former clause, looking out into the light; and we saw a full, free, direct out-throwing of the heart’s desire to go forward, ever forward, into the light. Now he turns and faces the darkness ; and we have the thought moulded by the sight of the darkness. The paradoxes in religion are caused by its having to do with facts so unnatural— so directly opposed to the nature of things as constituted by God at the first—as wickedness and misery. Sin is the great anomaly in God’s world, my brethren. It might well seem an utter self-contradiction, a violation of all law and order, that | the Prince of Life—the possessor of a life independent and essential, from whom all life springs, through whom and in whom all life subsists—should die; yet this was, in truth, the highest act of the highest divine law of love, for the restoration in the moral universe of the order which had been overthrown by sin. The true paradox, the true lawlessness, was that man, made to live, should wilfully have died,—should wilfully have chosen the defilement of sin, and the curse of the grave. The Prince of Life died that, in accordance with law and order, He might give life to dead men. Now, according to the eternal covenant of love, Christ’s people are so indissolubly united to Him, that we died with Him, and rose with Him,—and this in regard to both the grand elements of salvation, deliverance from the guilt and curse of sin, and deliverance from its power. As regards deliverance from guilt,—when ‘ Jesus was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification,’ we so died in Him, in the sight of God, that the law has no longer any claim upon us for punishment ; and we so rose in Him, as to pass out into the sphere of full blessed acceptance with God, and adoption into His family. As regards sanctification,—we live through the fellowship of Christ’s life ; and yet at the same time, being in a wicked world, we have ‘a fellowship of His sufferings, being fashioned after the likeness of His death.’ It is plain from many passages in the Apostle Paul’s writings, that |
this was a conjunction of thought in which he took great delight. He ‘always bore about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in his body.’
One element of the Saviour’s sufferings in which all true believers have fellowship with Him, was fain caused by the sight of abounding sin. When you remember the genuineness of the Lord’s humanity, and the consequent reality of His impressibleness by His surroundings, you will see how pungent a source of distress this must have been to Him. Ah, brethren, for a holy soul, a soul that throbbed with an unceasing and absolute devotion to the divine will, to live for three-andthirty years in the midst of a world like this, and in close intercourse with its people,—a world where blasphemy, and impurity, and falsehood, and cruelty, walk abroad unblushingly, and obtrude themselves on every eye and ear,—what a vast sum of anguish there was here for the Lord! Apart altogether from the direct hostility of men to Himself, and from those mysterious agonies caused by the hiding from Him of His Father’s countenance,—the Man Christ Jesus, simply because He was situated among sinful men, could not but be ‘a Man of sorrows.’ Now all His people have fellowship with Him in this suffering. If a man have no experience of the kind, no loathing at the sight of sin, no distress at the thought of the dishonour done to God, and the misery brought upon themselves, by the wickedness of the wicked, then certainly he is not a Christian. Every true believer knows something of the experience of the Psalmist,—‘ Rivers of waters run down mine eyes, because they keep not Thy law.’ Contentment with a sinful world belongs to the spirit of Satan, not of Christ. To be so brought out into the light of God, then, and so pervaded by its glorious radiance, that the sight of moral darkness shall” cause ever intenser distress,—this is the believer’s longing and aim.
This pain in Christians has a side—the saddest side—of
which Jesus could know nothing. We, His people, loathe our own sins, and pray that we may loathe them more. Our life with Christ is maintained by dying daily to sin, by painful struggle, through the energies of the Divine Spirit within us, against the power of remaining depravity. Though Jesus had no sin, yet in pain at the sight of the evil in our own hearts and lives we have true fellowship with Him ; for the spring of the hatred is that reverence and love to God which reigned in Him.
But the sufferings of Christ included also direct inflictions through the hatred of the wicked. The opposition of the Lord to sin was so direct and complete, that all who loved sin could not but hate Him. Those who lived in the darkness, and loved the darkness rather than the light, shrank from and abhorred that glory of heavenly light in the Saviour’s character which revealed the intensity of their own darkness; and it was but natural that by the children of darkness the incarnate Light should be crucified. Now, as He ‘was, Christian brethren—hated by the.world—so are we, in the measure in which we too are children of light. ‘If we were of the world, the world would love his own; but because we are not of the world, but Christ hath chosen us out of the world, therefore the world hateth us.’ Remember the word which He said unto us, ‘The servant is not greater than his Lord: if they have persecuted Me, they will also persecute you.’ -_ From the nature of things, it must be so. The contrast between sin and genuine holiness is far too decided and prominent a thing,—it bears at every turn far too strongly and piercingly on matters in which the heart is most interested,— to be treated, in the intercourse of men, as a thing of indifference. The stake, and the scaffold, and the thumbscrew, torture and death for religion, are eminently natural results of the meeting of two forces as mutually repugnant as fire and water. And though, in God’s kind providence, and through the indirect working of Christianity, the world does not burn nor 8 aM Δ. Cie α ill
crucify for religion in this our age and country, yet it hates Christianity and Christians just as really as of old. Moral light and moral darkness, moral life and moral death, cannot co-exist in mutual love. If any professing Christian among us, then, has no sense of this opposition—an opposition subtle, it may be, but real and strong,—if he feels himself quite at home, an honoured and thoroughly welcome friend, in the circles of those who are unmistakeably mere children of this world,—he has very great reason to fear that the darkness has thus lovingly received the professed light of the world, simply because there is no light in him. The profession of Christianity may be respectable in the eyes of the world, but a really Christian life the world hates. The truth stands all down the ages, till the consummation of the probationary history of our earth, that ‘the friendship of this world is enmity with God.
Such, then, I apprehend, brethren, is the meaning of the apostle’s statement that he aspires to ‘know the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings, being made conformable unto His death.’ His longing is, that he may sorrow over the existence of sin as the Saviour did; and that his opposition to sin may be so clear and sharp as to bring down the world’s hatred, as the Saviour’s was and did. This is to be ‘conformed to Christ’s death.’
The Christian life, then, you see, must be a life of seriousness. It is a happy life—the only happy life—because it is life with and in Him who, having risen triumphant from the grave, was ‘anointed with the oil of gladness.’ But God and sin, heaven and hell, are realities far too solemn to permit it to be a life of frivolous gladness. And the happiness of those who have fellowship of life with Christ, is none the less deep and broad and lasting, because they have fellowship also in His sufferings, and their life is, in considerable measure, ‘ conformed to His death.’
In the 11th verse, the apostle sets forth the object of hope,
with a view to which it was that he resolutely and prayerfully strove to ‘know Christ’ ever more fully, ‘and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed unto His death :᾿ ‘if by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead” ‘ Resurrection of the dead’ is in itself a phrase expressive of the destiny of all men, believers and unbelievers alike ; for, as Paul testified before Felix, ‘the unjust’ as well as ‘the just’ shall rise again (Acts xxiv. 15). In such a passage as the present, however, expressive of Christian aims and aspirations, the general term is very naturally employed with the special force of ‘ resurrection and glorious life with Christ.’ This special application occurs often in the New Testament,—as, for example, in our Lord’s contrast between ‘the children of this world’ and those ‘who shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead’ (Luke xx. 34, 35). In the apostle’s hopes this word gathered up all that his soul longed for,—perfect freedom for ever from sin and sorrow ; knowledge of Christ up to the fullest measure of his capacities of knowledge ; perfect experimental acquaintance with the power of His resurrection, through perfect fellowship of life with Him; the ineffable and everlasting blessedness of being with Him and like Him, ‘sitting with Him in His throne, even as He hath sat down with His Father in His throne.’ This is the glory of ‘the children of the resurrection.’ “T
f by any means’ is expressive of intense desire,—and at the same time here of the profoundest humility and sense of unworthiness to attain the object of desire. In so farasa certain degree of doubt appears to enter into the meaning of the phrase, we may feel some little surprise. At first sight this may seem to conflict with the sublime confidence which has shown itself in the first chapter, in ‘To me to die is gain,’ and which we meet also ever and anon in the other Epistles,—for example, in ‘Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of
righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give me at that day.’ ‘But,’ says the eminently wise and holy Neander, ‘these are discrepancies which belong to the essence of Christian life. When the Christian looks to his Redeemer, —to the grace of redemption assured to him,—to the unchangeable word of promise,—the end to which all his struggles are directed appears to him as an object of undoubted certainty. On the other hand, when he examines his life by the standard of divine holiness, his confidence finds no firm foundation, defects and defilement everywhere presenting themselves to his view,—and all this, the more he has really advanced in holiness, for thus his spiritual insight has become keener, through the power of the Holy Spirit, to apprehend the ideal pattern of divine holiness, in its application to the duties of his life—to test, by reference to this, his inner and outward life—and to prove its nakedness and shortcomings. Hence the fluctuation in Paul’s expressions.’ You remember the language employed by the apostle in writing to the Corinthians: ‘I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection ; lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway’ (1 Cor. ix. 27). In its suggestion of a measure of doubt, this is somewhat similar to his words in the verse now before us,—but much stronger and more startling.
5 Ῥ ad ὧν ‘ ᾿ + “ Ἵ a = i = _ 7 . ae em A ual hazards connected ht life i in this broad Ι of self-distrust, are vigilant, prayerful, and strenuous Ἃ after holiness, are likely to have brightness of h ἣν Th ‘if by any means I may attain,’ and ‘ henceforth there i Ἢ d up for me,’ are bound closely together.
