Children Of God
CHILDREN OF GOD
PHILIPPIANS 2:14-18
Paul encourages his friends to obey God’s commands cheerfully, without complaining.
A sustained concern for humility (see 2:3-12) leads Paul to instruct the believers concerning their responsibility to live in the world as those who have acknowledged the lordship of Christ. The attitudes against which he warns—grumbling and questioning (2:14)—are those which arise from a failure to have the humility appropriate to those who are in Christ. Grumbling or murmuring was the scandal of the wilderness generation (see Exodus 15:24; 16:2; 17:3; Numbers 14:2,29; 16:41). Moses had to say about Israel, “they are a perverse and crooked generation” (Deuteronomy 32:5). Paul now turns this around. The Gentile church at Philippi can be blameless and innocent children of God because they follow the path of humility marked out by Jesus Christ (2:15; see 1:10; 2:7f.). This news is “the word of life” to which the believers are to hold fast (2:16). The world is filled with self-centered people who seek their own glory; this is the character of a “crooked and perverse generation.” If the Philippians will order their lives in accordance with Jesus’ humility, Paul will be proud to present them as his “joy and crown” (4:1) when he appears before his Lord on the Day of Christ. The Christians are to live as lights in the world (echoing Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 5:14-16).
The thought of appearing before Christ brings the apostle back to the real possibility that he will be sentenced to death. He does not shrink from this prospect. He places his death vividly before the eyes of his readers by alluding to a pagan practice which could be observed in Philippi and elsewhere, the custom of pouring a cup of red wine over the sacrifice upon the altar (2:17). The Philippians, as priests, offer their faith to God in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation which had shed Paul’s blood at Philippi and imprisoned him at Rome. If he is to be put to death, his blood would be the drink offering, consecrating the service of his friends to God. The thought of crowning his service to God through his death was meaningful to Paul (the same thought comes in 2 Timothy 4:6), and provides for him a new ground of joy.