03.04. LESSON 4

LESSON 4 By being more specific in the opening of Php 2:1-30 than he was in the general exhortation for unity near the close of Php 1:1-30, Paul discloses what was amiss at Philippi. The nature and fervency of this prolonged exhortation is evi­dence that legitimate differences about secondary things and personal matters were needlessly disturbing the peace of the church. Their mishandling such things, rather than the things themselves, was the chief trouble.

Giving relatively small things more prominence than they merit, and wrangling over them, always causes weak­ness and sin in a church. With Christian treatment, many “important things” soon become very unimportant. When saints agree on essentials, let them beware of dissension over incidentals. Moreover, we all need superhuman wisdom in order to distinguish between supplementary and contra­dictory things. “If any of you lacketh wisdom, let him ask of God . . . and it shall be given him” (James 1:5). Honest study of the Bible and believing prayer are indispensable for a spiritual, functioning church.

Discord at Philippi In spite of all his troubles, Paul comes through Php 1:1-30 rejoicing, and encouraging the Philippians, “Soldiers of the cross, shoulder to shoulder”; yet his joy is not complete. He writes: “Make full my joy, that ye may be of the same mind, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind.” (Note how affection delights to repeat and linger). In tenderness he pleads that if their experience in Christ is real and has power to stir the heart and to move the will; if they find love, consolation, fellowship, and compassion; if they can be entreated at all, they do “nothing through fac­tion or vainglory, but in lowliness of mind each counting other better than himself; not looking each to his own things, but each of you also to the things of others” (Php 2:1-4). When the Philippians read this, could they fail to see that though the gospel had delivered them from Satan’s dominion, it had not taken them beyond the range of his temptations? fail to see that pride and selfishness were the cause of their disunion and of Paul’s exhortation? Could they fail to realize that the stubborn pride of nature must be broken down before grace can really be received as grace, and that only the lowly-minded can be like-minded? In the beginning man fell through pride, and he must be restored through humility. Christ’s first beatitude is, “Blessed are the poor in spirit (self-renounced); for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” If love is the summit of Chris­tianity, humility is its foundation. The gate of life is as low as it is narrow. Christian humility springs, basically, from man’s realizing that without the grace of God he is hopelessly lost in time and in eternity. Self-sufficient men cannot live the Christian life. “To be Christless is to be lifeless.”

Christ’s Essential Glory

“Have this mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who, existing in the form of God. . . emptied himself; . . and being in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, becom­ing obedient even unto death, yea, the death of the cross.” Just before his arrest Christ prayed: “Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was” (John 17:5). Since Christ retained his essential glory and was still God during his so­journ, on earth, it was only the heavenly glory and divine prerogatives of which he emptied himself. In him met all the attributes of the Godhead and all the perfections of manhood. He was God-man, the first but not the last, of a new order of life in the universe. As God he “emptied himself.”

Christ’s Acquired Glory

“Wherefore God highly exalted him, and gave him a name which is above every name; that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow . . . and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.” A sketch of Christ’s history runs: essential glory of the Godhead from all eternity, hu­manity redeemed by his service on earth, and return to his original glory with the Father plus the acquired glory for having saved a lost world. This is the high exaltation of our text. Earned, double exaltation for Christ and undeserved redemption for man! When Christ went back to heaven after his dive down to lowest humiliation on earth, he took mankind, to him a salvaged priceless treasure, on his shoulder with him. This acquired glory is the glory he shares with his bride now and evermore. The grand argu­ment of Hebrews 2:1-18 involves this consummate truth.

Since as eternal God, Christ could not be exalted, only as Mediator was his exaltation possible. Therefore his medi­atory name, his saving name, “Jesus,” the name Gabriel gave him before his birth to be worn forever, is “the name” that every tongue shall confess as “Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

Faithless Speculations

Paul knew that discord about secondary things could not exist among the Philippians after they possessed the mind of Christ; he knew that their friction grew out of the fact that some of them were not truly converted from self unto Christ; he knew also that the way to get them actually to give Christ precedence over self, thus becoming able to count others better than themselves, was to hold Christ up before them in all his unselfishness as an example. This explains how this great scripture,, which has caused so much useless and destructive speculation down through the centuries about the divine-human nature of Jesus, got into this informal letter. Probably the opposite extremes of these speculations are Unitarianism and Mariolatry: the former robs Christ of his deity, and the latter ascribes deity to a woman. Paul did not intend these verses to become a battleground, in the realm above human understanding, for theological disputation; he used them as practical, powerful persuasion.

If all Christians could have always divested themselves of the pride of learning, admitted that “without controversy great is the mystery of godliness” (1 Timothy 3:16), and in faith accepted Christ as God-man without trying to explain him, ambitious, divisive heresies about his person could not have arisen. Christianity still suffers from the pride of scholarship and intellectualism.

QUESTIONS

1.    What does the earnest exhortation at the first of Php 2:1-30 reveal about conditions in the church at Philippi?

2.    How may a failure to distinguish between supplementary and contradictory things cause sinful disunity in a church?

3.    How may Christians acquire wisdom to make this difficult distinction?

4.    Why is it that only the lowly-minded can be like-minded?

5.    What is the real, deep basis of Christian humility?

6.    For what purpose did Paul introduce the great passage deal­ing with Christ’s timeless, personal history?

7.    In what manner has the passage been desecrated and made to serve an unholy purpose?

8.    Distinguish between Christ’s essential glory and his acquired glory.

9.    Can all “the mystery of godliness” be resolved by man?