GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES.
Vers. 25–28. Anxieties of Ministerial Life.—1. Ministerial employment is a painful, laborious work, and faithful ministers who are standard-bearers or sentinels, and march in the front, before the Lord’s people, have a peculiar battle of their own for truth and piety. 2. The Lord sometimes suffers His servants to fall into desperate dangers, that His mercy may be the more seen in their delivery. 3. Courage under sufferings for Christ, and rejoicing in God, may consist with moderate sorrow and heaviness. 4. The weights and griefs of the godly do prove an occasion of rejoicing afterwards, so the grief which the Philippians had because of their pastor’s sickness and apprehended death ended in joy when they saw him in health again.—Fergusson.
Vers. 29, 30. Heroic Devotion to Christ—
- Is wholly absorbed in the work of Christ.
- Risks life in serving the cause of God.
- Should be held in highest esteem.
- Should be joyfully acknowledged in whomsoever manifested.
CHAPTER III.
CRITICAL AND EXPLANATORY NOTES.
Ver. 1. Finally.—Lit. “as to the rest.” The apostle had intended to bring his letter to a close, but something of which we have no information leads him to warn his readers against Judaizers and their methods. He resumes his farewell at ch. iv. 8, yet lingers there. To write the same things.—Whatever they may have been, they concerned the security of his readers. His hand had so often written up in bold letters the Cave canem to warn his unsuspecting children, that we may be allowed to think that is what he means to do again.
Ver. 2. Beware of dogs.—Who would “turn again and rend you.” If the term is a retort on “Gentile dogs,” and looks like “railing for railing,” we may explain it by the directness of the metaphor. Dogs and Judaizers have this in common—that they tear flesh. The savage delight of having inflicted a wound is shown in Gal. vi. 13. Beware of the concision.—A bitter play on the name by which the Jews thought themselves distinguished (Eph. ii. 11). St. Paul changes the prefix, and stigmatises them as “the mutilation party.” Lightfoot gives illustrations of this toying with words, e.g., in the complaint of an ambassador that he had been sent, not to Spain, but to Pain.
Ver. 3. For we are the circumcision.—How completely Paul had sloughed his Rabbinic literalism this verse clearly shows (Rom. ii. 28, 29). Which worship God in the Spirit.—See our Lord’s words to the woman of Samaria, prophetic of the day when worship shall be set free from its trammels and cerements (John iv. 23, 24).