"We are waiting, we are yearning for Thy voice
Through the long, long summer day and winter night;
We are mourning till Thou bid'st our souls rejoice,
Till Thy coming turns our darkness into light:
Come, Lord Jesus, come again;
We shall see Thee as Thou art,
Then, and not till then,
In Thy glory bear a part;
Then, and not till then,
Thou wilt satisfy each heart."
J. DENHAM SMITH.
CHAPTER X
THE BLESSED HOPE AND ITS POWER
PHILIPPIANS iii. 17-21
The problem of the body—Cautions and tears—"That blessed hope"—The duty of warning—The moral power of the hope—The hope full of immortality—My mother's life—"He is able"—The promise of his coming
The Apostle draws to the close of his appeal for a true and watchful fidelity to the Gospel. He has done with his warning against Judaistic legalism. He has expounded, in the form of a personal confession and testimony, the true Christian position, the acceptance of the believer in "the righteousness which is of God by faith," and the sanctification of the believer through union with his Lord and in an always growing communion with Him. Throughout this deep and most tender argument has run everywhere the truth with which it began, that the sure antidote to the spiritual errors in question is "joy in the Lord." The glad use of Jesus Christ in His personal glory and perfection, as He merited for us, and as we abide in Him—this is the way.
Already another class of mistake and danger has risen before his mind, and occupies it now exclusively. From ver. 12 onward, if I read the passage aright, he has been thinking not of the legalist only, who opposed and denounced his doctrine of grace and faith, but of the school or schools which rather would applaud it—and then distort it. There was the teacher who would assert a premature and delusive personal perfection, proclaiming himself so close to Christ that he had already reached the holy goal. And there was the teacher who would reason so upon the perfectness of the atoning merits as to disclaim the need of seeking with all his soul a personal conformity to the Lord of the Atonement. Such a man would conceivably affirm for himself an experience of intense spiritual insight, a communion with God profound and direct, an exaltation into a celestial atmosphere of consciousness; while yet, and on his own avowed theory, he was living a life in which sin was allowed to reign in his mortal body, What did it matter? The spirit soared and expatiated in a higher region. The true man lived in the world above, "commercing with the skies"; it was but the body, soon to perish, which went its own way, and might be allowed to do so, for it could never be other than the uncongenial burthen of the real man.
Such theories, as all are aware, were largely developed and widely spread in the sub-apostolic age. The word Gnosticism, so familiar to the reader of the early history of thought in and around the Church, reminds us of this; for while many Gnostics were severe ascetics, others were practical libertines; and the divergent practices sprang from one deep source of error, dishonour of the body. To both schools, spirit was good, matter was evil. By both therefore the body was viewed not as a subject of redemption, but as a barrier in its way. The one aimed to wear out the barrier, to help it to disappear. The others left it, as they thought, alone; leapt, as they thought, over it; as if they could pursue a spiritual life which should be irrespective of the body's hopeless evils.
The embryo, at least, of this latter type of thought was beyond doubt apparent in St Paul's day, and had begun to be felt at Philippi. There, in that loving and beloved community, the plague had begun, or at least the infection was imminent. "Many walked" (perhaps not actually at Philippi yet, but they might soon come) in the foul broad road which they asserted to be clean and narrow. Very probably they used the terms of the Pauline Gospel, and said much of grace, and faith, and the Spirit, and the things above. But none the less they were the victims of an awful self-delusion; teachers whose doctrine led downwards to the pit. To them he comes at length, explicitly and finally. In view of them he places before the Philippians once more the fact of his own and his brethren's examples, and then the sanctifying power of that blessed hope, the Redemption of the Body.
Ver. 17. +United imitators of me become ye, brethren+; taking me, your long-known guide in the Lord, for your moral pattern, and strengthening your mutual cohesion (summimêtai) by so doing (an appeal prompted not by egotism or self-confidence, but by single-hearted certainty about my message and my purpose); +and mark+, watch, in order to tread in their steps,[1] +those who so walk as you have us+, me and my missionary-brethren, +for a model+; those whose practical conduct in human life and intercourse (peripatein), seen among you day by day in its wholesomeness and truth, plainly reproduces what you remember of ours. There is need for this attention, and for this