The Surpassing Worth

Philippians 3:1–11

Read Philippians 3:1–11 before proceeding. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

But these assets I have come to regard as liabilities because of Christ. More than that, I now regard all things as liabilities compared to the far greater value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things (indeed, I regard them as dung!) that I may gain Christ, and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith.

Philippians 3:7–9 (v. 9 ESV)

Beware of the Dogs

The letter has had its share of warm moments. Paul has thanked God for the Philippians, prayed for them with joy, sung of the One who emptied Himself for them, commended Timothy and Epaphroditus to them, called them to shine as lights in their world. And now the tone changes. Finally, my brothers and sisters, rejoice in the Lord! he writes, and then, in the very next breath, he turns sharp.

To write this again is no trouble to me, he says, and it is a safeguard for you. Again, Paul says. Apparently he has warned the Philippians before, perhaps in person during his time among them, perhaps in earlier letters now lost. And he is willing to repeat himself, because the danger he is warning against does not go away.

Then comes the warning, repeated three times for emphasis. Beware of the dogs, he writes, beware of the evil workers, beware of those who mutilate the flesh!

The word beware, blepete, is literally look: the verb for keeping watch, paying attention, guarding against. Paul uses it three times in rapid succession, like a sentry calling out a warning. The triple repetition makes it impossible to miss. The Philippians are to look. They are to keep their eyes open. They are to watch for what is coming at them.

What is coming at them? Paul calls these opponents three things, each more pointed than the last.

First, dogs. The word is not a casual insult. In first-century Jewish usage, dog was a slur Jews sometimes applied to Gentiles: the unclean outsiders, the people of the streets. By calling these particular opponents dogs, Paul performs a stunning reversal. The men he is warning the Philippians against are Judaizing teachers, most likely professing Christians of Jewish background. They consider themselves the insiders of God’s covenant. They want the Philippians to be circumcised, to take on the markers of Jewish identity, to add the law of Moses to the gospel of Christ. And Paul says: you have it backwards. You are the dogs. You are the unclean ones. You are the outsiders, scavenging at the edges of God’s people, snapping at the faithful.

Second, evil workers. The phrase, kakous ergatas, is another pointed inversion. These men think of themselves as workers for God, laborers in His vineyard, defenders of the law. Paul calls them evil workers. The work they are doing, however zealously, is not the work of God. It is work against the gospel. And work against the gospel, however sincerely undertaken, is evil work.

Third, those who mutilate the flesh. This is a pun, and a brutal one. The Greek word Paul uses for mutilate, katatomē, is a deliberate play on the word for circumcision, peritomē. Peri- means around; kata- means down, against, with the sense of cutting destructively. Peritomē is to cut around. Katatomē is to cut up, to mutilate, to slash. Paul is saying: what these men are calling circumcision is not actually circumcision; it is mutilation. They are not cutting the foreskin of the body in a way that signifies anything God recognizes. They are simply cutting flesh, and worse, cutting up the body of Christ by attempting to divide it along ethnic lines.

What is at stake here? Everything. The men Paul is warning against would have insisted that they were not denying Christ. They were merely insisting that to be fully Christian, a Gentile must also become Jewish: must be circumcised, must keep the food laws, must observe the festivals. Paul saw, more clearly than any other man in the first generation of the church, that this addition was a subtraction. To say Christ plus circumcision is to say Christ is not enough. And to say Christ is not enough is to be left, in the end, with neither circumcision nor Christ, only with a mutilated flesh and a hope that cannot save.

Paul will not have it. So he says, with all the force of his apostolic authority: Beware.

Then he names what the church really is. For we are the circumcision, he writes, the ones who worship by the Spirit of God, exult in Christ Jesus, and do not rely on human credentials. The true circumcision, the true mark of the people of God, is not a knife-cut on the body. It has three marks: worship by the Spirit, exulting in Christ, no confidence in the flesh.

Worship by the Spirit of God. The Greek verb, latreuō, is the verb for the worship of God’s people, the priestly service that the Old Testament reserved for those set apart for the LORD. The Christian worship is not at a particular temple, not by means of a particular ritual, but by the Spirit of God. The Spirit makes worship Christian. The Spirit is the locus of where the people of God offer their service.

Exult in Christ Jesus. The verb exult, kauchaomai, means to boast in, to take confidence in, to make one’s pride. The Christian’s pride is Christ. The Christian’s confidence is Christ. The Christian’s identity is Christ. Not pedigree. Not learning. Not zeal. Not law-keeping. Christ.

And do not rely on human credentials. Literally, Paul says the true circumcision puts no confidence in the flesh, and the NET’s rendering catches what he means. The word flesh, sarx, in Paul’s vocabulary, refers to the natural human standing, the human as he is apart from the Spirit. To put confidence in the flesh is to rely on what you are by nature, by birth, by training, by personal achievement: on human credentials. The Christian does not do this. The Christian has been taught, by the gospel, that the flesh cannot bear the weight. Only Christ can. And the Christian, having been transferred from confidence in the flesh to confidence in Christ, never goes back.

This is what the true circumcision looks like, Paul says. And it is what the men he is warning the Philippians against have not understood. They want to add fleshly markers to a gospel that has already declared the flesh bankrupt. They want to put confidence where Paul has, by the grace of God, learned not to put it.

Confidence in the Flesh

But the warning takes a turn. Paul has just said that the true circumcision does not rely on human credentials; in the literal Greek, it puts no confidence in the flesh. Now, with a sort of bitter irony, he offers a confession: though mine too are significant. He has reason. If putting confidence in the flesh were the right strategy, Paul would be its master practitioner. If someone thinks he has good reasons to put confidence in human credentials, Paul declares, I have more.

And then he lists his reasons. Seven of them: four that came with his birth and three that he chose. The list is one of the most carefully constructed in Paul’s letters, and every item carries weight.

Circumcised on the eighth day. Paul was born to a Jewish family that observed the law from the beginning. He was not a proselyte, an adult Gentile convert who had been circumcised later in life. He was circumcised on the eighth day, as the law of Moses prescribed for native Israelites. From his earliest days, Paul belonged to the covenant people in the way the law itself defined that belonging.

From the people of Israel. He is not merely from Jewish stock; he is from the chosen people whom God called by the name Israel. The phrase places Paul within the line of the patriarchs, the inheritance of the promises, the covenant of God with His own.

The tribe of Benjamin. Among the twelve tribes, Benjamin held a particular honor. Benjamin was the only patriarch born in the Promised Land. The first king of Israel, Saul, whose name Paul bore, was a Benjaminite. When the kingdom split after Solomon, Benjamin stayed with Judah, the house of David, and the temple at Jerusalem. Benjamin was the small tribe that stood with David’s house. Paul belongs to it.

A Hebrew of Hebrews. The word Hebrew, Hebraios, refers in particular to Jews who had kept their Hebrew (or Aramaic) language and customs, who had not assimilated to Hellenistic Greek culture even when living in Greek-speaking cities. Paul was very likely raised speaking Aramaic at home, learning the Hebrew Scriptures in their original tongue, holding fast to the customs of his fathers. He was not a Hellenized Jew, casual about the heritage. He was the real thing.

So far, four items of pedigree, and not one of them was anything Paul did. They were the gifts of his birth. He had nothing to do with them. But the next three items are different. The next three are things Paul did.

I lived according to the law as a Pharisee. The Pharisees were the most rigorous of the Jewish interpretive parties, the men who took the law most seriously, who studied it most carefully, who applied it most thoroughly to every detail of life. Among Pharisees there were degrees, and Paul tells us elsewhere that he had been a student of Gamaliel (Acts 22:3), the most distinguished rabbi of his generation, the man whose name still stands in the Mishnah as one of the great teachers of Israel. And Paul says of himself, I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries in my nation, and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my ancestors (Gal 1:14). He was the kind of student a teacher remembers. He had earned, by long years of disciplined study, the right to be called a Pharisee.

In my zeal for God I persecuted the church. This one is the most painful for Paul to write. Before his conversion, Paul had directed his zeal against those who, in his judgment, were defaming the God of Israel by claiming that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah. He had hauled Christians from their homes. He had cast his vote against them when they were sentenced to death (Acts 26:10). He had carried letters to Damascus authorizing the persecution of Christians there. And he names this in his list because, by the standards of Jewish zeal, it was a credential. The zealots of Israel had always been those who defended the honor of God against perceived blasphemy, going back to Phinehas in the wilderness. Paul, in his persecuting days, was a zealot of the first rank.

According to the righteousness stipulated in the law I was blameless. The final and climactic credential. Blameless, amemptos, does not mean sinless in some absolute sense. It means that no one could lay a charge against Paul under the standards of the law. He kept the commandments. He did not fall into the sins for which a man could be excluded from the synagogue. He gave the alms, attended the festivals, kept the food laws, observed the Sabbath. By the standards of Jewish piety as they were measured in his world, he was a model. A teacher could point to Saul of Tarsus and say to his students: that is what righteousness under the law looks like.

This was Paul’s portfolio. By any standard of Jewish religious achievement, it was an extraordinary portfolio. He had every advantage of birth, and he had built on those advantages with every advantage of personal devotion. He was the kind of man who, if there were a roster of those most likely to be approved by God on the basis of human righteousness, would have headed the list.

And then he met Christ.

Loss for the Sake of Christ

What happened next is one of the most consequential moments in the history of theology. Paul, whose portfolio had every credential of human religious attainment, threw it all in the fire.

But these assets I have come to regard as liabilities because of Christ. The accounting language is deliberate. Paul speaks in the vocabulary of profit and loss. The seven items he has just listed were gain, kerdē, assets on his ledger, things to be counted in his favor on the day of accounting. And Paul says: I have come to regard them as loss, zēmian, liabilities, items in the wrong column. The Damascus road did not merely add Christ to Paul’s already-impressive spiritual résumé. It transferred his pedigree, his learning, his zeal, his blameless law-keeping from the assets column to the liabilities column. Not because those things were bad in themselves. They were good gifts. They became loss the moment they functioned as substitutes for Christ.

This is the great Pauline insight. The deepest sin is not gross immorality. The deepest sin is unbelief: the heart clinging to something other than God. Whatever your heart clings to and relies on, Luther teaches in the Large Catechism, that is your god (LC I 1–3). And the gods of a religious man are rarely ugly ones. They are good things used as substitutes for Christ. The Pharisee is not damned by his pedigree, his learning, or his obedience. He is damned by his confidence in them. The moment he treats his good works as the basis of his standing with God, the good works become the very thing that holds him back from the gospel. The law, given by God to show us our sin and drive us to Christ (Gal 3:24), becomes, when it is made a ladder to God, the very obstacle to faith. Paul knows this from the inside. He had been the man for whom the credentials were the problem.

And then he intensifies the statement, the way Paul does. More than that, I now regard all things as liabilities, he says, compared to the far greater value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.

The verb regard, hēgeomai, is in the present tense. Not simply I have come to regard, looking back to a particular day on the road to Damascus. I now regard. Paul is still doing it. He is, as he writes this letter from his Roman cell, still in the active business of counting everything as loss in light of the surpassing worth of Christ. The counting is not a one-time act. It is a daily reckoning. Every morning Paul wakes up and sees, fresh, that everything is loss in comparison to the One he has come to know.

The far greater value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. The phrase is breathtaking. Far greater value, hyperechon, means surpassing, exceeding, towering over; older translations render it the surpassing worth. The worth of knowing Christ towers over everything else Paul had, every other thing Paul could have. And the knowing (Paul uses the noun gnōsis, knowledge) is not abstract. It is the relational knowing of one person by another. To know Christ is to be in living relation with Him, to belong to Him, to walk with Him, to receive from Him. And the my Lord at the end is the warmest of the genitives. Paul is not just speaking of Christ. He is speaking of my Christ, his own Christ, the One who has met him personally and taken him as His own.

Then comes the strongest verb yet. For whom I have suffered the loss of all things. The verb suffered the loss, ezēmiōthēn, is in the passive voice. Paul did not exactly choose to lose everything. He lost it; he was deprived of it. By the very act of recognizing Christ as Christ, the value of everything else collapsed. The way a man might once have been proud of his standing in a great civic body collapses the moment he learns that the civic body has been disgraced. The currency of the old kingdom went bankrupt for Paul the moment he met the Lord of a new kingdom.

Indeed, I regard them as dung! The Greek word, skubala, is a strong word. It can mean dung. It can mean kitchen scraps. It can mean the refuse that the dogs eat in the streets. Many translators have softened it to rubbish or refuse, none of them quite as forceful as the Greek. The NET, rightly, does not soften it: dung. The point is clear. Paul’s old credentials, as soon as they are weighed against Christ, are not just valueless. They are repulsive. They are the kind of thing you throw out the back door, not the kind of thing you display in the parlor.

Why does Paul use such strong language? Because the gospel is at stake, and he wants to leave no room for the false teachers to twist his words. He does not say his credentials were less valuable than Christ. He says they were dung compared with Christ. There is no possibility of recovering them as supplementary. There is no possibility of adding them back to the gospel. They are out of the house, in the alley, with the trash. Christ alone is the substance of Paul’s confidence. Everything else has been taken to the dump.

And then comes a verse that stands at the center of the Reformation’s recovery of the gospel. The goal, Paul says, is that he may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith (Phil 3:9 ESV).

Read it slowly. Not having a righteousness of my own. The righteousness Paul wants is not his. It is not earned. It is not constructed. It is not generated by anything he is or has done. That comes from the law. The law is not the source. But that which comes through faith in Christ. The source is faith, and faith’s object is Christ. The righteousness from God that depends on faith. The righteousness is from God, ek theou. It is given, not produced. It is bestowed, not achieved. And it depends on faith, epi tē pistei, not on works.

A note on translation. The NET, which this study otherwise quotes, renders the Greek phrase pistis Christou in this verse as “Christ’s faithfulness.” The phrase can grammatically be read either way, as Christ’s own faithfulness or as faith in Christ, and some careful scholars favor the NET’s reading. But the Reformation, the Lutheran Confessions, and most English translations read it as faith in Christ. The verse’s own second half points the same direction: “the righteousness from God that depends on faith” (epi tē pistei) is most naturally the believer’s faith receiving what God gives. Either way, the heart of the matter does not move. The righteousness is not our own and not from the law; it is from God, in Christ, and faith is the hand that receives it (Ap IV). That is why this verse is quoted here from the ESV.

This is the heart of the gospel, and it is the heart of Lutheran theology. We do not stand before God in our own righteousness. We stand in the righteousness of Christ, which has been given to us as a gift, received by faith alone. The righteousness is not ours by production. It is ours by gift. It is not in us by nature. It is upon us by imputation. It is not earned by any work of ours. It is granted by the work of Another. And it is given freely, not because of anything we have done, but because of Christ.

The Augsburg Confession states it with characteristic clarity in Article IV. In substance it confesses that human beings cannot be justified before God by their own strength, merits, or works, but are justified freely on account of Christ through faith, when they believe that they are received into favor and that their sins are forgiven for Christ’s sake, who by His death made satisfaction for our sins; and this faith God reckons as righteousness in His sight (AC IV). Article IV is Philippians 3:9 in confessional form. Luther’s own breakthrough came through Romans 1:17, but the righteousness he found there is the righteousness Paul describes here.

What Luther saw, in his agonized reading of Romans and Galatians and Philippians, was the truth Paul is telling here in his own person. The Pharisee who had every credential of human righteousness could not be saved by them. He could only be saved by being given a righteousness he did not earn, a righteousness from God, received through faith. And what was true of Paul is true of every sinner. The credentials that make a man proud in his religion are the very things he must let go of in order to be saved. We are saved not by adding Christ to our portfolio. We are saved by giving up the portfolio.

That I May Know Him

The passage does not end with the doctrine of justification. The doctrine is the foundation; what follows is the building. My aim is to know him, Paul continues, to experience the power of his resurrection, to share in his sufferings, and to be like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.

What Paul wants is not a status. What he wants is a Person. The righteousness from God has been given to him; that is settled. What is now in view is the ongoing knowing, the continuing relation, the daily walk. My aim is to know him. The verb know, gnōnai, is the same root as the gnōsis of verse 8. To gain the righteousness from God is to gain the One whose righteousness it is. And to gain Him is to enter into the long work of knowing Him.

Paul names three aspects of this knowing. The power of his resurrection. To share in his sufferings. To be like him in his death. The three are not separable. The same Christ who was raised was first crucified; the same Lord who lives is the Lord who suffered. To know one aspect of Him is to know the other. To share in His resurrection is to be conformed to His death.

To experience the power of his resurrection. The same power that raised Jesus from the tomb is at work in the believer who has been baptized into Him. We have already begun to share in that resurrection life. We will share in it more fully when our bodies are raised on the day of Christ. And in the meantime, we walk in newness of life, not because we are stronger than we used to be, but because the same power that opened the tomb is at work in the people who have been opened to Christ.

To share in his sufferings. The word behind share is koinōnia again, the participation of 1:5, the great word of this letter. Paul wants a share in Christ’s sufferings. He wants to be conformed to the One who suffered. This is not morbid spirituality. This is the gospel as Paul has lived it. To follow Christ is to be conformed to Him, and Christ was the One who emptied Himself and was obedient to death. Those who belong to Him are conformed to that pattern, not by their own choice, but by the work of the Spirit in their lives. Paul has been beaten, imprisoned, hated, and abandoned. He counts all of it as sharing in Christ’s sufferings. It is part of how he is being made like Christ.

To be like him in his death. The word behind to be like, symmorphizomenos, picks up the morphē language of the Christ Hymn. The mind of Christ takes shape in the believer through conformity to His death. We are dying daily, Paul will say elsewhere: dying to our old self, dying to our old confidences, dying to the world. And in that dying, we are being shaped, slowly, into His likeness.

And so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead. The word somehow, ei pōs (literally if somehow), is striking. Paul is not presumptuous about his final destiny. He is confident of Christ but not casual about himself. He wants to attain to the resurrection from the dead: the final resurrection on the day of Christ, when all who belong to Him will be raised in glorified bodies. And he is willing, if it must come to it, to attain it by whatever road God brings him there. Through chains. Through more sufferings. Through martyrdom, if that is what is required. He is, in other words, all in. The righteousness he has received commits him to a life of total devotion to the One who gave it.

This is what justified life looks like. It is not the static possession of a doctrinal proposition. It is the dynamic running of a race, the daily knowing of a Person, the steady conformity to a death, the eager pressing toward a resurrection. The doctrine of justification produces a life, and the life Paul describes here is the life it produces: a life with its eyes fixed on Christ, its confidence wholly in Him, its hope wholly in His resurrection, and its endurance wholly given over to His glory.

Gathering the Threads

Philippians 3:1–11 is the Pauline center of this letter, and arguably the autobiographical heart of the doctrine of justification by faith in all of Paul. The passage moves from a sharp warning against false teachers, through an extraordinary list of Paul’s own Pharisaic credentials, to the great reversal in which everything is counted as loss for the surpassing worth of knowing Christ, and on to the active life of knowing Him in the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings.

The Lutheran theology of justification is fully present, in the very words that helped Luther see the gospel afresh. The righteousness that justifies is not a righteousness of my own that comes from the law; it is the righteousness from God that depends on faith (Phil 3:9 ESV). The Christian’s standing before God is not built on his pedigree, his learning, his zeal, or his moral attainment. It is given to him on the basis of Christ alone, received through faith alone. Paul, who had every credential the world could offer, threw them all out the back door for the sake of the One who had met him on the Damascus road. And what he received in their place (the righteousness from God, on the basis of Christ, through faith) is what every Christian receives at baptism and walks in by faith every day until the day of Christ.

The doctrine of sola fide is not an abstract proposition for Paul. It is the gospel as a confession of personal failure and personal rescue. I had every advantage, Paul effectively says. I built every credential. I was the man at the top of the religious ladder. And it would not have saved me. Only Christ saved me. And what Paul has, he now holds by faith, because faith is the only hand that can receive a gift this large. The Reformation reclaimed this confession against every system that wanted to make salvation a cooperation between Christ and the sinner’s merits. The gospel admits no cooperation in the question of justification. The gospel says Christ alone, grace alone, faith alone. Paul says it here in his own person.

And the gospel produces a life, which this passage also names. The justified man is not a passive holder of a status. He is an active runner after Christ. He wants to know Him, to share His sufferings, to be conformed to His death, to attain His resurrection. He is, in other words, all in. The same chapter that gives us the clearest statement of justification by faith gives us the most strenuous statement of what justified life looks like. The two go together. The gospel that frees us from earning our salvation does not free us from caring about it. It frees us, rather, to give ourselves entirely to the One who has given Himself entirely to us.

This is the Pauline gospel. This is the Lutheran gospel. And by God’s grace, this is the gospel that is ours, in Christ.

For Discussion

This session takes us to the theological heart of Paul’s letter and to the heart of the Lutheran confession. The questions below invite you to let Paul’s accounting sharpen your own: to see what you have been counting as gain, what would have to be counted as loss, and what it means to live in the righteousness that comes from God through faith.

1. Paul triple-warns the Philippians to beware of the dogs, the evil workers, and those who mutilate the flesh. Strong language. What do you think it was about these false teachers that drew such a strong reaction from Paul? Where today do you see versions of Christ-plus-something-else trying to pass themselves off as the gospel, and how would Paul speak to them?

2. The true circumcision, Paul says, is marked by three things: worship by the Spirit, exulting in Christ, and refusing to rely on human credentials (literally, no confidence in the flesh). Which of these three is hardest for you, and why? Where in your own life are you most tempted to put confidence in the flesh rather than in Christ?

3. Paul’s seven-item portfolio of Pharisaic credentials is one of the most carefully constructed lists in the New Testament. If you had to write your own portfolio (the things that, by the standards of your own world, would count as your credentials), what would be on the list? What would it cost you to count those things as loss for the sake of Christ?

4. Paul says he regards all things as liabilities compared to the far greater value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. How do you understand the relation between gaining Christ and losing other things? When the gospel asks us to count something as loss, what does it give us in its place?

5. Not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, Paul writes, but that which comes through faith in Christ (Phil 3:9 ESV). Luther returned to this verse again and again. How does the distinction between my own righteousness and the righteousness from God shape the way you face God, the way you face yourself, and the way you face other people?

6. The passage ends not with a settled status but with a strenuous running: My aim is to know him, to share in His sufferings, to attain to the resurrection. How does the doctrine of justification by faith, far from producing passivity, produce in Paul the most active life imaginable? What does that active life look like for you?

Looking Ahead

In Session 6 we continue in Philippians 3, following Paul as he moves from the great reversal of justification to the great forward motion of the Christian life. He will say that he has not already attained this, that he forgets the things that are behind and reaches out for the things that are ahead, that I strive toward the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. He will warn against those of whom he must say their god is the belly and their end is destruction, and he will name the Christian’s identity in a phrase that will give Session 6 its title: our citizenship is in heaven.

Read Philippians 3:12–4:1 before our next session.

Closing Prayer

Lord Jesus Christ, who met Paul on the Damascus road and turned all his gains into losses for the sake of Your surpassing worth, meet us where we are tempted to put confidence in our own flesh (in our pedigrees, our learning, our zeal, our accomplishments), and teach us, again and again, to count it all as loss for the sake of knowing You. Clothe us in the righteousness that comes from God by faith, not in any righteousness of our own. Conform us to Your death, that we may know also the power of Your resurrection. And bring us, by whatever road You choose, to the day when the surpassing worth of Your presence will fill all things. To the praise of Your name, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.