Philippians 3: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Paul warns the Philippians about people who push circumcision, then lists his own Jewish credentials and says he counts them all as loss compared to knowing Christ. He describes himself as still pressing on toward the resurrection and the prize, not as someone who has already arrived, and he asks his readers to follow his example. He warns, in tears, about many who live as enemies of the cross of Christ, and sets against them believers whose citizenship is in heaven and who wait for the Savior to change their lowly bodies.

Claim by Claim

1. 3:1
   • Paul addresses the recipients as his brothers.
   • He tells them to rejoice in the Lord.
   • Writing the same things to them is not troublesome for him.
   • Writing the same things to them is a safeguard for them.
2. 3:2
   • He tells them to watch out for the dogs.
   • He tells them to watch out for the evil workers.
   • He tells them to watch out for the mutilation, that is, those who cut the flesh.
3. 3:3
   • We are the circumcision.
   • We are those who worship by the Spirit of God.
   • We are those who boast in Christ Jesus.
   • We are those who place no confidence in the flesh.
4. 3:4
   • Paul himself has grounds for confidence in the flesh.
   • If any other person thinks he has grounds for confidence in the flesh, Paul has more.
5. 3:5
   • Paul was circumcised on the eighth day.
   • Paul is of the race of Israel.
   • Paul is of the tribe of Benjamin.
   • Paul is a Hebrew born of Hebrews.
   • As to the law, Paul was a Pharisee.
6. 3:6
   • As to zeal, Paul was a persecutor of the church.
   • As to the righteousness that is in the law, Paul was blameless.
7. 3:7
   • Certain things were gain to Paul.
   • Paul has counted those things as loss for the sake of Christ.
8. 3:8
   • Paul counts all things to be loss.
   • The reason is the surpassing worth of the knowledge of Christ Jesus.
   • Christ Jesus is Paul's Lord.
   • For the sake of Christ Paul has lost all things.
   • Paul counts those things as refuse.
   • Paul's purpose is to gain Christ.
9. 3:9
   • Paul's purpose is to be found in Christ.
   • Paul does not have a righteousness of his own that comes from the law.
   • Paul has the righteousness that comes through faith of Christ.
   • Whether this means faith in Christ or Christ's own faithfulness is left unresolved.
   • That righteousness is from God and rests on faith.
10. 3:10
    • Paul's purpose is to know Christ.
    • Paul's purpose is to know the power of Christ's resurrection.
    • Paul's purpose is to know the fellowship of Christ's sufferings.
    • Paul is being conformed to Christ's death.
11. 3:11
    • Paul hopes that by some means he may attain to the resurrection from the dead.
12. 3:12
    • Paul has not already obtained it.
    • Paul has not already been made perfect.
    • Paul pursues it in order to lay hold of it.
    • Christ Jesus laid hold of Paul.
    • What Paul pursues is that for which Christ Jesus laid hold of him.
13. 3:13
    • Paul addresses the recipients as brothers.
    • Paul does not count himself to have laid hold of it yet.
    • There is one thing Paul does.
    • Paul forgets the things that are behind.
    • Paul reaches forward to the things that are ahead.
14. 3:14
    • Paul presses toward the mark.
    • He presses for the prize of the upward calling of God in Christ Jesus.
15. 3:15
    • As many as are mature should be minded in this way.
    • If they are otherwise minded in anything, God will reveal even this to them.
16. 3:16
    • We have already attained to a certain point.
    • In what we have attained, we should walk by the same rule.
    • We should mind the same thing.
17. 3:17
    • Paul tells the brothers to join together in imitating him.
    • He tells them to observe those who walk according to the pattern they have in Paul and his companions.
18. 3:18
    • Many people walk as enemies of the cross of Christ.
    • Paul has often told them about these people.
    • Paul now tells them about these people while weeping.
19. 3:19
    • The end of such people is destruction.
    • Their god is their belly.
    • Their glory is in their shame.
    • They set their minds on earthly things.
20. 3:20
    • Our citizenship is in heaven.
    • From heaven we eagerly await a Savior.
    • That Savior is the Lord Jesus Christ.
21. 3:21
    • He will transform the body of our lowliness.
    • He will make it conformed to the body of his glory.
    • He does this according to the working of his power.
    • He is able to subject all things to himself.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

3:1

"Finally" translates a Greek phrase that means something more like "and so" or "as for the rest." It signals a turn in the letter rather than its ending, which is why the letter continues for two more chapters. The Greek word for "rejoice" was also an ordinary word of greeting and farewell, so it carries a shade of "and so, my brothers and sisters, farewell in the Lord" alongside its plain sense of "be glad." "Brethren" addresses the whole congregation, women included.

3:2

"Dogs" is an insult, not a description. In the ancient Mediterranean dogs were scavenging street animals, not pets, and Jewish writers sometimes used the word for outsiders who were ritually unclean. Paul turns the insult around on people inside the argument. "The concision" is a play on words that English cannot easily carry: the Greek for circumcision is *peritome*, a cutting around, and Paul substitutes *katatome*, a cutting up, the word used for the gashes pagan worshipers cut in their own skin. He is saying that those insisting gentile believers be circumcised are not performing the covenant sign at all, only mutilating flesh.

3:3

"The circumcision" was a standard way of naming the Jewish people as a whole, the way one might say "the baptized." Paul takes the label and applies it to those who trust Christ. "The flesh" here does not mean the body or sexual appetite; it means human credentials, birth, ancestry and religious pedigree, everything a person can point to in himself. That is the sense it carries through the next several verses.

3:5

Jewish law required a boy to be circumcised on the eighth day after birth. Saying so marks Paul as born into the covenant rather than a convert who joined as an adult, and distinguishes him from Ishmaelites, who were circumcised at thirteen. Benjamin was the tribe that produced Israel's first king and stayed loyal to the house of David, so it carried prestige. "An Hebrew of the Hebrews" most likely means his family kept the Hebrew and Aramaic language and Jewish customs rather than assimilating to Greek ways, though it may simply mean full Hebrew ancestry on both sides. Pharisees were a strict party committed to exact observance of the written law and the oral traditions that interpreted it; membership signaled serious religious discipline, not hypocrisy.

3:6

"Zeal" was a technical term of honor in Jewish tradition, naming the fierce loyalty that took violent action to defend the law against those corrupting it. Paul is listing this as a qualification, not a confession. "Blameless" does not claim sinlessness; it means that measured by the law's own standard, including its provisions for making things right when he failed, no charge would stick against him.

3:7

"Gain" and "loss" are bookkeeping words, the terms of a merchant's ledger. Paul is describing the credit column of his life being moved over into the debit column.

3:8

The word behind "dung" is deliberately coarse. It covers table scraps, refuse, and human excrement, and translators have split for centuries over how blunt to make it. "Garbage" is on the mild end of its range.

3:9

"Righteousness" means being in the right, standing acquitted, the verdict of a court as much as a quality of character. The phrase the King James renders "the faith of Christ" is genuinely ambiguous in Greek and has been argued over for a long time: it can mean faith placed in Christ, or Christ's own faithfulness. Both readings are grammatically open, and the rendering chooses one of them.

3:10

"Fellowship" translates a word meaning a shared stake or partnership, the term used for business partners and for members of a common enterprise. It is stronger than companionship.

3:11

Resurrection in this context means the raising of the dead to bodily life at the end of the age, an expectation Pharisees held and some other Jewish groups denied. It is not a term for the soul surviving death. The word Paul uses here is an unusual compound, roughly "the out-resurrection from among the dead."

3:12

"Perfect" in 1611 English meant finished, complete, brought to its intended end, not morally flawless. "Apprehend" and "apprehended" translate the same Greek verb, meaning to seize or grab hold of, which is why the sentence turns back on itself: Paul is trying to lay hold of the thing that already laid hold of him.

3:13

The image is an athlete in a footrace: the runner who glances back at the ground already covered loses ground, so the whole body is thrown forward toward what is still to come.

3:14

The image is a footrace. The "mark" is the marker at the end of the course that a runner fixes his eyes on, and the "prize" is the wreath handed to the winner at the games. "The high calling" is ambiguous in Greek: it can mean the summons that comes from above, or the summons that calls a person upward, and the two senses were not sharply separated.

3:15

"Perfect" here renders the same word Paul just denied of himself in verse 12. Used of people it commonly meant grown up or mature, as opposed to a child, and the shift of sense is deliberate: those who are mature are precisely the ones who know they are not finished.

3:16

"Rule" translates a word meaning a measuring rod or a surveyor's line, hence a fixed standard to keep straight against. The oldest surviving manuscripts of this verse are shorter, reading only something like "let us hold to what we have attained"; the clauses about walking by the same rule and minding the same thing appear in later copies, which is what the King James translators had in front of them.

3:17

Imitating a teacher's manner of life was an ordinary and respected part of ancient moral instruction, not a claim to be above criticism. The Greek word translated "followers together" is a compound meaning fellow imitators, that is, imitate alongside one another, not each on his own. "Ensample" is simply the older form of "example," here in the sense of a pattern or a die stamp that others are formed by.

3:18

The cross was not a symbol in Paul's day but a method of public execution, used by Rome on slaves, rebels and the lowest criminals, and designed to shame the victim as much as to kill him. To be an "enemy of the cross" is to refuse the humiliation attached to it.

3:19

"Belly" translates a word covering the stomach and the gut generally. It may point to appetite and self-indulgence, or to a preoccupation with food laws, and readers have taken it both ways. "Whose glory is in their shame" is equally open: it may mean they boast in conduct that ought to disgrace them, or, since the Greek word for shame could be a decent way of referring to the genitals, it may be another jab at those who take pride in circumcision. The rendering picks one reading of a line that will not settle.

3:20

"Conversation" in 1611 English did not mean talk; it meant a person's whole manner of life and public conduct. The Greek word underneath it is a political term, meaning a citizen body or a colony's home constitution, and it landed hard in Philippi: the city was a Roman colony whose residents held Roman citizenship and lived under Roman law hundreds of miles from Rome, proud of belonging to a capital most of them would never see.

3:21

"Vile" in 1611 English meant lowly, of little worth or humble in station, not disgusting or morally foul. The Greek says a body of humiliation, meaning one subject to weakness, decay and death. "Fashioned like unto" translates a word meaning to share the same form, the same root Paul used in verse 10 for being shaped to Christ's death.