The Expositor's Bible: The Epistle to the PhilippiansRainy, Robert
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The Epistle to the Philippians
Rainy, Robert
Bible. Philippians -- Commentaries
This familiar life, then, is the scene; it alone can furnish the
opportunities. And yet what the Apostle apprehends, as coming into
possession and experience, is a life of a higher style, a life set on a
nobler key: it is a life that has its centre and source and true type
elsewhere; it belongs to a higher region; indeed, it is a life whose
perfect play pertains to another, coming world. Capacity for such a life
is not something superhuman; it is congenital to man, made in the image
of God. And yet, if these capacities unfold, man's life must, in the
end, become other than we know it now; with a new proportioning of
elements, with a new order of experience, with new harmonies, with
aptitudes for love and service and worship that are beyond us now. Only
now, they begin and grow; they are now to be aimed at, and realised in
earnest and firstfruit, and embraced in hope. For they are elements in
the knowledge of Christ, who is ours to know.
This is indicated in the Apostle's aspiration after knowing Christ in
the power of His resurrection, and his yearning if by any means he might
attain to the resurrection of the dead.
The resurrection of Christ marked the acceptance of His work by the
Father, and revealed the triumph in which that work ended. Death and all
the power of the enemy were overcome, and victory was attained. For one
thing, the resurrection of Christ made sure the righteousness of faith.
He rose again for our justification. So every passage of the Apostle's
life which proved that his confidence in that respect was not vain, that
God in Christ was truly his God, was an experience of the power of
Christ's resurrection. But the resurrection of Christ was also His
emergence--His _due_ emergence--into the power and blessedness of
victorious life. In the Person of Christ life in God, and unto God, had
descended into the hard conditions set for Him who would associate a
world of sinners to Himself. In the resurrection the triumph of that
enterprise came to light. Now, done with sin, and free from death, and
asserting His superiority to all humiliation and all conflict, He rose
in the fulness of a power which He was entitled also to communicate. He
rose, with full right and power to save. And so His resurrection denotes
Christ as able to inspire life, and to make it victorious in His
members.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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