Righteousness That Is Not My Own

Philippians is a warm letter, and the warmth makes the opening of chapter three jarring. After telling the church to rejoice in the Lord, Paul turns and says: watch out for those dogs, those evildoers, those mutilators of the flesh. Three sharp phrases, each one deliberately turning an insult back on the people who would have used it. Jews sometimes called Gentiles dogs; Paul applies the word to Jewish teachers who were troubling Gentile churches. They thought of themselves as doers of the law; Paul calls them evildoers. They prized circumcision; Paul calls it mutilation when it is required as a condition of belonging to Christ. This is not a loss of temper. It is a pastor who has watched this teaching do damage elsewhere and refuses to be polite about it.

Then comes the counter-claim. It is we who are the circumcision, Paul says, we who serve God by his Spirit, who boast in Christ Jesus, and who put no confidence in the flesh. The true mark of belonging to God's people is no longer a physical sign but the presence of the Spirit and a boast that rests in Christ alone. Paul is drawing on the prophets here, on the promise of a circumcised heart in Deuteronomy 30:6 and Jeremiah's talk of a new covenant. The old sign pointed forward to something. That something has arrived.

Paul then does something unusual. He argues from his own biography. If anyone could trust in the flesh, he could, and he proves it with a list that would have impressed any first-century Jew. Circumcised on the eighth day, exactly as the law required, so not a convert but born into the covenant. Of the people of Israel. Of the tribe of Benjamin, the tribe that gave Israel its first king and stayed loyal to Judah when the kingdom split. A Hebrew of Hebrews, meaning Aramaic-speaking and Torah-shaped, not a Hellenized Jew of the diaspora. In regard to the law, a Pharisee, the strictest and most serious school. As for zeal, persecuting the church, which in the logic of his old life was the highest expression of devotion to God. As for righteousness based on the law, faultless.

That last word deserves attention. Paul does not say he was secretly miserable under the law, or that he failed at it and felt the weight of his failure. He says he was blameless. By the measure he was using, he passed. Some readers assume Paul's conversion was the relief of a guilty conscience. The text points elsewhere. Paul was a successful religious man, and success was the problem. Nothing in his list was wrong in itself. Every item was a gift or a genuine achievement. The trouble was where he had put his weight.

Verse seven marks the turn. Whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. The language is from accounting. Paul had a ledger, and everything in it was in the credit column. Then he met Christ on the road to Damascus, and the entire column moved to the other side. Not because the items changed but because the comparison did. He says it more strongly in verse eight: he considers everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus his Lord. For Christ's sake he has lost all things, and he considers them garbage. The Greek word is coarse. It refers to what is thrown to the dogs, the scraps and refuse. Paul, who was just called the false teachers dogs, now says his own credentials are dog food by comparison with Christ.

Why such violence of language about good things? Because of what they threatened to replace. Paul's goal, stated in verse nine, is to gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of his own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith. Two righteousnesses are in view. One is his own, built by observance, and it is real in its way; he really was faultless by that standard. The other comes from God and is received by faith. The two cannot be combined. To have a righteousness of your own is to not need the other one. To receive the other one is to admit your own was never enough. Paul chose, and he says the choice was no contest.

Notice the phrase found in him. It is the language of a final examination, of standing before a judge. On that day, Paul wants to be discovered inside Christ, wrapped in a righteousness that is Christ's rather than his own. This is the heart of what the Reformation would later call justification by faith alone. Not that faith is a work we do to earn righteousness, but that faith is the open hand that receives what God gives. The believer is counted righteous because of Christ, and that counting is not a legal fiction but a real transfer, the way a debt paid by another is really paid.

But Paul does not stop at the courtroom. Verse ten moves into something more intimate. I want to know Christ, yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death. Knowing here is not information. It is the knowledge of a person, the kind that grows through shared experience. And the shape of that experience is the shape of Christ's own life: power and suffering, resurrection and death, held together. Paul does not expect one without the other. The power of the resurrection is not a way to avoid suffering; it is what makes suffering bearable and fruitful. Participation in Christ's sufferings is not a punishment; it is a place where Christ is met.

Verse eleven closes the section with a phrase that has puzzled readers: and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead. The somehow is not doubt about the outcome. Paul is certain of resurrection elsewhere in his letters. It is humility about the road. He does not know what path will take him there, whether release or execution, long ministry or sudden death. He knows only that the road runs through Christ, and that the end of it is life.

Step back and the passage comes into focus. It warns against a religion of credentials, which is always a live temptation for people who are serious about God. It offers a righteousness that is received rather than built. And it sets the Christian life's ambition not at achievement but at knowing a person, in both his power and his pain. Paul's list of losses is a mirror. Every serious believer has a version of it, and every version can become a place to stand instead of Christ.

For reflection. What credentials, inherited or earned, do you quietly rely on when you imagine standing before God? Where in your life has success, rather than failure, kept you from depending on Christ? And what would it mean this summer to want to know him in both the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings, rather than only one of the two?