put away the gods which your fathers served beyond the River, and in Egypt, and serve the LORD.”
This praise-making in idolatry, which Moses and later Joshua strove against, Israel leaned on, a secondary trust formation undermining the LORD’s word.
For the Exodus, the LORD revealed his name—at that time, in that manner—as the I AM THAT I AM. Exod 6:2–3, “And God said to Moses, ‘I am the LORD. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty, but by my name the LORD I did not make myself known to them.” Not with Adam, Noah, and Abraham had he revealed himself in glory and majesty as with the Exodus, thereby demonstrating his power of salvation; he willed forever a people for himself.
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Since that time and to this day, forcefully, the LORD took his people out of the world. In the easygoing decay of Western civilization, struggling gods strive for mastery: Hindu atavars, the Buddha, one Allah, Mother Earth, even as Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Science, social conservatism, etc. This Western civilization consists now of a seething mass of religiosity, a rising and falling of decadent powers, the known and familiar home territory. Herein all face voluminous problems: the care of the earth, hatred of war, brokenness of tribalism, loneliness of individualism, covetousness of human rights, etc. Into this globally wide brokenness, worlds in which all except the Church seek comfortableness, masses of humanity sink away. The temptations of Roman Catholicism, the fears of Islam, the horrors of Nazism, the appeals of secularism, and looming shadows of Chinese communism fight each other for international control, grinding nations into dust. All sense deep down the chaos of dissolution in the known world. All, unhappy spirits, within these grim confines care only for survival of the fittest.
However, against all ideological pressures at conformity and accommodation, in fact, against all pains at being different, Christ Jesus reveals that his Church, though in the world, is never of the world. This Israel learned. This the New Israel still learns—the hard way. At one time the LORD Almighty in an entirely eschatological revelation demonstrated the majesty of his glory, wherein the redemption of his people, to the nervous astonishment of surrounding nations and empires.
Living generations of the Church, genealogical roots deep in the Old Testament, back to Abraham, moving through the Exodus, experiencing the resistance to the Word, headed forwards through the history of the Cross and the Resurrection, in every place and age to found finally a culture and a civilization conformable to the praise of Christ Jesus.
3–4
Phil 3:1–21 (17–21)
“Brethren, join in imitating me, and mark those who so live as you have an example in us. For many of whom I have often told you and now tell you even with tears, live as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their end is destruction, their god is the belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things. But our commonwealth is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power which enables him even to subject all things to himself.”
IN THE WORLD/NOT OF THE WORLD
A TIME-AND-ETERNITY PARADOX
New generations look into the perplexity of this paradox: Living in the world without essentially belonging to this world. For, post-Pentecost, the Lord Jesus placed believers on notice: as forebears of coming generations, they too lived simultaneously in-the-time-and-the-eternity tensions of the Commonwealth—politeuma—that created community in which grace enlivened all. New Testament documents, the Pauline specifically, revealed a marvelous level of access to this constantly intriguing paradox, and not only for the younger in Christ.
To honor these time-eternity tensions: In the world concentrated in and about Philippi, Romans, Hellenists, and Pharisees squeezed the newborn congregations seven days per week into assimilation with the then relevant religiosities. Constrictions pressed, or attempted to press, congregations of Christ into drab modes of accommodation and conformity, hereby to assume overarching control. However, the Lord of heaven and earth vindicated his rule, the Commonwealth, the community active in the Kingdom within which the epicentric Church. Since the Church represents the Commonwealth’s heart, her members inhabit both time and eternity beginning, then, in the first European congregation, Acts 16:11–15, Paul with companions exhorted Christ believers in Philippi to live in the new creation, the Commonwealth.
BELIEVERS ALIVE TO ADVERSITY
Paul, salutary, addressed all saints in Christ Jesus at Philippi. With the confirmatory “brethren” designation he reinforced this communal bond with its time-eternity tensions to live beyond covetous rotes or exuberant rites to please impossible gods. For a commissioned man of the Lord, the Apostle willed believers to imitate him, 1 Cor 11:1, even in the face of dire adversity generated by moving about in adversarial modes of existence. Paul insisted upon this imitation—that is, commitment in faithfulness to the Lord Jesus—because of explosive signs visibly creeping into the congregation; these idolatrous forces required the believers communally to assert the ground rules and boundary markers of the Faith.
The Exemplary Way
Paul lived intensely, more so after his conversion; with recreated conduct of heart, soul, intelligence, and body the Lord committed him irreversibly to serve in the Church and in the Kingdom. Striving pastorally with an eye on the maturing Philippian congregation, her wholeness, Phil 2:1–10, 2:12–18, and her total Christ-centeredness, the Apostle summoned the believers to honor with him the covenant promises, dedicating life, food, and space to Jesus, and obedience according to the Commandments, thankfulness with the same tireless dynamics as he, the Apostle, served. Speaking authoritatively, as apostle, Paul called the entire liberated Philippian congregation, free as fellow imitators, to implement Christ Jesus’s humility. Phil 2:5–7,
Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.
In that exemplary humbleness the Lord Jesus lived prophetically, looking to the Resurrection, even beyond; throughout his life preparatory to the Crucifixion, the Lord and Savior endorsed for his own primarily the first covenant promise, the resurrection life. Paul, too imitating the Lord and Savior, lived prophetically; from out of his central core he strove for entry into the Commonwealth’s totality. Simultaneously, the Apostle intended that all believers at Philippi follow him. Both the emphatic “brethren” and the imitation summons served to motivate everyone actually in Christ to pursue from the heart the Christian tradition of grateful living—the gratitude flowing out of salvation. From that workable beginning the Apostle called the living members of the Philippian congregation to acknowledge unity in mind and love, producing predictive evidence of salvation, thereby with him setting the eschatological pace.
Forcefully, then, Paul incited the Church at Philippi to copy the example, which he, Timothy, Phil 2:19–24, and Epaphroditus, Phil 2:25–30, placed before them, to replicate the thankful response to the Gospel as intensively. Therefore, the exhortatory, “. . . mark those who so live as you have an example in us.” With supportive companions Paul willed the entire Philippian congregation to duplicate them in Christian believing and living.
The Militant Way
Paul, for the commanded emulation cited two rivals, anti-Gospel forces, both endangering that congregation.
First: Approximately four hundred years earlier the Church—returning post-exilic to Jerusalem—consciously slipped away from the gratitude of the Return and the covenant promises the LORD God thereby reinitiated.
