NOTES for Php 3:1-8
The apostle Paul very often warns his readers against the temptation of a legalistic relationship with God. He devotes today’s passage from the Epistle to the Philippians to this problem, which was perhaps even more pressing in his time than in ours. He says that only Christ’s disciples, who worship God in spirit and place no confidence in the achievements of the flesh, truly fulfill the law. He says that he himself possesses every advantage of a zealot for the law and that, according to the righteousness of the law, he is blameless. Yet he counts all this as nothing, because he himself prefers—and calls us—to boast in one thing alone: that Jesus Christ gave His life for us. Indeed, what else can be set against all the horror that we perpetrate?