A Spiritual Dead End #1

Paul had followed Hebrew customs. He spoke the Hebrew language. Everything that a Jew could aspire after, in other words, Paul had done it. Paul was that. You cannot be more perfectly Jewish than Paul was. Following the rules to the letter and living a super religious life. That's a sure way to curry God's favor, right?

No. Hello, I'm Bill Wright and thanks for joining us on the Truth Pulpit with Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Today, as Don continues in his series called That I May Gain Christ, he takes a biblical look at the misguided idea that man is somehow able to earn his place in heaven.

Here's our teacher with part one of A Spiritual Dead End here on the Truth Pulpit. Philippians chapter three, verses four through seven, and it's the counterpart in some ways to the introductory theme of forgiveness. This forgiveness, you might say, and here's a way to help the transition, this forgiveness that we have in Christ is not received through self-effort. It is not received through self-righteousness. Salvation, as Steve Lawson says, and I'll paraphrase him, salvation is not a reward for the righteous.

It is a gift to the guilty. And if you can understand that, then you can go far in understanding the nature of true Christianity. We do not earn this marvelous position in Christ through what we do. And the Apostle Paul is going to make that clear in the passages that we're studying over the next three times that will be in Philippians. So we're looking at verses four through seven. This is a testimony of Paul concerning his life before Christ and the kind of man that he was. He said in chapter three, verses four through seven, he says this, although I myself might have confidence even in the flesh, if anyone else has a mind to put confidence in the flesh, I far more circumcise the eighth day of the nation of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, as to the law, a Pharisee, as to zeal, a persecutor of the church, as to the righteousness which is in the law found blameless.

But whatever things were gained to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Now, we looked at those first three verses and saw that there was a contrast between false and true religion. In verse two, Paul said, beware of the dogs, beware of the evil workers, beware of the false circumcision. And we saw that there is a warning there against ungodly, immoral men. There is a warning against trying to earn salvation through self-righteousness.

And there is a warning against pursuing a religion that is based on religious ritual. Those are all marks of a false gospel. And by contrast, we saw in verse three, the true gospel is spiritual in nature. Paul says we are the true circumcision who worship in the spirit of God. There is an indispensable inner dynamic to salvation. We worship from the heart, not simply in our outer flesh. And this is grounded in Christ alone. Paul says we glory in Christ Jesus and we put no confidence in the flesh. In other words, we have no confidence in self-righteousness whatsoever. We understand that we do not contribute one iota, one ounce of righteousness to our salvation, that even the faith by which we receive Christ is a gift from God.

And so it's just so vital for us to understand these things. Now, what Paul is doing here in verses four through seven, he is building on, he is illustrating how important it is to put no confidence whatsoever in the flesh, in other words, in your own self-righteousness, no matter how good a person you might think that you are. And Paul takes this concept of confidence in the flesh and says, if you want to talk about somebody who could have earned it by self-righteousness, I was that guy, Paul says. And he goes on and he explains his background in Judaism that would have qualified him by the standards of the false teachers for salvation if what they were saying was true.

So there's a little bit of a counterfactual going on here. And we're going to get into the text in just a moment. What I want to do, first of all, is to remind you of a fairly familiar, I think, Old Testament passage, the prophecy of Isaiah chapter 64. Isaiah chapter 64. And this famous text is going to kind of clear the path, the pathway for us for the things that we have to say.

And, you know, for some, you know, perhaps even a few of you in the audience, for some, this is going to be very offensive to you. Men do not like to hear the assessment of God on their self-righteousness. But we need to hear what the Word of God says and let it speak for itself and submit to the Word rather than trusting in our own heart and our own righteousness. We are beggars at the table of God. We are ignorant knaves at the schoolroom of God. We need God's Word to teach us so that we would know the truth. And what is the truth about the nature of ourselves and the nature of our so-called righteousness?

Well, Isaiah makes a statement for all time for us to take to heart. Isaiah 64 verse 6 says this, For all of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment, and all of us wither like a leaf, and our iniquities like the wind take us away. Everything righteous about us is what we think is righteous, even the best of our righteousness, filthy garment.

I'm going to talk about that in just a moment. What is our sin like, our iniquities, and what are we like? Well, we're shriveled up, old, dry, brittle leaves that blow away with the wind, and our sins are blowing us away. We are under the power and under the force of sin in a way that we have no control over and that we have no ability to change. Now, that phrase filthy garment there in the Hebrew could literally be translated a garment of times. You know, this is somewhat graphic, but it's the picture that the inspired writer of Scripture chose to use. The commentator Edward Young says this about that phrase, filthy garment, and I apologize.

Well, no, I'm not going to apologize. This is just what Scripture teaches us, and it's important for us to receive it on its own terms and not soften the edges of it. Young, who is a famous commentator and was a great scholar, said this. He says filthy garment refers to the menstrual periods of a woman. It stresses the character of sin as pollution and points to its disgusting nature. The righteous works that the people could present before God were even in their own eyes as disgusting and filthy as the menstrual cloths of women.

When one loathes his own works, as did these Jews, there is hope that he will turn to the pure righteousness that God imputes to those who believe in Jesus, end quote. And so that graphic picture that repels us, that is repulsive to us to contemplate, we must come to grips with the fact that Scripture is saying that the best of our righteousness is that repulsive in the sight of God. The best that we are, the highest form that we can obtain to, apart from Christ, is that kind of filthy condition that simply needs to be thrown away. There is nothing redeemable about it. And so that's the picture that Scripture gives to us of our own righteousness, our best righteousness.

Let me say this in the second person to you. Your best, your best righteousness is unclean and unworthy of a holy and righteous God. We do not measure up to the holiness of God, and we never can and we never will. And so it is in that context that we can understand the significance of what Paul is saying. We're going to look at it in more detail, but Paul is listing out this impressive list of Jewish credentials that would have placed him at the head of the class in Judaism. And what he is saying is that the best that anyone could achieve in Judaism, I've done it, and I'm here to tell you it's nothing more than a filthy garment in comparison to the holiness of Christ. And so with that background, remembering that Paul had just warned the church against the influence of these Judaizers who were coming in and insisting on circumcision as necessary for salvation, Paul meets them at their own point of assertion and refutes it and rejects it as having any possible contribution to the salvation of man. And so Paul is pointing us in this text to his own Jewish background as proof for his position.

Look at verse four with me. He says, although I myself might have confidence even in the flesh. You want to talk about self-righteousness?

I'll engage you on that ground, because if anybody was going to have confidence in the flesh, it would be me. Now, what he's doing here, understand the understand the literary approach that he's using and the method of argumentation that he's using. He is assuming for a moment the truthfulness of the Jewish argument that Jewish rituals are necessary for salvation. He is assuming the point of their argument simply for the sake of refuting it. He says, I'll meet you on your terms and I'll show you why you were wrong.

I'll show you why that could never be the case. And so he's looking at his life prior to his conversion from a Jewish point of view, just temporarily before he returns back to speaking about Christ. And so if excellence in Judaism was the standard, Paul met it. That is the point that he is making in our passage here. And so he talks about two different matters. He talks about his privileges of birth and then secondly, his accomplishments by choice. And so his privileges of birth are found in verse five.

And he goes through them rather quickly, and we can only summarize them rather briefly here. He lists out five privileges that he had by birth. First of all, Paul had been circumcised the right way. He says there in verse five, I was circumcised on the eighth day. Now, circumcision was the mark of the Abrahamic covenant. And in Genesis 17 and 21 and in the book of Leviticus chapter 12, God had told the Jews to circumcise their sons on the eighth day.

And that's why it is significant that Paul mentions this. He says, even when I was an infant, it was done the right way. I was circumcised according to the standards that God had given to his people. Not everybody was like that, I was.

My parents did that when I was just a baby. Now secondly, not only had he been circumcised the right way, he was born in the right country. Or you could say he was born in the right place. Look at it there in verse five. He said, circumcised the eighth day of the nation of Israel. Of the nation of Israel. The true Jews were direct physical descendants of Jacob. Paul was not a convert to Judaism.

He was not someone, he was not a proselyte. He was a physical Jew. He was genetically Jewish, in other words, and could trace his line back to the proper patriarchs. And so he had been circumcised the right way.

He was born to the right people in the right place. Thirdly, you remember that Israel, the people of the Jews, there were 12 tribes. Paul was even born to one of the preeminent tribes of the 12.

He says in verse five, circumcised the eighth day of the nation of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin. Now, Jacob's 12 sons had become the heads of national tribes in the Old Testament. And the tribe of Benjamin had distinguished itself in history. The first king of Israel, Saul, came from the tribe of Benjamin. Benjamin was one of only two tribes that stayed loyal to the throne of David in the divided kingdom. And so there is this rich history in the tribe of Benjamin, from the first king to being loyal to the true king, David. Benjamin was a distinguished tribe, and Saul was born there. He was a Jew among Jews.

You can see the case that he is building here. Fourthly, he says there in verse five, he said, I'm a Hebrew of Hebrews. In other words, Paul was born to genuinely Hebrew parents who spoke the Hebrew language, and his parents kept Hebrew customs. Look over at the book of Acts, chapter 21, for just a moment.

Acts chapter 21. Paul said in Acts chapter 21, verse 39, he said, I am a Jew of Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of no insignificant city. And when he spoke to the people in verse 40, he spoke to them in the Hebrew dialect. And so Paul had followed Hebrew customs. He spoke the Hebrew language. Everything that a Jew could aspire after, in other words, Paul had done it. Paul was that. You cannot be more perfectly Jewish than Paul was. And the false teachers could not match Paul in that Jewish attainment. And so what's he saying here? What's the point that he's making? He says, even in my ancestry, even by my birth, and what happened in matters that I had no control over, I belong to the inner circle of the best that Judaism has to offer.

That was my life before Christ. And so his credentials were impeccable. And keep that in mind as we go into the second point here, is his accomplishments by choice, his accomplishments by choice. Paul not only had the privileges of Jewish birth and Jewish upbringing in his column, in his column of assets, so to speak, he built on those privileges as he entered into his adult life. He was the strictest Jew by choice and by effort, he was a strict Jew building on his ancestral heritage.

Look at the end of verse five here. He says, as to the law, a Pharisee. He says, when I became a man, I chose to be a Pharisee. Now the Pharisees were the fundamentalists of Judaism. They were very strict in their approach to religion. They had a number of oral traditions that they kept that went beyond the law of Moses. And not every Jew was like that. The Pharisees were a smaller subgroup of the overall Jews. Paul says, I belong to that subset, that hardworking, dedicated subset of Judaism.

That was me. And then he goes on and talks about his attitude toward his religion, what his heart was like toward his religion. In verse six, he says, as to zeal, as to what motivated me, as to the energy that I brought to my religion, he says, I was a persecutor of the church. In other words, when Christianity started to rise up and there were starting to be converts preaching Christ, Paul said, before I was a Christian and I was embedded in my Jewish religion, I was so zealous to protect the truth of my religion that I went out of my way to persecute those who were opposing it and preaching something contrary.

Paul proved his love for his religion by hating those who threatened it. You may remember at the end of Acts chapter seven that he guarded the coats of those who stoned the martyr Stephen. You may recall that he had received authority to bind Christians and take them to Jerusalem for trial. That is how great his zeal was. He affirmed the stoning of Stephen and he took on himself the responsibility to get authority to take Christians and to bind them for a trial for heresy in Jerusalem.

This is a man of great zeal for his religion. And finally, you see that he, in terms of the, what was required of Judaism, he says, I was blameless in it. Look at verse six again. As to zeal, a persecutor of the church, as to the righteousness which is in the law, found blameless. Now Paul here is not speaking of moral perfection. He's not claiming utter sinlessness there.

He's simply saying this. He's saying my life as an adult Jew, my life as a member of the strict set of the Pharisees was exemplary. No one could have charged me with failing in any responsibility of Judaism. I had my act together as a Jew. I had everything that Judaism could give. I had everything that Judaism could require from me.

And I had it all. And so, now, for a moment, put yourself in the sandals of a Jew, an unconverted Jew who is reading this, and you can see how overwhelming the case that Paul has made for his accomplishments in self-righteousness. He was born in the right way. His adult life had carried that on and furthered it even more in the moral choices that he made. He had everything that Judaism could give and could require. Now, one writer summarizes Paul's argument here in this way, and I quote, he says, His superiority put Paul in a class of his own. Listen well, Judaizers, those of you who would import the laws and strictures of the old covenant back into Christ and his church.

Listen to what this spiritual superman has to say. So, Paul has said, you want Jewishness in the church? Let's talk about Jewishness. I am the model Jew.

I was the model Jew. And I can meet everything that you require from people, and now let me tell you about it and what it all means. So Paul has summarized briefly this, and now he's going to make a global statement. He's going to make a comprehensive statement about what all of that means in comparison to the Lord Jesus Christ. And so point number three here is you see Paul's assessment of it all. We have seen his privileges of birth. We have seen his accomplishments by choice, and now we're going to see Paul's assessment of it all.

Paul, you could say, was the perfect Jew. And how did he assess that in his spiritual past? Look at verse seven.

It's stunning. He says, but... He's going to give a contrast here. For all of the perfections of my Jewish experience and my Jewish qualifications, let me tell you something by way of contrast. Whatever things were gained to me, in other words, those things that contributed to the sense of self-righteousness that I had, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ.

He's using terms of accounting here. His prior righteousness he talks about as beforehand he considered them to be spiritual credits on his account. I had built up this bank of righteousness based on who I was and what I had done.

And he says everything that I thought was a credit to me was actually a debt. It was actually something that was working against me. It was something that was creating bankruptcy in me rather than advancing me in righteousness. Indeed, all of our best efforts at being righteous and somehow earning our way into heaven fall woefully short.

Salvation is found in Christ alone. Well, friend, thanks for taking the time to study God's Word with us today. There's more from Don Green and The Truth Pulpit coming your way next time. Do join us. Just before we go, if you'd like to receive some free teaching materials from Don to add to your study library, well, it's as simple as going to The Truth Pulpit website at thetruthpulpit.com.

Here's Don to tell you more. Well, thank you so much for joining us today on The Truth Pulpit. I want to let you know that we have a number of topical series available for download or CD request at our website, thetruthpulpit.com. Over the years, I've tried to address controversial matters that confuse Christians, issues like the place of Roman Catholicism, anxiety, transgenderism, homosexuality, and the charismatic movement.

You'll find series on those topics and so many more at our free offers link at thetruthpulpit.com. I invite you to take advantage of them all. As we say goodbye for now, I commend you to Christ in the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and give you an inheritance among those who are sanctified. God bless you. We'll see you next time on The Truth Pulpit. Amen, and thanks, Don. Again, friends, if you'd like to have any of the free materials Don mentioned, do go to thetruthpulpit.com. I'm Bill Wright, and we'll see you next time on The Truth Pulpit.