Those Who Hold Citizenship in the Kingdom of God
17Brothers, be imitators together of me, and note those who walk this way, even as you have us for an example. 18For many walk, of whom I told you often, and now tell you even weeping, as the enemies of the cross of Christ, 19whose end is destruction, whose god is the belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who think about earthly things. 20For our citizenship is in heaven, from where we also wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ; 21who will change the body of our humiliation to be conformed to the body of his glory, according to the working by which he is able even to subject all things to himself.
Every citizen carries an identity card that guarantees their status. A foreigner who stays on past the day they were required to leave becomes an illegal resident. Illegal residents are deported the moment they are caught, so anyone who remains on purpose would live in constant unease. We hardly notice the privileges that citizenship gives us. But people living illegally in another country have to endure long hours, low wages, unpaid pay, and miserable conditions, and for them citizenship must be something they long for. The only way out of that suffering is to go home, yet their circumstances make it hard to decide to return. Apart from lacking citizenship, they are no different from us at all — not in the hours they work, not in their abilities, not even in their love for their families. Yet they must risk leaping from high places to escape the police, and when they are treated with contempt, they cannot fight back. To live without citizenship is a painful thing indeed.
Believers living in this world are no different from illegal residents. Because the world where they stay for a little while has laws unlike those of God’s kingdom, they cannot exercise their rights as the people of the world do; they must live with care until they reach their true home. Before they received the gospel, they too held the world’s citizenship. Then one day they realized that they were people of God’s kingdom, chosen by God, and by faith they gave up their worldly citizenship of their own accord. People who have become illegal residents in another country, even when they go back to their own country, find it hard to escape poverty and hardship.
But the moment believers return to their true home, they will enjoy peace in heaven, which is full of the glory of God. Yet there is a condition for entering heaven: whatever circumstances we face in this world, we must keep God’s law and his word and live good lives by faith. If someone takes their own life because living is too hard, or takes up the world’s citizenship again in order to strike a bargain with Satan, they are stripped of their citizenship in God’s kingdom. However beautiful the country we visit, we come home to Korea in the end; in the same way, however much wealth and glory we enjoy in this world, when life reaches its end we must return to the kingdom of God. Moses said that people return to dust because God has commanded humankind to return. We must not make the foolish choice of giving up God’s eternal kingdom for a world that passes away. To hope always for God’s kingdom and to live by faith can be hard, since persecution may follow, but those whom God has chosen can do it.
Paul forsook the world in order to lead lost souls to heaven. Yet the people of the world, who measured everything by what a person owns, looked down on Paul as he suffered great hardship in the flesh. Paul felt no shame at all, because he had once held the power and wealth the world counts as strength, and he had given them up himself. To those who mocked him he declared that he was one of the chosen people, circumcised — the very thing they were so proud of. He was saying that he was in no way behind the legalists.
When we exhort someone, we must know more, or have more, than the one we exhort. Because Paul’s exhortation is spiritual, he must know the law and the gospel better than they do if he is to share anything with them. Here the attitude of those who receive it matters. This is because, in exhortation, deeper counsel can be given only when the hearer, even more than the speaker, opens their heart.
These people were prosperous in the flesh, but spiritually they were caught in the snare of the law. They had not met Christ, who fulfilled all that the law demands, and Paul grieved for them; he wanted to share with them the knowledge of God. If only they could meet Christ and know how good he is, Paul was ready to give even his own life. Those who have this kind of faith never stop pressing on toward the goal Christ has given them and the prize of the calling God will give, whatever hardship or persecution they face.
The apostle Paul’s faith was more than worthy of God’s commendation. Even so, he was always ashamed of his own shortcomings and spent his life wrestling with how he might draw closer to Jesus Christ. His zeal ran so high that when Barnabas and the believers tried to stop him from a dangerous missionary journey, he set out regardless of the risk. Paul chose a life for Christ over the comforts of the world he could have had for the asking; he was a spiritually mature man. He strove to think as Jesus Christ thought and to obey his words, and he is a man of faith we ought to imitate. He did not boast of his faith before people or seek their approval. Knowing that his faith needed approval from God alone, he was not shaken by what people said, and he lived in the true freedom that is in Christ. God had forgiven a wicked and sinful man like him and made him the apostle to the Gentiles, and to repay that grace Paul gave his very best. This is the posture of a mature believer. Where were you when God rescued you? I hope you will ask yourself whether you are truly grateful for that grace.
He knew that those who fear God and seek him lack no good thing. So he told the Philippians to imitate this faith of his. If God’s people come to understand the righteousness of God, they will become good people who practice justice with an upright faith and always speak only the truth. They will not find fault with others, nor do evil to their neighbors, nor slander them; such people will receive from God a grace in which nothing is lacking.
Only when believers live such good lives are the wicked put to shame. If the church in Philippi did not first stand upright in faith, even God could do nothing for them. Only when his people have a whole faith will he contend with those who trouble them, and be their shield and guard them.
When faith has not matured, people make God’s grace into their own righteousness. Once human righteousness has filled them, they sit in judgment even on God’s grace — judging whether the grace they received was much or little, judging their brothers and sisters, judging the worth of salvation — and so they fall into sin. That sin is hard to be forgiven, for it is a sin of resisting the Holy Spirit. This is because such people take their own thinking as the standard and go on sinning through complaint and pride. Those who love evil in this way love lies more than righteousness, and so they cannot live as children of God.
Because Paul had believed the law he trusted was perfect and that persecuting Christians was right, he had lived with conviction. But when he realized that such faith was as unsound as a tottering fence, he threw away the law and every boast the world could offer. He wanted to help God’s people so that they would not take the long way around as he had. Realizing that this would require sacrifice on his part, Paul resolved to walk the way of the cross that Jesus had walked.
Do you think it would have been easy for Paul to leave his family? Would it really have been easy to give up all that wealth, his education, and his friends? We find it hard to give up even small things; to throw away one’s whole life would hardly have been easy. We must consider how hard it must have been for Paul, blameless under the law, to give up the law and be set free by the truth. To abandon every way of life he had once been sure of would probably have been an agony close to death for him. Nothing comes as a result without a process. Faith in Jesus and salvation do not simply arrive while we sit still. The reason is this: only as we cast out, one thing at a time, the world that fills us to the brim does the Holy Spirit fill that empty space, little by little, with grace and the word.
People thought Paul was dead after he was stoned and threw him outside the city, but God invited his soul — a soul that waited quietly on God alone — into heaven. We cannot know what Paul saw and heard there, but as he looked on the glory of God and the brothers and sisters who had gone before, he would have gained the assurance of salvation. Having met the Lord of power, he would no longer have feared even martyrdom. Through this experience he could proclaim that even in the place of death it is a blessing to believe in Christ, and he could comfort his fellow Christians to the very end.
Could you confidently tell someone to imitate you? Before we can tell others to live as we do, we must spend our very lives striving to live out the Christian life.
Philippians 3:19
19whose end is destruction, whose god is the belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who think about earthly things.
Among believers there are those who, like Paul, earnestly seek God alone and depend on him, and there are others, like Demas, who cannot let go of their own righteousness and in the end fail to walk the way of truth. It is deeply sad that God’s people do not live by the truth, and that many live as enemies of Christ. God continually helps his people to live within the gospel, yet more of them than we might think fail to be sanctified and keep stumbling again and again. Though they know that Jesus Christ is the almighty King, people cling stubbornly to their own thinking and are perishing.
Paul declared that those who have become enemies of Christ will in the end be judged. Because their minds were set only on earthly things, they gave up nothing. Since they served their belly as an idol, they could not afford to lose anything; compromise followed. For the pleasures of the flesh, they ate and indulged as their belly desired. The destruction Paul speaks of here does not mean that a business has failed or that the body has grown weak; it means the opposite of salvation. Those who hear the gospel and know there is a life after death, yet live as the flesh desires, end up in hell.
I hope you will never treat God lightly. May you have a faith that longs and hopes for the Lord in this desolate world. If we do not fear God, the fence of his protection disappears, and then we have no strength to fend off Satan’s attacks. Without the fence God has built, even the sound of a little stream will roar like a waterfall, and the finger-pointing of the wicked will feel like a sword piercing to the heart; victory would be impossible. Because the grace by which God upholds you with his right hand looks to Satan like a great fortress, his forces can never attack it.
Sadly, the mistake believers make most often is to think they know God well. Once that thought takes hold, they cannot stop the proud thoughts that drive them toward darkness, like a stone falling from a cliff, and in the end they perish. That is why Paul told them to imitate his own faith, which obeyed God, and to set their relationship with God right. If the Philippians listened to Paul, they would be able to see through what the legalists were saying and choose a right faith, as the apostle Paul had.
Revelation 20:10
10The devil who deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet are also. They will be tormented day and night forever and ever.
When believers who have received God say one thing and do another, it shows that they are under the control of the spirit of darkness. We who have borne the cross with Jesus have become the new people God has granted us to be, so we must live lives in which word and deed agree within the truth. Those who fail to live as believers have no assurance of salvation, and so they live with questions that never find answers: where human beings come from and where they are going, who made this world, who I am. Unable to settle these questions, people pile up knowledge that holds no answers, give their imagination free rein, or make forced claims such as the theory of evolution.
Every answer people are searching for is written in the Bible. Where human beings come from and where they go, how this world was made, and how it will meet its final end — all that people wonder about, Christians can readily answer.
God wanted to share a holy glory that human beings cannot imagine and words can never describe. But he could not give it to just anyone, so he wanted to give that glory to the souls who believe in Jesus Christ, who obeyed the word of God.
Yet he saw the people he had made from the dust accept Satan’s temptation, eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, and fall into unforgivable sin. Satan used the sinful human heart and the desires of the flesh to drive people to betray God, and used human foolishness to lead them into idolatry. The promise to save those who believe in Jesus’ atonement is a plan God laid long before he created humankind. That is why, though he knew people would sin, he placed the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life in the garden of Eden, where Satan was.
Even now God has caused people to hear the gospel, and just as Adam chose the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, he has given them the opportunity to choose Christ. Adam and Eve fell for Satan’s lure, chose that fruit, and were driven out; in the same way, those who meet Jesus Christ and still listen to Satan’s voice cannot enter the holy city.
Through the death and resurrection of Jesus, who became flesh, Satan was utterly defeated. Even so, he is still hard at work, so that he may take with him into the lake of fire those who have defied God’s word. His tool is the human heart that has given way to deception. Satan does not dare to touch those who, like the apostle Paul, hold the citizenship of heaven; but people whose own righteousness is strong are easily tempted, which makes them easy for him to bring down. That the beast and the false prophet, who served as Satan’s slaves, are found in hell shows what a grave sin it is not to proclaim the truth.
Because Satan’s goal is to drag one more person into hell, it makes no difference whether people were deceived by a pastor, fell through greed, or were wounded by others: those who go to hell are the ones who were deceived. Having no assurance in Christ, they lose the meaning and purpose of life, and when they hear a false gospel they cannot recognize Satan at work behind it; that is how they are deceived. You must therefore discern Satan’s schemes at once, spiritually.
Paul knew he was going to die, yet he earnestly urged the church to live by faith, and the reason was his assurance of salvation. Because he was sure that he was a citizen of God’s kingdom and that his name was written in the book of life, he could stand boldly against Satan. The world people would risk their lives to keep is like straw that a single breath of God would scatter. Knowing this, Paul wanted to show how worthless Roman citizenship — so envied by everyone — really was. And he wanted to show that citizenship in God’s kingdom is precious beyond all reckoning. He gave his life for those who did not know these things. To keep one’s own faith while saving the souls of others is hard, but since it is the mission of God’s people, he did his utmost. It would be a great misfortune to give oneself wholeheartedly to saving others and then fail to hold on to one’s own salvation. Evangelism, then, matters greatly; but living by the word for the sake of our own salvation matters too.
God has set this law: no one lives forever in this world, and after death we must stand before the judgment seat. If you believe this, may you live not for the flesh but for the spirit, not for what is shameful but for what is glorious. Even if you spend your whole life on the flesh, all the fruit of that world will burn in the fire of hell. But whatever you sow for the kingdom of God, even a single bean laid on a rock, will become a great reward.
Truly — if this world were the end, Christians would be wasting their lives on something empty and having precious money and time taken from them by the church. If it were true that soul and body both vanish when a person dies, then we who are preparing now for the life after death would be fools indeed. But just as Paul said, earnestly and with tears, the moment we put off this body we will meet the God of glory. We must realize, then, how fearful a thing it is to live now without faith.
Because the kingdom of God is a holy place where there is no death, no mourning, no crying, and no pain, the detestable and the false will never enter it. Only believers who have lived by faith in this world can enter heaven, and the glory and honor of the nations are brought into it; the peace, rest, and joy we will know there forever are beyond words. That holy and beautiful place, where only those written in the Lamb’s book of life live in the glory of God, is the heaven we hope for.
Because the apostle Paul had seen this heaven with his own eyes, he could overcome death, the fear of beatings, robbers, cold, and hunger. This lay behind his confession that he could do all things through Christ, who strengthened him. Even in suffering he knew exactly who Christ is and why we must go to heaven, and he lived a victorious life by faith. Paul longed to bring to heaven with him even those who had imprisoned him, flogged him, and mocked him; he was a true servant of God. The Holy Spirit is at work, protecting the apostle Paul and all who share such faith with angels and leading them on the way of truth. When Paul had shared all the spiritual grace God entrusted to him and all the word he had come to understand, he knew his mission was finished, and he accepted death gladly.
Friends, the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. When we keep God’s commandments, a keen ability to discern things, their principles, and what is right awakens in us, so that we can live holy lives. The same God whom the apostle Paul believed in and served loves you. If you do not forget the word you have heard, and live by it, God will help you to do even greater things.
May you boldly proclaim the gospel as you look forward to the day you return to the kingdom of God.