Citizenship
For, as I have often told you before and now tell you again even with tears, many live as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is set on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body. New International Version
What's this all about?
Who was Paul warning the Philippians not to emulate?
The phrase “Their god
is their stomach (Greek: koilia)” is like Romans 16:18 which speaks of those
who serve their own appetite (koilia). Most likely they were professing
Christians flaunting their “liberty” to the point of sinful action. Paul asks
the Philippian Christians to remember their citizenship which was in heaven.
The libertine professing believers were failing to live up to their
citizenship.
N.T. Wright has
clarified what heavenly citizenship means. “The point about citizenship is a
point about status and allegiance, not about place of residence,” he says. He
illustrates his point with the Philippians themselves. The task of Roman
citizens in the colony of Philippi “was to live in the colony by the rules of
the mother city, not to yearn to go home again.” What the colonists might
occasionally need “was not a trip back
to Rome, but for the emperor to come from Rome to deliver them from any
local difficulties they might be having.”[1]
Understood this way, it means Christians’
bodies are to be transformed, not discarded when Christ returns (I Corinthians
15) and God liberates all of creation from its “bondage to decay” including
Christians’ bodies (Romans 8:20-23). It means God will unite heaven and earth
where humans will live eternally (Revelation 21:1-4).
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