Philippians: An Introduction

We're glad to be able to announce the end of the Ice Age. You can come here and be warm. I'm sure this summer that will be no problem, but right now, this time of year, that's good news. Another thing, just to let folks know, we'll be starting later on this month an elective that runs after the main service. and that'll be on marriage. It will be, as we did last quarter with the Biblical Finances class, a potluck and then the class. It'll just run on Sundays as opposed to the previous quarter where we did both Sundays and Wednesday evenings.

And if you are interested in participating, there's a sign-up sheet as well as kind of an information sheet that has the schedule and a few other little pieces of helpful information. So take a look at that at the table out in the lobby. And any questions on it, feel free to see me, okay? One of the things we always like to do here is to catch up on questions that come up.

And while last week we completed our study of Revelation, one of the questions we had here is this, here in Revelation 2215, you know, there's this description of these, you know, dogs and sorcerers and murderers, you know, aren't we done with that? And one of the things that, to answer that, one of the things we pointed out is that there are actually three places in the passage we looked at last week as the last one of those. There are three places in the last two chapters where even though the great white throne judgment has taken place, even though there are those who have been dealt with, we find this description that these are not in the New Jerusalem.

I think there's a couple of reasons why it's stated that way. Why did he make continual mention of people of this kind of behavior? I think there's a couple of reasons. One is just to reinforce that this time has passed. They no longer have a place here. And emphasizing that they're already dealt with. But I think the second reason that pops up is just to emphasize to the people, this behavior that you're used to, it just simply won't be there.

How many of you over the course of years have had somebody steal something from you at some point in time? You had that happen? It's kind of a disgusting feeling, maybe even worse. If you've ever had something stolen, damaged, vandalized, Imagine a situation where you don't have to worry about that.

That just isn't something in the back of your mind. If you had cars, I don't think we will, but if you had cars, you wouldn't have to lock them. That kind of a place. And I'm sure for a lot of these people to say, well, we've got this city and the idea that I live in the city and I don't have to worry about people breaking things and stealing things and wrecking things. It's just, I think, to show repeatedly the contrast, and it's a part of the contrast, because remember we saw in the last two chapters, no longer, no longer, no longer, and it's a part of that picture.

Anyway, I just wanted to deal with that question. Now, we'll be turning to the book of Philippians, and I have to make a confession here. I was telling a couple of guys earlier this week, last Sunday night I just could hardly sleep. I was so excited about teaching Philippians, I just couldn't sleep. So anyway, I'm still excited, but I did get a little sleep this week.

We'll be looking at this book, and so what we're going to be starting off with is just to kind of get a sense of what's Philippi like. So we're going to be going over some kind of understandings. What kind of a city was it where these Philippian Christians were living in. And what kind of a people was it that Paul was writing to? That's what we'll be looking at here this morning.

And one of the things I think to key in on is as we look at the book of Philippians, there's two big issues happening. One, Paul is writing from prison. The second thing is as he is writing, from prison, he is focusing the church at Philippi on the person of Jesus Christ. And we'll be seeing that in various aspects as we step our way through this book.

Now, one of the things we'll want to do is get an idea of what sort of an environment, what sort of a people is Paul and Timothy. Because as Jack read for us, Timothy also was there writing this book. What kind of a people are Paul and Timothy writing to? And one of the things that we'll want to do is, because we'll be interpreting scripture, we want to, just like we were doing with the book of Revelation, we want to make sure we're interpreting it carefully, interpreting it properly. And so we're going to be going through these three steps.

Observe, interpret, and apply. Those who were with me in the How to Study the Bible class, of course, saw this quite a bit. What I want to make available to you, there is a handout, just a one-page handout on the cabinet as you exit the doors to the right here. And if you haven't got a copy of this, please take advantage of it. And it's just a one-sheet handout that just kind of leads you through some logical, systematic steps on how do I interpret the Bible.

Why am I talking about that now? What's going on here? We're going to be looking at that first part, observe, and a couple of those questions are going to stand out this morning as we look at the church at Philippi and as we look at the city of Philippi and we seek to get an understanding. We're going to be looking at when was it written? What was happening at the time?

Because it matters, doesn't it? You ever get a hold of something and you start reading it and you can't figure out what it is? A part of what we're trying to do when we start reading something, we're asking these kinds of questions, aren't we? Who is this written to? Who wrote it? What was happening? And we're looking for the answers to those kinds of questions. Why?

Because we want to properly understand it. So we do that naturally. One of the examples is if I give you a newspaper, you know by the different sections of the newspaper how to start understanding it, don't you? You interpret the comic page differently from the front page, hopefully. And that's the same thing. As we read through this book, we're going to be wanting to ask the right questions as we proceed. So anyway, avail yourself of this handout, but we're going to be proceeding through these first couple of questions under the category of observing.

Okay, first thing here is Philippi has a timeline, and just to give ourselves some context, the last Old Testament book written was Malachi, and that was around the year 400 BC. It was about roughly a half century after that that Philippi was founded. There was a town there before, but it was rather small. What happened is Philip, that's where the name Philippi comes from, Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, was founding the city of Philippi, obviously after his name, at that place and at that time. From this period of time up until about two centuries later, Philippi was a very Greek city. Then, what we find here in the middle of the 2nd century BC, is the Romans came in and captured Philippi.

Now it starts to have some strong Roman influence. And then, roughly a century and plus later, now you see Philippi is established as a Roman colony. We'll be looking at that in a minute in terms of what that means. It was established as a Roman colony by Augustus Caesar.

Now here we have the birth of Christ, and then Christ's crucifixion, burial, raising, ascension, and seeding. And then after that, the Book of Philippians written a few decades later. And we'll look in more detail at the time. That's kind of the rough picture here. Here's a city with a few centuries of history. And the latter part of that history was very Roman in its influence. Let's take a look at the next part. If you want to find out how did this church get established at Philippi, we look at Acts 16. That's going to be the core of the background on how this church got started.

If we look at verses 12 through 16, here's Paul and his companions coming to the riverside, and one of the things that Jack pointed out is that there's very little Jewish influence in Philippi. According to the Jewish rules, the way they had their traditions, if you had ten men, you had enough to start a synagogue. The fact that Paul and his friends didn't go to the synagogue, we have no record of a synagogue there. There's no indication in the scriptures of that.

What the Jews that were there would do is they would go and gather typically by a riverside or by the ocean. Well, Philippi is not by the ocean, so they're going to gather by the river, the nearest river. And that's exactly where they call them the God-worshippers were. Lydia, who was a seller of purple, she was from the city of Thyatira. Lydia was there and she was the first believer that we have recorded in the city of Philippi from that time.

She believes, along with her household, In the next couple of verses we find Paul then, and from the description it sounds like he's more traveling around in the middle of the city trying to communicate the gospel, and what happens is there is a girl there who is possessed by a demon and is constantly harassing them. What she is saying, if you read the passage, is true in fact, but the way that she says it is not helpful, and finally he delivers demon out of her.

Well, it turns out that this slave girl with the demon had been very profitable for her owners. And that's very interesting. Multiple owners? Either this slave girl was very expensive and therefore a lot of people would have to put the money into buying her or somehow there was some level of risk. I'm not sure which. But here's multiple owners and what do they do versus 19 through 21?

They haul them into the forum, which we'll see here in a little bit. They haul them into the forum and falsely accuse them. Paul and Silas are then beaten with rods, imprisoned in stocks, and it's real interesting. We are still trying to figure out exactly where this prison cell was. We'll take a look at some pictures here shortly. Some of the indications are that where they were imprisoned was really poor, poor conditions. And yet, what were they doing? Praying and singing into the night. An earthquake shook the prison, and incidentally, earthquakes happen quite a bit in that part of the country.

And so the jailer rushes in, the jailer asks the question, what must I do to be saved? And to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved is the response. And he and his household respond in faith. Finally, Paul reveals his Roman citizenship, and at that the magistrates say, you know, please leave, we don't want to get into a big hassle over this, you know, just depart, get out of here.

And so they go over to Lydia's place with these new believers. So far as we know, there's Lydia's household and the jailer's household. There may well have been others, okay? But they're gathering here at Lydia's, and then they leave. Okay, that's the initial account. Where did this all take place? They had been over here. This is the west end of Asia Minor, now modern Turkey.

And this end that we see here is where the churches were, the churches in Revelation, the seven churches. Paul and his companions travel across here and they go to Philippi. And then as they proceed on, there's Philippi, Thessalonica, Berea, Athens, and Corinth. Berea was the place, remember, where the Bereans were more noble because they examined the scriptures daily.

One other interesting piece of history. It is believers from this area that some centuries later went and took the gospel and their language up to Russia. And that's one reason why you ever notice the Russian language has some kind of Greek-looking letters.

Some of it looks familiar and some not. And this is real interesting. This area was an area after the work of Paul and his companions that ended up sponsoring missionary activity into other parts of the world, Russia included. Okay. Here's something that had a big impact. It's not directly mentioned in scripture, but it's fairly evident.

From one side of this piece of land to the other. was a Roman road called the Ignatian Way. And the Romans, they had commands to their road builders, you build a road and this road had better last forever. Because Rome's got to last forever. So they built roads that lasted a long time. And one of the reasons why we know this is significant is when Paul basically heads for Philippi and travels along this road until he gets to Thessalonica and starts heading down the peninsula. And as he goes on the subsequent missionary journeys, he does the same thing. So this road is an important roadway.

And there it is now. And even though there are segments of it that have been put to other use, the truth is an awful lot of it's in really good shape for 2000 years, almost. It's amazingly good shape. Matter of fact, See this little picture down here? Let me show you something interesting on this next slide. You see these little kind of grooves here, and here, and there? Chariot wheel ruts. Ruts in the stone, if you can imagine that, okay? And after centuries, what's that? Yeah, studded tires, yep. But just after centuries, imagine, we don't have quite the same incident, Centuries of use. They would actually develop ruts in the rocks.

So, here's Philippi. It's a Roman colony. And that's reflected in what we see in Acts chapter 16. It's also reflected in the book as we proceed through the book of Romans. We're going to be seeing that come out. It was established as a Roman colony about 30 BC under Caesar Augustus. This is the same Caesar Augustus that required Mary and Joseph to go to Bethlehem for the census. Now, Caesar Augustus was a rather hard-headed fellow. He didn't care, you know, is this going to be a hardship or not? He says, you're going to Bethlehem for the census. It was that same fellow.

Roman soldiers and officials were transplanted there to establish a Roman military, political, and cultural presence in the region. It was to make it, this is to be a bastion of Rome. This is going to be Rome transplanted. We want a place that will represent Rome in that area and kind of hold the fork for us.

Roman colonies enjoyed a tax-free status and special funding. How's that for a nice perk? Among other special privileges. Now, which New Testament cities were Roman colonies? Philippi, we obviously know of. That's the one we're looking at here. But what's not typically known is there's a few others. Antioch, city in Antioch, Lystra, Corinth, and then Philippi, which is the only one that's actually named as a colony. The Greek word, by the way, is kolonia. Sound familiar? So it comes straight across in our use of the word. Here they are.

Here's Corinth, Philippi, city in Antioch, Lystra, and Antioch. What's interesting, that red line you see is Paul's second missionary journey. What do you notice? His second missionary journey looped through every single one of the Roman colonies in the region. Furthermore, here's something else that shows up. Corinth. We've got two New Testament letters to Corinth, the Roman colony. We have this book we're studying now, to City in Antioch and Lystra were likely cities where the letter to the Galatians went. So that was also a pivotal area.

Antioch, here, doesn't receive any letters, but two of Paul's three missionary journeys started in Antioch. They were ascending church. And his second missionary journey, this one that you see here in red, looped through Antioch. Bottom line, he never went on a missionary journey that he didn't either travel through or start in Antioch. All five of these Roman colonies in this part of the world end up being real pivotal in the whole picture of the development of the New Testament Church.

If we look at Philippi itself, this is kind of a map of the middle of town, if you will. Here we have what's called the prison. This is likely, although there's some debate and we'll talk about that in a minute, this is likely the area where Paul and Silas were kept. Then we see, here's the Ignatian Way, that roadway that we saw some pictures of, goes right through the middle of town. Seems like that always happens, doesn't it? Here's this highway and they build on either side of it.

Next, we have a bunch of pagan temples, and it's real interesting. We'll take a look at it in more detail. There are a number of pagan temples, and there are varying backgrounds, including Roman, but other almost surprising backgrounds, and we'll see that in a bit. There's a large theater there, and we'll take a look at that in a minute as well. One of the things you notice in a lot of these ancient cities is the theaters were well-preserved, and one reason is because nothing's sticking up to fall over or to get toppled.

And so this is case in point. There's the forum in the Agora. And it was this forum and that area right there where Paul and Silas were hauled to when the accusations were made. So that's the place. And then this palaestra here is also called the gymnasium. And we'll see that in the pictures that we see in just a little bit here.

Here's Ignatian Way again, just And by the way, the part that runs through Philippi is now covered with pavement. It was such a good place for a road, they decided to pave it. But this is a part that's outside of Philippi immediately. The Lion of Amphipolis would have been right on the road, so as they left Philippi, this would have been there.

And it's basically a structure that's been well-preserved. Paul and his friends would have seen it almost certainly as they walked by it. Here, according to local tradition, is where Paul and Silas would have been held in the prison. This location is debated. Scholars go both ways.

That doesn't concern me particularly, though, because scripture is inspired. But one other point, it's still being excavated. They're going through all of Philippi and excavating it even still. So more information could well come to the surface and settle that issue.

Here's the theater. This is kind of looking away from town. And it's in pretty good shape after, you know, a couple millennia. Okay. Looking the other direction, over here is where kind of the middle of town was situated. And the theaters, even from this perspective again, were very well preserved.

They would gather tens of thousands of people at these theater gatherings here. Here's a picture of standing up on the mountain and looking down at Philippi. This is the forum where they dragged Paul and Silas. Here they had temples and sanctuaries. There's an Egyptian temple that's off to the side here and there's a Greek temple that's off to the side here. It's not shown. The theater is in this direction. Now, one of the things to take a look at, and at first you might think, well, Vern, why are we looking at all these pagan gods and goddesses? We'll get there, okay?

Here's a couple of the gods. This is Dionysius, also known as Bacchus, the god of wine. They would go through celebrations in which they would involve the children. People from every segment of society would be involved in this and dragged into this worship of Dionysius and it was a debauched, raunchy festival that they would hold.

This would be Athena and one of the things you see, you see this shield and it's kind of a sword there. Athena was a goddess of military victory, which if you got a Roman city that makes sense, right? They had Dionysius and Athena. They also had Egyptian deities.

Real interesting. As the Romans would go into different parts of the empire, they would bring in religions from those other places. They also had Artemis, which was a deity that we saw featured boldly in Ephesus when we were studying Ephesus a year and a half back almost now. One of the interesting things as you look at this, you say, well, boy, they've got all these different, very strange religions. And it comes out as we start looking at these religions, these people are really without hope. One of the things that pops out when we look at this next one, they had rock carvings and tombstones in the area make one thing very, very clear.

You see, the gods that were worshipped at Philippi before Paul and his companions came. Those gods were, first of all, multiple gods, and human beings were not particularly necessarily loved by the gods. And so one god might be fighting with another and get human beings involved in the battle. The gods would be capricious and unpredictable, and there was no assurance that those gods cared at all for you.

And so when Paul and Silas came in and delivered the gospel of Jesus Christ and told them there is a singular God and not just one of a bunch. And this one God is communicating the truth to you now. This one God loves you unconditionally. And you can be saved, but it's entirely by grace. That was such marvelous good news. They had never heard of such a thing.

They would have all sorts of concern once people had died as to whether or not they were going to continue to make it to the right place in the afterlife. So they'd have to do all sorts of things after people were dead to try to keep them in the right path after they were dead. And so you'd do things for your friends and your relatives And you'd be worried and concerned about them all the time. And perhaps the gods might do something unpredictable and mean-hearted that would derail your whole thought and intent and hope. The Gospel was marvelous good news to these people. Marvelous good news. And that's why Paul, he says, I thank the Lord for what He's doing in your church from this day, you know, that first day until now.

Here is the river, as we showed earlier. This is the Genghis River. This is where Paul and his companions introduced Lydia to the Gospel. This first woman to be responsive. I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, always offering prayer with joy in my every prayer for you all, in view of your participation in the Gospel from the first day, that day by the river, until now. How is Philippi like Denver?

You may say, wow, that's quite a question, Vern. There's a good reason for asking that question. One is because, surprisingly, there are lots of similarities. There's another reason, I think, that it helps fix in our minds that there are some things here that, oh yeah, that's like what I can relate to. And that leads into the next point. What Paul is writing about is he's writing to a people, yes, there are many differences, from what you and I live now, but there are also many similarities and some things to kind of center on.

Let's take a look at some of them. One of them shows up right in this picture. Here's the mountainside above Philippi. Here's the big forum that we looked at where they dragged Paul and Silas. And here's this plain that extends out that direction. So here they were, a large city, at the base of a mountain range on the edge of a big plain. Sound familiar? The next one is a major highway runs through it, the Ignatian Way. We can relate to that, right? It's a regional military and political center, but not the empire's capital. It's a Roman colony. So we can relate to that as well.

It has a large population. Their estimates, and this is one of those things where we don't have some exact a number from their records, but just looking at the area, this is a big city for those days. And of course, Denver is good sized as well. There was a medical school there, possibly where Dr. Luke was trained. The indications there is that that may be the case.

The next thing you find is religious variety and many religious buildings. Lots of, and you find that here in Denver, don't you? Lots of religious variety. It's real interesting, I did some checking on it. Some of the gods and goddesses worshipped in Philippi are also worshipped here in Denver. Isis being one of them. Okay? Real interesting. Now, where are we headed from here? Okay?

As we look at this, we've been taking a look mostly this morning at the city of Philippi itself and As we go through this, we'll see the value in doing that, getting an understanding of who is being written to here. As we go ahead, we'll be looking next week at the Apostle Paul and his life, and as he came to the point of writing this letter, how did that come about, and how does that impact the character of the letter?

Timothy is also listed as a co-author, Paul's son in the faith. And he'll be looking at his life as well. Here's an amazing fellow. Here's this guy Timothy. Paul sends him into all kinds of places. We have an indication that Timothy is a very timid fellow. And the first thing we read in 1 Timothy is, Paul's writing says, Timothy, I sent you to Ephesus so you could deal with the false teachers. How's that for a timid fellow thing to do, right? Next we'll be looking at this question of bond servants. That's not something we easily relate to in our culture. I don't know about you, but I've never been one. At least not in human terms. But scripture repeatedly talks about it, and it comes up right in the beginning verse of this letter. So we'll be taking a look at that as well and seeing what does that mean? What's the impact? And how does that impact me spiritually? Okay. You'll have on the back of your handout an outline, and I just want to review that together with you here. Basically, the outline falls real easily into the four chapters. That's nice, isn't it?

And the first thing, we'll see that the first chapter, Paul is very thankful for what the Lord is doing and has done in that church, and he makes that very clear to them. He also deals with the rest of that chapter about his affliction and others that are involved in affliction. And that'll be a fascinating topic. We've got some segments of Christendom that believe that if you become a believer that all hassles go away, right? You're just on the highway to heaven, right? So anyway, we'll take a look at that.

The next thing, and I think this is fascinating, we look at the next three chapters and we find a focus The appeal to have the mind of Christ is in the second chapter. The mind of Christ. The understanding. The perspective. The next thing we find in the third chapter is the appeal to have a knowledge of Christ. This is his exhortation that you know Christ personally. You know Christ personally. He's got some other warnings that go along with that. And finally, the appeal to have the peace of Christ. They were in a situation where certainly the gospel was really, really good news. But it also meant that they as people were very, very different and subject to persecution. Here's just one instance.

You saw that big marketplace, that Agora, that forum that we saw in the middle there. And then you notice that the sanctuaries of all the pagan deities were kind of right next to it, right across the street, across the Ignatian Way. In order for you to be involved in any of the guilds, the unions, if you will, in those days, you had to be also involved in the pagan temples, because that's where the guilds met.

So if you came and you said, oh, I'm not going to do this anymore, they said, oh, well, I guess you just lost your income. Pretty cruel, huh? So, they went through some difficult times. Right away, real quick, this brought them to some tough issues. And we'll see, Paul addresses that very thing. They appealed to have the peace of Christ. Frankly, in the circumstances that they were moving themselves into, there was no other way. Only the peace of Christ would do.

As we begin this book, and as I look at it, I'm just excited to be able to go through it and to look at it with you, and to look at what God is doing in the lives of Paul and Timothy and his companions, in the lives of the believers there at the church. It's going to be fascinating, amazing to see what the Lord is doing, and just like we saw here, There's going to be a lot of things we're going to look at and we're going to find profoundly relevant.

Not just because Denver has some similarities to Philippi, certainly there's some of that. But relevant because you and I, it's amazing after 1900 plus years, we deal with the same issues, don't we? We are part of the same body of Christ that they were. And we'll be able to go back to the recipients of these letters and talk with them about that. Meanwhile, it's amazing, we get to read their mail.

I wouldn't suggest you do that in general, but in this case, the Lord wants us to. Alright, let's pray. Lord, thank you for the truths that are laid out in your word, and as we embark on this study of this marvelous book, brief, but so packed, Lord, with valuable, essential truths, truths that we need, truths to grow on. And we would ask, Lord, that you would draw our hearts, draw our minds, Lord, to these truths, that we would indeed grow in a knowledge of you, that in the midst of the situations that we find ourselves in, and all of us find things that circumstantially would disrupt our peace, that we would draw upon the very peace of Christ. Thank you, Lord, for the blessing that we have in this book as we begin it. In Jesus' name, Amen.