Beware of every threat to gospel joy
If anyone else thinks he has reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: 5 circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; 6 as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless.
7 But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ.
To the Judaizers, fleshly things like ethnic background, physical rituals, and outward displays of human endeavor meant everything. They labored under the perverted impression that their souls’ salvation depended on those earthly things. Paul did not want the Philippians to be deceived by that kind of thinking. So he used his own life as an example of how perverted such thinking really is. If he chose to argue along with the Judaizers on their own terms, he would have greater reason for boasting than any Judaizer could ever have.
Were the Judaizers concerned about circumcision? Paul had been circumcised on the eighth day in strict accord with the ceremonial law. How many Judaizers, many of whom had been later converts to Christianity, could claim that? Were the Judaizers concerned about ethnic purity? Paul did not belong to a mixed stock of less than 100% pure Israelite blood, as most of the Jews after the Babylonian captivity did. He was a member of the tribe of Benjamin, one of only two tribes that had remained fairly intact after the Jews returned from exile. Paul was a true Hebrew among Hebrews, a genuine Israelite through and through, with a genealogy that would put many of the Judaizers to shame.
His family had remained strictly faithful to the ancestral religion and had even retained the Hebrew language, which many other Jews had forgotten. If the Judaizers were concerned about the outward keeping of Old Testament ceremonial laws, Paul could boast that he had been a Pharisee, a member of the strict Jewish sect that prided itself in keeping the laws of Moses to the last detail. The Pharisees even added many of their own laws to the laws of Moses. Even Paul’s father before him had been a Pharisee, and none of his contemporaries came close to being as good a Pharisee as Paul had been. During his years as a Pharisee, Paul, then known as Saul, had diligently kept and upheld all the Pharisees’ laws and regulations. His zeal for those laws, in fact, had been so great that it led him to try to violently destroy the infant Christian church, because it taught a way of salvation contrary to that which the Pharisees taught.
As measured by the standards of righteousness that the Judaizers upheld, Paul was therefore practically faultless. And if heaven’s gates could have been opened by any combination of these outward things, Paul, both by what he had inherited and what he had attained, would have been able to walk right in.