August 4

Job 35-36; Phil. 1

Years ago, I was at a retreat where the topic of the Bible study portion was Philippians. The teacher called the letter "an epistle of joy." (Many others have called it that too.) At the time, I decided to highlight the words "joy," "glad," and "rejoice" in the letter. If you try that, you'll find there are lots of them. There are four in this first chapter alone.

But it's not just the number of times the words appear; it's the whole atmosphere of the letter. It seems like warmth and gladness just jump off the page as you read it. So, after all the reading we've been doing in Job, where the complaint is about the suffering of the righteous, we land here in the letter to the Philippians, where Paul is in prison, and there's the possibility that he will be executed. Still, he tells the Philippian Christians to rejoice...and he does too.

Fortunately, it doesn't sound like Paul's circumstances as a prisoner are too onerous. He's probably under house arrest. If you remember back to Acts 16, when Paul first visited Philippi, you'll recall that he ended up in prison there too. Paul and Silas had met Lydia there, and they had been preaching in the town. After Paul exorcises a slave girl, her owners create an uproar, and Paul and Silas end up being beaten and thrown into prison. What did they do there that night? They started singing hymns to God. So this theme of joy already fits with Paul's attitude when he was in Philippi himself.

Now, probably a couple visits and a decade or so later, Paul feels close to this small congregation. He is thankful for his relation to them, and he rejoices in their concern for him. As we said, he writes this while in prison, but he actually takes it a bit futher: "Rejoice," he tells them and us, "Regardless of circumstances." To illustrate this, he can go so far as to say that even though some of his "enemies" are rejoicing too - in his imprisonment! - he's still glad that they are preaching Christ (vss. 15-18).

The moral of the story, then, is pretty clear: So much has been given to us that we can have joy regardless of our situation and sufferings. (Actually, there's a touch of this thought in Job 35:9-11, too, if you want to check it out.)

Jim