The Surpassing Worth of Knowing Christ
Introduction
Peter tells us that there are places in Paul’s letters which are difficult to understand (2 Pet. 3:15-16). That is true enough, but I also want to say that there are places in the Pauline corpus where he positively soars. We all naturally think of 1 Corinthians 13, for example, or that last glorious passage from Romans 8. Or consider the place from which I want to draw my starting point, Phil 3:4-12, and particularly verse 8.
Before reading this text, what I would like to do today is describe certain first century realities, and when I have done with that, I would like to move down to our own time, and describe certain twenty-first century realities. When I have done this, I trust that you will realize that down through the years some things just stay the same. People are regularly the same, their snarls and sins are the same, and, glory to God, the gospel of Jesus Christ is still the same.
The Text
“Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ” (Philippians 3:8, ESV).
“Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ,” (Philippians 3:8, KJV).
What we learn in Scripture is that water is thicker than blood. This is a comparative statement, and casts no shade whatever on blood, which is certainly thick enough to the purpose. There is nothing at all wrong with a deep natural affection for your own people and your own place. There is something desperately wrong with contempt for the natural affections of others—a contempt that drives out any possible love for God.
“If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?”1 John 4:20 (KJV)
So the great apostle of this universal gospel was the apostle Paul, and he was willing to go to Hell, if such a thing were possible, for his natural kinsmen.
“For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh.”Rom. 9:3 (KJV)
So don’t come around to him talking about blood and soil. He knew that he was descended from Benjamin, a man who had lived almost two millennia before. Most of us don’t know who our great-grandfather was, even though he was born in an American hospital. Paul was a man who had forgotten more about natural affection than the most ardent kinist will ever know (Phil 3:4-5). But compared to the knowledge of Christ, all of that was nothing more than dumpster scrapings to him (Phil. 3:8).
How this is possible is nothing other than the sheer grace of God, but trying to look at the grace of God straight on is like staring at the sun.
Background Considerations
One of the things that surpassing knowledge does is surpass. But surpass what? Ultimately, in every age, in every generation, what it surpasses is any of our efforts to go about to establish a righteousness of our own.
Now when we undertake this effort to establish such a righteousness, we have to recognize that while most of us are selfish enough, there are very few radical individualists. And what this results in is the formation of plausibility structures, corporate entities that reflect your standards back at you, and are sure to tell you how well you are doing, and what a fine fellow you are.
These plausibility structures can be ideological factions, or a group of intense hobbyists, or a political party, Signal chat groups, or other artificial constructs, but the one that is the most common among fallen men is the one you were born into—your ethnic tribe.
Now unlike some of our other artificial structures, your kin are a natural good, a gift from God, and a gift that you are summoned to receive with gratitude, honor, and respect. It is a gift you are to treasure, in obedience to the Fifth Commandment. And if you take the Westminster Larger Catechism seriously, as you should (Q 123-133), you will discover that the authority of the Fifth Commandment extends out to your shirttail relatives and all your kinfolk. Indeed, the Fifth Commandment is the cornerstone for all godly social order.
But how this is to be done is crucial, as will be seen shortly. To do it the wrong way is to give way to ethnic idolatry, and to do it the right way is nothing other than a sanctified natural affection.
So in times like ours, when deliberate efforts are underway to erode or otherwise destroy our national and civic identity, it is not unlawful for Christians to defend their people. The secular globalists want to swallow up our families, tribes, and nations, intending to homogenize all of humanity. They want all of humanity to come out as a light brown puree.
We must fight them, but we must do it in the name of Christ, and with His mark upon us. That mark is baptism, and water is thicker than blood. When our ethnic identities are defeated by or surrendered to the Church of Humanity, they are simply digested, like so many dainty morsels. When they are surrendered to Christ, as Christ requires, they are crucified, and raised to life again. How are they raised? This is a gospel mystery, but a man cannot follow Christ unless he hates his father, mother, wife, brothers, sisters, and children (Luke 14:26)—but then when he embraces this duty in willing obedience, he is raised to life again, and is equipped to love his wife as Christ loved the church and gave Himself for it (Eph. 5:25).
And so here is a mystery revealed. God does in fact open the way for us all to love our own people—our families, our relatives, our ethnic tribes, our towns, our regions, and our nations. But the only proper way to love any of them, the only region in which the ordo amoris can be fruitfully learned, is on the other side of a bloody cross. The only place where it is not idolatry is in the land of resurrection.
Two Kinds of Idolatry
And so this leads us to consider the profound difference that exists between two kinds of idolatry. We need to be careful here, because the dinosaur world of Big Eva loved to solemnly warn us about the incipient dangers of idolatry lurking in anything that you really liked—buttered popcorn, the smell of a well-oiled baseball glove, or your wife’s neck. So we don’t want to do anything like that . . . but we do need to do something with the concept, because actual idolatry really does happen, and it really is bad.
I said there were two types of idolatry. The first type is glaring and obvious. Gideon’s father Joash had an altar to Baal in his yard, and that was something that needed to come down (Judges 6:30). Overt idolatry means that the idol has to go. Idols like this need to be ground to powder and thrown into the Brook Kidron. The idol needs to be destroyed and, as John Bunyan would say, there’s an end on it.
But the other kind of idol needs to be demoted, not eliminated. For example, Paul tells us that covetousness or greed is idolatry, saying this in a couple of places (Col. 3:5; Eph. 5:5). But when a man repents of this sin, he still needs to handle money—Jesus commends the man who handles unrighteous Mammon shrewdly (Luke 16:9). And if a man has made an idol out of his car, career, or family, what repentance needs to do is to recalibrate everything. The idol is demoted and restored to its proper place. This kind of idol should not be destroyed, but rather to be introduced to its rightful place in the ordo amoris. And as mentioned a moment ago, the way this demotion occurs is for the idolater to bring his idols to the only place where resurrection is a possibility, which is the cross of Christ.
This should not be that difficult, but one of the things that idols do as they whisper in your ear is to complicate things.
One of the Grand Themes
Now, with all that established, let us consider how this applies to our natural relations, and how all of this is handled in the Scriptures.
This is one of the grand emphases of the New Testament—not destroying natural relations, or kinship connections, but relativizing them in Christ. And by “relativizing” I mean demoting, and by demoting I mean crucifying and raising to life again. This process is actually one of the central themes of the entire New Testament.
The book of Acts began with a declaration that the gospel was going to go everywhere—Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. We are then given one systematic demonstration after another of God’s purpose in this. First the gospel spread throughout Jerusalem and Judea (Acts 2:14). Then it spread to Samaria (Acts 8:5). Galilee was then mentioned (Acts 9:31). The Ethiopian eunuch hears the Word from Philip (Acts 8:35). And the message had apparently taken root in Damascus in Syria (Acts 9:2), which is why Saul of Tarsus, the persecutor, needed to go there.
So Acts gives us a freighted table of contents in the first chapter—the gospel would spread in concentric waves from the place where that large rock of the gospel was thrown into the pond. And that is how the whole book of Acts unfolds, from Philip’s Samaritans, to the Ethiopian eunuch, to Cornelius and his household, to the showdown at the Jerusalem Council. And that was the Council that determined that the Christian church was to be catholic and universal. It was that first great Council that determined that water was thicker than blood.
“Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.”Colossians 3:11 (KJV)
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”Galatians 3:28 (KJV)
If anyone wants to slip off the point by maintaining that these ancient ethnic tensions and animosities were trivial compared to what we have today, the only exhortation I would use in reply is to ask you to get out more. Or perhaps to read a book.
According to Scripture, this is a big deal, and not adiaphora. Christians should receive one another despite various denominational differences— “paedo or credo,” “Thomist or VanTilian,” “postmill, premill, amill.” But to establish policed ethnic lines within the body of Christ is a gospel issue. It is what caused a fierce confrontation at Antioch between Paul and Peter, it is what caused Paul to call down anathemas in his letter to the Galatians, and it resulted in the great Jerusalem Council.
Bring This All Down to Our Own Moment
Going by the online chatter, a lot of people want to be based, or one of the bois, or perhaps a third option, increasingly popular, of just being bad. But if it must begin with a B, I want to be a simple Bible guy.
However, as John Stott argued in his book Between Two Worlds, the task of the preacher is to exegete the Scriptures, and then to exegete the times, so that he might know how to apply the former to the latter. And one of the principles to remember, when dealing with this sort of issue, is that there is nothing new under the sun (Eccl. 1:9).
Now this portion of my talk is going to be directed at some folks who are not here, although there are many reasons for thinking that they will find out about it. And in the meantime, I trust that it will be edifying for you.
As I am going to mimic the apostle Paul in just a moment, I also need to imitate him in another way by way of introduction. I am out of my mind to talk like this, but I have been forced into it (2 Cor. 11:23).
We live in a demented time when one can be assaulted for being a white supremacist for offenses like arriving on time for work, or doing math correctly, or for taking showers. The received wisdom of the ruling elites is that the cancer of the planet can be described as young, male, white, and heterosexual. Woe betide the young fellow who is all four of those. Such young men have often been harangued, attacked, blamed, ostracized, and abandoned by their fathers in the faith, and also abandoned by their actual fathers. The hard leftists are so given over to this that we should start calling them harangutans.
As a result, some of their targets have taken refuge in some pretty dank places, and some of them have even taken to calling the people assembled on this stage various insulting names. This is grievous sin, to be sure, but I don’t fault them as much as I fault the winsome and toothy evangelical elites who chased them there. The task we are facing here is akin to an attempt to get an angry, snarling cougar out of a bear trap.
Yes, we live in absurd times, and in these times some of these young bucks have taken on the mantle of defending the West. But they are defending something they have read about in books—or more likely memes—or which they learned about from Turner Classic Movies. But I grew up there. I remember it. I was shaped by it. I can remember when The Andy Griffith Show could be watched unironically. My friends, you can’t get back to Mayberry by ridiculing the people who grew up there, who were shaped by it, and who know things about it that have never even occurred to you.
There is always a ditch on both sides of the road, and when the Spirit works to get us out of one, the devil is hard at work to make us veer over into the other one. The devil has no loyalty whatever to one particular ditch—he just wants us off the road. The devil is the despot of both ditches, and so there are two basic lies he tells, just as soon as you are out of one. One is to say that you are now too close to the other one, so you had better slide right back in. Or perhaps he will suggest that you now need to gun it, in order to get over to the new ditch faster.
The ethnic malice, bigotry, hatred that characterized much of the early twentieth century really was a bad ditch. It smelled like sulfur, and was straight from the Pit. The Tulsa Riots in 1921 provide a particularly egregious example. That was not some imaginary thing that Al Sharpton thought up.
And that means the subsequent work of cultural amelioration really was a blessing from God and was a work of the Spirit. There was something in there that was really good.
But the devil was on the case immediately, and through the War on Poverty, the hypocrisies of MLK Jr. and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he sent us careening into the opposite ditch, eventually resulting in the apotheosis of St. George Floyd. For more on all of this, read Coldwell’s Age of Entitlement, or Jeremy Carl’s The Unprotected Class.
An ecclesiastical form of this over-reaction against the old bigotries came in the mandate that decreed that all churches had to be as integrated as Heaven would be. But they did not want churches in northern Idaho—or as I affectionately call it, little Norway—to look like Heaven. They actually wanted it to look like Manhattan. Now there is nothing wrong with looking like Manhattan . . . if you are in Manhattan. And there is nothing wrong with being as white as South Dakota . . . if you are in South Dakota. Their mandatory cosmopolitanism was as obnoxious as mandatory segregation was.
Martin Luther said that humanity is like a drunken peasant trying to ride a donkey. He falls off one side, and then, in order to correct himself, he falls off the other side. The dank right is playing right into this. After some decades of watching entitled black stupidity try to wreck the country, they have risen up as one man, and are demanding equal time. We need to return to the halcyon days of a regnant white stupidity. Our argument for sinning is that other people are sinning.
One of the phenomena that we are seeing online is that of certain people being praised unduly, and this is often the result of them exuding a certain aura. They are a dumb person’s idea of what a smart person must be like. There is a parallel here.
For a generation that has grown up in destabilized times, largely online, and in broken homes or with absentee fathers, its children have developed a deep yearning for a real society, a real country, a stable nation. They want it desperately, but they have distorted ideas of what such stability could look like. What they are applauding is an unstable person’s idea of what stability looks like.
My plea is this. Some of us remember it. My observation here is that you cannot really recover a tradition by trashing it. You cannot learn how to honor your fathers by dishonoring your fathers. There is more that needs to be said here. Some of us have been in the front lines of this war for decades, and while we appreciate the new reinforcements arriving at the front every day, we could use a little less of the criticism that wonders aloud why we haven’t won the war yet. What have we been doing all this time?
Well, you know. The usual stuff. Starting a college. Planting churches. Establishing a classical Christian school, and then a movement of classical Christian schools. Starting pro-life pregnancy centers. Holding conferences. Editing worldview magazines for year after year. Writing books. Equipping families to live in accordance with God’s design. Preaching the Word, in season and out of season.
Do you revel in being accused of being a hate-monger? I far more. Our ministries were labeled as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center—we were purportedly the Taliban of the Palouse. Do you think that your ideas are banned for being “dangerous?” I far more. It is a point of pride that a book of mine was publicly burned by Muslims in Jakarta, Indonesia. When the COVID tyrannies came down, our church community had a psalm sing confrontation with our city government, resulting in arrests and a federal lawsuit that we won. In the aftermath of all that, then came the Stickergate free speech protests, with the result that years later, and hundreds of thousands of dollars later, one of my grandsons now has his case being appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Please pray they take it up. All this over a misdemeanor charge, which makes some people wonder why we are fighting over a misdemeanor—have we lost all sense of proportion? No. What our corrupt city government did was not a misdemeanor.
If you wonder what all of this is about, we are just floating down the lazy river of the post-war consensus in our inner tube, splashing as we go. You know us, just trying to fit in with the secularist liberal norms.
What we are all up against will not be successfully fought with any number of White Boy Summer videos. Those seemed harmless enough at the beginning, but experienced pastors still had that uh oh vibe. It reminds me of Microsoft’s Tay chatbot back in 2016, designed to mimic teen girls and learn from Twitter interactions. Remember that? Within hours it became a Paradise for trolls, and had to be shut down because of her Nazi sympathies.
Something is seriously demented when a movement begins by telling us that we need to be able to take pride in our fathers, and then within a matter of months starts celebrating the mortal enemies that our fathers fought and defeated just a generation before. In the name of heritage and legacy, they started making celebratory videos that trashed their forefathers’ heritage and legacy. Our nation defeated the Nazis, whom they celebrate. My fathers fought the Nazis, whom they celebrate.
One of the fellows who was behind a bunch of this performative gunk recently complained that we were zealous to cancel anybody who was “an inch to our right.” But all we are doing is “noticing.” We are noticing that these guys are more like light years to our left, thus creating an optical illusion. Due to the curvature of space, they only look to some folks like they are to our right. No socialists, commies, Nietzscheans, Darwinists, collectivists, collaborators with Stalin, or black pillers are actually to our right, or on the right.
It is like these guys want Tokyo Rose to have her own float in the Fourth of July parade.
Conclusion
So I want to return to the theme with which we began—the surpassing worth of knowing Christ. One of the great blessings that comes from knowing Christ is that you are then given the gift of knowing yourself, and from there of knowing the world. Part of knowing the world is knowing how the world is structured, and how your loves are supposed to be structured within it.
Ethnic animosity is as old as dirt, and slipping back into it is about as hard as hitting the ground with your hat. But in Christ, it is not complicated. The liberty of love is not complicated. Love your wife, love your neighbor, and love your enemy. Everyone you meet all day long has to be at least one of those. But you are not to love willy-nilly in some sort of scattershot way. You must submit yourself to the high calling of Scripture, and do what God says, the way He says, and when He says.
He tells you to love your own household, providing for them, and refusal to do so means that you have denied the faith and are worse than an unbeliever (1 Tim. 5:8). And if you only love those who can reciprocate, how are you any better than the heathen (Luke 14:12-14)? So does God call you to love the insider? Of course. Does He call you to love the outsider? Again, of course. It is a sin to over-complicate this. Just remember your Sunday School lessons.
Back in the middle of the Jim Crow days, a black salesman was once on the road, and he came to a city in the South that was set in its segregated ways. He had to be there over a Sunday, and as a devout man, he wanted to make sure he worshiped the Lord. He had noticed a church building down the road from his motel, and so he looked it up, noted the worship times, and walked down there just before the worship was to begin. Unfortunately, he was seen coming up the walk, and a deacon met him at the front door, and said that he was very sorry, but he might find another church more conducive. But that church was a couple of miles away. The man could hear singing inside, one of his favorite hymns, so he walked around to the side door. But he was again stopped, this time by another deacon. This was thoroughly discouraging, but he tried once more on the other side. And a third time he was stopped. As he was walking back to the motel, he found himself praying. “Lord, I tried. I really wanted to worship You, and yet . . .” At this point he was interrupted by a voice from Heaven. And the voice said, “Son, don’t fret about it. I have been trying to get in there for years.”