The order of these verses is notable and instructive. (1) First comes the knowledge of “the power of the Resurrection.” What this is we see by examining it as historically the main subject of the first apostolic preaching. There it is considered, as in St. Peter’s first sermons, as giving the earnest of “forgiveness,” or “blotting out of sins,” and the “gift of the Holy Ghost” (Acts 2:38; Acts 3:13; Acts 3:26), or, as St. Paul expresses it, of “justification from all things” (Acts 13:38-39). This same idea is wrought out fully in his Epistles. Thus, for example, without it (1 Corinthians 15:17) “we are still in our sins.” It is the pledge of our justification (Romans 5:1), and the means of our being “alive unto God” (Romans 6:11). Hence “the power,” or efficacy, “of His resurrection” is the justification, and regeneration inseparable from it, which lie at the entrance of Christian life. (2) Next comes the “partaking of His sufferings” and “conformity to His death,” which are the “taking up the cross, and following Him,” in the obedience even unto death. This “fellowship of sufferings,” coming partly from the sin of others, partly from our own, is the constant theme of the New Testament. (See 1 Peter 4:13; Romans 8:17; 2 Corinthians 1:5; Colossians 1:24; 2 Timothy 2:11.) The “conformity to His death” is the completion of the death unto sin, described as “mortification” of sin (Colossians 3:5); “as bearing about in the body the dying (or, properly, mortification) of the Lord Jesus” (2 Corinthians 4:10); or more frequently as being “crucified with Christ,” “the world to us and we to the world” (Galatians 2:20; Galatians 5:24; Galatians 6:14). (3) Lastly comes the “attainment to the resurrection of the dead,” properly, “the resurrection from the dead,” which is (see Luke 20:35) the resurrection unto life and the glorification in Him, so nobly described below (Philippians 3:20-21). “If we have been planted together in the likeness of His death, we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection” (Romans 6:5). For of our resurrection (see 1 Corinthians 15:12-23) His resurrection is not only the pledge, but the earnest. Note how in 1 Thessalonians 4:14-18, and 1 Corinthians 15:51-57, the whole description is only of the resurrection unto life, and compare the first resurrection of Revelation 20:6. This is the completion of all; St. Paul dared not as yet anticipate it with the confidence which hereafter soothed his dying hour (2 Timothy 4:7-8).
Philippians 3:12-16 lead us from the warning against trust in human merit to deprecate the supposition of a perfection here attained even in Christ. The transition is natural. The same spirit which shows itself undisguisedly in the one pretension, comes out half-concealed in the other.