People today are consumed by the passionate pursuit of happiness. Self-help books, motivational speakers, and advice columnists claim to offer the key to happiness, but for many people the door remains locked. Unable to control their circumstances, they find themselves instead controlled by their circumstances.
When their job, relationship, or house (or, in the case of Christians, church) fails to make them happy, they dump it and look for a new one. But on the merry-go-round of life, they can never quite seem to reach the brass ring.
Having fruitlessly pursued happiness through pleasure and self-gratification, they arrive at the jaded view of life expressed by the Preacher in Ecclesiastes 1:2:“Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.” But if happiness, the fleeting feeling of exhilaration, is elusive, joy is not.
Biblical joy, the settled conviction that God sovereignly controls the events of life for believers’ good and His glory, is available to all who obey Him. In fact, God commands believers to rejoice (2:18; 3:1; 4:4; cf. 2 Cor. 13:11; 1 Thess. 5:16).
That divine joy is the theme of Philippians; the Greek word for joy, in both its noun and verb forms, appears more than a dozen times in its four chapters (1:4,18,25;2:2,17,18,28,29;3:1;4:1,4,10).
The circumstances of both the writer and the recipients of this brief epistle were not those that would be expected to produce joy and happiness.
When the apostle Paul wrote this letter to his beloved Philippian congregation, he was a prisoner in Rome. Little in his tumultuous life since his dramatic conversion on the Damascus Road three decades earlier would have been expected to produce joy.
He had faced fierce and unrelenting opposition, both from Gentiles and from his unbelieving Jewish countrymen (cf. 2 Cor. 11:23–30). Immediately after his conversion, Paul’s bold, fearless proclamation of the gospel aroused the ire of Damascus’s Jewish population. They sought to kill him, and he was forced to flee the city by being lowered from the city wall at night in a basket (Acts 9:20–25).
Later he was forced to flee from Iconium (Acts 14:5–6); was pelted with stones and left for dead at Lystra (Acts 14:19–20); was beaten and thrown into jail at Philippi (Acts 16:16–40); was forced to flee from Thessalonica after his preaching touched off a riot (Acts 17:5–9); went from there to Berea, from where he was also forced to flee (Acts 17:13–14); was mocked and ridiculed by Greek philosophers at Athens (Acts 17:16–34); was hauled before the Roman proconsul at Corinth (Acts 18:12–17); and faced both Jewish opposition (Acts 19:9; cf. 20:18–19) and rioting Gentiles at Ephesus (Acts 19:21–41; cf. 1 Cor. 15:32). As he was about to sail from Greece to Palestine, a Jewish plot against his life forced him to change his travel plans (Acts 20:3).
On the way to Jerusalem, he met the Ephesian elders at Miletus and declared to them, “Bound in spirit, I am on my way to Jerusalem, not knowing what will happen to me there, except that the Holy Spirit solemnly testifies to me in every city, saying that bonds and afflictions await me” (Acts 20:22–23).
When he got to Jerusalem, he was recognized in the temple by Jews from Asia Minor, savagely beaten by a frenzied mob, and saved from certain death when Roman soldiers arrived on the scene and arrested him (Acts 21:27–36).
While Paul was in custody at Jerusalem, the Jews formed yet another plot against his life, prompting the Roman commander to send him under heavy guard to the governor at Caesarea (Acts 23:12–35). After his case dragged on without resolution for two years and two Roman governors, Paul exercised his right as a Roman citizen and appealed to Caesar (Acts 25:10–11).
After an eventful trip, which included being shipwrecked in a violent storm, Paul arrived at Rome (Acts 27,28). As he wrote Philippians, the apostle was in his fourth year of Roman custody, awaiting Emperor Nero’s final decision in his case.
The Philippian church also had its share of problems. Its members were desperately poor, so much so that Paul was surprised at their contribution to the offering he was collecting for the poor in Jerusalem (2 Cor. 8:1–5). Like Paul, they were being persecuted for the cause of Christ (1:27–30).
Worse, they were being attacked by false teachers (3:2, 18–19). On top of everything else, a feud between two prominent women in the congregation threatened to shatter the unity of the church (4:2–3; cf. 2:1 4,14).
Yet despite the circumstances of both writer and recipients, joy permeates Philippians, so much so that it may be called “the epistle of joy.” R. C. H. Lenski wrote, “Joy is the music that runs through this epistle, the sunshine that spreads over all of it.
The whole epistle radiates joy and happiness” (The Interpretation of St. Paul’s Epistles to the Galatians, to the Ephesians, and to the Philippians [Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1961], 691).
Those who study its teaching and apply its principles will, like its human author, learn the secret of having joy, peace, and contentment in every circumstance (4:11–13)
