Philippians 1:12

Note

After thanks and prayer, Paul gives his news. The Philippians must have feared that his imprisonment would block the gospel's way. Paul writes that it has done the opposite.

The advance has two sides. "It has become clear throughout the whole palace guard and to everyone else that I am in chains for Christ" (Philippians 1:13), and "most of the brothers, confident in the Lord by my chains, now dare more greatly to speak the word without fear" (Philippians 1:14). The "palace guard" is the praitōrion, a word used of the emperor's guard or of a governor's residence. On the long-held view that Paul wrote from Rome, the soldiers who guarded him had learned why he was there. Some scholars place the letter in Caesarea or Ephesus instead.

The noun euangelion is the genitive after prokopē, "progress" or "advance." Paul uses the same word again in verse 25 for the Philippians' "progress and joy in the faith" (Philippians 1:25). The gospel's advance into the world and faith's growth within people share one word. The verb, elēluthen, is a perfect: what happened still has its effect. And mallon, "rather" or "actually," marks the surprise: things went the other way from what anyone expected. The chain did not bind the gospel.

The KJV reads, "the things which happened unto me have fallen out rather unto the furtherance of the gospel." "Furtherance" is an old word for exactly this, a furthering, a pushing forward. The BSB's "served to advance" makes the circumstances the servants of the gospel, and the LSV is the most literal: "the things concerning me, rather have come to an advancement of the good news."

Wesley sets the verse against the Philippians' worry: these things "Have fallen out rather to the furtherance, than, as you feared, the hinderance, of the gospel" Wesley. Matthew Henry says of the apostle that "to take off the offence of the cross, he shows the wisdom and goodness of God in his sufferings," and that these things "led some to inquire after the gospel" Matthew Henry.

A few years later Rome itself shows how far the gospel had come there. Tacitus records that when Nero blamed the Christians for the great fire of AD 64, a vast multitude of them were convicted Tacitus, Annals 15.44. By then they were numerous enough in the city to be blamed by an emperor.

Paul counted his chains as part of the gospel's story rather than his own, and in that reckoning the prison was not where the gospel stopped but a place where it went forward.