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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
Beware; he cautions all, both officers and people: and though the original word doth signify to look with mind and eye, yet it is also frequently rendered, to take heed, Mar_8:15 12:38 8:9,23,33 1Co_16:10 2Jo_1:8.
Of dogs; of those dogs, (with the article emphatically proposed), a metaphor borrowed from those voracious, fierce, impure animals, whose price was not brought into the Lord’s house, Deu_23:18 Pro_26:11 Isa_66:3 2Pe_2:22; to connote the false apostles, who endeavoured to corrupt the gospel with Judaism and profaneness, even antichristianism; compare Psa_22:16,20 Mt 7:6 15:26 Rev_22:15. Some think the apostle may allude unto the proverbial speech: Take heed of a mad dog, forasmuch as false teachers, being acted as with a certain madness, would bite Christ and his apostles, and tear his body; and these mad dogs were the more dangerous, in that they did not bark so much as bite. Hence they say, Take heed of a dumb dog and still watcher. There were of several sorts, enemies to the cross of Christ, Gal_5:12 1Th_2:14,15; some more secret, as Absalom against Amnon, 2Sa_13:22, pretending contrary to their practice, 2Ki_8:13 13:22. Our Saviour bade his disciples beware of such, Mat_10:17, which he found to be of this temper, Psa_22:16,20 55:15; though some of them were but dumb dogs, Isa_56:10: some such there were amongst the Philipplans, who, notwithstanding their fair pretext, were enemies to the cross of Christ, did secretly disparage his true apostle, and tear his flock: see Phi_3:18, with Phi_1:15,16.
Beware of evil workers; such as pretended to labour in promoting the gospel of Christ, but secretly were doing mischief amongst Christians, not serving the glory of Christ but their own bellies, Phi_3:18,19; being, as he elsewhere calls them, deceitful workers, 2Co_11:13, glorying in the flesh, Gal_6:13.
Beware of the concision; by an elegant allusion to the name circumcision, which rite the Jews did glory in, and some false teachers of Christianity, after the time of reformation, did urge as necessary to salvation, and require it from others, Act_15:1 Gal_5:2,4 Ga 6:12. These Paul here, in a holy sarcasm, charges the Philippians to take heed of, under the contemptible name of the concision, or cutting off, intimating that the exterior part of that typical work, which was done in the cutting off the foreskin, was now, from the coming of Christ, altogether made a mere cutting off the skin, condemned by God in the heathens, as a profane incision, Lev_19:28 21:5, where the LXX. use the same preposition in the compound word, the apostle here doth in contempt of the thing; which could now bring nothing of profit, nothing of holiness, nothing of honour to any Christian, could no more avail or advantage a man now, than if it were conferred on a beast, being no seal of the covenant now, but a stickling for that rite (when abolished by Christ) which was a mere rending of the church, and in that effect a cutting off from it, Gal_5:10,12. And the apostle doth three times significantly repeat this word,
beware of these enemies to Christian purity and unity, to show how necessary it was to avoid their insinuations, against which he is more sharp in his Epistle to the Galatians.