Charles Ellicott Commentary Philippians 3:18

"For many walk, of whom I told you often, and now tell you even weeping, [that they are] the enemies of the cross of Christ:" — Philippians 3:18 (ASV)

Even weeping.—The especial sorrow, we cannot doubt, lay in this: that the Antinomian profligacy sheltered itself under his own preaching of liberty and of the superiority of the Spirit to the Law.

The enemies of the cross of Christ.—Here again (as in the application of the epithet “dogs” in Philippians 3:2) St. Paul seems to turn back on those he rebuked a name they had probably given to their opponents. The Judaizing tenets were, indeed, in a true sense, an enmity to that cross, which was to the Jews a stumbling-block, because, as St. Paul shows extensively in the Galatian and Roman Epistles, they encroached upon faith in the all-sufficient atonement, and so (as he expresses it with startling emphasis) made Christ to be dead in vain.

But the doctrine of the Cross has two parts, distinct, yet inseparable. There is the cross which He alone bore for us, of which it is our comfort to know that we need only believe in it, and cannot share it. There is also the cross which we are to take up and follow Him (Matthew 10:38; Matthew 16:24), in the fellowship of His sufferings and conformity to His death, described above (Philippians 3:10–11).

St. Paul unites both in the striking passage which closes his Galatian Epistle (Galatians 6:14). He says, God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ! but he adds, whereby the world is crucified unto me, and I to the world. Under cover, perhaps, of absolute acceptance of the one form of this great doctrine, the Antinomian party, continuing in sin that grace might abound, were, regarding the other, enemies of the cross of Christ.