Expositor's Bible Commentary 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)

Who were these “enemies of the cross of Christ”? While some regard them as the Judaizers of v.2 (whose emphasis on legalism undermined the Cross), they are more likely antinomians, who went to the opposite extreme from the Judaizers and threw off all moral restraints. By their lawless lives, they too were enemies of the Cross and the new life that should issue from it.

It is not likely that these people were simply pagans, of whom nothing much better was to be expected. Rather, they were probably professing Christians, but ones whose lives were so profligate that it was clear to Paul that they had never been regenerated. Presumably, they were not members of the Philippian church (the character of this letter would have been different if “many” such people were in that congregation), but because there were such in the Christian world as a whole, they posed a danger to every church (cf. Romans 16:17–18; 2 Peter 2:10–22). Paul had already warned of them, perhaps in former visits or in other letters, and felt real anguish when the churches were threatened with falseness of doctrine or life.