“Therefore, my dear friends, just as you have always obeyed, so now, not only in my presence but even more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God who is working in you both to will and to work according to his good purpose.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

How does salvation work? Who is responsible for it? Does God do all of it and we are just passive participants, or do we play some kind of a role? How much of a role? This is a question and debate that has challenged the church since its inception. Some theologians and interpreters have leaned hard into one side; others have landed squarely on the other. So, which is it? Paul doesn’t give us an answer here. Instead he ratchets up the tension on us. Let’s talk about what’s going here.

Let’s remember first what Paul is talking about here. While we just came off of his incredible reflection on and celebration of the humility of Christ (along with a call to embrace it in our own lives), tracing Paul’s argument back a bit, this is really all about living our lives worthy of the Gospel of Christ. Everything we talked about last week as we got into chapter 2 flows from that idea.

Living worthy of the Gospel of Christ means embracing His humility. Moving forward into this next section, Paul begins by commending the Philippians’ obedience. They have shown themselves willing to do what God says. That kind of willingness comes out of several different ideas and understandings about God, all of which are important. Paul has heard about their obedience, and calls them to more of it.

This, though, leads directly into the point of tension we mentioned at the beginning. In light of their commitment to obedience, Paul calls them forward to more. They are to by their obedience work out their salvation with fear and trembling. What does that mean? Well, it could mean a few different things. The word in Greek has a range of meanings.

The first is to perform or accomplish or achieve. The idea here would be that the Philippian believers are to work out the implications of their salvation to their lives and through their lives into the lives of others. They should do the good works of salvation. That would certainly fit with Paul’s reference to obedience. They are to seek out the things Jesus would have done and do those. Salvation isn’t merely a gift to be received, but something to be actively worked out.

The second option is to put oneself in shape for something. Think here in terms of working out for a race. I’ve got a kid running track right now. Every day after school he has practice. The coach gives him a plan to run with the goal in mind of putting him in shape to be able to succeed in his races. (He won his most recent heat, so the workouts seem to be doing something.) Taking this idea to our salvation, we are to put ourselves in shape for salvation by our good works and obedience.

Option three is to do something from which something else is the result. That is, do the thing that causes the other thing to happen. The idea here would be that we are to play some sort of active role in receiving our salvation. We walk that path of obedience and God rewards us with salvation.

I’ll be honest: the third option here is the most problematic and seems least likely to be correctto me, but all of them are lexical possibilities given the range of the word being translated. Even discounting the last one, though, what Paul seems to be indicating here is that we have some sort of a role to play in our salvation. Whether the work we do is to help us secure it in the first place or simply to live in light of what we have received, ours is not a passive reception, but an active cooperation. It’s God and us getting it done.

For those folks whose theological preferences have them leaning toward some sort of cooperation between us and God, this verse is like gold because, honestly, there aren’t a ton of verses that offer this kind of emphatic support for their position. Paul here clearly agrees with the Arminians. Salvation is not the one-sided affair those radical Calvinists always make it out to be.

And if it was okay to cherry-pick verses completely out of context, perhaps there would really be an argument to be made here. But unfortunately for this point, after v. 12 comes v. 13. And v. 13 offers us a jarring different perspective. Look at this again: “For it is God who is working in you both to will and to work according to his good purpose.”

So we are to be the ones doing the working out of our salvation, but God is still the one doing all the work. He enables us not only to do the work in fact, but it’s even Him who grants us the will to do it in the first place. That is, we wouldn’t want to do the work if He didn’t give us the will to do it before we ever got started. We can’t do acting when it comes to our salvation that is not what God has inspired and enabled in us in the first place. We may not be merely passive participants, but it’s all and only Him from start to finish. And all the Calvinists said, “Amen!”

So then, which is it? Is salvation something we work out, or is it God who does it all? Are the Arminians right, or do the Calvinists have the marketed cornered? What seems to be the case when we take Paul fully for what he says here is that the answer to this age-old question is an unequivocal, emphatic yes. The very uncomfortable truth about the Scriptures, and especially the New Testament, is that elements of both positions are affirmed in various places. This is about the only time I can think of that they are both affirmed in such tight succession, but there are other places they both appear.

Theologically speaking, we don’t like tension. We want all of our big questions answered with clarity and precision. We don’t want gray. Our great preference is to have everything painted in brilliant black and white. Sure, the culture around us talks a lot about gray, but if you pay very close attention to the actual things being said, there’s far less gray than we pretend there is. Arguing for gray is a surreptitious way of saying you are wrong and I am right; all we really see is black and white.

And into this grand desire for precision, the Scriptures consistently offer us tension. Glorious, irritating tension. Now, that’s not to say there is not a single correct answer to the question of how exactly salvation works. There is. God has things all worked out just fine. It may be, though, and from the witness of the Scriptures as a whole there seems to be multiple elements to His answer that seem to us to be competing or even contradictory. Our minds are finite; His is not. He invites us to trust Him, to put our faith in Him, and to work with Him to advance His plans and purposes in the world around us.

Salvation is entirely His work from start to finish, but we have a role to play. How does that work exactly? We don’t know with the kind of precision we wish we had. But when we put our faith in Him and dutifully obey His commands, His Spirit accomplishes something miraculous in us, transforming us from within into the kind of creatures He made us to be in the beginning; creatures who perfectly reflect the glory of His Son who laid down His life so that we might live. When we work with Him as He does all the work, that’s where the real magic happens.