Epaphroditus - A Man Of Honor Or Shame? Series

We are continuing with our series on the book of Philippians. By now, hopefully, you realize that the book of Philippians was actually a letter written to the Philippians by the apostle Paul in about 60 A.D. Consistent with what we have been doing the last few weeks, I would like to have somebody read today’s passage, which comes out of Philippians 2:19-30. If you can, read from the NIV version and read loud. (Scripture read here.)

As you can see, compared to the passages that we looked at last week in the earlier part of chapter 2 that dealt with the descent of Jesus Christ and the ultimate exultation of Jesus Christ, these passages seem a little mundane and ordinary. Really what they are simply referring to is Paul’s travel plans for his associates, Timothy and Epaphroditus. What is good about this passage is that it breaks itself down into two nice and neat sections. The first section has to do with Timothy and Paul’s desire to send Timothy back to the Philippian church with this letter and hopefully return with some good news. The second section deals with the fact that Paul found it more necessary that he would send this virtually unknown guy named Epaphroditus. Since Timothy gets a lot of press in other areas of the New Testament, I thought I would focus on this section that deals with Epaphroditus not only because it tends to be a little bit more interesting but I get to say Epaphroditus about 20 times in the next few times. It is a fun word to say. Back in the day it was actually a quite common name. Just as we often name our children after celebrities or movie stars, back then it was popular to do a very similar thing. They would name their children after Greek gods and goddesses. I suspect some of you have had Greek mythology in high school and you might remember the goddess Aphrodite. She was the goddess of love, beauty, fertility, and all that sort of thing. The male name Epaphroditus stems from that particular name and it basically means someone who is devoted to Aphrodite. This seems strange because when you think about Christians, we are supposed to be devoted to no one else but Jesus Christ. So you would think when Epaphroditus became a Christian that Paul would have forced him maybe into a name change to give him a more common Christian name. But he didn’t make him change the name, which gives us the idea that Paul was not so much interested in a person’s name as he was with the character behind the name. Although we know a little bit about the name Epaphroditus, we really don’t know much about the man Epaphroditus because we just don’t have a lot of information. We have the section we just read and a little snippet about Epaphroditus back in chapter 4:18. When Paul is talking about the receipt of certain gifts when he was in prison he writes “I am amply supplied, now that I have received from Epaphroditus the gifts that you sent.” So really this is all we have on this guy named Epaphroditus in the entire New Testament.

Even though our information is limited, scholars have been able to basically put together a pretty good picture of the situation here. We believe that Epaphroditus was part of the Philippian church, and when Paul became imprisoned, the Philippian church decided they were going to send some gifts his way. We don’t know exactly what type of gifts but some suspect it was financial gifts at least. Epaphroditus took these gifts to Paul in prison in Rome. As I said before, Paul was under house arrest and he was also a Roman citizen, which means he probably had a lot of flexibility to receive visitors and the various gifts that people would bring. Epaphroditus was a part of the Philippian church. He came to Rome and brought these gifts. But somewhere along the line we learn that he got sick. He either got sick on the way to Rome or somewhere in Rome, possibly even injured, to the point where he was really on his deathbed. We can glean that somehow that information got back to the church in Philippi. They had heard that he was sick or ill or injured and they were worried about it.

The situation here is that Paul is writing this letter back to the Philippian church and he is probably thinking about who he is going to send back with this letter. They needed to have a messenger. Paul ideally would like to send Timothy because he is interested in sending someone who is a good representation of him and knows him and knows what he is looking for and really can direct the issues that he brings up in the letter to the people in a very good way. So he desires to send Timothy. We can see that Timothy had a good character and really would be a good person to go because earlier on it said Timothy had a genuine interest for the welfare of the Philippians. We also know that, unlike some of the Philippians that we read about last week, Timothy didn’t just look out for his own interests, but he looked out for the interests of others. It says he had the interest of Christ in mind. We also know that Paul refers to Timothy as really a son in the faith, someone who has served with him for years in the work of the gospel. If Paul was going to send anybody back, his first desire was really to send his right-hand man Timothy. He knows he would be a good representation of Paul and a good example for the Philippians to model. But as we learn also, for some reason Paul thought it more necessary to send back Epaphroditus “whom you sent to take care of my needs.” Those are the basic facts of the story that most all scholars would agree on.