To: Leolaia
I don’t see how using Ephesians is a problem with regards to Paul saying that he hasn’t received his reward yet. Nobody gets their reward until Jesus comes:
(Revelation 22:12) “‘Look! I am coming quickly, and the reward I give is with me, to render to each one as his work is.”
The point of me alluding to Ephesians is to show how one can in some sense be “in heaven” but yet on earth.
Anyhow, I don’t think it necessary to understand Phil. in light of Eph.
British N.T. scholar NT Wright says this about Philippians 3:20-21:
“Many have thought that if our citizenship is in heaven that means that heaven is our real home, the place to which we will eventually go. But that is not how the language of citizenship functions. The point of being a citizen of a mother city is not that when life gets really tough, or when you retire, you can go back home to the mother city. The people to whom Paul was writing in Philippi were Roman citizens, but they had no intention of going back to Rome. They were the means through which Roman civilization was being brought to the world of Northern Greece. If and when the going got tough there, the emperor would come from Rome to deliver them from their enemies in Philippi, and establish them as a true Roman presence right there. So, Paul says, 'from heaven we await a saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body.' This is, I suggest, much more integrated with a theology of new heavens and new earth than with a theology of going from the present space-time world to a nonspatiotemporal one. It ties in with other passages such as Gal 4.21-31, which speaks of the Jerusalem 'which is above.' The purpose is not to escape to that Jerusalem, any more than the muddled Galatians thought they had to go and live in terrestrial Jerusalem in order to be proper Christians. No: they were under the dangerous influence of the terrestrial Jerusalem, and Paul is saying, in effect, 'you must be under the influence of, and act as the agents of, the heavenly Jerusalem.' Philippians 3 and Galatians 4 both speak of the dimension of the present reality which is to be informed by the mother city, not of a sense of escaping from present reality to that mother city.”
With regards to Philippians 1:23, I would agree that to be “released” (NWT) or “departed” to be with Christ is what Paul is talking about. You asked, in essence, ‘where is he departing?’ I would say where Jesus is. But when does this take place? When is this “being with Christ” take place? I believe it is at his coming. Since the dead in Christ are raised first, and since that should include Paul, then it is at his coming (1 Thess 4:16-17) when Paul gets what he was talking about.
Jesus is only in heaven temporarily:
(Acts 3:19-21) Repent, therefore, and turn around so as to get YOUR sins blotted out, that seasons of refreshing may come from the person of the Lord and that he may send forth the Christ appointed for YOU, Jesus, whom heaven, indeed, must hold within itself until the times of restoration of all things of which God spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets of old time. . .