Ver. 5. +of others also. Have this mind+ (phroneite) in +you+, this moral attitude in each soul, +which+ was, and is,[7] +also in Christ Jesus+, (in that eternal Messiah whom I name already with His human Name, JESUS; for in the will of His Father, and in the unity of His own Person, it was as it were His Name already
Ver. 6. from everlasting,) +who in God's manifested Being[8] subsisting+,[9] seeming divine, because He was divine, in the full sense of Deity, in that eternal world, +reckoned it no plunderer's prize[10] to be on an equality with God+;[11] no, He viewed His possession of the fulness of the Eternal Nature as securely and inalienably His own, and so He dealt with it for our sakes with a sublime and restful remembrance of others; far from thinking of it as for Himself alone, as one who claimed it unlawfully would have done,
Ver. 7. +He rather (alla) made Himself void by His own act+,[12] void of the manifestation and exercise of Deity as it was His on the throne,[13] +taking[14] Bond-servant's+ (doulou) +manifested being+ (morphê), that is to say, the veritable Human Nature which, as a creaturely nature, is essentially bound to the service of the Creator, the _bond_service of the Father; +coming to be+, becoming, genomenos, +in men's similitude+, so truly human as not only to be but to seem Man, accepting all the conditions involved in a truly human exterior,
Ver. 8. "pleased as Man with men to appear." +And+ then, further, +being found+, as He offered Himself to view, +in respect of guise+ (schêati), in respect of outward shape, and habit, and address, +as Man+, He went further, He stooped yet lower, even from Humanity to Death; +He humbled Himself, in becoming obedient+,[15] obedient to Him whose Bondservant He now was as Man, +to the length[16] of death, aye+ (de), +death of Cross+, that death of unimaginable pain and of utmost shame, the death which to the Jew was the symbol of the curse of God upon the victim, and to the Roman was a horror of degradation which should be "far not only from the bodies but from the imaginations of citizens of Rome."[17]
So He came, and so He suffered, because "He
Ver. 9. looked to the interests of others." +Wherefore also God+, His God (ho theos), +supremely exalted Him+, in His Resurrection and Ascension, +and conferred upon Him+, as a gift of infinite love and approval (echarisato), +the Name which is above every name+; THE NAME, unique and glorious; the Name Supreme, the I AM; to be His Name now, not only as He is from eternity, the everlasting Son of the Father, but as He became also in time, the suffering and risen Saviour of sinners.[18] In His whole character and work He is invested now with the transcendent glory and greatness of divine dignity; every thought of the suffering Manhood is steeped in the fact that He who, looking on the things of others, came down to bear it, is now enthroned where only the Absolute and Eternal King
Ver. 10. can sit; +so that in the Name of Jesus+,[19] in presence of the revealed majesty of Him who bears, as Man, the human personal Name, Jesus, +every knee should bow+, as the prophet (Isa. xlv. 23) foretells, +of things celestial, and terrestrial, and subterranean+, of all created existence, in its heights and depths; spirits, men, and every other creature; all bowing, each in their way, to the imperium of the exalted Jesus,
Ver. 11. JEHOVAH-JESUS; +and that every tongue should confess+, with the confessing of adoring, praising, worship (exomologêsêtai), +that Jesus Christ is+ nothing less than +Lord+, in the supreme and ultimate sense of that mighty word, +to God the Father's glory+. For the worship given to "His Own Son" (Rom. viii. 32), whose Nature is one with His, whose glories flow eternally from Him, is praise given to Him.[20]
So closes one of the most conspicuous and magnificent of the dogmatic utterances of the New Testament. Let us consider it for a few moments from that point of view alone. We have here a chain of assertions about our Lord Jesus Christ, made within some thirty years of His death at Jerusalem; made in the open day of public Christian intercourse, and made (every reader must feel this) not in the least in the manner of controversy, of assertion against difficulties and denials, but in the tone of a settled, common, and most living certainty. These assertions give us on the one hand the fullest possible assurance that He is Man, Man in nature, in circumstances and experience, and particularly in the sphere of relation to God the Father. But they also assure us, in precisely the same tone, and in a way which is equally vital to the argument in hand, that He is as genuinely Divine as He is genuinely Human. Did He "come to be in Bondservant's Form"? And does the word Form, morphê, there, unless the glowing argument is to run as cold as ice, mean, as it ought to mean, reality in manifestation, fact in sight, a Manhood perfectly real, carrying with it a veritable creaturely {98} obligation (douleia) to God? But He was also, antecedently, "in God's Form." And there too therefore we are to understand, unless the wonderful words are to be robbed of all their living power, that He who came to be Man, and to seem Man, in an antecedent state of His blessed Being was God, and seemed God. And His "becoming to be" one with us in that mysterious but genuine Bondservice was the free and conscious choice of His eternal Will, His eternal Love, in the glory of the Throne. "When He came on earth abased" He was no Victim of a secret and irresistible destiny, such as that which in the Stoic's theology swept the Gods of Olympus to their hour of change and extinction as surely as it swept men to ultimate annihilation. "He made Himself void," with all the foresight and with all the freewill which can be exercised upon the Throne where the Son is in the Form of the Eternal Nature. Such is the Christology of the passage in its aspect towards Deity.
Then in regard of our beloved Lord's Manhood, its implications assure us that the perfect genuineness of that Manhood, which could not be expressed in a term more profound and complete than this same morphê doulou, Form of Bondservant, leaves us yet perfectly sure that He who chose to be Bondservant is to us only all the more, even in His Manhood, LORD. Was it not His own prescient choice to be true Man? And was it not His choice with a prescient and infallible regard to "the things of others," to "us men and our salvation"? Then we may be sure that, whatever is meant by the "made Himself void," heauton ekenôsen, which describes His Incarnation here, one thing it could never possibly mean—-a "Kenôsis" which could hurt or distort His absolute fitness to guide and bless us whom He came to save. That awful and benignant "Exinanition" placed Him indeed on the creaturely level in regard of the reality of human experience of growth, and human capacity for suffering. But never for one moment did it, could it, make Him other than the absolute and infallible Master and Guide of His redeemed.