Philippians 2:8

found as one who presented Himself for inspection and test. See Appendix F.

fashion See third note on Philippians 2:6 above. The Greek word schêmadenotes appearance with or withoutunderlying reality. It does not negative such reality any more than it asserts it; it emphasizes appearance. In the context, we have the realityof the Lord's Manhood abundantly given; and in this word accordingly we read, as in the word "likeness" just above, an emphatic statement that (a) He was Man in guise, not in disguise; presenting Himself to all the conditions of concrete life as Man with man; and that (b) all the while the schêmahad more beneath it than its own corresponding reality: it was the veil of Deity.

as a man Better, perhaps, as man, though R.V. retains "as a man." As the Second Man, our Lord is rather Man, the Man of men, than a Man, one among men. Yet the assertion here is rather as to what He was pleased to be in relation to those who "found" Him, came into contact with Him, in His earthly walk; and to such He certainly was "a man." And so, with wonderful condescension, He speaks of Himself as "a manthat hath told you the truth" (John 8:40).

he humbled himself in "the acts of condescension and humiliation in that human nature which He emptied Himself to assume" (Ellicott). More particularly the reference is to the specially submissive, bearing, life, under the afflictive will of His Father, which He undertook to lead for our sakes; see the next words. The Greek verb is in the aorist, and sums upthe holy course of submission either into one idea, or into one initial crisis of will.

and became Lit. and better, becoming; an aorist participle coincident in reference with the previous aorist verb.

obedient to the Father's will that He should suffer. The utterance of Gethsemane was but the amazing summary and crown of His whole sacred course as the Man of Sorrows. His "Passion," standing in some vital respects quite alone in His work, was in other respects only the apex of His "Patience."

unto death R.V. rightly supplies even before these words. "Unto" means (by the Greek) "to the length of." He did not "obey" but "abolish" death(2 Timothy 1:10); He obeyed His Father, "even to the extent of" dying, as the sinner's Sacrifice, at the demand of the holy Law, and "by the determinate foreknowledge" (Acts 2:23) of the Lawgiver.

of the cross "Far be the very name of a crossnot only from the bodies of Roman citizens, but from their imagination, eyes, and ears" (Cicero, pro Rabirio, c. 5. Cp. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, ch. xx.). Every thought of pain and shame was in the word, and was realized in the terrific thing. Combining, as we should do in the case of our Redeemer's Crucifixion, the significance to the Jew of any death by suspension, with the significance to the Roman of execution on the cross, we must think of this supreme "obedience" as expressing the holy Sufferer's submission both to "become a curse for us" (Galatians 3:13, with Deuteronomy 21:23) as before Godthe Lawgiver, and meanwhile to be "despised and rejected of men" (Isaiah 53:3) in the most extreme degree.

On the history of thought and usage in connexion with the Cross, and Crucifixion, see Zöckler's Cross of Christ.