Philippians 2:9

Philippians 2:9. Wherefore also God highly exalted him. This refers to the fact that at the ascension it was in ‘the likeness of men' that Christ ascended into heaven. Thus was He exalted in the body of His humiliation, and the exaltation thereof corresponds to the debasement to which He voluntarily submitted. As His humiliation was the lowest, so His exaltation was the highest, for the form of man has been received at the right hand of God. As Son of God, Christ is only where He was before, but as Son of man He has received from the Father honour in return for His sufferings.

and gave unto him the name that is above every name. St. Paul has his mind still full of the thought of the voluntary humiliation, and so he represents the gift made by the Father to the Incarnate Son as a gift of grace. And this agrees with the language of Jesus (John 17:5), where He prays: ‘Father, glorify Thou Me with Thine own self with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was,' words in which the Son of man preserves the character of one who has emptied Himself of glory, but who still is the Eternal Word who in the beginning was with God. The person is not changed, only the ‘form of a servant' is voluntarily worn by Him who afore had worn the ‘form of God.'

The best MSS. give ‘the name' instead of ‘a name,' and the reference is probably to that supreme name of God which among the Jews was held as incommunicable, a name which represented the concentrated omnipresence of the Godhead, whose emblem in old times was in the Shechinah. In the vision of St. John (Revelation 19:11-16) the ‘name which no man knew' is among the names of the Word of God, who is also called ‘King of kings and Lord of lords.' It is worth notice that the name which was provided for the Incarnate Son (Jesus, i.e., Joshua) had by a special change which Moses made (Numbers 13:16) been compounded with the Tetragrammaton, the most sacred name of the Eternal, as though the compound should speak of salvation through Jehovah but with a human as well as Divine nature in Him who should be the true ‘Jehoshua.'