Sermon Tone Analysis

Intro

So, we’ve been slowly going through the book of Philippians.

Some weeks we cover a whole passage, and others, like the last few weeks, we’ve spent considerable time on just a couple of verses, going into detail what the words truly mean.

So, today, I want to back up, and look at a section that I skimmed over a couple of months ago.

This morning and next week, we’re going to look at .

We’ll focus mainly on verses 5-8 today, and there are a few things that I hope for us to get out of this passage.

See, I think this passage is a beautiful summary of Who Jesus is, What Jesus did, and it teaches us how we should live our lives towards each other.

Open your Bible, will you please, to the second chapter of Philippians, and I want you to look with me at verses 5-8, 5-8.

The passage before us is deep.

It is majestic.

In many ways it is both overwhelming and unfathomable.

And certainly we would agree that the text that we look at this morning would have to be included among the most important and glorious texts in all the New Testament.

It describes the condescension of the second person of the Trinity into human incarnation.

It is the single greatest New Testament passage on God becoming man.

When Paul says that Christ Jesus was in the form of God, that is, in full possession of the divine nature, he underlines the fact by using, not the simple verb ‘to be’, but a stronger verb which in its characteristic usage has the force ‘to be really and truly’, ‘to be characteristically’, even ‘to be by nature’.

In a passage like the present one, where it is plain that every word has been weighed and measured, the full meaning of the verb can be assumed: he was really and truly, in his own personal and essential nature, God.

But, being so, he emptied himself.

The very notion of ‘emptying’ inevitably suggests deprivation or lessening, the loss of something that was possessed before.

When Jesus emptied himself, did he diminish himself, and if so, in what way?

Here is a thought which must obviously be handled with great care.

It is helpful to note, in the first place, the fact that the verb ‘to empty’ in every other New Testament instance means ‘to deprive something of its proper place and use’.

‘Christ, indeed,’ says Calvin, ‘could not divest himself of Godhead; but he kept it concealed for a time … he laid aside his glory in the view of men, not by lessening it, but by concealing it.’

Or again, ‘Kenosis’, according to D. G. Dawe, ‘says that God is of such a nature that acceptance of the limitations of a human life does not make him unlike himself … he is free to be our God without ceasing to be God the Lord.’

Or, more specifically, if we follow through the interpretation of Collange mentioned above, ‘the kenosis was a voluntary deprivation of the exercise of Lordship’.15

Secondly, we ought to notice that in asking the perfectly natural question, ‘Of what did Christ Jesus empty himself?’, we are, in fact, departing from the direct line of thought in this passage.

For the verb emptied is at once followed by an explanatory clause, taking the form of a servant (slave).

Our eye, in other words, is removed from the realm of mystery (the relation between the new incarnate life and the eternal divine life) and focused on the realm of historical factuality, the reality of the eternal God becoming truly man.

It is not ‘Of what did he empty himself?’ but ‘Into what did he empty himself?’

While it must be pointed out that this way of putting it arises from the flexibility of the English verb ‘to empty’ and does not reflect the Greek use of kenoō in the New Testament, it nevertheless catches perfectly the movement of Paul’s thought: Christ Jesus brought the whole of his divine nature, undiminished, into a new and—had it not been revealed to us in Scripture—unimaginable state.

Yet it may be that ‘Into what did he empty himself?’ is not all that far, if far at all, from Paul’s thought.

The parallel between he emptied himself and Isaiah’s word concerning the Servant of the Lord, that ‘he poured out his soul to death’, is too plain to be resisted.

The fundamental thought is that of a deliberate, conscious consigning of oneself to a foreseen situation: the Servant of the Lord brought himself voluntarily and totally into death; Jesus, in order to die, first brought his total being down to the condition of the Lord’s Servant.17

Concerning the state to which the Lord Jesus consigned himself, Paul makes three points.

First, the intention of the great change was obedient service; he took the form of a slave.

Secondly, the sphere in which the service would be discharged was that of a true humanity; he was born in the likeness of men.

Thirdly, his true humanity ‘left room’ for that other reality which he brought with him.

It was a true humanity: Paul uses again the word form, already discussed; but this time of the slave-state.

The Son became the reality of a bondservant.

None of this reality is taken away by the careful phrase in the likeness of men: ‘this leaves room for the other side of his nature, the divine, in the likeness of which he did not appear.

His likeness to men was real, but it did not express his whole self.’

Throughout all this there is the same revelation of the ‘mind of Christ’.

His are the eternal glories, both by nature and by right, but they are not a platform for self-display, nor a launching-pad for self-advancement; they are all for self-denial.

Self is something to ‘pour out’.

2. The incarnate God becomes a curse

The story continues in the same vein.

By the end of verse 7 a true incarnation has taken place, and at this point Paul picks up the narrative.

Christ Jesus was found in human form (verse 8), that is to say, those meeting him felt themselves to be in the presence of a man.

They could say, ‘Is not this the carpenter?’20

How exactly true their observation was, but, equally, how much they missed!

Well might Isaiah say, ‘To whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?’

(53:1)—or, as we might paraphrase, ‘Who would have believed, were it not revealed by God, that this is the Lord himself come down to save?’ Notice how Paul says (verses 5–6) that it was Jesus who existed before the incarnation and possessed the very nature of God—but Jesus is the name of ‘the carpenter’!

The pre-existing and the incarnate Son of God were one and the same person:

Lo, within a manger lies

He who built the starry skies.

He seems the same as other men but in fact is vastly different.

The question therefore is, what will he do with this ‘difference’?

Will he use it as an occasion for self?

Will it, in turn, become ‘a thing to be grasped’?

Maybe this is the reason why the Lord spoke to Moses and Elijah on the Mount of Transfiguration of ‘his departure, which he was to accomplish at Jerusalem’.23 For, having received the plaudits of these two great prophets and the accolade from the Father himself, he could surely have chosen to step back into the personal glory of heaven.

What he did was, however, very different.

He chose rather to take upon himself that one thing which, without his consent, had no power against him, death.

He was distinct from all others because of his divine nature.

In particular, he possessed immortality, proper to God alone.25

But he subjected his immortality to death and thus humbled himself; nothing has now been held back; all has been given up:

Even his garments they parted

When he hung on the cross of shame.

Paul tells us that this was done as an act of obedience to God.

The English obedient unto death suggests ‘obeying death’, but the Greek cannot bear this meaning.

It requires rather ‘obedient as far as or right up to the point of death’.

Death was the mode, not the master, in his obedience; the obedience was yielded to his Father: this was ‘the cup which the Father has given me’.

Furthermore, the obedience which he rendered to God also achieved a purpose for man: it was death on a cross.

Just as it was necessary to appeal to other scriptural evidence to establish that the obedience was a service offered to the Father, so here also Paul is using the succinct, allusive forms of poetry, not writing an itemized doctrinal thesis.

When we ask why he proceeds from the fact of death (obedient unto death) to the mode of death (death on a cross), we must look elsewhere to discover what he intended.

But the explanation is not hard to find.

From one angle, the reference to the cross enhances the thought of his obedience, for ‘cursed be everyone who hangs on a tree’.

Our Lord’s cry of dereliction28 shows how truly he entered into the place of rejection and with what horror he was enfolded in so doing: he who was in the form of God came down to earth, down to the cross, down to the curse—and he did it for us, for me! ‘Christ redeemed us from the curse … having become a curse for us.’

Though he was rich, so rich,

Yet for our sakes how poor he became!

Even his garments they parted

When he hung on the cross of shame.

All that he had he gave for me,

That I might be rich through eternity.

Finally, this Godward-manward act was undertaken by the will and consent of the Lord Jesus himself.

No-one else did it: he humbled himself.

This feature, so central to Philippians 2:6–8, must find its root in Isaiah 53, especially verses 7–9, where for the first time in the Old Testament we meet with a consenting sacrifice.

All through the long years of animal sacrifice the Lord had driven home the lesson that in the divine purposes there could be a transference of sin and guilt from the head of the guilty to the head of the innocent.

Whenever a sinner brought his animal to the altar and laid his hand on the beast’s head31 the lesson was plain: this stands in my place; this bears my sin.

Yet the substitution was incomplete, for the central citadel of sin, the will, was left unrepresented in the uncomprehending, unconsenting animal.

Isaiah foresaw that only a perfect Man could be the perfect substitute and that at the heart of this perfection lay a will delighting to do the will of God.

This was the ‘mind of Christ’.

He looked at himself, at his Father and at us, and for obedience’ sake and for sinners’ sake he held nothing back.

So, we’ve been slowly going through the book of Philippians.

Some weeks we cover a whole passage, and others, like the last few weeks, we’ve spent considerable time on just a couple of verses, going into detail what the words truly mean.

So, today, I want to back up, and look at a section that I skimmed over a couple of months ago.

This morning, we’re going to look at , and there are a few things that I hope for us to get out of this passage.

See, I think this passage is a beautiful summary of Who Jesus is, What Jesus did, and it teaches us how we should live our lives towards each other.

Background

Before we look at the text, I want to give a little background info: this section is considered to be an early Christian hymn or song.

It may have been adopted by the early church as a worship song or meditation practice.

The Apostle Paul, who wrote this letter, likely either wrote this hymn, or he adapted it for the purpose of his argument.