Philippians 1:27–2:18
1:27Whatever happens, conduct yourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ. Then, whether I come and see you or only hear about you in my absence, I will know that you stand firm in one spirit, contending as one man for the faith of the gospel 28without being frightened in any way by those who oppose you. This is a sign to them that they will be destroyed, but that you will be saved—and that by God. 29For it has been granted to you on behalf of Christ not only to believe on him, but also to suffer for him, 30since you are going through the same struggle you saw I had, and now hear that I still have.
2:1If you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any fellowship with the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, 2then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose. 3Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. 4Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.
5Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
6Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something
to be grasped,
7but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
8And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to death—even death
on a cross!
9Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above
every name,
10that at the name of Jesus every knee should
bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the
earth,
11and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is
Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
12Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, 13for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.
14Do everything without complaining or arguing, 15so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation, in which you shine like stars in the universe 16as you hold out the word of life—in order that I may boast on the day of Christ that I did not run or labor for nothing. 17But even if I am being poured out like a drink offering on the sacrifice and service coming from your faith, I am glad and rejoice with all of you. 18So you too should be glad and rejoice with me.
WHAT DOES THE CROSS ACHIEVE? Why does it occupy so central a place in the minds of the New Testament writers? The Bible gives many wonderfully rich answers to such questions. I would like to begin this chapter by sketching a few of them. It will prove helpful to think about the cross from various perspectives before we examine exactly what the passage before us has to contribute to a comprehensive theology of the cross. The examination of the passage itself will occupy us both in this chapter and in the next. In this chapter we will reflect on 2:5–11, and in the next we’ll reflect on what precedes and follows this section (1:27–30; 2:1–4, 12–18). But first, let’s survey some diverse perspectives on the cross, culled from New Testament theology.
Five Perspectives on the Cross
1. God’s Perspective
What does the cross look like to God?
If we ask that question of contemporary writers, immediately we are embroiled in various disputes, even a dispute about the translation of a word. Perhaps it will clarify the issues a little if we lightly trace out one such argument.
According to 1 John 2:2, believers have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. And he (according to the King James Version) is the “propitiation” for our sins. What does that mean? The NIV declares that Jesus is the “atoning sacrifice” for our sins. What does this change in wording signify? The issue is crucially important if we are to grasp how God views the cross.
“Propitiation” is that act by which God becomes “propitious,” that is, favorable toward those who have offended him. For centuries the church happily used the term. The cross is the place, the event, the sacrifice, by which God becomes favorable or propitious toward us poor sinners. The cross, in other words, was the place of propitiation; it was the means by which God was propitiated, his anger assuaged and appeased. But about sixty years ago it became unpopular to speak of propitiation.
The argument went something like this: Propitiation sounds too much like pagan sacrifice. In animistic cultures, the aim of many of the sacrifices offered to various spirits and deities is to win their approval—in short, to propitiate them. You don’t want the storm gods to be angry. You certainly want the appropriate deity to ensure that the crops will be good or that your wife has a fat baby or that your husband comes home safely from his hunting expedition in the jungle. So you offer the spirits the prescribed sacrifices and thereby try to win their favor. You are performing an act of propitiation. In this model, human beings are the subjects, and they propitiate the gods, who are the objects of this action.
But if that model prevails, it was argued, how can one reasonably think of the cross as an act of propitiation? In the cross, human beings do not offer up a sacrifice to appease God. Far from it: God himself is the subject, the one who loves the world so as to send his Son (John 3:16). He initiates the action; he sends his own Son to be the sacrifice. So how can the sacrifice propitiate him, when he initiated the act of sacrifice? Thus, according to this argument, we must think of the cross not as an act of propitiation, but as an act of expiation. That is, the cross is not about making God favorable, since God is already so favorable to this broken world that he has sent his beloved Son. Rather, it is about canceling sin.
As soon as this argument was put forth, objections appeared. How can we dispense with the notion of propitiation in light of the many biblical passages that speak of the wrath of God? If God is wrathful on account of our sin, if he is truly angry, then whatever removes his anger is what propitiates him. In other words, we cannot get away from the notion of propitiation as long as the Bible talks about the wrath of God. It is a fearful thing to fall under that wrath. What removes that wrath is the cross: Jesus takes our punishment, and we go free. Propitiation must not be set aside.
The new voices replied that if we are to reconcile passages that speak of the wrath of God with passages that tell us God loved the world so much that he sent his Son, we must understand the “wrath” of God in impersonal terms. In this view, the “wrath of God” is merely a metaphorical way of talking about the terrible yet inevitable results of sin. If you do bad things, bad things ensue. That is the way God has constructed the universe. Only in that sense can the bad things that follow your evil be traced, however indirectly, to God. But God himself, they argued, cannot be thought of as personally angry. How could that be, when this God, in love, sent his Son while we were yet sinners?
But the traditional voices would not be silenced. The new view that wants to ban propitiation simply does not take sin and wrath seriously enough. It is not true that doing bad things always results in impersonal judgment. Sometimes wicked people get away with horrible sins and even prosper because of them. Unless one holds that God personally responds in judgment to balance the books, it is terribly naive to think that impersonal judgment will uphold justice. Besides, in the few places in the Bible where the word traditionally rendered “propitiation” is found, the surrounding context is, repeatedly, the wrath of God. Granted this link, how can one responsibly say that God’s wrath is nothing more than the inevitable and impersonal outworking of evil? One could as easily argue that the love of God is also impersonal and nothing more than the inevitable outworking of good! The entire conception of God begins to drift from biblical theism to thoroughly unbiblical deism.
And so the debate goes on. A lot of ink has been spilled on this question. But some of that debate is misguided because it attempts to drive wedges between truths that the Bible joins together. In particular, the Bible insists that God is simultaneously angry and loving. What the Bible says about propitiation cannot be grasped unless this point is understood.
In the Bible, God’s wrath is a function of his holiness. His wrath or anger is not the explosion of a bad temper or a chronic inability to restrain his irritability, but rather a just and principled opposition to sin. God’s holiness is so spectacularly glorious that it demands that he be wrathful with those of his creatures who defy him, slight his majesty, thumb their noses at his words and works, and insist on their own independence—even though every breath they breathe, not to say their very existence, depends on his providential care. If God were to gaze at sin and rebellion, shrug his shoulders, and mutter “Well, I’m not too bothered. I can forgive these people. I don’t really care what they do,” surely there would be something morally deficient about him. Should God care nothing for Hitler’s outrages? Should God care nothing about my rebellion and your rebellion? If he acted this way, he would ultimately discount his own significance, sully his own glory, besmirch his own honor, soil his own integrity.
That is why in Scripture God is sometimes portrayed as blisteringly angry. Moreover, it is important that we reject the common evangelical cliché on this subject: “God hates the sin but loves the sinner.” The second part may be true, but, as it stands, this antithesis is fundamentally mistaken and is clearly refuted by Scripture. For example, fourteen times in the first fifty psalms alone the texts insist that God “hates” sinners, “abhors” those who tell lies, and so forth.
It is a glorious truth that although God is angry with us, in his very character he is a God of love. Despite his anger as he perceives our anarchy—anger that is a necessary function of his holiness—God is a loving God and therefore provides a means of forgiving sins, one that will leave the integrity of his glory unsullied. He comes to us in the person of his Son. His Son dies as the propitiation for our sins. That is, he dies to ensure that God becomes favorable toward us in precisely those areas where God has been opposed to us in judgment and wrath. But this is quite unlike pagan propitiation, for God himself is the one who has provided the sacrifice. In pagan propitiation, as we have seen, we offer the sacrifices and the gods are propitiated. By contrast, in the Bible God is both the origin and the object of the propitiating sacrifice. He provides it by sending his Son to the cross; yet at the same time, the sacrifice satisfies his own honor, and his righteous wrath is turned away without his holiness being impugned.
Much of this is summarized in another letter written by Paul: “God presented him [Jesus] as a sacrifice of atonement [propitiation], through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished—he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus” (Rom. 3:25–26). Observe how Paul repeatedly insists that God sent his Son to the cross “to demonstrate his justice”—not simply to save us, but to demonstrate his justice—as well as to be the one who justifies those who have faith in his Son. It is the cross that unites God’s love and his perfect holiness.
Sometimes poetry says this better than prose:
Love in the Deity stretches conceptions of men.
Love seems not love which permits our full measure of hate.
Promise of judgment in ages beyond seems too late.
Where is God’s love when the wretched are wretched again?
Holiness absolute stands far removed from our ken,
Either its brightness so alien it seems to frustrate,
Blindingly brilliant, or else its rich glories abate,
Fading in mist as the distance seems too much to mend.
One place remains where this love and this holiness meet,
Mingling in poetic measures with no verbal dross.
Symbol of holiness pure, justice without defeat,
Coupled with unbounded love, stands the stark, ugly cross.
Lord God of hosts, in the worship surrounding your throne
Questions once clamoring give place to hushed homage alone.
That is one of the ways, at least, that God looks at the cross.
2. Christ’s Perspective
Here, too, many things could be said. But one of the great and neglected themes about what the cross means to the Son is the obedience of the Son. This theme surfaces with special strength in the Epistle to the Hebrews and in the Gospel of John. There we repeatedly learn that the Father sends and the Son goes; the Father commissions and the Son obeys. The Son always does what pleases the Father (John 8:29). The most staggering commission the Father gives to the Son is that he go to the cross to redeem a race of rebels. And the Son knows that this is the commission given him. Jesus came, he insists, not “to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). But knowledge of the commission he had received did not make obedience easy. He faced Gethsemane and the cross with an agony of intercession characterized by the repeated petition “Yet not what I will, but what you will” (Mark 14:36).
Thus the cross for Jesus was not only the means by which he sacrificed himself, the just for the unjust, to bring us to God (1 Peter 3:18), it was also the high point of his unqualified obedience to his heavenly Father. That point is alluded to in the passage before us: “And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross!” (Phil. 2:8).
3. Satan’s Perspective
Revelation 12 is one of the most important chapters in the New Testament for understanding the devil’s perspective on the cross. There Satan is portrayed as full of rage because he has been banished from heaven and knows that his time is short. He has not been able to crush Jesus, so he vents his rage on the church. He is the “accuser of our brothers” who wants simultaneously to roil their consciences and to accuse God of ungodliness because God accepts such miserable sinners as these. But believers, we are told, defeat Satan on the ground of “the blood of the Lamb” (Rev. 12:11)—an unambiguous reference to the cross. What does this mean?
What is meant, of course, is that these believers escape the accusations of Satan himself, whether in their own minds and consciences or before the bar of God’s justice, because they make instant appeal to the cross. They sing with full attention and deep gratitude the wonderful words,
Nothing in my hand I bring,
Simply to thy cross I cling.
Augustus M. Toplady,
“Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me”
Before that appeal, Satan has no retort. God has retained his honor while redeeming a rebel brood. We can be free from guilt—both objective guilt before a holy God and subjective awareness of guilt—not because we ourselves are guiltless but because Jesus “himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed” (1 Peter 2:24).
Imagine the first Passover, just before the exodus. Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones, two Hebrews with remarkable names, are discussing the extraordinary events of the previous weeks and months. Mr. Smith asks Mr. Jones, “Have you sprinkled the blood of a lamb on the two doorposts and on the lintel over the entrance to your dwelling?”
“Of course,” replies Mr. Jones. “I’ve followed Moses’s instructions exactly.”
“So have I,” affirms Mr. Smith. “But I have to admit I’m very nervous. My boy Charlie means the world to me. If, as Moses says, the angel of death is passing through the land tonight, taking out all the firstborn in the land—I just don’t know what I’ll do if Charlie dies.”
“But that’s the point. He won’t die. That’s why you sprinkled the lamb’s blood on the doorposts and on the lintel. Moses said that when the angel of death sees the blood, he will ‘pass over’ the house so protected, and the firstborn will be safe. Why are you worried?”
“I know, I know,” splutters Mr. Smith somewhat irritably, “but you have to admit that there have been some very strange goings-on these last few months. Some of the plagues have afflicted only the Egyptians, of course, but some of them have hit us too. The thought that my Charlie could be in danger is terribly upsetting.”
Rather unsympathetically, Mr. Jones replies, “I really can’t imagine why you’re fretting. After all, I have a son, too, and I think I love him just as much as you love your Charlie. But I am completely at peace: God promised that the angel of death would pass over every house whose door is marked by blood in the way he prescribes, and I take him at his word.”
That night the angel of death passed through the land. Who lost his son, Mr. Smith or Mr. Jones?
The answer, of course, is neither. The fulfillment of God’s promise that the angel of death would simply “pass over” and not destroy their firstborn depended not on the intensity of the faith of the residents but only on whether or not they had sprinkled blood on the doorposts and on the lintel. In both cases the blood was shed, the houses marked; in both cases the firstborn son was saved.
So also with us who have trusted Christ and his cross-work on our behalf. The promise of deliverance, the assurance that we are accepted by Almighty God, is tied not to the intensity of our faith or to the consistency of our faith or to the purity of our faith, but to the object of our faith. When we approach God in prayer, our plea is not that we have been good that day or that we have just come from a Christian meeting full of praise or that we try harder, but that Christ has died for us. And against that plea, Satan has no riposte.
For the truth of the matter is that the cross marks Satan’s defeat, and Satan knows it. That is what the cross means to him.
4. Sin’s Perspective
Sin is not a living thing, of course, so one cannot suppose that sin literally has a perspective. But the category is useful, even if metaphorical, because it helps us see what the cross achieved with respect to sin.
The answer to that question is highly diverse in the Bible, because sin can be thought of in so many ways. Sin can be thought of as a debt: I owe something I cannot pay. In that case the cross is seen as the means by which the debt is paid. One sometimes reads on Christmas cards the two-line poem,
He came to pay a debt he did not owe,
Because we owed a debt we could not pay.
That is exactly right. That is what the cross achieved.
Sin can also be thought of as a stain. In that case the dirt is removed by the death of Christ. Or sin is offense before God. In that case we insist that the cross expiates our sin, it cancels it and thus removes it. But regardless of what imagery is used to depict the foulness and odiousness of sin, the cross is the solution, the sole solution.
5. Our Perspective
Here, too, many complementary things could be underlined. The cross is the high-water mark of the demonstration of God’s love for his people. It is a symbol of our shame and of our freedom. It is the ultimate measure of how serious our guilt is and the comforting assurance that our guilt has been dealt with. In the New Testament, the cross is tied to many of the most important words and concepts: justification, sanctification, the gift of the Spirit, the dawning of the kingdom.
But in the New Testament the cross also serves as the supreme standard of our behavior. That theme is perhaps most dramatically drawn, in the New Testament, by the apostle Peter in his first letter. But it is also the primary point that Paul makes here: “Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus” (Phil. 2:5), Paul writes, and then he drives to the cross.1
Although the passage before us runs from 1:27 to 2:18, there is little doubt that the core section is 2:5–11. We shall see that it is not only important for what it says about Jesus and his cross, but that its thought controls the surrounding paragraphs. In this chapter I shall focus on these verses (2:5–11); in the next chapter, on the surrounding paragraphs.
There is at least some evidence, albeit disputed, that this passage preserves some early Christian hymn. That is why the NIV sets out the text in poetic lines. Some have criticized these lines because in Greek they do not seem to scan very well as poetry. One remembers the limerick,
There once was a poet from Japan
Whose poems could not possibly scan.
When told this was so,
He replied, “Yes, I know;
That is because I always try to squeeze as many words into the last line as I possibly can.”
It would be unfair to accuse Paul of this particular deviation. Nevertheless one must remember that Greek poetry, like its contemporary English counterpart, can break forms for the sake of effect.
It is possible that this hymn (if hymn it be) is older than the letter to the Philippians and that, just as Paul quotes the Old Testament and on occasion even pagan authors, he here draws on some hymn of the church. If that is what Paul has done, he may also have adapted it. Alternatively, he may have written the entire passage himself, just as I have sometimes written poetry to illustrate or adorn some prose piece I have written (like the poem on page 47). Either way, by being employed here, these lines have been preserved in an apostolic writing judged canonical and thus have come down to us for our edification.
This great passage can be broken down most usefully into two parts.
The Son’s Self-Denial (2:5–8)
Verse 5 tells us that our attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus, whose attitude in his own indescribably remarkable self-denial is the theme of the first part of this passage. “Being in very nature God, [he] did not consider equality with God something to be grasped . . .” (2:6). There are two important elements to understanding these opening words.
First, the words “being in very nature God,” more literally “being in the form of God,” do not precisely address the distinction between essence and function loved by the Western world. The passage is not quite saying that he was in very essence God, still less that he merely functioned as if he were God (which would surely be a shocking thing to say anyway, granted who the God of the Bible is). The word used is a subtle shading of both ideas. In the next verse it appears again: Jesus empties himself and takes “the very nature of a servant,” more literally “the form of a servant” (2:7). Clearly, in this latter context Paul is not merely making a claim about ontology, about mere essence or being. Jesus lives and acts and functions as a servant.
The idea, then, is that Christ Jesus began, shall we say, in the mode of existence of God himself but took on the mode of existence of a servant. This “mode of existence” of God embraces both essence and function: he enjoyed real equality with God, and he became a real servant. That is why the second line of verse 6 insists that Jesus “did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,” or, perhaps better, something to be exploited, something to be employed for his own advantage. Rather, he “made himself nothing” and took “the very nature of a servant.”
Second, the opening expression, both in Greek and in English, is slightly ambiguous. The phrase “being in very nature God” could be understood in one of two ways. It could be understood concessively: although he was in very nature God, he took the form of a servant. Or it could be understood causally: because he was in very nature God, he took the form of a servant. On the whole, the latter better suits the context. The eternal Son did not think of his status as God as something that gave him the opportunity to get and get and get. Instead, his very status as God meant he had nothing to prove, nothing to achieve. And precisely because he is one with God, one with this kind of God, he “made himself nothing” and gave and gave and gave.
He “made himself nothing”: What does that mean? Literally translated, the original reads, “He emptied himself.” But the expression does not mean he emptied himself of something. For example, it is not as if he emptied himself of his deity, for then he would no longer be God. Nor did he empty himself of the attributes of his deity (though that has been argued), for he would likewise cease to be God. An animal that waddles like a porcupine, has the quills of a porcupine, and in general has all the attributes of a porcupine is a porcupine. If you take away all the attributes of a porcupine, whatever you have left is not a porcupine. Likewise, if the Son is stripped of the attributes of deity, it is difficult to see how he can in any meaningful sense still claim to be deity.
In fact, the expression “he emptied himself,” far from meaning he emptied himself of something, is idiomatic for “he gave up all his rights” or similar expressions. He emptied himself, hence the NIV’s “[he] made himself nothing” (2:7). Not literally nothing, of course, for then he would cease to exist. He abandoned his rights; he became a nobody. In particular, Paul tells us in the next line that Jesus became a servant, a slave. That is of course the defining characteristic of slaves; in many respects they are nobodies. They may represent certain wealth to their owners, and they may have certain cherished skills. But they have no rights; they are nobodies. By contrast, the eternal Son has always had all the rights of deity. He was one with God. Yet precisely because of this, he did not perceive his equality with God something to be exploited, but became a nobody. He “made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant [literally, slave]” (2:7).
But Paul does not tell us that Christ exchanged one form for another; he is not saying that Jesus was God, gave that up, and became a slave instead. Rather, without ever abandoning who he was originally, he adopted the mode of existence of a slave. To do this, he (literally) became “in human likeness” (2:7). The idea is not that he merely became like a human being, a reasonable facsimile but not truly human. Rather, it means that he became a being fashioned in this way: a human being. He was always God; he now becomes something he was not, a human being. “And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross!” (2:8).
It is very hard for us today to hear the shocking overtones of the words Paul uses, because the cross has become for us such a domesticated symbol. Today many women and some men dangle crosses from their ears. Our bishops hang crosses around their necks. Our buildings have crosses on the spires, or stained wooden crosses are backlit with fluorescent lights. Some of our older church buildings are actually built in cruciform, and no one is shocked.
Suppose you were to place in a prominent position in your church building a fresco of the massed graves of Auschwitz. Wouldn’t everyone be horrified? But in the first century, the cross had something of that symbolic value. Scholars have gone through every instance of the word “cross” and related expressions that have come down to us from about the time of Jesus and shown how “crucifixion” and “cross” invariably evoke horror. Of the various forms of Roman execution, crucifixion could be used only for slaves, rebels, and anarchists; it could never be used for a Roman citizen, apart from the express sanction of the emperor. Crucifixion was considered too cruel—so shameful that the word itself was avoided in polite conversation.
But here is Paul, boldly insisting that the Lord Christ whom we serve—precisely because he is that kind of God—made himself a nobody, became in fact a slave (becoming a human being in the process), and then humbled himself yet further by obeying his heavenly Father and dying—dying the odious, revolting death of the cross, reserved for public enemies and the dregs of the criminal justice system. The language is meant to shock. Jesus died on a cross! I believe it was W. H. Auden who penned the lines,
Only the unscarred overfed
enjoy Calvary as a verbal event.
The Son’s Vindication (2:9–11)
The second part of this “hymn” (if hymn it be) treats the Son’s vindication. “Therefore,” Paul writes—because of his self-emptying, because of his obedience, because of his death on the cross—therefore “God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (2:9–11). Here, in magnificent summary, is the Father’s approval and vindication of the Son.
When Paul says that God gave Jesus “the name that is above every name,” he is saying much more than that the Father simply “renames” him or the like. In the ancient world, names were more than convenient labels. What is meant here is that God assigns Jesus a name that reflects what he has achieved and that acknowledges who he is. Probably the “name” that Paul has in mind is “Lord,” and inevitably this title brings with it echoes of many Old Testament passages. In Isaiah, God declares, “I am the LORD; that is my name!” (Isa. 42:8). The Hebrew is “I am Yahweh.” God is the Eternal One, the God who discloses himself through his covenantal name (Exod. 3:14). But when that Hebrew word was rendered in Greek, it was commonly translated simply “Lord” (Kyrios). Jesus has achieved this same “lordship,” this same status with his Father, over the whole broken universe—not because there was no sense in which he had it before, but because he now achieves it for the first time as the God-man, as the crucified and risen Redeemer. That the New Testament should quote Isaiah 42 on this matter is particularly significant, for the context shows that this honor belongs to God alone: “I am the LORD; that is my name! I will not give my glory to another or my praise to idols” (Isa. 42:8). To give such a title to Jesus, therefore, is tantamount to confessing Jesus’s deity—but now as the triumphant, resurrected God-man who was once crucified and now reigns.
One cannot help but be reminded of Jesus’s teaching in the Gospel of John: the Father has determined that all should honor the Son even as they honor the Father (John 5:23). Every knee in heaven and on earth and under the earth shall bow to him. Here, too, the language is drawn from Isaiah, and once again the context of the passage is presupposed. In Isaiah 45 God declares,
“Turn to me and be saved,
all you ends of the earth;
for I am God, and there is no other.
By myself I have sworn,
my mouth has uttered in all integrity
a word that will not be revoked:
Before me every knee will bow;
by me every tongue will swear.
They will say of me, ‘In the LORD alone
are righteousness and strength.’”
All who have raged against him
will come to him and be put to shame.
But in the LORD all the descendants of Israel
will be found righteous and will exult.
Isaiah 45:22–25
Once again, the implications for who Jesus is, if such words as these are unhesitatingly applied to him, are staggering. To confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, using the language of this passage in Isaiah (“Before me every knee will bow”), is a transparent ascription of deity to Jesus Christ. Yet even so, Jesus is distinguished from God the Father: it is God who has exalted Jesus to the highest place. Moreover, the confession that “Jesus Christ is Lord” is “to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:11). Some of the rudiments of what would later be called the doctrine of the Trinity come together in a passage like this.
Not for a moment can this passage be used to support universalism; that is, the view that every single person in the entire world will finally be saved. In the Isaiah 45 passage, although everyone confesses that in the LORD alone are righteousness and strength and although everyone bows the knee, nevertheless, “All who have raged against him will come to him and be put to shame” (Isa. 45:24). So here in Philippians 2: every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, but it does not follow that every tongue will confess Jesus Christ is Lord out of happy submission. The text promises that Jesus has the last word, that he is utterly vindicated, that in the end no opposition against him will stand. There will not be universal salvation; there will be universal confession as to who he is. That means that either we repent and confess him by faith as Lord now, or we will confess him in shame and terror on the last day. But confess him we will.
Perhaps you have talked to someone about the Lord Jesus, only to be rebutted in the following terms: “Look, I’m pleased if you think this Jesus helps you. If he makes you feel better and enables you to cope and find some sort of significance in life, I’m happy for you. But frankly, I don’t need your religion. I like you as a friend, but if this friendship is going anywhere, not to put too fine a point on it, you and this Jesus will have to stay off my back.”
What do you say? One thing you must say sooner or later, and only in the kindest possible way, is something like this: “You are a friend, and I wouldn’t want to lose your friendship. But I have to insist that the Jesus I talk about is not some sort of personalized therapy. The Jesus I am talking about made you. You owe him. And one day you will have to give an account of your life to him. Every knee will bow to him sooner or later, whether in joy or in shame and fear. Not to see this is already a mark of horrible lostness from which only he can enable you to escape.”
In other words, Paul is not making this claim about a Jesus who is domesticated, easily marginalized, psychologically privatized, remarkably sanitized, and merely personal. He is one with God, yet he died on the cross to redeem us to himself. Elsewhere Paul insists that all things were made by him and for him (Col. 1:16). Now Paul insists that the Father has vindicated him in his humiliation and sacrifice and that every knee will bow before him.
This is a wonderful passage. Unqualified divine majesty unites with the immeasurable divine self-sacrifice. And now, Paul insists, “Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus.” (Phil. 2:5). Indeed, that is what the surrounding paragraphs tease out. And that is what we shall pursue in the next chapter.
1. The last few decades have witnessed the rise of another interpretation of Philippians 2, an interpretation that has found its way into many commentaries. I am persuaded it is wrong, but I cannot deal with it here. One of the best treatments of the exegetical questions at stake is found in the commentary by Peter T. O’Brien, The Epistle to the Philippians, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 186–271.