Deeper Waters

Welcome back to Deeper Waters for our continuing Trinitarian commentary. It’s been our goal here to go through the Bible and see what we could find on the doctrine of the Trinity, and we are finding a lot of it! Right now, we’re in the book of Philippians and tonight, we’re going to look at the third chapter with verses 7-11:

⁷But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. ⁸What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ ⁹and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. ¹⁰I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, ¹¹and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.

Paul has just got done listing his credentials in Judaism and showing that he disregards all of them. Everything is nothing compared to Christ. It is amazing how much he speaks of Christ in these verses. There is not mention of God in here except once. The center of Paul’s devotion has been Christ through whom he worships God. God is not removed entirely of course, but Christ is seen as the revelation of God through whom God is known.

He even considers everything else rubbish, which is where we get the title for tonight’s blog. The Greek word is skubalon. This is the only place in the NT that this word shows up and it is an extremely strong word. I have spoken to some people that even think you could insert an expletive for the word. Paul is wanting to use the strongest language he can to illustrate how worthless everything else is before Christ. (Add in the fun that when something goes wrong you can shout “Skubalon!” and hardly anyone has a clue what you’re saying.

Christ is also seen as the one through whom righteousness comes for Paul. In the Old Testament, righteousness came from YHWH and he was the righteous one. In the New Testament, we see this in Christ. Christ is so united with the Father that one cannot get righteousness apart from him. There is no righteousness of God that ultimately does not come through Christ.

What does Paul want to know? Paul wants to know Christ. He wants to know the power of the resurrection. He also wants to know the fellowship of his sufferings. These are strong words for an age where Word of Faith teachers emphasize physical healing as a sign of the favor of God. We don’t like to hear the message of suffering in America, but it is a reality. Paul knows that apart from this, he has no hope of resurrection to the new life.

Why does Paul think like this? Because he sees Christ as he is, fully God and fully man. Do we?

Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters where we constantly seek to dive into the ocean of truth. We have for some time now been going through a sort of Trinitarian Commentary on the Scriptures. As I’ve said before, we are diving, but do not think we have fully explored the depths of the passages we are studying. I hope this is a call to get others to explore on their own the wonder of the ocean of truth. Tonight, we shall be finishing up the Philippians 2 hymn by looking at verse 11. Let’s go to the text:

¹¹and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
      to the glory of God the Father.

Again, this passage started out with a focus on Jesus and the shame that he endured in that he was to be our example. Paul is not wanting to leave us at just suffering and humbling ourselves. He wants us to see what the results are when we esteem others as better than ourselves. For that purpose, he tells us about what God does for Jesus in response.

We saw that every knee would bow at the name of Jesus yesterday. Today, we see that every tongue will confess. Again, we go back to the Scripture in Isaiah 45 and we’ll read verses 22-24.

 

 ²² “Turn to me and be saved,
       all you ends of the earth;
       for I am God, and there is no other.

 ²³ 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.

 ²⁴ 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.

 This is the full passage and it is a passage that is devoted in the book of Isaiah to God alone as Isaiah 40-48 is all about the monotheistic faith of Israel and how YHWH is the only true God as he challenges all the other gods to prove themselves before him.

His challenge goes so far however as to say that not only are there no other gods, but anyone who makes that claim will come and bow down before him and confess to him who he really is. What’s amazing for our purposes is that this is exactly what is to be said of Christ in the end. Everyone will come before him and acknowledge him for who he is. They will say that he is Lord, which is a term loaded with deity.

Why? For the glory of God the Father. Notice again that this juxtaposition is taking place. The title God is further explained by “the Father” so as to not confuse him with the Son, who has been proclaimed to be Lord. When we acknowledge that Jesus is Lord, then we honor the Father for the Son is the one through whom the Father’s reign exists.

Thus, throughout this hymn, we have the supreme example in Christ in that he had the highest position of all and lowered himself to the lowest position of all. In response to this, God the Father honored him again with the highest position of all. It is a wonder that someone could read this chapter and not see the deity of the Son.

May you not be one of them and may you follow the example he gave.

Hello readers to Deeper Waters, hopefully a blog you frequent in your quest for Christian truth. Tonight, we’re going to be continuing our Trinitarian commentary in the book of Philippians. Right now, we’re in the masterful hymn in the second chapter of that book and we’re going to be looking at verse 10. Let’s go to the text.

¹⁰that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

Again, the first part of this passage spoke of what the Son did in obedience to the Father. The second part now takes the shame that the Son went through as he took on the lowliest position of all and how the Father honored that by giving him the highest position of all. It was the position he could rightly claim by nature, but that he did not grasp onto as an excuse to avoid going to the cross. God gave him what was rightfully his as a result of the obedience he fulfilled.

Does the language bear any resemblance to an Old Testament passage? Definitely. Consider this from Isaiah 45:22-23.

²² “Turn to me and be saved,
all you ends of the earth;
for I am God, and there is no other.

²³ 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.

The language is identical and the speaker is no doubt God. Yet in this case, we are told that every knee will bow at the name of Jesus, which would refer to his person. This is the same God who said he would not share his glory with another yet in Philippians 2, we find that Jesus is receiving the worship that was to be given God alone.

The bending of the knee was a position of subservience. Those who came were those who would finally kneel before Jesus as inferiors recognizing that their superiors were before them. This would be the ultimate juxtaposition in that the one who came as a servant ended up being the Lord of all the universe. There could hardly be any greater contrast.

The recognition of who Jesus is goes to all places and all peoples as well. Everyone in Heaven will bow down before Jesus. All of the angels will acknowledge him and kneel (hypothetically seeing as they’re non-physical of course) before him as their master. Jesus is the Lord of the angels.

Everyone on Earth will bow before him. Whenever Jesus returns, anyone who is on the Earth, which would mean those who have not yet tasted death, will kneel before him as well and acknowledge him rightly as their king.

Finally, this even extends to the realm of the dead. The Bible does speak of the conscious existence of those who are dead and all of them will come out and kneel before the throne of Jesus. The conclusion that comes from all of this? Jesus is Lord of all.

I don’t know about you, but it sounds like deity to me.

Welcome back everyone to the Deeper Waters blog where we are continuing our look at the doctrine of the Trinity. Tonight, we are still continuing our walk through Philippians 2 and right now, we are in the great hymn in chapter 2. Tonight, we’re going to be looking at verse 9 of this chapter.

Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,

This passage all throughout has been talking about Jesus. Now we have heard about the obedience of Jesus to God. From this point on in the second half of the hymn, we are going to see how God responded to the obedience of the Son.

We are told that God exalted the Son to the highest place. At this, we are caught in a paradox. Did not the Son have the highest place to begin with? However, we must quickly remind ourselves that that which was his by right he did not cling to and use as an excuse to not go forth with his mission.

This again doesn’t mean that the Son forsook his deity. He was always deity. He never used his deity however as an excuse to not come and save the world. I would say that he forsook the divine prerogative use of his deity. He performed supernatural acts as we would call them only when it was necessary for the fulfillment of his mission.

As he submitted, so he remained in submission not receiving that highest place again until the Father bequeathed it upon him. The Father was pleased to do so due to the obedience of the Son. God honored him for completing the task that needed to be done.

He was also given the name that is above every name. Now we can have a hard time understanding that in our 21st century American worldview. We live in a world where names are chosen out of baby books quickly and just with whatever sounds good usually or maybe a family name. In the ancient world, names were taken far more seriously.

Your name was wrapped up in your identity. It told the story of who you were. This is also why only God, or one who saw himself as deity, could change names in the Bible. Let us not forget that this is what Jesus did with Peter which means Jesus was making a claim even in changing Peter’s name.

What is the name that is above all names? It is the name of YHWH. No one could truly be given that name if they did not have it beforehand as no one else could be said to be eternally existing or to begin to eternally exist. The Son is given that name however in light of what he has done on the cross. Instead of a curse, God reveals his identity by the name that he is given. If Jesus truly does have the name that is above all names, as the text clearly says, then he cannot be anything less than God.

Tomorrow, we shall go to the next verse.

Welcome back everyone to the Deeper Waters blog. Tonight, we are continuing what has been titled a Trinitarian commentary on the New Testament. We are in the epistle to the Philippians at the moment and in the beautiful hymn in Chapter 2. Tonight, we are going to examine verse 8 of that passage:

⁸And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to death—
even death on a cross!

Being found in appearance of a man points us back to the verse from yesterday. We said this is not denying that Jesus was fully human but rather indicated that to the people in the time period he lived, he seemed like an ordinary human. My Smallville obsession at this point is thinking that Clark Kent would be a good example of this as to the average onlooker, he would be just a man. To anyone else however who knows him, he is not just a man but is rather a superhero with the appearance of a man. (I will admit I do have a concern with the analogy as I sometimes debate back and forth if Clark Kent is truly human or not.)

There are different views on what this means. Some people think it refers to the Son of Man passage in Daniel 7. That just doesn’t strike me as plausible since Jesus certainly didn’t have the appearance of the Son of Man when he walked this Earth. Others however believe that it could refer to being like Adam, which to me makes much more sense as Jesus is the second Adam.

An interesting idea has been put forward that the idea of being obedient to death admits of the deity of this being. For other creatures that have a material component, death is not a choice. It is a necessity eventually. However, Jesus is described as one who was obedient to death.

Jesus could have avoided death at any time, but instead, he willingly underwent it. That was how far he was able to go in his obedience to the Father. His obedience was such a level where he did whatever the Father desired of him. Keep in mind that Jesus did ask if the cup could pass through him in the garden. If there was any other way, Jesus would have desired it, but he took the way that the Father had made.

It wasn’t just any death either. It was death on a cross. If you were a good Jew, death on a cross meant that you were being cut off from the covenant of God, which is what every Jew would have realized when Jesus was crucified. Since he died that kind of death, then there was no way that he could be the Messiah.

Yet Jesus was the Messiah and he went all the way to show it. As we will continue this passage, we will see how the Father responds, but the point is still relevant to Paul’s main reason for bringing this up. This is the kind of love Christians are to have for one another. Are we that obedient to God to love in such a way?

Hello everyone. Welcome back to Deeper Waters where we are continuing our Trinitarian Bible Study. Right now, we’re in the book of Philippians and in the second chapter looking at the great hymn. I think JB for his comment based on last night’s post. I hadn’t heard that and I find it extremely interesting. Keep in mind based on that that this blog is not to be an end-all to study. I encourage anyone to look further and see what more can be said.

Having said that, we’re going to be looking at verse 7 tonight:

but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.

This in fact fits in with the comment that our good friend JB made. Jesus definitely had the position of a great emperor and still does. However, he was willing to come and lower himself. We see this all throughout the epistles. We heard it in 2 Cor. 8-9 when Christ was presented as our example of one who was rich but for our sakes became poor.

The passage tells us that Christ made himself nothing which is the highest example of self-sacrifice. Christ took upon himself that which he did not have to have to save those who he did not need and undergo a pain that he need not have to have undergone as the most innocent one of all. However, he saw fit to come and give himself for his people. Rather than the people dying for the cause of the emperor, Christ was the first to die for his people. Many have died for him since, but only by following his example.

We also find that he took the very nature of a servant. The word is the same word that’s used in verse 6. In other words, if Jesus really wasn’t God in nature, then he really wasn’t a servant in nature either. We see at the start however that he is fully God and now we see that he is fully a servant. He is the God-man. He is 100% God and 100% man.

We cannot lose sight of this great contrast in the passage. Paul is talking about Jesus dwelling in Heaven as God and then saying that he came to Earth and lived as a servant. He didn’t come down as an emperor or ruler or some glorified figure. Instead, he came down as a servant. He came from the highest of all to dwell in the lowest of all.

Human likeness. Does that mean that he was not a human? No. He was fully human. It means that by his appearance, everyone would have assumed that he was just a man. The truth is however that he was more than a man. He was the God-man again.

What do we learn from this? We ought to learn humility as well. We should be willing to give up what we have to bring about the good of others. If we are not, then we are not living as Christ did. The great emphasis to do so is that we are merely walking in the footsteps of Christ.

We shall continue tomorrow.

Hello everyone. Welcome back to our Trinitarian commentary here at Deeper Waters. We are right now in the epistle to the Philippians and looking at the great hymn in chapter 2. It is often called the kenotic passage, although by this, I do not mean that I believe in what is known as the kenotic heresy, the idea that Jesus forsook his deity while he was on Earth. Tonight, we’re going to be looking at 2:6b. Let’s go to the text.

Did not consider equality with God something to be grasped.

Keep in mind in all of this that our passage has been focusing on the nature of Christ and how he is to be our example. We are to esteem others as better than ourselves and the basis for doing such is to look at what Christ did. He was one who came for the suffering of others. Note that he is not saying we are better than he is in doing so. We certainly are not. Instead, he is seeking our greater good. He is taking upon himself the evil in the world selflessly so that we might be saved.

What does this passage tell us about the nature of Jesus? It tells us first off that he had equality with God. Again, we see an implicit understanding that God refers to God the Father. There was already room for a Trinitarian idea even if that hadn’t been fully conceptualized yet at this point. The Jewish system of the day was open to the possibility of the divine nature of God including more than one person. This is something anyone should be open to as well. It is a strange idea that we assume that when we come to God, he must be one person. He can do anything at all that is not a contradiction, but yet, he cannot be more than one person. Now in saying that, I do not mean to say that he chooses to exist in three persons. He has always existed in three persons by necessity of his nature.

When Jesus is seen in relation to the Father, he is seen as an equal in his nature. We know this for certain because of the usage of the word form in the prior passage. It means that Jesus was in his very nature God. Yet we are also told that he did not consider that equality as something to be grasped. What does this mean?

The grasping means more of a clinging. This means that Jesus was not holding on to his deity as an excuse to avoid the incarnation and not come to bring about the salvation of man. He did not see being deity as a reason to not come to Earth and bring about the salvation of man. Instead, he took upon a position that would be lowering. This is a concept that we will explore further as we go through this beautiful passage.

It does not mean he gave up his deity. That would imply he was not God on Earth, which the texts as we have seen show he was. Theologians debate exactly what it was that Jesus forsook, because he did forsake something. I would argue that Jesus forsook a sort of divine prerogative. He came and in many ways played by the rules unless his very mission necessitated that he act in a different manner. Of course, this is a point that we can debate, but we must not say that Jesus forsook deity or ever lacked deity.

Tomorrow, we shall look at verse 7.

Hello everyone! Welcome to Deeper Waters again! I am really looking forward to this next part of our Trinitarian blog. We are going to be going through the Philippian hymn in chapter 2 of that book and this is such a powerful place to go to demonstrate the deity of Christ. I was so excited that for one brief post I skipped over Ephesians to get to this one. Well we’ve taken care of that now. Tonight, we’re going to start in Philippians 2:6, but we’re not even going to read the whole verse. Instead, we’re going to read just the first part of that verse.

⁶Who, being in very nature God

I was actually on a chat program once where someone made the remark that Jesus could not be God because if you are equal to something, you cannot be that thing. He referred to that as simple logic.

Bluntly, I call that simple stupidity.

Paul here is also telling the Philippian church about unity. Now disunity was not a major problem in the church, although we do see signs of it in Philippians 4 where one member is urged to help two others to get along. Philippians by and large is a church that Paul highly commends and is very pleased with.

It will also be helpful for our purposes through this study to keep in mind that Philippians is one that the scholars will grant you is Pauline. This passage in the middle is believed to be an early Christian hymn. It could have been written by Paul himself for all we know. However, it was a hymn and it indicates a high Christology at an early point in church history.

Let’s look at this however. It’s not a shock that the early church was called to follow the example of Christ. This was in the context of esteeming others as better than yourselves. Notice this. Christ did seek the good of those who were less than him. How do we know this?

The passage tells us that he was in the very nature of God. The word is morphe and it refers to the form of something, the nature of it. What he is telling us is that the nature of God was that which was found in the nature of Christ.

As we go through this passage, we’ll deal with the kenotic idea that Jesus forsook his deity, a belief that no Trinitarian can hold. However, let us look at the very beginning of this passage for now. Paul states that Jesus existed in the very nature of God.

Is there an argument for this? No. What does that tell you? It tells you that this was something that was well-established and self-evident to the early church. It would be like thinking you had to explain to a Muslim that Muhammad was a prophet. (It is not a position I hold of course.) They already believe that by virtue of being a Muslim.

When Paul wrote to this church, he appealed to what they already knew. They already knew that Jesus was fully God which means that we can place this in the line of the early Christian teachings. What does this reveal to us then? From the very beginning, the message had been that Jesus is God. This was not a later development in the church. This is fact that has been going from that time on.

Tomorrow, we shall continue this wonderful passage.