Philippians 2:11

every tongue should confess Again an implicit quotation of Isaiah 45:23.

The verb rendered "confess," as Lightfoot points out, has in Scriptural Greek almost resigned its literal meaning of open avowal, to take that of praise and thanksgiving. Our Lord Himself uses it, Matthew 11:25; Luke 10:21; ("I thankThee, O Father, &c.") Every tongue shall "give thanks to Him for His great glory." It may be asked, how shall this be fulfilled in the case of the lost? We reply, either there is no explicit reference here to any but the subjects of final redemption, as in Ephesians 1:10, where see note in this Series; or the mysterious state of the lost may admit, for all we know, such a recognition that even their hopeless woe is the ordinance of "supremest Wisdom and primeval Love [19]," manifested in Jesus Christ, as shall be tantamount to the adoration indicated here.

[19] "Justice the Founder of my fabric moved,To rear me was the task of power divine,Supremest wisdom and primeval love.All hope abandon, ye who enter here."Dante, Inferno, canto iii (Cary).

Jesus Christis Lord Cp. 1 Corinthians 12:3; a passage which teaches us that the Lordship in question is such as to be known only by Divine revelation. It is supreme Lordship, a session on the eternal throne. (Cp. Revelation 3:21, and see Revelation 22:3.) He "who being in the form of God took the form of a bondservant" of God, and "obeyed even unto the cross," is now owned and adored as "God, whose throne is for ever and ever" (Hebrews 1:8), and as exercising His dominion as the Son of Man. The Person is eternally the same; but a new and wonderful condition of His action has come in, the result of His Exinanition and Passion.

It is observable that the Valentinian heretics (cent. 2), according to Irenæus (Bk. 1 Chronicles 1 § 3) ascribed to Jesus the title Saviour, but refused Him that of Lord.

For proof that in apostolic doctrine the supreme Name, Jehovah, was recognized as appropriate to the Person of the Christ, cp. John 12:4 with Isaiah 6:5. In that passage, as here, we have presented to us the personal identity of the Preexistent and the Humiliated Christ.

to the glory of God the Father the ultimate Object of all adoration, inasmuch as He is the eternal Origin of the eternal Deity of the Son.

Cp. John 5:23; John 13:31-32; John 17:1; 1 Peter 1:21; for this profound relation between the glory of the Son and the glory of the Father. But no isolated references can properly represent a subject which is so deeply woven into the texture of the Gospel.

In the light of the Scriptural truth of His Nature, a truth summarized with luminous fulness in the "Nicene" Creed [20], we see the Christ of God as at once properly, divinely, adorable, and the true Medium for our adoration of the Father.

[20] And more elaborately in the "Definition" of the Council of Chalcedon, a.d. 451.

St Chrysostom here in a noble passage shews how the attribution of full and eternal Godhead to the Christ enhances, not diminishes, the Father's glory. "A mighty proof it is of the Father's power, and goodness, and wisdom, that He hath begotten such a Son, a Son nowise inferior in goodness and in wisdom … When I say that the Son is not inferior in Essence to the Father, but equal, and of the same Essence, in this also I adore the Lord God, and His power, and goodness, and wisdom, that He has revealed to us Another, begotten of Himself, like to Him in all things, Fatherhood alone excepted" (Hom. vii. in Ep. ad Philipp. c. 4).

Thus closes a passage in which, in the course of practical exhortation, the cardinal truth of the true Godhead and true Manhood of Christ, and that of His example, are presented all the more forcibly because incidentally. The duty of unselfish mutual love and self-sacrifice is enforced by considerations on the condescension of Christ which are quite meaningless if He is not preexistent and Divine, and if the reality of His Manhood is not in itself a sublime example of unforced self-abasement for the good of others. All merely humanitarian views of His Person and Work, however refined and subtilized, are totally at variance with this apostolic passage, written within fresh living memory of His life and death.