one of a settled, common, and most living certainty. These assertions
give us on the one hand the fullest possible assurance that He is Man,
Man in nature, in circumstances and experience, and particularly in the
sphere of relation to God the Father. But they also assure us, in
precisely the same tone, and in a way which is equally vital to the
argument in hand, that He is as genuinely Divine as He is genuinely
Human. Did He "come to be in Bondservant's Form"? And does the word
Form, _morphe_, there, unless the glowing argument is to run as cold as
ice, mean, as it ought to mean, reality in manifestation, fact in sight,
a Manhood perfectly real, carrying with it a veritable creaturely {98}
obligation (_douleia_) to God? But He was also, antecedently, "in God's
Form." And there too therefore we are to understand, unless the
wonderful words are to be robbed of all their living power, that He who
came to be Man, and to seem Man, in an antecedent state of His blessed
Being was God, and seemed God. And His "becoming to be" one with us in
that mysterious but genuine Bondservice was the free and conscious choice
of His eternal Will, His eternal Love, in the glory of the Throne. "When
He came on earth abased" He was no Victim of a secret and irresistible
destiny, such as that which in the Stoic's theology swept the Gods of
Olympus to their hour of change and extinction as surely as it swept men
to ultimate annihilation. "_He made Himself_ void," with all the
foresight and with all the freewill which can be exercised upon the
Throne where the Son is in the Form of the Eternal Nature. Such is the
Christology of the passage in its aspect towards Deity.

Then in regard of our beloved Lord's Manhood, its implications assure us
that the perfect genuineness of that Manhood, which could not be
expressed in a term more profound and complete than this same _morphe
doulou_, Form of Bondservant, leaves us yet perfectly sure that He who
chose to be Bondservant is to us only all the more, even in His Manhood,
LORD. Was it not His own prescient choice to be true Man? And was it
not His choice with a prescient and infallible regard to "the things of
others," to "us men and our salvation"? Then we may be sure that,
whatever is meant by the "made Himself void," _heauton ekenosen_, which
describes His Incarnation here, one thing it could never possibly
mean---a "Kenosis" which could hurt or distort His absolute fitness to
guide and bl