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Summary

Did Jesus Conceal Something?

God is holy other—profoundly different from us. Isaiah 55:8-9 declares that His thoughts and ways are higher than ours as the heavens are higher than the earth, and Deuteronomy 29:29 draws an even sharper line: "The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us." Scripture therefore distinguishes between God's revealed will—what He has plainly told us in His Word, such as "do not steal"—and His hidden will, those purposes He keeps to Himself, often understood only in the rearview mirror of our lives. So the question naturally arises: when the second person of the Trinity walked the earth, did He, too, conceal something?

The answer comes from the great Christ-hymn of Philippians 2:5-11. Paul says Jesus was "in the form of God." The word for form here is not the ordinary term for outward appearance but a word denoting essential reality. Jesus did not merely look divine as if wearing a costume; divinity is who He is. Colossians 1:15 calls Him the image of the invisible God, and John 1:1 confesses that the Word was God. The Athanasian Creed crystallizes this: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are co-eternal and co-equal—one God in three persons.

Yet though equal with the Father, Jesus "did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited" or grasped. Instead, "He emptied Himself." In the nineteenth century a heresy spread that took this to mean Jesus emptied Himself of His divinity when He came to earth. He did not. He emptied Himself of the prerogative of His divinity—the free use of His divine attributes. A glimpse of what He set aside breaks through at the Transfiguration in Matthew 17:1-2, where His face shone like the sun: a preview of post-Easter glory. For the most part, before the cross, Jesus concealed His glory. So in Mark 13:32 He can say that no one knows the day or hour of His return, "nor the Son, but only the Father"—not because He ceased to be omniscient, but because He was not exercising that prerogative in that moment. This is what it means to say that Jesus, in the form of God, concealed His glory during His earthly ministry.

Paul then drives the humbling deeper. Jesus took "the form of a slave"—again the word for essential reality, not mere appearance, against any later notion that He only seemed human. He is true God and true man, the two natures united in one person. "Being found in human form, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross." Each phrase descends a step lower: the incarnation itself is humbling; obedience unto death is further humbling; and crucifixion—reserved by Rome for public humiliation outside the city—is the lowest rung. The One through whom all things were made girded Himself with a servant's towel and washed the feet of sinful disciples, and then let those same kinds of hands nail Him to a tree.

We elevate ourselves; He empties Himself. Nebuchadnezzar struts across Daniel 4:30 boasting of his "magnificent Babylon." A mother in Matthew 20:21 angles for thrones for her sons. Judges 17:6 records that everyone did what was right in his own eyes, and Romans 12:3 warns against thinking of ourselves more highly than we ought. Into this proud, self-elevating race, the eternal Son comes downward. Through that cross, forgiveness is won and reconciliation with God restored.

Therefore—and the "therefore" matters—God highly exalted Him and gave Him the name above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow and every tongue confess that He is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. The pattern is set, and Paul opens the hymn with its application: "Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus." The Christ who concealed His glory and humbled Himself for sinners is also the pattern for the lives of those He has redeemed. Might the world be different if His people thought as He thinks?

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