I. The act of exaltation which forms the contrast and the parallel to
the descent.
'God highly exalted Him.' The Apostle coins an emphatic word which
doubly expresses elevation, and in its grammatical form shows that it
indicates a historical fact. That elevation was a thing once
accomplished on this green earth; that is to say it came to pass in the
fact of our Lord's ascension when from some fold of the Mount of Olives
He was borne upwards and, with blessing hands, was received into the
Shechinah cloud, the glory of which hid Him from the upward-gazing eyes.
It is plain that the 'Him' of whom this tremendous assertion is made,
must be the same as the 'He' of whom the previous verses spoke, that is,
the Incarnate Jesus. It is the manhood which is exalted. His humiliation
consisted in His becoming man, but His exaltation does not consist in
His laying aside His humanity. It is not a transient but an eternal
union into which in the Incarnation it entered with divinity.
Henceforward we have to think of Him in all the glory of His heavenly
state as man, and as truly and completely in the 'likeness of men' as
when He walked with bleeding feet on the flinty road of earthly life. He
now bears for ever the 'form of God' and 'the fashion of a man.'
Here I would pause for a moment to point out that the calm tone of this
reference to the ascension indicates that it was part of the recognised
Christian beliefs, and implies that it had been familiar long before the
date of this Epistle, which itself dates from not more than at the most
thirty years from the death of Christ. Surely that lapse of time is far
too narrow to allow of such a belief having sprung up, and been
universally accepted about a dead man, who all the while was lying in a
nameless grave.
The descent is presented as _His_ act, but decorum and truth required
that the exaltation should be God's act. 'He humbled Himself,' but 'God
exalted Him.' True, He sometimes represented Himself as the Agent of His
own Resurrection and Ascension, and established a complete parallel
between His descent and His ascent, as when He said, 'I came out from
the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go
unto the Father.' He was no less obedient to the Father's will when He
ascended up on high, than He was when He came down to earth, and whilst,
from one point of view, His Resurrection and Ascension were as truly His
own acts as were His birth and His death, from another, He had to pray,
'And now, O Father, glorify Thou Me with Thine own self with the glory
which I had with Thee before the world was.' The Titans presumptuously
scaled the heavens, according to the old legend, but the Incarnate Lord
returned to 'His own calm home, His habitation from eternity,' was
exalted thither by God, in token to the universe that the Father
approved the Son's descent, and that the work which the Son had done was
indeed, as He declared it to be, 'finished.' By exalting Him, the Father
not merely reinstated the divine Word in its eternal union with God, but
received into the cloud of glory the manhood which the Word had assumed.