To Him, therefore, with and in the Father, we have learned to ascribe all wisdom and power, all glory and blessedness, all holiness and all majesty. Specially, through Him the worlds were made, and in Him they consist. The fulness, the sufficiency, the essential strength of Godhead were His. The exercise and manifestation of all these was His form of being. One might expect, then, that in any process of self-manifestation to created beings in which it might please Him to go forth, the expression of His supremacy and transcendence should be written on the face of it. The next thought is expressed in the received translation by the words "thought it no robbery to be equal with God." So truly and properly Divine was He that equality with God could not appear to Him or be reckoned by Him as anything else than His own. He counted such equality no robbery, arrogance, or wrong. To claim it, and all that corresponds to it, could not appear to Him something assumed without right, but rather something assumed with the best right. So taken, these words would complete the Apostle's view of the original Divine pre-eminence of the Son of God. They would express, so to say, the equity of the situation, from which all that follows should be estimated. Had it pleased the Son of God to express only, and to impress on all minds only His equality with God, this could not have seemed to Him encroachment or wrong. I think a good deal can be said for this. But the sense which, on the whole, is now approved by commentators is that indicated by the Revised Version. This takes the clause not as still dwelling on the primeval glory of the Son of God, and what was implied in it, but rather as beginning to indicate how a new situation arose, pointing out the dispositions out of which the Incarnation came. "He counted it not a prize to be on an equality with God." To hold by this was not the great object with Him. In any steps He might take, in any forthgoings He might enter on, the Son of God might have aimed at maintaining and disclosing equality with God. That alternative was open. But this is not what we see: no holding by that, no solicitude about that appears. His procedure, His actings reveal nothing of this kind. What we see filling His heart and fixing His regard, is not what might be due to Himself or assumed fitly by Himself, but what might bring deliverance and blessedness to us.[2] [2] Various shades of meaning have been proposed. Meyer, whose opinion has weight, virtually interprets in this way: He did not reckon equality with God (which was His) to imply or to be fitly exercised in acquisition, or in accumulation of benefit to Himself: and Hofmann, after supporting another view, appears (in his _Hist. Schrift. N. T._) to agree with this. To be equal to God, and to put forth power for His own enrichment, were for the Son very different things. The one He possessed: the other He renounced.