I. The Son of God was in the form of God: glorious as the Father; equal to the Father; the Creator and Upholder of the universe. Notwithstanding, He thought it not robbery to be equal with God, i.e.for the words are obscure as they now stand He deemed not His equality with God a matter eagerly to be grasped by Him; did not think of it as the robber does of his prey, so that he would not on any account let it go; esteemed it not matter of self-enrichment or self-indulgence. He looked on His Divine glory and majesty as willing, if need be, to detach them from Himself, if He might thus the better fulfil the great end of His Divine being: the expression of the Father's will and the showing forth of the brightness of His glory. He made Himself of no reputation; literally, He emptied Himself. He laid aside, not His Divine nature for that was His very being not His Divine person as the Son of God, not His purity and holiness for these were the essential elements of His Divine nature and person but all accessories to these: all power, all majesty, all renown, yea and what is more mysterious still to our apprehension: all that infinite knowledge of all things with which as God and Creator He was clothed.
II. "He was made in the likeness of man." From being a glorious uncreated Being He became enshrined in a created nature, became as to His outward form a creature and subject to the laws of the creature: hunger; weariness; pain; death. We in vain endeavour to form any idea of this vast descent into degradation of the Son of God. When He, in His glory and His joy, took on Him the character of Redeemer, He knew what was in man; He saw all the depths of depravity, all the wonders of selfishness, all the pollutions of sin, of which this our nature was capable, and to which it would degrade itself: and He shrank not from contact with, from identification with, the vessel which had been thus defiled. We shall never know what Christ's humiliation was till we know what His exaltation and His glory are. The eye which cannot bear the light above is dazzled and misted when it contemplates the depth of darkness below.
H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons,vol. vi., p. 35.
References: Philippians 2:6-11. W. Harris, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xiv., p. 276.