The Hyperlinked Bible
Intertextuality Pair
Echo
Later text
Who, existing in the form of God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross.
Earlier text
Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness, to rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, and over all the earth itself and every creature that crawls upon it." So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
Paul's declaration that Christ existed "in the form of God" (en morphē theou) and did not consider "equality with God something to be grasped" (harpagmon) reads as an echo-reversal of the Adam of Genesis 1:26-27. Adam was made in God's "image" (tselem) and "likeness" (demut) but, tempted by the serpent's promise "you will be like God" (Gen 3:5), grasped at equality with God. Christ, who genuinely possessed divine status, refused to exploit it and instead "emptied Himself" — the precise opposite of Adam's grasping. The contrast is theologically decisive: where the first Adam seized upward and fell, the last Adam descended voluntarily and was exalted (Phil 2:9-11). Paul's hymn thus presents Christ as the anti-Adam who reverses the primal human sin of self-exaltation. The morphē theou language resonates with the tselem elohim of Genesis, suggesting that Christ is the true image-bearer who fulfills the human vocation that Adam abandoned. This Adam-Christ typology runs through Paul's theology (cf. Rom 5:12-21; 1 Cor 15:22, 45-49) and here grounds the ethical exhortation to humility in the Philippian congregation.