A common objection surfaces whenever the deity of Christ becomes the subject of conversation. Jesus never claimed to be God, the argument goes, and later Christians invented His divinity somewhere between the resurrection and the writing of the Gospels, perhaps borrowing the idea from the surrounding Greco Roman world where deified heroes were nothing unusual. It is a serious objection and it deserves a serious answer, and one of the strongest answers available sits quietly in a letter most readers pass over without noticing its full weight.
Paul's letter to the Philippians was written somewhere around the year sixty one or sixty two, from Rome, during his imprisonment. This dating matters enormously. It places the letter within roughly thirty years of the resurrection, decades before the Gospel of John would open with its explicit declaration that the Word was God. It also places the letter within the lifetime of eyewitnesses. The apostle John did not die until the eighties. If Paul's claims about Jesus were fabrications unmoored from what the earliest disciples actually believed, those disciples were alive to correct him, and nothing in the historical record suggests they ever did.
What makes this passage so significant is not merely its early date but the way it speaks about Christ's nature. Paul writes that Jesus, being in the very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to His own advantage, or as some translations render it, something to be grasped. The word behind this phrase carries the sense of seizing, exploiting, or holding onto by force. Paul is not describing someone straining to reach a status not yet his own. He is describing someone who already possessed that status and chose not to exploit it for personal advantage.
This distinction carries real theological weight. If Jesus were merely a righteous human being later elevated to divine status, or a created being ranked somewhere beneath the one true God, the language of grasping would make a certain kind of sense, since one might imagine such a figure reaching for a status not naturally his. But Paul's wording assumes the opposite. Jesus already possessed the nature of God. The question was never whether He could attain equality with God. The question was what He would do with equality He already had. He chose not to cling to the exercise of that divine prerogative but to set it aside temporarily in order to take on the nature of a servant.
This single passage, read carefully, dismantles several of the oldest heresies about the person of Christ. It rules out the view that Jesus was merely a human being exalted to divine status after the fact, since Paul describes Him as already possessing the very nature of God prior to His incarnation. It rules out the view that Jesus was a created being ranked below the Father, a lesser divine intermediary rather than fully God, since a created being would have nothing of true equality with God to set aside. It rules out the notion that Jesus only appeared to be human while remaining a purely spiritual being, since Paul is explicit that He took on the very nature of a servant and was found in appearance as a man, language that in the original text conveys genuine human form rather than illusion. And it rules out the idea that the Father, Son, and Spirit are simply three temporary masks worn by a single divine person, since the passage presupposes a real relationship between the Son who empties Himself and the Father who subsequently exalts Him.
None of these errors are relics of the ancient world alone. Each has a living counterpart today, whether in movements that treat Jesus as a created archangel, traditions that regard Him as merely human, philosophies that reduce Him to pure spirit disconnected from real humanity, or theologies that flatten the distinct persons of the Trinity into interchangeable roles. What Paul wrote to a small congregation in Philippi in the first century still functions as a precise corrective to every one of these modern variations.
The apologetic force of this passage lies precisely in its casualness. Paul is not writing a defense of Christ's deity. He is assuming it as common ground already shared with his readers, using it as the foundation for an entirely different argument about humility and unity within the church. This is often how the strongest evidence works. A doctrine argued for at length can feel forced or defensive. A doctrine assumed in passing, embedded within an unrelated appeal to Christian character, reveals what the earliest church actually believed without needing to prove it. Nobody builds an ethical argument for humility on a theological claim they think their readers will dispute.
For those who encounter the objection that the divinity of Jesus was a later invention, this passage offers a firm and early answer. Within a single generation of the resurrection, while eyewitnesses still walked the earth and could have refuted a fabrication, Paul describes Jesus as possessing the very nature of God, a nature He did not need to grasp because it was already His. What Jesus surrendered was not His deity but the exercise of its glory, taking on human likeness so that He might become, in the fullest and most costly sense, a servant. That is not the language of invention. It is the language of a conviction already settled and already shared, thirty years after the empty tomb.
Dr. William C.K. Yomes is the founding apologist of Faith Makes Sense and the Senior Pastor of Catalyst Community Church in Wilmington, Delaware. This article is part of his ongoing teaching ministry at Catalyst Community Church.