Some acts of humility happen once and are done. A wealthy person gives away a portion of their fortune, and the act, however meaningful, concludes. A leader steps aside from a position of influence, and the transition, however costly, has an ending point. But the humility described in Philippians chapter two does not stop at a single act. It moves in stages, each one lower than the last, until it reaches the most degrading death the ancient world could devise. This is not a single descent. It is a double descent, and understanding both movements changes how we read the whole passage.
The first descent is the incarnation itself. Paul writes that Christ, existing in the very nature of God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but instead emptied Himself, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. Stop and consider the distance covered in that single movement. The eternal Son, who shares fully in the nature and glory of God, who spoke creation into existence and upholds it by the word of His power, chose to step into the very world He had made, taking on the limitations of a human body, a human mind, and a human life. He did not simply visit humanity from a comfortable distance. He entered it fully, submitting Himself to hunger, exhaustion, temptation, and the slow unfolding of human development from infancy onward. This alone would have been an act of staggering humility, the infinite entering the finite, the eternal submitting to time.
But Paul does not stop there, and this is where the passage moves from remarkable to almost unthinkable. Having already descended from the glory of heaven into human flesh, Christ descends further still. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. The first descent brought the Son of God into human limitation. The second descent brought that same human life, already humbled by incarnation, down into the most shameful death available in the Roman world. Crucifixion was reserved for those the empire considered beneath the dignity of ordinary execution. Roman citizens were exempt from it by law. It was designed not merely to kill but to humiliate, to display the condemned publicly as an object of contempt.
Consider what this means. The One who had every right to remain in the fullness of divine glory chose instead to become fully human. Then, having become fully human, the One who deserved reverence and worship in that human form chose to be treated as the lowest of criminals, stripped, mocked, and executed in the manner reserved for those society had already discarded. Each step downward was voluntary. Nothing was taken from Him that He did not first surrender. This is the shape of the double descent, glory laid aside for humanity, and humanity laid down in death.
Why does this pattern matter for us today. Because it tells us something essential about the character of God that we might otherwise be tempted to miss. We often think of divine power as something displayed through control, through commanding circumstances, through remaining untouched by suffering. The double descent of Christ tells us the opposite. The deepest revelation of who God is came not through the exercise of power from a distance but through the willing surrender of that power, not once but twice, until there was nothing left to surrender but life itself.
This pattern also shapes what we should expect from a life following Christ. We sometimes imagine spiritual maturity as a single decisive act, a moment of surrender after which the difficult work is finished. Christ's example suggests something more demanding and, ultimately, more honest. Humility is rarely a single transaction. It is often a series of descents, each one asking more of us than the last, each one testing whether we will continue choosing the lower place when the cost increases. The first act of surrender in following Christ, whatever that looked like for each of us, was rarely the last. There are further descents still ahead, moments that will ask us to set aside comfort, reputation, or control that we thought we had already surrendered.
Paul does not leave us with descent alone. The passage moves immediately from the depths of the cross to the heights of exaltation, God highly exalting Him and giving Him the name above every name. The double descent is not the end of the story. It is the path that leads to glory, and it establishes the pattern for every believer who follows Him. The way down is not the opposite of the way up. In the economy of the kingdom, it is the very road that leads there.
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.