for Paul, is that ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself’ (2 Corinthians 5:19). The point of verses 6 and 7 is that Jesus didn’t regard this equality as something to take advantage of, something to exploit. Rather, the eternal son of God, the one who became human in and as Jesus of Nazareth, regarded his equality with God as committing him to the course he took: of becoming human, of becoming Israel’s anointed representative, of dying under the weight of the world’s evil. This is what