A body you prepared for me ( Hebrews 10:5)
John Appleby, Telford
Christmas, again! Fairy lights and baubles; plum puddings and mince pies; parties and presents. Thus, if we are not very careful we hide, by the wearisome mundane of tinsel, the ineffable wonder of ‘the body prepared’. Does not that ‘body prepared’ require an infinitely greater response than fairy lights and tinsel?
The author of Hebrews is quoting here from Psalm 40:6-8. Most of the quotations from the Old Testament in the letter to the Hebrews, including this one of ‘the body prepared’, come from the Greek version of the Old Testament (the Septuagint) and not from the Hebrew version. This means that in our English versions of Psalm 40:6 we have David strangely saying, according to the Hebrew, 'my ears you have pierced (opened)' or ‘you have given me an open ear' and not 'a body you prepared for me', as in the Greek version. Is this one more of the ‘mistakes' in our Bible that the secularists love to shout about?
I think not; we are used to the Old Testament prophets regarding the great King David – ‘the man after God’s own heart’ (1 Samuel 13:14) – as a faint adumbration of the coming of his greater Son, Jesus Christ. We can properly understand, therefore, that under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the author of Hebrews understood that the Hebrew version and Greek version, by implication, are both saying the same thing. As John Owen succinctly puts it:
God the Father did so order things towards Jesus Christ that he should have the nature wherein he might be free and able to yield obedience unto the will of God; with an intimation of the quality of it in having ears to hear, which belong only to a body. By ‘body’ then is meant the human nature of Christ.
The absolute necessity for such a body to be prepared is in order that the last Adam shall be adequately able to substitute for the first Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45). In the mists of the first days of the earth, as Genesis tells us, the first Adam walked from that moment of creation a living body and soul. He had ears open to hear his Creator’s words and was, in his human nature, ‘free and able to yield obedience unto the will of God’. Remarkably, the last Adam was there at that moment too! (John 1:3).
But a day came when the freedom and ability of the first Adam to obey the will of his Creator tragically died. Sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin (Romans 5:12). Now, without a ‘body prepared’ specifically for the task, there could be no Saviour capable of redeeming any sinner. In the first Adam human nature had signally failed; now it must be shown that in the last Adam human nature can succeed in pleasing God.
Animal sacrifices, even though ordered by Divine instruction, would not do. Something much deeper than external sacrifices is God’s requirement. Hence ‘a body is prepared’ – a body with opened ears and an obedient, willing heart to please God (Isaiah 40:4-5). The merit of such a holy life could be offered, through death, in sacrifice to God (Isaiah 53:10). But that body must be wholly free from any taint of the sin that the first Adam bestowed upon all his descendants. Hence the conception by the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:35), which act made the last Adam unique, a Saviour without equal. Being a human body and rational soul made it possible that the offering of it could be by death, the separation of soul and body.
Because this death was to be the confirmation of a new covenant, blood must be shed which only a body contains (Hebrews 9:22). A body is essential to make the sacrifice of death visible and real and therefore credible. And the staggering thing is that, in that body, all the fulness of the Deity was living in bodily form (Colossians 2:9). By entering into human flesh, though without its sin, the last Adam entered into actual union with those of humankind whom he came to redeem, thus qualifying himself to be their substitute Saviour, able to taste death for them (Hebrews 2:14). By a bodily resurrection from among the dead the last Adam brought the hope of everlasting glory to those redeemed who, all their lives, had lived under the fear of death (1 Peter 1:3).
No wonder the author of Hebrews used a strong word for our word ‘prepared’; it is a word not often used in the New Testament, which has the sense of ‘to make fully ready’. What more could God have done than he has done for us and our salvation – miracle upon miracle, tumbling over each other in a divine determination to have the redemption of sinners accomplished! Doesn’t our tinsel look inadequate, now?