Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Hebrews · About this commentary
A Body You Prepared for Me
Hebrews 10:1-10
1 For the law, having a shadow of the good to come, not the very image of the things, can never with the same sacrifices year by year, which they offer continually, make perfect those who draw near. · WEB
The annual repetition is read as the system's own confession, and a psalm supplies the will that replaces the offerings.
For the law, having a shadow of the good to come, not the very image of the things, can never with the same sacrifices year by year... make perfect those who draw near.
Shadow against image — a silhouette against the thing that casts it. The shadow is accurate about outline and empty of substance, which is the letter's settled estimate of the old arrangement: true in shape, incapable in effect Hebrews 8:5.
The proof offered is the calendar itself, put as a question: or else wouldn't they have ceased to be offered? A completed cure is not re-administered. The offerings' annual return is their own testimony that nothing was finished — in those sacrifices there is a yearly reminder of sins. The day designed to deal with sin functioned, year over year, as the day sin was formally remembered.
And verse 4 states the underlying impossibility without softening: it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins. The book's third impossibility Hebrews 6:4 Hebrews 6:18. An animal's death can picture the cost; it cannot pay it, because the animal is neither the offender nor a willing party.
That last point is where the psalm comes in, and the quotation is placed in Christ's own mouth at the incarnation: when he comes into the world, he says, "You didn't desire sacrifice and offering, but you prepared a body for me... Behold, I have come... to do your will, O God."
The wording follows the older Greek translation — a body you prepared where the Hebrew speaks of an opened ear Psalms 40:6 — and the argument rests on the word quoted. What God wanted was never the animals; four terms for offering are listed and declined. What he wanted was a will aligned with his, and a body is the instrument by which a will acts in the world. The ear that hears and the body that obeys are one thought: obedience, embodied.
Verse 9 draws the structural conclusion in six words: he takes away the first, that he may establish the second. Offerings out; the doing of God's will in.
And verse 10 lands the paragraph on the readers: by which will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. The will that replaced the sacrifices became the sacrifice — the prepared body, offered. The tense is settled and the scope is the phrase the letter has used twice before Hebrews 7:27 Hebrews 9:12: once, for all.
settled What this mark means