‘That is the reason why when he comes into the world, he says, “Sacrifice and offering you would not, But a body did you prepare for me. In whole burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin you had no pleasure.” '
So it was because of the failure of these offerings and sacrifices to finally achieve God's purpose that they were to be put aside as not sufficient for God. That then explains why the Psalmist said that when Messiah comes into the world He will declare, ‘sacrifice and offering you would not, but a body did you prepare for Me.' He is setting aside the offerings and sacrifices because in His coming a greater purpose was here. And while the Psalmist had merely been thinking of them being put in a secondary place (the emphasis is on insufficiency), pointing to the pre-eminence of an obedient ear and heart, the complete fulfilment of his words would set the sacrifices aside altogether, to be replaced by a something better. He had spoken better than he knew.
The quotation is taken from Psalms 40:6-8 LXX. There the Psalmist is speaking of obedience as being far more important to God than any sacrifices (compare 1 Samuel 15:22; Psalms 50:8-14; Psalms 51:16-17; Hosea 6:6; Isaiah 1:10-17; Jeremiah 7:21-23). For obedience was hard while partaking in ritual was easy. So the danger always with ritual was that it could become the be all and end all, as though it could work by itself regardless of the response of men's hearts. That is not so, says the Psalmist. God looks first for the obedient heart without which all sacrifices are unacceptable and in vain.
The writer is here quoting from LXX. That was the main Greek version of the Old Testament which was largely used by the early church, who were initially Greek speaking. And in LXX ‘a body have you prepared for me' replaces ‘ears have you dug (or pierced) for me' which is found in the Hebrew Massoretic Text of Psalms 40 (on which our translations are mainly based). How then are these to be reconciled?
In the context of the Psalm the LXX rendering means that the body has been given to the subject in mind so that he might act obediently on God's behalf rather than just trusting in the efficacy of outward ritual. He has been given a body so that he might walk with God and obey Him, so that he might do His will. The body here represents the whole living person, the one who hears and the one who does, in contrast to the ritual offering which neither hears nor does.
How then does this tie in with ‘ears have you dug (or pierced) for me' in MT? It must be obvious that the Psalmist does not of course simply mean there that God has given him ears. We must ask what he means. And the obvious answer is that he means ears that hear and respond. Note the parallels in the verses (citing MT).
Sacrifice and offering, you have no delight in,
My ears have you dug into,
Burnt offering and sin offering, you have not required,
Then said I, Lo, I am come.'
Note how ‘my ears have you dug into' parallels, ‘Lo I am come' (to do your will O my God). The second is the response to the first. Thus the ears have been entered into in order that there might be response to the will of God.
So one explanation for these words is that the Psalmist means that he knows that God has provided the subject in mind with a hearing ear and a hearing heart so that he might do God's will. In other words by providing him with the ‘ears to hear' he has provided that which will make his whole being (his body) responsive to God's will. This then confirms that in both renderings the idea of the obedience of the whole man is prominent with LXX referring it to the body and MT referring it to the ear. The LXX in this explanation is thus to be seen as simply an interpretation, seeing the hearing ears as representing the whole self, because the ear is the hearing part of the body and affects the behaviour of the whole body. It is saying, you have provided me with a hearing ear, that is with a hearing and responsive body. Compare how when we say, ‘you have my ear', we mean ‘you have the attention of my whole being', signifying that we are listening with our whole being in order to consider a possible response.
Others, however, see ‘ears have you dug into/pierced for me' as referring to the ceremony where a Hebrew bondsman, having served his full term of servitude, wished to remain serving his master permanently and thus had a hole made in his ear with an awl and attached to the doorway of the master's residence (Exodus 21:6). The idea in Exodus could be seen to be that, through the attachment of the hearing ear to the door, he was giving his body in obedience to his master's house for ever. The ear there represents the hearing ear of the servant's whole being. Thus ‘ears have you pierced for me' in the plural might, in the light of this, refer to the giving of one's own self in one's own body entirely.
This being so the ‘body prepared' and ready to hear and obey, and the ‘hearing ear' (which presumes a body prepared to obey) are very similar, parallel thoughts. The truth being declared is therefore the same.
Furthermore in view of the fact that the Psalm is dedicated to the house of David the words are seen by the writer as clearly applicable to the sons of David who were to come following the writing of the Psalm, and especially therefore to great David's greater son, the Messiah. We can then come to the conclusion that these words, which in the end ill applied to any other son of David, are here put by the writer in the mouth of the Messiah to Whom they applied absolutely.
So when ‘He' (the Christ, the Messiah) comes into the world as David's son and as God's great High Priest He is seen as agreeing with God that dumb, unresponsive sacrifices and offerings are insufficient. That God no longer wishes for them. That God rather seeks a body yielded in obedience, in a true and responsive life, to be offered as a sacrifice. Indeed that it is that that is at the centre of all God's requirements. God looks for a sacrifice which has fulfilled complete obedience to His will, one that is morally without blemish.
And Christ is then shown as pointing to ‘a body', His own body (compare here John 2:19-22), a hearing, willing, obedient body, which God has prepared for Him, as being not only God's requirement but also God's solution, for it is a body through which He can reveal His obedience and willingness to do God's will, even to the point of offering Himself in death as a sacrifice. Here was God's great plan for the future, a willing and obedient body which represented a willing and obedient man, not the body of animals who had no option and were consumed in ritual sacrifices, but the body of the Messiah, a body that would be fully obedient to Him, and could then, as without blemish, be offered as the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). This would more than adequately replace the burnt offerings and sacrifices and it would accomplish what they could not, for it would contain within it the essential requisite of total obedience to the will of God.
This emphasis on His earthly body in relation to His saving work comes out elsewhere in Colossians 1-2. It is in ‘the body of His flesh' through death that we are to be presented holy, and without blemish and unreproveable before Him (Colossians 1:22 compare 1 Peter 2:24). And indeed in that body, declares Paul, dwells all the fullness of the Godhead in bodily form (Colossians 2:9). For the earthly rituals were but shadows, but the body, the reality, is of Christ (Colossians 2:17). The body then represents all that He is.
He knew that He had come to be offered up in the body as a sacrifice (Mark 10:45; Luke 22:37; compare Mark 8:31; Mark 9:31; Mark 10:33), to die for sins not His own. And all the offerings and sacrifices had been merely shadows pointing to this. If men were to be made perfect He must be offered up in His own willing, obedient body, paying the ransom for sin, and in that body rise again. For the wages of sin was death, and perfect and eternal life could therefore only be offered through the death of One Who was equivalent to all who sinned, and Who yet died undeservedly on behalf of those who deserved death, as their representative and substitute.
For this One Who was willing and obedient in offering Himself to death had not Himself sinned, and was therefore not subject to death. But He was offering Himself as a sacrifice for the sins of His own people, dying the death that they deserved, so that the death of His body would be of more significance than all the sacrifices and offerings, all put together, and was sufficient to deal with all the sins of the whole world (1 John 2:2), if they were only willing to respond, simply because of Who and What He was.
Lying under all references to His body is the recognition of One Who was fully obedient to His Father's will. It was a body totally given up to Him.