Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters. I thank you all for your continued prayers and I hope that you keep them up. I am on an exciting journey and want to make sure that the people of God in the body of Christ, as all are, will be praying for me on this path. We’re going to get into our Trinitarian Commentary once again and tonight, we’re in the 10th chapter of Hebrews and we’ll be reading verses 5-10:
5Therefore, when Christ came into the world, he said:
“Sacrifice and offering you did not desire,
but a body you prepared for me;
6with burnt offerings and sin offerings
you were not pleased.
7Then I said, ‘Here I am—it is written about me in the scroll—
I have come to do your will, O God.’ ” 8First he said, “Sacrifices and offerings, burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not desire, nor were you pleased with them” (although the law required them to be made). 9Then he said, “Here I am, I have come to do your will.” He sets aside the first to establish the second. 10And by that will, we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.
I recommend readers look at verses 1-4 to see what the therefore is there for. What is being talked about ultimately is the inability of bulls and goats to take away sins. Christ is superior and this passage tells us about that.
Note that we see the pre-existence of Christ spoken of. I do not believe in the pre-existence of other human beings. Now I do not think that Scripture gives an explicit “yay” or “nay” on the doctrine at this point, but I am personally skeptical of such an idea.
However, this is about Christ coming on a mission from the Father and saying that a body has been prepared for him. Christ has not always been tied with a human body. He has been fully deity. We must get this clear in our Trinitarian thought. The body of Jesus is not God.
When we realize that, it helps us deal with a lot of misconceptions, such as the objection to ask if God died on the cross. God did not die on the cross, but the person of Jesus who is ontologically God was separated from his body when he died on the cross, which is a good definition of death as well.
This sacrifice is essential to the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews as well. It was the body that Christ dwelt in that became the sacrifice. Notice that the writer makes a distinction between Christ and his body as well. Now I believe the body is part of being fully human and so when Christ rose again, he did rise again in his body. If Christ had not been raised physically, then that would mean that we had a more Gnostic religion. The body was something bad to be discarded upon victory. However, Christianity does not affirm that. The body is good. Matter is good. It is the creation of God.
And a body was a tool that was used to bring about our salvation. We Christians are people of the body of Christ, but we are also persons in bodies, and we should be thankful for them as well and celebrate our own bodies as the good creations of God.
We shall continue tomorrow.
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