Hebrews 10:5Meaning & Commentary from the Church Fathers

He also strongly proves that they have not ceased only now, but from the very coming of Christ, or rather, even before His coming.

It was not Christ who put an end to them. Rather, first they were abolished, and only afterward did He come. First they were brought to an end, and then His coming followed.

So that they might not say, “We could please God even without this sacrifice of Christ,” He waited until the sacrifices had exposed themselves. Only then did He come.

For “neither sacrifice nor offering,” he says, “hast Thou desired.” By this he rejected everything. After speaking generally, he also speaks particularly: “Neither burnt offerings nor sacrifice for sin,” which are offered according to the law, “hast Thou been pleased with.”

“Offering” meant everything else besides sacrifices.

“Then He added: Behold, I come to do Thy will, O God.” Of whom is this said? Of no one other than Christ.

Here the Apostle in no way accuses those who offered. He shows that God does not refuse the sacrifices because of their vices, as He said elsewhere.

Rather, the insufficiency of the action itself has finally been revealed, and it has become manifest that it has no power and is now untimely.

How, then, is this to be reconciled with the frequent offering of sacrifices? It is not only from their frequent offering, he says, that they are seen to be weak and useless.

It is also from the fact that God does not accept them, since they are barren and useless. The same thing is expressed elsewhere when it says, “For if Thou hadst desired sacrifice, I would have given it” (Ps 50:18).

From this it is clear that He does not desire them. Therefore the will of God does not desire sacrifices, but the abolition of sacrifices. Thus there is no will of God that they be offered.

What does “to do Thy will” mean? It means to hand Himself over. This is the will of God.

For he did not say, “after He had entered,” but “when He enters the world,” in order to show that even before He entered, He hated their sacrifices.

“Sacrifice and offering Thou hast not desired” (Ps 39:6). Clearly, these are the sacrifices established by the law.

Here “offering” denotes something distinct from sacrifice. I think it signifies the bloodless sacrifices.

“But a body hast Thou prepared for Me” (Ps 39:6). That is, Thou hast determined that My Body should become the most perfect sacrifice.

Therefore He said to John, “Permit it now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness” (Mt 3:15).

Thus it is fitting for Him to say what is required of us, as the head of the body and as the firstborn of many brethren according to the flesh.

Having shown, says the Apostle, that the offering of irrational animals is not pleasing to God, he then pointed to Himself and to the predictions of His coming.

He expressed this by the words, “In the scroll of the book it is written of Me.” He says the same thing again in another way. See Heb 10:9.

The Lord prefers obedience above sacrifices (1 Sam 15:22). Since the taking of a body, or better, its preparation as a sacrifice by Jesus Christ, was the sign of His greatest obedience to the will of God, the meaning is the same.

One may say, “Thou hast dug,” or “bored,” or “prepared ears for Me,” or, “Thou hast prepared a body for Me,” or “hast made it perfect,” and so forth.

The Apostle chose the expression that gave greater force to his thought.

The Apostle had the right to apply these expressions to the Messiah because this Psalm relates to the known prophecy of Nathan concerning the birth of the Messiah from David (2 Sam 7).

As for the attempt to explain the appearance of this textual difference between the words of the Apostle Paul and the text of Psalm 39 by supposing a Hebrew text of the Epistle, it is unsound.

According to this supposition, the word sheor, meaning “higher,” could have stood in the expression, “Thou hast prepared the higher for Me.” The translator of the Epistle supposedly read sheer, meaning “body” or “flesh,” and translated, “A body hast Thou prepared for Me.”

This supposition is itself wholly unproved. It also errs by forcing all manuscripts of the translation of the Seventy to be altered according to an incorrect translation of the Epistle, made no earlier than the end of the first century.

Whatever the cause of this difference in readings, they express one and the same thought concerning the unquestioning obedience and devotion of Christ the Messiah to the heavenly Father.

In ancient times, the ears of those servants were pierced who had received the right to depart freely from their master, but preferred to remain forever in his service.

In this case, the piercing was a symbolic sign of complete devotion, obedience, and perpetual belonging to the master (Ex 21:5-6).

The God-man Jesus Christ was filled with these feelings toward the heavenly Father, “becoming obedient unto death, even death on a Cross” (Phil 2:8).

Appearing on earth, He declared that the will of God would be fulfilled by Him, because precisely about Him, and not about anyone else, it had been foretold in the most ancient prophecies.

These prophecies are contained “in the scroll of the book,” that is, at the very beginning of Holy Scripture, in the Pentateuch.