THAT is a very remarkable expression that Paul represents our Savior as using in Hebrews 10:5: When He cometh into the world, He saith, Sacrifice and offering Thou wouldest not, but a body hast Thou prepared Me.” The body of Christ was specially prepared for Him and for His great work. To begin with, it was a sinless body, without taint of original sin, else God could not have dwelt therein. It was a body made highly vital and sensitive, probably far beyond what ours are; for sin has a blunting and hardening effect even upon flesh; and Christ’s flesh, though He was made “in the likeness of sinful flesh,” was not sinful flesh, but flesh which yielded prompt obedience to His spirit. His body was capable of great endurance, so as to know the griefs and agonies and unspeakable sorrows of a delicate, holy, and tender kind which it was necessary for Him to bear. In the fullness of time, He came into that body, which was admirably adapted to enshrine the Godhead. He who assumed that body was existent before that body was prepared.
He says, “A body hast Thou prepared Me. Lo, I come.” We could not, any one of us, have said that a body was prepared for us, and therefore we would come to it; for we had no existence before our bodies were fashioned. From everlasting to everlasting, our Lord Jesus is God, and He comes out of eternity into time, the Father bringing Him into the world, to fulfill the great purposes of His love and grace. He was before all worlds, and therefore He was before He came into this world to dwell for a while in His prepared body.
Beloved, the human nature of Christ was taken on Him in order that He might be able to do for us that which God desired and required. God desired to see an obedient man, a man who would keep His law to the full; and He sees him in Christ. God desired to see one who would vindicate the eternal justice, and show that sin is no trifle; and behold our Lord, the eternal Son of God, entering into that prepared body, was ready to do all this mighty work, by rendering to the law a full recompense for our dishonor of it. He renders unto God an absolutely perfect righteousness; as the second Adam, the Lord from Heaven, He presents it to His Father for all whom He represents.
He bows His head a victim beneath Jehovah’s sword, that the truth, and justice, and honor of God might suffer no detriment. His body was “prepared” to this end. Incarnation is a means to atonement. Only a man could vindicate the law, and therefore the Son of God became a man. This is a wonderful Being, this God in our nature. Surely, for the Incarnation and the Atonement, the world was made from the first. Was this the reason why the morning stars sang together when they saw the corner-stone of the world laid, because they had an inkling that, here, God would be manifest as nowhere else beside, and the Creator would be wedded to the creature?
That God might be manifested in the Christ, it may even be that sin was permitted. Assuredly, there could have been no sacrifice on Calvary if there had not first of all been sin in Eden. The whole scheme, the whole of God’s decrees and acts, worked up to the consummation of an atoning Savior.
Of the great pyramid of Creation and Providence, Christ is the apex. He is the flower of all that God hath made. His Divine nature, in strange union with humanity, constitutes a peerless Personage, such as never was before, and can never be again. God in our nature one Being, yet wearing two natures, is altogether unique. He saith, “A body hast Thou prepared Me.
Lo, I come.”
