Holiest of All by Andrew Murray

332 ^bc Ibolicst of an
Psalmist uses words which, though true of himself, could only
have their full meaning revealed when the Messiah came. Our
author makes special use of two significant expressions, A body
thou didst prepare for Me, and, Lo, I am come to do Thy will,
God. Speaking of the sacrifices of the Old Testament,
the Psalmist had shown that he understood that they never
were what God really willed :
they were but the shadows pointing
to something better, to a spiritual reality, a life in the body
given up to the will of God, as a divine prophecy of what has
now been revealed in Christ.
A body didst thou prepare for Me. Instead of the sacrifices,
God prepared a body for Christ, which He so offered up
or sacrificed that we have now been sanctified by the offering
of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. Christ's body was to
Jlim just what any man's is to him—the dwelling and organ of
the soul ; the channel for intercourse with the outer world,
susceptible of impressions of pleasure and of pain, and therefore
one of the first occasions of temptation. His body was a
part of His human personality and life. He was in danger,
just as we are, of using the body for His own service or pleasure,
a means of gratifying self. But He never did this. He was
filled with one thought— God prepared Me this body ; I have it
for His disposal, for His service and glory; I hold it ready
every moment to be a sacrifice to Him. The body comes from
God ; it belongs to Him ; it has no object of existence but to
please Him. The one value My body has is, that I can give it
a sacrifice to God.
It
was the purpose of the Old Testament sacrifices to waken
this disposition in the worshipper. There was to be not only
the thought— as specially in the sin offering—This sacrifice dies
in m)- stead, so that I need not die. But the farther thought—