Last week we were looking at Hebrews 10, verses 5-10, examining Christ’s intention to become flesh and enter this world with a body made for sacrifice. All of this would show more magnificently what would satisfy God’s desires and complete His will.
5 Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said, “Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body have you prepared for me; 6 in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure. 7 Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come to do your will, O God, as it is written of me in the scroll of the book.'” 8 When he said above, “You have neither desired nor taken pleasure in sacrifices and offerings and burnt offerings and sin offerings” (these are offered according to the law), 9 then he added, “Behold, I have come to do your will.” He does away with the first in order to establish the second. 10 And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.
The word “will,” which is the Greek word thelema, is found in verses 5, 7, 8, 9 and 10. It is obviously a key concept in these verses. What is God’s will?
Verse 5 tells us that God does not desire, or will, and that is more animal sacrifices and offerings. Twice, in verses 6 and 8, we find in quoting Psalm 40, that God takes “no pleasure” in these sacrifices. Christ, however, came “to do” God’s will (vv. 6, 9). He substituted the passive sacrifice of the animals with a voluntary and obedient sacrifice of Himself.
Verses 5-10 makes three points.
First, the cross was the direct will of God.
The cross was no accident or an unforeseen tragedy that took Jesus or the Father by surprise. It was not a temporary setback that God figured out how to turn for good. Rather, the cross was God’s predetermined plan, before the beginning of time, to deal finally and fully with our sin.
The Son of God determined to come into this world as a man with a human body subject to death, would live a completely obedient life in that body, and then would die as the sacrifice that the justice of God demands as payment for sins.
We know that it was God’s will for Jesus Christ to die upon the cross, first of all, because of the many prophecies concerning the cross, so much so that Jesus Himself predicted His own death on the cross (Mark 10:33-34).
The Old Testament confirms this in a passage that will seem very strange to our ears. In Isaiah 53:6, 10 we read, “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned–every one–to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all” and then in verse 10 we read, “it was the will of the LORD to crush him; he has put him to grief…”
It was God’s will to crush His Son on the cross. “Amazing pity, grace unknown and love beyond degree.”
There is a great mystery here that we must submit our thinking to: even though God ordained the cross, down to the minute details (e.g., casting lots for Jesus’ clothing), He is not in any way responsible for the sin of those who crucified Jesus.
As Acts 4:27-28 puts it: “for truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel,to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.”
These verses establish both man’s voluntary decision to crucify the “holy servant Jesus” and God’s sovereign plan, so that they did “whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.”
Not only did God plan it, but his “hand” made it happen. As John Piper explains, “The hand of God ordinarily stands for God’s exerted power—not power in the abstract, but earthly, effective exertions of power. The point of combining it with ‘plan’ is to stay that it is not just a theoretical plan; it is a plan that will be executed by God’s own hand” (Spectacular Sins, p. 104).
By coming into this world specifically to go to the cross, Jesus not only provided sacrifice for sins that we need. He also provided a supreme example of resolute obedience to the complete will of God (something these Hebrew readers and we ourselves need today). As Luke 9:51 points out, Jesus “set his face to go to Jerusalem” and He didn’t allow anything to deter Him. As Jesus prayed in the garden, “not My will, but Yours be done” (Luke 22:42). We cannot imagine how difficult it was for the sinless Son of God, utter purity, to be made sin for us. We know the pain of a foreign object piercing into our bodies, but that is miniscule compared to the intense pain of sin being laid upon the perfectly holy body of Jesus Christ.
And Jesus delighted to do God’s will. He didn’t grudgingly give up His life, but voluntarily laid it down. In fact, He joyfully sacrificed Himself for our good, as Hebrews 12:2 reminds us. Kent Hughes reminds us, “Our Lord did not obey the Father grudgingly or under duress but with joy! Later, in 12:2, the writer tells us that Jesus endured the cross “for the joy that was set before him.” The angels sang at the Incarnation (Luke 2:13ff.) because they were reflecting and expressing Christ’s joy. He had come to die, and that could logically have produced an angelic dirge. But the angels gave out an anthem instead, because of the anthem of Christ’s heart—“Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come to do your will, O God.’” There is “in Deity Itself the joy of obedience: obedience which is a particular means of joy and the only means of that particular joy.” Jesus willed to be subordinate to God!
But His determined obedience to do God’s will, no matter how difficult it may be, teaches us to commit ourselves to obey His will, whatever the cost we may have to pay. You don’t decide to obey God at the moment of temptation. It has to be a rational commitment that you make before you find yourself facing temptation. Jesus, before He entered this world as a baby, made this decision to have a body and to be perfectly obedient to His heavenly Father.
But even more important than the example of Christ in how we might fight against sin and disobedience is the fact that His obedience can now be credited to our account. As 1 Corinthians 1:30 says that Christ “became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption.”
Christ’s perfect obedience is what satisfied God’s wrath against our sin as Christ bore it on the cross and now credits that obedience/righteousness to our accounts, thus making us positionally “perfect.”
Second, we see that Christ’s obedience to God’s will at the cross set aside the Old Testament sacrifices once and for all. Verse 9 says, “He does away with the first in order to establish the second.”
Folks, you cannot mingle the two! You cannot combine our obedience to Christ’s obedience and get something better. That is what Paul warned the Galatians about and what our author is warning his readers about. Christ plus anything is not something better, but something that doesn’t work at all!
It is so important that we hear and believe and rest upon the reality that we are saved by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness; I dare not trust the sweetest frame but wholly lean on Jesus’ name. On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand.
Our author in Hebrews 8:13 said that the old was “obsolete” and “soon to disappear.” Hebrews 7:18-19 reads, “For on the one hand, a former commandment is set aside because of its weakness and uselessness (for the law made nothing perfect); but on the other hand, a better hope is introduced, through which we draw near to God.”
The New Covenant is that better hope. Christ is the “end of the law” (Romans 10:4) and we no longer draw near to God on the basis of rules and performance.
Aren’t you glad?
When the psalm states that God did not desire or take pleasure in sacrifices (Heb. 10:5-6), it reflects a frequent theme even in the Old Testament, that God never really desired sacrifices for their own sake. Rather, the sacrifices should always have reflected a repentant heart (cf. 1 Sam. 15:22; Psalm 51:16-17; Isaiah 1:11-13; 66:3-4; Jere. 7:21-23; Hosea 6:6; Amos 5:21-24; Micah 6:6-8). God is displeased when people go through the outward motions of worship, then and now, when their hearts are still harboring sins that they are unwilling to forsake.
In modern terms, you can go to church and partake of communion, but if you are still living in disobedience to God or if you are covering some sin in your heart, God is not pleased with your worship.
In vv. 5, 6 and 8 he mentions four types of offerings, representing the entire breadth of the sacrificial system, effectively saying “no matter what you offer, it is never enough. It does not automatically please God.”
But the author’s main point is not to get his readers to make sure that they offer animal sacrifices with a good heart, but rather to see that the sacrifice of Jesus Christ has replaced the Old Testament sacrificial system.
Christ, by His sacrifice, totally pleased God. That righteousness is credited to the account of those who believe in Jesus Christ so that God counts them righteous (2 Cor. 5:21) and considers them “saints.” And, it makes it then possible for these believers to do God’s will, because that righteous Christ is now living in us and by faith He can live His righteous life through ours (Gal. 2:20).
Thirdly, we see in vv. 5-10 that by Christ’s complete obedience to God’s will at the cross, we receive perfect standing before God once and for all. Perfect obedience is what is required, but we could never give it. Jesus Christ did live a life of perfect obedience and offered that life in payment for our sins. That perfect righteousness is credited to our account.
That is the point of Hebrews 10:10. The author of Hebrews uses “have been sanctified” to refer to “inward cleansing from sin” and “being made fit for the presence of God, so that…[we] can offer Him acceptable worship” (F. F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Hebrews, p. 236). “Have been sanctified” is the Greek perfect tense, signifying a past action that has continuing results. In other words, through the offering of Christ’s perfect obedience on the cross, and our confidence in that, His perfect obedience, His entire dedication (sanctification) has been credited to our account AND it now has the effect of sanctifying our thoughts, attitudes, motives, words and actions in our day-to-day interactions.
By way of contrast with the often-repeated Old Testament sacrifices, the one and only offering of Christ on the cross conveys to believers perfect standing before God for all time. It can never change. This refers to our position before God, not to our daily practice. As we will see in 10:14, even though we are perfect in our standing before God, we are still progressing in our growth towards holiness which befits His glory.
However, this is truly how God sees us now. He sees us “in Christ” and clothed with the righteousness of Christ. He sees us as “saints” even though we do not always act saintly. Therefore, it is important that we see ourselves this way. It is vital that we base our sanctification on our justification and not vice versa. In other words, we must believe our new standing before God and on the basis of that strive for holiness.
The author especially wants us to see that the Old Testament sacrifices could not completely remove guilt and make us holy (10:1-4), and that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross removed the sacrificial system and provides for our perfect standing before God (10:5-10).
Paradoxically, God does want a sacrifice after all, but only one—the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. That is the only sacrifice that pleases God.
I hope that you can see that God can be trusted. God says, “I want your body.” We may wonder, “Can I trust God with my body?” God is good and wants us to trust His good will for us. He wants us to will His will and His will for Christ was for Him to offer up His body for us.
If we are ever going to move toward offering our bodies to God, we have to see God as trustworthy. But what He did for us in Christ reveals His heart for us—doing everything necessary for us to be pleasing to Him. In these last two verses, we see that the will of the Father and the will of the Son are both “for us.”
We can see the heart of Christ in His words to His Father. He assessed our condition. He realized that the animal sacrifices would not take away our sins. But He wanted us. So, He spoke to His Father, and the writer of Hebrews take us back in time to that scene and gives us front row access so that we may see and heart what it was really like, what Christ really thinks of us and what He proposed to do—the sacrifice He made—for our sakes. Let’s make sure we hear these words accurately, and let them penetrate our hearts.
We couldn’t do God’s will, so Jesus determined to do it for us. Animal sacrifices ultimately couldn’t do the job, so Jesus took on a human body so that He could sacrifice Himself for us. So, when we hear the words, “Behold, I have come to do your will, O God,” we know that Jesus uttered those words in response to our utterly helpless condition and determined to do whatever it took to bring us to God.
In Romans 5:6 Paul reminds us of our powerlessness to change our condition. He says, “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” We couldn’t make ourselves righteous.
Romans 8:3-4 emphasizes this: “For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh,in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.”
We could not, through the law, fulfill the righteous requirement of the law. But God has done what we, in cooperation with the law, could never do. And He did that “by sending his own Son.” Jesus Christ took on a body in order to do this, “the likeness of sinful flesh” and died “for sin” thereby “he condemned sin in the flesh” so that that “righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us…”
This sanctification that Christ provides, came through the “once for all” sacrifice of His body. “And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (v. 10). Jesus’ sacrifice “once for all” is emphatic, and the writer wants us to see that its results are equally final, for the phrase “we have been sanctified” refers to an enduring, continuous state (perfect tense). Our salvation is a completed thing—a “done deal.”
“It is finished” (Jn 19:30). Does the divine law require for our acceptance perfect submission to the will of the Lord? He has rendered it. Does it ask complete obedience to its precepts? He has presented the same. Does the fulfilled will of the Lord call for abject suffering, a sweat of blood, pangs unknown, and death itself? Christ has presented it all, whatever that “all” may be. Just as, when God created, His word effected all His will, so when God redeemed His blessed and incarnate Word has done all His will. In every point, as God looked on each day’s work and said “It is good,” so, as He looks upon each part of the work of His dear Son, He can say of it, “It is good.” The Father joins in the verdict of His Son that it is finished; all the will of God for the sanctification of His people is accomplished. (Charles Spurgeon, Spurgeon Commentary: Hebrews, 276)
In that sense, our sanctification is a “done deal.” Nothing else is needed.
This argues against both the idea that one can lose their salvation—it is a done deal—and the Catholic idea of the continued sacrifice of the body of Christ in the Mass. F. F. Bruce says, “The heavenly high priest has indeed a continual ministry to discharge on His people’s behalf at the Father’s right hand; but that is the ministry of intercession on the basis of the sacrifice presented and accepted once and for all, it is not the constant or repeated offering of His sacrifice. This last misconception has no doubt been fostered in the Western Church by a defective Vulgate rendering which springs from a well-known inadequacy of the Latin verb.”
What concerns the author most is the law’s inability to “make perfect those who draw near to worship” God (v. 1). The “perfection” he has in mind does not involve a “lack of flaws” but, rather, a state of right relationship with God, in which the worshipers are once and for all cleansed from sin and delivered from a nagging sense of guilt. The fact that the old covenant system could not deliver in this regard, as demonstrated by offerings made year after year, shows the need for a better system. (George H. Guthrie, The NIV Application Commentary: Hebrews, 326-7)
In another sense, our sanctification is an ongoing process. It is the process of beholding Jesus through the Word, believing that He can live His righteous life through us, and becoming more and more like Him in our daily behavior.
But it is vital that we build our progressive sanctification on the foundation of our positional sanctification, otherwise we will be fooled into thinking that our salvation is based upon our efforts, or our efforts plus faith in Christ. Definitive, or positional sanctification is given to us the moment we believe and will not be taken away. Progressive sanctification is the day-to-day application of that position to our daily decisions and interactions.
Grace Still Amazes 