Sermon for Fourth Sunday in Advent

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In the name of Jesus, Amen. Dear Saints, this book of Hebrews is a marvelous, we’ve been studying it in Sunday school, such a marvelous text, beautiful sermon. It starts out with all of these verses Times when the Father is speaking to the Son in the Old Testament: Psalm 2, “You’re my Son, today I’ve begotten you.” Psalm 110, “Sit here at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.”

But now, toward the end, in Hebrews 10, we have this Psalm where it’s the Son talking to the Father. It’s the other way around, what the Son says to the Father. And He’s saying it on His coming into the earth, and it’s a quotation from Psalm 40. When Christ came into the world, He said, “A body you’ve prepared for me.” Now that’s marvelous and wonderful. It is our doctrine of the incarnation, the second great mystery of the Christian faith, that the eternal Son of God takes upon Himself human flesh and blood, that these two natures are united in the one singular person of Christ so that we can speak now of the birth of God, the mother of God, the blood of God, the suffering of God, the dying of God.

This is what Jesus comes to do, to take upon our flesh and our blood and be our brother. And this is what’s being confessed here, “A body you’ve prepared for me.” But the mystery of the text, and this is what we want to wrestle with a little bit, is that that gift of the body is put in contrast to the sacrifices and offerings. The sacrifices and offerings is how the Lord instituted worship in the Old Testament.

If you read through the Old Testament, this is how people normally will come and tell me. I think it’s maybe a confession. They might not know it. They say, “Pastor, I was really excited to start reading the Bible. I started at Genesis. I started at Genesis. And I got through Exodus about halfway, and then I started to get bogged down.” Why? It’s because that’s when the Lord on Mount Sinai is given these instructions for worship, and it’s pretty explicit and pretty detailed. You’re going to have this kind of tabernacle, and it’s going to have this kind of altar, and you’re going to offer these sacrifices on these days. On the morning, you’re going to put this lamb to death, and on the evening, this ram, and on these days, and on these months, and once a year, it’s going to be like this, and there’s going to be a priesthood, and here’s going to be who’s in the priesthood, and what they’re wearing, and what they’re eating, and what they’re doing, and what they’re praying, and what kind of incense is being offered, and when it’s being offered, and all these details.

The Lord puts all of this in place, and it’s marvelous. But here’s the strange thing: When the Lord gathers the people out of slavery in Egypt and takes them into the wilderness and brings them to the base of Mount Sinai and calls Moses up there into that pillar of cloud and gives him all these instructions for worship and then sends them back and puts it in place, then the Lord sends prophets, and those prophets are always preaching against the sacrifices. Right?

For example, Psalm 40 here, “Sacrifices and offerings you, God, have not desired.” Now, what do we make of that? How do we unravel that? Does the Lord want sacrifices or not? He, after all, is the one who invented sacrifices, who told the people to offer the sacrifices, and then He turns around with the prophets and says things like, “My heart despises your sacrifices.” How do we unravel that, and especially how do we unravel it in the context of this mystery where Jesus is saying, “You didn’t want sacrifices, but you gave me a body?”

That’s what I want to think about. Now, let’s first make sure we have the right theology of sacrifice. I think it goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden. Remember when Adam and Eve ate the fruit that was forbidden, and they recognized that they were naked, and they made these fig leaves for themselves, and they think, “We’ve done it. We’ve solved the problem. We don’t need to worry about the shame and nakedness of the fall. We’ve fixed it ourselves” until they hear the sound of God coming in the garden.

And then they think, the fig leaves are insufficient. They hide in the bushes. And the Lord comes and, instead of destroying them, blesses them marvelously with that first promise. “I’ll put enmity between you and the woman,” he says to the devil, “between your seed and her seed.” Absolutely tremendous, wonderful. But then the Lord does something else. He takes an animal. It’s amazing to think about. He takes an animal and he kills the animal and he slaughters the animal and he takes the skin of the animal and he wraps that hide, that skin, that warm skin.

Amen. It should be you spilling your blood for the things that you’ve done wrong, for the sins that you’ve committed. It should be Adam and Eve punished for what they did. But here’s the second thing that the sacrifices preach, and that is that the Lord sheds the blood of another in your place. Yes. The Lord accepts the death of another in your place, and that’s the preaching of the sacrifice.

Whenever the Israelites would come into the tabernacle and the temple, and they would bring a lamb for their own sin, can you imagine how this would be? The lamb didn’t do anything wrong. The lamb was just living its peaceful, lamby life, and you grabbed it and brought it to the temple, and there you see it slaughtered, and the blood spilled, and its body set on fire, and you know something, and that is that that’s what you deserve, but you’re not getting it. This is law and gospel, the preaching of the sacrifices.

But there’s something a little bit more, and that is that even though the lambs and the bulls and the goats and the blood are being spilt and the animals are being offered, that is not enough. After all, how could the Lord accept the death of an animal in place of a human? So that these sacrifices are year after year, day after day, they are preaching that another is on the way, a sacrifice, the Son of God Himself is on the way, and His death would be that death that takes away sin. His spilt blood would be the blood that washes away sin.

In fact, that’s what the verse right before our epistle lesson, Hebrews, we started in verse 5, verse 4 says, “The blood of bulls and goats cannot take away sin.” It can only preach the blood that can take away sin, the blood of the coming Messiah. And in this way, beautifully, Jesus is going to contrast His incarnation and the pleasure that God has in giving Him a body with the lack of pleasure that God the Father has in the sacrifices.

Now, let’s look at the Bible. One more thing to get, because there’s two ways to get the theology of the sacrifice wrong, right? If the sacrifice is there to tell me that I’m a sinner, I can get it wrong by saying that the sacrifice is there to declare my own good works and my own goodness. That’s the Pharisee problem, remember? They would go and offer a sacrifice and think, “Look how holy I am and look how righteous I am because I’m doing this thing.” So they were missing the preaching of the law, or they could miss the preaching of the gospel. They could think that this blood here of the animal is good enough, that it’s not pointing to a better blood, to a higher blood.

And I think that was the problem when David preaches Psalm 40. “Sacrifices and offerings you haven’t desired.” The sacrifices of the Old Testament were not like the pagan sacrifices at the pagan temple where they thought, “Well, the gods are hungry, so we have to give them food,” or “the gods are angry, so we have to give them something to make them happy,” as if we’re going to bribe them out of their wrath. No, that’s not how the Lord is to offer sacrifices. The sacrifices that are offered in the temple are not for God. They’re for the people, just like the Lord’s Supper. It’s not something that we’re offering to God. It’s something that he’s given to us.

The sacrifices on the altar week after week in the Old Testament are there so that the Lord would know, so that the Lord’s people would know that the Lord is taking away their sins, covering their sins, forgiving their sins. And in this way, the sacrifices are contrasted with the incarnation because it’s not the blood of bulls and goats that takes away God’s wrath. It’s not the sacrifices offered every day and every year in the tabernacle and the temple in the Old Testament that makes God happy. There’s only one thing, and that is the body of our Lord Jesus Christ sacrificed on the cross.

And here’s where this riddle starts to make sense. “Sacrifices and offerings you haven’t desired because they were not sufficient. They were not enough. But a body you have prepared for me.” And that body will be offered as the sacrifice once for all to take away the sin of the world.

In this way, we start to see, dear saints, this great mystery of Christmas is that it is deeply, profoundly connected to Good Friday. Luther said it like this, I think, preaching. He wasn’t speaking literally, but figuratively we get the idea. He says, “…the wood of the cross was cut from the same tree as the wood of the manger.” Because the reason why our Lord Jesus Christ needs a body is so there would be something to nail to the cross. The reason why he needs blood is so that he would have something to spill on your behalf to take away all of your sin.

Listen to the last verse of our epistle lesson. “By that will, the perfect will of the Father, which has to do with the sacrifice of the Son, by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.” So that the incarnation and the birth of Jesus is just chapter one of the story that ends with his death and his resurrection.

And I’d like to put this in your minds this week as we think about Christmas and we think about the manger and we think about the birth of Jesus and we think about the song of the angels to the shepherds. Whenever you see Jesus in the manger and you see the ox and the donkey and the sheep that are gathered around the manger, I want you to think that there’s a pretty good chance that that ox and that donkey, well, maybe not the donkey, that ox and that sheep are going to end up in the altar in Jerusalem.

Or when you hear the story of the shepherds watching their flocks by night, that you think there’s a pretty good chance that those sheep in those flocks are going to end up on the altar in Jerusalem because this was all in preparation for the sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Himself, born amongst all of these sacrificial animals because He was born to be the Lamb of God to take away the sin of the world. God didn’t want the blood of bulls and goats, but he does rejoice in the blood of his son.

And his joy in that sacrifice is your forgiveness and life and hope and peace and the promise of everlasting joy and peace in the presence of God. So let us rejoice, not just now, but our whole lives, but especially this week. Rejoice in this little riddle from Paul, Hebrews 10 and Psalm 40, where Jesus says to God the Father, “Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body you’ve prepared for me.”

May God grant us that peace through Christ our Lord. Amen. And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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