Pastor John,
I thought about Hebrews 10:5 “…sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not, but a body hast thou prepared for me.”
Who prepared “a body”? If it was the Son, then wouldn’t the entire verse apply to the Son? Whew! Does “body” in this verse mean a body for a sacrifice (Mary’s son) or a body of believers?
===============
Many times, prophecies refer to more than one thing (e.g., Isa. 28:11-12). While this prophecy, quoted in Hebrews 10:5 obviously is a prophecy about the human body of Jesus, we cannot rule out the possibility that it also refers to the NT body of believers.
===============
There are two things I found interesting while researching this: First, the Greek word for “prepare” (κατηρτισω) appears to mean “to repair, restore, adjust or complete something” rather than creating something new. (The Greek text uses a form of that word that I am not familiar with.) Am I understanding that word correctly?
===============
Greek-English lexicons cannot give us the full range of possible definitions of any word. Some definitions must be determined by context, including this one. It makes no sense, for example, for the Son, in heaven before he came to earth, to have been saying to his Father, “a body hast thou adjusted for me.” Sometimes, translators have to use their common sense in order to get it right.
===============
Second, the author of Hebrews 10:5 seems to have been quoting Psalm 40:6 but there is no mention of a body being prepared unless I overlooked it.
===============
Often, Tom, NT writers quoted from the Septuagint, the ancient Greek Old Testament, instead of the Hebrew OT, and that is the case here.
===============
The thought of the Son creating the body he would dwell in while on earth is mind-boggling.
Tom