Here I Am

Halfway through this Psalm there is a sentence the writer of Hebrews will later lift up and put in the mouth of the Lord Jesus on the day He came into the world: "Sacrifice and offering you have not desired, but you have given me an open ear. Burnt offering and sin offering you have not required. Then I said, 'Behold, I have come; in the scroll of the book it is written of me: I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart.'" The psalmist looks at the altar of the temple, with all its rivers of blood from morning to evening, and recognizes something startling: that none of it is the thing God most wanted. What He wanted was a person. A Son. An open ear and a delighted heart and a body offered in obedience. The animal sacrifices were placeholders for what the Father most desired.

And so Hebrews tells us where the Psalm finds its rest. Christ came into the world saying these very words. He came with the open ear; He came with the delighted heart; He came with the body the Father had prepared for Him. He looked at the long altar of the temple and walked through it to its end, because He was the End — the true offering the rest had only foreshadowed. "Behold, I have come... I delight to do your will, O my God." And He did it. To the last drop, on the last hour, He did it. So now the altar is folded up. The placeholders have been retired. The Father has His Son, and the Son has us, and the will of God in our salvation is done. We sing this Psalm now after Him, in Him, and the song is no longer waiting. It is glad.