Seemingly Psalm 40:6-8 was the word of David, but actually it is the word of Christ. Christ said to God, "You do not delight in sacrifice and offering;/You have bored My ears;/You do not require burnt offering and sin offering./Then I said,/Behold, I have come;/In the scroll of the book/It is written concerning Me./I delight in doing Your will, O My God;/Indeed Your law is within My inward parts" (lit.).
This prophecy was fully quoted and defined by the apostle Paul in Hebrews 10. Christ delighted in doing God's will, which was the will of God to replace the Old Testament sacrifices and offerings (vv. 5-10). Many Christians apply the doing of God's will in Hebrews 10 to their daily affairs. Actually, however, the doing of God's will in Hebrews 10 refers to Christ coming to replace the Old Testament sacrifices and offerings. In the old dispensation, God commanded His people to offer to Him sacrifices and offerings. But when Jesus came and lived on this earth, God no longer delighted in those Old Testament offerings. Instead, it was God's will to replace them with Christ Himself. Christ came to be the real sacrifice, the real offering, the living sacrifice, the living offering, who offered Himself on the cross as the reality of all the offerings. He is the reality of the sin offering, the trespass offering, the burnt offering, the meal offering, and the peace offering.
Actually, Christ came to replace all the Old Testament types. In other words, by Christ's first coming, the entire Old Testament has been terminated and replaced. Now our offering and sacrifice are Christ. Day and night we offer Christ to God as all kinds of offerings. Whenever we sin, we ask God to forgive us, taking Christ, God's Son, as our sin offering and trespass offering. He is the real offering for our sin and transgressions. When we need peace toward God, we can take Christ as our peace offering. We can also take Him as our burnt offering and meal offering. Christ is everything to us because He fulfilled all the Old Testament types and has taken them away. Today He is the reality of all the types in the Old Testament.
The revelation in Psalm 40:6-8 is one of the greatest revelations concerning Christ in His commission of His incarnation. Verse 6 says, "You do not delight in sacrifice and offering," and again, "You do not require burnt offering and sin offering." This indicates that God was intending to give up His Old Testament economy. Just by reading Psalm 40:6-8 alone, we cannot understand this much. But this portion was quoted and expounded by the apostle Paul in Hebrews 10. He indicated that to stop the sacrifices and offerings of the Old Testament is to replace the Old Testament for the establishment of the New Testament.
Sacrifice (for sin and sins before God) and offering (for fellowship with God) were the elements based upon which the old testament (covenant) was established, and the old testament (covenant) was the centrality and universality of God's economy in the Old Testament. God not delighting in and not requiring the sacrifice and offering means to terminate His economy in the Old Testament. This is the importance and the greatness of this prophecy in Psalm 40.
Verse 6 also says, "You have bored My ears." This was quoted by the apostle Paul in Hebrews 10:5 as "a body You have prepared for Me," from the Septuagint, a Greek version of the Old Testament translated about three hundred years before Christ. To bore the ears of a slave's body indicates the master's requirement of the slave's obedience (Exo. 21:6). This signifies that God required obedience of Christ as His Slave in Christ's humanity. This obedience was spoken of by Paul in Philippians 2:8, which says that Christ became "obedient even unto death, and that the death of a cross." This obedience was for Him to do the will of God by being the sacrifice and offering in His crucifixion in the flesh, the body (Col. 1:22). Based upon this the Septuagint interprets the boring of the ears into the preparing of a body, in which Christ offered Himself to God as the sacrifice and the offering to replace the sacrifice and the offering of the animals in the Old Testament.