Psalm 40:6-7

"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. . . .'"

Jesus told his disciples they would find Him if they looked in the Old Testament (Luke 24:25-26,45-47). The whole of the Old was about Him; He was the distant music that pervaded it all. But here and there are special places where we glimpse His very face and not only His shadow. These next few verses are some of these.

Hebrews 10 dispels our doubt by applying these verses to Jesus. I love this passage because we see Jesus coming into full consciousness of His identity and His mission. We see the wheels turning in His mind: "Sacrifice and offering, sheep and goats, year after year." Then, a sudden epiphany: My God, you are not interested in these; these are a picture---a picture of . . . me!"

(He reverently pages through His Torah again.) "In the scroll of the book it is written of . . . me!" Now my ears are opened and I understand fully---the virgin birth, the flight to Egypt, the murder of the innocents, the blessing of Simeon, the whispers of scandal in the village gates.

When Jesus hears, He comes. There is no delay, no gap between command and obedience. If little Samuel came running to Eli, if Mary said at once, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord," we would not expect otherwise.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from prison that when you feel God calling, it is crucial to come immediately, and let no human reasoning interpose. To put off obedience while gathering more information "is to reduce discipleship to the level of the human understanding" (The Cost of Discipleship). We don't need to understand God to trust Him. "If he [the disciple] refuses to follow and stays behind, he does not learn how to believe." And we know that Jesus learned obedience through obeying itself, and the suffering of obedience.

Bonhoeffer writes that God calls men into "the impossible situation in which everything is staked solely on the word of Jesus." The Father called Jesus into the impossible situation in which everything was staked solely on the word of the Father. "For faith is only real where there is obedience, and never without it, and faith only becomes faith in the act of obedience."

It is a fascinating study to see the ears of Jesus open to the Spirit's every whisper. How does He know it's the time to do his first miracle? He hears the signal in his mother's mere suggestion: "They have no wine" (John 2). How does He know He should go forth to the feast after all, the one He has just told His brothers He is not going to? (John 7:8-10) He has evidently heard a redirection in His heart just after their conversation.

"I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge" (John 5:30). "Morning by morning, he awakens; he awakens my ear to hear as those who are taught. The Lord GOD has opened my ear, and I was not rebellious; I turned not backward . . ." (Isaiah 50:4-5).

Like Master, like servant. Now we are to have open ears. He passes the baton to the Church, and we have the Spirit in us, the same who gave Jesus the notion to go into the wilderness for 40 days (Mark 1:12), to move on to the next town (Mark 1:38), to set his face for the last time for Jerusalem (Mark 10:32).

O Lord, give me ears to hear your every prompting.

To read Andrée Seu's series on Psalm 40, click here.

To hear commentaries by Andrée Seu, click here.