Genesis 17, one through 14. Let me pray for us briefly. Father in heaven, we do thank you for your word. We thank you for the Lord's day, a day in which we are called to set aside our burdens and cares and set our minds on you and to find rest for our souls. We pray that you would help us to enter in on this day with joy and with gladness. Eager to worship you we pray that you would help us now and prepare us for worship even as we Look at your word together in this class. We pray for your blessing on it. We pray that you give us a greater appreciation for who Your son is and what he has done for us in his bloodshed on the cross. We pray these things in Jesus name. Amen Then Genesis 17 when Abraham was 99 years old the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him I am God Almighty Walk before me and be blameless That I may make my covenant between me and you and may multiply you greatly Then Abram fell on his face and God said to him behold My covenant is with you and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations No longer shall your name be called Abram But your name shall be Abraham For I have made you the father of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful, and I will make you into nations, and kings shall come from you. And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generation for an everlasting covenant to be God to you and to your offspring after you. And I will give to you and to your offspring after you the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession, and I will be their God. And God said to Abraham, as for you, you shall keep my covenant, you and your offspring after you throughout their generations. This is my covenant, which you shall keep between me and you and your offspring after you. Every male among you shall be circumcised. You shall circumcise in the flesh of the four skins and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you. He who is eight days old among you shall be circumcised. Every male throughout your generations, whether born in your house or bought with your money, From any foreigner who is not of your offspring, both he who is born in your house and he who is bought with your money shall be circumcised. So shall my covenant be in your flesh an everlasting covenant. Any uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut off from his people. He has broken my covenant." Now, circumcision is not something that we talk about around the dinner table often. It's not a conversation that we have in our Christian fellowships, and there are good reasons for that. One of those reasons is quite obvious. God ordained a sign to go on the male reproductive organ. The other reason is the Apostle Paul makes an enormous amount of theological discourse on the irrelevance of the Old Covenant sign, sacrament, circumcision, against the insistence of the Judaizers that new converts, especially Gentile converts, needed to adhere to circumcision and to the ceremonial laws of Judaism. And the majority of what we read about circumcision in the New Testament, not all, but the majority, is put more in negative light because of false teaching that was insisting people needed Jesus plus circumcision. So, you can understand how we would have a propensity then to diminish the significance of circumcision in the Bible. Circumcision takes up a huge portion of God's Word, both in the Old and the New Testament. It is the first sacrament that we read about for the visible church, for the church, the gathered, organized, visible church. I know you all know that distinction. We distinguish between the visible and the invisible church. The invisible church is not everybody who's not there on Sunday. The invisible church are all those people who are truly united to Jesus by faith. And the visible church is that mixed multitude of professing believers and their children. That church begins with Abraham. That's where God first forms the visible church. There's a church before Abraham, but God is creating the visible church with Abraham, and so he gives him the sacrament of circumcision as the sign and seal of the righteousness of faith that God had promised Abraham that Abraham already possessed because he believed in chapter 15, and then he circumcised, but it is also the sign of admittance into the visible church, so that Abraham is to give it to all of his male offspring on the eighth day, and that's how you knew whether someone was a member of the visible church or not. It was sort of a, to put it not crassly, but perhaps cheaply, it was sort of like a divine tattoo, so that people were marked off, this was the seal of God, the mark of God, and it had tremendous importance. Now, We're going to consider all of that importance this morning, but I want to first put this in context. We read in Genesis 17 about the institution of circumcision, that very painful day when Abraham at 99 and Ishmael at 14, and all of Abraham's servants would have to go through this. I imagine that Abraham had a lot of questions. about why this? Why now? What does this mean? And yet, I think Abraham actually understood more than we realized because in chapter 15, when Abraham believes God's promise and is counted righteous, 15.6, you'll remember that God enters into a covenant reminder to Abraham, sort of a confirmation of what he's already promised him in chapter 12, And there's what? What strange thing does God do in chapter 15? It's a covenantal act he does. The cutting of the animals, right? The cutting of the covenant, the animals on both sides. Two parties are supposed to go through. God goes through for both parties. The flaming torch and the smoking pot saying, whoever breaks this covenant, may the malediction of what this covenant represents come on them. May they be cut apart in judgment. That's the point of the cutting. Abraham understood this covenantal act and arrangement. And then we have the sign of circumcision, which also involves cutting. And that's going to be huge to understand what's going on. The cutting away of the foreskin was in some sense related to what had already happened in the cutting of the covenant. Circumcision, let me say this before I come to the cutting aspect. Circumcision went on the male reproductive organ because corruption passes generation to generation from Adam. So that's why. First time I learned that, I'm like, how did they never teach me that in Sunday school? We are all corrupt because of Adam, because of ordinary generation and circumcision. And we'll talk about what circumcision is symbolizing and how that's related to the cutting away of the filth of the heart, the depravity that we receive from our first father. It does make sense. God strategically put it somewhere where he's saying, my promise is that I am going to cut away the filth of your hearts, and we know that from the prophets. Get a circumcised heart, right? God talks about removing their heart of stone, giving them a heart of flesh. Circumcision becomes shorthand throughout the prophets for a regenerate heart, which is what God's promising, to take away the sin nature. That's only gonna happen through a bloody judgment. There's actually, and a lot of writers have talked about this, there's actually a sense where we don't want to have a cleaner view of circumcision than the Bible, that there was a sense where, especially in the patriarchal era, they would have understood there was a violence associated with the cutting away and the bloody judgment. And that was indicating another side of this. Now, we'll get into this with baptism, And perhaps for just the sake of explanation, I'll move to baptism for a second and then work back to circumcision. You'll remember that Peter talks about the flood as baptism in 1 Peter 3, where he says, baptism now saves us, not the washing away of the filth of the flesh. But right before that, he said, Noah and those with him were saved through water And then he says, baptism now saves us. Peter calls the flood baptism. Well, I mean, everybody that got immersed drowned. So that was a judgment. Paul calls the Red Sea Crossing baptism in 1 Corinthians 10.1. All our fathers passed through the sea. All were baptized into Moses in the cloud and the sea. And remember, everybody that got baptized in the Red Sea were destroyed, the Egyptians. So, baptism has both a judgment salvation side to it. The Israelites, Noah and those with him were saved through water. We're not saved by water, but as a symbol and a type. and then all God's enemies, the filth of the earth, was washed away in a watery judgment. In the same way, circumcision has a two-side component to it. God is promising to cut away the depravity of the human heart, represented by the generational depravity that we get from Adam, And think about this, if you would, every Israelite who bears the sign of the covenant of circumcision is supposed to live his life recognizing his sinfulness and his need for God to do what God has promised. So it was a sacrament that was always there. And it was always supposed to be saying, you need God to remove your filthy, perverse, old nature and cleanse you. And that's only going to happen through a bloody judgment. We're going to talk about that. But if you don't have that happen to you, if you don't get a circumcised heart, then the language of scripture is that you are going to be cut off everywhere. Numbers 15, 30, and 31, God promises to cut off those who are covenant breakers. It's the language of the Old Testament. If you were cut off from the people of God, you were excommunicated. That was a foretaste of eternal judgment. It was God indicating what the judgment is on the unregenerate. So, if you're an Israelite, you ought to think There's a promise to circumcision that God will cut away the filth of my wicked, depraved heart in regeneration, or I will be cut off. Those are the two sides, the judgment, the salvation. Now those things are going to work together in Christ. It's very interesting. Jesus is circumcised. One of the first things that we read about the Savior in Luke's gospel is that Mary took him to the temple and that he was circumcised. And that ought to raise the question for us, if we understand the nature of circumcision, why did Jesus have to be circumcised? Someone could simply say, well, he had to be an Israelite in order to fulfill the law of God and live a covenantally faithful life as an Israelite. That's true. That's very true. He is the true Israel of God. He's the last man of Israel. He is the Redeemer who's come to do what has been promised so long before. But think about this, the sinless, the holy harmless, Sinless, undefiled son of God has to bear in his body for 30-some years a mark that says he needed the filth of an unregenerate heart cut away when he didn't have one. Why did Jesus have to be circumcised? For us, he was the representative of his people. really interesting, and I'll read this to you. A number of years ago I was reading Jonathan Edwards on this. First thing he says is, Jesus obeyed all those laws that he was subject to as he was a Jew. Thus he was subject to the ceremonial law. He conformed to it. He conformed to it in being circumcised on the eighth day. He strictly obeyed it, going up to the temple three times a year, at least after he was come to the age of 12, which seems to have been the age when males began to go to the temple. And so Christ constantly attended the service of the temple and the synagogues. Edward's point there is that Jesus was fulfilling the law. by keeping circumcision. So, he was the law keeper for his people because God had commanded it. He's the seed of Abraham. He's come to fulfill it all. So, of course, he has to undergo that first of the laws. By the way, circumcision was the first of the 613 laws. Paul makes a big deal about that in Galatians. He says, if you tell people you've got to be circumcised for your standing before God, then you're telling them they have to keep the whole law because it is the first of all the laws. And therefore, everything else follows, it can't be separated from, Edward's point is Jesus undergoes that and then undergoes a life of perfect law keeping for his people. And then he's cut off on the cross. And I'm going to come back to that in a second. Isaiah says he's cut off from the land of the living. He's judged for our sin, cut off. But this is amazing. Edward says, It was by the same things that Christ both satisfied God's justice and also purchased eternal happiness. The satisfaction and purchase of Christ were not only both carried on throughout the whole time of his humiliation, but were both carried on by the same things. Now listen to this. To instance, in his circumcision, what he suffered in that had the nature of satisfaction. So, He's saying what Jesus suffered as an infant and being circumcised had an element of satisfying the justice of God. You have to listen carefully. He says the blood that was shed in his circumcision, John Owen and Edwards will say this and many other Puritans will say the blood that was shed in his circumcision was propitiatory blood. but it was conformity to the law of Moses as part of his meritorious righteousness. What Edwards and Owen will say is the same blood that he shed in his circumcision as an infant is the same blood he sheds at the cross. And the reason he has to shed it is because he has to give a whole life of obedience and a whole life of taking the sufferings and the humiliation because of our sin on himself. You might think of it more properly as it was anticipatory. propitiatory blood. That's really hard to say. Anticipatory, propitiatory, wow. But it was anticipating what the blood he would shed in his other circumcision was going to do. Now, why did I just call the cross circumcision? Is that in the Bible? It is in the Bible, I believe, in Colossians 2, 11 and 12. Yes, Colossians 2, 11, and 12. We've been doing a lot of good and necessary consequence. Now we're just going to go proof texting. Somebody read for us Colossians 2, 11, and 12. In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him Okay, so you have a we have a death burial resurrection Structure to these two verses and you have the circumcision baptism bookends and usually we go to these verses to say this is why we as Presbyterians and reform believe that baptism replaces circumcision and and we're right to do that and We sometimes miss the nuances here. In him you were circumcised. He's writing to Gentiles. He's writing to the New Covenant Church, Jews and Gentile believers. And they have not received physical circumcision. This is the church in Colossae. He's telling them you were circumcised. He's talking about regeneration. In him, with the circumcision made without hands, in the flesh, spiritual circumcision, what the prophets talked about. The new birth is circumcision, right? The cutting away of the filth of the heart. And then he says, in the circumcision of Christ. Now, some people try to say, well, that's just Christ doing it spiritually, not Moses or any of the Old Testament figures, the priest. But here it's just saying the risen reigning, ascended, Christ is doing the work of heart circumcision, and that's true. A writer named Peter O'Brien, he's an Australian Calvinistic Anglican, in his commentary on Colossians and Philemon, actually argues, and I agree with him, that when Paul says here, we were circumcised in the flesh, without hands, by the circumcision of Christ, he's speaking about Jesus' bloody death as circumcision. Jesus will speak about his death as baptism. He says, I have a baptism to be baptized with. So, it's not a far reach to say that the crucifixion of Jesus was what circumcision was pointing to. It was the bloody judgment, the wrath of God falling on him because our sins, our filth is put on him by imputation at the cross. So, All the sins of all those for whom he died, all of it, and it's a lot of sin, is imputed to the Son of God. And God then pours His wrath out on the Son as the object of that wrath. As Calvin says, He's dying in our person, Calvin will say. In my person, He's dying. on the cross. John Gerstner used to say, the old Negro spiritual, were you there when they crucified my Lord? And he would say, you bet you were there. You were nailed to that tree with him because of union with Christ, because of your sin. So the filth of our depravity is imputed to Jesus, and then God cuts him off in the worst judgment ever. And it's a bloody judgment. And the son is, as it were, crushed and destroyed and exiled on the cross. He takes the covenant curse, as Paul says. Not only did he get cursed, Paul says he was made a curse. It's a much stronger language. Galatians 3, 10 through 13, verse 13 says, Christ became a curse for us. Not was cursed, but became a curse. He's cut off. He's circumcised. It's the judgment side of circumcision. So that the gracious side, the promissory side of circumcision could be ours. He gives us a new heart. He takes out the heart of stone, gives us a heart of flesh. How's that related to what he did? Well, he purchased redemption for his people. He secured the circumcision of the hearts of his people. So Paul could now say to the Colossians and to us, in him, you were circumcised with the circumcision made without hands by the putting off the body of the flesh in the circumcision of Christ. Let's talk briefly about the eighth day because that's something that hasn't gotten enough attention in my opinion. Why did God, and if anybody says science teaches cloudings at its highest, I'm done asking questions. No, I'm just playing. Why was it on the eighth day? So I just preemptively shut that one down. There's only one other option. It is true, clodding's real high on the eighth day, I know. Well, at creation, how many days were there? Right. Created in six, rested on the seventh. God from the beginning creates a seven-day work week, right? We're still on a seven-day week. I mean, that's all of human history. I think France tried to change that. several hundred years ago when all the animals started dying and their country was falling apart. You can't change what God builds into creation without adverse consequences. So, first day is creation. Seventh day is rest. It's eschatology. It's looking forward to that eternal Sabbath. writer of Hebrews talks about. There remains a rest. God rested. There remains that eternal rest. But then in our work week, it's one through seven, one through seven, one through seven. If one is denoting creation, what would eight on a seven-day work week denote? And we see foreshadowings of this in the old covenant law, in the Mosaic law. What would the eighth day denote on a seven-day work week? New creation. Right? If the first day is creation, the eighth day is the first day renewed. It's the new creation. So in the Old Testament, you had eighth day Sabbaths. Remember, they'd have like a festival all week. God said, feast, live in your tents, feed on the goodness of the Lord, and then rest on the seventh day, and then rest again on the eighth day. It was an eighth day Sabbath. So when Paul says, let nobody judge you in Festivals, New Moons, Sabbaths, in Colossians 2, he's most likely referring to the Old Covenant 8th day ceremonial law, the ceremonial side of the Sabbath in the Old Covenant. But the 8th day is pointing forward to the resurrection and the new creation. Both Calvin and Augustine believed that circumcision was ordained by God on the 8th day to be a precursor to what God was going to do in making his people new creatures. So it went on the eighth day to say, I'm going to make you a new creation. The sign went on the male reproductive organ to say, I'm going to take away the corruption that passed down from Adam through ordinary generation. Eighth day, I'm going to make you a new creation, which is the whole point of what Jesus came to do. If anyone's in Christ, he's part of the new creation. He's in a new world of grace. I think circumcision carries all of that. with it. When we're reading details in Scripture, especially in the Old Testament, we do have to be careful of fanciful explanations. But God doesn't do anything arbitrarily. So, God doesn't do things arbitrarily. He doesn't breathe out. If we learn anything from the New Testament, it's that everything God does, he does with very specific purposes and reasons. He's a very specific God. So there has to be a significance. It's not just arbitrary that it just happens to be the eighth day. But I think we have to proceed with a lot of humility. And when you read Calvin on this, I'd encourage you to read Calvin. He'll talk about how Augustine proposes this and Calvin says, seems good to me, makes sense to me. But you know what? I wouldn't press it. I think that's wise. Caution's always good. One other thing we can talk about, and this has caused a lot of problems throughout church history for sects and cults and offshoots, false teaching groups, lots, where they'll say, well, God told Abraham that circumcision was to be an everlasting ordinance. We read that this morning. But then Paul says circumcision means nothing. Whoa, that's concerning. I don't think it's that concerning. You'll often read about the Passover being an everlasting ordinance, circumcision being an everlasting ordinance, God will say. And some theologians will say, well, the word everlasting just means a really long time. I don't know. I don't I'm not sure I buy that. I mean, it's clever. I think it means everlasting How can circumcision be an everlasting ordinance and yet in the New Testament? Paul can say circumcision means nothing and he refuses to circumcise Titus Because it goes on the eternal Christ at the cross and then he does it in the hearts of his people for eternity That's how it's an eternal ordinance which is really beautiful. Everything moves in and out from Jesus in scripture. Everything's always moving in and out from Christ. So that if we bypass him, we're always going to end up, you could see how so many people say Judaism, not Christianity. because it says forever, and you guys don't do this. Well, no, we do celebrate, we do recognize circumcision as new creatures, right? Paul says, circumcision doesn't avail anything nor uncircumcision, but a new creation. And as many as walk according to this rule, grace and peace be on them, even on the Israel of God, the true people of God.