“9 Then God said to Abraham, “As for you, you must keep my covenant, you and your descendants after you for the generations to come. 10 This is my covenant with you and your descendants after you, the covenant you are to keep: every male among you shall be circumcised. 11 You are to undergo circumcision, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and you.
12 For the generations to come every male among you who is eight days old must be circumcised, including those born in your household or bought with money from a foreigner—those who are not your offspring. 13 Whether born in your household or bought with your money, they must be circumcised. My covenant in your flesh is to be an everlasting covenant.
14 Any uncircumcised male, who has not been circumcised in the flesh, will be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant.”
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When I was in fourth grade, my best friend moved out of state. We both read comic books. We shared a love of Ninja Turtles. He had this cool shirt that looked like a shark had taken a bite out of part of it. That is the stuff friendships are made of in fourth grade.
Before he left, he gave me a gift. It was a little glass plaque that read, “old friends are the dearest.” I was and am grateful for that gift. I think I still have it. I was also a bit sheepish when I received it because I hadn’t thought to get him a gift. .I was only in fourth grade, but I knew that friends reciprocate. When your friend does something nice for you, you want to do something nice in return. That’s what friends do; they reciprocate.
When your friend shows a sign of friendship, you want to show one in return. God has displayed a sign of covenant friendship for Abraham. He walked between animal parts which had been split in half as a way of saying, “may this happen to me, if I don’t do all that I have promised.” God displayed His sign of covenant friendship, but to this point in our study, Abraham hasn’t displayed any such sign. He is roughly in the situation in which I found myself in fourth grade. Where is Abraham’s sign of covenant friendship?
This sign of friendship between God and Abraham is serious business. God was serious when He walked between those dead animals. He expects Abraham to be serious about this sign He commands in this text. This is a study in Abraham’s mark of friendship. This was a sign that Abraham was serious about this relationship with God. The same goes for you. The sign of the covenant is a sign that you are serious about your relationship with God. That’s the claim of this sermon: the sign of the covenant is a sign that you are serious about your relationship with God.
We see this in three points. First: the sign of the covenant. Second: the sign of covenant grace. Third: cut off from the covenant. We see the sign of the covenant in verses 9-11. We see the grace of the covenant as seen in this sign in verses 12-13. We see that those who do not bear the sign are cut off from the covenant in verses 14.
First: the sign of the covenant. God has already spoken about His obligations in the covenant. We studied them last week; “As for me, this is my covenant with you: you will be the father of many nations. No longer will you be called Abram; your name will be Abraham.” We studied God’s repeated promises of land, identification, and descendants. We studied the ways in which God was reintroducing the blessings of Eden through His promises to Abraham.
God gave a sign of His commitment to such promises by walking through those split animal pieces as if to say, “may this happen to me, if I don’t do all that I have promised.” God was clearly serious about His commitment to His relationship with Abraham. He expected Abraham to share this same commitment. That brings us to verse 9, ‘Then God said to Abraham, “As for you, you must keep my covenant, you and your descendants after you for the generations to come.”’
The “you” is emphatic in the Hebrew. That emphatic “you” shows that God treated Abraham as a responsible individual. He expected that Abraham could and must participate in this relationship as a partner.
Being treated as a responsible individual carries responsibility. It’s maddening to deal with someone who wants to be treated as responsible and yet refuses to take responsibility. God won’t stand for that. Abraham was responsible to keep the covenant. He was responsible to train his descendants to keep the covenant. He was responsible to train his descendants to train their descendants to keep the covenant. “As for you, you must keep my covenant, you and your descendants after you for the generations to come.”
If you are part of the covenant, God treats you as a responsible individual. He expects you to take this relationship seriously. He expects you to train your children to take this relationship seriously. He expects you to train your children to train their children to take this relationship seriously.
He treats you as a responsible individual. If you sense the gravity of that, good. If you really don’t like the fact that God will hold you responsible, ask yourself, “why?” Is it because you don’t think that you are worthy of being treated as a responsible individual? Is it because you are surprised that God has expectations in this relationship? It’s a rather strange thing to think that a mortal could enjoy a relationship with God with no expectations. It is, in fact, rather arrogant, and that arrogance lurks in the hearts of us all. Repent of it if you see it in yourself.
God had expectations of Abraham just like He has expectations of everyone with whom He is in covenant relationship. We saw some of His expectations last week. Now we see His expectation of a covenant sign from Abraham; verse 10, “This is my covenant with you and your descendants after you, the covenant you are to keep: every male among you shall be circumcised. You are to undergo circumcision, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and you.”
God had given a sign in blood. We saw that in the split heifer, goat, and ram between which He walked. He expected a sign in blood from Abraham.
Circumcision is a sign in blood. It has been and is practiced in many parts of the world for merely cultural reasons. There are any number of explanations given as to its meaning, but by and large those who practice it in these different cultures have no explanation for the practice other than tradition-- “this is simply what we’ve always done.”
While it would be helpful to understand the wider background of the practice, it isn’t necessary because what interests us is the meaning of this sign when it comes to the relationship between Abraham and God. Ask yourself, “why would circumcision be an appropriate sign of the relationship between Abraham and God?” Well, God had promised Abraham children and Abraham seemed unable to have children. To this point, the greater part of our knowledge about Abraham revolves around this inability to have children and everything depending upon this promised child. Now if everything of importance to you hinged upon having this promised child, what could seem more dangerous than someone slicing into your sexual organ?
God is asking Abraham to put His complete trust in Him for this promised child. Circumcision says “I can have no children aside from your power.” God is calling for serious skin in this game.
God walked between the split animals. Abraham underwent circumcision. They made a covenant in blood. God did so because He would keep His promises. Abraham did so because he planned to trust the promises. As Victor Hamilton puts it, “Abraham’s circumcision is as much an amen to Yahweh as his affirmation in 15:6,” namely, “Abram believed the Lord, and He credited it to him as righteousness.”
Undergoing circumcision as an adult male without anesthesia, which, of course, was the only way it could have been done in those days, was certainly a costly act of obedience. Abraham saw it as worthwhile because he was thinking about the promises. Abraham thought the value of the promises outweighed the cost of being circumcised. If Abraham would have heard Jesus say, “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field,” he would have said, “exactly. That’s why I got circumcised.”
Perhaps Abraham’s obedience is a kindly rebuke for you this morning. Perhaps you thought you were doing God a favor by coming to show Him a bit of honor and now you see this man who is willing to do whatever God asks. God has people who will give Him whatever He asks because they believe that He will do everything He has promised. You need to ask yourself if you are one of those people.
God invited Abraham into this relationship. God demonstrated His faithfulness to this relationship. He expected Abraham to do the same. He expected that as a response to grace. We see that in our second point: the sign of covenant grace.
God found Abraham while the man was in Ur worshipping the moon and the stars. Abraham was only in covenant relationship with God because of grace and we see something of that same grace in verse 12, “For the generations to come every male among you who is eight days old must be circumcised.”
These baby boys were no more worthy to be in covenant with God than any of the other baby boys born anywhere else in the world just as Abraham was no more worthy to be in covenant with God than any of the other idolaters found anywhere else in the world. They both entered the covenant the same way; they entered the covenant by God’s choice. God had chosen Abraham. God had chosen to put these babies in covenant families.
We will see a picture of that next week when we baptize Elsie. We will baptize her because God chose to put her under the authority of covenant keeping parents. Elsie didn’t place herself in the covenant any more than those eight-day-old boys did. She will have to respond to the covenant just like those boys would, but she didn’t place herself in the covenant. That was God’s grace.
God did this. If you’ve ever had a baby and you have much spiritual sense about you, you find yourself thinking, “God did this,” quite a bit. You look at those little fingers, you look at those little toes, and you think to yourself, “this baby didn’t simply happen; God did this.” The same goes for babies entering the covenant; God did this. That is a choice of grace
You see more of the grace of this covenant in the fact that it is everlasting. You see that in verse 13, “My covenant in your flesh is to be an everlasting covenant.”
The fact that this mark is made in the flesh is a sign of its everlasting nature. You can’t undo circumcision. This procedure left and leaves an everlasting mark in the flesh as a sign of an everlasting covenant. It is an everlasting mark because the relationship it signifies is everlasting. God was to be Abraham’s God forever. Abraham was to be God’s friend forever. That’s one reason that it was a forever mark.
That’s appropriate because God bears a forever mark of the covenant in his flesh. “This is the new covenant in my blood.” “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side,” as Jesus told Thomas. You see that in John’s vision, “Then I saw a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing at the center of the throne.” God in the flesh bears the everlasting marks of the covenant.
He bears these marks not because he failed to keep the covenant. He did walk through those bloody animal pieces as if to say, “may this happen to me if I fail to keep the covenant,” but he didn’t break the covenant. I did. You did. God’s people did, and so, because He is more gracious that we can begin to understand, “he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.” God asked Abraham to wear an everlasting mark of their relationship. He didn’t ask for anything He wasn’t willing to give. This is a forever mark.
This sign is also a mark of the everlasting nature of the covenant because it was passed on from generation to generation. Isaac was circumcised because this was an everlasting covenant. Jacob was circumcised because this was an everlasting covenant. Jacob’s sons were circumcised because this was an everlasting covenant. The boys of the twelve tribes were
circumcised because this was an everlasting covenant. They were circumcised because they were children of Abraham. They were in relationship with God because of God’s promises to Abraham.
No one enjoys a relationship with God aside from these promise to Abraham. His story is, in so many ways, the beginning of Scripture because it is the story of God’s electing grace and nobody knows God aside from God’s electing grace. That is the history of God’s people and that’s your history.
Now we don’t practice circumcision today, but that’s not because the covenant is anything less than everlasting. It is because the promises to Abraham have been kept. The descendant promised to Abraham who would bless the whole world has been born. The promise given to Abraham that he would be the father of many nations is apparent today. You are a child of father Abraham, not because you are a Jew or because you have been circumcised but because you—Gentile though you are, unchosen according to the flesh though you are – have faith like Abraham. That is what circumcision was really always about. It was about having a circumcised heart. If you are born again, you have that. You have faith like Abraham. You can say with Paul, “we are the circumcision, we who [have the Holy Spirit] and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh.” You are baptized into Jesus. You have the reality to which the sign pointed.
Now either you have that reality, or you could. You must. If you don’t have and you never do, you will be cut off. That’s our final point: cut off from the covenant.
It’s clear that God takes this relationship seriously. He is serious about circumcising not simply the flesh, but the heart. You see His seriousness in His repetition of the covenant sign at the beginning of verse 14, “Any uncircumcised male, who has not been circumcised in the flesh…”
That wording should sound a bit redundant to you, “Any uncircumcised male, who has not been circumcised in the flesh…” That’s saying the same thing twice. It’s redundant because God does not want anyone to miss its seriousness.
He wants them to be serious about the relationship. Think of it this way: imagine a boss calls an employee into his office. Let’s call this employee Hank. The boss calls Hank into his office and says, “I want you, Hank, to handle this order.” Doesn’t that sound more serious than simply saying, “I want you to handle this order”? Of course it does. The boss meant it to be sound more serious. Now I want you to imagine that the boss said, “I want you, Hank, to handle this order, and if you will not, you will be fired,” because that is the equivalent of what God said in verse 14, “Any uncircumcised male, who has not been circumcised in the flesh, will be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant.” Hank would have to be a blockhead to miss the point. Israelites would have to be blockheads to miss the point. God takes this covenant relationship seriously and He expects that we will. He holds us responsible.
Now these words aren’t merely about the act of circumcision. These words are about keeping the covenant of which circumcision is merely a sign. Imagine if I would have taken that glass plaque from my friend that said, “old friends are the dearest,” and smashed it to pieces in front of him. He wouldn’t have interpreted that as merely an act of violence against a piece of home décor; he would interpret that as an act of violence against him, and so would God when it came to a refusal to show the sign. The sign is a sign.
God expects His people to take the covenant seriously. He warns those who will not take it seriously that they are living on borrowed time. They will be cut off. H.H. Cohn explains it this way, ‘the threat of being “cut off” by the hand of God, in His own time, hovers over the offender constantly and inescapably; [such a man] is not unlike the patient who is told by his doctors that his disease is incurable and that he might die any day.’
It is possible that someone listening this morning in this sanctuary or online is in this very position right now. You are living on borrowed time. You are on the edge of being cut off because, for some bewildering reason, you’ve been hearing from God for the last thirty minutes without once truly taking God seriously.
If that is you, you would be wise to heed the warning from the book of Hebrews, “land that drinks in the rain often falling on it and that produces a crop useful to those for whom it is farmed receives the blessing of God. But if that land produces thorns and thistles, it is worthless and is in danger of being cursed. In the end it will be burned.”
Don’t be burned. Don’t be cut off. You might not take God seriously, but God takes you seriously. He treats you as responsible for your response to Him.
God takes this relationship seriously. He takes His promises seriously. You see that in Jesus. In many ways the life of Jesus can be best described as, “look at the seriousness with which God takes His promises.” He is the promise made flesh. He is what the promises look like if they were to move in next door. God was obviously serious when He walked between those animal pieces to say, “may this happen to me if I don’t keep my promises.” All He is asking is that you do the same. All He is asking is that you reciprocate. That is what friends do. Amen.