Clough Genesis Lesson 52

Circumcision, Abraham’s mature faith – Genesis 17:1-27

 

… in the call of Abraham, we have noticed three elements.  In Genesis 12, all the way down to Genesis 15:5 we have watched God call Abraham.  This calling and all the stories and adventures associated with that calling are given in the Scriptures to demonstrate that were it not for God’s grace, Abraham would never have come to faith.  Left to himself during this period of time Abraham would have stayed outside of the land.  Left to himself during this time his wife would have been a victim of the harem of Pharaoh.  Left to himself Abraham would never have made it.  So the call that we see here is a reminder to you that no one becomes a Christian unless God, the Spirit, calls, and calls him over every obstacle, over every thing, every impediment to the gospel.  In Genesis 15:6 we have Abraham’s justification marked by the entering into union with God’s plan through a covenant.  In connection with that, that very, very foundational doctrine, the doctrine of justification, we’ve reminded you of several things that have to be stressed hard in our own day because of what’s going on in our own Christian circles.  Faith by itself is nonmeritorious.  Abraham’s faith is counted as righteousness, which means that the faith isn’t righteous because if it was it wouldn’t have to be counted as righteousness.  So faith doesn’t merit God’s response; faith is simply the empty hand looking up to God to receive the gift.  Faith is blind to itself, it’s not narcistic, it doesn’t look at itself.  We’re not told where God obtained the righteousness that He credited to Abraham’s account.  That isn’t revealed until the New Testament when we’re told by God the Holy Spirit that it comes from the work of Christ.

 

In Genesis 16 we saw Abraham produce the fruit of the flesh, showing again that he is a depraved person, he has a sin nature, he, like us, is naturally, in his natural state unredeemed, simply wants to defy the law of God, and simply wants to turn his back on God’s authority.  Then as we began chapter 17 we see Abraham being glorified, that is, we’ve seen him show his identification with God in a historical way.  Abraham is now going to experience the results of being justified.  He is going to experience the male seed that he’s looked forward to for so long.  He is going to see the imputed righteousness or credited righteousness now brought into his life and inherent in his life through the new nature, indicated by his change in name.


Now there’s something that you want to observe about this covenant.  It’s very important because if you observe this it will protect you against getting things mixed up in the gospel.  When God made a covenant with Abraham in Genesis 15 it was a different thing than when He gave circumcision as the ordinance in chapter 17.  In chapter 15 God made the covenant with Abraham in heaven; it was a heavenly vision.  It was something that didn’t exist on a piece of paper, it was something that was not present on stone tablets; it was something simply conveyed in a heavenly vision.  So there is God making the covenant and setting it up.  It is a covenant and therefore we’re talking about something that is legal, and that is characteristic of justification.  And of course all of this points to the New Testament thing called “justification.”  That used to be a very precious word to Protestants. 

 

Today, because Protestants aren’t educated and know nothing of justification it’s a term that is meaningless to most Christians.  However, if this term were understood we would be insulated against all the cheap substitutes for justification, all the cheap emphasis on religious experience this and religious exper­ience that.  What greater experience can you have than having all of the cloak of the righteousness of Christ put upon you, so you can wear it in God’s presence and when God looks at you He sees Christ.  Now I ask you, what experience could you possibly have that is greater than that one?  You can’t, and you wouldn’t be looking for them if you had been properly taught people and had understood what Luther, Calvin and the Reformers understood, that justification is where it’s at. Everything else follows.  If I am not legally acceptable before God then I can have no experience other than the experience of being perpetually judged.  I can know nothing of His grace and nothing of His love unless I am justified.  That’s chapter 15. 

 

But in Genesis 17 we have read that Abraham is going to have circumcision in his home and in one particular verse, the last part of verse 13, God says “My berith” or “My covenant shall be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant.”  So now the covenant is brought down to human flesh and it shows up in human flesh.  It therefore, more than legal, is the moral side of God’s Word and it answers to regeneration.  It is the change that God works on the inside, and the regeneration, of course, is also included in the word glorification.  So we have again regeneration following justification, and not as some streams of the Reformation hold, that regeneration precedes justification.  So we have seen these two chapters; on the one hand the position legally, on the other hand that which flows from the position that changes in Abraham’s life. 

 

Now since we did not have time last week to work with circumcision a little bit we want to notice some things.  Ahead of the passage that was read this morning, back in Genesis 17:10-12 there are some details that we want to remember.  “This is My covenant,” God says, and you’re going to keep it.  That means there is a human response here.  There is a response that I as a believer must make to my God; my God sovereignly promises to do things for me so I, as a human being, must respond.  In other words, God’s sovereignty does not destroy human responsibility and the responsibility Abraham had in keeping the covenant was to “circumcise the flesh of your foreskin; it will be a token [sign] of the covenant between Me and you.  [12] And he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, [every male child in your generation, he that is born in the house, or bought with money of any foreigner who is not of thy seed.]” 

 

Now we have a series of questions and a series of points we want to get on the doctrine of circumcision.  We do this because of a problem that’s come up again and again in church history.  For centuries, in fact, for some 500 or 600 years we’ve been fighting this problem and the problem is this, that people always want to make circumcision, which was done to infants, equal to baptism and then argue backwards that therefore we ought to baptize infants.  In other words, there’s an analogy being made between circumcision in the Old Testament and baptism in the New Testament.  We’ve got to clarify that, first by studying what circumcision was all about.

 

First, a few general observations about circumcision.  Obviously it was something that could only be given to males.  And this is important from the very start because it says that the man is the one who is spiritually responsible.  In the home it is the man who is to obtain the covenant rights.  Under the covenant the man is given the leadership position, not the woman.  This is reiterated again in the New Testament when Paul says in 1 Timothy 2, I do not permit a woman to usurp authority over a man.  We would have some evangelicals in the Unites States, the advocates of ERA, misread the New Testament and say like our President says, I don’t bother to read 1 Corinthians 11, it isn’t pertinent to my day.  But we don’t read the New Testament selectively that way; we take all the New Testament as one indivisible unit and in that we find that the woman’s role is defined, whether we like it or not and the man’s role is defined.  We commented last week that the Israeli women’s lib movement is having a very humorous thing, and faces very humorous things because the women’s lib movement in Israel is trying to find something like circumcision that they can have and try to undo the Torah, and they’re stuck because it’s very obvious in Orthodox Jewry that there is this circumcision rite and it is only for men.  Well, maybe some of our more ardent Gloria Steinem and Rosaline Carters can do something about it to help them, wish them best of luck.

 

The second position, the second observation we want to make in general about circumcision is that it is the only bodily mutilation authorized in the Scriptures apart another one that had to do with legal problems.  This is unusual.  In the ancient world religion practices were often practices of mutilation.  Remember the confrontation between Elijah and the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel?  Do you remember what the prophets of Baal were doing when they were defying Elijah?  They were cutting themselves and holding up their bloody hands, and their bloody face and their bloody scalp because the idea of cutting yourself and showing the exposed bleeding to God was a system of self-atonement.  And this was often done in the ancient world, and yet in Israel it was forbidden to cut the body at any point other than this one exception, this ordinance of circumcision. 

 

Another observation in general about circumcision is that it was given in Israel to infants, whereas in other lands, in other places it was given to males at the point of adolescence. And the question then becomes why did the Israelites give circumcision in infancy when the other people surrounding them gave it adolescence, and the answer is that the circumcision had something to do with that which is present from birth.  We’ll see later what is present from birth.

 

And finally, on a medical note, Dr. S. I. McMillan, who is the author of the book, “None of These Diseases,” notes two interesting things in connection with circumcision.  I mention these two because I want you to walk away from the Bible thinking of the Bible not just as a book of do’s and don’ts but I want you to think of the Bible as that which is authored by the same God who created things, so that when God tells us to do something it’s not apart and separate and disjunctive from how we’re made.  Dr. McMillan points out numerous studies that have been done, done back in the 1930s, 1940s, where the incident of cancer of the cervix in Jewish women was significantly lower than cancer of the cervix in Gentile women, suggesting that circumcision has a hygienic device. 

 

But the more intriguing thing has to do with verse 12, on the eighth day circumcision was to occur.  Dr. S. I. McMillan quotes in his book from an article in The Journal of the American Medical Association which shows that one of the clotting compounds in the human blood, vitamin K, is not formed in infants to a normal level until the 5th to 7th day, making the 8th day the first day in which cutting can proceed with the full force of blood clotting vitamin K available.  Also, another blood clotting chemical, according to the article, prothrombin, while at 40% normal on the third day, rises to 110% of normal on the eighth day.  If these medical facts are true then you have to decide whether Abraham and Moses had a fantastic chemistry lab out in the middle of the desert to discover these truths or whether, in fact, they were told them by the God who created the human body.  So, in fact, this letter of the Scripture fits physiology and anatomy in the way we’re made. 

 

Now having looked at the general observations of circumcision, let’s look at its spiritual meaning.  Turn to Deuteronomy 30:6.  Let’s look at the context.  What did circumcision mean spiritually?  God wouldn’t have set up an ordinance like this just to mutilate parts of the human body.  Why did He do it?  There must be a doctrinal meaning to it all.  Looking at Deuteronomy 30:1, this is a fore view of Israel’s history.  Moses is looking ahead in time and he’s forecasting, he’s predicting what is going to happen to the nation Israel down the corridors of time and he says what’s going to happen is that you are going to fail in response to the Word of God, you are going to be exiled under the fifth step of discipline, you are going to be restored to the land and then the millennial kingdom will come.  “And it shall come to pass, when all these things are come upon thee, the blessing and the curse,” the blessing was ended about the time… right after Solomon; the curse began in 586 BC, at the beginning of the exile. 

 

And incidentally, the Jews are still basically under the same curse because we’ve only had partial restoration to the land. There was a partial restoration in 516 BC and there has been now, since 1948 and in the latter part of the 19th century immigration to Palestine and the setting up of the Jewish state.  But those are partial restoration. We’re not talking about partial restorations here in Deuteronomy 30; here it’s the full.  “…after the blessing and the cursing have come upon you, which I have set before you, and you shall call them to mind among the nations, where the LORD thy God has driven you,  [2] And you will return  unto the LORD thy God, and shall obey His voice according to all that I command you this day, you and your children, with all your heart, and with all your soul.  [3] Then the LORD thy God will turn thy captivity,” that is He will bring the Jews back to the land.  He “will turn thy captivity, and have compassion upon thee, and will return and gather you from all the nations where the LORD thy God has scattered you.  [4] If any of you be driven out unto the outmost parts of heaven, from there will the LORD thy God gather you, and from there will He fetch you.  [5] And the LORD thy God will bring you into the land which thy fathers possessed, [and thou shalt possess it; and He will do thee good, and multiply thee above thy fathers.]”

 

Now Deuteronomy 30:6, “And the LORD thy God will circumcise thine heart, and the heart of thy seed,” now this is a slogan that is repeated again and again in the Old Testament, “the LORD thy God will circumcise your heart.”  [“…and the heart of thy seed, to love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, that thou mayest live.”]  Obviously then circumcision develops a metaphor that is used to teach spiritual truth.  What spiritual truth?  Diagramming the verse you’ve just seen, God says down through the corridors of time, from that date, which was 1440 BC, on down through the exile and they conceded the exiles lasting until the Messiah came back and then you have the kingdom out here, that this restoration period will be the time when the Jewish nation nationally, not just some Jews, but all Jews, the entire nation of Jews, would return under the authority of God’s Word and at that time it’s described as a process of circumcising the heart. 

 

Turn to Jeremiah 31 to see a little bit more about this heart circumcision.  Jeremiah 31:31; again this is predicting something in the future for the nation Israel; it’s looking ahead and seeing that glorious time when the nation will be functioning, not just physically but spiritually.  “Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a new berith,” or “new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah, [32] Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt,” that’s the Mosaic Covenant, “which, My covenant, they broke, although I was a husband to them, saith the LORD.  [33] But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel,” and now notice the language.  I set you up for this because I pointed out to you just a few minutes ago that when we compare the chapter 15 and 17 that the covenant is said in Genesis 17 to be in the flesh, in the flesh, the covenant in the flesh!  Now look at Jeremiah 31:33, “After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts, [and will be their God, and they shall be my people.]”   “…and write it in their hearts,” that is the spiritual circumcision; the writing of the Word of God in the inner nature, or the new nature.  Now this is a prediction of national regeneration.  At the point that the nation Israel nationally is regenerated or born again you have that being spiritual circumcision.  So at least it gives us a clue as to what spiritual circumcision is all about; it has something to do with the cleansing of human nature… the cleansing of human nature. 

 

Now let’s turn to the New Testament for a further comment on circumcision.  In Colossians 2:11, we read “In whom,” talking about Christians, talking about our position in Christ, “In whom also you all,” that “you” there is plural, every Christian, “you all are circumcised,” so here again we have the metaphor of circumcision appearing, “you are circumcised with the circumcision made without hands,” non-surgical, non-human, “with the circumcision made without hands, in putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ.”  Now what is this?  The “circumcision made without hands,” the “putting off of the body of the sins of the flesh?”  Well, “the body of the sins of the flesh” is the sin nature.  And the sin nature, of course in experience isn’t going to be put off until down in the future when we get raptured and we leave, we physically leave our bodies, but until that point in time, or until the time we die, whichever comes first, we have a position that in principle the believer has died with Christ… in principle the believer has died with Christ.  If you want an exposition of this it’s Romans 6, what is sometimes called retroactive positional truth or my position with Christ looking back in time.  “…the circumcision made without hands” is a destruction, or a cutting away of fallen flesh, or human nature, the fallen part of human nature and it says  it is “by the circumcision of Christ.” 

 

Now there’s a debate among Bible students about the nature of the genitive case in “of Christ.” 

There are two ways of handling that: (1) a subjective genitive, and a subjective genitive means the genitive is the subject, so then it says Christ does the circumcising.  Then if we translate it that way it would be something that Christ does for you and for me.  He circumcises us; the action of circumcision would be directed against us.  Well now that’s a truth but I don’t believe that’s the interpretation in verse 11.  I think it’s an objective genitive; that is, the circumcision here is that which is done to Christ. 

 

Now this is a figure of the cross and the death of Jesus Christ.  Christ came to the cross innocent.  He did not have one sin credited to His account and this is something you, as a Christian, must ponder at times, and you’ve just got to discipline yourself to think and remember this.  A good time to get it in your cycle of life would be to remember this on the day when we have communion.  But you ought to get used to thinking this through once in a while just to refresh your soul.  Jesus Christ came to that cross without an ounce of dirt on Him, spiritually speaking.  When He went to that cross He picked up every single sin you have ever done, are now doing, and ever will do.  He did not have to do that, He voluntarily picked up the tab for you and that means everything you’ve ever done, every sin in thought, word and deed He acquired and put upon Himself at the cross.  He became sin par excellance in the eyes of God at that point, and at that point God cut Him off.  At that point, for three hours, He experienced the wrath of God for you, for the wrath of God was so violent and so awful that from the gospel accounts we have that God cloaked the cross in darkness so no human being standing even feet away could see what was happening, it was so awful to see that kind of transaction.  Jesus Christ was taking it for you and for me at that point.  Now that is His circumcision and when Jesus Christ was cut off from His Father, Psalm 22, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me, why are You so far from My screaming,” that kind of thing, when Jesus Christ was cut off that fulfilled the type of circumcision.  Therefore the ritual of circumcision ultimately looked forward to that pure seed which would come about, the pure male seed.

 

Let’s put it together what circumcision means.  It looks ahead because out of the loins of Abraham will come the Messiah, but in the course of the loins of Abraham and coming out from him from father to son, father to son, mother to daughter, mother to daughter, you have transmission of the sin nature.  Therefore there can’t arise out of him a pure seed without some sort of cutting off and the cutting off will be the virgin birth of Jesus Christ.  And there is produced the pure male seed. And once again the metaphor of circumcision is applied because that pure male seed acquires like a sponge, it sucks up, all the sin in the world, and then it’s judged, violently and catastrophically on the cross.  So we have this looking forward through a male Savior who must be pure, coming forth from Abraham’s seed.  So circumcision spiritually has reference to the destruction of that which is sinful and by means of the male, the male Savior. 

 

We’ve studied general remarks about circumcision, we’ve talked about what the spiritual meaning of circumcision is, now we’ve got to answer some questions, and there are two sticky questions: one easier and one harder.  The easier question is: was the guy that was circumcised in the Old Testament always saved?  Turn to Romans 2:28. All of this is necessary because it defines how the Bible looks at ritual versus reality.  We’ve got to keep a careful distinction between the two.  “For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, neither is that circumcision which is outward in the flesh; [29] But he is a Jew who is one inwardly, and circumcision of the heart, in the spirit and not in the letter,” so there you have it very clearly stated it would be theoretically possible for a Jewish man to be circumcised and not believe.  So the ritual of circumcision does not make the person circumcised a Christian or a believer, any more than baptism can make you a Christian.  The circumcision of the Old Testament did not do that and if you want a beautiful illustration in context, think of the first male child circumcised, and his name was Ishmael, and he was not a believer as far as we know.  If you look at Genesis 21:7, you look at Romans 9:7, you find evidence that Ishmael was not a believer.  Well if that’s the situation then it is interesting, that the first male child ever circumcised never was a Christian, never was a believer.  So conclusion to the first question: circumcision does not save anyone; it never did save anyone, it was nothing more than a ritual that was to picture a spiritual truth.   It was a badge, an emblem that was worn by God’s elect nation.

 

Now the harder question: is circumcision in the Old Testament equivalent to baptism in the New Testament?  Is circumcision in the Old Testament analogous and equivalent to baptism in the New Testament?  If it is, do you know what follows?  If I answer this question yes then I automatically must subscribe to infant baptism.  If I say that baptism in the New Testament is an answer to circumcision in the Old Testament, I have got to also say that therefore we baptize infants. 

 

One of the most astute opponents of the position of infant baptism is Pierre Marcel, who wrote the book, The Biblical Doctrine of Infant Baptism.  Marcel looked at every single argument ever advanced for infant baptism and found them all wanting except one.  Said Marcel: “With the rejection of the covenant of grace every possible foundation of infant baptism disappears.” What Marcel found is that if you take all the arguments that have ever been advanced for infant baptism, you can shoot every one of them down except one, he says; I will shoot that one down.  But he said this was the one, the argument that certainly would hold.  He said if you subscribe to the covenant of grace, that there is one covenant of grace that is administered differently in the Old Testament and the New Testament, and the Old Testament is one administration of that same covenant of grace, and the New Testament is another administration of the same covenant of grace, then you can show that circumcision, which is the outer sign of this covenant administration, and since it’s the same covenant and baptism over here is the sign of the covenant, then these two are equivalent.  You show their equivalency by showing that they are both ordinances that are manifestations of the same covenant.  You get your unity between them by this over-arching covenant of grace. 

 

Now this is why covenant theology has always tended to infant baptism and why some of you flirting with covenant theology are going to wind up baptizing your baby.  The inevitable force of logic is going to propel you in that direction, and that’s what’s going to happen to some of our friends in Dallas, within the next ten years they will be baptizing their infants, that is, if they continue into covenant theology.  It’s go to go that way, it always has gone that way and it always will go that way; as night follows day, the inevitable pressures of logic compel that conclusion. 

 

Let’s look at how circumcision does not reflect that same thing as baptism.  We want to look at some differences between these two ordinances.  The first one: circumcision looks to the death of Christ; baptism, when we take someone, down they go in the water and up (hopefully), when we have that sequence we are talking not just of the death of Christ but the resurrection of Christ.  So baptism adds a new element; it adds the post cross thing that was not in view in the Old Testament doctrine of circumcision.  Baptism adds something; it’s not quite picturing the same thing. 

 

But more powerful than that, turn to Galatians 3:7.  Notice what we’re looking for when we through these two verses is whether the people who are being incorporated as Abraham’s seed in Galatians 3 are being incorporated under the physical principle of heredity, that is that they are in a family who is identified with Abraham, in other words whether it’s familial or whether it’s individual faith.  Look careful at the language of Galatians 3:7.  “Know ye, therefore, that they which are of faith, the same are the children of Abraham.”  Does it say those who are of parents of faith?  Or does it say those who are born to Christian parents, the same are the children of Abraham.  Now it ought to read that way, it would read that way in the Old Testament.  [8] “And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen [Gentiles] through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all nations be blessed.  [9] So, then, they who are of faith are blessed with faithful Abraham.”  It doesn’t say they which are born of Christian parents. 

 

Galatians 3:14, “That the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.”  Not heredity, not because we’re born in a Christian home.  Verse 22, “The Scripture has concluded all under sin, that the promise by faith of Jesus Christ might be given to them” who are the children of Christian parents?  No, “to them that believe.”  Verse 23, “But before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed. [24] Wherefore, the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. [25] After faith is come….”  Now where do you read in that that anybody is becoming a member of the kingdom of God by virtue of the faith of their parents?  It’s talking about their own personal faith.  And so therefore as Professor G. R. Beasley Murray points out, (quote) “Not a line of this suggests the covenant in Christ operates on a heredity basis.  The promise is explicitly for those baptized in Christ in faith.  Had Paul shared the so-called covenant theology he could never have written Galatians 3 in this manner.”

 

Then if circumcision and baptism aren’t the same, then we have no right to argue that in this situation baptism ought to be administered to infants.  Let’s look at Acts 2, the first time we notice baptism occurring in the church age and even there notice something.  Often it’s said on the basis of verse 39 that here is the justification for infant baptism, that if a parent believes then the child automatically receives the benefit of the parent’s faith because of the covenant, and they use Acts 2:39, “For the promise is to you and to your children, and to all that are far off, even as many as the Lord, our God, shall call.”  See it says, “the promise is to you and your children.”  So if you believe then your children are automatically accepted.  Wrong!  That’s a citation from the book of Joel in the Old Testament and the word “children” means your descendants, and it’s talking about those who are the recipients of God’s promises and they are people whom the Lord our God shall call individually and personally.  So all one need do is finish reading the verse in the Old Testament context. 

 

So we see no legitimate reason for infant baptism in the Scripture.  All right you say, what are you going to do to honor the children born of Christian parents. Doesn’t the New Testament, some place, give a special privilege to children born in Christian homes and the answer is yes but the special privilege isn’t conveyed by means of baptism.  Turn to 1 Corinthians 7:14; this is the only verse I know that speaks directly to the matter of children of Christian parents.  It’s a hard verse.  It’s talking about mixed marriages, mixed marriages where the husband is a believer and his wife a non-believer, or his wife is a believer and he is a non-believer.  And the question arises, well what about their children then, in such a situation.  Verse 14 is the answer.   “For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband; else were your children unclean, but now they are holy.” 

 

Now this is not saying that the children here are automatically saved.  What this doctrine is is the obverse of the doctrine you’ve recognized before in the doctrine of suffering; remember the third point of suffering is that I suffer because I am identified with someone else who is suffering.  Now turn that doctrine around; the children are blessed because they are identified with someone else who is blessed.  So if we have a situation here, the husband and wife and say the husband is a believer and the wife is a non-Christian, in this situation they have child one, child two.  In that kind of an arrangement what 1 Corinthians 7:14 is saying is that because this man is a Christian and God the Holy Spirit is working in his life the blessing covers those two children.  How does it cover those two children?  Does it make them saved?  No, it doesn’t make them saved.  What it makes them is the recipients of God’s blessings on him, such as answered prayer, such as insight that that father has that a non-Christian wouldn’t and therefore he can teach his child and so on. 

 

Again Professor Murray sums it up well when he says this: “Such children are brought up in an environment of faith and prayer, at home and in the church, and are under the constant instruction of the Word of God,” hopefully, he didn’t say that, I added that, hopefully.  “They are the most privileged children of all time,” and I will say that, underlined.  Many of you have grown up in non-Christian homes and you know what it’s like.  This is why I think there’s such a reaction on the part of the younger generation who have become Christians, to taking much more interest in the things that go on in the home than their parents ever did because they have grown up with the first fruits of a heathen culture and they don’t like what they see and they go back to make those homes functional.  This is why we have a lot of young couples who, even now before they have children are in the family training program to learn how to work with their children when children come along in their home. 

 

“They are the most privileged children of all time, under the shadow of the wings of God and His Christ, being prepared in the midst of His people for His kingdom of grace and glory.  Recognizing to the full, however, the blessing of such a situation, it is a mistake not to recognize the limitations.  Birth in a Christian home is a priceless privilege but it is not a guarantee of inheritance in the kingdom of God.  In the inscrutable providence of God neither all members of Christian families believe the gospel to be incorporated into Christ and the Church, nor mercifully are all the members of non-believing families doomed to irreparable loss.”  We’ve all observed that, it doesn’t require profound theology to see this, that infants can be helped, but the dedication and the attraction of the infant is the blessing of God to the parents or parent who is a believer in the marriage.  That is a channel through which that child is blessed; blessed in prayer, blessed in teaching and so on.  See parents, do you pray for your children?  If you don’t pray for them who else is going to pray for them.  So there is something to challenge you. Are you doing anything for your children, Christian parents, that non-Christian can’t do?  What is unique about the things that you can do for your children that your neighbor down the street who is not a Christian can do for his or her children?  You ought to think in those terms and it will bring you back to this point.

 

So much for circumcision and the difference with baptism.  Let’s turn back and finish Genesis 17.  This sign cannot be confused with New Testament baptism; it is merely a physical emblem worn by the heads of the home of the Jewish culture of the Old Testament. 

 

Now Genesis 17:15, God says to Abraham, change the name of your wife.  We have a little lexical problem here, I have not yet been able to prove to my own satisfaction what exactly is the difference between Sarai and Sarah on lexical data alone; I know from the context what it ought to be, that Sarai must refer to her queenly character and Sarah to her queenly offspring. That’s clear to anybody that reads the text but unfortunately our linguistic tools are limited here and quite frankly I confess that there’s just not too much known about the derivatives of these nouns so we leave it there.  [“And God said unto Abraham, As for Sarai, thy wife, thou shalt not call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name.”]

 

Genesis 17:16, “And I will bless her, and give you a son also of her,” now men, here’s something interesting about the dynamics of a home and it’s indicated by a little quirky way the Hebrew flows in verse 16.  It says “I will…give,” this is God blessing the home, “I will give,” literally, “out from her to you a son,” now one of those phrases is out of line with a normal expression.  Normally it would be “I give you a son from her.  But when you have this clause taken from the end of the sentence and injected earlier in the sentence it’s to draw emphasis to something, and the emphasis is upon it’s through the woman that this blessing is given.  Always with a rigorous logical consistency the Scripture hammers away again and again and again that the woman must be protected, she must be cultivated, she must be nourished, she must be nourished to produce life, that the woman is the source and channel of the next generation.  Remember the definition I read in the manhood course about the relationship of a husband and his wife and his children and George Gilder was the guy who wrote from the New York Times that coined this, I don’t even know if the man’s a Christian but his observations fit very well with the Scripture and he put it far better than I could.  “It is the womb of your wife through which you participate in the next generation.”  A very serious attitude, the womb must be protected.  The womb is always looked upon as the fountain from which will flow that which gives life. So here again, as always, we have this honoring of the role of the woman.  I will bless the man with a son but it will be through his woman.  “I will bless her, and she shall be a mother of nations; and kings of people shall be out of her.”

 

And now Abraham falls on his face and he laughs, but the laughter here is not the laughter like his wife.  In the next chapter she too will laugh but it will be a laugh born of doubt.  The laugh here is a kind of chuckle, the laugh that you’ve often had sometimes when you’ve been so extremely blessed, above your wildest expectations, and it’s a laugh where you body just totally relaxes, you can’t respond and you just sit and chuckle.  It’s that kind of a laugh, the laugh of a amazement. The word “laughter” here in the Hebrew is the word Yitzhak, and it’s the word from which we get the boy’s name.  We drop the “y” and it comes over in our Bible… this “s” is always the [?] sound in our English word but actually it’s not in the Hebrew, it’s “ts” together, Yitzhak, and a-a-k, our “c” covers as a “k,” if you ever get messed up in spelling Isaac and you want to put “ss” in his name instead of “aa” just remember that from the Hebrew “aa” means you’ve got one consonant; the consonant sounds like an “a” and then there’s a vowel “a” and that’s why you have two “aa”s there. 

 

Yitzhak, laughter, so your boy is going to be called “Laughter.”  And that’s to act as a reminded.  Can you imagine calling the kid, “hey Laughter, where are you.” That’s literally what it meant so when Abraham and his wife had to call this kid through the village, “Laughter, Laughter, come here.”  And this would be known as his name. Sarah, every time she called her son “Laughter, Laughter” she’d be reminded of her stupidity and her doubt and Abraham would be reminded of his amazement, that God could bring this boy through him.  So it’s God’s sense of humor.  He gets bored after a while looking at you and me and so he has to do something to keep Himself amused and He pulls these little stunts off from time to time in history.  He probably got a chuckle every time… there they go, calling him again. 

 

Genesis 17:18, “Now you see another quality of Abraham’s character.  Strong though he was as a man, he was also a very merciful man and one thing you find amazing about Abraham’s character is that the times and the places where he could have been quite vengeful and spiteful he showed mercy, and here’s one of them.  In verse 17 he’s amazed and he half questions God, how can this be, that I can have a child this old, showing that he’s clearly in a situation where he recognizes the miraculous nature of it, and then he says, “Oh, that Ishmael might live before You!”  Because he suddenly realizes oh-oh, what did I bring into the world when I tried to do things my way.  I brought this little boy, here this little boy is 13 years old and I look at him and now his life has been rendered completely apart from the covenant.  It was my mistake.  Now what he prays for is Lord, it wasn’t that little boy’s mistake that he was born into the world; it was mine, it was  my mistake, it was my sin so I pray to cover him, to prosper him in a physical way, in a blessing way and that’s what he’s doing in verse 18.  So you find something of the man Abraham and how he thought.  He was not a vengeful, vindictive man.  He was a strong man, he was sent out, he would kill terrorists as he did in Genesis 14, but when it came to vengeance he was not a vengeful person. 

 

So verse 19 answers verse 17; verse 20 answers verse 18.  Genesis 17:19, “Sarah, thy wife, shall bear thee a son indeed; and thou shall call his name Yitzhak and I will establish My covenant with him for an everlasting covenant, and with his seed after him.  [20] And as for Ishmael, I have heard you: behold, I have blessed him, and I will make him fruitful, and will multiply him exceedingly, [twelve princes shall he beget], and I will make him a great nation.”  God did bless Ishmael.  Why? Because Ishmael was a believer?  No, because he had a father who prayed for his son and God listened to the prayers of his father. 

 

Genesis 17:21, “My covenant I will establish with Isaac,” however, so the emphasis still is on the plan of God, God’s sovereign plan will not be changed, it’s still going to come through Sarah, and she will bear as on twelve months from now, [“whom Sarah shall bear unto thee at this set time in the next year.”]  I say twelve months in verse 21 to make it clear to you that this was not a miraculous conception in the sense that it bypassed, like the virgin birth kind of thing, normal sexual intercourse.  This was required and so there again you have in verse 20-21 a clear blend of God’s sovereignty and human responsibility.  Twelve months, so the couple had to do something. 

 

Genesis 17:22, “And he left off [ceased] talking with him, and God went up from Abraham.”  That’s an interesting verb, God went up?  What do you suppose, a three stage missile or what?  The Theophany physically left the earth.  We don’t know what it looked like or what but just Abraham watched Him and that was it, He went up.

 

Now the passage concludes with something else that tells you much of the man Abraham, and his nature.  Genesis 17:23-27, the end of the chapter.  “And Abraham took Ishmael, his son, and all that were born in his house, and all that were bought with his money, and every male among the men of Abraham’s house, and circumcised the flesh of their foreskin in the self same [very same] day,” and in the Hebrew that’s emphasized.  As you look down to verse 26 it’s emphasized again, the self same day,” now that’s another character of this great model of faith.  When finally Abraham was convinced what God wanted him to do he said “yes Sir” and did it right away.  He didn’t sit there and argue, well I can’t do it today I’m tired; I’ve got to go watch the boob tube for two hours of Mickey Mouse, or I’ve got some other great important job on hand.  No, we’ll do it and we will do it today; whether we like it or whether we don’t, God has said it and we will do it.  You see, that has got to come; that is the sign of mature faith.

 

And there are some people and some people in Lubbock Bible Church that still can’t do this.  You have to go feel before you can obey; you’ve got to conjure up this sensation, I don’t know what it is, some spooky sensation before you’re convinced that you’re supposed to submit to the Scriptures on that point.  Now I think some of you may be confusing emotions with faith; I hope you’re not, but I think some of you honestly believe that faith, if it’s present in your heart, will have a feeling to it and if you have this feeling then you know okay, now I can obey the Word of God without being a hypocrite.  That’s not true.  There will become those times when you submit to the Scriptures just because you know they’re true.  Think of it in the normal non-religious thing in life.  If you know something is true, whether you feel like it or not, you do it, you get up in the morning and get your breakfast and sometimes you don’t feel like it but know the knob on the stove works, you know water still boils at 212 degrees, it did yesterday, still does, it takes you so long to heat it up and whether you’re just stumbling around blind in the morning or not, the laws that control the boiling of the water are still the same so you do it.  You don’t say I’m going to sit in bed until I have a feeling… maybe some of you do that too, I don’t know.

 

But the point is that faith is not feeling; faith is the convincing that it’s right and sometimes you will be in a situation where you can’t feel.  Some have experienced death, tragedy, heartache in a home, sometimes heartache will come so hard that it will render you almost to the point where you couldn’t emote if somebody said “boo” to you in a dark room on a back alley; nothing could happen, you are just totally destroyed emotionally, you are like a zombie and yet you still know the Word and you still know what you are to do and you still obey.  Now until you’ve had enough experiences like that you cannot mentally, some of you I think, distinguish between what it means to feel like believing God and believing Him and doing it.  But I urge you to watch these examples.  I needn’t go too far in the birds and the bees to make you realize that this wasn’t quite the most pleasant scene that you have pictured, with 300 or 400 men circumcised on the same day, and all these guys, 300 of them, were Abraham’s security guards.  So he’s rendering all of his camp open to marauders for probably 48 hours at least, while this healing process goes on.  That’s the kind of situation he faced.

 

Another thing to observe about this final test is apparently there was not static and flack given to Abraham, and that shows you another thing about him; it wasn’t that he was a big dictator, okay guys, if you don’t do it I am.  Nothing like that.  What Abraham said, we’re going to do it and they said yes, okay, fine. To have the stature that would suddenly that of 400 men in a company, not just talking about the family, this was a large size company, Abraham had to be a man and had to be a leader and had to have that illusive quality of leadership called inherent authority; that is that people trust him to the point he doesn’t have to raise his voice, he just says it and they say yes, that’s the thing to do. 

 

Let’s summarize what we’ve done.  Genesis 17 has been the chapter that shows the covenant of God showing up in space/time history.  Chapter 17 has pointed out clearly that what is promised in position must come true in experience.  Chapter 17 has shown us what a leader Abraham was, a man who instantly obeyed the Scriptures once it was clear what he ought to do, a man who commanded other men to follow because he was that kind of a mature leader, and a man who set the model for us in obedience.  Remember, as Abraham brings forth Yitzhak by a miraculous way, you and I as Christians ought to have a fruit of justification, but this time it’s not a child; this time it’s the fruit of righteousness.

 

Let me give some examples.  Remember that little passage back there when God said I’m going to do this to you, he kind of ha-ha, you know, just kind of a laughter of amazement.  Now sometimes it will happen in your Christian life that you will be on, say, let’s take a scene of tragedy and let’s pretend you’re the only believer there.  And maybe it’s a person you care very much for who’s a non-Christian, and they’re involved in an awful thing, and there’s no help around, there’s no notebooks, there’s nothing, just you and whatever you’ve got up here in that moment.  And you are able in some strange way to draw upon resources that you didn’t even know you had in your soul, Bible doctrine that you’d long since forgotten, promises that you never consciously memorized, suddenly come flowing and you are able to help that person, almost unconscious to yourself you’re able to help them. 

 

Or you might think of the Christians trapped in those awful prison compounds in Vietnam for 6 and 7 years, men who had not consciously memorized any Scripture but every day they kept praying, bring to my mind some more of the Scriptures that I heard my Sunday School teach me back in second grade, and somebody else would think of a few more clauses and then it’d get out the soot, the dust, the spit, and the carbon black off the bottom of that prison wall and scratch another verse into a piece of bark, cloth, or the side of the cave, and that was their Bible, the Gideon’s didn’t supply them with them, they supplied their own the hard way.   That’s the kind of fruit we’re talking about, the fruit of righteousness, that oftentimes in your Christian experience will come forth and you’ll very clearly know it wasn’t you that did it, there was another factor.  Just like Abraham laughed, can this happen to me who is old and sexually dead, we can laugh too and say can this kind of work come out of somebody who’s totally depraved and spiritually dead.

 

We’ll finish by singing……