Abraham (17:3-14, 23-27)
The people. “Abram” means “exalted father”; “Abraham” means “father of a multitude.” When Abraham informed the people in his camp that he had a new name, some of them must have smiled and said, “Father of a multitude! Why, he and his wife are too old to have children!” Whether he looked beneath his feet or up into the heavens, or whenever anyone called him by name, Abraham was reminded of God’s gracious promise to give him many descendants.
Keep in mind that Abraham’s descendants include not only the Jewish people, but also the Arab world (through Ishmael) and the nations listed in Genesis 25:1-4. All who trust Jesus Christ as Savior are spiritual children of Abraham (Gal. 3:6-9), and that will be a vast multitude (Rev. 7:9).
In being fruitful for God, we have nothing in ourselves that will accomplish the task. Abraham and Sarah had tried their own plan, and it failed miserably. Jesus said, “Without me ye can do nothing” (John 15:5). “We say that we depend on the Holy Spirit,” wrote Vance Havner, “but actually we are so wired up with our own devices that if the fire does not fall from heaven, we can turn on a switch and produce false fire of our own.”
I read about a young Scottish minister who walked proudly into the pulpit to preach his first sermon. He had a brilliant mind and a good education and was confident of himself as he faced his first congregation. But the longer he preached, the more conscious everyone was that “the Lord was not in the wind.” He finished his message quickly and came down from the pulpit with his head bowed, his pride now gone. Afterward, one of the members said to him, “If you had gone into the pulpit the way you came down, you might have come down from the pulpit the way you went up.”
The land. God’s everlasting covenant also included an everlasting possession: the land of Canaan. This land is a battleground today and always will be until the Lord returns to reign. But as far as God’s covenant is concerned, the land belongs to Israel.
The Jews’ ownership of the land depends solely on God’s gracious covenant with Abraham: God gave them the land. But their possession and enjoyment of the land depends on their faithfulness to obey the Lord. This was the theme of Moses’ messages in Deuteronomy. More than sixty times in that book, Moses told the people they would inherit or possess the land, and at least twenty-five times, Moses reminded them that the land was a gift from the Lord. God’s name was there (Deut. 12:5, 11, 21), and He would watch over the land to bless it if His people walked in His ways.
The only piece of ground all the patriarchs possessed was the cave Abraham purchased from Ephron, the son of Zohar, to become a family burial place (Gen. 23; 49:29-31). Jacob and his family had to leave the land and go to Egypt (Gen. 46), but God had promised that they would return to Canaan at the appointed time (15:13-17).
Joshua led them into their land where they conquered the inhabitants and claimed their inheritance. But the people did not stay true to the covenant, so God had to discipline them in the land (Judg. 2:10-23). He raised up enemy nations to defeat Israel and put her in bondage. Israel was in the land, but she did not control it or enjoy it (Deut. 28:15ff.).
During the reigns of David and Solomon, the people enjoyed their inheritance and served the Lord faithfully. But after the kingdom divided, Israel and Judah both decayed spiritually (except for occasional interludes of revival) and ended up in bondage: Assyria defeated Israel, and Babylon conquered Judah. It was then that God disciplined His people outside their land. It was as though He were saying, “You have polluted My land with your idols, so I will put you in a land that is addicted to idols. Get your fill of it! After you have been away from your land for seventy years, maybe you will learn to appreciate what I gave you.”
God permitted a remnant to return to the land, rebuild the city and the temple, and restore the nation, but it never became a great power again. However, whether Israel is faithful or faithless, the land belongs to her, and one day she will inherit it and enjoy it to the glory of God. Israel’s title deed to the land is a vital part of God’s everlasting covenant with Abraham.
The sign. In Genesis 17:4, God said, “As for Me,” but in verse 9, He said, “As for you” (nkjv, nasb, niv). Abraham’s part in the covenant was to obey God and mark each male in his house with the sign of the covenant. Circumcision was not a new rite, for other nations practiced it in Abraham’s time; but God now gave it new importance and special meaning. For the descendants of Abraham, circumcision was not an option; it was an obligation.
It is important to note that circumcision was not a “sacrament.” The performing of it did not convey spiritual blessing to the recipient. An eight-day-old baby boy (Lev. 12:3) would not even understand what was going on, and when he got older, the ritual would have to be explained to him. It was the obedience of the parents that was important, for if they did not obey God in this matter, their son would be cut off from his people (Gen. 17:14). The covenant people must bear the mark of the covenant.
Since God’s covenant involved Abraham’s “seed,” it was fitting that the mark of the covenant be on the male organ of generation. Since all people are conceived in sin (Ps. 51:5), this special mark would remind them that they were accepted by God because of His gracious covenant. It was God who chose the Jews, not the Jews who chose God (Deut. 7:1-11), and He chose them to be a holy people. Immorality was rampant among the Canaanite peoples, and was even a part of their religion, but the people of Israel were “marked” to be separate from the evil around them.
Unfortunately, the Jewish people eventually made this ritual a means of salvation. Circumcision was a guarantee that you were accepted by God. (Some people today place the same false confidence in baptism, Communion, and other religious rites that can be very meaningful if rightly used.) They did not realize that circumcision stood for something much deeper: the person’s relationship to God. God wants us to “circumcise our hearts” and be totally devoted to Him in love and obedience (Deut. 10:16; 30:6; Jer. 4:4; Rom. 2:28-29).
Romans 4:9-12 makes it clear that the physical operation had nothing to do with Abraham’s eternal salvation. Abraham had believed God and received God’s righteousness before he ever was circumcised (Gen. 15:6). Circumcision was not the means of his salvation but the mark of his separation as a man in covenant relationship with God. The legalistic element in the early church tried to make circumcision and obedience to the law a requirement for salvation for the Gentiles, but this heresy was refuted (Acts 15:1-35). In his Galatian epistle, Paul argues convincingly for salvation by grace alone.
What does all of this mean to Christian believers today? The seal of our salvation is not an external rite but the presence of an internal witness in the person of the Holy Spirit of God (Eph. 1:13; 4:30; Rom. 8:9, 16). We have experienced a “spiritual circumcision” (Col. 2:9-12) that makes us part of the “true circumcision” (Phil. 3:1-3 nasb). When we trusted Christ to save us, the Spirit of God performed “spiritual surgery” that enables us to have victory over the desires of the old nature and the old life. Circumcision removes only a part of the body, but the true “spiritual circumcision” puts off “the body of the sins of the flesh” (Col. 2:11) and deals radically with the sin nature.
This “spiritual circumcision” is accomplished at conversion when the sinner believes in Christ and is baptized by the Spirit into the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12:13). This baptism identifies the believer with Christ in His death, burial, resurrection, and ascension, and also in His circumcision (Col. 2:11-12; Luke 2:21). It is not “the circumcision of Moses” but “the circumcision of Christ” that is important to the Christian believer.
Donald Grey Barnhouse has said, “We have a nature of sin that must be dealt with by the knife.… The thing must be dealt with as a whole, and not piecemeal.” In Christ, we can “walk in the Spirit, and … not fulfil the lust of the flesh” (Gal. 5:16).
Abraham immediately obeyed God and gave every male in his household the mark of the covenant. No doubt when he told them his new name, he also explained what this ritual meant.