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“This is my covenant with you… every male among you shall be circumcised… it will be the sign of the covenant between me and you…. any uncircumcised male, who has not been circumcised in the flesh, will be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant.” Genesis 17.
Circumcision is not required in the New Covenant. In the New Covenant we are “marked” with the Holy Spirit which is received at baptism. Acts 2:38.
“you also were included in Christ when you heard the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation. When you believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance…” Ephesians 1:13-14.
Circumcison was a physical “mark” performed by men. They marked themselves.
The gift of the Holy Spirit was a “mark” given by God for those believers who chose to be baptized. He did the marking.
Circumcision was only for men… not women… but the Holy Spirit was given to all mankind… men and women equally.
In the Old Testament if you refused to be circumcised you were not part of Gods people.
In the New Testament if you refuse the Holy Spirit… given at baptism… then you also refuse and disrespect God and are not part of his people.
God marks his people today not based on ethnicity but based on belieficity. Let’s all believe and obey!
In Matthew 18, Jesus was teaching his disciples about forgiveness and he told them that if they were forgiving then they would be forgiven but if they were not forgiving then they would not be forgiven.
And then Jesus illustrated that concept with a story. A guy owed the King 10,000 talents of silver (presumably silver) which was such a vast debt that there was no way he could repay. Long story short, the King through his grace forgave the debt because the debtor asked for it to be forgiven.
But then the recently forgiven dude found one of his debtors who owed far less and choked his neck and had him thrown in prison when he could not repay.
Anyway, word (as it often does) got back to the King and the King calls in the dude and says why didn’t you forgive like I forgave you? No answer. The King loses his temper and delivers the dude to be tortured.
The story concludes with Jesus’ admonition to his disciples that the same thing would happen to them if they didn’t give heart felt forgiveness.
Now some might think about the King as being a sort of “Indian Giver”. The King extended grace and forgave but later takes the forgiveness back. It wasn’t permanent, irrevocable forgiveness.
It was a kind of conditional grace… conditioned based on the believers actions.
Get this… God can take his grace back and threatened the 12 disciples with that very thing… they could be delivered to the “torturers”
And if the twelve Disciples could be delivered to the torturers then so could we. Appreciate God’s free gift of grace and live lives worthy of it… be forgiving from your hearts.
