"The Sacraments"
Gen. 17:1-14
Feb. 2, 1997

Text Comment

v.14 Circumcision was widely practiced in the ANE. The Philistines did not and were known in Israel as "uncircumcised." It was often a rite of passage into manhood. In Israel, of course, it was performed at the headwaters of life as a sign of membership in God's covenant.

We come this morning for the fourth time to this most important text and take up one more of the great subjects that receive either a definitive statement or prominent introduction in this account of the renewal and elaboration of God's covenant with Abraham, the father of the faithful.

This morning I want to consider this text as the first in the Bible to introduce the existence and purpose of "sacraments" in the life of God's people. This is, of course, the text which introduces circumcision in the OT as the sign of God's covenant with his people. Later we will be taught that sacrifice and, especially, Passover serve in a similar way as signs and seals of God's covenant, and, of course, much later, baptism and the Lord's Supper will come in the place of circumcision and Passover as the sacraments of the present epoch in the history of salvation.

Now, we have already argued that circumcision is not the first sacrament, not the first sign of God's covenant. Not only have we already read of the rainbow, which is explicitly said to be a sign of the covenant God made with Noah never again to destroy the world, but the trees of Life and of the Knowledge of Good and Evil we said were sacraments of God's covenant with man in the Garden. But here, with the introduction of circumcision, we have something new: new, not only because of the explicit introduction and command concerning this rite that will be a sign of the covenant, new not only because there is something for us to do, but new because it is a sign of the covenant God made, not with man generally as in the Garden and with Noah, but with his own, his chosen people, the people to whom he is promising salvation.

Here for the first time we are introduced to the "rites," the central rituals of the Christian church, the rites and practices that separate Christians from non-Christians.

Now, it will not surprise you to know that this entire area of the Bible's teaching has been through many ages a matter of the keenest controversy. Christians have differed among themselves over virtually every aspect of the Bible's teaching about these rites, whether circumcision and passover in the OT, or baptism and the Lord's Supper in the NT.

They have argued whether these and these only are the sacraments of the church, the Roman Church and the Eastern Church having more, seven indeed, though they do not agree entirely with one another as to which rites belong among these sacraments; they have argued strenuously over the nature of the working and efficacy of these rites -- what spiritual effect they have and how that effect comes about; they have argued about to whom the sacraments are to be given, by whom they are to be administered, and, even, whether they are to be used at all.

What A.B. Bruce said about the Lord's Supper could be fairly said about the sacraments in general.

"The history of these controversies is very humiliating and their consequences most disastrous. Through them the symbol of union has been turned into a chief cause of division. The church has remembered her Lord, and obeyed His commandment of love, as members of families sometimes remember a deceased parent, casting angry glances at each other across his grave, and retiring to the house, whose head they have buried, to squabble about the meaning of his will." [The Training of the Twelve, p. 357]

And squabble hardly does it justice. In the Anglican communion alone, one scholar, reminds us, "Two archbishops of Canterbury have lost their lives and a third his see, in those quarrels. One king has been beheaded and another dethroned; many lesser men have suffered all manner of penalties from martyrdom downwards on one side and another." [Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, p. 614] One German scholar says rather finely that the history of the doctrine of the Supper has been itself a Leidensgeschichte, a history of suffering.

And to that we add all the controversies about baptism, beginning already in earliest Christianity and still with us today.

I do not at all mean to excuse the church for the confusion and misery and misunderstanding and harm and spiritual death that all of these different opinions have caused through the ages. But, I tell you candidly, I myself find this entire part of the Bible's teaching on of the most difficult of all its doctrines.

Even the definition of terms is a problem. Perhaps you will recognize the problem if I point out to you the fact that the term "sacrament" which I have used to refer to circumcision, passover, baptism, and the Lord's Supper, is not itself a biblical term. It was a term taken over from the Latin culture of the early church and was in early Christian theology used very flexibly. Augustine, for example, provided the most famous definition of a sacrament, when he defined it as "an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace." But, then, he went on to enumerate more than thirty such "sacraments" including "making the sign of the cross" and ordination as well as baptism and the Lord's Supper.

In the Eastern Church these rites are referred to as "mysteries" which is a biblical term but it is never used in the Bible of these rites. But the term came to be applied to the rites of the church because of the sense that their way of working was mysterious, incomprehensible and invisible

Now, here in Gen. 17, no real explanation of circumcision is offered, no real theory of sacramental efficacy mysterious or otherwise. We aren't told how such a rite was to function, exactly what role it was to play in a believer's life. We are told only that it was a "sign" of the covenant.

Now a sign is something that stands for something else, a visible thing that represents something invisible, or at least represents some meaning or significance that can be compressed into a sign.

We, of course, have all manner of signs today that serve to represent things -- whether traffic instructions or a particular kind of hamburger. And we have many signs that are extraordinarily impressive and important to us for their capacity to contain within themselves a great deal of precious meaning -- a wedding ring, or the Stars and Stripes for which soldiers have actually risked their lives that it might not lie in the mud of some battlefield.

Well circumcision was such a sign. This was a sign of God's covenant. And if we ask why this sign and not another, though the Scripture never explains this in so many words, perhaps it doesn't take much thought to see at least some of the reason. The permanent marking of the body suggests the everlasting character of this covenant, either its blessings or its cursings -- "no turning back, no turning back" --; the marking of the most intimate part of the body suggesting the reach of this covenant and its demands into the innermost part of the life -- which is why the Bible will speak later of the circumcision of the heart as an image of that total devotement of life to God that is required in this covenant and that God brings to pass in all who are truly in covenant with him. What is more, the act of circumcision apparently had some sense in those days of an act of cleansing or an image of purification. Uncircumcised lips, for example, later will be a way of speaking of human sinfulness and impurity. It is this part of the signification of circumcision that is taken over primarily into baptism, which is so obviously a sign of cleansing. What is done in circumcision, then, seems to convey in an indelible way the character of the covenant in which one now stands with God -- and all that it requires of us and all that we receive in it as a gift of God -- the forgiveness of our sins and the cleansing of our hearts; deliverance from both the guilt and the power of sin, and the entire consecration of ourselves to God.

But, still, we are not given here a clear explanation of how circumcision is to work, what effect it is to have upon those in the covenant and exactly why it is appointed. The problem becomes still more complex later when other things are said about circumcision and when we come to the other sacraments, concerning which the Bible says a number of striking things, things that suggest that the sacraments are divine instruments in the life of believers in a way that we would not perhaps guess from the few words said of circumcision here.

We cannot take up those statements this morning and, in any case, they are not in the text that we have before us, which is what we are to consider. So, I want to confine myself to a narrower point, a point that is certainly the chief emphasis of what God did say in Gen. 17, his first great statement on the sacraments. I am speaking of the tremendous weight that God places on this rite and obedience to the commandment to perform it.

So emphatic is the obligation to circumcise the male members of the covenant community that, in v. 10, by way of synecdoche or part for the whole, it becomes the covenant itself. "This is my covenant with you...every male among you shall be circumcised." And then the "every." Every male, no matter what, is to be circumcised, no matter how he comes into the covenant community: by birth or by adoption or by conversion. And, then, and most emphatically, any male who is not circumcised shall be judged cut off from God's people.

We may wonder about certain things touching this sacrament and all the sacraments, one thing we cannot doubt is the importance the Lord himself attaches to these rites and ceremonies.

Now, that in itself, is highly important and interesting and all the more important for a congregation of American evangelicals for whom, at least generally, the sacraments do not occupy a place of great importance. For many such evangelicals, and I suspect for many of you, and, I know, too much for me, the sacraments could disappear and my Christian life would be left intact; many Christians, I suspect, would scarcely miss them.

And, they would certainly be able to say something in explanation of that fact.

1. After all, for example, the Bible makes it perfectly obvious that the sacraments of the OT and NT are not the difference in someone's salvation. Israel had circumcision and the passover but perished in unbelief in the wilderness. Throughout the centuries from Moses to Christ circumcision continued to be practiced but for most of that time the people of Israel as a whole were unbelievers and idolaters. Paul, in 1 Cor. 10, warns the Corinthians believers of this very fact and urges them not to suppose that being baptised or participating in the Lord's Supper will prevent a man or woman from slipping away into hell.

2. What is more, though clearly here and everywhere else, one purpose of these signs, and of circumcision and baptism in particular, is to mark out those who are in covenant with God, to identify the people of God, once again, through the ages, vast multitudes of folk have been circumcised or baptised who lacked living faith in Christ and died under God's wrath. All of us know folk who were baptised either as infants or as adolescents or adults who became real Christians only much later and we all, alas, know folk whom we cannot regard as Christians -- for their lack of faith in God's Word or obedience to his commandments -- but who have been baptised and participate regularly in the Supper, or Eucharist, or Mass.

Why, then, should we make too much of these rites, these signs of the covenant? Well, the first answer, which is the answer we are given here, is simple enough: because God makes so much of them! And not only here where he threatens to cut off any uncircumcised male from his people.

1. In Exodus 3 we read that strange and, from the point of view of American evangelical Christianity, that unsettling episode, when God threatened to kill Moses -- this after Moses had been set apart to deliver God's people from Egypt -- because Moses had not seen to the circumcision of his son.

[Upper Room - last night, with suffering and death before him...]

2. And, in the Great Commission, the last will and testament of our Lord and Savior, there is baptism in a central place in the commission of the Christian church: "go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit..."

3. And, what is perhaps more weighty evidence of the importance attached to these rites by God himself, he sustains their place in the life of his people, as the irreplaceable signs of his covenant with them, even though through all the ages of the ancient epoch over and over again God's people stumbled over the sacraments and found it so easy to turn them into talismans, charms to ward off God's wrath, were so ready to trust their souls and their salvation and their peace with God to these rites as if the rites themselves made unnecessary any true faith in God or love for him or willing and whole-souled submission of their lives to his rule. Always the prophets had to tell the people of God not to trust in circumcision and the sacrifices as if the doing of such things made them right with God when they had neither true faith nor love.

Always the prophets themselves mourned the fact that the people continued to practice these rites without faith and continued to assure themselves of God's favor because of their faithfulness to circumcision and sacrifice. As the prophets say what Jeremiah when he tried to convince the people that while they were circumcised, they were uncircumcised.

We might well have supposed that God would tire of this and, in the new epoch, throw up his hands in disgust and leave rites and sacraments out of the life of his church altogether as simply an unnecessary danger and complication. Through all those centuries the sacraments -- circumcision and sacrifice -- had mostly been misused, corrupted. Might we not have expected that, in view of that history, God would simply eliminate these covenant signs? But he did not! He made them as central to the life of the church in the new age as it was to the life of the church in the ancient epoch. And he made the sacraments so knowing full well how regularly the church would stumble over them in just the same way it did before! It is certainly no surprise that baptism and the Lord's Supper were turned, over and over again, in Christian history into superstitions and charms, and that their practice by generations of Christians would replace the Lord himself and living faith in him. It was what had always happened before. The Reformers in the 16th century, for example, were nothing more than the OT prophets reborn, their message was the same: warning the church against a confidence in external rites and calling her back again to true faith in Christ and true love for him, such love as shows itself in holy living and the love of others in God's name. 

Now, given that sorry history, given the penchant of the church to corrupt the sacraments and turn them into an obstacle in the way of the gospel instead of a sign of the covenant of grace, God's insistence upon them and upon their use and practice by his people is all the more impressive.

Now, what we have here in Gen. 17 is only the beginning of the Bible's theology of the sacraments and their place and function in the life of faith. Only this: that they are "signs of the covenant."

Our fathers saw clearly what this meant -- at least, something of what this meant -- there is mystery here as well, of course, as in every area of our faith.

Calvin, taking seriously the Lord's definition of these rites as "signs" of the covenant wrote this concerning any and all sacraments, from circumcision to the Lord's Supper:

"it is an outward sign by which the Lord seals on our consciences the promises of his good will toward us in order to sustain the weakness of our faith; and we in turn attest our piety toward him in the presence of the Lord and of his angels and before men."

That doesn't tell you exactly how the "sealing" takes place; by what means the Lord makes these rites to strengthen our faith. But that is what they are, what they are for, and his insistence on their practice reminds us of how important they must be, whether we understand or even sense that importance much of the time.

Gen. 17 is a summons to come to sacramental worship with true and living expectation. Whatever God insists upon so forcefully, must be important to him and thus very important to us; and being our covenant God, very important to the maintaining of our relationship with him.

He wishes to make visible in our lives the grace and salvation he has promised us who trust in him and love him. Let us open our eyes and our mouths and our hearts in the certainty that our God has something to give us!

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