And he received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had yet being uncircumcised: that he might be the father of all them that believe… (Romans 4:11).
In Psalm 32, King David writes: ‘Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin.’ The Apostle Paul quotes from the great, forgiven king in service to his grand exposition of the unstoppable power of God’s unmerited favor—the grace from which all our hopes depend.
But who is Psalm 32 meant to comfort? Is this divine blessedness the just reward for our accomplishments? Is the guilt humanity carries from moment to moment, year to year, something we can beat or medicate out of ourselves? Is there a law or substance or procedure through which I can save myself? A gigantic amount of the commerce, politics, and religion of our world exists to try and fill this universal need, and of course, it fails. Paul’s words to men and women who were taught to clutch silver idols to try and improve their lives are just as relatable to us modern people to whom an infinite number of dead and dying things are held out to us as talismans of salvation. The ultimate way to ensnare humanity in an endless cycle of self-destruction and shame and compliance is to convince us we can save ourselves: that deliverance from the stark limitations of our mortality can be negotiated or earned.
Paul, under the direction of God the Holy Spirit, would have us see Abraham as the ultimate example of both the madness of thinking we are capable of saving ourselves and the tremendous, enduring model of God’s grace and favor. The one to whom we all must look to understand how the Trinity is saving the world. Fascinatingly, the more we look at Abraham as the hinge or point of union for human salvation, the better we understand the necessity of Christ’s work and why it is our only hope.
It is good to start by reminding ourselves that it is Christ who saved both Abraham and David or Paul’s entire argument here makes no sense. Either Psalm 32, Genesis 15, and Genesis 17 are for Christ believers or there is absolutely no reason for Paul to quote them and base his argument around these texts. I mention this reality to make sure no one is laboring under the false idea that when Jesus says, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me,’ He really meant there are many ways to come to the Father including having the right bloodline or a particularly demanding religious tradition. All men who are saved are saved by grace through faith whether looking forward to the Messiah or living in the beginning of the new creation His death and resurrection have inaugurated.
Abraham was called by God to be a father despite being an old man with no children. He was a man with no future; a grim casualty of a world made cruel and twisted by humanity’s failure to rise above our shared slavery to sin and death. It would be hard to imagine someone less likely to be called out of our world to be the father of many nations than Abraham. In fact, it might seem like a cruel, cosmic joke for God to command Abraham to take his barren wife Sarah away from the only family they had to become strangers in a strange land: a land filled with warlords and child sacrifice, pain and betrayal. But of course, we are meant to see in Abraham’s unsuitability and peril the shimmering outline of our own calling into the family of God. For without Christ, what future do you and I have? We can try to rage and fight against the darkness or become its pathetic servant, but no amount of anger or groveling will hold back the darkness: it is as futile as screaming at a sunset. No, we too must, ‘…get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee. (Genesis 12:1). Abraham is our father because we are of the chosen, but he was also our father in sharing with us the desperate need to be delivered, and so he is our father when we leave the familiar lands of sin and death to journey to the promised land Jesus Christ has built with His true heart and loving obedience. God’s unmerited mercy on Abraham is our story; it is the beginning of how we and our children will make it home alive—how we will fill the mansions of the new heaven and earth with the holy family death can no longer rip away from us. We need not scream at the sunset if we know the Son will rise and never set.
Circumcision, as Paul writes today, was the sign and seal of being in the covenant people who trusted in the promise made to Abraham. It is Abraham’s faith which is made visible and objective in the physical changing of his body, and it is by faith that Abraham gives the sign of circumcision to his baby son Isaac, the Son of Promise, supernaturally given to the aged Abraham and Sarah and through whom the Savior of the world would be born. Isaac shows no evidence of faith, but the faith of Abraham is applied to his son as he receives the covenant sign. It is imperative that we understand that the seeming unworthiness of Isaac to receive the sign is no different from Abraham’s unworthiness. Abraham’s faith was just as much an unmerited gift as the sign bestowed upon the child Isaac, for there is no man who comes to salvation who is not drawn by the Father, as Jesus says, ‘No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day. It is written in the prophets, And they shall be all taught of God. Every man therefore that hath heard, and hath learned of the Father, cometh unto me’ (John 6:44-45).
It would be to miss the nature of God’s gracious work in creating and saving Abraham to falsely believe the patriarch had earned the covenant sign while Isaac had not; no, it is either grace or it is works as Paul writes, ‘Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt. But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness’ (Romans 4:4-5). ‘Justifieth the ungodly,’ who is Paul referring to here? Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Peter, John, you and me. All of us have put our faith in the incredible God who does not justify those who deserve it but those who do not. Paul knows that forgiveness even when he remembers the screams of the men and women he brought to be slaughtered by those who had the circumcision but not the faith which marks the true sons and daughters of Abraham, the sons and daughters of the living God.
This same understanding of ‘sign and seal’ remains with us who are the beneficiaries of the covenant expanding to include the Gentiles. As Paul writes in Colossians, after telling us to remain unspoiled from the ‘vain deceits’ and ‘traditions of men’ which would draw us away from Christ, he writes ‘And ye are complete in [Christ], which is the head of all principality and power: In whom also ye are circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, in putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ: Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised him from the dead. And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses; Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross; And having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it. (Colossian 2:10-15).
Our baptisms are the new covenant sign which now includes men and women as a signal that the finished work of Christ has added rather than subtracted to the covenant people of God, and of course as in circumcision, the faith of believing parents marks children as visible members of the covenant rather than little Canaanites who have no right to call God their Father. Baptism marks our unique Christian identity, and so it is the sign and seal of the regenerate circumcised hearts only God can give us in the fulfillment of God’s words to Jeremiah, ‘…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 (Jeremiah 31:33). Loving obedience can only flow from the faith we have been given as a gift, and so it is faith which saves both ethnic Jew and Gentile.
This reality should drive us to our knees in praise and worship of Jesus who is the author and finisher of our faith (Hebrews 12:2), and it should fill us with unending hope as we follow Abraham into the still occupied lands of this fallen planet, for despite the horrors and temptations which beset him, Abraham was never alone. Wherever he went he carried with him the righteousness of God and the unfolding glory of God’s fulfilled promises revealed to him each day of his life.
May we walk in that faith and know we are heirs of the world.