God not only calls us to worship him with praise and Scripture, but also to worship him with sacrifice (as we saw the last two weeks). God also establishes sacred covenant signs that unite the individual to God and to his holy people—his family—just as a wedding ring or the marital embrace unites spouses, renewing and deepening their covenant of love in a holy exchange of grace and affection. This too is true worship. These signs are sacred because God establishes them.
God also gives us memorials—like a wedding anniversary—to remind us of moments he revealed his eternal love in our history, renew our sacred covenant of love with him and the responsibilities we have assumed.
The first covenant God established was with Adam and Eve, with the seventh day for rest to be kept as a memorial (Gen. 2:1-3). They worshipped God with a sacrifice of obedience, not eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 2:16-17; 3:1-19) and so they were able to eat of the tree of life (Gen. 2:9), a sign of the covenant. Upon breaking the covenant, they lost access to the tree of life, and death entered our existence.
God established a new covenant with Noah after God saved his family from the flood. When they reached dry land, Noah offered a sacrifice to God (Gen. 8:20-21). God commanded Noah and his sons not to eat flesh with its blood (Gen. 9:4), setting the rainbow as the sign of the covenant (Gen. 9:12-16).
Sacred Circumcision
When God changed Abram’s name to Abraham, making him the father of many nations, God also made a covenant pact with him and with his future descendants: to be their God and to give them the land of Canaan as an everlasting possession. As a sign that he and his descendants accepted this covenant, he had to make the sacrifice of being circumcised, with every male in his household. Then Abraham, Ishmael, and every male in his house were circumcised (Gen. 17). After this, every boy had to be circumcised on the eighth day. When God fulfilled his promise to give Sarah and Abraham a male child, Abraham circumcised Isaac on the eighth day (Gen. 21:1-7).
Later, before Moses could return to Egypt to lead the people to the Promise Land, he became deathly sick. His wife then circumcised their sons, healing Moses and making him her “Bridegroom of Blood” (Exodus 4:24-26). To leave Egypt, God also commanded all the males first be circumcised to participate in the Passover Sacrifice (Exodus 12:43-48). So God maintained the covenant of circumcision with Abraham while establishing a new covenant with Moses, adding that, after the exodus from Egypt, all first-born males had to be consecrated to God (Exodus 13:2-3,12-16; 34:19-20): this was to be a memorial of how God slew the first-born of Egypt to free Israel from slavery.
After the people of God had crossed over the Jordan river but before they conquered Jericho to enter the Promised Land, all the boys and young men who had been born during the forty years in the desert had to be circumcised (Joshua 5:1-8). Then the people could offer the Passover Sacrifice to remember the great deed God had done for them. The manna then ceased, and they ate unleavened bread and the fruit of the land (Joshua 5:9-12).
“The covenant of circumcision” (Acts 7:8) became the way that males entered the covenant people of God—he became their God and they, his people. This sacrificial ordinance was to be kept by all God’s people (Leviticus 12:3). Divisions arose among the early Christians when some Jewish converts taught “the brethren, ‘Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved’” (Acts 15:1). The Holy Spirit led the apostles to declare that circumcision was fulfilled in Jesus Christ (Acts 15:6-41). So, circumcision no longer means anything for the Christian who is baptized into Christ.