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A MISSIONARY was reading the
gospels to some rural Chinese. But he skipped the passage about
Jesus’ genealogy. The Chinese wanted to know what he had
left out. When he told them, they were indignant. Of course,
they wanted to know about Jesus’ family. How can you trust
anyone if you don’t know where he comes from?
There are plenty of passages
in the Bible which we tend to skip over. They don’t mean
anything to us, so we are not interested. But that doesn’t
mean they are not important. It might just mean that we are ignorant
of their meaning.
CIRCUMCISION INSTITUTED
I admit it. I generally skip over Jesus’ circumcision.
Yet it is hardly a meaningless part of his story. It is really
part of how the Bible tells us who Jesus is and what his purposes
are for us.
Eight days after his birth, Jesus was circumcised. It’s
the law for Jewish males.
Now, we should understand about
circumcision.
If you are squeamish, you might
want to go outside. Someone can call you when I’ve finished.
This will be M-rated. There will be sexual references and adult
themes.
There is a vast difference between male circumcision, and so-called
“female circumcision” as practiced in some traditional
and Muslim cultures.
Jewish boys are circumcised at eight days old by cutting a
narrow band of skin away. It heals quickly without loss of sexual
function. A very small number of babies suffer problems, but
even babies with haemophilia are usually OK.
Circumcision reduces the risks of infections due to hot climates
and poor hygiene. And wives of circumcised men have very low
rates of cervical cancer.
So–called “Female circumcision” entails the
cutting out everything possible to keep a woman from having any
sexual pleasure. It is often done at about 12 years old, and
causes massive physical and psychological trauma, ugly scars
and even chronic pelvic infections.
Don’t be confused about these procedures. One is minor
trimming, the other is major mutilation.
If you went outside, you can come in again, now!
Well, on the eighth day, Mary
and Joseph took their baby boy to be circumcised, just the same
as every little Yohanan and Y’shua and Netanyahu and David
who was born on the same day. And they gave him the name, Jesus
— Y’shua — just as the angel had told them to.
In Jesus’ time, probably very few Jews even thought about
the health side of circumcision. It was a religious ritual, one
of the most important ones in the whole Jewish lifestyle.
Let’s go back to the beginning.
In Genesis 15 we read that
the Lord promised to be with Abram, but Abram was worried that
he had no heir, other than a slave who managed his business.
We read,
GE 15:4 Then the word of the
LORD came to him: “This man will not be your heir, but a
son coming from your own body will be your heir.” 5 He took him outside and said, “Look
up at the heavens and count the stars—if indeed you can
count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring
be.”
6 Abram believed the LORD,
and he credited it to him as righteousness.
Abram still wasn’t sure
that he would inherit the land, and wanted a sign. It continues:
GE 15:9 So the LORD said to him, “Bring
me a heifer, a goat and a ram, each three years old, along with
a dove and a young pigeon.”
10 Abram brought all these
to him, cut them in two and arranged the halves opposite each
other; the birds, however, he did not cut in half. 11 Then birds of prey came down on the
carcasses, but Abram drove them away.
12 As the sun was setting,
Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness
came over him. 13 Then the LORD said to
him, “Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers
in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated
four hundred years. 14 But I will punish the
nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out
with great possessions. 15
You, however, will go to your fathers in peace and be buried
at a good old age...”
Finally we read how God completed
the covenant agreement between himself and Abram:
GE 15:17 When the sun had set
and darkness had fallen, a smoking firepot with a blazing torch
appeared and passed between the pieces. 18 On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram
and said, “To your descendants I give this land, from the
river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates...”
From that time, many years
passed, and Abram never forgot the promise. God had bound Abram
to himself and himself to Abram. God chose Abram, God blessed
Abram, and God would never desert Abram. But Abram lived his
life, and he even had a son, Ishmael, by his wife’s servant,
Hagar.
Twenty three or more years after the first time God appeared
to Abram to establish the Covenant, God spoke to Abram again.
He said he would now confirm his covenant with Abram, and would
keep the promise to give him descendants and to bless all nations
through his seed.
But Abram had responsibility
as well. Apart from walking before the Lord and being blameless,
Abram also had to be circumcised, and so did all the males in
his household, as a sign that they were people within God’s
Covenant of blessing for a chosen people. So we read,
10 This is my covenant
with you and your descendants after you, the covenant you are
to keep: Every male among you shall be circumcised. 11 You are to undergo circumcision, and
it will be the sign of the covenant between me and you. 12 For the generations to come every male
among you who is eight days old must be circumcised...
13 Whether born in your
household or bought with your money, they must be circumcised.
My covenant in your flesh is to be an everlasting covenant. 14 Any uncircumcised male, who has not
been circumcised in the flesh, will be cut off from his people;
he has broken my covenant.”
To belong to God’s chosen
people, to Israel, a man had to be circumcised.
In Jewish law, a woman is automatically within the covenant,
but a man has to be made part of the covenant. Jewishness always
passes through the woman in Jewish law.
I saw a movie about a young
girl. She was in her early teens, a bit rebellious, and she went
to a Catholic school. The nun was getting the children to fill
in personal details for enrolment, and the girl left one field
blank. The nun said, “You haven’t listed your religion
here.”
The girl replied, “I don’t have a religion.”
The nun said, “What’s this? Everyone has a religion!
Are you an atheist?”
“No,” said the girl, “But in the Catholic religion,
Catholicism passes down through the father, but my father is
a Jew, so he can’t pass on Catholicism to me. And, in the
Jewish religion, being a Jew passes through the mother, but my
mother can’t pass Jewishness on to me, because she’s
a Catholic, so I guess I am nothing.”
So Jewish woman is always a Jew and within the Covenant, but
a Jewish man has to be fixed up before he becomes a man of the
Covenant.
JESUS, THE COVENANT MAN
So Jesus had to be circumcised to come within the Covenant,
the one begun with Abram, refocused through Moses, and still
in force nearly 2000 years later.
God never saves outside his Covenants. When he brought the
people out of Egypt, it was because of his covenant with Abram.
When he brought the people into Canaan, it was because of the
Covenant at Sinai. When he saved you and me, it was through the
Covenant established on the cross.
You look at any of the new religions, from Islam to Latter
Day Saints, and none of them has a grasp of God’s covenants.
They use the word, but don’t know the reality.
To be our Saviour, Jesus had
to stand firmly on what was established beforehand.
So his parents brought him to be circumcised. They wanted him
to be a Jew in every way.
They were poor people. They couldn’t afford the sacrificial
lamb required when a woman’s days of purification after
childbirth were over. But they did what was right.
They were social outcasts. Mary was still only promised in
marriage to Joseph, and people would have known it. But they
wanted the best for their boy.
They had had to begin a family in a rush with the least of
preparation, and start it in an enforced journey from Nazareth
in the north to Bethlehem in the south. They just didn’t
have all the things that most people had. But they were determined
to make a go of it. They were good people.
And they made Jesus into a
Covenant man, a man who belonged as a Jew, a man who stood in
the paths of Moses and Abraham and the prophets and the kings
and the priests. He was a Jew among Jews.
JESUS: THE LORD SAVES
We also read that they named him Jesus.
In many ways that was an insignificant act. How many thousands
of little Jesuses were running around Israel in those days? It
was a common name, Y’shua. Y’shua was Moses’ successor,
Joshua; the man who fought the battle round Jericho, the one
who brought Israel into the Promised Land.
But there was one unusual aspect. Do you remember when John
the Baptist was born? Everyone wanted to know what name he was
to have, and Zechariah wrote that he was to be called, John.
Everyone was astonished, because no one in Zechariah’s or
Elizabeth’s families was called, John. But Zechariah insisted,
because it was what the angel had told him.
There doesn’t seem to
have been a Y’shua in Joseph’s or Mary’s family
either. Even without bringing the angel into it, people would
say, “These two have great hopes for their boy.”
But the name means, “Yahweh
saves”. It was a pointer to what was to come. Jesus was
not only a man from the Old Covenant, he was the mediator of
the New Covenant. He was the one Israel looked for. When the
prophets looked forwards, they saw a time when God would establish
a new covenant, not written on tablets of stone, but written
on the hearts of men and women.
The name, Jesus, is a Salvation name, a New Covenant name.
This would be an everlasting Covenant, a Messianic Covenant,
a Covenant in which the Lord would suddenly come to his Temple,
even the messenger of the Covenant.
By calling him Jesus, they
pointed to the coming of that Salvation, just over the horizon,
just about to dawn on the people.
THE OBEDIENT MAN
We also see that they named him Jesus as the angel had told
them to.
The family of Joseph and Mary might not have been perfect,
but they knew that a life pleasing to God is an obedient life.
When God says, “Do something!” they knew that you
do it.
When the angel told Mary that God had chosen her as the Messiah’s
mother, Mary said, “I’m your servant, do as you will.”
This was the environment that Jesus grew up in, an environment
of obedience, even if it brought terrible difficulties, even
if it caused people to think them eccentric.
In John 15, Jesus makes the
point to his followers:
JN 15:9 “As the Father has loved me, so
have I loved you. Now remain in my love. 10 If you obey my commands, you will remain in my
love, just as I have obeyed my Father’s commands and remain
in his love."
As Keith Green said, quoting
Samuel,
“To obey is better than sacrifice.”
APPLICATION
We are going into 2003. It’s a new year, a year of opportunity.
For some it will be a year
of changing family situations, Your family might grow, or it
might shrink. It might take different directions. You might get
engaged, or married; you might have someone sicken or die. There
are many possibilities in families.
For others, it might be career changes: retirement, retrenchment,
redeployment; new positions, starting your first job.
Or you might begin a new phase of your relationship with Christ,
a new area of ministry, a new direction with something you have
been at for a long time, or dropping something that no longer
works effectively.
It might be something new in social and community affairs,
or the end of some social or community involvement.
Whatever you do, some kind
of new beginning is involved.
The first lesson we can draw
is,
Understand the issues. What principles are involved? Where
do they derive from? How well do I understand them? If you don’t
know what you are working with, you won’t know where to
begin.
The second lesson is,
Ground yourself securely in solid first principles. Don’t
cut yourself loose from what you know, even if you can see that
it isn’t ideal for current conditions. As Jesus began with
the Old Covenant, begin with dependable basics.
The third lesson is,
Live in hope of a radically different future. This is
where fundamentalists go wrong. They get the part about solid
basics right, and refuse to look at a changing future. “The
Lord hath yet more light and truth to break forth from his holy
Word.”
Finally,
Obey all the way. Certainly, you will fail ocasionally.
But get up and keep obeying, and, no matter what befalls, you
will remain in Jesus’ love.
May he bless you abundantly.
AMEN |
