What was the meaning of circumcision in the Abrahamic covenant?
Remember the context in which circumcision was instituted: right after Abraham tried to produce the promised seed in his own strength with Hagar. The sequence of Gen. 15-16-17 is critical. Abraham is given the promise of the seed (chapter 15). But then he tried to bring the promised seed into the world in the strength of his own flesh (chapter 16). As a consequence, God “weakens” the male organ of generation to remind Abraham that it is God’s power, not his own, that will bring about the fulfillment of the promise (chapter 17). Circumcision is the sign of the covenant precisely because it is a sign that the coming seed, but that seed will be a gift of grace, born of the Spirit, not the flesh. When Isaac is finally born many years later (chapter 21), this becomes clear. Abraham and Sara are way too old for children, but their son’s miraculous birth is a type of the messiah to come (and this is made even more clear when Isaac undergoes a symbolic death and resurrection on Mount Moriah in chapter 22).
Circumcision is simply the male equivalent of female barrenness (note how many patriarchs had barren wives in the book of Genesis and elsewhere in the old covenant — Satan was trying his best to keep the promised seed from coming into the world). To be blunt, circumcision was a symbolic castration. The seed would be born of the Spirit, not the flesh. The seed of the woman would come into the world as a gift, not as man’s achievement.
But now that God has provided the true promised seed, Jesus Christ, through the ultimate barren womb, that of a virgin, circumcision is obsolete. Sure, Jewish Christians continued to practice it for a while after Pentecost (just as they continued going to the temple, taking Nazirite vows, etc.). But it became clear during the apostolic era that circumcision, like the rest of the old covenant system, was obsolete and was fading away. In 70 AD, the old covenant came to a final end. To go on circumcising (for covenantal purposes) as some Jewish Christians wanted to, even insisting that Gentiles get circumcised, is a denial that Jesus is the promised seed. It’s a denial that the new age has come. This is one of the themes of Galatians — Paul is showing that Jewish Christians who demand Gentile Christians get circumcised are trying to live in a BC way in an AD world. They’re trying to turn back the clock of redemptive history, and it cannot be done.
Further, a bloody rite of covenant entrance would no longer be fitting now that the final and effective bloody sacrifice has been offered on the cross. The blood of circumcision was a typological pointer to the cross, e.g., when a son was circumcised, his mother was cleansed under the law (Leviticus 12). But now that Christ has been cut off for us on the cross, the people of God no longer practice circumcision as a covenant badge (Col. 2:11ff).
In the old covenant, circumcision marked out Israel as God’s priestly nation. Circumcision was given before the law of Moses, but in Galatians, Paul lumps circumcision with the law because it was part of the Jew/Gentile divide God instituted temporarily, until the seed came. Gentiles could be saved under the old covenant, but they could not share in Israel’s special priestly privileges without becoming Jews via circumcision. Gentile God-fearers in the old covenant era were welcome to all the special feasts, with one exception — the Passover. To participate in the Passover required circumcision. But, again, circumcision cannot be the mark of God’s new covenant family. At the end of Galatians 3, Paul cinches this point: Circumcision has to go because it divided Jew from Gentile and thus stood in the way of God forming one worldwide Abrahamic family, which had been the goal from Genesis 12 onwards. Indeed, circumcision differentiated the covenantal status not just of Jews and Gentiles, but of males and females in ways that are no longer appropriate. Obviously, Galatians 3:28 has been abused by egalitarians — Paul is not doing away with the categories of sex or ethnicity. But he is showing that they no longer any connection to covenant status in the new age. The singular worldwide family promised to Abraham is now coming into existence. The Abrahamic covenant has been transformed and is now coming to fulfillment in Christ.
The irony is that while circumcision should have been a continual call to humility and self-abandoning trust for old covenant Israelites, they managed to turn it into its opposite – into a sign of Jewish pride and privilege. And so Paul rightly tells those who want to go on practicing covenantal circumcision to go the whole way and castrate themselves (Gal. 5:12). Elsewhere, he says that covenantal circumcision is now a form of mutilation (Phil. 3:2) — which is ironic, since circumcision marked out Israel out as a priestly nation, but men who were mutilated were disqualified from the priesthood. Circumcision was once an entrance ritual, but now Paul says it has become an exit ritual.
While unbelieving Jews boasted in circumcision, Paul shows it has become their shame. By analogy, imagine someone boasting he was so clean that he *needed* baptizing! It makes no sense to say you’re so clean, you need to be washed. Baptism, too, is humbling because it is a sign of God’s promise and action, not our own. The only thing we bring to the font is spiritual dirt. Likewise, circumcision was supposed to be a sign of Israel’s inability to produce her own Savior, it was a sign of her desperate need for God to do for her what she could not do for herself.
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