Genesis 21:

3 When his son Isaac was eight days old, Abraham circumcised him as God commanded him.

In previous meditations, we saw God cutting a covenant with Abraham. Abraham, taking a heifer, a goat and a ram, each, three years old, and a dove and a pigeon, cuts the animals in half and kills the fowls. Into this arranged  row of two halves of animals, descends God to walk. It’s a great enacted statement of being one with with Abraham. It says, “My life is for your life. Any one that touches you has also touched me. I’m in covenant with you. If you are attacked, I’m also attacked. If I fail to come to your aid and help, then the life of the betrayer amongst the two parties will be as the end of those animals and fowls.” Covenant is supposed to be between two, but this is initiated by God, even though He is one.

Covenant, in Hebrew, means cutting off. There are echoes of this, if distorted, in Africa where neighbouring people cut covenant to help protect one another from attackers or marauders.

In this covenant, it’s to be noted that blood was shed. It’s called the speaking blood; it stood for God’s rights on earth. Now, this was a type of blood shed even before the world began. It’s a mystery!

The Abraham covenant constitutes the Old Testament in the scriptures while the the latter, involving Christ’s own life as the incarnate of God bunches up as the New Testament. Trusting by faith in the atoning and remissing blood of Jesus Christ doesn’t only save physically and ensure preservation of ife, it also ensures eternal salvation. The shed blood of God means life and no deaths or darkness can breach through it. It’s a drawn line on the ground impassable for thrones, dominion, principalities and powers. Christ as a covenant is the most effective initiative God has done with man. And to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling, that speakerh better things than that of Abel (Hebrews 12:24). The eternal blood of sprinkling speaks, pleads on behalf of each man that has brought himself under the blood by faith.

This eternal covenant between man and God, cut and mediated by God Himself, also ensures the victory over the flesh, the law-weakened,  which draws man irresistibly away from God.

In this passage of meditation above, Abraham is seen obeying the token or sign of the covenant God cut with him earlier even before Isaac was conceived. On the eighth day after the so much expected Isaac was born. …. it’s time to circumcise him and “it will be the sign of the covenant between you and me” (Genesis 17:11). The covenant cut of God using Christ  puts the authority of the Father, the initiator, on whoever believes in Christ for salvation. It’s a sign or token of the covenant. A consciousness grows in the believer as him having a Lord, a Owner. Just as the sign of the covenant was to separate and make Abraham’s descendants distinct from all the world, so the covenant relationship with Christ is to separate and make believers in Christ distinct from the rest of mankind. As far as we are concerned, there are two types of mankind: all who have first birth into this world though natural descent and those who have been born again, the second time, born of the Spirit through faith in Christ. In the exodus through the wilderness, Israel was to wear a piece of blue cloth on their garments, identifying them with the heavenly which was to say they were in the heavenlies. And all in Christ, whether they know it or not, have been lifted together with Christ Jesus into the heavenlies very far above thrones, dominion, principality, authority…

The people that descended from Abraham, the Israelites came to believe that this covenant made by God with Abraham involved merely cutting off the foreskin. But no, they were wrong; it’s a spiritual identification with the giver of the sign of circumcision. Paul says of the Israelites that they had missed the true meaning and significance of the sign. It’s actually a worship done in Christ Jesus, which is more of spiritual significance. Circumcision later became the basis of Jewish discrimination against other races of the world. But by Christ Jesus God has actually cut eternal covenant with man, not now only with Israel alone, and it’s not anymore of cutting the flesh but being in the depth of Christ, putting off all that offends against the divine nature. In whom also ye are circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, in putting of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ (Colossians 2:11). Circumcision is, as earlier alluded, worship, the worship of the only true God; it’s glorifying the Lord by our replicating the excellency of His moral and spiritual life, pleasing the father, standing for God’s rights on the plain of the earth. For we are the the circumcision which worship God in the spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh (Philippians 3:3).

Isaac was a promised son in whom human race would be blessed. He wasn’t born by parental decisions but by the promise of God. To make the distinction clear, Isaac arrived when it was impossible for him to be born. He was God’s deliberate miracle. The family knew this and worshipped God. The birth of Jesus Christ might have looked as one of those curious things for people outside His family. But few people had the testimony. The testimony of Christ is aboard. Isaac was born to generate a new race which would know and worship the true owner of the world. In Christ Jesus, a new race also began, the race of Christ. It isn’t the continuation of the natural man, the fallen man of Eden, the first race of the first Adam; it’s the race of the Second Adam which is the mystery of second birth by the washing of regeneration and cleansing of the Holy Spirit 

Lord of glory all praises and thanks to You for the covenant, for the establishing of the covenant in the Lord Jesus and for making us yours, and yours alone. What a great blessing to be owned by Christ the Lord!

Thank You Lord for this