2:25
“For circumcision is indeed profitable if you keep the law; but if you are a breaker of the law, your circumcision has become uncircumcision.”
Paul is not trying to suggest the physically impossible. He’s stating a spiritual truth.
The Jews trusted in their heritage. They trusted in their law. And they trusted in circumcision, the sign of the covenant. Paul is about to dynamite all three confidences so he can plant confidence in another way of salvation.
Circumcision. Why? At the risk of being graphic I follow Macarthur here in saying “the very procreative organ needed to be cleansed of a covering.” He makes the point that this symbolic gesture shows that man at his core is sinful and needs cleansing. Like baptism, it was a picture of something. But like baptism, the Jew began to believe that the symbolism was the real thing.
If you were baptized to show God’s forgiveness and cleansing before you were forgiven or cleansed, maybe you need to be baptized again – assuming you have since been forgiven or cleansed.
Circumcision was valuable to the Jew who was keeping the law. It was a signal that he was in covenant relationship with God. It was not the relationship itself, only a symbol of it. So if you keep the law, the symbol is meaningful. Keep breaking the law, what does it mean? Nothing! It’s as though you had not been circumcised.
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Once more the prophets come to our assistance, reminding us that Paul’s teachings are not his own. The Spirit of God had been saying this for centuries. Here’s Jeremiah (9:25-26).
“Behold, the days are coming that I will punish all who are circumcised with the uncircumcised – Egypt, Judah, Moab, and all who are in the farthest corners, who dwell in the wilderness. For all these nations are uncircumcised, and all the house of Israel are uncircumcised in the heart.”
Sounds a lot like Paul.
2:26
“Therefore, if an uncircumcised man keeps the righteous requirements of the law…”
What is Paul saying here?! He has already concluded that Jew and Gentile alike are sinners condemned. And he has just argued again that the Jew who has the law but doesn’t do it is condemned. That the Jew who trusts in circumcision but doesn’t act like a covenant person is condemned.
Where is he going?
Suppose, he says, there was a Gentile who perfectly kept the law of God. Wouldn’t he be more acceptable to God than a circumcised Jew who did not keep the law? Just suppose…
“will not his uncircumcision be counted as circumcision?”
Yes, says Paul. Definitely. God is interested in what’s on the inside, not the symbolic language of circumcision, Bibles stacked high in your church or home, water baptism, church attendance. That Gentile who obeys Me from the heart is more acceptable than the Jew who does not. Matthew 23 again, speaking to the ruling class of Jews, but to any Jew who had this problem:
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“Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, you pay tithe of the smallest things in your possession, but you have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. You strain out a gnat and swallow a camel.
You clean the outside of the cup but the inside is full of extortion and self- indulgence. You’re like a whitewashed grave that appears beautiful on the outside, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones.”
Not only that,
2:27
“Will not the physically uncircumcised, if he fulfills the law, judge you who, even with your written code and circumcision, are a transgressor of the law?”
Serious stuff here. Paul, the Jew, says to his own people, and himself, the former Pharisee, Not only is the Gentile equal to you now, he is above you and will sit in judgment over you. Trouble is, how do we find such a Gentile? That is, a Gentile who fulfills the law?
Thus Paul is setting up his case logically, one step at a time. Chapter 1, and 2:6: All men, Jew and Gentile, are worthy of judgment. But there is a third class of men, 2:7, who will not be judged because they are seeking God and doing good.
Then back to the universal judgment. First the Gentiles, 2:12-15, based on the law in their own hearts. Then the Jew, 2:17-25. who had a written law and a seal in their body. All condemned.
But then that other class, at present a theoretical group: 2:26-27, a class of Gentiles who actually could keep the law without Moses, without circumcision. Then Paul blows away the entire Jewish façade, the stranglehold that the Jews thought they had on God. Yes, they thought God had to save them. God was obligated to save them. They were descended from Abraham. They received the law from Heaven itself via
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Moses. They had a seal in their bodies that proved their covenant relation to God. If anyone gets to go to heaven, it’s the Jew, they reasoned.
No. You can’t say that any longer. In fact, you never could really say it. God was always willing to make exceptions to people who loved Him and loved or feared Israel.
Were there not Egyptians that came out of Egypt with Moses?
Was not a woman who had an all-night business in Jericho saved from destruction, then married to Salmon , father of Boaz? Was she not the great-great-grandmother of David, and thus in the line of Christ?
Was not a Moabite, the sometime-enemy of Israel, accepted into Naomi’s household as a daughter? Did she not marry the Jew Boaz, and become the great-grandmother of David, and thus in the line of Christ?
Can we not imagine that many other Gentiles were brought in through the years? Did not Jesus minister to a woman in Phoenicia, and a Roman centurion?
Still the notion continued, in spite of prophecies to the contrary about Gentiles, that the way to salvation was Israel, as opposed to, the God of Israel. May we never fall into the trap of thinking salvation is in our church or our denomination, or in the church universal. Salvation remains right where it has been from the beginning. “Abraham believed God, and God counted it to him for righteousness.”
So Paul is not re-defining Jewishness here, only bringing it back to where God intended it when he says,
2:28
“For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly…”
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A breath-taking statement, if you are an orthodox Jew. He says there are many people calling themselves Jews that are not really Jews.
He’s not saying, Away with Jews, from now on we are Christians. No, the movement is always towards Israel in the Scripture, not away from it. God has a plan and a purpose and that plan is Israel. Just because there is a false Israel and a false Jew does not take away the status of Israel and Judaism in the heart of God. God loves Israel, the Israel He saw from the foundation of the world, the kingdom that shall rule under Jesus for one thousand years, the people of God. God’s not done with Israel, but we must define Israel and Jews as Paul defines them: Perfectly obedient people who have the law written in their hearts.
Yes, remember, Jeremiah 31 about the New Covenant, was written by a Jew, to Jews, and fulfilled in the Jews, starting on the Day of Pentecost. The promise of the Holy Spirit was first given by a Jew, to the Jews.
Peter, the Christian who just happened to be a Jew, quotes Joel in his first “Christian” sermon, a very Jewish sermon.
Remember that this Jewish sect called Christian was not even called Christian until Antioch, and then there is no evidence that it was a God- ordained word. God’s program for Israel continues, but it is the true Israel we seek.
Nearly one hundred years into the church’s history, John is entrusted with a letter to several churches. In one of them there were people claiming to be apostles, who were not apostles. We have the same issue today.
Ephesus was all over that. I wish we could eliminate it today.
Then there were people, blasphemers, saying they were Jews, but were not. I believe that they were the same people Paul is speaking of here. How can a true Jew kill God in the flesh? How can a true Jew reject those filled with the Spirit of God? How can a true Jew not recognize the apostles as their own people and cling only to the first covenant? Simple answer. They are not true Jews.
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Outward claims to being a Jew are no longer enough. Manifest your Jewishness by what is on the inside.
“… nor is circumcision that which is outward in the flesh.”
Circumcision no longer counts unless you can keep the law of Moses in that same body that has been circumcised. And you can’t.
Who are the true Jews?
2:29
“But he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the Spirit, not in the letter…”
Another mouthful from Paul. More information added. More complication, to some. You want to prove to me you are a true Jew? You may be circumcised already. You may be a card-carrying Jew, as was Paul. There’s nothing wrong with that. But Paul will tell you, that card is not your ticket in. Something must happen to your heart. Somehow the Spirit of God must transform you, or you are not a Jew in the God sense.
Let me say it again. In God’s eyes, according to what we have just read, there are no Jews on the earth except those who have been filled with the Spirit of God and forgiven of their sins, that is, circumcised in their heart. The evil is gone, the good is in. God lives in that man or woman or child, and he is a true Jew. All others are imposters.
The “letter” of the law, as Paul will bring out in other passages, can only kill. Why? To be a slave of the letter and fail in one point, condemns a man forever. You cannot keep the law of God, not even that short list of ten. God must write His law on your heart so that you want to keep it and therefore you do keep it. God changes your wants and desires into His
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own. How many stories of drug addicts who suddenly did not want any drugs? Or cigarette? Or alcohol? Or the wrong kind of sexual pleasure?
The true Jew is the Spirit-filled born again Jew. He does not cease to be a Jew! In fact he becomes a true Jew. You will not see the word “Christian” in Paul’s words. “Oh, just leave the synagogue and come over to our building.” No.
We ask Catholics to leave Rome and come to our meetings. Our meetings don’t save people. No church saves. No building is magical. People must be born again before they can understand what we are about here. A true Jewishness,
“…whose praise is not from men, but from God.”
Remember “Judah”, praise? He was blessed originally because he was going to be the one that people would praise. And Judah became that man and that tribe and that nation. And people praised the Jew because of his many exploits.
Paul turns that around a little too. Even the name “Jew” is now to stand for the fact that not only will men love the tribe of Judah, and its Lion, but God Himself will honor the true Jew.
