The following "Question" was asked by a member of the congregation at Grace Community Church in Panorama City, California, and "Answered" by their pastor, John MacArthur Jr. It was transcribed from the tape, GC 70-2, titled "Bible Questions and Answers."  A copy of the tape can be obtained by writing, Word of Grace, P.O. Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412 or by dialing toll free 1-800-55-GRACE.  Copyright John MacArthur Jr., All Rights Reserved.

Question

What is the significance of the covenant of circumcision in the Old Testament as opposed to ear piercing?

Answer

What is the purpose of circumcision? The best way to say it is this, we learn by object lessons, okay? Especially in a more primitive time in the unfolding of God’s revelation in the Old Testament God gave His people many, many object lessons, didn’t He? I mean, just their whole religion was a series of object lessons. Life was filled with ceremonies and ceremonies and ceremonies and ceremonies, ritual upon ritual upon ritual. There was this thing to do and that thing to do and the other thing to do and this was symbolic in so many, many cases. Every animal that was ever sacrificed was a symbol of the ultimate sacrifice of Christ, right? Every cleansing, every washing of a pot, washing of a pan, washing of the hands, washing of the feet, every ceremonial washing they went through was a symbol of the inward washing of the heart. In the Old Testament economy, God was always giving out outward symbols to identify what He wanted to say about inward responses and inward attitudes.

Now circumcision is one of those very same things. And circumcision was a symbol of cleansing and when a child, a baby, was born, on the 8^th day the foreskin was removed and it was in a way, a symbol of the removal of sin from the life. In other words, God was saying to them….and you do it all the time, all the time…it’s painful, it’s bloody and so forth and so on…and the picture was that what God is doing here is giving you a symbol of what He wants to do in your heart and that’s why the Bible says circumcise your hearts! You know? Cut off that which contributes to your uncleanness. Cut that off so that the outward symbol is only a sign or an indication of what God wanted done in the heart, and He makes that very clear throughout the Old Testament. Circumcise your heart. Circumcise you hearts comes the cry of the Old Testament. And so circumcision was just another one of God’s symbols and it was a very dominant one. Every child that was born went through that and it was a way to constantly remind the people that there was an inner reality of cleansing that God was after.

It was a physical identification because of the fact that it was unique to the people of God. Every animal sacrifice was also an identification of a child of God in the Jewish era. A covenant child. There were many of them. They grabbed onto that and that became the mark. I think by the time you get to the New Testament, that was more an aberration of God’s intention than anything else, because they had lost the meaning of it and they were just doing it and it became for them a symbol of God’s blessing, no matter how they lived. And so what they did was they never did bother to circumcise their hearts. They never did bother to take care of the inside. They thought themselves to be right with God based on what they did on the outside. And that’s why in Romans chapter 2, Paul says in verse 28, "he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, neither is that circumcision which is outward in the flesh, but He is a Jew who is one inwardly and circumcision is of the heart, in the spirit and not in the letter," you see. So what they had come to was just a symbol without any meaning, without any impact and so the basic symbol was a symbol of cleansing.