Like the rib from Adam that made Eve, God bound flesh with bone to knit us in our mother’s womb. Then at the moment of our birth, when our lungs first knew the burning pangs for this world’s air, our relationship with the God who formed us began. We were dead to Him, Paul tell us Ephesians 2:1-3. Adam’s sin and transgression had imprisoned us to the ruler of the kingdom of the air we now craved.

Now out of Adam, God had chosen a remnant to be His people. But as Paul tells us in Ephesians 2:11-12, here too we stood unreconciled. For we were not the remnant Israel, but foreigners to their covenants of the promise that God in His grace had given to Abraham (Gal 3:18). And God signed His name with the sign of circumcision. So, in being born, not only were we dead to our maker, but without the circumcision of His people and “without hope of reaching God.”

To God’s people, “the circumcision,” we became Gentiles—‘uncircumcised,’ dirty like pigs and unclean. For to them, circumcision was a sign demanded by the Law to be done by the hands of men to ensure their inheritance as God’s people. And therein lies the wonderful good news. For they had misunderstood the sign of inheritance. Inheritance to God’s people didn’t depend on the Law. It depended on the promise of a Seed given to Abraham as a “seal [ie. circumcision] of the righteousness that he had by faith” (Rom 4:11) “until the Seed to whom the promise referred had come” (Gal 3:19).

Now this Seed was Christ (Gal 3:17). With the coming of Christ, his death and resurrection, the sign of our Gentile death and exclusion—circumcision—was shown not to be a seal of Abraham’s own righteousness as Israel believed, but a seal of the righteousness that came to Him through faith in the Seed promised all those years ago. That is why Abraham is called father of believers (Rom 4:11), because he was the first to put his faith in Christ.

So Gentile, having believed and being beloved, “you were also circumcised, in the putting off the sinful nature not with a circumcision done by the hands of men but with the circumcision done by Christ, having been buried with Him in baptism and raised with Him through your faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead” (Col 2:11-12). Just as we are no longer dead in our transgression, we are no longer Gentiles, but part of God’s people, Abraham’s Seed. Amen.