February 5 - Deuteronomy 30:6

February 5 - Deuteronomy 30:6

“Moreover, the LORD your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, so that you will love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, in order that you may live.”

Way back in Genesis 17, God had set up a covenant with Abraham – that He would bless Abraham with a great many descendants, many nations and that God would be their God and they would be His people.  The physical sign of the covenant was circumcision, so Abraham and every single male in His household was circumcised on that day.   This was to remind each of them every moment of every day that they had chosen to follow God.

Down through the years, rather than remaining as a sign to remind the Israelites, circumcision became a law and the reason for the initial act was left behind in a flurry of rules and regulations.  Circumcision occurred because it was expected and not as a heartfelt response to the relationship that God wanted to have with His people.

God reminds the Israelites of this reason with a different approach in this passage.  Since circumcision cuts away part of the man’s body, the allusion here is to cutting out those things that stop people from being in relationship with God.  The purpose for circumcision was not to simply set people apart from everyone else physically, but to remind them of their covenant relationship with God the Creator.  What He wanted from His people was for them to love Him with their heart and with their soul.  He wanted to offer them life.

Centuries continued to pass and the desire to remain in communion with God was lost over and over again, but the law regarding continued.  In fact, it was so important to the Jews that they demanded any Gentile who became a Christian prove himself by being physically circumcised.  The law was so much more important to them than the actual relationship that a person had with Christ.

Paul reminded them that Abraham had a strong relationship with God before he was circumcised in Romans 4.  Being circumcised was not a requirement for believing in God.

The Jews firmly believed that the sign of the covenant was circumcision, but Paul argued in his letters that faith in Christ was what made a person part of the kingdom of God.  Belief in the work of the Cross was the path into the covenant, not the physical act of circumcision.  For Paul, there could be no distinction between the circumcised and uncircumcised, the Jew or the Gentile.  All are unified in Jesus Christ.

This is the path to our relationship with God – it takes us to the Cross of Jesus where our hearts are measured by our willingness to believe and accept that He has done the work of atonement for us.