All right folks. It's test time. Your kids all come home complaining about surprise quizzes the teacher pops in math class. Well, now it's my turn.
In the section of the Catechism which concluded the study of the Apostles' Creed we spoke God's plan of salvation, and the way he worked all through salvation history with his people.
We spoke about the relationship between the Old Testament and the New, the Old Covenant period and the New Covenant period.
I know it's ancient history - we're going back a few weeks. But, digging down deep can you recall what the main point was, the gist of it all? How are the Old and New Testament eras related? Are they related at all? Or are they totally discreet, separated, unconnected to each other?

Think think think......

The answer?
They are one, two chapters of one continually unfolding story; two chapters that have as their central focal point the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Everything in the Old Testament leads towards that. Everything in the New Testament grows out of that.
The Old Testament is the Testament of Promise.
The New Testament is the Testament of Fulfilment, unfolding in ever-greater detail what is foretold and promised through the Law and the Prophets.
They are intimately intertwined. Everything in the New Testament has its precursor in the Old Testament. Everything. Including the Sacraments.

Which is where we are presently in our study of the Heidelberg Catechism - studying the sacraments, baptism specifically. This morning we did an overview of this great sign & seal, this tool in God's "Workshop of Faith."
We saw from scripture that it was a symbol of our membership in the Body of Christ, the family of Christ, the Church;
signifying and sealing to us the salvation promises of God, calling us to respond to those promises.

Tonight we will dig back into the Old Testament to find the roots of this sacrament. We'll see how those roots have resulted in the Church's practice of baptizing infants.
 
 

So here we go... digging right back to the beginning - to Genesis, where in the first 11 chapters we are given a peek into the early time of human history and how people rebelled against their Creator, breaking the perfect relationship that was between them.
Then, in the great turning point of Scripture, Genesis 12, God begins what will be the theme of the whole Old Testament
- the work of preparing a nation out of which will come the Messiah, the seed of the Woman who will crush the head of the seed of the Serpent.
In Genesis 12 God calls Abram. And Abram responds in faith. Genesis 15.6 says "Abram believed the Lord, and God credited it to him as righteousness."
Abram believed.
Faith. Right there at the beginning. And extending right to the end. It is the thread that joins everything together.

A couple of chapters later God appears again to Abram and says "I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you.... I will be their God." [Gen 17.7,8]
In His magnificent grace, God re-establishes the relational bond, the family tie if you will, between Himself and a lost humanity. He re-establishes a covenant bond. He is their God. They are His people, the people of faith, the children of Abram.

Then as a sign and seal of this bond of faith God gives the ritual of circumcision. Everyone who entered the family of Abraham, and the nation of believers that followed in the coming years, was to be circumcised, says Gen 17.12-14.
The sequence of events was this:

1. You enter the community of faith
2. You are circumcised

For male children who entered the community through birth it meant circumcision on the 8th day. For slaves bought or foreigners converted, and so finding their way into the Community it meant circumcision as soon as they had become a part of the nation.
If you neglected circumcision, or refused to be circumcised, you were to be considered as still outside the community, outside of a relationship with God; cut off; unclean.
The important thing to remember about all this, and the thing that many Jews forgot over the centuries, is that the sacrament of circumcision had no intrinsic value;
it didn't carry any spiritual weight on it's own;
you couldn't count on it to get you into God's "good books", so to speak.

Faith, and faithful obedience were the key to that.
Circumcision was but the pointer to God's faithfulness, to his promise of care to those who, in following Abraham, believe God.

That is why you read bible phrases like these:
Deut 10.16 "circumcise your hearts, therefore, and do not be stiff-necked any longer."
Deut 30.6: "The Lord your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you may love him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live."
Jer 4.4: "Circumcise yourselves to the LORD, circumcise your hearts, you men of Judah and people of Jerusalem, or my wrath will break out and burn like fire..."
Circumcision was a symbol of the purity that God graciously granted to believers, a purity unearned and undeserved.
That is why Isa 52.1 speaks of uncircumcised as being "defiled".
That is why a fruit tree, which in the first three years of its life was off limits and considered religiously unclean was, in fact, called "uncircumcised." (Lev 19.23)

Into that rich Biblical tradition, the children of Jews were circumcised. And why? Because God is a God of the generations, ...to be God to you and your descendants after you...; showing his love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments...
This is the language God used when speaking his covenant promises to Abram, to David, to Solomon -- all through the Old Testament.
The promises of God come to the whole community of faith -- young and old alike.....
as do the warnings that if the people stubbornly remain in disobedience and rebellion they will be cut off, cut out of the community and left to endure the eternal wrath of God at the final judgement.

So children were circumcised. And so God insisted that they be taught diligently of the faith so that as they approached the age of 12, the age of accountability, they could stand on their own two feet and answer the call of the prophets to believe and to devote their entire life to the LORD. Answering that call was done through the ceremony of BAR MITZVAH, the "Son Of The Commandment" ceremony.

So what happened -- whatever happened to circumcision?
If Old Testament and New Testament are really connected, WHY is circumcision no longer practised? Why did we not circumcise little Matthew Dykstra last Sunday morning?
Does not the Bible speak of believers in the New Testament as being "children of Abraham" (Gal 3.7)? Does not it speak of Abraham as the father of ALL believers (Rom 4.11)?
If circumcision was demanded of them, why is it not demanded of us?

And the answer is, for the same reason that making sacrifices is no longer required. They are no longer required because they, like everything in the Old Testament era of Promise, pointed forward towards the coming of the Messiah.
Messiah Jesus is the fulfilment of all purification ceremonies, and all sacrifices..... and of circumcision. The tiny bit of blood that went along with the circumcision ceremony looked forward to, was a pointer to, the great flow of blood that ran down the cross out of the body of Jesus.
So once Jesus came and completed his work, there was no further need to point to the future. There was no further need to shed the blood of man, for the blood of the One Man, Jesus the Christ, had been shed.
The promise is now fulfilled.

Col 3.11 puts it this way - "Here there is no... circumcised or uncircumcised... but Christ is all, and is in all."
Phil 3.3 says, "For it is we who are the circumcision, we who worship by the Spirit of God, who glory in Christ Jesus, and who put no confidence in the flesh..."
Col 2.11 speaks of Christ's death on the cross as THE great circumcision, saying, "In him you were also circumcised, in the putting off of the sinful nature, not with a circumcision done by the hands of men but with the circumcision done by Christ..."

Circumcision -- made complete, mission accomplished, in the coming of Jesus.

So now what? Where does that leave us in the New Testament era?
To answer that I want to take you to Acts 2.38,39 where Peter is addressing a crowd about the work of Jesus Christ. He gives them the promise of God that all who believe in the name of Jesus and repent of their sins will be forgiven and given a new lease on life by the inner presence of the Holy Spirit.
He then says, "The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off - for all whom the Lord our God will call."

Did you catch that? That is Old Testament language, brothers and sisters, almost a carbon copy of what God says to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob, to David, to Solomon (Gen 17.7; 26.24; 28.13; 2 Sam 7; 1 Kings 3.14).

Believe... and you will be a recipient of the great promise of Salvation which God first made to Abram, your father in faith.

As Paul and Silas said to the Philippian Jailer - "Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved - you and your household."
As it was for Abraham, so it is for us today: Faith is the key that unlocks the door of salvation. When we believe in the Messiah the door unlocks, we enter, and immediately become a part of the Great, Eternal, Family Of God.
And the promise that was first made to Abraham is the same promise that we have today - the promise of God's day-to-day care, His salvation, and a place in His eternal home.

So what symbol, what sign, what seal do we have now in the New Testament to replace circumcision?
Well, as circumcision was a ceremony that pointed FORWARD to Jesus Christ, we'd want to be looking for one that points BACK to Jesus. Got any ideas?
Right -- it's baptism, of course.

Go back with me to Colossians 2, the passage that so beautifully showed how Christ is the fulfilment of circumcision in v.11. It goes on in v.12 to say, speaking about believers,
"...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."

Or recall Acts 22.16: "Rise and be baptized, and wash away your sins, calling on His name."

The water of baptism - symbolizing the dying to sin and new life in Christ; symbolizing the washing away of sins and being made whiter than snow by the blood of Christ.
Baptism -- the symbol of the covenant, pointing back to the Central Covenant figure: Jesus the Christ.
If this sounds strange, go to Calvin's web site and read through this morning's message.

Baptism - New Testament Era Of Fulfilment sacrament replacing Old Testament Era Of Promise sacrament, circumcision.

If you understand that you will understand why it is so natural to baptize children. We baptize them today when they are born into the covenant family of faith, or adopted in, just as in the Old Testament days of Promise they were circumcised.
We baptize children in believing households because in God's eyes they are holy, special, set apart (1 Cor 7.14).
We take little children, children too small to be able to make a full and understanding adult-like profession of faith in Jesus seriously because JESUS takes them seriously (Mk 10).
We baptize them because the promises of faith are just as real to them as they are to their parents.
That's why in Acts 16 you read of Lydia being baptized, along with the members of her household (16.15).
And in that same chapter you read of the Philippian jailer and his family being baptized (16.33).

Now I know -- some people who want to see baptism as a totally new thing, disconnected from the Old Testament and applying to adults only, will argue here - "But the bible doesn't tell us that there were any children there. Maybe they were all adults and all came to clear independent personal belief along with Lydia or the Jailer."

Oh, how that misses the whole point. It is to tear the sacrament of baptism right out of its deep biblical covenant heritage -- the heritage of family, beginning with the family of Abram. "The promise is to you and your children...."
The bible doesn't have to give us the ages of the children.
It doesn't matter.

It's the pattern we must see.
A pattern from the Old Testament carried right on into the New.
One pattern. One sacrament. One God. One salvation.

So in that one biblical tradition we baptize children, and then we nurture them, train them, teach them, give example to them, and love them in the name of the Lord when we sit at home and when we walk along the road, when we lie down and when we get up; tying them as symbols on our hands and binding them on our foreheads; writing them on the door frames of our houses and on our gates (Deut 6.7-9).
In other words, in every part of life, as best we can, trying to get them, in ever greater ways, on their level, to see the love of Jesus for them, and the demand that he makes on them to respond in faith to Him.

For as with the ancient children of the covenant, there is an age of accountability when they have to stand on their own before God. And they will no more be able to say,
"But I was baptized. Wasn't that good enough?"
than children of the Old Testament era were able to say,
"But I was circumcised. Wasn't that good enough?"

And that is also why when there is someone of an accountable age who is converted, and who through conversion is made automatically a child of God and a member of His Great One Holy and Catholic Church, that we baptize them.
For God's promises are now real in their lives, sealed and made sure through the blood of Christ. The promise to Abraham is now a concrete part of their eternity. And so, just like ancient converts were given the sacrament of circumcision, we give to new adult converts the sacrament of baptism.
the sign and seal of God's work in their lives.

Baptism -- God's way of saying, "You belong to me. All my promises are for you.... through faith. Now live like it!"

His sign. His holy seal.
Demanding a response from your life and mine, as children and adults.
Assuring us, always, of His gracious forgiveness and constant care.