_THE TRUE CIRCUMCISION._
"In whom ye were also circumcised with a circumcision not made with
hands, in the putting off of the body of the flesh, in the
circumcision of Christ; having been buried with Him in baptism,
wherein ye were also raised with Him through faith in the working of
God, who raised Him from the dead. And you, being dead through your
trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, you, _I say_, did
he quicken together with Him, having forgiven us all our
trespasses."--COL. ii. 11-13 (Rev. Ver.).
There are two opposite tendencies ever at work in human nature to
corrupt religion. One is of the intellect; the other of the senses. The
one is the temptation of the cultured few; the other, that of the vulgar
many. The one turns religion into theological speculation; the other,
into a theatrical spectacle. But, opposite as these tendencies usually
are, they were united in that strange chaos of erroneous opinion and
practice which Paul had to front at Colossae. From right and from left he
was assailed, and his batteries had to face both ways. Here he is mainly
engaged with the error which insisted on imposing circumcision on these
Gentile converts.
I. To this teaching of the necessity of circumcision, he first opposes
the position that all Christian men, by virtue of their union with
Christ, have received the true circumcision, of which the outward rite
was a shadow and a prophecy, and that therefore the rite is antiquated
and obsolete.
His language is emphatic and remarkable. It points to a definite past
time--no doubt the time when they became Christians--when, because they
were in Christ, a change passed on them which is fitly paralleled with
circumcision. This Christian circumcision is described in three
particulars: as "not made with hands;" as consisting in "putting off the
body of the flesh;" and as being "of Christ."
It is "not made with hands," that is, it is not a rite but a reality,
not transacted in flesh but in spirit. It is not the removal of
ceremonial impurity, but the cleansing of the heart. This idea of
ethical circumcision, of which the bodily rite is the type, is common in
the Old Testament, as, for instance, "The Lord thy God will circumcise
thine heart ... to love the Lord thy God with all thine heart" (Deut.
xxx. 6). This is the true Christian circumcision.
It consists in the "putting off the body of the flesh"--for "the sins
of" is an interpolation. Of course a man does not shuffle off this
mortal coil when he becomes a Christian, so that we have to look for
some other meaning of the strong words. They are very strong, for the
word "putting off" is intensified so as to express a complete stripping
off from oneself, as of clothes which are laid aside, and is evidently
intended to contrast the partial outward circumcision as the removal of
a small part of the body, with the entire removal effected by union with
Christ. If that removal of "the body of the flesh" is "not made with
hands," then it can only be in the sphere of the spiritual life, that is
to say, it must consist in a change in the relation of the two
constituents of a man's being, and that of such a kind that, for the
future, the Christian shall not live after the flesh, though he live in
the flesh. "Ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit," says Paul, and
again he uses an expression as strong as, if not stronger than that of
our text, when he speaks of "the body" as "being destroyed," and
explains himself by adding "that henceforth we should not serve sin." It
is not the body considered simply as material and fleshly that we put
off, but the body considered as the seat of corrupt and sinful
affections and passions. A new principle of life comes into men's hearts
which delivers them from the dominion of these, and makes it possible
that they should live in the flesh, not "according to the lusts of the
flesh, but according to the will of God." True, the text regards this
divesting as complete, whereas, as all Christian men know only too
sadly, it is very partial, and realised only by slow degrees. The ideal
is represented here,--what we receive "in Him," rather than what we
actually possess and incorporate into our experience. On the Divine side
the change is complete. Christ gives complete emancipation from the
dominion of sense, and if we are not in reality completely emancipated,
it is because we have not taken the things that are freely given to us,
and are not completely "_in_ Him." So far as we are, we have put off
"the flesh." The change has passed on us if we are Christians. We have
to work it out day by day. The foe may keep up a guerilla warfare after
he is substantially defeated, but his entire subjugation is certain if
we keep hold of the strength of Christ.
Finally, this circumcision is described as "of Christ," by which is not
meant that He submitted to it, but that He instituted it.
Such being the force of this statement, what is its bearing on the
Apostle's purpose? He desires to destroy the teaching that the rite of
circumcision was binding on the Christian converts, and he does so by
asserting that the gospel has brought the reality, of which the rite was
but a picture and a prophecy. The underlying principle is that when we
have the thing signified by any Jewish rites, which were all prophetic
as well as symbolic, the rite may--must go. Its retention is an
anachronism, "as if a flower should shut, and be a bud again." That is a
wise and pregnant principle, but as it comes to the surface again
immediately hereafter, and is applied to a whole series of subjects, we
may defer the consideration of it, and rather dwell briefly on other
matters suggested by this verse.
We notice, then, the intense moral earnestness which leads the Apostle
here to put the true centre of gravity of Christianity in moral
transformation, and to set all outward rites and ceremonies in a very
subordinate place. What had Jesus Christ come from heaven for, and for
what had He borne His bitter passion? To what end were the Colossians
knit to Him by a tie so strong, tender and strange? Had they been
carried into that inmost depth of union with Him, and were they still to
be laying stress on ceremonies? Had Christ's work, then, no higher issue
than to leave religion bound in the cords of outward observances? Surely
Jesus Christ, who gives men a new life by union with Himself, which
union is brought about through faith alone, has delivered men from that
"yoke of bondage," if He has done anything at all. Surely they who are
joined to Him should have a profounder apprehension of the means and the
end of their relation to their Lord than to suppose that it is either
brought about by any outward rite, or has any reality unless it makes
them pure and good. From that height all questions of external
observances dwindle into insignificance, and all question of sacramental
efficacy drops away of itself. The vital centre lies in our being joined
to Jesus Christ--the condition of which is faith in Him, and the outcome
of it a new life which delivers us from the dominion of the flesh. How
far away from such conceptions of Christianity are those which busy
themselves on either side with matters of detail, with punctilios of
observance, and pedantries of form? The hatred of forms may be as
completely a form as the most elaborate ritual--and we all need to have
our eyes turned away from these to the far higher thing, the worship and
service offered by a transformed nature.
We notice again, that the conquest of the animal nature and the material
body is the certain outcome of true union with Christ, and of that
alone.
Paul did not regard matter as necessarily evil, as these teachers at
Colossae did, nor did he think of the body as the source of all sin. But
he knew that the fiercest and most fiery temptations came from it, and
that the foulest and most indelible stains on conscience were splashed
from the mud which it threw. We all know that too. It is a matter of
life and death for each of us to find some means of taming and holding
in the animal that is in us all. We all know of wrecked lives, which
have been driven on the rocks by the wild passions belonging to the
flesh. Fortune, reputation, health, everything are sacrificed by
hundreds of men, especially young men, at the sting of this imperious
lust. The budding promise of youth, innocence, hope, and all which makes
life desirable and a nature fair, are trodden down by the hoofs of the
brute. There is no need to speak of that. And when we come to add to
this the weaknesses of the flesh, and the needs of the flesh, and the
limitations of the flesh, and to remember how often high purposes are
frustrated by its shrinking from toil, and how often mists born from its
undrained swamps darken the vision that else might gaze on truth and
God, we cannot but feel that we do not need to be Eastern Gnostics, to
believe that goodness requires the flesh to be subdued. Every one who
has sought for self-improvement recognises the necessity. But no
asceticisms and no resolves will do what we want. Much repression may be
effected by sheer force of will, but it is like a man holding a wolf by
the jaws. The arms begin to ache and the grip to grow slack, and he
feels his strength ebbing, and knows that, as soon as he lets go, the
brute will fly at his throat. Repression is not taming. Nothing tames
the wild beast in us but the power of Christ. He binds it in a silken
lash, and that gentle constraint is strong, because the fierceness is
gone. "The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and a little child shall
lead them." The power of union with Christ, and that alone, will enable
us to put off the body of the flesh. And such union will certainly lead
to such crucifying of the animal nature. Christianity would be easy if
it were a round of observances; it would be comparatively easy if it
were a series of outward asceticisms. Anybody can fast or wear a hair
shirt, if he have motive sufficient; but the "putting off the body of
the flesh" which is "not made with hands," is a different and harder
thing. Nothing else avails. High-flown religious emotion, or clear
theological definitions, or elaborate ceremonial worship, may all have
their value; but a religion which includes them all, and leaves out the
plain moralities of subduing the flesh, and keeping our heel well
pressed down on the serpent's head, is worthless. If we are in Christ,
we shall not live in the flesh.
II. The Apostle meets the false teaching of the need for circumcision,
by a second consideration; namely, a reference to Christian Baptism, as
being the Christian sign of that inward change.
Ye were circumcised, says he--being buried with Him in baptism. The form
of expression in the Greek implies that the two things are
cotemporaneous. As if he had said--Do you want any further rite to
express that mighty change which passed on you when you came to be "in
Christ"? You have been baptised, does not that express all the meaning
that circumcision ever had, and much more? What can you want with the
less significant rite when you have the more significant? This reference
to baptism is quite consistent with what has been said as to the
subordinate importance of ritual. Some forms we must have, if there is
to be any outward visible Church, and Christ has yielded to the
necessity, and given us two, of which the one symbolises the initial
spiritual act of the Christian life, and the other the constantly
repeated process of Christian nourishment. They are symbols and outward
representations, nothing more. They convey grace, in so far as they
help us to realise more clearly and to feel more deeply the facts on
which our spiritual life is fed, but they are not channels of grace in
any other way than any other outward acts of worship may be.
We see that the form of baptism here presupposed is by immersion, and
that the form is regarded as significant. All but entire unanimity
prevails among commentators on this point. The burial and the
resurrection spoken of point unmistakably to the primitive mode of
baptism, as Bishop Lightfoot, the latest and best English expositor of
this book, puts it in his paraphrase: "Ye were buried with Christ to
your old selves beneath the baptismal waters, and were raised with Him
from these same waters, to a new and better life."
If so, two questions deserve consideration--first, is it right to alter
a form which has a meaning that is lost by the change? second, can we
alter a significant form without destroying it? Is the new thing rightly
called by the old name? If baptism be immersion, and immersion express a
substantial part of its meaning, can sprinkling or pouring be baptism?
Again, baptism is associated in time with the inward change, which is
the true circumcision. There are but two theories on which these two
things are cotemporaneous. The one is the theory that baptism effects
the change, the other is the theory that baptism goes with the change as
its sign. The association is justified if men are "circumcised," that
is, changed when they are baptised, or if men are baptised when they
have been "circumcised." No other theory gives full weight to these
words.
The former theory elevates baptism into more than the importance of
which Paul sought to deprive circumcision, it confuses the distinction
between the Church and the world, it lulls men into a false security, it
obscures the very central truth of Christianity--namely that faith in
Christ, working by love, makes a Christian--it gives the basis for a
portentous reproduction of sacerdotalism, and it is shivered to pieces
against the plain facts of daily life. But it may be worth while to
notice in a sentence, that it is conclusively disposed of by the
language before us--it is "through faith in the operation of God" that
we are raised again in baptism. Not the rite, then, but faith is the
means of this participation with Christ in burial and resurrection. What
remains but that baptism is associated with that spiritual change by
which we are delivered from the body of the flesh, because in the Divine
order it is meant to be the outward symbol of that change which is
effected by no rite or sacrament, but by faith alone, uniting us to the
transforming Christ?
We observe the solemnity and the thoroughness of the change thus
symbolised. It is more than a circumcision. It is burial and a
resurrection, an entire dying of the old self by union with Christ, a
real and present rising again by participation in His risen life. This
and nothing less makes a Christian. We partake of His death, inasmuch as
we ally ourselves to it by our faith, as the sacrifice for our sins, and
make it the ground of all our hope. But that is not all. We partake of
His death, inasmuch as, by the power of His cross, we are drawn to sever
ourselves from the selfish life, and to slay our own old nature; dying
for His dear sake to the habits, tastes, desires and purposes in which
we lived. Self-crucifixion for the love of Christ is the law for us all.
His cross is the pattern for our conduct, as well as the pledge and
means of our acceptance. We must die to sin that we may live to
righteousness. We must die to self, that we may live to God and our
brethren. We have no right to trust in Christ _for_ us, except as we
have Christ _in_ us. His cross is not saving us from our guilt, unless
it is moulding our lives to some faint likeness of Him who died that we
might live, and might live a real life by dying daily to the world, sin,
and self.
If we are thus made conformable to His death, we shall know the power of
His resurrection, in all its aspects. It will be to us the guarantee of
our own, and we shall know its power as a prophecy for our future. It
will be to us the seal of His perfect work on the cross, and we shall
know its power as God's token of acceptance of His sacrifice in the
past. It will be to us the type of our spiritual resurrection now, and
we shall know its power as the pattern and source of our supernatural
life in the present. Thus we must die in and with Christ that we may
live in and with Him, and that twofold process is the very heart of
personal religion. No lofty participation in the immortal hopes which
spring from the empty grave of Jesus is warranted, unless we have His
quickening power raising us to-day by a better resurrection; and no
participation in the present power of His heavenly life is possible,
unless we have such a share in His death, as that by it the world is
crucified to us, and we unto the world.
III. The Apostle adds another phase of this great contrast of life and
death, which brings home still more closely to his hearers, the deep
and radical change which passes upon all Christians. He has been
speaking of a death and burial followed by a resurrection. But there is
another death from which Christ raises us, by that same risen life
imparted to us through faith--a darker and grimmer thing than the
self-abnegation before described.
"And you, being dead through your trespasses, and the uncircumcision of
your flesh." The separate acts of transgression of which they had been
guilty, and the unchastened, unpurified, carnal nature from which these
had flowed, were the reasons of a very real and awful death; or, as the
parallel passage in Ephesians (ii. 2) puts it with a slight variation,
they made the condition or sphere in which that death inhered. That
solemn thought, so pregnant in its dread emphasis in Scripture, is not
to be put aside as a mere metaphor. All life stands in union with God.
The physical universe exists by reason of its perpetual contact with His
sustaining hand, in the hollow of which all Being lies, and it is,
because He touches it. "In Him we live." So also the life of mind is
sustained by His perpetual inbreathing, and in the deepest sense "we see
light" in His light. So, lastly, the highest life of the spirit stands
in union in still higher manner with Him, and to be separated from Him
is death to it. Sin breaks that union, and therefore sin is death, in
the very inmost centre of man's being. The awful warning, "In the day
thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die," was fulfilled. That
separation by sin, in which the soul is wrenched from God, is the real
death, and the thing that men call by the name is only an outward symbol
of a far sadder fact--the shadow of that which is the awful substance,
and as much less terrible than it as painted fires are less than the
burning reality.
So men may live in the body, and toil and think and feel, and be dead.
The world is full of "sheeted dead," that "squeak and gibber" in "our
streets," for every soul that lives to self and has rent itself away
from God, so far as a creature can, is "dead while he liveth." The other
death, of which the previous verse spoke, is therefore but the putting
off of a death. We lose nothing of real life in putting off self, but
only that which keeps us in a separation from God, and slays our true
and highest being. To die to self is but "the death of death."
The same life of which the previous verse spoke as coming from the risen
Lord is here set forth as able to raise us from that death of sin. "He
hath quickened you together with Him." Union with Christ floods our dead
souls with His own vitality, as water will pour from a reservoir through
a tube inserted in it. There is the actual communication of a new life
when we touch Christ by faith. The prophet of old laid himself upon the
dead child, the warm lip on the pallid mouth, the throbbing heart on the
still one, and the contact rekindled the extinguished spark. So Christ
lays His full life on our deadness, and does more than recall a departed
glow of vitality. He communicates a new life kindred with His own. That
life makes us free here and now from the law of sin and death, and it
shall be perfected hereafter when the working of His mighty power shall
change the body of our humiliation into the likeness of the body of His
glory, and the leaven of His new life shall leaven the three measures in
which it is hidden, body, soul, and spirit, with its own transforming
energy. Then, in yet higher sense, death shall die, and life shall be
victor by His victory.
But to all this one preliminary is needful--"having forgiven us all
trespasses." Paul's eagerness to associate himself with his brethren,
and to claim his share in the forgiveness, as well as to unite in the
acknowledgment of sin, makes him change his word from "you" to "us." So
the best manuscripts give the text, and the reading is obviously full of
interest and suggestiveness. There must be a removal of the cause of
deadness before there can be a quickening to new life. That cause was
sin, which cannot be cancelled as guilt by any self-denial however
great, nor even by the impartation of a new life from God for the
future. A gospel which only enjoined dying to self would be as
inadequate as a gospel which only provided for a higher life in the
future. The stained and faultful past must be cared for. Christ must
bring pardon for it, as well as a new spirit for the future. So the
condition prior to our being quickened together with Him is God's
forgiveness, free and universal, covering all our sins, and given to us
without anything on our part. That condition is satisfied. Christ's
death brings to us God's pardon, and when the great barrier of
unforgiven sin is cleared away, Christ's life pours into our hearts, and
"everything lives whithersoever the river cometh."
Here then we have the deepest ground of Paul's intense hatred of every
attempt to make anything but faith in Christ and moral purity essential
to the perfect Christian life. Circumcision and baptism and all other
rites or sacraments of Judaism or Christianity are equally powerless to
quicken dead souls. For that, the first thing needed is the forgiveness
of sins, and that is ours through simple faith in Christ's death. We are
quickened by Christ's own life in us, and He "dwells in our hearts by
faith." All ordinances may be administered to us a hundred times, and
without faith they leave us as they found us--dead. If we have hold of
Christ by faith we live, whether we have received the ordinances or not.
So all full blown or budding sacramentarianism is to be fought against
to the uttermost, because it tends to block the road to the City of
Refuge for a poor sinful soul, and the most pressing of all necessities
is that that way of life should be kept clear and unimpeded.
We need the profound truth which lies in the threefold form which Paul
gives to one of his great watchwords: "Circumcision is nothing, and
uncircumcision is nothing, but the keeping of the commandments of God."
And how, says my despairing conscience, shall I keep the commandments?
The answer lies in the second form of the saying--"In Christ Jesus
neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new
creature." And how, replies my saddened heart, can I become a new
creature? The answer lies in the final form of the saying--"In Jesus
Christ neither circumcision availeth anything nor uncircumcision, but
faith which worketh." Faith brings the life which makes us new men, and
then we can keep the commandments. If we have faith, and are new men and
do God's will, we need no rites but as helps. If we have not faith, all
rites are nothing.