September 13, AD 2011

Last November, the city of San Francisco wanted to criminalise circumcision of a boy up to age 18, but the ballot measure died in court (surprisingly) in July.

In a Christianity Today online article (“Criminalizing Circumcision,” August 29), writer David Neff took the position that “We have secularized the ancient Jewish rite—but it is still inescapably religious.”

He re-travelled circumcision’s familiar paths of biblical, medical and social proclivities, including the controversy between the Apostle Paul and the Galatians. That spat, as you might recall, opened the door for Paul to teach on the “circumcision of the heart.”

But, apparently, Paul’s doctrine of the heart was beyond the scope of Neff’s theology, as he did venture into it.

And, perhaps, so too, with most Christians.

But the significance to Christians of the circumcised heart is vastly too important to be ignored.

Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome: “Circumcision is that which is of the [spiritual] heart, by the Spirit” (Romans 2:29). And to the Colossians he explained: “In Him you were also circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, in the removal of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ; having been buried with Him in baptism, in which you were also raised up with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead. And when you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with him, having forgiven us all our transgressions” (Colossians 2:11-13).

And to the Galatians Paul wrote: "For neither is [physical] circumcision anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation" (Galatians 6:16).

What the Bible says about the “circumcised” heart gives us one of numerous perspectives of the removal of the old heart and the implantation of our new heart in Christians.

So, let’s begin by first considering an analogy from a seemingly unlikely source: secular television.

“Cut to the Heart” was aired on Public Broadcasting’s Nova. It was one of those surgery programs that took the viewer inside the operating room to observe surgeons removing diseased heart tissue. Had the patient not undergone surgery, the disease, in time, would have overtaken the entire heart, impairing its ability to function adequately, and eventually causing the death of the patient.

There are similarities between that procedure and God’s giving you a new spiritual heart.

Your old spiritual heart was “desperately sick” (Jeremiah 17:9). It was in the flesh, and therefore “disease-ridden” with sin to the very core of its substantive nature, which rendered it spiritually dead.

The Bible describes the “diseased” spiritual heart of natural man as an “uncircumcised heart” (Leviticus 26:41; Jeremiah 9:26; Ezekiel 44:7, 9; Acts 7:51). The new spiritual heart, of course, is a “circumcised heart” (Deuteronomy 10:16, 30:6; Jeremiah 4:4; Romans 2:29).

Just as physical circumcision involves the removal of foreskin, circumcision of the spiritual heart involves the removal of a spiritual kind of flesh (Colossians 2:11). Physicians surgically remove diseased tissue from a biological heart, and God removes the “diseased” portions of the natural spiritual heart. Your procreated old fleshly spirit and soul, along with inherited Adamic life, were removed from you—“circumcised” from your God-created personhood. Your personhood—that is, the spiritual essence of “you”—was crucified and resurrected in newness of life with Christ and enjoined to a new spirit, a new soul, and Christ’s eternal life.

Circumcision of the heart by the Holy Spirit amounts to a spiritual heart transplant (Ezekiel 36:26-27). The old, fleshly components of heart (soul and spirit procreated in the sinful likeness of Adam) are removed, and new, God-created soul and spirit, created by Him in the likeness of Christ, are implanted. In the process, God-created personhood undergoes the transformation of being co-crucified and co-resurrected with Christ.

In the process, the Spirit of Christ was placed in your spirit part and imparted Christ’s eternal life to you, along with His holy, righteous, and love nature; this gave you unity and identity in Christ. Your new soul has a mind, emotion, and will that are substantively Christ-like and are immune to every spiritual “disease” in that they will never die or become separated from God. All of that happened to you ontologically, as part of being born again.

The result of all of this: You are a new creation in Christ! “Therefore if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

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There are several other biblical allusions to the Christian’s new heart:

• the grafted branch
  
• the vine and branches
  
• the new temple
  
• the new wineskin
  
• the potter’s new jar

You can learn more about them in “The Miraculous Heart Transplant” (Chapter 7, in my Advanced Study No. 1: The Christian’s New Heart).

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