Weekly Pursuit – Week 4 of Mar.

Mar 24, 2014 by LMAsia

Verses:

Gen. 15:5-6 “And He brought him outside and said, Look now toward the heavens, and count the stars, if you are able to count them. And He said to him, So shall your seed be. And he believed Jehovah, and He accounted it to him as righteousness.”

Excerpts:

God is also seen as the God of silence to Abraham. This was due to the fact that Abraham listened to his wife Sarah and married Hagar to get a son by the exercise of his flesh when he was eighty-six years old (Gen. 16:1-4, 15-16). That offended God to the uttermost.

In spite of God’s repeated promise and His confirming covenant [Gen. 12—15], in Genesis 16 Abraham’s wife proposed that he take Hagar her maid to bear a child for her (vv. 1-3). Abraham took, by exercising his flesh, Hagar and she bore a son by the name of Ishmael. This was a real offense to God! And God became silent to Abraham for that long time of thirteen years.

When Abraham was ninety-nine years old, God came in to reconfirm His covenant, which became a covenant of circumcision (Gen. 17:9-14).

In God’s third appearing with His seventh speaking to Abraham, He is the God of all-sufficiency in being the God of circumcision to cut off His chosen people’s natural man in the flesh that they may become God’s new creation, signified by Isaac who was born by God’s grace, not as Ishmael who was born by Abraham’s flesh (Gen. 17:1-21; Gal. 4:22-31).

Circumcision is the cutting off of the flesh, signifying that the flesh of our fallen man, our natural man, has to be cut off, ended, terminated. The apostle Paul said that the physical circumcision in the Old Testament was a full type of the crucifixion of Christ in dealing with the flesh of our body (Col. 2:11). Christ’s death on the cross, His crucifixion, is our real circumcision which cuts off our flesh with its passions and its lusts (Gal. 5:24). (The History of God in His Union with Man, pp.97-99)

Further Reading: The History of God in His Union with Man, ch. 7