SPIRITUAL SURGERY

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In Christ, Mark

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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

When you came to Christ, you were “circumcised,” but not by a physical procedure. Christ performed a spiritual circumcision—the cutting away of your sinful nature. 

You were dead because of your sins and because your sinful nature was not yet cut away. Then God made you alive with Christ, for He forgave all our sins. He canceled the record of the charges against us and took it away by nailing it to the cross. In this way, He disarmed the spiritual rulers and authorities. He shamed them publicly by His victory over them on the cross.

Colossians 2:11, 13-15 NLT

This ends this reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

It’s estimated that there are more than 300 million major surgeries done every year. That’s a lot of people who are “going under the knife” as they say. Many people go through more than one. I have a very close family member who has had both knees and both hips replaced over the past several years. That’s a lot of operations and subsequent rehabilitation periods but the end result has been a life of reduced pain and a much better quality of life.

And that’s the point, right?

People who have surgeries opt to go through them because in the end, they will be left in better health than before. This is why you often see the word “corrective” precede the word “surgery”.

With all this in mind, we now approach verse 11 of the second chapter of Colossians as we find the Apostle Paul conveying to the Christians in Colossae how Jesus performs His own form of “surgery” on those who believe in Him, a spiritual surgery intended to leave the new believer better than they were before. Look again at what Paul had to say here:

When you came to Christ, you were “circumcised,” but not by a physical procedure. Christ performed a spiritual circumcision—the cutting away of your sinful nature. 

You were dead because of your sins and because your sinful nature was not yet cut away. Then God made you alive with Christ, for He forgave all our sins. He canceled the record of the charges against us and took it away by nailing it to the cross. In this way, He disarmed the spiritual rulers and authorities. He shamed them publicly by His victory over them on the cross.

It’s interesting how Paul uses the physical surgical procedure of circumcision here to explain a spiritual truth. He could have used any other form of operation on the body so why circumcision?

I believe that the answer lies in the matter of covenant relationship and to start to fully understand the core of Paul’s statement, we need to go back to Old Testament times and God’s words to Abraham. Here’s what He said:

When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to him and said, “I am El-Shaddai—‘God Almighty.’ Serve me faithfully and live a blameless life. I will make a covenant with you, by which I will guarantee to give you countless descendants.”

At this, Abram fell face down on the ground. Then God said to him, “This is My covenant with you: I will make you the father of a multitude of nations! What’s more, I am changing your name. It will no longer be Abram. Instead, you will be called Abraham, for you will be the father of many nations. I will make you extremely fruitful. Your descendants will become many nations, and kings will be among them!

“I will confirm My covenant with you and your descendants after you, from generation to generation. This is the everlasting covenant: I will always be your God and the God of your descendants after you. And I will give the entire land of Canaan, where you now live as a foreigner, to you and your descendants. It will be their possession forever, and I will be their God.”

Then God said to Abraham, “Your responsibility is to obey the terms of the covenant. You and all your descendants have this continual responsibility. This is the covenant that you and your descendants must keep: Each male among you must be circumcised. You must cut off the flesh of your foreskin as a sign of the covenant between Me and you. From generation to generation, every male child must be circumcised on the eighth day after his birth. This applies not only to members of your family but also to the servants born in your household and the foreign-born servants whom you have purchased. All must be circumcised. Your bodies will bear the mark of My everlasting covenant. Any male who fails to be circumcised will be cut off from the covenant family for breaking the covenant.” Genesis 17:1-13 NLT

Here, in what is referred to as the Abrahamic Covenant, we find God imposing a requirement on all Jewish males that would serve as a mark of His covenant with Abraham and the nation of Israel. The requirement involved a physical alteration, one done surgically on the penis of every male. We read where the “flesh of the foreskin” was to be cut off as a sign of the covenant between God and His people. To refuse the surgery would result in being excommunicated from the covenant family.

And so it was. This Old Testament covenant was one that required a physical circumcision and it carried on into the very early part of the New Testament as we read where even Jesus was circumcised on the eighth day after His birth per the Abrahamic covenant (Luke 2:21).

But then things changed.

With the coming of Jesus and His death and resurrection, a new covenant was established between God and His people. A physical circumcision was no longer required to be a part of God’s covenant family. All one needed to do was simply believe in His Son Jesus as Savior.

This had a seismic impact on all the people of the world at that time who could be essentially divided into two major groups from a religious perspective: the Jews and the Gentiles. Jewish males could easily be identified by their circumcisions, the mark of their special covenant with God. All uncircumcised males were considered Gentiles and, from a societal standpoint, were treated as outsiders by the Jews, considered unclean and unworthy of any special privilege with God. As many Gentiles lived within polytheistic cultures, there was some spiritual validity in the way the Jews viewed them.

Jesus altered this religious landscape. For through Him, all people could come into a right relationship with God. As the Apostle Paul would write to the Romans, all had sinned and fallen short of God’s glory (3:23). Everyone has a sin problem and Jesus was the only One who could fix it, the only One who could perform spiritual circumcision on anyone who places their belief in Him.

You see, when Jesus died on the cross, He put to death all sin as well. In other words, He bore the punishment of God’s wrath so we wouldn’t and as the prophet Isaiah wrote, it is “by His wounds” that we are “healed” (53:5). When we believe in Him as Savior, we do so with the knowledge that His blood washes away our sins and leaves us “white as snow” (Isaiah 1:18), justified (or made just-as-if-we-had-never-sinned) before our Father God who judges everyone for their transgressions.  

This is how Jesus performs spiritual surgery through supernatural “circumcision”, “cutting away” our sinful nature. He and He alone corrects the sin disease within and leaves us eternally better as a result.

Let’s give thanks today and every day for God’s gift of His Son!

Amen.

In Christ,

Mark

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