Sign of the Covenant
Genesis 17:9–14
It shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you. Genesis 17:11
The same God who joined his breath and name to Abraham as evidence that he could live as God wanted him to live and do what God wanted him to do is also joined to us through the power of the Holy Spirit. His name is joined to ours as we believe in Christ and become Christians.
What does it mean to be a Christian? It means to be Christ’s, to be joined to him and to take his name. If your name is Mary and you become a Christian, you become Mary Christian. If your name is James, you are James Christian. If it is Susan, you are Susan Christian—and so on. As we enter into the covenant and become Christians, we recognize that this is all of God and that our ability to do certain things, which we must do, comes not from ourselves but from God, who joins himself to us.
This is also suggested by the sign of the old covenant, which figures so strongly in Genesis 17, and by the Christian signs of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, which emerge in the New Testament. So far as Abraham’s sign was concerned, it is significant that Abraham did not establish it. God did. But although God established the sign, Abraham had to respond by carrying it out, as we read in the last paragraph of Genesis 17: “Abraham took Ishmael his son and all those born in his house or bought with his money, every male among the men of Abraham’s house, and he circumcised the flesh of their foreskins that very day, as God had said to him” (v. 23).
Abraham’s obedience did not mean that he was contributing anything to the covenant. In fact, it meant the opposite. The cutting away of the flesh meant the renunciation of human effort, which arises out of the flesh, and the willingness to bear about in the body the mark of the individual’s identification with God.
The signs of the new covenant are similar in meaning. Baptism, the sign of initiation into the body of Christ, symbolizes three things:
1. dying to the past and to self
2. rising to newness of life in Christ
3. identification with the Lord Jesus Christ
It is in baptism that we take Christ’s name and say before the entire world that henceforth we are to be known as Christians. And what of the Lord’s Supper? This is the continuing sacrament of Christianity that symbolizes our constant dependence on Christ for power to live in a way that pleases him. Moreover, this is accomplished by a symbolic feeding, just as Abraham may have been encouraged to think of himself as feeding on El Shaddai. It is only by drawing on Christ that we have strength to live as God’s covenant children.