(December 17, 2012 at 4:45 pm)Undeceived Wrote: Jeremiah 31:31-34
“The days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them,” declares the Lord. “This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel after that time,” declares the Lord. “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will they teach their neighbor, or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,' because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,” declares the Lord. “For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.”
Circumcision was an outward sign of Israel's Old Covenant with God. Hebrews 8 describes Jesus as the mediator of the New Covenant, which is based on a personal relationship with God (when we are made clean by Jesus' sacrifice and can stand in His presence). Like every OT physical act, circumcision represents a spiritual standing with God. As Colossians 2:9-15 explains,
"For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and in Christ you have been brought to fullness. He is the head over every power and authority. In him you were also circumcised with a circumcision not performed by human hands. Your whole self ruled by the flesh was put off when you were circumcised by Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through your faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead. When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross."
And if we were under the new covenant, you wouldn't need to teach me about God...
But regardless of that, Yeshua brought the offer of forgiveness while he was alive. I don't agree with human sacrifice, period! Also, the Bible says there is no mediator between man and God...
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