Why Circumcision 2

Why Circumcision

Genesis 17:10-14

When God entered into a covenant with Abraham. He told him to circumcise every make 8 years and older including himself. (Genesis 17:10-14)

Blood was shed, but it’s referred to as: “The Fountain of Life.” Which the place from which the seeds fear the future generation would come from – and the circumcision was a sign there was a covenant between God and Abraham.

10 This is my covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and you and thy seed after thee; Every man child among you shall be circumcised.

11 And ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall be a token of the covenant betwixt me and you.

12 And he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, every man child in your generations, he that is born in the house, or bought with money of any stranger, which is not of thy seed.

13 He that is born in thy house, and he that is bought with thy money, must needs be circumcised: and my covenant shall be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant.

14 And the uncircumcised man child whose flesh of his foreskin is not circumcised, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken my covenant.

• Blood is a powerful element, and because of the blood is life and becomes a part of life. (Leviticus 17:4)
• When anything is covered by blood, it’s God way of looking at it as covered with life and it is cleansed.
• When we receive Jesus as Our Savior, we are indeed covered by His blood, and God sees us in a clean and pure way before him.

Romans 4:11 ESV He received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised. The purpose was to make him the father of all who believe without being circumcised, so that righteousness would be counted to them as well.

Philippians 3:3 ESV For we are the circumcision, who worship by the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh—

Colossians 2:11 ESV In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ

Circumcision has ancient roots among several ethnic groups in sub-equatorial Africa, and is still performed on adolescent boys to symbolize their transition to warrior status or adulthood.

Circumcision and/or subincision, often as part of an intricate coming of age ritual, was a common practice among Australian Aborigines and Pacific islanders at first contact with Western travellers. It is still practiced in the traditional way by a proportion of the population.

In Judaism, circumcision has traditionally been practised on males on the eighth day after birth (after the First Temple era).

The Book of Genesis records circumcision as part of the Abrahamic covenant with Yahweh (God).

Circumcision was common, although not universal, among ancient Semitic people.[citation needed] Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BCE, lists first of all the Egyptians being the oldest people practicing circumcision, then Colchians, Ethiopians, Phoenicians, and Syrians as circumcising cultures. In the aftermath of the conquests of Alexander the Great, however, Greek dislike of circumcision (they regarded a man as truly “naked” only if his prepuce was retracted) led to a decline in its incidence among many peoples that had previously practiced it.

The writer of 1 Maccabees wrote that under the Seleucids, many Jewish men attempted to hide or reverse their circumcision so they could exercise in Greek gymnasia, where nudity was the norm. First Maccabees also relates that the Seleucids forbade the practice of brit milah (Jewish circumcision), and punished those who performed it, as well as the infants who underwent it, with death.

The origin of circumcision is not known with certainty. It has been variously proposed that it began

• as a religious sacrifice;
• as a rite of passage marking a boy’s entrance into adulthood;
• as a form of sympathetic magic to ensure virility or fertility;
• as a means of reducing sexual pleasure;
• as an aid to hygiene where regular bathing was impractical;
• as a means of marking those of higher social status;
• as a means of humiliating enemies and slaves by symbolic castration;
• as a means of differentiating a circumcising group from their non-circumcising neighbors;
• as a means of discouraging masturbation or other socially proscribed sexual behaviors;
• as a means of increasing a man’s attractiveness to women;
• as a demonstration of one’s ability to endure pain;
• as a male counterpart to menstruation or the breaking of the hymen;
• to copy the rare natural occurrence of a missing foreskin of an important leader;
• as a way to repel demonesses; and/or
• as a display of disgust of the smegma produced by the foreskin.

Removing the foreskin can prevent or treat a medical condition known as phimosis. It has been suggested that the custom of circumcision gave advantages to tribes that practiced it and thus led to its spread

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