Genesis 17:9-14 And God said to Abraham, You shall keep my covenant therefore, you, and your seed after you in their generations.… The Rev. Henry Ward Beecher says: "If there was one thing which the Jews set above another, as they do still, it was circumcision. It not only was a patriotic ordinance, but it had come down to them as a race peculiarity, a symbol of which they were proud, and they ran along the line of that observance clear back to Abraham himself. While I was in the West, I came across a Rabbi who told me that a man had travelled over six hundred miles with a child in order to have him circumcised. 'I admit,' he said, 'that the people may not have been moral, and may not have been religious, but they wanted the child circumcised anyhow.' That feeling existed in the time of the Apostle Paul to the last degree. The Jews felt about that as you feel about baptism and the Lord's Supper. Paul says: 'Neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature.'" Parallel Verses KJV: And God said unto Abraham, Thou shalt keep my covenant therefore, thou, and thy seed after thee in their generations. |
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