What does First B Jackson teach about circumcision?
Drawn from the messages where it was actually addressed: the words said from the front, the passages taught, and where to hear the whole thing.
At First B Jackson, the teaching on circumcision starts with where Paul starts in Galatians: the question of what actually saves a person. The Judaizers pressing the Galatian Christians insisted that Gentile believers needed to be circumcised and take on the requirements of the law of Moses. Pastor Mark's sermon on Galatians 4 and 5 showed that Paul does not sidestep their argument but turns it back on them, saying in effect: if you want to live under the law, then listen carefully to what the law actually says. What the law says, going all the way back to Abraham, is that faith came first and circumcision came after. It was a sign of the covenant, not its foundation.
Paul's allegory of Hagar and Sarah presses the point further. The question, Pastor Mark explained, is not ancestry but method. Anyone trying to reach God through their own effort and rule-keeping is working in purely human resources, just as Hagar represented, producing children born into slavery. Isaac came through God's promise, by the power of the Spirit, when nothing in Abraham and Sarah's own strength could have produced him. The Judaizers claimed to be children of Isaac, but Paul's answer was that physical descent is not the point. The dividing line is whether a person is trusting in what they can do or in what God has promised.
That same groundwork shapes the broader teaching at First B on how Gentiles fit into God's covenant people. The message on Ephesians 2 made clear that circumcision was the sign God gave to mark off his covenant community, but the covenant itself rested on faith from the very beginning, five hundred years before the law arrived at Sinai. What Christ accomplished was not the replacement of that old promise but its fulfillment, bringing near those who were far off and making one new people out of two, with no requirement of the old boundary markers standing between them and God.
Taught from Galatians 4:21-5:1 · Genesis 17:9-11 · Ephesians 2:11-12 · Genesis 15:17 · Acts 15
The passage taught · Galatians 4:21-5:1
21 Tell me, you that desire to be under the law, don’t you listen to the law?
22 For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the servant, and one by the free woman.
23 However, the son by the servant was born according to the flesh, but the son by the free woman was born through promise.
24 These things contain an allegory, for these are two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai, bearing children to bondage, which is Hagar.
World English Bible
The messages that teach on it
- June 14, 2015 Children of the Free Woman Paul shows the Galatians, and us, that we are children of promise, not slaves to the law, and that freedom in Christ is the only inheritance worth having.
Mentioned along the way
- May 18, 2025 Two Issues Acts 15 shows Paul and Barnabas splitting over John Mark, and Timothy being circumcised despite the Jerusalem Council. Two hard lessons on unity, rights, and the gospel.
- February 4, 2015 No Longer Strangers and Aliens Ephesians 2 traces how Gentiles once excluded from God's covenant are now brought near through Christ's blood and welcomed into one household with God's people.