The Razor's Edge of Judgment
Introduction: The Religion of the Skin
We live in an age that is obsessed with surfaces. We are experts in the art of the external. Our culture trades in virtue signals, pronouns in the bio, and the right bumper stickers, all of which are designed to place a person on the correct side of whatever cultural line is being drawn that week. It is a religion of the skin, a faith that goes no deeper than the epidermis. And because we are creatures of our age, we are tempted to believe that God is impressed with this sort of thing. We are tempted to think that if we have the right theological labels, the right church membership, the right kind of baptism, and the right political outrage, then we are safe. We think the sign is the substance.
But the God of the Bible is not the god of this age. He is not a diversity and inclusion officer. He is the God who weighs the heart, and His gaze penetrates deeper than skin, deeper than water, deeper than our most carefully curated religious identities. The prophet Jeremiah is sent by God to a people who had perfected the religion of the skin. They were the people of the covenant. They had the temple, they had the sacrifices, and they had the sign of circumcision. They had the ultimate identity marker, given by God Himself. And they believed this sign was a talisman, a magical ward that protected them from the judgment of God. They were, in a word, wrong. Dead wrong.
Jeremiah comes with a word that is like a divine razor, to shave away all their fleshly confidence. God declares that He is about to bring a judgment that will make no distinction between the marked and the unmarked, between the people of God and the pagans, if the heart is the same. This is a terrifying word because it demolishes our favorite hiding place: the refuge of external conformity. God is telling Judah then, and He is telling us now, that it is possible to be circumcised in the flesh but uncircumcised in the heart. It is possible to be baptized with water but unbaptized by the Spirit. And in the day of judgment, God does not inspect the skin. He inspects the heart.
This passage is a divine declaration that God hates religious hypocrisy more than He hates honest paganism. The pagan is lost in the dark, but the religious hypocrite is lost in the light, and this is a far greater offense. God is about to lump His own people in with a gallery of pagans, showing that a shared rebellious heart is a stronger unifier than a shared religious ritual.
The Text
“Behold, the days are coming,” declares Yahweh, “that I will punish all who are circumcised and yet uncircumcised, Egypt and Judah, and Edom and the sons of Ammon, and Moab and all those inhabiting the desert who clip the hair on their temples; for all the nations are uncircumcised, and all the house of Israel are uncircumcised of heart.”
(Jeremiah 9:25-26 LSB)
The Great Equalizer (v. 25)
The prophecy begins with the ominous tolling of a bell. God is putting the world on notice.
“Behold, the days are coming,” declares Yahweh, “that I will punish all who are circumcised and yet uncircumcised, ” (Jeremiah 9:25 LSB)
When God says, "Behold, the days are coming," it is time to stop what you are doing and listen. This is the language of divine appointment. An accounting is coming. A day of reckoning is on the calendar. And the object of this punishment is described in a startling, paradoxical phrase: "all who are circumcised and yet uncircumcised." The Hebrew is literally "circumcised in uncircumcision."
This is God’s indictment of formalism. He is describing a man who has the covenant sign in his flesh, but whose life and heart are indistinguishable from that of a pagan. He has the badge, but not the character. He has the uniform, but not the allegiance. He is a man who has undergone a religious ritual, but has not undergone a spiritual reality. The sign of circumcision was meant to be an outward picture of an inward reality: a heart cut open to God, a heart tender and obedient to His law, a heart set apart from the world. But for these men, it was just a tribal mark. It was their "get out of jail free" card. They trusted in the fact that they had the cut in their flesh, and they lived like the devil.
This is the essence of dead religion. It is trusting the sign instead of the thing signified. It is like a man who believes he is married because he wears a wedding ring, even though he despises his wife and lives with another woman. The ring, in that case, is not a sign of his faithfulness, but a monument to his hypocrisy. It is a witness against him. For Judah, their circumcision had become a witness against them. They bore in their bodies the mark of a covenant they trampled with their lives.
And God says He will punish this. He will not overlook it; He will not grade on a curve. He will bring judgment upon those who bear His name but deny His nature. Judgment, as the apostle Peter tells us, begins at the household of God (1 Peter 4:17). Why? Because to whom much is given, much is required. To sin against the light is a far graver thing than to sin in the darkness.
The Unholy Alliance (v. 26)
In the next verse, God makes it clear just how He views this hypocrisy. He places Judah in a lineup with the usual suspects, the pagan nations surrounding them.
"Egypt and Judah, and Edom and the sons of Ammon, and Moab and all those inhabiting the desert who clip the hair on their temples; for all the nations are uncircumcised, and all the house of Israel are uncircumcised of heart." (Jeremiah 9:26 LSB)
Imagine the shock to the original hearers. God makes a list of those He is about to punish, and right in the middle of Egypt, Edom, Ammon, and Moab, He drops "Judah." This is like reading a list of America's greatest enemies and finding "the United States" included. Egypt was the old house of bondage. Edom, Ammon, and Moab were the treacherous cousins, the nations that consistently opposed Israel. These were the outsiders, the uncircumcised, the gentiles. And Judah is placed right in their company.
God is teaching them a crucial lesson: a shared heart of rebellion creates a deeper solidarity than a shared religious ceremony. In God's eyes, rebellious Judah was spiritually aligned with pagan Egypt. Their hearts were in the same place, even if their flesh was marked differently. God's judgment cuts through external distinctions and goes straight to the heart. He is the great equalizer. Before His throne, there is no special treatment for those who are merely externally religious.
God even throws in a detail about those "who clip the hair on their temples," a pagan mourning ritual forbidden to Israel (Lev. 19:27). This is God's way of saying, "I see all the religious games you people play. I see their rituals and I see your rituals. And if the heart is not mine, it is all just noise. It is all just paganism with a different haircut."
Then comes the devastating summary, the reason for this unholy alliance in judgment. "For all the nations are uncircumcised, and all the house of Israel are uncircumcised of heart." Here is the parallel. The gentiles are uncircumcised in their flesh. That is their state by nature. But Israel is uncircumcised in heart. This is their state by rebellion. They have the sign of a soft heart, but they have cultivated a hard one. An uncircumcised heart is a heart that is stubborn, impenetrable, and resistant to the Word of God. It is a heart that has a thick, calloused foreskin of pride and self-will over it. It cannot be taught, it cannot be corrected, and it will not repent.
The apostle Paul picks up this very theme in Romans. He says, "For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision that which is outward in the flesh; but he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the Spirit, not in the letter; whose praise is not from men but from God" (Romans 2:28-29). Both Jeremiah and Paul are preaching the same message across the covenants: God has always been after the heart. The outward sign was only ever valuable as a true expression of an inward reality.
The New Covenant Surgery
This brings us directly to our situation. We are not under the covenant of circumcision, but we are under the new covenant, signified by baptism. And we must hear this warning as though it were delivered on our doorstep this morning. The same danger that confronted Judah confronts the Christian church in every generation. It is the danger of substituting the sign for the substance.
It is entirely possible to be a baptized, church-going, creed-affirming member of a solid reformed church, and to be utterly uncircumcised of heart. It is possible to have been washed with the water of baptism and yet never have been washed by the blood of the Lamb. It is possible to have all the external markings of a Christian and yet have a heart that is as hard, rebellious, and pagan as any idolater in Edom or Moab.
If your trust is in your baptism, you are lost. If your trust is in your church membership, you are lost. If your trust is in your theological knowledge or your family heritage, you are lost. These things are good gifts and right ordinances, but they are not the savior. They are pointers to the Savior. And if you worship the pointer instead of the destination, you have committed idolatry.
The good news of the new covenant is that God has promised to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. He promised, through Jeremiah himself, "I will give them a heart to know Me, that I am Yahweh; and they will be My people, and I will be their God, for they will return to Me with their whole heart" (Jeremiah 24:7). He promised to perform this heart surgery.
This is what Paul is talking about in Colossians when he says, "In Him you were also circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, in the removal of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ; having been buried with Him in baptism, in which you were also raised up with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead" (Colossians 2:11-12).
True circumcision is a supernatural act of God. It is the "circumcision of Christ," a spiritual surgery where the Holy Spirit cuts away the old, dead, rebellious flesh of our hearts and makes us alive in Jesus. Baptism is the sign of that death and resurrection. When we are baptized, we are publicly testifying that this surgery has taken place, or we are calling upon God to perform it. We are saying, "I have died with Christ to my old self, my old trusts, my old pride. And I have been raised with Him to a new life, with a new, soft, obedient heart."
So the question this text lays before each one of us is this: Have you undergone the circumcision of Christ? Has your heart been cut? Do you hate your sin? Do you love His law? Is your heart tender toward Him? Or are you hiding behind the externals? In the great day of judgment, God will not ask to see your baptismal certificate. He will look at your heart. And on that day, the only safety will be to have a heart that has been washed, cut, and made new by the grace of God in Jesus Christ.