Circumcise Your Heart

Deu 10:12-22

  "And now, Israel, what does the LORD your God require of you, but to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all His ways and to love Him, to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul,

and to keep the commandments of the LORD and His statutes which I command you today for your good?

Indeed heaven and the highest heavens belong to the LORD your God, also the earth with all that is in it.

The LORD delighted only in your fathers, to love them; and He chose their descendants after them, you above all peoples, as it is this day.

Therefore circumcise the foreskin of your heart, and be stiff-necked no longer.

For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality nor takes a bribe.

He administers justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the stranger, giving him food and clothing.

Therefore love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

You shall fear the LORD your God; you shall serve Him, and to Him you shall hold fast, and take oaths in His name.

He is your praise, and He is your God, who has done for you these great and awesome things which your eyes have seen.

Your fathers went down to Egypt with seventy persons, and now the LORD your God has made you as the stars of heaven in multitude.

Deuteronomy 10:12-22 

Jehovah's desire for His people was summed up in the words "to fear . . . to walk . . . to love . . . to serve . . . to keep" (vv. 12, 13). 

All of God's commandments were designed for their good (v. 13b). Moses encouraged them to obey God because of His greatness (v. 14), His sovereign choice of Israel as His special people (v. 15), His righteousness and justice (vv. 17-20), and His past favors to the nation (vv. 21, 22). 

A circumcised heart (v. 16) is one that obeys. 

Deu 10:16

They were, therefore, to lay aside all insensibility of heart and all obduracy, to acknowledge God’s supremacy, to imitate his beneficence, and to fear and worship him. Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart. As circumcision was the symbol of purification and sign of consecration to God, so the Israelites are enjoined to realize in fact what that rite symbolized, viz. purity of heart and receptivity for the things of God. This is enforced by the consideration that Jehovah the alone God, the Almighty, is mighty and terrible without respect to persons, and at the same time is a righteous Judge, and the Protector of the helpless and destitute.

On “circumcision” see Gen 17:10. This verse points to the spiritual import of circumcision. Man is by nature “very far gone from original righteousness,” and in a state of enmity to God; by circumcision, as the sacrament of admission to the privileges of the chosen people, this opposition must be taken away ere man could enter into covenant with God. It was through the flesh that man first sinned; as it is also in the flesh, its functions, lusts, etc., that man’s rebellion against God chiefly manifests itself still. It was fitting therefore that the symbol which should denote the removal of this estrangement from God should be worked in the body. Moses then fitly follows up the command “to circumcise the heart,” with the warning “to be no more stiff-necked.” His meaning is that they should lay aside that obduracy and perverseness toward God for which he had been reproving them, which had led them into so many transgressions of the covenant and revolts from God, and which was especially the very contrary of that love and fear of God required by the first two of the Ten Commandments. The language associated with circumcision in the Bible distinguishes the use made of this rite in the Jewish religion from that found among certain pagan nations. Circumcision was practiced by some of them as a religious rite, designed (e. g.) to appease the deity of death who was supposed to delight in human suffering; but not by any, the Egyptians probably excepted, at all in the Jewish sense and meaning.

The grounds on which circumcision was imposed as essential by the Law are the same as those on which Baptism is required in the Gospel. The latter in the New Testament is strictly analogous to the former under the Old; compare Col 2:11-12.

Colossians 2:11-12

11  When you came to Christ, you were “circumcised,” but not by a physical procedure. Christ performed a spiritual circumcision—the cutting away of your sinful nature.

12  For you were buried with Christ when you were baptized. And with him you were raised to new life because you trusted the mighty power of God, who raised Christ from the dead.