But he has more to say about the position of the Jew. He would not even seem to forget the greatness of the God-given privilege of Israel; and he will use that privilege once more as a cry to conscience.
[Sidenote: Ver. 25.] =For circumcision indeed profits you, if you carry law into practice;= in that case circumcision is for you God's seal upon God's own promises to the true sons of Abraham's blood _and faith_. Are you indeed a practiser of the holy Code whose summary and essence is love to God and love to man? Can you look your Lord in the face and say--not, "I have satisfied all Thy demands; pay me that Thou owest," but, "Thou knowest that I love Thee, and therefore oh how I love Thy law"? Then you are indeed a child of the covenant, through His grace; and the seal of the covenant speaks to you the certainties of its blessing. =But if you are a transgressor of law, your circumcision is turned uncircumcision;= the divine seal is to you nothing, for you are not the rightful holder of the deed of covenant which it seals. [Sidenote: Ver. 26.] =If therefore the uncircumcision,= the Gentile world, in some individual instance, =carefully keeps the ordinances of the Law,= reverently remembers the love owed to God and to man, =shall not his uncircumcision,= the uncircumcision of the man supposed, =be counted as if circumcision?= Shall he not be treated as a lawful recipient of covenant blessings even though _the seal_ upon the document of promise is, not at all by his fault, missing? [Sidenote: Ver. 27.] =And= thus =shall not this hereditary (ἐκ φύσεως) uncircumcision,= this Gentile born and bred, =fulfilling the law= of love and duty, =judge you, who by means of letter and circumcision are--law's transgressor,= using as you practically do use the terms, the letter, of the covenant, and the rite which is its seal, as means to violate its inmost import, and claiming, in the pride of privilege, blessings promised only to self-forgetting love? [Sidenote: Ver. 28.] =For not the (Jew) in the visible= sphere =is a Jew; nor is circumcision in the visible= sphere, =in the flesh, circumcision.= [Sidenote: Ver. 29.] =No, but the Jew in the hidden= sphere; =and circumcision of heart, in Spirit, not letter;= circumcision in the sense of a work on the soul, wrought by God's Spirit, not in that of a legal claim supposed to rest upon a routine of prescribed observances. =His praise,= the praise of such a Jew, the Jew in this hidden sense, thus circumcised in heart, =does not come from men, but does come from God.= Men may, and very likely will, give him anything but praise; they will not like him the better for his deep divergence from their standard, and from their spirit. But the Lord knows him, and loves him, and prepares for him His own welcome; "Well done, good and faithful."
Here is a passage far-reaching, like the paragraphs which have gone before it. Its immediate bearing needs only brief comment, certainly brief explanation. We need do little more than wonder at the moral miracle of words like these written by one who, a few years before, was spending the whole energy of his mighty will upon the defence of ultra-Judaism. The miracle resides not only in the vastness of the man's change of view, but in the manner of it. It is not only that he denounces Pharisaism, but he denounces it in a tone entirely free from its spirit, which he might easily have carried into the opposite camp. What he meets it with is the assertion of truths as pure and peaceable as they are eternal; the truths of the supreme and ultimate importance of the right attitude of man's heart towards God, and of the inexorable connexion between such an attitude and a life of unselfish love towards man. Here is one great instance of that large spiritual phenomenon, the transfiguration of the first followers of the Lord Jesus from what they had been to what under His risen power they became. We see in them men whose convictions and hopes have undergone an incalculable revolution; yet it is a revolution which disorders nothing. Rather, it has taken fanaticism for ever out of their thoughts and purposes. It has softened their whole souls towards man, as well as drawn them into an unimagined intimacy with God. It has taught them to live above the world; yet it has brought them into the most practical and affectionate relations with every claim upon them in the world around them. "Your life is hid with Christ in God"; "Honour all men"; "He that loveth not, knoweth not God."