Acts 7:8Meaning & Commentary from the Church Fathers

And see how He seems to grant something to circumcision, while in fact granting it nothing. The promise was given before it, and circumcision came afterward.

The promises are given to the descendants, but calamities to the forefathers.

The fathers were commanded by the Law to circumcise the foreskin because Abraham had gone out from the land of the Chaldeans. Among the Chaldeans, as also among the Medes and Persians, ancestral customs permitted men to marry their mothers and sisters.

Thus Abraham is circumcised as a sign that he renounces carnal mingling and rejects unlawful marriages among kindred.

Others say that circumcision was commanded to Abraham and his descendants so that it might be clear that from them Christ was to come according to the flesh.

In the speech which Stephen delivered in the hall of the Sanhedrin, in answer to the high priest’s interrogation, he recalled before his judges the history of the people of God. He began with their forefather Abraham and ended with Solomon (vv. 1-50).

In conclusion he reproached the persecutors of Christians for their resistance to the Holy Spirit, Who was calling them to salvation (vv. 51-53).

Stephen’s speech is both defensive and accusatory. The accusation reported that he had spoken blasphemous words against the Law of Moses and the Jerusalem temple, and against Moses and God.

“And He gave him the covenant of circumcision”: the covenant concluded through the mediation of circumcision.

God’s covenant with Abraham is so called because the circumcision of Abraham and his posterity was not only the outward sign of this covenant, but also an essential part of it (Gen. 17:10-11).

The expression “He gave him a covenant,” instead of “He made a covenant with him,” seems to have been chosen with special intent.

It points out that the making of the covenant is a free act of God, even His gift to Abraham and his posterity.

In His revelations and relations with man, God is not bound by man. Only what is pleasing to Him is granted, and only if it is pleasing to Him.

The word concerning the law of circumcision stands beside the report that Isaac was born from Abraham, Jacob from Isaac, and the twelve sons, the patriarchs of Israel, from Jacob.

It points to the special divine election of all Israel. The sign of this is the sacred covenant with God, accomplished through circumcision.

This covenant was a type of a still more sacred and mystical image of spiritual union with God, given in baptism. In baptism the one baptized, through immersion, as it were dies, and through rising from the water, as it were lives again.

“We know,” writes Blessed Theophylact, “that circumcision, which in the Old Testament was a type, contained the image of saving baptism. By the cutting away of flesh it signified renunciation of life according to the flesh.