Romans 2:26

If therefore the uncircumcision keep the ordinance of the law, shall not his uncircumcision be reckoned for circumcision?

In Romans 2:18, the alternative translation of a key clause was noted: "distinguish the things that differ"; and the crying need to do just that becomes apparent in the study of a verse like this. All kinds of false teachings are advocated as a result of Paul's statement here. For example, Hodge wrote in his comment on this place,

If circumcision is in itself nothing, its presence cannot protect the guilty; its absence cannot invalidate the claims of the righteous.[19]

In Hodge's statement there is a failure to distinguish things that differ. If he had said, "Its absence in those persons of whom God has not required it cannot invalidate the claims of the righteous," then his: statement would have been true. To take Hodge's statement as it stands, it would have to mean that a "righteous Jew" who had refused to obey God's commandment regarding circumcision would not thus have invalidated his righteousness. The tremendous importance of this distinction will be seen a little later as applied to the subject of baptism. Obviously, Paul taught nothing like that.

The above raises the question at once of who were those uncircumcised people keeping the ordinances of the law; and which law and which ordinances are meant? Without any doubt, Godet's identification of those uncircumcised keepers of the law is correct. He said,

We are to regard the apostle as referring to those many Gentiles converted to the gospel who, all uncircumcised as they were, nevertheless fulfilled the law in virtue of the Spirit of Christ, and thus became the true Israel, the Israel of God (Galatians 4:16).[20]

Here then is the instance where uncircumcision had become circumcision, and here is the case where uncircumcision could not invalidate the claims of the righteous; Hodge's statement noted above does not take into account this distinction and is not correct. Many of the Christians of Jewish descent in the early church insisted upon circumcision for Gentile converts, a requirement Paul fought vigorously and never allowed; and it is the shadow of that old controversy that looms here. The law required circumcision; and, therefore, any person credited with "keeping the ordinances of the law" would positively have to be a person of whom God had never required circumcision in the first place, and who was fulfilling the law, not in the shadow of its old ordinances, but in the realities of the new life in Christ. Every Christian, though literally uncircumcised, is nevertheless circumcised "in Christ;" in the same sense that he has paid the penalty of death due to sin, "in Christ." All who are truly "in Christ" thus fulfill the law.

[19] Ibid.

[20] F. Godet, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1970), p. 130,