Northpointe PCA Sermons

A. Genesis 17 adds "flavor and new features" to the same covenant first promised in Genesis 12 and formally established in Genesis 15.

B. Naming in Scripture signals the authority of the one who names and carries the promise of God bound up within the name.

C. The name change in verse 5 declares an already-confirmed reality: God speaks of what he has promised as though it has already occurred, because his word is certain.

D. The pattern mirrors the New Testament epistles: indicatives (who you are declared to be in Christ) precede imperatives (therefore walk blamelessly), just as God declares Abraham's identity before calling him to walk before him.

E. In Romans 4, Paul argues that Abraham was counted righteous by faith (Genesis 15:6) before he received circumcision — that is, Abraham believed while he was, in biblical terms, still a Gentile.

F. The "mystery" now revealed in Christ (Ephesians 3) is that the nations (Gentiles) are grafted into the one covenant through faith — already hidden in Abraham's name, now made fully clear in Christ.

G. Every believer in Meridian, Mississippi was in the mind of God at the name change: united to Christ, in whom all the promises of God are yes and amen (2 Corinthians 1:20), every passage of Scripture speaks to us as participants in God's grand cosmic redemptive story.

A. God institutes circumcision as the sign of the Abrahamic covenant (v. 10), cutting away the flesh as a consecration to God — death to the old man, life to the new.

B. Verse 14: to be uncircumcised is to be "cut off" — the language of covenant curse, a deliberate play on words mirroring the cutting ceremony of Genesis 15.

C. God speaks of the sign using the language of sacramental union — he calls circumcision "my covenant" (v. 10, 13), because the promises are so bound up in the sign that the sign is spoken of as the thing itself.

D. Circumcision finds its fulfillment and termination in the crucifixion of Christ: Colossians 2 teaches that Christ's cross is the true circumcision; Isaiah 53:8 says he is "cut off from the land of the living."

E. Practical application: as the Hebrews were to look at their circumcision and have faith drawn out in the sure promises of the covenant, so believers are to look back to their baptism and draw out faith in those same promises now fulfilled in Christ.

A. The word "everlasting" permeates the passage (vv. 7, 8, 13, 19), raising a tension: how can circumcision be an everlasting covenant sign if Paul declares it of no value after Christ?

B. Abraham himself never possessed the land and would not live to see nations come from him — so "everlasting" cannot be exhausted by his earthly lifetime or by Israel's history alone.

C. The answer to the everlasting nature of the covenant is Jesus Christ.

D. The physical land of Canaan was a type and shadow of the imperishable, heavenly country — the everlasting rest that Christ, the final Joshua, has entered and prepared for his people (Hebrews 4).

E. The Lord's Supper is the covenant meal in which believers feed on Christ — the sum and substance of the Abrahamic covenant — and taste the foretaste of the everlasting rest: the wedding feast of the Lamb where every tribe, nation, and tongue, sons and daughters of Abraham, rejoice together in his presence forever.

A. The Greek word koinonia (fellowship) points to a specific, capital-F fellowship — not merely casual Christian friendship, but the gathered assembly of God's people in worship.

B. Post-resurrection appearances tie the breaking of bread to the recognition of Christ's presence.

C. The order of the Apostles' Creed is intentional: Holy Spirit → Church → individual salvation benefits, reflecting the Confession's teaching that there is no ordinary hope of salvation outside the church (WCF 25.2).

A. The name Jesus means "he will save his people from their sins"; to confess faith in Jesus is to confess the forgiveness of sins.

B. The guilt of sin is fully expunged at the cross — justification brings not only a clean slate but the positive, active righteousness of Christ imputed to the believer.

C. Freedom from the guilt of sin is inseparably linked to freedom from the power of sin.

D. The Roman Catholic doctrine of infused grace collapses justification and sanctification, making final justification dependent on one's cooperation with grace — a prison house the Reformers rightly rejected.

E. Forgiveness proclaims: sin is no longer master; the believer is no longer a slave to sin but a slave to righteousness — hearing Christ say, "Go and sin no more."

A. The creed explicitly denies the Gnostic heresy that Christ is Lord only of the spirit; Christ redeems body and soul.

B. The Gospels repeatedly show Christ caring for the body as a confirming sign of his messiahship (Luke 7) — blind see, lame walk, lepers cleansed, deaf hear, dead raised.

C. The Levitical law's treatment of bodily uncleanness establishes that physical death, not only spiritual death, is an offense before the living God; Christ becomes incarnate to redeem and glorify our bodies.

D. By faith Joseph directed that his bones be carried into Canaan (Hebrews 11:22) — he wanted his dead bones in the land of the living, where the God of life would meet his people.

E. Believers are to treat their bodies not in light of the dust they will become, but in light of the resurrection glory they will become — united to Christ the firstfruits of the resurrection harvest.

A. Life everlasting follows and is inseparable from the resurrection of the body; the eschaton is not a disembodied heaven but the resurrection of body and soul into the full presence of the triune God.

B. Eternal life is not monotonous repetition (cf. Groundhog Day) but the inexhaustible riches of the triune God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — perpetually flooding over glorified creatures who can never reach the bottom of those riches.

C. The life everlasting is pictured in Revelation 21–22 as beholding the glory of God and the Lamb without fear, trembling, or sin clouding the vision.

A. Holiness (qadosh / hagios) means being set apart from the common and consecrated unto the Lord.

B. The tabernacle pattern establishes this principle — every furnishing in the tabernacle was washed with blood or water because the holy God would dwell there (Exodus 25–40).

C. 1 Peter 2:9 applies the Exodus language of Exodus 19 directly to the church: "a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession."

D. Holiness also means wholeness — as God is light with no mixture of darkness, so every aspect of the church and her worship is to be wholly set apart.

A. "Catholic" does not mean Roman Catholic — it means universal: one church across all times, places, and peoples.

B. The word catholic arose in the earliest church to combat Gnostic, cult-like factionalism — wherever the apostolic gospel is faithfully proclaimed, there is the true church.

C. To confess the holy catholic church is to affirm two things:

D. We should not surrender the word catholic to those who have distorted it — battles for orthodoxy are battles over the proper definition of words, and abandoning good words does a disservice to future generations.

A. The Greek word ekklesia (church) means "the called-out ones" — drawn from darkness into light (1 Peter 2:9).

B. Ekklesia fundamentally means an assembly — a gathered people.

C. Every believer's presence in the assembly matters, even those who feel unimportant.

D. The assembled church gives the greatest foretaste of heaven available on earth.

A. Sarai's solution — giving Hagar to Abram as a concubine — was culturally normal in the ancient Near East, where marriage contracts often stipulated the use of a handmaid to produce an heir if the wife was barren.

B. But Sarai is doing more than following cultural custom; she is using the culture's pragmatic solution to bring about a covenant promise that God alone can fulfill — invoking Yahweh's name (Genesis 16:2) while bypassing God's means.

C. The contrast with Genesis 15 is deliberate: God alone passed through the severed carcasses in the covenant theophany, swearing by himself to fulfill the promise. It is not Sarai's pragmatism but God and God alone who guarantees the promise.

D. The church today faces the same temptation: adopting the culture's solutions when God seems slow — market-driven church growth strategies, watered-down ethics, entertainment-driven worship — rather than waiting on God's ordinary means of grace.

E. The call to the church: remain faithful, word-and-sacrament congregations, feeding on ordinary means of grace and waiting — even when the world calls it boring, irrelevant, or old-fashioned.

A. Genesis 16:2 records that Abram listened to the voice of Sarai — a Hebrew construction used only one other time in Genesis, in Genesis 3:17, where God rebukes Adam for listening to the voice of his wife and eating the forbidden fruit.

B. Moses deliberately echoes the original Fall throughout Genesis 16.

C. The siren call of self-sufficiency — have it your way, you are all you need — is the serpent's temptation repackaged for every generation. A biblical waiting-trust in God does not compute in a me-centered world.

D. Contrast King Saul and King David as illustrations of impatience versus patient obedience.

A. In Genesis 16:7-14, the Angel of the Lord finds Hagar fleeing in the wilderness on the way to Shur — most likely heading back to Egypt — and addresses her by name, the only instance in any ancient religious document where a deity addresses a woman by name.

B. The Angel of the Lord is best understood as a pre-incarnate theophanic appearance of the second person of the Trinity, the Son.

C. Hagar names God El Roi — the God of seeing — and her response echoes Exodus 33:23, where Moses sees the back of Yahweh's glory passing by: Have I really seen the back of him who sees me?

D. Theophany is the inverse of idolatry: idolatry is man searching out and constructing God according to human imagination; theophany is God searching out and revealing himself to the creature.

E. The theophany points forward to the Incarnation: Jesus says, If you have seen me, you have seen the Father (John 14:9); John's prologue declares we have seen his glory (John 1:14). The invisible God searches sinners out through the visible manifestation of the Son made man.

F. Application: those crushed by the consequences of their own impatience — guilt, shame, impulsive decisions that still haunt — are tempted to flee back into the house of slavery. It is there, on the road back to Egypt, that the God who sees meets us.

A. Mark opens by declaring Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God — meaning God himself come to accomplish his final saving act, not merely a demigod or supernatural figure.

B. Mark reinterprets Malachi 3:1 and Isaiah 40:3, applying them to Jesus: the messenger prepares the way before Yahweh, and Jesus is that Yahweh come in flesh.

C. The opening of the heavens fulfills Jewish expectation drawn from texts like Isaiah 64:1 — that when God returned, three signs would accompany him.

D. Mark uses the Greek verb schizō (to rip or tear) for the opening of the heavens — a cataclysmic, forceful entry of God into history — deliberately echoing the tearing of the temple veil at the end of the gospel (Mark 15:38).

E. The voice from heaven in Mark 1:11 alludes to three Old Testament texts that together define Jesus' identity and mission.

A. In the Old Testament, prophets, priests, and kings were anointed with oil before beginning their office — a sign that the Holy Spirit was coming upon them to empower and authorize their work (cf. 1 Samuel 16:13).

B. Jesus' anointing surpasses all others: rather than oil representing the Spirit, the Holy Spirit himself descends bodily upon him — the greatest anointing of any of God's servants.

C. The dove form of the Spirit carries deep biblical resonance.

D. Jesus waited 30 years before beginning ministry, a reminder that God's people must wait on his timing rather than rushing ahead; yet when his moment came, a brief ministry of roughly three years accomplished the greatest work in history.

A. Two striking oddities mark the baptism account.

B. Mark draws a deliberate parallel between the many and the one: the crowds of Judea and Jerusalem came and were baptized (Mark 1:5); then Jesus came and was baptized (Mark 1:9) — the one representing and identifying with the many.

C. The order of events is theologically significant: Jesus is baptized first, and only then do the heavens open and the Father speak — showing that he willingly and voluntarily chose to identify with sinners before receiving heavenly confirmation.

D. The practical significance for believers flows from this identification.

A. God opens the covenant by recounting his redemptive act: "I am the LORD who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess" (Genesis 15:7).

B. J. I. Packer summarizes covenant theology in one word: you. God is not merely a transcendent deity but one who bows down, redeems, and says, "I am your God and you are my people."

C. The New Testament epistles echo these covenant preambles in their opening greetings; believers should not pass by them but immerse themselves in the covenant Lord's address to his redeemed people.

A. A deep and dreadful darkness falls on Abram (Genesis 15:12), corresponding to a dark message: his offspring will be sojourners, servants, and afflicted for 400 years (Genesis 15:13).

B. The promise is ultimately fulfilled, but not on Abram's timetable — God gives it to him straight rather than offering flattery.

C. The honest God who calls by redeeming grace is the same God who corrects and chastises because he loves his people.

D. The question pressed on the congregation: Do you want the God who gives it to you straight, or a god who tells you only what you want to hear?

A. A covenant in the ancient Near East was ratified by both parties walking between severed animal carcasses, symbolically invoking a self-maledictory oath: "May I become like these dead animals if I break this covenant" (cf. Jeremiah 34:18).

B. In Genesis 15:17, God alone — appearing as a smoking fire pot and flaming torch (a theophany) — passes between the pieces while Abram sleeps.

C. This covenant ceremony points forward to the cross, where the promise is ultimately and fully kept.

D. The cross is not only salvation from sin and death; it is the Father's ultimate cry of assurance to his people: "Do you see how far I go to show you that my promises never fail?"

E. The call to the congregation: know that the covenant love and promises of God are not for "them out there" but for you whom he has redeemed — do not disbelieve, but believe.