Northpointe PCA Sermons

A. Isaiah 11:1-2 promises a Messiah — the "stump of Jesse" — upon whom the Spirit of the Lord will rest, marking him as a new and greater David.

B. The Spirit's role spans the entirety of Christ's earthly ministry.

C. What qualifies Christ to possess the Spirit without measure is his eternal identity as the Son from whom the Spirit proceeds.

A. Joel 2:28-32, quoted by Peter at Pentecost (Acts 2), is fulfilled as the exalted Christ pours out the Spirit from the right hand of the Father (Acts 2:33).

B. The completion of Christ's redemptive work is not the resurrection or even the ascension, but Pentecost — the moment he rains down the Spirit upon his people (Richard Gaffin).

C. John 16:7 — Christ promises that his departure is necessary so the Helper will come; without Pentecost he would be a king with no citizens and a priest with no one to intercede for.

D. The Spirit applies all that Christ accomplished in redemption — "redemption accomplished, redemption applied" (John Murray).

E. The Spirit functions like floodlights at a stadium: he does not draw attention to himself but illumines the main event — Jesus Christ, in whom all the promises of God find their "Yes and Amen."

A. The doctrine of the church appears in the Creed under the rubric of the Holy Spirit — not the Son — signaling that the church is a supernatural, Spirit-gathered community.

B. The gathering of converted sinners in fellowship is itself the powerful demonstration of the Spirit — the "greater works" Christ promised his disciples (John 14:12; John 17).

C. The Spirit is the bond of the one body.

D. The church is a spiritual entity — not a political organization, marketing enterprise, or vehicle for cultural transformation — gathered around Word and Sacrament through the ordinary means of grace.

A. The resurrection is a historical event, not merely a set of principles; Christianity's doctrines rest on it as a real, datable occurrence under Pontius Pilate.

B. The resurrection brings clarity — it is like glasses being put on after walking in darkness.

C. The resurrection declares Christ's authority over death and Hades.

D. The deepest human longing for freedom is ultimately a longing for resurrection life.

A. Christ's states of humiliation and exaltation frame his person and work.

B. The pouring out of the Spirit at Pentecost is the sign and seal of Christ's enthronement, not an ongoing repeatable pattern.

C. Christ's ascension as King means he rules all things now for the sake of his church.

D. Christ's ascension as High Priest after the order of Melchizedek means he ever lives to intercede for his people.

A. The Apostles' Creed — "From there he shall come to judge the living and the dead" — speaks of Christ's second coming as the great separation.

B. Judgment as separation is a theme running throughout all of Scripture, always coinciding with salvation for God's people.

C. The resurrection is the public assurance that the appointed Judge is coming; the days of ignorance are over.

A. When Abram heard his kinsman Lot had been taken captive, he immediately mustered 318 trained men and allies to pursue the Mesopotamian kings (Genesis 14:14-16).

B. The relationship between Abram and Lot is that of a kinsman redeemer.

C. Abram's rescue of Lot points to Christ our kinsman redeemer.

A. After his victory, Abram encounters the king of Sodom, who attempts to place Abram in his debt (Genesis 14:21).

B. Abram refuses the king of Sodom's offer with a sworn oath to the Lord God Most High (Genesis 14:22-24).

C. This same principle runs through the ministry of Jesus and defines the nature of his kingdom.

D. The eyes of the Father are not on the powerful and prominent but on the humble and faithful.

A. Melchizedek, king of Salem and priest of God Most High, comes to Abram with bread and wine and a two-fold blessing (Genesis 14:18-20).

B. Melchizedek serves as a marker of anticipation, pointing Israel toward the coming Messiah.

C. The bread and wine Melchizedek brings is significant and anticipates the Lord's Supper.

D. Receiving continually from the hand of the priest king is what shuts the ears of God's people to the offers of the world.

A. Abram, fearing for his life, instructs Sarai to say she is his sister so that he will be spared — a plan motivated by self-preservation rather than trust in God.

B. This sin flows from a presumptuous certainty about the future — Abram acts as though he knows exactly what will happen and must manage the outcome himself.

C. This failure fits a recurring pattern in Genesis: a gracious call from God is followed almost immediately by a sinful fall.

D. The story of Reformed Theological Seminary illustrates the question this passage poses: How big is your God?

A. By handing Sarai to Pharaoh, Abram puts the covenant promise of Genesis 12:7 in jeopardy — the offspring through whom all nations would be blessed is threatened before it even begins.

B. The potential mixing of the blessed line with the cursed line of Ham (Egypt) mirrors other dangerous minglings throughout Genesis.

C. Being unequally yoked carries serious generational consequences, not merely personal ones.

D. The congregation's vow at a covenant child's baptism is an expression of this generational, Abrahamic family commitment — pledging to assist parents in the Christian nurture of their children.

E. The bare promise of God — not past experiences, feelings, or grand displays — is what faith must lean on.

A. The account in Genesis 12:10-20 is a miniature, proto-Exodus that prefigures Israel's later deliverance from Egypt.

B. God preserves Israel in Egypt for the same reason he preserved Abram — his covenant faithfulness to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

C. The pattern continues in the life of Christ: Herod acts as a new Pharaoh, seeking to kill the promised offspring, and the holy family flees to Egypt.

D. Unlike Abram, Christ does not sell his bride into enemy hands to save his own skin — he lays down his life for her.

E. The closing application returns to the central question of the sermon: How big is your God, and how big are his promises to you in Christ?

A. Only an eternal being can pay an eternal debt.

B. A cosmic redemption requires a cosmic redeemer.

C. Only eternal God can come before the face of God in wrath and rise victorious.

D. Christ does not become eternal life at the resurrection; he is eternal life incarnate.

A. The principle of lex talionis (the law of retaliation in kind) establishes that only a man can atone for man's sin.

B. Sin is a murderer; therefore sin itself must be put to death — Romans 6:23.

C. Christ is fully human but without a sin nature or imputed guilt — conceived by the Holy Spirit.

D. The additional phrase in Genesis 9:6 — "for God made man in his own image" — reveals a deeper purpose of the incarnation.

A. The term hypostatic union comes from the Greek word hypostasis, used in Hebrews 1:3 — Christ is the exact imprint of God's nature, meaning he is fully God.

B. Two early heresies were rejected by the church in defining the hypostatic union.

C. The Council of Ephesus (AD 431) declared Mary Theotokos (Mother of God) to safeguard the hypostatic union, not to elevate Mary.

D. The hypostatic union is essential to Christ's office as the one mediator.

A. The toledot ("these are the generations of") formula appears ten times in Genesis, carrying the promise of Genesis 3:15 — the offspring of the woman who will crush the serpent's head — forward through the genealogical line.

B. Abraham is not called arbitrarily; he is the son of Terah, son of Shem, son of Noah, son of Seth, son of Adam — the line of the promised offspring of the woman.

C. Luke's genealogy in Luke 3:23-38 traces Christ back through Shem, Noah, Seth, and Adam, showing that Genesis 3:15 is the programmatic promise for all of redemptive history culminating in Jesus Christ, the true offspring of the woman.

A. Genesis 12:3 promises that in Abram all the families of the earth shall be blessed. In context, "families of the earth" refers to the lines of Shem, Ham, and Japheth dispersed after the flood (Genesis 9:18-19).

B. When God promises in Genesis 12:7 to give the land of Canaan to Abram's offspring, Abram recognizes Noah's prophecy coming to fulfillment and builds an altar in thanksgiving.

C. Redemption is a family reunion: Paul tells the Athenians in Acts 17:26 that God made from one man every nation, and calling a sinner to faith is calling them back home to their father.

A. The note in Genesis 11:30 — "Now Sarai was barren; she had no child" — is a deliberate disruption of the uniform genealogical pattern, signaling that the promised offspring will not come by natural means alone.

B. Matthew's genealogy in Matthew 1 uses the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew toledot ("the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ"), deliberately echoing Genesis and presenting itself as the final and culminating toledot.

C. The Emmanuel principle — "I will be your God and you will be my people" — seen in the nation (Exodus 6:7), in the Davidic king (2 Samuel 7:14), and in the new creation (Revelation 21:3) — finds its origin and root in the family of Abraham.

A. The name Jesus is the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew Joshua, meaning "Yahweh is salvation," and is consistently linked in the Old Testament to Yahweh's strength (chayil).

B. This pattern of Yahweh's saving strength originates in the Song of Moses after the Red Sea crossing in Exodus 15:1-21; just as Yahweh threw horse and rider into the sea, so Jesus is Yahweh come down to destroy sin.

C. Matthew 1:21 — the angel instructs Joseph: "You shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins."

D. The salvation Jesus brings is not merely a pardon but a conquest: he suffocates sin, treads it underfoot as a conquering king, and throws it into the depths of the sea.

E. The object of this mighty work is particular — "his people" — underscoring the personal, covenantal nature of Christ's saving work.

A. Christ is the Greek rendering of the Hebrew Messiah, meaning "the Anointed One"; anointing in the ancient world carried two implications.

B. The anointing of Christ took place at his baptism in the Jordan, where the Spirit descended and the Father declared, "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased" — echoing David's anointing in 1 Samuel 16.

C. At the Transfiguration, the Father again seals and anoints Christ — this time adding "Listen to him," identifying Jesus as the God-approved, God-sealed prophetic voice.

D. To confess Christ is to confess the one anointed to all three Old Testament offices: prophet, priest, and king — and to exclude all rival claimants (Muhammad, Joseph Smith, and others).

A. The creed's phrase "only begotten Son" refers to the divine nature of the Son as described in John 1:14 and John 1:18; he is not a high-ranking angel (as Arianism and Jehovah's Witnesses claim) but fully God as the Father is fully God.

B. Hebrews 1:3 describes the Son as "the exact imprint" (hypostasis) of the Father's nature — the same substance and essence; everything that makes the Father God makes the Son God.

C. The phrase "eternal generation of the Son," first coined by Origen in the second century, guards against Arianism's error that "there was a time when the Son was not."

D. The proper order is: the eternal gives meaning to the temporal, not the reverse — eternal love between Father and Son is the basis for human love; eternal generation is the basis for human generation.

E. To confess "his only begotten Son" is to deny the right of any human philosophy, higher criticism, or secular worldview to define God on human terms; God alone, through the Son, has the prerogative to define himself.

A. The Greek word kyrios (Lord) denotes power, authority, control, and legal ownership; it translates the Hebrew Adonai, which the scribes used as a reverent substitute for the covenant name Yahweh in the Septuagint (approximately 7,000 occurrences).

B. To call Jesus "Lord" (kyrios) in a Jewish context was to identify him with Yahweh, the great I AM.

C. The title Lord also carries a Davidic, royal-coronation meaning rooted in Psalm 110:1 — "Yahweh said to my Adonai, sit at my right hand."

D. The ascension is the coronation of the greater David; confessing "our Lord" is the church's acclamation — "long live the everlasting King" — in obedience to the Father's command.

A. The creed's opening "I believe in God" is first and foremost a statement of monotheism, grounded in the Shema of Deuteronomy 6:4.

B. The Greek word pistis (believing/trusting) in the creed carries far more than intellectual assent to theism — it conveys active trust and leaning upon this God.

C. Monotheism is not the natural evolutionary product of primitive religion becoming sophisticated, as secular critical scholarship argues.

A. The creed uses the definite article the Father rather than my or our Father, conveying two distinct realities.

B. Following Cornelius Van Til, God is not merely a being who has personality as an attribute — God is absolute personality as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

C. In Matthew 11:27, Jesus reveals a perfect relational knowledge (yada) between Father and Son that we are invited into.

A. The creed calls God Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth — he creates ex nihilo, out of nothing, by the word of his power alone.

B. The creed is deliberately polemical against Gnosticism and its Greek dualism, which held that one evil god (the Demiurge) created the material world and a good god rules the spiritual realm.

C. This ancient polemic remains urgently relevant today — gender confusion ideology is a modern form of Gnosticism.

D. There are no new heresies — only old heresies in new costumes; the worn, tried, and true historic creeds and confessions are sufficient to combat them in every age.

A. Paul contrasts the Abrahamic promise with the Mosaic law, insisting in Galatians 3:15 that a ratified covenant cannot be annulled or added to.

B. God neither annuls nor adds to the covenant promise given to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; He is a trustworthy, promise-keeping God.

C. Faith, defined in Hebrews 11:1 as "the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen," is the dominant theme of the patriarchal history.

A. Galatians 3:21 asks: "Is the law contrary to the promises of God?" — Paul answers with an emphatic "Certainly not!"

B. Israel's redemption from Egypt was grounded in the Abrahamic promise, not the other way around.

C. The giving of the law at Sinai reveals the high moral character of the God of promise.

D. The dangerous inversion (making the promise serve the law) produces pharisaism — the idea that one must climb the ladder of lawkeeping before receiving grace.

A. There is a deliberate contrast between "annul/add" in Galatians 3:15 and "added" in Galatians 3:19.

B. The law functions as a guardian (paidagogos) driving sinners to Christ, the offspring of Abraham (Galatians 3:24).

C. God does not become a debtor to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, or to us — He becomes a debtor to His own word.

D. The result: all who are in Christ are Abraham's offspring and heirs according to promise (Galatians 3:29), whether Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female (Galatians 3:28).