Cited in sermons
Herman Bavinck
57 sermons · All people cited
Bible Study - Exodus 3
Exodus 3 presents the burning bush theophany as a revelation of the character of God before it is a commission to Moses. The passage is expounded under three headings: the commission given to Moses (vv. 1–12), the revelation of the divine name Yahweh (vv. 13–15), and the instructions given to Moses concerning Israel and Pharaoh (vv. 16–22). The divine name 'I AM WHO I AM' discloses God's self-existence, eternality, immutability, and covenantal faithfulness — attributes that must frame corporate worship and undergird the believer's confidence in affliction.
The Resurrection and Justification
Romans 4:25 declares that Christ 'was delivered up because of our offenses and was raised because of our justification' — a verse Charles Hodge called a comprehensive statement of the gospel and Matthew Poole called an abridgment of the whole. The sermon works through two inseparable redemptive realities: the substitutionary, particular atonement accomplished in Christ's death, and the five-fold testimony of the resurrection to the validity of that work. The central application is that a robust grasp of justification by faith alone — the imputation of Christ's righteousness received through faith — is the irreplaceable foundation for Christian stability, comfort, and peace with God.
The First Missionary Journey, Part 10
Acts 14:8–18 presents Paul and Barnabas in Lystra, where a miraculous healing of a congenitally lame man provokes the crowd to mistake the apostles for Zeus and Hermes. The sermon moves through three movements: the healing and its spiritual significance, the apostles' repudiation of pagan worship, and Paul's proclamation of the living God to a purely pagan audience. Particular attention is given to the doctrine of divine impassibility — the classical confession that God is without passions — as the necessary corollary of divine immutability, with pastoral argument that this doctrine secures rather than undermines the believer's confidence in God's unchanging love and justice. The sermon closes with an appeal to repent of all idolatry and trust in the Lord Jesus Christ as the only Savior for sinners.
The Third Commandment
The Third Commandment — 'You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain' (Deuteronomy 5:11) — grounds its prohibition and its positive demands in the theological weight of the divine name itself: God's name is the vehicle by which He reveals His nature, being, and attributes to His creatures, so every misuse is a direct offense against God. The sermon works through five concrete violations (blasphemy, false oaths, magic and sorcery, misapplication of providence, and misinterpretation of Scripture) before turning to the positive duties of reverent use, worshipful fear, and a sincere profession of faith matched by answerable conduct. Throughout, the law-gospel distinction is maintained: no sinner is accepted by God on the basis of keeping this commandment, but on the basis of Christ's perfect obedience rendered in the sinner's place; those united to Christ by grace through faith are then pointed back to the law as a rule of grateful living.
The Preface to the Ten Commandments
Deuteronomy 5:1–6 opens the Ten Commandments with a preface that sets law within the context of grace: God identifies himself as the one who redeemed Israel from Egypt before issuing a single command. This sermon introduces a new series on the Decalogue by situating it within its canonical, covenantal, and historical setting — tracing the narrative from Exodus through Numbers to Deuteronomy's second giving of the law. The preface establishes the lawgiver's identity (Yahweh, the covenant God), his personal involvement with his people, and the redemptive act that grounds all the commandments that follow. The threefold use of the law — civil, pedagogical, and normative — frames how believers are to receive and apply the Decalogue in the new covenant era.
The Dedication of the Temple
Solomon's dedicatory prayer in 1 Kings 8:22–53 is examined as a model of theological depth and dependent petition. The prayer opens by rehearsing God's incomparability, faithfulness, transcendence, and imminence — attributes that ground every request that follows. Six petitions structured around covenant curse and restoration (Leviticus 26; Deuteronomy 28) demonstrate that forgiveness is the central burden of the prayer, and that affliction is a designed instrument for drawing God's people back to dependence on Him. Practical applications press the congregation toward reverent worship, heart-obedience rooted in justification by Christ's righteousness alone, daily confession of sin, and confidence in God's unfailing covenant fidelity.
Genesis 3:17-24
Genesis 3:17–24 confronts the reader with the full weight of the curse upon Adam and the ground, but the passage is finally a text of hope. The consequences imposed upon Adam — the ground cursed, toil unrelenting, and death certain — do not obliterate God's redemptive purpose announced in verse 15; they preserve the race through which the promised seed will come. Adam's faith-filled naming of Eve, God's provision of animal-skin tunics foreshadowing blood atonement, and the merciful expulsion from the tree of life are all acts of divine grace that anticipate the whole subsequent history of redemption, culminating in the Lord Jesus Christ's decisive conquest of the devil.
Of Christ the Mediator 2 (2LCF 8)
The person and work of Christ as Mediator, as confessed in chapter 8 of the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith, is the most central locus in all of Christian theology — to be wrong here is damnable. This session surveys paragraphs 3 through 10 of that chapter, tracing Christ's anointing and suitability for office, the active and passive obedience by which He fully satisfied divine justice, the retrospective application of His redemption to the elect of all ages under the old covenant, the communication of idioms in His two natures, and the effectual application of salvation to His people by His Spirit and Word. The threefold office of prophet, priest, and king supplies precisely what the elect need in their ignorance, alienation, and inability — and no other mediator may share or transfer any part of that office.
Of Christ the Mediator 1 (2LCF 8)
The person and work of Christ as mediator stands at the center of Christian theology, as this study of 2nd London Baptist Confession chapter 8 makes clear. Working through all ten paragraphs of the chapter in overview, the session traces the pre-temporal appointment of Christ as mediator in the covenant of redemption, the historical stages of his mediatorial work, and the necessity of his threefold office as prophet, priest, and king. Particular attention falls on paragraph 2's account of the incarnation — the eternal Son taking true human nature with all its essential properties yet without sin — and paragraph 7's careful rule for reading Scripture passages that attribute what belongs to one nature to the other, guarding against both a divinized humanity (Lutheran ubiquitarianism) and a humanized deity. Hearers are called to hold fast the church's historic confession of Christ as one person in two natures, whole, perfect, and distinct, without conversion, composition, or confusion.
2LCF Chapter 1 - Of the Holy Scriptures, Part 2
What gives the Bible its authority, and how did the church come to recognise which books belong in it? Working through paragraphs 2–4 of the Second London Confession of Faith (1689 LBCF chapter 1), this study examines the canon of Scripture — its 66 books, the exclusion of the Apocrypha, and the ground of scriptural authority. Three factors explain the origins of canon: the eschatological expectations of early Christianity, the covenantal framework that always paired redemptive acts with written covenant documents, and the unique apostolic authority Christ invested in his designated spokesmen. Against both the community-determined and historically-determined models, the confession's self-authenticating model is defended: Scripture's authority rests wholly on God as its author, confirmed inwardly by the testimony of the Holy Spirit, and evidenced by the divine qualities of the text itself, its providential spread across the churches, and its corporate reception among believers of every age.
Free Grace Baptist Church - March 20, 2016 AM
Galatians 4:4–5 announces that when the appointed fullness of time arrived, God the Father sent forth his eternal Son — not to become his Son, but as his Son — born of a woman and born under the law. The sermon traces the fourfold structure of the text: the timing of the sending (sovereignly predetermined by God), the fact of the sending (the pre-incarnate Son dispatched from the Father), the condition of the sending (the Son assuming human nature and human legal obligations), and the twofold purpose of the sending (redeeming those under law's condemnation and restoring them to adoptive sonship). Against every religion that offers man a path upward to God, Christianity declares that God came down in the person of the incarnate Son to accomplish what no fallen creature could — perfect obedience to the law's precepts and perfect satisfaction of its penalty — and freely bestows that righteousness on all who believe.
The Incarnation and True Humanity of Christ
Philippians 2:5–11 anchors a study of the incarnation and true humanity of the Lord Jesus Christ. Drawing on the Nicene, Constantinopolitan, Chalcedonian, and Athanasian creeds together with the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith, the study traces three aspects of the incarnation — assumption of human nature, the virgin birth, and the union of two natures in one person — before marshalling seven biblical proofs of Christ's full humanity. The central argument throughout is soteriological: the Son of God must be truly and perfectly man, body and soul, yet without sin, because only such a mediator can make propitiation for guilty sinners and be their faithful high priest.
The Deity of Christ
Who is Jesus Christ, and what does Scripture mean when it confesses that He is God? This Bible study on John 1:14–18 opens a series on Christology by examining the deity of Christ from three angles: its precise meaning, the breadth of its biblical testimony, and the doctrinal affirmations necessary for confessing it rightly. The study moves from definitional clarity—ruling out Arian, adoptionist, and Mormon distortions—through exegetical survey of Christ's self-identification, apostolic statements, Old Testament Yahweh texts applied to Christ, and divine attributes predicated of Him, before concluding with four essential affirmations: His essential identity with the Father, His personal eternal distinction as the eternally begotten Son, His unchanging post-incarnation deity, and the specific role His divine nature plays in assuming, personalizing, and sustaining His human nature.
2LCF Chapter 17 - Of the Perseverance of the Saints
The perseverance of the saints rests not on the believer's free will or moral resilience, but on five immovable pillars: the immutability of God's decree of election, the believer's union with Christ, the oath of God, the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit, and the nature of the covenant of grace. This exposition of 2LCF Chapter 17 works through all three paragraphs, distinguishing the genuine saints from temporary believers, refuting both Arminian and Roman Catholic denials of the doctrine, and showing that perseverance is inseparable from divine preservation. The challenges to perseverance — Satanic temptation, the world, and remaining corruption — are honestly confronted, with the vital role of the means of grace pressed upon the hearer as the God-ordained pathway through them.
The Third Commandment
The Third Commandment—'You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain' (Deuteronomy 5:11)—encompasses far more than profane speech: it governs every use of God's titles, attributes, and works, whether in word, oath, prayer, or conduct. The sermon works through the richness of the divine name (Yahweh, Elohim, El Shaddai, and the Triune persons) before examining the prohibition's reach across blasphemy, unlawful oaths, magic and manipulation, misapplication of providence, and misinterpretation of Scripture. The positive demand of the commandment calls believers to reverent use of God's name in worship, to integrity in oaths and vows, and to a holy profession of faith whose conduct matches its confession. The law's pedagogical use is pressed upon the hearer: all stand guilty before this commandment and are thereby driven to Christ, who alone kept it perfectly and bore the penalty for those who did not.
The Preface to the Ten Commandments
The Ten Commandments are not a path to earned standing before God but the covenant stipulations of a God who has already redeemed his people — the indicative of grace always precedes the imperative of law. Expounding Deuteronomy 5:1–6, this sermon examines the summons to obedience Moses issues to the second generation on the plains of Moab, and then the preface to the Decalogue itself, showing that the identity and activity of the Lawgiver are the indispensable foundation for understanding why God's moral law binds his people. The threefold division of the law — ceremonial, judicial, and moral — is defended from the confessional Reformed tradition, and the abiding validity of the Decalogue in the new covenant is grounded in Jeremiah 31 and 2LCF 19. The sermon closes by tracing the law's three uses — civil, pedagogical, and normative — so that hearers neither abuse the law as a ladder to heaven nor discard it as obsolete, but receive it as the Spirit-given pattern for a life of grateful obedience.
1 Samuel 15, Part 2
Divine impassibility — the classical Christian doctrine that God does not undergo emotional changes — stands at the center of a textual tension in 1 Samuel 15: verses 11 and 35 record that God 'greatly regrets' making Saul king, while verse 29 declares that the Strength of Israel 'will not lie nor relent, for he is not a man that he should relent.' This study argues that there is no contradiction, paradox, or problem in the text, but that the apparent tension is resolved by understanding anthropopathism (the ascription of human emotions to God in Scripture as accommodated language), the priority of divine-essence texts in interpretation, and the inseparable relationship between impassibility and immutability. The practical stakes are high: to modify impassibility is to unravel divine simplicity, omniscience, independence, and eternity, and ultimately to rob God of his divine nature and religion of its firm foundation and assured comfort.
2LCF Chapter 8 - Of Christ the Mediator, Part 3
What role did the Holy Spirit play in the earthly ministry of Christ, and why does it matter for the doctrine of salvation? Expounding 2LCF Chapter 8, Paragraph 3, this session traces the Spirit's work across every stage of the Mediator's mission: the virginal conception, the public ministry, the cross, and the resurrection. Because Christ executed his mediatorial office in his human nature — not merely by the immediate operation of his divine nature — the Father's gift of the Spirit without measure to the man Christ Jesus is essential to orthodox Christology and to the assurance that a genuinely human Mediator has met every demand of the covenant on behalf of the elect.
2LCF Chapter 4 - Of Creation
The doctrine of creation, as confessed in chapter four of the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith, encompasses far more than the sheer scale of the cosmos — it demands precise theological definition on every point from the time and agent of creation to its purpose and result. This study works through three sections of the chapter: the overview of creation (paragraphs on creation ex nihilo, the triune authorship, divine purpose, the full extent of all things visible and invisible, the literal six-day duration, and the verdict 'all very good'), the apex of creation (the constitution, identity, and integrity of man made in God's image in knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness), and the fulcrum of creation (the covenant of works in the garden as the hinge upon which God's redemptive purpose to save sinners by Christ Jesus turns). Creation is neither an emanation nor a reshaping of pre-existent matter, but a free act of the triune God out of nothing, ordered ultimately to the manifestation of his glory and the redemption of his elect to the praise of his glorious grace.
Divine Simplicity 2 - Of God and the Holy Trinity (2LCF 2.1-3)
What does it mean to say God is 'without parts,' and why does it matter for every other divine attribute? This second session on divine simplicity (2LCF 2.1–3) continues an expository study of the Second London Baptist Confession's opening chapter on God, working through the classical doctrine that God is not composed of physical, metaphysical, or logical parts — a doctrine historically attested from the church fathers through the Reformation and represented in every major Reformed confession. The session focuses especially on God's pure actuality (the denial of act-and-potency composition), the inseparability of God as knower, knowing, and things known, and the impossibility of God being both agent and patient — showing that divine simplicity is the ontological foundation for God's immutability, independence, absoluteness, unity, and infinite love.
Divine Simplicity - Of God and the Holy Trinity (2LCF 2.1-3)
Divine simplicity — the classical doctrine that God has no parts, no composition whatsoever, and that all that is in God is God — is examined through its confessional, definitional, historical, and doctrinal dimensions. The 1689 London Baptist Confession's phrase 'without body, parts, or passions' serves as the entry point, with 'without parts' identified as the direct expression of divine simplicity. The doctrine is shown to be the ontological foundation for God's aseity, infinity, immutability, and the unity of his attributes, and is traced through an unbroken stream of witnesses from Irenaeus and Augustine through Aquinas, the Reformers, and the Reformed scholastics. Hearers are pressed to resist any conception of God as a composite being whose attributes are properties inhering in a subject, and to affirm instead that God is identical with his own essence, being, and every perfection predicated of him.
Of God and the Holy Trinity (2LCF 2.1-3)
The doctrine of the Trinity — one divine and infinite being in whom there are three subsistences, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — is not a speculative ivory-tower abstraction but the foundation of all Christian communion with God and comfortable dependence upon him. This session in the study of 2LCF Chapter 2 continues the examination of paragraph three, working through the personal distinctions of generation, filiation, and spiration; the confession's summary statement on unity and personal distinction; and the practical import of Trinitarian theology for prayer, worship, redemption, and assurance. Biblical proofs are drawn from Genesis, the Psalms, Isaiah, and the New Testament, demonstrating the revelatory development of the doctrine from its seed form in the Old Testament to its full flower in the New.
Of God and the Holy Trinity (2LCF 2.3)
What does it mean to confess that God is one being subsisting in three persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? This study of 2nd London Baptist Confession of Faith chapter 2, paragraph 3 works through the classical Trinitarian formulation upheld by the particular Baptists, tracing its foundations in Scripture, its continuity with the ecumenical creeds, and the Baptist Confession's terminological improvement of 'subsistences' over 'persons.' The exposition addresses the unity and equality of the three subsistences, the personal distinctions expressed by eternal generation and procession, and the practical necessity of robust Trinitarian confession in an age of continuing anti-Trinitarian error.
Of God and the Holy Trinity (2LCF 2.1-2)
What does it mean that God is omnipresent, and how does his omniscience differ from all creaturely knowledge? Working through the second chapter of the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith, this study examines the divine attributes of omnipresence and omniscience with theological precision, drawing on Scripture, the church fathers, the Reformers, and the Reformed orthodox tradition. God's omnipresence is grounded not in his omnipotence or omniscience but in his infinity and immensity — he fills all of heaven and earth repletively, with his whole being, while remaining utterly transcendent and uncircumscribed by creation. God's omniscience is equally distinguished from creaturely knowing: he knows all things not discursively, derivatively, or by foreknowledge acquired through observation, but intuitively, independently, and eternally, in one simple act of self-knowledge.
Revelation 1:4-6
Revelation 1:4–6 introduces the book of Revelation not with mystery or doom but with a carefully structured doxological greeting that grounds suffering believers in the triune God as the source of all grace and peace. The sermon works through the threefold office of Christ — prophet (faithful witness), priest (firstborn from the dead), and king (ruler over the kings of the earth) — demonstrating from Psalm 89, Acts 2, and Colossians 1 that Christ's royal reign is a present reality, not a future hope. The atonement is shown to be the irreducible distinction of Christianity: unlike every competing religion, the gospel is rooted in blood redemption, not moral example. Believers are called to resist anxiety and despair by fixing their gaze on the enthroned Lamb, whose sovereignty over all earthly powers has not diminished by one degree.
The Christian Doctrine of the Trinity
The Christian doctrine of the Trinity — one God eternally subsisting in three distinct persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — is defined, defended against historic and contemporary errors, and displayed across the whole of Scripture. The sermon works through three movements: first defining the doctrine precisely (one in essence, three in person), then defending it against polytheism, Arianism, and modalism, and finally displaying its pervasive witness throughout both Testaments. The doctrine is shown to be not a cold theological abstraction but the very foundation of salvation, worship, and the believer's communion with the triune God.
2LCF Chapter 2 - Of God and of the Holy Trinity
The doctrine of the Trinity — one God eternally existing in three distinct persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the same in substance and equal in power and glory — is not a peripheral curiosity but the beating heart of Christian confession. This sermon defines the doctrine precisely, distinguishes it from the ancient heresies of Arianism, polytheism, and modalism, and then marshals Old and New Testament evidence to demonstrate that the entire canon is Trinitarian to its core. The deity of the Son and the personality and deity of the Holy Spirit receive particular attention, since these are the contested points, and the sermon closes by showing that a right understanding of the Trinity grounds our communion with God, shapes our worship, and patterns our treatment of one another.