Theological term
Apostate Israel
3 sermons · All terms
The Holy Confidence
Jeremiah 9:23–24 confronts the hollow complacency of boasting in wisdom, might, and riches — the carnal securities that cannot avert the certain judgment of God — and calls God's people instead to a holy confidence whose sole ground is the knowledge of the Lord who exercises lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness. The sermon traces a threefold structure: the folly of earthly boasting illustrated from Scripture and the case of Nebuchadnezzar, the necessity of glorying in God alone as the antidote to every false confidence, and the hallowed contemplations — lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness — that are to fill the believing mind. The Christward trajectory of the passage is pressed home: Christ secures the lovingkindness, bears the judgment, and provides the righteousness that alone avails before God, so that the promise 'believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved' is as certain as every judgment God has already executed.
The Vine, the Vinedresser, and the Branches
John 15:1–8 presents Christ as the true vine, his Father as the vinedresser, and his people as the branches — a passage that answers the question of who constitutes the true Israel of God. The sermon argues from Jeremiah 31 and the New Covenant's own terms that the New Covenant knows no externally connected members, and that the unfruitful branches of verse 2 refer to apostate Old Covenant Israel and to those who counterfeit saving faith, not to baptized infants as some paedo-baptist readings propose. The pruning of living branches is shown to be the Father's gracious work of conforming his people to the image of his Son through affliction and discipline. The sermon closes with a double application: unbelievers are called to look to Christ in faith, and believers are urged to receive God's chastening as the evidence of his love and the means of their growth in grace.
The New Heaven and New Earth
Revelation 21:1–8 presents the new heaven and new earth not as the annihilation and replacement of creation but as its renovation — the consummation of covenant blessing in which God dwells fully and finally with his redeemed people. Working through four elements of the vision (the new creation, the bride, the announcement of blessing, and the voice from the throne), this exposition situates John's language within the broader biblical storyline of paradise lost in Adam and paradise restored in Christ, and interprets the new Jerusalem as the church — the covenant community that has replaced apostate Israel as the bearer of God's covenant promises. The sermon closes with a meditation on individual eschatology, drawing on Job, the Psalms, and the Apostle Paul to comfort believers with the certainty that those who die in Christ pass immediately into his presence, and that the fullness of covenant blessing awaits them in the age to come.