Topic
Covenant Theology
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Of the Duties of the Priests and Levites
Numbers 18–19 belongs to a literary unit stretching from chapters 16 through 19, all of which works to vindicate Aaron's God-ordained priesthood in the aftermath of Korah's rebellion. Chapter 18 defines the distinct duties and the provision of both priests and Levites, while chapter 19 supplies the purification rites that answer Israel's terrified cry in chapter 17 — 'shall we all utterly die?' — by providing a lawful way of drawing near to a holy God. The regulative principle of worship stands at the centre of these chapters: God alone determines who may approach Him, by what means, and under what conditions, and the death penalties attached to violations are not capricious but reflect the consuming holiness of the Lord. These Old Covenant arrangements point forward to the Lord Jesus Christ, the great High Priest who is also the Lamb, the one who both provides atonement and promotes and protects true worship under the New Covenant.
Sons and Daughters of God
What does it mean that sinners dead in trespasses can be called children of God? Expounding 1 John 3:1, this sermon works through five elements of the verse: the imperative weight of 'behold,' the immeasurable and immutable love of God rooted in his own essential being, the unmerited bestowal of that love upon the undeserving, the Christian's status as adopted sons and daughters in union with Christ, and the world's consequent ignorance and enmity toward believers. The sermon grounds adoption in the eternal predestinating love of the Father, the incarnation and obedience of the Son, and the indwelling of the Spirit — and closes with a call to behold these realities with eyes of faith as the only ground of encouragement for a church opposed by the world.
Ask FGBC #28: What is "The day of the LORD?"
The phrase 'the day of the Lord' refers to God's visitation in judgment, a theme running from the Old Testament prophets through the New Testament's eschatological texts. Multiple historical fulfillments — the fall of the Northern Kingdom to Assyria in 722 BC, the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC, and the AD 70 destruction — function as types pointing forward to the final day when God judges the living and the dead. First Thessalonians 5 and 2 Peter 3 ground the ultimate fulfillment: Christ's return, unexpected as a thief in the night, bringing final judgment upon all.
2LCF Chapter 28 - Of Baptism and the Lord's Supper
2LCF Chapter 28 presents baptism and the Lord's Supper as two ordinances of positive and sovereign institution appointed by the Lord Jesus Christ, the only lawgiver, to be continued in His church until the end of the age. This session traces the confessional groundwork laid in 2LCF chapters 8, 14, 17, 22, and 26 before examining Chapter 28's two brief paragraphs in detail. The particular Baptist choice of 'ordinance' over 'sacrament,' the exclusion of 'seal,' and the inclusion of 'positive' are each shown to be polemically deliberate — asserting that baptism and the Lord's Supper are divine commands to be obeyed only by those who can render obedience, that is, regenerate believers. The session closes by grounding lawful administration of the ordinances in Matthew 28 and the commission given to qualified, called ministers of the gospel.
Ask FGBC #27: Why the shift from Saturday to Sunday worship?
Why did Christian worship shift from the seventh day to the first day of the week? This Q&A response argues that Sunday observance is not an abolition of the fourth commandment but its new-covenant fulfillment, grounded in Christ's resurrection as the inauguration of new creation. The moral principle embedded in the fourth commandment — one day in seven set apart for the worship of God — transcends any particular covenant, while the positive element specifying which day shifts from Saturday to Sunday in light of Christ's finished work and rest. Drawing on Hebrews 4, the eighth-day Sabbath typology of the Old Testament, and the 1689 LBCF's treatment of the Lord's Day, the speaker urges believers to receive Sunday worship not as a burden but as the highest delight and privilege available to the people of God.
The Vindication of the Aaronic Priesthood
Numbers 16:41–17 records the immediate aftermath of Korah's rebellion: Israel accuses Moses and Aaron of murder, God's wrath breaks out in a plague, and Aaron runs into the congregation with a censer to make atonement, standing between the dead and the living until the plague stops. Chapter 17 then confirms the Aaronic priesthood definitively when Aaron's rod alone buds, blossoms, and produces ripe almonds, functioning as a perpetual sign against any future usurper of the priestly office. The typological weight of Aaron's intercession in verse 48 points forward to Christ, who stands between dead sinners and the wrath of God, propitating that wrath by his blood. The sermon calls hearers to recognize both the sinfulness of Israel's hasty accusation and the glory of the priestly atonement that alone grants the unholy access to a holy God.
The Spirit's Conviction of the World
The Holy Spirit's conviction of the world — of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment — is not a promise that every hearer will be saved, but a declaration that the Spirit will confirm the identity and vindication of Jesus Christ through the apostolic proclamation. Drawing on John 16:8–11 alongside Acts 2 and Acts 24, this sermon argues that the Spirit's primary work in the world is to expose unbelief in Christ, to declare the sufficiency of Christ's imputed righteousness, and to announce the judgment already rendered against the ruler of this world at the cross. The church's calling is therefore not to measure success by numerical response but to preach sin, righteousness, and judgment faithfully, trusting the Spirit to do His own sovereign work.
The Rebellion of Korah & Company
Numbers 16:1–40 records a combined ecclesiastical and political mutiny against God's ordained leaders: Korah, a Kohathite Levite, challenges Aaron's exclusive priesthood, while Dathan and Abiram challenge Moses' civil authority. The rebellion is not merely an internal dispute but an act of treason against the living God, who appointed both men to their offices. God vindicates Moses and Aaron by a catastrophic judgment — the earth swallows the ringleaders and fire consumes the 250 who offered incense — and the bronze censers are hammered into an altar covering as a perpetual memorial against unauthorized priestly intrusion. The passage warns that malcontents misrepresent truth, recruit the influential, and ultimately reap divine judgment when they resist God's ordained authority structures.
Ask FGBC #22: What is the New Covenant in the Reformed Baptist view?
The New Covenant in Reformed Baptist theology is identified as the historical expression of the covenant of grace, ratified in the blood of Christ and offering salvation to God's elect through faith in Jesus Christ. Unlike many Paedo-Baptist positions that locate the covenant of grace in the Abrahamic or Mosaic covenants, the Reformed Baptist view holds that only the New Covenant is that historical expression, with the earlier covenants serving as types and shadows pointing forward to it. Dispensationalism, by contrast, structures redemptive history around distinct divine dealings with Jews and Gentiles, tends to resist the theological covenant framework of redemption, works, and grace as extra-biblical categories, and anchors its New Covenant reading in a literalistic hermeneutic. Jeremiah 31, Hebrews 8 and 10, and the institution of the Lord's Supper together ground the Reformed Baptist insistence that the New Covenant begins with Christ's death and resurrection.
2LCF Chapter 27 – Of the Communion of Saints
The communion of saints, as confessed in 2LCF Chapter 27, is grounded in the believer's union with Christ by the Spirit and through faith — a union that conveys participation in His graces, sufferings, death, resurrection, and glory without any divinization of the creature or diminishment of Christ's divinity. From that vertical union flows a horizontal obligation: holy fellowship in corporate worship, mutual edification through rightly ordered spiritual gifts, and material relief distributed according to ability and necessity. A necessary qualification guards the confession against both spiritual individualism and collectivist error: the communion of saints neither licenses neglect of public worship nor grants any person a right to another's private property, placing both socialism and communism in direct conflict with the Eighth and Tenth Commandments.
Ask FGBC #20: How can I clearly explain credo baptism to teenager who grew up paedo?
Credo-baptism (believers' baptism) rests not on implication or covenant inference but on the plain order Scripture establishes: discipleship, then baptism, then ongoing instruction. The Great Commission and the pattern in Acts present baptism as a willful, obedient act that signifies union with Christ in his death and resurrection — something an infant cannot confess or perform. Paedo-baptist arguments from household texts and Abrahamic circumcision are weighed and found insufficient, and the discussion models how to walk a younger person from simple biblical texts toward the deeper covenantal questions as their theological capacity grows.
The Requirements for Religious Life
Numbers 15 interrupts the narrative of Israel's rebellion in chapters 11–14 with renewed covenant obligations — laws of offerings, provisions for unintentional sin, and the command to wear tassels. The placement is deliberate: faithfulness to God's ordained means of grace is the proper remedy for the kind of corporate collapse just witnessed. The sermon traces how God's judgment on one generation does not exhaust His covenant mercy, and draws a typological line from Mosaic sacrifice and priesthood through to the once-for-all offering of Christ and the believer's advocate before the Father.
Ask FGBC #19: Should Christians engage in politics?
Should Christians engage in politics? This Q&A addresses the Christian's dual citizenship — as a member of both the church and the civil body politic — and argues that while political engagement is neither commanded nor forbidden by Scripture, it is entirely lawful. The discussion distinguishes the church's spiritual sword (the gospel and the keys of the kingdom) from the civil state's coercive sword, drawing on the Noahic covenant in Genesis 9 as the foundational charter for justice, family, and enterprise in society. The threefold use of the law is applied to show why preaching against abortion or civil injustice is ethics and theology, not partisan politics.
The Baptism of Saul of Tarsus
The baptism of Saul of Tarsus in Acts 9:17–25 demonstrates the proper order of Christian baptism: conversion precedes the ordinance, which then publicly marks the believer as a disciple of Christ. The passage is treated as a direct answer to Stephen's dying prayer in Acts 7:60, with Saul's transformation from chief persecutor to chief preacher serving as a vivid display of sovereign, redeeming grace. The sermon draws out three observations from Saul's early ministry — the immediacy, the effects, and the hostility of his preaching — and closes with the baptism of three new believers, each of whom gives a brief testimony of their own conversion.
The Requirements for Priesthood and Sacrifice
Leviticus 21–22 sets out strict requirements for both the priests who offer sacrifice and the animals brought to the altar: wholeness, purity, and freedom from defect. These ceremonial regulations are not arbitrary exclusions but typological anticipations of the one perfect High Priest and the one perfect sacrifice that God himself would provide in the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. The sermon works through the four sections of the passage — practical restrictions on priests, physical requirements for priests, regulations concerning priestly food, and physical requirements for sacrificial animals — before turning to Hebrews 7–10 to show how Christ fulfills and surpasses everything the Levitical system could only shadow. The conclusion calls the congregation to the Lord's Supper with eyes fixed not on themselves but on the one who offered himself once for all and sat down.
Baptism service
A baptism service in which three candidates — one raised in the congregation from birth, and a married couple — publicly profess repentance toward God and faith in Jesus Christ alone and are baptized by immersion. Each candidate gives a brief testimony of conversion: one through Isaiah 55 and the finished work of Christ on the cross, another through a sermon on Mark 5:36 following years of grief over a father's death. The service rehearses the 1689 LBCF paragraphs on the significance, proper subjects, outward element, and mode of baptism, anchoring the visible ordinance in the gospel it pictures.
The Intercession of Moses for the People, Judgement by God, and Folly of Israel
Numbers 14 records the aftermath of Israel's refusal to enter Canaan, and this exposition works through three movements in verses 11–45: Moses' intercession before a holy God, God's measured judgment upon the faithless generation, and Israel's final act of presumptuous folly. Moses' prayer is examined as a model of bold, Scripture-grounded intercession — appealing to God's reputation among the nations, His covenant character revealed in Exodus 34, and the precedent of His patient mercy. The chapter ultimately teaches that faithless cowardice is the fruit of rejecting the living God, that covenant-breaking brings assured judgment, and that faith in God's promises is the only ground of genuine courage.
2LCF Chapter 26 – Of the Church
What is the church, who belongs to it, and how is it governed? Working through 2LCF Chapter 26, this session surveys the doctrine of the church from its universal and invisible reality in Christ to its visible, local expression — arguing that the church is constituted exclusively of regenerate believers, is headed solely by the Lord Jesus Christ, and is rightly governed by elders and deacons within an independently organized yet associationally connected congregation. The session highlights the sharp departure from the Westminster Confession's inclusion of covenant children in the visible church, grounding the Baptist position in a proper doctrine of covenant theology, baptism, and regenerate church membership.
The Gospel’s Irreplaceable Value
Galatians 1:6–10 confronts every generation with the irreplaceable value of the gospel by exposing three responses to its perversion: astonishment, abhorrence, and anathema. The Judaizers who troubled the Galatian churches were not offering a different gospel but no gospel at all — a metastrophe that renders God less holy than he is, man less sinful than he is, and Christ inglorious and his work useless. Justification is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, or there is no justification before the God of heaven and earth. The sermon closes with a call to Pauline vigilance in protecting gospel purity and to seek God's approval rather than man's.
The Gospel's Liberty
Galatians 1:1–5 introduces an epistle written in urgent opposition to the Judaizing error that was perverting the gospel of justification by faith alone among the southern Galatian churches. Working from the historical setting of Paul's first missionary journey and the impending Jerusalem Council of Acts 15, this exposition traces how Paul's apostolic greeting — his assertion of divine authority, his benediction of grace and peace, and his compressed account of Christ's self-giving — is deliberately shaped to lay the theological foundation for the entire letter. The sermon argues that every element of Paul's opening salutation serves the polemic purpose of the epistle: to cast down the error that adds Mosaic ceremony to faith in Christ and to anchor the believer's peace and joy exclusively in the finished work of Jesus Christ.
The rebellion in the wilderness
Numbers 14:1–12 records the congregation of Israel responding to the faithless report of the ten spies with weeping, complaint against Moses and Aaron, blasphemy against God, and a proposal to appoint a new leader and return to Egypt. The passage exposes the idolatry underlying Israel's rebellion — not merely a preference for Egyptian food, but a wholesale rejection of Yahweh in favor of the gods they had left behind. God's response in verses 11–12, spoken in what theologians call the 'manner of men,' underscores the gravity of Israel's sin, the holiness of God's judgment, and sets the stage for Moses' remarkable intercession on behalf of a people who had just sought to stone him.
Ask FGBC #14: How do we connect modern day Israel to Old & New Covenant Promises?
How should Christians understand the modern state of Israel, the Abrahamic and Davidic covenants, and the land promises in light of the New Testament? This Q&A exchange argues that the church is not a replacement for Israel but is the eschatological Israel of Old Testament prophecy — one people of God, Jew and Gentile together, united in Christ. Dispensationalism's two-peoples-of-God framework is evaluated and rejected on hermeneutical grounds, with Romans 11, the Davidic covenant, and the land promise examined in turn. The conversation broadens into the necessity of reading Scripture canonically and horizontally, the value of confessionalism, and the danger of allowing political rhetoric to distort biblical interpretation.
Ask FGBC #12: Can I apply Old Testament promises to my life?
The question of whether Old Testament promises — such as Jeremiah 29:11 — can be applied by Christians today requires careful attention to covenantal epochs, the progress of revelation, and the organic unity of Scripture. The discussion distinguishes between positive laws tied to Israel's tenure in the land, moral principles embedded within those laws that endure, and the climactic focus of all Scripture on the incarnation, sufferings, and glory of Christ (Galatians 4:4). The Old Testament is affirmed as the Christian's book, but application must reckon with the difference between Old Covenant and New Covenant rather than collapsing that distinction into a flat one-for-one transference. Faithful reading looks first for something larger than the reader — the mediator of salvation — and from that vantage point finds genuine ground for hope and doxology.
2LCF Chapter 25 - Of Marriage
Marriage as a divine institution is examined through the four paragraphs of 2LCF Chapter 25, with Matthew 19:5–6 as the anchor text where Christ grounds marriage in the creation of male and female. The sermon argues that marriage is not a social construct or ecclesiastical sacrament but a creation ordinance ordained by God before the fall, designed for the union of one man and one woman in monogamous covenant. A threefold providential purpose is unfolded — companionship, the inhabitation of creation, and a hedge against sexual immorality — and the regulative bounds of marriage regarding consanguinity, affinity, and Christian marital duty are applied against both contemporary sexual confusion and Roman Catholic sacerdotalism.
The Reconnaissance of the Land
Numbers 13 records the reconnaissance of Canaan, in which twelve tribal leaders are sent to survey the land God had promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Ten of the spies return with a report grounded not in the word of the living God but in an appeal to fear, functioning as anti-prophets who slander the land and paralyze the congregation — while Caleb calls the people to immediate, faith-driven obedience. The chapter exposes the difference between faithless fear and faithful courage as the decisive interpretive divide among those who witnessed the same evidence and held the same promise. The narrative calls believers to ground their courage not in the absence of obstacles but in the sovereign faithfulness of God, who has promised, guided, and proven himself in redemptive history.
The Glory of God in the Valley of Elah
Standing in the Valley of Elah, the armies of Israel cower before Goliath for forty days — not merely from want of courage, but from failure to rest upon the covenant promises of God. Against this backdrop of faithless fear, David's response exposes what true faith looks like: a jealous zeal for the honor of Yahweh, grounded in historical retrospect upon God's past deliverances, expressed in bold confidence that the Lord of hosts will act. The narrative drives toward a climax in which Goliath falls on his face to the earth — mirroring the fall of his god Dagon before the ark — as a forced worship of the very God he defied, and the whole account points forward to Christ, the greater Shepherd-King who crushes the head of that ultimate enemy at the cross.
The Gospel of Christ in the Valley of Elah
David's victory over Goliath in 1 Samuel 17 is not merely an episode in Israelite history but a Christological shadow pointing forward to the greater conquest of Christ over Satan at Golgotha. This sermon works through twelve points of typological correspondence between David and Christ — from Bethlehem's birthplace, to the shepherd-king, to vicarious representation, to the skull motif of Genesis 3:15 — demonstrating that the whole of Scripture is organically unified around the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. The exposition serves as a Lord's Supper meditation, calling believers to rejoice in their conquering substitute and urging the unconverted to flee to the champion who uses death itself to destroy death.
Bible Study - Numbers 12: 1-16
Numbers 12 records the rebellion of Miriam and Aaron against Moses, ostensibly over his Cushite wife but in reality a challenge to his God-given authority as Israel's unique covenant mediator. The passage establishes a hierarchy of prophetic revelation — vision and dream to the prophets, but face-to-face speech to Moses — which God himself defends by immediately judging Miriam with leprosy. Moses' humility and intercessory prayer on behalf of his accusers point forward typologically to the greater Mediator, the Lord Jesus Christ, who alone bears the full weight of God's people and speaks face-to-face with the Father.
2LCF Chapter 24 - Of the Civil Magistrate
What does the Bible teach about civil government, and how should Christians relate to governing authorities? Working through 2 London Baptist Confession of Faith Chapter 24, this study expounds the divine origin and limited purpose of civil magistracy, the lawfulness of Christian participation in government, and the qualified obedience owed to rulers who govern within God-ordained bounds. The particular Baptists are shown to occupy a distinct position between the Anabaptist rejection of civil authority and the Erastian tendencies of their Presbyterian contemporaries, grounding Christian submission not in the authority of the magistrate but in the sovereign ordination of God over all nations.
The complaint of the people
Numbers 11 records the complaint of Israel in the wilderness — a sin that provokes divine judgment, exposes the limits of Moses as covenant mediator, and points forward to the burden-bearing Christ and the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost. The chapter is not a collection of independent narratives but a unified account of complaint (vv. 1–15), the appointment of seventy elders (vv. 16–30), and the execution of God's judgment (vv. 31–35). Israel's craving for meat is not mere hunger but a rejection of Yahweh as their God — an idolatrous longing for Egypt that God answers with poetic justice. The passage calls the new-covenant people of God to replace grumbling with gratitude, recognizing that God is to be valued for his own sake, not merely for what he provides.