Many times over Paul speaks of the Holy Spirit as God's gift to us; three times as an earnest (or a guarantee); three times again he says the believer is sealed with the Spirit; and twice at least he speaks of Him as the Spirit of Adoption.
The Holy Spirit is first a gift - a sheer gift. He is given to us out of the Father's generosity. "God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit Who has been given to us," says Paul. (Rom. 5:5) "If," said Jesus, "you know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him." (Luke 11:13)
He is given to those who ask. "Ask and you will receive" ... you will. There is no recipe you have to follow. "Did you receive the Spirit by works of the Law (doing prescribed things)," asks Paul, "or by hearing with faith?" There isn't anything you do to earn or win the gift; you hear God make the offer, you trust Him to mean what He says, and you say "Please and thank you."
Don't be bamboozled into making complicated what God has made simple; do this, do that, do the other ... "Repent of all known sin" for example (you need the Spirit to be able to do that anyway; how - to get Him - can you do what can't be done till you've got Him?) … "wait on God … agonise in prayer … have hands laid on you … speak in tongues" and so on. There's no technique that works. How could there be? For what is the Holy Spirit but God … as He is in His inmost self? When God gives His Spirit to us, He gives Himself to us; and there is no means open to us by which we can manipulate God. It is not in our power to "work" Him. The Holy Spirit is the gift of God's Grace
The parable of the beggar and the nobleman makes the point. A beggar used to sit on the steps of a cathedral. For years he had begged there, the meagre charity of passers-by just enough to keep body and soul together for him and his family. Then one day a certain nobleman came down the cathedral steps. Just that morning he had received news of the greatest good fortune. So full of excitement and joy was he that he had gone to the cathedral to pour out his heart in thanksgiving to God, and seeing this beggar on the street, he tossed him the whole bag of gold that hung on his belt. It was an impulsive thing - a spontaneous gesture of sheer gladness.
Of course, it
transformed the beggar's life. He bought clothes and a home, and an
education for his children, and a business. After a time, it occurred
to him that perhaps he should do something to help his old friends
who still eked out a living begging on the cathedral steps. So he
went back to them and said, "Look, you see what great good fortune
has come to me. Let me tell you the secret.
You must hold out your hands ... so, as I used to do. And you must
look up to the folk you beg from with your head tilted a little to
one side ... see? And you should use a certain tone of voice ... let
me demonstrate. And let me teach you the right form of words to say.
You do it all, just as I did, and you'll see; it'll happen to you
just as it did to me. I've got the proof now, you see ... it works!
Let me show you again, now."
"Stupid man," we say, "it wasn't anything he did that brought about his good fortune. It was just the nobleman's impulsive generosity."
Just so, it is not anything we do that secures to us the treasure of God's Holy Spirit; it is just God's generosity; the Holy Spirit is the gift of His Grace. There is no technique that works. All that is necessary is to know you are a beggar, and ask. And the generosity of Heaven's Prince is more to be relied on than the fickle impulse of any earthly nobleman! We have His promise, "If you ask anything of the Father, He will give it to you in My Name. Hitherto, you have asked nothing in My Name. Ask and you will receive, that your joy may be full."
It is by grace we are saved, through faith.
But the gift of the Spirit is not an isolated episode in the Christian's life; it is a gift in continual supply. In Gal. 3:5, Paul speaks of God "Who supplies the Spirit to you." In Phil. 1:19, Paul speaks of "the supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ." The word he used is a Greek word with a great meaning. It goes back to the golden age of Athens when a large part of the city's glory lay in its drama - the plays of Sophocles and Euripides and the rest. All of these dramas required a chorus, and to dress, maintain, and train the chorus was a large and very expensive undertaking. It was a custom for wealthy and public-spirited citizens of Athens to make themselves responsible for it all. This action on their part was called their 'Choreggia' and that is the word Paul uses, only he uses the prefix 'epi' with it which makes it mean 'an abundant provision.'
As those Greek citizens supplied and maintained the chorus, so God supplies and maintains the company of His own people, and it is by the continual supply of His Spirit that He does so. As time went on this Greek word was expanded in its usage to cover the provision a generous husband made for his wife, and even the equipping of an army for war. Think of the supplies the U.S. poured into Operation Desert Storm or the NATO exercise in Bosnia and Kosovo ... ample supplies. So God supplies His Spirit to us to play our part in life's drama, to furnish us with everything needful for the management of His household, to arm us with everything needful for our warfare.
We should revel in the wealth of our Father's generosity. We are rich! It is not the Father's generosity that is lacking - only our belief in it.
But of course, we cannot enjoy everything all at once. This undoubtedly Paul has in mind when he describes the Holy Spirit as "the earnest of our full inheritance." (Eph. 1:14) The word translated 'earnest' is 'arrabon', a very common Greek word used in the area of trade. It means the first instalment, the down payment which secures possession of the goods being paid for, because it is a pledge that payment in full will follow later. Archaeologists have unearthed a papyrus, for example, which records a transaction made by a musician, Copreus by name. He agreed to bring his company of flute players to a village fair. In the papyrus he acknowledged the receipt of twenty drachmae from the organiser of the fair as 'arrabon', as a deposit to secure the booking. In the same way we send a deposit when we book our holiday accommodation. By that deposit, we secure the booking, and undertake to pay the rest of the bill when we get there.
So when Paul speaks of the Holy Spirit as the 'arrabon' God has sent us, he means that the gift of the Holy Spirit is His deposit on the life of the world to come - given to us now, and a solemn undertaking by God to follow it up with full payment later. Life in the Spirit now is a foretaste of life eternal, and a guarantee that everything promised will surely follow. By the gift of His Spirit, God signs, seals and delivers the transaction, so to speak. It means He will not go back on it. He has begun a good work in us, and He will see it through. However differently we may stand in our progress in the life of the Spirit, we all stand the same in God's intentions, He has set His hand to the plough with us, and He will not turn back. I am told that in modern Greek, the word 'arrabon' means an engagement ring! The gift of the Holy Spirit is God's gift to us of an engagement ring. We will surely be at the marriage supper of the Lamb, because God will not break off the engagement.
Believe it ... and go forward with confidence.
Paul speaks further of the believer as having been "sealed with the Holy Spirit of Promise." It is a further development of the same thought. In the Roman world, seals served a variety of purposes.
1. To guarantee safety or security
Military installations, when they were not in use for the time being, were sealed. This kind of seal was put on the tomb of Jesus, to prevent anyone rifling it. Or if a book was held sacred, it was sealed so that no uninitiated person might read it. John has this idea in the book of Revelation: the scroll of human destiny is sealed with seven seals and only the Lamb of God is found worthy to open the seals and unfold the contents of the scroll.
In this sense, the Holy Spirit is the mark of God's protection on us. Our life is safe against intruders who would enter to plunder or profane it.
2. As an attestation
Wills and other legal documents were sealed to attest their validity.
In this sense the Holy Spirit is God's seal on us - to attest that we are truly His child. As John expressed it in I John 4:13, "By this we know that we abide in Him, and He in us, because He has given us of His own Spirit."
3. As a guarantee of quality
Corn in a sealed sack, wine in a sealed jar was thereby known to be a genuine product of the farm or vineyard whose name it bore. Animals for sacrifice had to be examined, and if they were found to be fit because they were unblemished, they were duly sealed.
In this sense, the Holy Spirit is God's guarantee of the quality of new life that He has made to dwell in us. It is because God has sealed our lives with His Holy Spirit that He is pleased to receive them as an offering. The difference between a believer and a non-believer is not anything in the natural character and personality of the believer that makes him more agreeable to God, but simply the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the believer's heart.
4. As a mark of ownership
Goods in the ancient world were sealed as a mark of ownership, the way cattle today are branded.
So the Holy Spirit is God's mark on us - His brand, so as to say: "This man, this woman is mine; signed, 'GOD'."
5. As a guarantee of redemption
A seal on goods sailed down the river to the harbour wharf guaranteed that they would be 'redeemed,' not left lying around as neglected lumber. Neither will God so leave us.
Paul calls the Holy Spirit "the Spirit of Adoption."
We in the West are perhaps not much taken with this metaphor. We think of adoption as almost a second-class means of entry into family relationships … all very nice but not quite natural. We much prefer to speak of our entry into the family of God as being by new birth rather than by adoption. It's curious how the new birth metaphor seizes the evangelical mind more than the adoption metaphor does because we fail to enquire what the meaning of adoption was. The process of adoption in the Roman Empire was a much more thorough-going and honourable means of entry into a family than it has ever been among us.
1. It was not confined to babies and young children. Grown men and women were quite commonly candidates for adoption.
2. Adoption was not by any means confined to those whose natural parents had died or had abandoned or rejected them. To be given adoption was not a stigma at all; it could be the very highest of honours. A patrician nobleman, for example, might so admire a young soldier from the ranks as to desire to adopt him as his own son. His parents would not be likely to resent this, but rather take pride in it and be excited by it. They would feel as proud as would a Scottish crofter whose son was knighted. It meant the boy was being elevated to the rank of nobility in the land.
3. The process of adoption was itself absolutely final. In Roman law, the adopted child's natural parents abandoned all rights and claims to him, and in his new family, the child ranked as a real and genuine son, with full rights of inheritance. If he was adopted after other children were born naturally to the family he ranked as the first-born, even so. So complete was the process that in law the man he had been before his adoption was regarded as though he were now dead. No action could be brought against him for any crime he might have committed in the past - all previous debts and obligations were cancelled and he took a new name.
Now all this is in Paul's mind when he says we have been adopted into the family of God. It means that we are Sons of God in the most complete sense possible.
When we become a child of God by faith in Jesus Christ, all who ever held sway over our life or claimed any title to us are required to abandon all rights and claims to us - the devil included. Sin, too, no longer has dominion over us.
Again, ours is the honour of having been chosen by God to be His own child. He has already bestowed on us the highest favour He has it in His power to grant.
And as an adopted Son of God, we have full rights of inheritance, "When we cry 'Abba, Father,' writes Paul, "it is the Spirit Himself bearing witness with our spirits that we are children of God ... and if children, then heirs - heirs of GOD ... and fellow-heirs with Christ!" (Rom. 8:16) All that belongs to Christ - all that is His by right of His Sonship - is ours also.
And because we are adopted sons of God all previous debts and obligations are cancelled out. We can never be called to account for them. We have become new men in Christ, new women, with a new name which God Himself will give us. (Revelation 2:17, 3:12)
All this is the work of God's Spirit. He is the Spirit of Adoption, who draws us near to God, ushers us into His Presence for adoption, and is Himself the guarantee that we shall honour the family name. It is He who has it in His power to make us at home and at ease in our new station in life, and instruct us in the affairs of the Father's estate, and teach us the run of it.
"When you believed in Christ," says Paul, "you were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, Who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of His glory." What praise that will be!
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