The Expositor's Bible: The Epistle to the Ephesians. Findlay George Gillanders
(Gal. iv. 6, 7).
In the chamber of our spirit, while we abide in faith, the Spirit of the Father and the Son dwells with us, witnessing to us of the love of God and leading us into all truth and duty and divine joy, instilling a deep and restful peace, breathing an energy that is a fire and fountain of life within the breast, which pours out itself in prayer and labour for the kingdom of God. The Holy Spirit is no mere gift to receive, or comfort to enjoy; He is an almighty Force in the believing soul and the faithful Church.
III. The end for which the seal of God was affixed to Paul’s Gentile readers, along with their Jewish brethren in Christ, appears in the last verse, with which the Act of Praise terminates: “sealed,” he says, “with the Holy Spirit, which is the earnest of our inheritance, until the redemption of the possession.”
The last of these words is the equivalent of the Old Testament phrase rendered in Exodus xix. 5, and elsewhere, “a peculiar treasure unto me”; in Deuteronomy vii. 6, etc., “a peculiar people” (i. e., people of possession). The same Greek term is employed by the Septuagint translators in Malachi iii. 17, where our Revisers have substituted “a peculiar treasure” for the familiar, but misleading “jewels” of the older Version. St Peter in his first epistle (ii. 9, 10) transfers the title from the Jewish people to the new Israel of God, who are “an elect race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession.” In that passage, as in this, the Revisers have inserted the word God’s in order to signify whose possession the term signifies in Biblical use. In the other places in the New Testament where the same Greek noun occurs,56 it retains its primary active force, and denotes “obtaining of the glory,” etc., “saving of the soul.” The word signifies not the possessing so much as the acquiring or securing of its object. The Latin Vulgate suitably renders this phrase, in redemptionem acquisitions, – “till the redemption of the acquisition.”
God has “redeemed unto Himself a people”; He has “bought us with a price.” His rights in us are both natural and acquired; they are redemptional rights, the recovered rights of the infinite love which in Jesus Christ saved mankind by extreme sacrifice from the doom of death eternal. This redemption “we have, in the remission of our trespasses” (ver. 7). But this is only the beginning. Those whose sin is cancelled and on whom God now looks with favour in Christ, are thereby redeemed and saved (ii. 5, 8).57 They are within the kingdom of grace; they have passed out of death into life. They have but to persist in the grace into which they have entered, and all will be well. “Now,” says the apostle to the Romans, “you are made free from sin and made servants to God; you have your fruit unto holiness, and the end eternal life.”
Our salvation is come; but, after all, it is still to come. We find the apostle using the words “save” and “redeem” in this twofold sense, applying them both to the commencement and the consummation of the new life.58 The last act, in Romans viii. 23, he calls “the redemption of the body.” This will reinstate the man in the integrity of his twofold being as a son of God. Hence our bodily redemption is there called an adoption. For as Jesus Christ by His resurrection was “marked out [or instated] as Son of God in power” (Rom. i. 4), not otherwise will it be with His many brethren. Their reappearance in the new “body of glory” will be a “revelation” to the universe “of the sons of God.”
But this last redemption – or rather this last act of the one redemption – like the first, is through the blood of the cross. Christ has borne for us in His death the entire penalty of sin; the remission of that penalty comes to us in two distinct stages. The shadow of death is lifted off from our spirits now, in the moment of forgiveness. But for reasons of discipline it remains resting upon our bodily frame. Death is a usurper and trespasser in the bounds of God’s heritage. Virtually and in principle, he is abolished; but not in effect. “I will ransom them from the power of the grave,”59 the Lord said of His Israel, with a meaning deeper than His prophet knew. When that is done, then God will have redeemed, in point of fact, those possessions in humanity which He so much prizes, that for their recovery He spared not His Son.
So long as mortality afflicts us, God cannot be satisfied on our account. His children are suffering and tortured; His people mourn under the oppression of the enemy. They sigh, and creation with them, under the burdensome and infirm tabernacle of the flesh, this body of our humiliation for which the hungry grave clamours. God’s new estate in us is still encumbered with the liabilities in which the sin of the race involved us, with the “ills that flesh is heir to.” But this mortgage – that we call, with a touching euphemism, the debt of nature– will at last be discharged. Soon shall we be free for ever from the law of sin and death. “And the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come with singing to Zion, and everlasting joy shall be upon their heads: they shall obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”
To God, as He looks down upon men, the seal of His Spirit upon their hearts anticipates this full emancipation. He sees already in the redeemed spirit of His children what will be manifest in their glorious heavenly form. The same token is to ourselves as believing men the “earnest of our inheritance.” Note that at this point the apostle drops the “you” by which he has for several sentences distinguished between Jewish and Gentile brethren. He identifies them with himself and speaks of “our inheritance.” This sudden resumption of the first person, the self-assertion of the filial consciousness in the writer breaking through the grammatical order, is a fine trait of the Pauline manner.60
Arrhabon, the earnest (fastening penny), is a Phœnician word of the market, which passed into Greek and Latin, – a monument of the daring pioneers of Mediterranean commerce. It denotes the part of the price given by a purchaser in making a bargain, or of the wages given by the hirer concluding a contract of service, by way of assurance that the stipulated sum will be forthcoming. Such pledge of future payment is at the same time a bond between those concerned, engaging each to his part in the transaction.
The earnest is the seal, and something more. It is an instalment, a token in kind, a foretaste of the feast to come. In the parallel passage, Romans viii. 23, the same earnest is called “the firstfruit of the Spirit.” What the earliest sheaf is to the harvest, that the entrance of the Spirit of God into a human soul is to the glory of its ultimate salvation. The sanctity, the joy, the sense of recovered life is the same in kind then and now, differing only in degree and expression.
Of the “earnest of the Spirit” St Paul has spoken twice already, in 2 Corinthians i. 22 and v. 5, where he cites this inner witness to assure us, in the first instance, that God will fulfil to us His promises, “how many soever they be”; and in the second, that our mortal nature shall be “swallowed up of life” – assimilated to the living spirit to which it belongs – and that “God has wrought us for this very thing.” These earlier sayings explain the apostle’s meaning here. God has made us His sons, in accordance with His purpose formed in the depths of eternity (ver. 5). As sons, we are His heirs in fellowship with Christ, and already have received rich blessings out of this heritage (ver. 11). But the richest part of it, including that which concerns the bodily form of our life, is still unredeemed, notwithstanding that the price of its redemption is paid.
For this we wait till the time appointed of the Father, – the time when He will reclaim His heritage in us, and give us full possession of our heritage in Christ. We do not wait, as did the saints of former ages, ignorant of the Father’s purpose for our future lot. “Life and immortality are brought to light through the gospel.” We see beyond the chasm of death. We enjoy in the testimony of the Holy Spirit the foretaste of an eternal and glorious life for all the children of God – nay, the pledge that the reign of evil and death shall end throughout the universe.
With this hope swelling their hearts, the apostle’s readers once more triumphantly join in the refrain: To the praise of His glory.
CHAPTER V.
FOR THE EYES
1 Thess. v. 9; 2 Thess. ii. 14; Heb. x. 39.
Comp. Chapter VIII.
For the former usage see, along with ver. 7 and ch. ii. 5, 8; Rom. iii, 24, x. 9; Titus iii. 5; 2 Tim. i. 9; Col. i. 14; Heb. ix. 15; for the latter, ch. iv. 30; Luke xxi. 28; Rom. v. 9, 10, viii. 23; Phil. ii. 12; 1 Thess. v. 8, 9; 2 Tim. ii. 10, iv. 18. It may be doubted whether St Paul ever uses these terms to denote present salvation or redemption without the final issue being also in his thoughts. Perhaps he would have called the redemption of ver. 7, in contrast with that of Rom. viii. 23, “the redemption of the spirit.”
Hosea xiii. 14; Isa. xxv. 8.
The same incoherence occurs in Gal. iv. 5–7: “that