1 Ephesians 1:13 14 The Role of the Spirit 3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, 4 just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. 5 He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, 6 to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. 7 In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace 8 that he lavished on us. With all wisdom and insight 9 he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, 10 as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. 11 In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance, having been destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will, 12 so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory. 13 In him you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in him, were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit; 14 this is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God s own people, to the praise of his glory. We continue this week on our journey through the first chapter of what we have come to know as Paul s letter to the Ephesians, turning this morning to vv. 13 and 14, the conclusion of Paul s long Trinitarian sentence, the breathless exclamation of praise and wonder as Paul contemplates what God has done on our behalf. As we have noted the past two weeks, Paul s desire for us this morning at Riverdale Baptist Church, is that we will know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power. (vv. 18-19) Once again I share these reflections with the image of Andrei Rublev s icon before us. If you were here the past two weeks, I hope you will be patient with a bit of a review. Before there was creation, there was a loving relationship within the very being of God, a relationship depicted in symbol by Andrei Rublev s icon (painted in 1411). Called The Hospitality of Abraham, it uses the three angels who visited Abraham in Genesis 18 as a
2 symbol or type of the Holy Trinity. Through the rich use of (at the time) well-understood symbols, we are invited into a conversation that began before anything was created. Reflecting on this icon, Henri Nouwen suggests that we can understand it as a gentle invitation to participate in the intimate conversation that is taking place among the three divine angels and to join them around the table. We come to see with our inner eyes that all engagements in this world can bear fruit only when they take place within this divine circle the house of perfect love (Henri Nowen, Behold the Beauty of the Lord: Praying with Icons, p. 20-22). With this gentle invitation before us, let us continue to explore Paul s amazed declaration what God has done. Two weeks ago we explored Paul s declaration of what the Father has done: Blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing Chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless in love Adopted us through Christ as his children Lavished his grace on us in Christ (his beloved) Last week we followed Paul s enthusiastic description of what Jesus, the second person in the Trinity, has done for us: He has redeemed us we are forgiven IN him.
3 He has pulled back the curtain revealing to us his intentions to unite heaven and earth, restoring and healing what has been divided and broken since the fall of our original parents. We noted how this is, in fact, the completed answer to what we ask for every time we pray the Lord s prayer: Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. The heavenly Jerusalem comes down to earth at the end of Revelation. He has made us, in Christ, his heirs. All that comes to Christ in this heavenly family also comes to us. I am reminded of the Father s words to the older brother in the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:31): Son, all that I have is yours. This is what it means to be heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ (Romans 8:17). And now Paul turns to the work of the Spirit. 13 In him you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in him, were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit; 14 this is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God s own people, to the praise of his glory. And here we note a paradox. The work of the Father and the work of the Son are 100% their initiative. It is the Father who, purely on his initiative, out of the pleasure of his will and on the basis of his grace, blesses, choses, adopts. It is the Son who freely lavishes his grace on us, redeeming and forgiving us. And we noted how it was all past tense--accomplished. But now we see that we also have a part to play in this drama. We hear the word of truth and we believe. We are invited to the fellowship at the table and we take a seat, we join the conversation. There is great mystery here. Do I believe because I have been chosen? Or have I been chosen because I believe? And I think the Bible answers yes to both questions, without resolving what we experience as a tension, an either/or dilemma. We come to the gateway that leads to salvation and respond to the invitation written over the entrance: Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. (Matthew 11:28) We gratefully enter with joy and, looking back on the gateway, we see inscribed over it, Chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world. (Ephesians 1:4) As I noted when we began, it is an obsession of the West, reflected in the Western church, that mysteries are problems that must be solved. And so we come up with
4 elaborate theological schemes and systems to try to rationalize what God simply declares. The Eastern church, on the other hand, sees mysteries as a cause for humble worship. I bow before the wisdom of the Eastern church in this instance. In these verses, this long sentence of Paul s, we are seeing both sides of the gateway as it were. We have been allowed a holy glimpse into the council of the Trinity, a conversation that has been going on since before anything was created. And we learn that our redemption was on God s mind and heart. And we reflect on how, from our experience, we came to be listening to this conversation. Doing so, we recall how we heard and came to understand the message of the gospel learning about Jesus: his teaching, his life, his death and resurrection. We recall how we came to understand and to believe that in fact his life, death and resurrection were related to us that he died for us, for our redemption. For some of us a dramatic Damascus Road experience, for others a gradually dawning awareness with no conscious turning point. But whatever our experience, however we came to believe, there was a choosing. We were, we are, free moral agents who listen, reflect, and make choices for which we are morally, spiritually accountable before God. And here s the thing at that point of believing, whether or not we were even aware of the transition taking place, Paul tells us that we were marked with the seal of the Holy Spirit as per God s promises. How are we to understand this? John Piper observes that the idea of being sealed has at least three senses in the NT where this word is used: 1. In Matthew 27:66 we read how the tomb of Jesus was sealed with guards posted around it. Similarly, in Revelation 20:3, there is the image of Satan being thrown into a pit that God then seals so Satan cannot escape. In these instances, the idea of a seal has to do with locking something and guaranteeing its security. We see the equivalent today on, e.g., electrical meters or transport trucks. 2. In Romans 4:11, the circumcision of Abraham is described as the sign and seal of the righteousness Abraham had by faith. In a similar sense, in I Corinthians 9:2, Paul describes the Corinthian believers as the seal of [his] apostleship. Here the seal is seen as the guarantee of the authenticity of something. We are familiar with this when we have a lawyer or a notary public seal a document with their stamp.
5 3. The third sense has to do with possession and can be seen in Revelation 7:3 where the servants of God are marked with a seal on their foreheads to distinguish them as those who belong to God, as well as those who have the mark (or sign) of the beast, the mark that shows them as belonging to the Devil. We know this sense when we mark a valuable tool or belonging with our name. When we yield our lives to Christ, the Holy Spirit takes up residence in our lives literally indwells us. Again, this is a great mystery but the significance is clear enough: 1. The Holy Spirit secures us from being tampered with, from being violated by anyone or anything that would seek to do us harm. Our security is guaranteed by the seal of the Holy Spirit. 2. The Holy Spirit guarantees the authenticity of our identity in Christ that we are legitimate children and heirs of God, with Jesus. 3. And finally, the Holy Spirit is the mark of God s ownership, the sign that we are his property, that we belong to him. In the words of Stevie Wonder, we are Signed, sealed and delivered by the Holy Spirit we are guaranteed secure, guaranteed as belonging to God. This was always, as Paul reminds us, God s intention, God s promise, as, e.g., God declared to Ezekiel: I will put my spirit within you, and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. (Ezekiel 36:27) Jesus renewed and elaborated upon the OT promises. E.g., If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you. (John 14:15-17) There is great comfort in God s promise of the Holy Spirit sealing our relationship with him, sealing for eternity the question of our identity and destiny. If you are like me, there are many moments and occasionally long stretches when I don t feel very godly or Christian. I certainly do not feel holy or righteous. I fall into sinful habits or thoughts. I get caught up in the frustrations and challenges of work and life. I forget who I am and what I am in Christ. I am ashamed to confess that there are times when being a Christian feels like a burden.
6 Thank God, my identity in Christ, my place in his family, my inheritance in him, does not depend upon the constancy of my fickle faith. Having once yielded my life to him, I have been sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise. We have been sealed. We belong to God. At very dark times in my life, this has been a refrain I have repeated, meditating on the significance of each word. I.belong.to God. The idea of being sealed by the Holy Spirit is further amplified by the image of the pledge or earnest. This word has two senses, both of which are deeply encouraging and comforting to us. 1. The first sense is that of a down payment, the first installment of a larger payment to come. In this sense, seal of the Holy Spirit in our lives now is the first installment of what will be finalized on the day when, as we saw last week, Heaven comes down to Earth and the new creation is fully realized. Paul is thinking in these terms in Romans 8:23, when he speaks about us having the first fruits of the Spirit while we, along with all of creation, endure the labour pains of the redeemed world being born. It is because of the down payment of the Spirit and the seal of the Spirit that Paul can declare with confidence to the Philippians (1:6): I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ. 2. There is a second sense to the idea of a pledge that I find especially meaningful. This is the idea expressed by a young man when he gives the woman of his dreams a carefully chosen engagement ring. It is an image that resonates through the Bible and especially in the NT, in which we come to understand that the church is the Bride of Christ. In this image, the Holy Spirit is the engagement ring given by Jesus as the token of his promise that we, as the people of God, will be united with God, part of the great marriage supper of the Lamb celebrated in Revelations 19:6-9: Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready; to her it has been granted to be clothed with fine linen, bright and pure
7 And the angel said to me, Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb. And he said to me, These are true words of God. The church is the bride; we are the guests at the marriage supper. The Holy Spirit is, if you will, the engagement ring the pledge of God s gracious love and the guarantee of his promise to bring to completion the good work that he has begun in us. So Paul writes that in Christ, having yielded our lives to him, we were...marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit; this is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God s own people, to the praise of his glory. The glory of God is the character and power of God showing itself for what it is. Our redemption with the redemption of the creation is the ultimate expression of who God is and what God is like...to the praise of his glory. I can only conclude with the final scene in Revelation 22, the culmination of God s great plan for his beloved but broken creation, the culmination of his plan for us: Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever. We belong to God. We have been sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise. He is faithful and can be trusted to fulfill what he has promised, to the praise of his glory. Benediction: Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy, to the only wise God our Savior, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen. Jude 1:24,25