Pauls's Epistle to the Ephesians
Chapter Thirteen
THE SEAL OF THE SPIRIT
"And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption. Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil-speaking, be put away from you, with all malice: and be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you. Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children; and walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savour."- EPH. iv. 30-v. 2.

THE day of redemption (ver. 30) is to be understood as pointing to the consummation elsewhere described (chap. i. 14) as the redemption of the purchased possession. The idea suggested is that of property, such as an estate or house, secured by purchase, but not yet fully claimed and occupied. The purchaser has acquired a full and valid title to it by payment of the price. His ownership of it, or vested interest in it, is secure beyond all legal challenge. But, for some reason that seems good to him, he does not immediately complete the transaction by the final step of actual and entire appropriation. He departs for a time, and abstains from taking it absolutely and exclusively into his own hands; leaving it, in the meantime, apparently very much in the condition of the other and ordinary lots or streets in the midst of which it is for the present situated; open to temporary tenancies, or to untoward intrusions and influences; from which, when he comes back, he will effectually and conclusively deliver it.

But he does not, on that account, care for it less now than when he purchased it. On the contrary, in the view of its present circumstances, he cares for it all the more. And in his care for it, he seals it with his own seal, as the sign of his having bought it and separated it to himself, and the sure pledge of its safe preservation unto the day of redemption.

The sealing, in this case, is by the Holy Spirit of God; as the property to be sealed is the church collective and its members individually. You personally, as believers, each one of you apart, are sealed by the Holy Spirit of God, or you are sealed in the Holy Spirit of God. So, with the approval of competent criticism, the preposition may be more literally rendered. The difference matters little. By the agency of the Holy Spirit of God in the one view, or in the sphere and working of his agency in the other, a seal is stamped or impressed upon you. It is of course stamped inwardly; for it is the work of the Holy Spirit. The material point is, that the Holy Spirit comes in here. And he comes in, not so much as being the giver of the seal, but rather as being himself the gift - the seal.

The sealing, as to its source and original donation, is to be ascribed more directly and properly to Christ than to the Holy Spirit; and indeed ultimately to the Father; as the apostle speaks elsewhere, "Now he which stablisheth us with you in Christ, and hath anointed us is God; who hath also sealed us, and given the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts" (2 Cor. i. 21, 22). So also the Lord says of himself, as the Son of man (John vi. 27), "him hath God the Father sealed." Thus this sealing comes from God the Father through the Son. The office of the Spirit in the matter of this sealing is to apply or impress the seal in the heart. Nay, more than that. It is his own blessed and gracious operation there that is itself the seal. In his indwelling in you; in your receiving him into your inmost souls; in your experience of those heavenly communications, and holy movements, and loving frames, which indicate his presence and his power, in that lies the very essence of the seal. Ye are sealed by or in the Holy Spirit of God.

But what precisely are these indications, constituting, as it were, the stamp or impression more or less legible to you and to others, which the Holy Spirit of God, in this sealing process, makes and leaves upon your inner man? There is no trace in them of the Spirit himself. He does not speak of himself. He makes no manifestation, nor does he stamp any image of his own person or of his working. He is like one present and working incognito; keeping himself and his working concealed. He gives out, as it were, a stamp on the wax which he softens, and by means of the softening influence he exerts, and of the die he uses, he makes, not himself cognisable or recognisable, but something else or some one else. Such is the teaching of Scripture elsewhere on this subject. And so it is here as regards your being sealed by or in the Holy Spirit of God. Apart from all general reasoning out of Scripture, and keeping to the present text, I think you may find in this passage a twofold sealing by or in the Holy Spirit of God about which you have to concern yourselves. On the one hand, he seals to you, or in you, "God, for Christ's sake, forgiving you;" on the other, "Christ loving you, and giving himself for you, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savour." In either view, the exhortation applies -"Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption " (ver. 30).

I. God, for Christ's sake, hath forgiven you. And if you would not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, you are, in this respect, to be followers of God as dear children, imitators of God as his beloved sons and daughters (chap, iv. 31; chap. v. 1). The precise and particular line of your thus following or imitating God is his having forgiven you ; and so forgiven you as to make you, and make you feel yourselves to be, in his forgiving you, his dear children. That is what is first of all sealed to you by or in the Holy Spirit of God. The forgiveness of God and its fatherly character ; that God in Christ does forgive you, and that in Christ he forgives you as a father forgiving dear children ; such is the import or aspect of this sealing by or in the Spirit, so far as God the Father is concerned.

And it is plainly a sealing that is to be recognised by you in your own consciousness and your own experience ; and that not merely, according to the view of this passage, in order to the promotion of your comfort and peace. That is not what is chiefly pointed at here ; nay, it is not pointed at here at all. It is duty, not privilege; your obligation towards others, not your enjoyment for yourself, that Paul is anxious about. His only object is to have your way of dealing with your fellow-men moulded on the type or pattern of God's way of dealing with you. That it may be so, he would have you to realise God's way of dealing with you as a fact, a real fact, an actual event in your personal history; he has in Christ forgiven you.

Of course, in the first instance, and in its fullest sense and force, this applies to your first apprehension of the pardoning mercy of God in Christ; your first turning from sin unto God; your first embracing the glorious gospel of reconciliation; your first tasting and seeing how good God is. But it is not at all necessarily restricted to that. To the Lord our God belong mercies and forgivenesses. He multiplies his pardons. "Forgive us our debts" is your daily prayer: and daily forgiveness, if rightly asked and really got, is ever a fresh renewal and revival, day by day, of the original forgiveness reached through your first knowledge of the righteousness of God in Christ, and your first conscious grasp of his saving mercy, his forgiveness, and the manner of it. Daily, hourly forgiveness, which you need, is nothing to you if it is not that. Day hy day, therefore, hour by hour, you must be realising the nature and character of that forgiveness; the Holy Spirit of God must be sealing it as regards its nature and character, to you, and in you. It is forgiveness in Christ, and its being so involves two great commendations of it.

Negatively, there is the absence of all personal feeling of irritation (chap. iv. 31). Forgiveness is possible, after a sort, even when he who forgives retains, and pleads that he cannot help retaining, some soreness as regards the wrong that has been done to him. In spite of that he forgives. He may even make a merit of the forgiveness being in spite of that. But that is not the manner of God. It cannot be. For, first, there never was any such element as personal irritation in his holy anger against sin, or in his judicial condemnation of it. And, secondly, his forgiveness is in Christ; for Christ's sake; flowing to guilty men through the channel of that mediation of Christ, that gift of his own dear Son, which makes his forgiveness a purely, thoroughly, unreservedly, paternal or fatherly act, and absolutely precludes and shuts out the very idea of anything like a reserved grudge or a lingering sense of wrong. Forgiveness, with such a drawback, may be the manner of men. It is not the manner of God.

But more than that. Positively, there is in the forgiveness of God a kind and tender heart (chap. iv. 32). It is not the careless or contemptuous overlooking of a fault, because he who commits it is below resentment. It is not the supercilious graciousness of one who is above taking notice of an offence ; and in a sort of offhand exercise of clemency, pardons because he does not consider it worth while to punish; the offence being in his view so abortive as an attempt to hurt him, and the offender being so poor and pitiable a wretch, as scarcely to attract his notice. No! That cannot be. For it is forgiveness in Christ; in the Son of his love; in whom he does, and even must, manifest himself as having a father's nature and a father's heart; in whom and for whose sake his forgiving you must needs be forgiving you with full fatherly affection; because you are in his Son, and being one with him, are yourselves his own dear children.

Thus in Christ, through Christ, for Christ's sake, forgiveness comes in such a way as to bring out unmistakably, and with resistless cogency and affecting power and pathos, on the one hand the view which God takes of the sin to be forgiven, as being so exceeding sinful that nothing but the blood of his own dear Son could blot out its guilt; and on the other hand the special and peculiar regard which God has to each one and every one of those, for each one and every one of whom individually Christ tasted death. Forgiveness in Christ, or for his sake, is not, and cannot be, a mere vague amnesty, or indiscriminate gaol-delivery; consistent with entire ignorance of the parties delivered, and the entire absence consequently of all personal feeling of good-will towards any of them. It is, and must be, of a sort implying kindness and tenderheartedness to the forgiven ones, one by one, if it is forgiveness in Christ as tasting death for every one. Now it is this forgiveness of God in Christ that is sealed to you by the Holy Spirit of God. And if you would not grieve the Holy Spirit of God you must be, in respect of this manner of forgiveness, like-minded with God.

Hence, on the one hand, the exhortation, negatively: "Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice" (ver. 31). The thing condemned is primarily "bitterness," acrimony, a frame of mind that is acrid and sour, ill-tempered, ill-conditioned. It is such a frame of mind as breeds inwardly "wrath and anger;" hasty indignation sometimes, and at other times prolonged and settled animosity. And it is apt to vent itself outwardly in "clamour and evil speaking;" in clamour, or outspoken vehemence, if it is a passionate burst of wrath; in evil speaking, or calumny, if it is more deliberate. And the whole is traced to "malice;" to ill-will; to what is the opposite of goodness, generosity, and geniality; to the evil spirit of unregulated self-seeking and self-regard. For it is that spirit which begets "bitterness," the root of all this evil. It makes a man jealous and fretful as regards the treatment he meets with at the hands of his fellow-men. It inclines him to be easily provoked; to take amiss what may not be really meant to be an offence. Or, if he is of a slower and more retentive temperament, it inclines him to dwell on the affront or injury, and to magnify his sense of it.

If it is the first of these inward movements that he feels, it may escape - as steam does through a safety valve, in a loud roar or cry - in "clamour." If it is the second, it is but too likely to work more insidiously, as "evil speaking" or slander. In either case it has its origin in "malice," in badness, in evil-mindedness; and the badness is easily traceable to ignorance, or unbelief, of the goodness of God, in his way of forgiving you in Christ.

If, therefore, you would not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, in this matter of forgiveness, or dealing forbearingly and forgivingly with your brethren, get into the very manner of God, in forgiving you in Christ. Get into the heart of God himself in his thus forgiving you. Is there, on his part, any clamour or evil speaking - any hasty reproach or prolonged accusation - when he forgives you? Is there any wrath or anger - any vehemence of passion, as if indulging itself in one last ebullition, or any reserved and suppressed heat of cherished sullen resentment? Surely God's forgiveness of you has not in it any of these drawbacks. Let not your forgiveness of one another - your treatment of one another in the way of a forbearing and forgiving line of conduct - be such in that view as to grieve the Holy Spirit of God, who upbraideth not, who remembers your sin no more.

Rather, on the other hand and on the contrary, learn the positive lesson, cherish the positive spirit of brotherly kindness and tender-heartedness (ver. 32). No forgiveness, no manner of forgiving, has any value if it has not these two qualities or characteristics - kindness and tender-heartedness. Without them it is not really forgiveness at all. It wins no confidence; it calls forth no gratitude. It is set down to the account of weakness, or indifference, or partiality; or any motive consistent with, at the best, an enlightened selfishness. If I am to be forgiven in such a way as to touch my heart, and make it one with the heart of him who forgives me - and no other forgiving is worth my having - there must be kindness and tender heartedness; kindness, as opposed to bitterness, or the lurking acrimony that may inwardly survive the outward condoning of an offence; tender heartedness, as opposed to the indifference cloaking over ill-will, that affects to treat the offence as a trifle, and to let off the offender accordingly.

Kind, tender-hearted! Are not these the right adjectives and epithets to be applied to God's forgiveness of you in Christ? Does he not, when he first forgives you in Christ, and whenever he forgives you anew in Christ, come out before your eyes, or rather come into your inmost heart, as very kind, thoroughly generous, dispensing to you complete pardon, pardoning you with perfect graciousness - not retaining in his bosom one spark or atom of the righteous indignation which your sin has provoked? It must be so if he forgives you in Christ; in him on whom, being his own beloved Son, in his kindness to you, he laid the burden of all your guilt; in Him who for the bearing of that burden asked no other recompense than that the Father should be as kind and well disposed and gracious to you as he ever is to him ; that he should make you his dear children, as he is his beloved Son; loving you even as he loveth him.

And then what tender-heartedness! It is from the heart that God forgives you in Christ. And from the heart, oh, how tenderly! Even when you are out of Christ he cares for you in Christ. He is tender-hearted towards you in Christ; giving him to you, in all tender-heartedness; and if you will but have him to be yours, giving you forgiveness in him. True, he cannot, however tender-hearted, forgive you out of Christ. In Christ, however, his forgiveness of you is tenderhearted indeed. It is cordial, oh, how cordial! It may well be so if it is forgiveness in Christ. In tender-heartedness he gives him for you ; in tender-heartedness he clasps you in him, to his bosom, as his dear children. Now in all this, in this manner of forgiving, in this way of dealing with those who offend you, or whom you inadvertently offend, that is, in short, in all your dealings with your fellow-men generally, you are to be followers of God; imitators of him; followers and imitators of him as your Father; you being his dear children. And the Holy Spirit of God is grieved when you fail in this duty. For he is in you as the Spirit of adoption, the Spirit of God's own Son. You are sealed in the Holy Spirit of God as being thus in you as the Spirit of adoption.

The seal, as regards its manifestation to your consciousness and your realising apprehension of it, is your being God's dear children; and your consequently feeling and acting as God's dear children. If, therefore, in any case you feel and act otherwise; if you deal with your fellow-men, be they ever so hostile, otherwise than as God deals with you, who are in yourselves more hostile to him than any of them can be to you; if you so manifest and indulge an unbrotherly and therefore an unfilial spirit; you grieve the Holy Spirit of God. For the unfilial spirit implies the unbrotherly. If you are not God's dear children, having him consciously as your Father, you cannot cherish the brotherly love of which Christ's love to you is the type and pattern.

II. We now come to the second particular as regards the impress of the seal; you are to walk in love, as Christ also has loved you.
The sphere, or atmosphere, in which you are here called to walk, to have your hahitual going up and down, going out and coming in, to live and move and have your being, is love. Walk in love. It is larger and wider, apparently, than what goes before; it expands personal forgiveness into general and universal benevolence. But it is not, on that account, vague or indefinite. The benevolence or love meant is precisely indicated. It is that of Christ.

He hath loved us so as to give himself for us. Even vague as that statement is, it is, with all its vagueness, important and impressive, in the practical point of view of this text. The love in which you are to walk, if you would not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, is a self-giving love; a love that gives itself. For no one can give himself, save only in the way of his giving his love. "Whatever else about himself he may give, and in whatever sense, he must at any rate give his love. So Christ, giving himself, gives his love. If he did not give his love, I would care little for any other gift of his. He gives therefore his love, when he gives himself.

But he gives his love, himself, in a very peculiar way, for us; for you and me. He gives me his love, himself, as lovingly taking my place, and acting on my behalf, in the negotiation of my peace with God, I would not have him discharge this office for me, much as I feel my need of it, unless he first gave himself, his love. Scarcely otherwise would I accept his discharge of it. But, oh ! how cordially, how warmly, do I welcome and embrace him, when I do so in the exercise of a simple, childlike, appropriating faith in him as loving me, and giving himself for me.

Nor is his giving himself for me a mere mystery to me ; an incomprehensible act of self-surrender or self-denial, or self-crucifixion, in the efficacy of which I am ignorantly and implicitly to trust. I apprehend his giving himself for us an offering and sacrifice to God.

To God! For that is a material, significant, emphatic consideration. The phrase should be connected with the nouns rather than with the verb. He gave himself to God. True! He gave himself an offering and sacrifice. True! But the impressive and affecting thought is this : it was an offering to God : it was a sacrifice to God. He gives himself, not as at his own discretion, and of his own proper and personal motion, volunteering homage to God; but simply as rendering to him his own ordained offering, his own appointed sacrifice. Not otherwise could it be really an offering and a sacrifice to God. Not otherwise could it be an offering and a sacrifice to him of a sweet-smelling savour. No will-worship could be thus acceptable to him ; not even if it were presented by the Son of his love. When he gives himself for us, it is as an offering and sacrifice unto God; it is as the offering and sacrifice which God appoints. He gives himself as an offering; himself, as the righteous one, fulfilling all righteousness. He gives himself as a sacrifice; himself, as expiating guilt and enduring the condemnation in the room and stead of the criminal And he gives himself thus for us. It is all for us ; for our salvation ; out of love to us ; love surely passing knowledge.

Now it is in this love that you are to walk, if you would not grieve the Holy Spirit of God; in the knowledge and belief of it; in the sense and experience of it; in the appropriation and imitation of it; in the reception and reproduction of it; in the air or atmosphere which it breathes and inspires. Walk in love. Abroad, among your fellows, walk in this love. Give lovingly yourselves; not your money, nor your time, nor your labour merely; but yourselves; your hearts. Let all with whom you have anything to do on Christ's behalf see that for his sake, and in his Spirit, you give yourselves. And let them see that you give yourselves for them ; cordially and affectionately for them ; not merely to serve a purpose, nor in the mere discharge of a necessary task; but as putting yourselves in their place, and alongside of them ; so as to become one with them and make their case your own. But yet let them always see also, that you thus give yourselves for them in the view of what they and you alike owe to God; not indeed as if you could answer for them ; but at all events as if you would fain do so if you could ; in the very spirit of Paul, when he wrote : "I say the truth in Christ: I lie not, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost, that I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart. For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh." Walk thus in love, as Christ also hath loved us.

Now let us come back to our original starting-point; your being sealed by the Holy Spirit of God unto the day of redemption. What is it that the Spirit seals to you and in you, in this intermediate state of your spiritual life, between grace and glory? What but God's forgiving you in Christ, and Christ's loving you and giving himself for you? He does not put his seal on anything that is yours; no ; not even on anything that is yours through his own agency and his own operation. At least, so far as I see, there is no trace of any such sealing here. His seal is reserved for what is of God; the Father's pardoning mercy; the Son's redeeming sacrifice. But his sealing you thus implies his imparting to you a real sense and feeling of what he seals upon you and within you.

He sheds abroad in your hearts the love of God. He causes that love, as the love of God forgiving you in Christ as dear children, and of Christ giving himself for you, to flow into your souls, so as to make itself felt through all your inner man. And it is when he is doing this, and would fain do it more and more, that you are apt to thwart and hinder him. And how ? How, but by your cherishing in yourselves what is opposed to that in God which the Holy Spirit of God would seal to you, by your not forgiving as the Father forgives, and not loving as the Son loveth? For what is it that the Spirit really seeks? He would have you to know and believe the love which God has to you. But that is impossible if you are yourselves unloving. For no one who is himself unloving ; incapable of loving, or in fact not loving; can credit, or even comprehend, the reality, the possibility, of love, disinterested, unselfish, generous, and true, in the bosom of another. Your continuing therefore to be unloving is a counteracting of the work of the Holy Spirit of God, and it must be very grievous to him.

Let it be fixed then in your minds, believe assuredly, that this sealing work of the Holy Spirit of God is a great reality, within the range and sphere of your own spiritual consciousness, and that it is a real and living divine person who is carrying it on. Nay, more than that, the three persons in the Godhead are all severally concerned in it. For it is mainly in this sealing work of the Holy Spirit of God that the Lord's own promise is fulfilled : "If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him" (John xiv. 23). This is that manifesting of himself and of the Father to his disciples and not to the world of which he speaks so affectionately. It is the Holy Spirit of God sealing to you and in you as a blessed fact the Father's forgiveness of you in the Son, and the Son's love in giving himself for you. It is the Holy Spirit of God personally doing this; he, personally, dealing thus with you personally. Will you not suffer him to do it more and more, to make the impress of his seal broader, deeper, surer, clearer? He can do so only through your coming yourselves to have more of the mind of God and the mind of Christ.

How God forgives you in Christ, what manner of forgiveness it is, you can best learn by forgiving one another as he forgives you. The love of Christ in giving himself for you will be fully apprehended when you lay down your lives for the brethren. Still, however, remember always that this is no merely natural process, the result of means and influences brought to bear upon you, or of your own exercise of your spiritual gifts and graces. The Holy Spirit of God is personally in the whole work, and in every part, in every stage of it.

Consider well, that when you are slow of heart to receive and welcome the Father's forgiveness in Christ, and Christ's own dying love; when you cherish contrary affections in yourselves, thereby shutting out both from your hearts; you are not merely rejecting a true doctrine and resisting a powerful motive, you are wounding and vexing a living person, one who loves you tenderly, and who cannot but be grieved when you hinder him in the discharge of his gracious office on your behalf. And consider also what is your security, what can be your sense of your safe preservation till the day of redemption, if you dim, or sully, or efface, even partially, the only seal you can ever hope to have of it - the Holy Spirit of God shedding abroad in your hearts the love of God, and taking of what is Christ's that he may show it unto you.
Go to Chapter Fourteen

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