The Holy Spirit an Earnest
“Who is the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession” Eph. i. 14.
CfHE word ‘’earnest’’ was used in ancient times in connection with legal forms and business transactions. When a piece of real estate was purchased it was customary for the seller to give to the purchaser a little bag or handful of the very soil which he had bought as a pledge that in due time the whole of the estate would likewise be transferred and the sale completed. This is still the usage in China and some other Oriental countries to-day. And the writer once had the opportunity of receiving such a little bag of sand from a Chinese attorney in connection with the purchase of mission property in that country.
The use of this figure in connection with the Holy Spirit represents the Spirit in His present indwelling in our hearts and His gracious influences upon us as being the guarantee and pledge of all the blessings of redemption that are still awaiting us in the coming ages. The Spirit brings to us part of our inheritance now as the assurance that all the rest will follow in due time. The earnest was not only similar, but identical. It was the very soil of the estate purchased. And so the Holy Spirit gives to us the very substance of all the blessings of salvation which are yet awaiting us.
The joy of heaven is our eternal inheritance, but the Holy Spirit gives us in this present time a foretaste of eternal joy. Perfect purity and likeness to God will constitute part of the glory of our future life. But the Holy Spirit sanctifies us here and gives us the blessed foretaste of heaven.
Our final salvation is to involve a higher physical life and our bodies are to be raised up at the coming of our Lord in strength, immortality and glory, and to share His own perfect, boundless, and incorruptible life for ever more. But the Holy Spirit has not left us without the physical earnest of the coming resurrection in the healing of our bodies from pain and sickness through simple faith in the name of Jesus, in the quickening life which He imparts to all our mortal frame when we fully trust and touch Him. We have even here the first pulses of the coming resurrection and the earnest of immortality and glory. Divine healing is just a little heart-throb of resurrection life coming in advance of the advent. And it is our privilege to draw upon our future heritage in this respect and know even here a little of the joy and glory of the resurrection morning. In the fourth chapter of II. Corinthians the apostle dwells particularly upon this somewhat obscure truth, teaching us that we have now the elements of our future tabernacle. And he adds, ‘‘He that hath wrought us for this very thing is God who hath also given unto us the earnest of the Spirit.’’ The same truth is taught by Paul in the eighth chapter of Romans where he says, “We which have the first fruits of the Spirit groan within ourselves waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.”
Again, the future life will bring us an exalted condition of all the powers of our intellectual being. “Then shall we know even as also we are known,” and all our faculties will expand into the complete likeness of His glory. But the Spirit is the earnest of even this in our present life. “For we have the mind of Christ,” as well as His physical quickening in our body. Every power of our intellect may be enlarged by the Spirit’s quickening life.
The coming age is to bring the world’s restoration. Physically, socially and politically the curse of sin will be destroyed and a condition of liberty, peace and happiness will be universal. All the powers of nature will be completely controlled by the mind of man and made subservient to the welfare and happiness of human society. This old storm-tossed earth, torn with earthquake and volcano and transformed into a very sepulchre will become the abode of universal life and joy and ‘’the wilderness and the solitary place shall rejoice and blossom as the rose.’’ But even of this God is giving the earnest in our time. The discoveries of science, the marvelous progress of human knowledge, invention, refinement and culture are all foreshadowings of that coming age when man shall be by God’s complete approval the Lord of nature and the vicegerent of heaven on earth below. Just as the winter leaves which the botanists may find hidden beneath the hard, protecting buds and husks of December, contain wrapped up in the bosom of these rough shells the soft and living germs of next summer’s foliage and blossoms; so even in this old wintry world we can trace already the harbingers of the coming spring and the earnests of the new creation. God’s chosen Israel is “scattered and peeled” over all the earth, and the promise of Zion’s future glory seems
like an empty dream. But even amid all this wreck and apostasy God is gathering out a people from the chosen race, while from the Gentiles He is gathering out a people for His name, and in countless signals we can already trace the earnest of the Lord’.s return and the millennial age of peace and glory.