The Spirit Seals Infallibly

In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, 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.
Ephesians 1:13-14

We have to begin by dealing with a bit of pedantic word fixation, or is it an intentional red herring? The translation of καὶ itself is uncontroversial, since “and” would not work here. The question is how the word “also” is being used. Simply pointing to the immediate audience does not settle the question. Is Paul now only including Ephesian Christians? That would be out of step with the way we interpret the vast majority of the epistles. It would be perfectly simple and reasonable to take the change of the personal pronoun to be speaking generically—in an immediate sense, from the first generation of Christians (whether Jew or Gentile) to the immediate audience in Ephesus.1 This “generic” view would deny that we need to choose among distinctions between saved and unsaved, or Jew and Gentile,2 or apostle and non-apostles.

I mentioned an intentional red herring. What do I mean by that? The red herring fallacy—so named for the fish that hunters would use to confuse their dogs from following another scent—occurs when a line of reasoning is introduced which is immaterial to the proposition. It is distracting, and it is sometimes even intentional.  In popular lingo, we call a “rabbit trail” any conversation that has the same tendency, even if unintentional.

Now the question of whether Paul is somehow beginning to introduce the Holy Spirit’s work in salvation in a way that divorces that work from his previous descriptions of the work of the Father and the Son is so unnatural to the flow of the text, that we are within our rights to ask if the person who brings this up is not attempting to change the subject out of discomfort.

To be specific, the change in personal pronoun in verse 13 has been taken by Arminians in a way similar to the way John 17:20 is marked out as a transition between what applied to the immediate audience and what will now (following) apply to the later audience.

I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word.

The idea is that these words of Jesus mark a division between “these only,” who were the recipients of the blessings of His prayer in the verses prior, and “those who will believe,” for whom Jesus will now begin to include in the prayer. Thus the doctrine of limited atonement is stealthily extracted from the prayer because Jesus was only making intercession for those directly in front of Him, for whom He would die.

I am not saying that all who ask this question about Ephesians 1:13-14 are intending to do something similar here. What I am saying is that it would have a similar consequence, and that some are indeed motivated to water down the effect of this powerful proof text for God’s sovereign grace. Now there is one difference in structure between the two texts. The disciples were the immediate audience of John 17 and those discussed in the third person were the “later” group, whereas here in Ephesians 1, the Ephesian believers were both the immediate audience and the later group.

All such pedantic shifting of the recipients misses the context which is applying the same chain of salvation to all involved. I can respect the view that the shift moves from Jew to Gentiles, given the subject matter in Chapters 2 and 3. But it is still more natural, in my view, prior to all that being introduced to conclude that this is nothing more than Paul speaking the way that an ordinary person would when he is delivering good news that has affected him and also affects those of his audience. The “we” to “you” is simply a manner of moving from those of us who know and believe this to those of you who I want to persuade of this even more. After all, the same sentence goes on to treat their faith in the past tense. If the statement is true at all, then it could hardly be less true about “you” than it is for “we” who are the messengers. At best, this is a classic case of the paralysis of analysis.

The Spirit’s Role in the Ordo Salutis

If I can put one more fastener on the lid of who all Paul is talking about throughout, there is something significant about the same referent—“in whom” (ἐν ᾧ)—now used twice as in verse 7. For one, it further solidifies the connection between verses 3-12 and verses 13-14 in terms of the unity of the work of the triune God. It furthers the notion that the same group of people who have benefitted from the Son’s work are now benefiting from the Spirit’s work, and indeed that the latter work is, in some sense, encompassed by the former work. On the one hand, it is what the Spirit does in regeneration that “gets one in Christ,” yet if we recall, we were chosen “in Christ” from before the foundations of the world.

On the other hand, though it clearly connects the work of the Spirit to the work of the Son, it remains as to which way the relative pronoun directs the reader, as to person or work. Hodge explains our options:

There are three interpretations of this clause possible, of which our translators have chosen the best. The relative (ἐν ᾧ) may be referred to the word “gospel,” ‘In which having believed;’ or it may be referred to Christ, and connected with the following participle, ‘In whom having believed;’ or it may be taken as in our version, by itself, ‘In whom’ (i.e., united to whom) ‘after that ye believed, ye were sealed.’ This is to be preferred, not only because the other construction is unusual (i.e., it is rare that πιστεύειν is follows by ἐν), but because the words, “in whom,” occur so frequently in the context in the same sense with that here given to them.3

This can certainly decide how much weight we put on the sequential element of the belief of the believers in view. In other words, is the Spirit’s role described in this trinitarian order of salvation making a statement about an order within the Spirit’s role? We must pause here and catch up on some vocabulary.

By ordo salutus, one may mean one of three things—each of which is entirely legitimate and important. One could be speaking of the order of the decree (and even using the singular “decree,” as opposed to the plural “decrees,” is a conversation in its own right); or one could be speaking of the personal experience of salvation; or one could attempt to map out the eternal order together with the history of salvation. Let me explain each of these.

The first is the most fundamental to get right, as it is the ultimate cause of all else that follows both in broader history and in one’s own conversion. To speak of an order within the decree of God seems to some people to be presumptuous or else incoherent. I only say this to those who think that this subject is presumptuous. In this very chapter, we have already seen not only that predestination is an eternal reality (v. 4) but that God gives us enough indication that there is a basis for His choice in eternity (vv. 5-6, 11). Those two facts, taken together, relate two eternal truths to each other for our consideration. Will we say that it is presumptuous to reflect on that which the Bible plainly communicates? And yet, it still may be objected that discussion of this decree is claiming more than those two points. Beyond that, it will be objected, an order among things supposes a plurality of things to order; but the will of God (just as all that is in God) is simple, eternal, immutable, and omniscient, each attribute of which would be called into question if God “ordered” things in Himself. This second objection is the more formidable of the two and must be answered.

The answer is actually more straightforward than we might think. The whole problem is resolved by noting that the conception one may have of order is faulty to begin with. To speak of an “order” within the divine decree is not a sequential order, as if a series of events in God, but a logical order, just as the distinction between divine attributes is a logical distinction—i.e., between concept and concept—rather than a real distinction—i.e., between separable thing and thing. Consequently, there is no danger of composition to God’s simplicity, none of sequence to God’s eternality, no deliberation required between options that would change God’s mind or add to His knowledge. By this logical order between concept and concept within the decree, even those things outside of God are related to each other causally owing to how they are related in God logically. Thus, in the language of Romans 8:29-30, glorification is rooted in and follows from justification, which is rooted in and follows from the call, which is rooted in and follows from predestination. I use these different kinds of causal terms because there is overlap, even in Paul’s words, between what God makes to rest in another reality and what comes first in time.

That brings us to the second sense of order. Here, priority in order speaks to what happens before something else happens. Someone might ask: Which comes first: Repentance or faith? Regeneration or faith? Faith or justification? Effectual (inward) call or Gospel (outward) call? and so forth. Here it is a strictly temporal order that one has in mind, though even here, one must be careful. A thing can maintain a causal priority over another thing even if not exhibiting a sequential order. We in the Reformed tradition say that repentance precedes faith. However, much like the relationship between light and heat, one thing can be causal for another even while the results of the latter are often instantaneous.

The third sense of an order to salvation is the result of some who attempt to put all of the pieces together. This is rarer and is not an irrelevant project. What God puts into effect from eternity and what the Spirit applies in our experience is bridged by the work of Christ in history. So our faith looks not only to God’s promise and notices a change inward, but looks to the performance of the God-Man, in the form of his flesh which He gives us for life (cf. Jn. 6:35-58).

Where does the specific work of the Holy Spirit that Paul describes in Ephesians 1:13-14 fit into that? The first answer we can give is that these two verses are not meant to be exhaustive. For example, why speak of “sealing” here instead of regeneration? Especially from a Reformed perspective that comes to such passages expecting only a contrast to Arminian error, this might seem to be a secondary matter. Hodge says concisely and matter of factly, “Whatever is meant by sealing, it is something which follows faith.”4 Does Hodge mean to suggest that this seal is not simultaneous with the act of regeneration, in a way similar to my illustration of light and heat? If what Hodge’s use of “follows” is of temporal sequence, then this sealing cannot be the same as regeneration, since regeneration precedes faith. If this thing follows faith, then it cannot also precede it. Thielman argues that the syntax here reveals what is called an anacoluthon, or broken sentence. He is not saying that Paul made a mistake, but that he made the kind of “break” we make when we speak parenthetically or add clauses for nuance. The upshot is that Paul is actually not speaking of a sequence of three events—hearing, believing, being sealed—but rather, “two aspects of the same event.”5

Hearing and Believing

One of the more telling sayings of our materialistic age—perhaps even of the simplistic animal element that fallen human beings have always descended to—is the saying, Seeing is believing. No it isn’t. Seeing is seeing. Believing is believing. Now, I realize that this saying is meant to give a shorthand way of highlighting the importance of evidence in a matter where talk is cheap. It is like saying “The proof is in the pudding,” shifting the imagery from one of our five senses to another. The trouble for our sense of sight and our sense of taste is the same. A propagandist may be at work in one and poison in the other, whatever bias or delight was satiated by this lower kind of confirmation. Hearing suffers under the same human limitations. Hearing does not equal believing. Jesus helps us keep them distinguished in saying, “ Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life” (Jn. 5:24). Paul seems to collapse them back in a famous verse by saying, “faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Rom. 10:17). However, even in this latter statement, this hearing is refined to a kind of sound that the physical ear is not naturally attuned. Obviously it requires physical ears to hear the words of the gospel in their audible form, just as it requires physical eyes to see the words on the pages of Scripture. Yet we know that an unbelieving critical scholar, no less than a demon, can do all of that. There must be a deeper kind of hearing.

I mentioned in passing the distinction between the external call and internal call. These two are also sometimes called the gospel call and the effectual call. The first goes by these names “external” and “gospel” because here the physical ears receive the good news from outside of us. Anyone can experience that, provided he is within earshot of the preacher or evangelist. The second goes by the names “internal” and “effectual” because the Holy Spirit makes effective that truth which transforms a spiritually dead person in their inner man, now alive, with a new heart that is capable of seeing the kingdom (Jn. 3:3) or beholding the glory of Christ (2 Cor. 4:6). In other words, the deeper kind of hearing that Jesus and Paul were both hinting at is not a sixth sense, nor any other kind of natural faculty, but is rather a supernatural gift. This is the primary role of the Spirit if the order we are talking about is our own salvation experience.

Our challenge is that here Paul relates some other action of the Spirit to the substance of that gospel call. Notice in this passage that both hearing and believing are in their participle form as they are related to “the word of truth.” Thielman sees the context as similar to 3:13, namely, Paul’s encouragement for the Ephesians.

The inclusion of his readers “in Christ”—in the sphere in which the blessings he had just described become operative—happened when his readers heard the gospel, believed it, and received God’s eschatological seal of the Holy Spirit.6

So, “having heard” (ἀκούσαντες) and “having believed” (πιστεύσαντες) are “adverbial participles of time,”7 their purpose being to say, in effect, to believers, that such has been your destiny from the very moment you first believed. It was never in danger by the trials you have undergone, and you need never think it lacking now simply because you will discover more later. The Christian’s possession of all that is in Christ does not depend on the strength of our faith, much less our subjective impression of how our faith is doing. That would make our faith the object of our faith!

The Seal of the Holy Spirit

Paul borrows his imagery here from the ancient practice of the king. The wicked queen Jezebel “wrote letters in Ahab’s name and sealed them with his seal” (1 Kings 21:8). When the Persian king regretted his decree used to trap Daniel and have him thrown into the lion’s den, “a stone was brought and laid on the mouth of the den, and the king sealed it with his own signet and with the signet of his lords, that nothing might be changed concerning Daniel” (Dan. 6:17). To Esther, King Ahasuerus said, “But you may write as you please with regard to the Jews, in the name of the king, and seal it with the king’s ring, for an edict written in the name of the king and sealed with the king’s ring cannot be revoked” (Esther 8:7). Even of the lesser magistrate, Nehemiah, and the priests with him, were in the place to use a seal, as evidenced by the last line of the peoples’ repentance: “Because of all this we make a firm covenant in writing; on the sealed document are the names of our princes, our Levites, and our priests” (Neh. 9:38).

Hodge says, “There are several purposes for which a seal is used:—1. To authenticate or confirm as genuine and true; 2. To mark as one’s property; 3. To render secure. In all these senses believers are sealed.”8

That third aspect of a “security” has an object in view. The word that the ESV renders as “the guarantee” (ἀρραβὼν) is elsewhere translated as “downpayment” or “earnest” or “pledge.” Interestingly, Paul uses it specifically about the Spirit in 2 Corinthians 1:22 and 5:5 as well. Notices how he brings together the same themes there as in Ephesians 1.

“And it is God who establishes us with you in Christ, and has anointed us, and who has also put his seal on us and given us his Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee” (2 Cor. 1:21-22).

“He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, qwho has given us the Spirit as a guarantee” (2 Cor. 5:5).

The latter verse may seem dissimilar, until one reads the context. Paul is comforting the Corinthians in the midst of life’s trials. It is these that make us doubt our inheritance with God.

The word περιποιήσεως is the most difficult for translators and commentators. The reason why “possession” makes sense is that the downpayment is that given as part of the whole. It is a preview, or even a foretaste, but it is a part of the thing itself. Another monetary word that we already examined was “redemption,” and we note that redemption is used in the New Testament to also refer to the full possession of the thing redeemed that comes in the end. In other words, though Christ purchases in full, legally, by his atonement (cf. Jn. 19:30), yet the fruits or reward of the purchase is not manifested in its totality, so that Paul can speak eschatologically of “the redemption of our bodies” (Rom. 8:23). Then, later on in this very letter, we read of “the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption” (Eph. 4:30). We will come to other difficulties about that verse in due time. For now, we simply note that redemption is used there in its finality. All of this is to reinforce the relationship between earnest and acquisition, or else downpayment and full possession.

One payoff of that previous question about the relative pronoun is that, if one takes the view that Christ is the referent, then this continuous thought has the believer sealed in Christ—the intervening expressions about having heard and having believed only pointing to the moment this all became real to them. Christ is, in a sense, the location of this sealing, the place of one’s safety.

The genitive here of τῆς ἐπαγγελίας can mean “of promise” or “promised” as an adjective. Acts 1:4 still looks forward to the specific dimension of the promise that Jesus made about the Spirit. Here, there was a unique outpouring of the Spirit required to initiate the new covenant church witness (1:8). Galatians 1:14 would be one passage that speaks more broadly of the Spirit as a promise for all believers in the gospel. Paul is not generic in Ephesians 1:14. He is very specific. He gives us great help in that the promise meets a great need.

We want to be secure and we want our possessions to be secure. When I say “we” here, could mean that as a basic human need. All human beings have, by nature, the desire for self-preservation and, by extension, the care of the things they have labored to produce or that they wish to be in their future or legacy. For the unbeliever, this must all come to nothing. The believer has the promise of God that our whole lives, body and soul, and all that is called “an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading [is] kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time” (1 Pet. 1:4-5).

The relationship between the sealing of the Spirit and perseverance is simply that the former guarantees the latter. If Christ is the place of one’s safety, then we can easily connect this passage with where Jesus says,

I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand. I and the Father are one (John 10:28-30).

If ever there was a truth revealed in which the inseparable operations of the Trinity and the distinct mission of the Spirit come together, it is here. It is as if the Spirit welds the destiny of the believer shut inside the already omnipotent hand of God. If that is a phenomenological piece of imagery, we might remember that so is the hand, as God is spirit. The point remains. This work is infallible.

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1. Mitton (Ephesians, 57) and Lincoln (Ephesians, 38) see this as the difference between first generation believers and second generation believers. Thielman sees it as even more generic than that (Ephesians, 78), as I tend to.

2. Hodge held to the view that this divided between the Jews who were initially saved and the Gentiles grafted in (Ephesians, 32).

3. Hodge, Ephesians, 33-34.

4. Hodge, Ephesians, 34.

5. Thielman, Ephesians, 79.

6. Thielman, Ephesians, 78.

7. Thielman, Ephesians, 78.

8. Hodge, Ephesians, 34.