[This is the sixth in a series of six posts on the importance of Pentecost and the Holy Spirit. To catch up, here is the Introduction, Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, and Week 5. There will be one final summary post next week.]
What does the Holy Spirit do? He guarantees God’s promised future.
In my (admittedly biased) view, Ephesians 1:3-14 is about as good as it gets in Scripture. Verses 3-10 are a veritable smorgasbord of delights, depicting what the Father has done for us—past and present—in the person of Christ. These are ‘spiritual blessings’ which reform our loves, and reshape our identities. Verse 11 continues this theme, only now with Paul’s gaze fixed on the future: “In [Christ] we have obtained an inheritance.” Inheritance, for Paul, leads to Spirit, and this is where his grand preamble to Ephesians concludes: “In [Christ] you also … 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” (1:13-14).
The Holy Spirit is “the guarantee of our inheritance,” or—as would also be a fitting translation—the ‘down payment’ of that inheritance. A down payment implies that something further is to come. The Holy Spirit, then, is the first installment of our future hope, and as such, is the “guarantee” that there is more to come (i.e. “until we acquire possession of it”; v. 14).
Which leads us to the all-important question: “What is our inheritance?”
We get the beginnings of an answer in 2 Corinthians 5. Here, Paul is comparing our bodies in the here and now (our ‘earthly tent’; vv. 1-2) with what will be true of them then (our ‘heavenly dwelling’; v. 2). What we long for—our hope—is to be fully clothed, “so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life” (v. 4). And then the critical verse (which should sound familiar): “He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee [down-payment]” (v. 5). The presence of the Spirit now, in other words, is a down payment towards our promised future—redeemed, restored, resurrected bodies.
But it gets better. The personal vision of 2 Corinthians 5 becomes, in Romans 8, a robustly cosmic vision. Here, Paul’s future vision for the cosmos—“that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay” (v. 21; resurrection!)—is intimately linked to Paul’s future vision for God’s children. Creation is groaning, waiting to give birth to a new creation. But creation is not the only thing creaking: “We ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (v. 23). For Paul, the future destiny of God’s children, and the future destiny of God’s world, are bound up together. Humanity unbound gives way to the cosmos unchained, when creation too “obtain[s] the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (v. 21).[1]
And to be explicit: the reason we (and the world) are groaning now—the reason we know now that a better future awaits us—the reason we hope now for resurrection both personal and cosmic—is because we have the firstfruits of the Spirit. Like the picture of your last family vacation (on a beach, with the sun setting, a drink in hand, etc.) makes you yearn for that place in the midst of your varied present, the Spirit is for us the image, the down-payment, the guarantee that a better land awaits. And so (now) we groan.
This, then, is what the Holy Spirit is a down payment of—the ‘more-that-is-to-come’ is nothing less than the resurrection of our bodies, nay, the resurrection of the whole cosmos. When Paul, in Ephesians and 2 Corinthians, calls the Spirit a “guarantee of our inheritance,” this is what he means.
So: if this be the inheritance, what be the way? If what we’re after is ‘God’s promised future’, how do we arrive ‘there’? Thomas’ words are my words: “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way” (John 14:5)? And while we may wish for something more specific, the answer comes back fairly clear: follow the Holy Spirit.
What does this mean?
First, the Spirit is the agent to God’s promised future. In the same way that the pillars of cloud and fire led God’s people out of slavery in Egypt and into the ‘freedom’ of Canaan, so now the Spirit is our cloud and fire—leading us out of bondage to sin and into the freedom of the world to come. So long as we follow the Spirit, in other words, we are guaranteed to arrive at (receive) God’s promised future.[2]
Second, more than just an agent to this future, the Spirit is also a deposit of this future. Through the Spirit, we are able to live, in the present, the life that awaits us. There is an element of ‘Back to the Future’ here (or, perhaps, ‘Back from the Future’): the life of then (i.e. resurrection) that we could not lead on our own is now available to us through the Spirit. The pillar of cloud and fire, in other words, are no longer external to us; the life towards which those external signs were meant to lead is now actually resident within us. The Promised Land has come wherever the Spirit is.
We cannot make ourselves; we cannot construct our own identities; and we certainly cannot take our future into our own hands. And then Pentecost happened, and we no longer have to try. The Spirit makes us, gives us an identity, and guarantees a future we could never have dreamed up (much less obtained) on our own. How marvelous that, in Christ and by the Spirit, our future is not in doubt: it has come, and it is coming.
[1] O, how much more one wants to say here, but I’ll restrain myself to this question: Is it any surprise, given the profound interdependence of creation and creature in the first creation story, that the ultimate redemption of both in the new creation will be bound up as well?
[2] This example from Israel’s history is a wonderfully helpful analogy for questions about whether it is possible to lose one’s salvation, or what the relationship is between our work and God’s work ‘between justifications’ (initial and final). If the Spirit leads to the ‘Promised Land’, then to follow the Spirit is to guarantee (the strongest language possible) our arrival ‘there’. In the Spirit, in other words, the loss of salvation is impossible. This implies, of course, a genuine human following after the Spirit (and, therefore, real human agency). But even here, the priority remains with the Spirit, for (as we will see below) the Spirit is also the deposit of that future. In other words, we are powerless to follow the Spirit unless the Spirit himself indwells us, and this indwelling is nothing less than the gift of God. I do not mean to negate (or sideline) for one moment genuine human agency in this time between ‘Egypt’ and ‘Canaan’, but only to emphasize that the priority always belongs with God’s work on our behalf. The emphasis, then, is not either on a ‘God-who-does-everything’ or ‘humans-who-do-everything’, but rather both on a ‘God-who-does-everything’ and ‘humans-who-participate-in-that-everything’ (to use really technical language!). This emphasis on both divine and human agency is (I think) the right way to go, in line with Paul’s own emphases in places like Romans 8:12-17, Galatians 5:16-25, and Philippians 2:12-13.