'The earnest of our inheritance, until the redemption of the
purchased possession.'--Eph. i. 14.
I have dealt with a portion of this verse in conjunction with the
fragment of another in this chapter. I tried to show you how much the
idea of the mutual possession of God by the believing soul, and of the
believing soul by God, was present to the Apostle's thoughts in this
context. These two ideas are brought into close juxtaposition in the
verse before us, for, as you will see if you use the Revised Version,
the latter clause is there rightly paraphrased by the addition of a
supplement, and reads 'until the redemption of God's own possession.' So
that in the first clause we have 'our inheritance,' and in the second we
have 'God's possession.' This double idea, however, has appended to it
in this verse some very striking and important thoughts. The possession
of both sides is regarded as incomplete, for what _we_ have is the
'earnest' of the 'inheritance,' and '_God's_ own possession' has yet to
be 'redeemed,' in the fullest sense of that word, at some point in the
future. An 'earnest' is a fraction of an inheritance, or of a sum
hereafter to be paid, and is the guarantee and pledge that the whole
shall one day be handed over to the man who has received the foretaste
of it in the 'earnest.' The soldier's shilling, the ploughman's 'arles,'
the clod of earth and tuft of grass which, in some forms of transfer,
were handed over to the purchaser, were all the guarantee that the rest
was going to come. So the great future is sealed to us by the small
present and the experiences of the Christian life to-day, imperfect,
fragmentary, defective as they are, are the best prophecy and the most
glorious pledge of that great to-morrow. The same law of continuity
which, in application to our characters, and our work, and our daily
life, makes 'to-morrow as this day, and much more abundant,' in its
application to the future life makes the life here its parent, and the
life yonder the prolongation and the raising to its highest power, of
what is the main though often impeded tendency and direction of the
present. The earnest of the 'inheritance' is the pledge until the full
redemption of 'God's own possession.' I wish, then, to draw attention to
these additional thoughts which are here attached to the main idea with
which we were dealing in the last sermon.
I. And I ask you to look with me, first, at the incompleteness of the
present possession.
I tried to show in my last sermon how those great thoughts of God's
having us, and our having God, rested upon the three ideas of mutual
love, mutual communication, and mutual indwelling. On His side the love,
the impartation, the indwelling, are all perfect. On our side they are
incomplete, broken, defective; and, therefore, the incompleteness on our
side hinders both God's possession of us, and our possession of Him; so
that we have but the 'earnest' and not the 'inheritance.' That is to
say, the ownership may be perfect in idea, but in realisation it is
imperfect.
And then, if we turn to the word in the other clause, 'the redemption of
the purchased possession,' that suggests the incompleteness with which
God as yet owns us. For though the initial act of redeeming is complete,
yet redemption is a process, and not an act. And we 'are having' it, as
the Apostle says in another place very emphatically, in continual and
growing experience. The estate has been acquired, but has not yet been
fully subdued. For there are tribes in the jungles and in the hills who
still hold out against the reign of Him who has won it for Himself. And
so seeing that the redemption in its fulness is relegated to some point
in the future, towards which we are progressively approximating, and
seeing that the best that can be said about the Christian experience
here is that we have an 'earnest of the inheritance,' we must recognise
the incompleteness to-day of our possession of God, and of God's
possession of us.
That is a matter of experience. We know that only too well. 'I have
God'--have I? I have a drop at the bottom of a too often unsteadily held
and spilling cup, and the great ocean rolls unfathomable and boundless
at my feet. How partial, how fragmentary, how clouded with doubts and
blank ignorance, how intermittent, and, alas! rare, is our knowledge of
Him. We sometimes go down our streets between tall houses, walking in
their shadow, and now and then there is a cross street down which a
blaze of sunshine comes, and when we reach it, and the houses fall back,
we see the blue beyond. But we go on, and we are in the shadow again.
And so our earthly lives are passed, to a large extent, beneath the
shade of the grimy buildings that we ourselves have put up, and which
shut out heaven from us, and only now and then a slanting beam comes
through some opening, and carries wistful thoughts and longings into the
Empyrean beyond. And how feeble our faith, and how little of His power
comes into our hearts, and how little of the joy of the Lord is realised
in our daily experience we all know, and it is sometimes good for us to
force ourselves to feel it is but an 'earnest' of the 'inheritance'
that the best of us has.
'God has us.' Has He? Has He my will, which submits itself, and finds
joy in submitting itself, to Him? How many competitors are there for my
love which come in in front of Him, and we 'cannot get at Him for the
press'! How many other motives are dominant in our lives, and how often
we wrench ourselves away from our submission to Him, and try to set up a
little dominion of our own, and say, 'Our lives are ours; who is lord
over us?' Oh, brethren! we have God if we are Christians at all, and God
has us. But alas! surely all honest experience tells us that there are
awful gaps in the circle, and that our possession of Him, and His
possession of us, are wofully incomplete.
Now, let me remind you that this incompleteness is mainly our own fault.
Of course, I know that for the absolute completeness, either of my
possession of God or of His of me, I must pass from out this world, and
enter upon another stage and manner of being. But it is not being in the
flesh, but it is being dominated by the flesh, that is the reason for
the incompleteness of our mutual possession. And it is not being in the
world, but it is being seduced and tyrannised over by the influx of
worldly desires and thoughts, surging into our hearts, that drives God
from out of our hearts, and draws us away from the sweet security of
being possessed by, and living close to, Him. Death does a great deal
for a man in advancing him in the scale of being, and in changing the
centre of gravity, as it were, of this life. But there is no reason to
believe that anything in death, or beyond it, will so alter the set and
direction of his soul as that it will lead him into that possession of
God, and being possessed by Him, which he has not here. There are many
of us who, if we were to die this instant, would no more have God for
ours, or belong to God, than we do now. It is our fault if the circle is
broken into so many segments, if the moments of mutual love, communion,
and indwelling are so rare and interrupted in our lives. The
incompleteness which is due to our earthly condition is nothing as
compared with the incompleteness which is due to our own sin.
But this incompleteness is one which may be progressively diminished,
and we may be tending moment by moment, and year by year, nearer and
nearer, and ever nearer, to the unreachable ideal of the entire
possession of, and being possessed by, our God. There is a continual
process of redemption of 'God's own possession' going on if a Christian
man is true to himself and to that Divine Spirit which is the 'earnest'
of the 'inheritance.' Mark that in my text, as it stands in our Bibles,
and reads 'until the redemption,' there seems to be merely a pointing
onwards to a future epoch, but that, in the more accurate rendering
which you will find in the Revised Version, instead of 'until' we have
'_unto_,' and that teaches us that the Divine Spirit, which in one
aspect is the 'earnest of the inheritance,' is also operating upon men's
hearts and minds so as to bring about the gradual completion of the
process of redemption.
So, dear brethren, seeing that by our own faults the possession is
incomplete, and seeing that in the incompleteness there is given to each
of us, if we rightly use it, a mighty power which is working ever
towards the completion, it becomes us day by day to draw into our
spirits more and more of that divine influence, and to let it work more
fully upon the sins and faults which, far more than the body of flesh,
or the connection with the world which it brings about, are the reasons
for the incompleteness of the possession. We have, if we are wise, the
task to discharge of daily enclosing, so to speak, more and more of the
broad land which is all given over to us for our inheritance, but of
which only so much as we fence in and cultivate, and make our own, is
our own.
The incompleteness is progressively completed, and it is our work as
much as God's work to complete it. For though in our text that
redemption is conceived of as a divine act, it is not an act in which we
are but passive. The air goes into the lungs, and that oxygenates the
blood, but the lung has to inflate if the air is to penetrate all its
vesicles. And so the Spirit which seals us unto the redemption of the
possession has to be received, held, diffused throughout, and utilised
by our own effort.
II. Now, secondly, notice the certainty of the completion of the
incompleteness.
As I have already said, the clod of earth and the handful of grass, the
servant's wages, the soldier's shilling, are all guarantees that the
whole of the inheritance or of the pay will be forthcoming in due time.
And so there emerges from this consideration of the Divine Spirit as the
'earnest,' the thought that the present experiences of a Christian soul
are the surest proofs, and the irrefragable guarantees, of that perfect
future. We ask for proofs of a future life. They may be very useful in
certain states of mind, and to certain phases of opinion, but as it
seems to me, far deeper than the region of logical understanding, and
far more conclusive than anything that can be cast into the form of a
syllogism, is the experience of a soul which knows that God is its, and
that it is God's. 'I think, therefore, I am,' said the philosopher. 'I
have God; therefore I shall always be,' says the Christian. Whilst that
evidence is available only for himself, it is absolutely conclusive for
himself. And the fact that it does spring in the hearts which are
purest, because nearest God, is no small matter to be considered by men
who may be groping for proofs of a life to come. If the selected moments
of the purest devotion here on earth bring with them inevitably the
confidence of the unending continuance of that communion, then those who
do not believe in that future have to account for the fact as best they
may. As for us who do know, though brokenly, and by reason of our own
faults very imperfectly, what it is to have God, and be had by Him, we
do not need to travel out to dim and doubtful analogies, nor do we even
depend entirely upon the fact of a risen Christ ascended to the heavens,
and living evermore, but we can say, 'I am God's; God is mine, and death
has no power over such a mutual possession.'
The very incompleteness adds strength to the assurance, for the facts of
the Christian life are such as to demand, both by its greatness and by
its littleness, by its loftiness and by its lapses into lowliness, by
the floodtide of devotion that sometimes sweeps rejoicingly over the
mud-shoals and by the ebb that sometimes leaves them all black and
festering, a future life wherein what was manifestly meant to be, and
capable of being, dominant, supreme, but was hampered and hindered here,
shall reach its full development, and where the plant that was dwarfed
in this alien soil, transplanted into that higher house, shall blossom
and bear immortal fruits. The new moon has a ragged edge, and each of
the protrusions and concavities are the prophecy of the perfect orb
which shall ere long fill the night with calm light from its silvery
shield. The incompleteness prophesies completion.
And if the incompleteness is so blessed, what will the completeness be?
A shilling to a million pounds, Knowledge which is partial and
intermittent, like the twilight, as contrasted with the blaze of
noonday, Joy like winter sunshine as compared with the warmth and heat
of the midday sun at the zenith on the Equator. The 'earnest' of the
'inheritance' is wealth; the inheritance itself shall be unaccountable
treasure.