Paul describes the Holy Spirit as a “deposit” In Ephesians 1:14, a trading term in the Greek world of his day for securing a contract. Put down a deposit and it guaranteed full ownership. You could now enjoy whatever you’d bought, despite not having paid for it in full yet.
And that was the picture Paul gave us to help us understand what we’ve been given in the “promised Holy Spirit” (verse 13). It was the deposit God put down on us to secure us as his, just like we would put a deposit down on a car to secure it as ours. And having secured it with our deposit, we can jump into the car and start enjoying it right away.
And now that God has secured us as his with the Holy Spirit deposit, he can start enjoying us right away too. And it really does mean “enjoy,” because it was “according to his good pleasure,” Ephesians 1:9, that he signed the contract and put down a deposit to make us his.
But how exactly does he enjoy us? Well, Paul tells us back in verse 3, that the Father “has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.” That’s the Father’s goal, to fill us up on everything he has to offer us from his world. That’s the full payment he has waiting for us, that he put the deposit down on us for. He’s not paying in full all at once, and not all in this lifetime of ours now either. But he does promise us a real taste of those blessings – “the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age” now, Hebrews 6:4-5 – so that we know what awaits us in full payment of those blessings on a much grander scale later.
What God enjoys doing now, then, is giving us a taste of those blessings, and real enough in our experience that we know something special is being given to us. And it keeps on coming too, in the most surprising ways as well, when we realize we’re not the same people we were. List off the fruits of the Holy Spirit in Galatians 5:22-23, and compare them to “the acts of the sinful nature” in verses 19-21, and it’s obvious we’re growing.
It’s like the pleasant surprise we get when the bank sends us a statement on the interest we received on a deposit we made. Our money just grew, without us doing anything too. And God has the same pleasure, sending us a statement once in a while showing us how much we’ve grown, to prove the Holy Spirit deposit he put down on us is paying interest too.
And that gives him great pleasure. Imagine his pleasure, then, when he can release all the spiritual blessings he has in mind for us.
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