The Holy Spirit “deposit”  

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.  

One thought on “The Holy Spirit “deposit”  

  1. I’m reminded of the “Parable of the Talents” in Matthew 25, where God’s faithful servants invested their talents, doubled their investments, and were given a position of rulership in the Kingdom of God.

    I pity poor Ahaz who stupidly refused the “talent” the Lord offered him. He didn’t even take it so he can at least lock it away in a safety deposit box, never mind depositing it in the bank to gain a little bit of interest on it. It’s hardly surprising that he had no “Holy Spirit” measure and was given over to his unholy ways.

    “For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away.” (Matthew 25:29)

    “But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.” (2 Cor 3:18)

    Like

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s