The Siberian Grinder

On Sunday, we had a great time taking a closer look at Ephesians 1:13-14. We payed special attention to the word sealed. In preparing, I explored the four main contexts in which the Greek word was employed. They are these:

1. Something was sealed as a security measure and to protect the contents. Tombs were often sealed with a big rock (e.g. Matt 27.66) to protect the remains. Even small wooden boxes and chests were sealed to keep their contents in safety until the owner chose to open them.

2. People in those days put a mark on their property to mark ownership – and they called that mark a seal. Cattle, sheep, and even slaves were often branded to show permanent ownership.

3. A seal was placed on documents to show authenticity. E.g., a king would apply his signet to a decree, and everyone who viewed it would know that it was from the king.

4. People would seal a package or letter for delivery. Only the recipient could break the seal.

Anyway you dice it, all of these ideas fit with what Paul taught in this passage. A seal is protective, shows authenticity and ownership, and is intended to be permanent (or definite until a specific future time). The seal of the Holy Spirit allows the believer to feel secure in his relationship with God. Indeed, he is standing on a rock that cannot be moved!

Ephesians 1:13-14 has my attention this morning. It is a loaded passage, full of glorious truth for the believer. I can hardly wait to teach this on Sunday. In the course of trying to unpack the text and bend my mind to understanding it, I translated it into English and Russian from the NA27. My English one turned out like this:

In him you also, hearing the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and having believed in him, were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is the guarantee of our inheritance, until redemption of the possession, to the praise of his Glory.

By comparison, it is dissimilar to my favorite English translation, the ESV , on many points. I maintained the Greek participle form of ‘hearing’ and the tense approximation and form of ‘having believed’. I also played it safe and went with a literal translation of “ ” (until redemption of the possession). For me, that phrase is the hardest to understand. It means either that God will redeem us finally as his possession or that we will redeem our possession, presumably the full realization of our inheritance. The jury has not complete come back yet, but I lean towards the former. The ESV translators took some interpretive license, going with the latter. Here is my Russian translation, which bears more resemblance to the RST than my English one did to the ESV (probably because the RST is more accurate to the Greek on this passage):