Positioned for Anointing
Chap. 1, ver. 21.—“Now He which stablisheth us with you in Christ, and hath anointed us, is God.”
The Anointing which Establishes.
I. Notice the deep source of Christian steadfastness. The language of the original, carefully considered, seems to me to bear this interpretation, that the “anointing” of the second clause is the means of the “establishing” of the first,—that is to say, that God confers Christian steadfastness of character by the bestowment of the unction of His Divine Spirit. No man will be surely bound to the truth and person of Christ with bonds that cannot be snapped except he who in his heart has the knowledge which is possession by the gift of that Divine Spirit to knit him to Jesus Christ.
II. In the next place, notice the aim or purpose of this Christian steadfastness. The words “in Christ” seem to me to imply (1) that our steadfastness, made possible by our possession of that Divine Spirit, is steadfastness in our relations to Jesus Christ; (2) that such steadfastness as we have been trying to describe has for its result a deeper penetration into Jesus Christ and a fuller possession of Him.
III. Notice the very humble and commonplace sphere in which the Christian steadfastness manifests itself. It was nothing of more importance than that Paul had said he was going to Corinth, and did not, on which he brings all this array of great principles to bear. From which I gather just this thought, that the highest gifts of God’s grace and the greatest truths of God’s word are meant to regulate the tiniest things in our daily life.
A. MACLAREN, The Unchanging Christ, p. 93.
One day, President Abraham Lincoln was riding in a coach with a colonel from Kentucky. The colonel took a bottle of whiskey out of his pocket. He offered Mr. Lincoln a drink. Mr. Lincoln said, “No thank you, Colonel. I never drink whiskey.” In a little while, the colonel took some cigars out of his pocket and offered one to Mr. Lincoln. Again Mr. Lincoln said, “No, thank you, Colonel.” Then Mr. Lincoln said, “I want to tell you a story.”
“One day, when I was about nine years old, my mother called me to her bed. She was very sick. She said, ‘Abe, the doctor tells me that I am not going to get well. I want you to be a good boy. I want you to promise me before I go that you will never use whiskey or tobacco as long as you live.’ I promised my mother that I never would, and up to this hour, I kept this promise! Would you Advice me to break that promise?”
The colonel put his hand on Mr. Lincoln’s shoulder and said, “Mr. Lincoln, I would not have you break that promise for the world! It is one of the best promises you ever made. I would give a thousand dollars today if I had made my mother a promise like that and had kept it like you have done. I would be a much better man than I am!”
The Anointing Reveals the Promises of God in Christ
The Anointing Establishes steadfastness in Christ
The Anointing Gives us a seal of ownership
It is through the Holy Spirit in us that God marks us out as His own and empowers us to stand firm in Christ.
We in the holiness tradition have often so emphasized the perfecting work of the Holy Spirit that we have missed some of the more obvious roles He plays in the life of the believer. For Paul, it is the Holy Spirit who more than any other factor makes the difference between someone who is a Christian and someone who is not. As he says in Romans, “if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ” (Rom. 8:9).
In 2 Cor. 1:22 Paul once again points out that the Holy Spirit is God’s seal of ownership on us, like a seal a notary public puts on a document to signify its authenticity. The Holy Spirit is this kind of a seal in us, a clear indicator that we belong to God.
Paul also uses a word in 1:22 that the King James Version translated as an “earnest” (arrabōn). We still use the idea of “earnest money” when buying a house. The buyer puts down such money (1) to guarantee that the seller will not negotiate with anyone else and (2) to put a down payment toward the purchase of the house. Since the word earnest is so rarely used today, the NIV tries to spell out clearly what Paul is saying: the Holy Spirit is a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come. Here we have the two functions of an earnest. The Holy Spirit guarantees that God will give us salvation on the Day of Judgment. Yet the Spirit is also a “foretaste of glory divine,” a little bit of heaven inside us. The Holy Spirit is a taste “of the powers of the coming age” (Heb. 6:4–5).
