You also. The role of the Spirit in the Gentiles' inclusion (Ephesians 1:13-14 and Acts)
The context of Acts’ teaching on the Holy Spirit
I’m going to start with an uncontroversial statement:
Acts is not in the Old Testament. What’s more, there is almost no possibility that
Acts was finished by the time Ephesians had been written. So, this post is a bit
different to the last one and the next few. The Ephesians weren’t able to read Acts
and see links with this letter Paul had been writing. The Ephesians had not read
the book of Acts. And yet, the Ephesians were living through the book of
Acts. So, for us, a careful study of the big ideas in Acts will be really helpful
in interpreting Ephesians.
This is particularly the case when it comes to the
role of the Holy Spirit. The early church’s experience of the Holy Spirit was carefully
documented in Acts, and so noticing what the Holy Spirit’s work is there will be
much more fruitful than our own attempts to extrapolate from our own experience
what the Holy Spirit might have “meant” to them.
Ephesians’ teaching on the Holy
Spirit
The Holy Spirit is important in Ephesians. He comes
up at the exciting “big reveal” moment in the middle of chapter 1. Paul has just
spent 10 verses rehearsing the glorious Old Testament blessings that Jewish believers
have in Christ, but now he turns from “us Jewish believers” to “you Gentile believers”:
Ephesians 1:13-14 says, “In him you also, when you
heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were
sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our* inheritance until
we* acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory.”
The reason Paul is so sure of the inclusion of the
Gentiles – who have heard the gospel and believed – is because of the testimony
of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit has acted unambiguously to confirm that people
outside Abraham’s biological line can now enjoy these Abrahamic promises.
More links to Genesis?
Just before God gave his promises to bless the nations through Abraham, he cursed our human communication, so that we cannot understand
each other. You are probably struggling to understand my dense prose, you probably
had a miscommunication with a colleague recently, and you would certainly struggle
to learn enough languages to communicate directly with every person in the world.
Whether the more trivial difference in nuance, or the significant differences in
language families, the Bible says that God has deliberately frustrated our communication
as a punishment for human pride. In Genesis 10, there is a summary of the main bronze-age
nations in the ancient Middle East, and in Genesis 11, there is a theological explanation
for why there are so many nations, all with different languages. The Tower of Babel,
theologically speaking, is the starting point for this. That is the immediate context
for the promise that “in you [Abraham] all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
Therefore, it makes perfect sense that at the point
where the promises to Abraham go international, the effects of the Tower of Babel
are reversed. The first act of the Holy Spirit within the book of Acts comes in
Acts 2:4: “they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other
tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.” The miraculous gift of tongues was given
so that this good news could be proclaimed to people who spoke different languages.
(At first it was proclaimed mainly to the Jewish diaspora, but also to some proselytes,
Cretans and Arabians – see Acts 2:5-11.)
Other Holy Spirit mentions in Acts
As the gospel goes out beyond the Jewish people,
the Holy Spirit again verifies the genuineness of the gospel that has been believed.
When the Samaritans, who somewhat spuriously claimed to be Jewish, had received
the gospel, in Acts 8:14-17, the Holy Spirit was received in the presence of Peter
and John, so as to confirm that this message really was spreading beyond just Jewish
people themselves.
As the gospel goes out to the Gentiles, in Acts10:44-48, the emphasis is very clearly on the Holy Spirit falling on the Gentiles.
It is on the basis of that unambiguous verification from the Holy Spirit that the
circumcision party (in Acts 11:18) “glorified God, saying, “Then to the Gentiles
also God has granted repentance that leads to life.””
At the big make-or-break moment of the Jerusalem
council in Acts 15, the church is potentially on the brink of telling Gentile believers
that trusting Jesus is not enough and that they need to get circumcised too, it
is the giving of the Holy Spirit that bears witness that the Gentiles truly are
included (Acts 15:8).
And when the gospel finally reaches Ephesus itself,
in Acts 18:24-19:7, how did God show that these Gentiles were included? You guessed
it! Through the ministry of the Holy Spirit (19:6) unambiguously coming upon the
believing Gentiles there.
The Holy Spirit was there at every new frontier
as the gospel went out further and further from Abraham’s biological descendants.
He verified again and again that the day had arrived. Now is the time that all the
families of the world would be blessed through Abraham’s seed.
Isn’t “Gentile inclusion” basically
boring?
I used to get pretty bored when people suggested
that a book of the Bible talked about the inclusion of the Gentiles. I used to think
it was basically a way of saying “here’s a boring but hard to disprove suggestion”,
rather than a serious attempt to apply God’s living word. But as I read through
Acts, the inclusion of the Gentiles is exciting! It’s dynamic! It’s what God seems
to be really excited about!
I have come to learn (through His immense patience)
that when I disagree with the Holy Spirit, I am the one who is wrong. So, when it
comes to Ephesians, I need to be reminded again and again that the inclusion of
the Gentiles, as verified by the Holy Spirit, is the big event in itself. It’s not
a stepping stone to a more exciting application. It’s a massive development in the
Bible story that we can dwell on for ages.
The Holy Spirit’s work today
Now, there is another question of how the Holy Spirit
acts today. In my view, the type of language that is consistently used in Acts is
of the Holy Spirit acting in a completely unambiguous way. No believers were denying
the miraculous gift of speaking different languages that he had equipped His Church
with to preach the gospel to the Gentiles. The type of healing miracles as well
were comprehensive, with all being healed (Acts 5:12-16). I think that the Holy
Spirit was acting in a particularly unambiguous way, through miraculous signs and
wonders, in order to verify the message of the gospel (see also Hebrews 2:3-4 as
an interpretation of why the Holy Spirit worked so many miraculous signs).
I personally am not aware of any similarly, visibly
miraculous and unambiguous work of the Holy Spirit in the world today. This doesn’t
mean that it doesn’t happen (I’m unaware of 99.99%+ of what goes on in the world)
but most of the people that I’ve heard claim there has been a similar work of the
Holy Spirit, whether it be speaking in what they call tongues or whether it be claims
about miraculous healing, have been, at best, ambiguous.
The Holy Spirit still is at work in the hearts of
everyone who believes the gospel, and He is still, with the Father and the Son,
sustaining every square inch of the universe all the time. He is God and I do not
want to give the impression that I think His power is limited. But I am also sceptical
of unwittingly limiting His power by attributing ever smaller and more ambiguous
gifts and signs to His “miraculous” work, rather than to His regular, but no less
amazing, natural sustaining of the world.
Something we can all agree on
There are lots of different views on this amongst
Bible-believing, Jesus-loving Christians, and I would seek never to look down on
anyone for reaching different conclusions from the Bible. Whatever we think on this,
though, there is hopefully something that we can agree on: The Holy Spirit loves
that the Gentiles are included in God’s people. He has verified it several times.
And so part of our worship of our triune God is to foster a similar love for this
aspect of God’s plan.
* This “our”/“we” might mean “both of us, Jewish
and Gentile alike” or it might still mean Jewish believers only. In the latter case
the sense would be “you were sealed with the Holy Spirit who is the guarantee of
this same blessing that us Jewish Christians have, as stated in verses 11-12”. I
don’t think an awful lot hangs on this either way. I tend slightly towards the second
option, although Paul does begin to use “we”/“us” increasingly to refer to the united
church of Jewish and Gentile believers.
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