A Gateway to the Supernatural: Down Payment for Our Legacy

This week we shall continue to study the results which the baptism in the Holy Spirit is intended by God to produce in the life of each individual believer.

For a third main result of this experience we may turn to the words of Hebrews 6:4-5, which speak of believers who:

“...have become partakers of the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come.”

These words indicate that those who have been made partakers of the Holy Spirit have tasted the powers of the age to come. The baptism in the Holy Spirit gives the believer a foretaste of an altogether new kind of power – a supernatural power that belongs, in its fullness, to the next age.

For this reason Paul describes the seal of the Holy Spirit as the guarantee of our inheritance.

“In Him you also trusted, after you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation; in whom also, having believed, you were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, to the praise of His glory.” (Eph. 1:13-14)

An alternative translation for guarantee is “down payment.” The Greek word, which is borrowed from Hebrew, is arrabon. This is a very interesting word which I have encountered – with slight variations – in four different languages: Hebrew, Greek, Arabic and Swahili.

Its meaning was brought home to me in a vivid way many years ago in Jerusalem. My first wife, Lydia, and I had moved with our children to a new home for which we needed to purchase about twenty yards of curtain material. We went to the Old City and found some suitable material for which, after some bargaining, we agreed to pay the equivalent of four dollars per yard, making a total of eighty dollars. I gave the storekeeper a down payment of twenty dollars (called in Arabic an arbon) and promised to come back within a week with the balance of sixty dollars.

I reminded the storekeeper that I now regarded the material as already my property. As such, he must set it aside until I returned, and he had no right to offer it to any other purchaser.

In the same way, the Lord gives us – through His Holy Spirit – a “down payment” of heavenly power and glory – a foretaste of the next age. This down payment sets us aside as His purchased property, not to be offered to any other purchaser. It is His guarantee, too, that at the appointed time He will return with the balance of payment and take us to His home, to be with Him forever. That is why Paul calls it “the guarantee of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession.”