Theopedia

Seal

“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.”

— Ephesians 1:13-14 (ESV)

Definition

A seal authenticates something as genuine, marks it as belonging to its owner, and guarantees a transaction still to come (1 Kings 21:8; Esther 8:8). God seals believers with the Holy Spirit himself: a mark of ownership and a guarantee of the redemption still ahead (2 Cor. 1:22; Eph. 1:13-14; 4:30). Once adopted, a believer is never cast off, but sealed to the day of redemption. Baptism and circumcision are also called seals, but in a dependent sense: properly speaking, the Spirit himself is the seal, not the rite that signifies him.

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states that a believer accepted into the grace of adoption is “never cast off, but sealed to the day of redemption, and inherit the promises as heirs of everlasting salvation.”1 The Westminster Confession and the Savoy Declaration make the same point, in similar wording, but under their own chapter on assurance rather than adoption.2

The word “seal” appears nowhere else in the 1689 confession. Its own chapter on baptism states only:

“Baptism is an ordinance of the New Testament, ordained by Jesus Christ, to be unto the party baptized, a sign of his fellowship with him, in his death and resurrection; of his being engrafted into him; of remission of sins; and of giving up into God, through Jesus Christ, to live and walk in newness of life.”3

The Westminster Confession’s parallel chapter calls baptism “a sign and seal of the covenant of grace, of his ingrafting into Christ, of regeneration, of remission of sins.”4 Where Westminster names baptism itself a seal, the 1689 confession does not.

Biblical Basis

Paul writes that God “has also put his seal on us and given us his Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee” (2 Cor. 1:22), and that believers, having heard and believed the gospel, “were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it” (Eph. 1:13-14). The same verb governs his warning not to “grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption” (Eph. 4:30). In each of these texts the Spirit himself, not a rite performed on the believer, is what does the sealing.

The Old Testament supplies a precedent for a sign that also functions as a seal: Abraham “received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised” (Rom. 4:11), the seal confirming a righteousness Abraham already possessed rather than conferring it. What that precedent implies for the sacraments is argued at length in Sacramentalism and Baptism; here it establishes only that Scripture itself uses “seal” in both the pneumatological and the sacramental sense.

Doctrinal Significance

Bavinck traces “seal” across a wide range of biblical uses and finds one root idea running through all of them: a seal serves “to authenticate, to validate and confirm,” distinguishing “the true from the false, the genuine from the spurious.”5 Applied to believers generally, sealing marks them as God’s own possession and guarantees them for a salvation not yet received; applied to Paul’s ministry, a seal confirms his apostleship (1 Cor. 9:2); applied to the church, a seal marks it as God’s possession, “a pledge that it is his possession.”6 The same word, in Revelation, marks a period of protection for God’s servants and the confinement of Satan (Rev. 7:2-3; 20:3): the same idea of authentication and guarding a possession, extended past salvation to God’s wider government of history.5

Calvin grounds the believer’s assurance in the same concept: it is the Spirit himself, not a further proof or argument, who is “called an earnest and seal to confirm the faith of the godly.”7 A sacrament may be called a seal because it accompanies and confirms the Spirit’s own sealing work; it is not a second, independent source of that assurance.

Historical Development

The distinction between the Spirit’s own sealing work and the sacraments’ dependent use of the same word predates the Reformed confessions that eventually wrote it down. The 1549 Consensus Tigurinus, the agreement between Calvin and the Zurich church over the sacraments, states it directly: “the Sacraments are sometimes called seals… and yet the Spirit alone is properly the seal, and the same Spirit is the originator and perfecter of our faith.”8

Nearly a century later, the Westminster Confession (1646) and the Savoy Declaration (1658) wrote “seal” into their own definition of baptism, calling it “a sign and seal of the covenant of grace.”4 When the Particular Baptists produced their own confession in 1677, reissued in 1689, their own chapter on baptism changed this clause: the ordinance became “a sign,” with “seal” removed.3 The confession did not drop the word from its pages altogether; it kept “sealed to the day of redemption” for the Spirit’s own work in the chapter on adoption.1

Related Doctrines

References

  1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 12, “Of Adoption,” para. 1. ↩ ↩2

  2. The Savoy Declaration (1658), chap. 18, “Of the Assurance of Grace and Salvation,” para. 2: “which Spirit is the earnest of our inheritance, whereby we are sealed to the day of redemption.” ↩

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 29, “Of Baptism,” para. 1. ↩ ↩2

  4. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 28, “Of Baptism,” para. 1. ↩ ↩2

  5. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 22, “The Spirit’s Means of Grace.” ↩ ↩2

  6. Bavinck, chap. 22, “The Spirit’s Means of Grace”: “He presses his seal on the building of the church as a pledge that it is his possession.” ↩

  7. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 1, chap. 7, sec. 4. ↩

  8. Consensus Tigurinus (1549), art. XV, quoted in Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 654. ↩