When You Don't Want to be Sealed
/If you’ve restored any furniture, or perhaps built a backyard deck, etc…, then you know (hopefully) that it should be finished with a good sealant. Sealing the material protects it from the elements, maintains the beauty and gives it a smooth surface. Basically, sealing preserves and protects.
For the Christian, the being “sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise” (Eph. 1:13) is much the same – only much more. According to the Benson Commentary, this sealing:
- assures our adoption and regeneration,
- stamps us with the image of God,
- constitutes us as heirs of heavenly inheritance, and prepares us for the enjoyment of it, and
- produces, in every man that possesses it, a new nature, marked (as) the son of God; a stronger evidence of title to eternal life, than if possessing miraculous gifts.
So, don’t you always want to seal your work, don’t you always want to be sealed? The surprising answer to that is – NO.
Suppose that the furniture that you are sealing is wet, that the paint job is unsatisfactory or that there are imperfections that need to be addressed. In those cases, you would potentially be sealing mold into the surface, or setting the piece into a perpetually imperfect state. You would first want to make sure that your work is finished and ready to be sealed before you do seal it.
The same goes for us being “sealed in Him.” If you are a Christian, you shouldn’t want to be sealed as a blemished being.
Leviticus 4 is Moses’ recording of God’s instructions regarding the sacrifice to be made for sin. We sin, we confess and repent, and we are forgiven. That’s what most of us know. And it is true, but it also leaves out a most critical step – the sacrifice. For the Jews of the Old Testament, that meant transferring their guilt onto an animal and offering that animal upon the altar. For Christians that sacrifice has been made, once and for all, by the blood of Jesus Christ. Believing on Him is a prerequisite for being forgiven, after confession and repentance. It is a prerequisite to being “sealed in Him.” Confessing and repenting is also called “atonement.” So, atonement = forgiveness. That’s a formula that any student can remember.
Still, when is being sealed not such a good thing? Well, it’s when we assume His forgiveness without the necessary atonement. In Leviticus 4:18, the priests were to take some of the blood of the sacrifice and put it on the horns of the altar of incense. This was symbolic of the cleansing of the sin, for Jeremiah said that,
“The sin of Judah is written down with an iron stylus; With a diamond point it is engraved upon the tablet of their heart and on the horns of their altars,” Jer. 17:1 (NASB).
Their sins, our sins, are “written…on the horns of (the) altar.” We know that if we sin we must atone – confess AND repent. Repenting means to sincerely regret the sin and to sincerely dedicate ourselves to the removal of that sin. It’s this second part where so many of us get stuck. We often confess, and less often regret, but much less often sincerely dedicate ourselves to its removal. And, so it remains in us. It remains written upon the horns of the altar.
When our sins remain written upon the horns of the altar, the application of the sacrificial blood, Christ’s blood, still a sealant, seals our sins upon the horns. Christ’s blood seals our sins, as Matthew Henry writes, “binding them on faster, perpetuating their memory and they will remain a witness against us.” Christ’s blood seals us in our mold, in our imperfect state.
THIS is when being sealed is not such a good thing.
One additional note about Leviticus 4. This sin offering is in regards to a sin that is one committed unintentionally, of which one becomes aware later. (A sin committed intentionally is a whole different subject.) When we commit a sin unintentionally, we become aware of it either by our own cognizance (again, after the fact) or by being made aware of it by another. The thought of being made aware of it by another is, at first, likely to “ruffle our feathers” a bit. In our “me first” culture we remove ourselves from the right of alerting others to their sin, or their pointing out of ours. That wasn’t so much the case back then – and it shouldn’t be now. We should desire to know our sins, for they are still sins whether we know them or not. And, we remain guilty whether we know them or not. And, they will become sealed upon us if we do not know them. Matthew Henry also wrote, regarding this, “In ignorance we may fall into sin, but let us not, in ignorance, still lie in it.”