When I worked, I was often privy to information that was confidential. Before everything was electronic, I had a locked file cabinet for confidential information and a “Confidential” stamp in red that I used to mark the papers that went into that cabinet.
That “Confidential” mark reminded people that what they were looking at needed to be treated differently. It meant that information and those documents were to be handled in a special way.
In Ephesians when I came across that simple phrase, “And you also were included,” I noticed that it was followed by another simple phrase, “you were marked in Him …” [1:13-14]
Once we heard the gospel of salvation and believed and were included in Christ, Paul says we were marked in him “with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance.”
Not just included but marked. We have been marked in Christ with a seal and that seal is the Holy Spirit in us. The Spirit of God in us is our guarantee of inheritance. The Spirit of God in us marks us as God’s possession and as such we are to be treated as God’s children.
The enemy of our soul is given notice by God’s seal in us that we belong to the Almighty God and when he messes with us, he messes with our Father.
And we are reminded that no matter what we see with earthly eyes, no matter our circumstances, no matter the fact that outwardly we are perishing daily, we have a seal that guarantees our inheritance in God.
