III. The end for which the seal of God was affixed to Paul's Gentile readers, along with their Jewish brethren in Christ, appears in the last verse, with which the Act of Praise terminates: "sealed," he says, "with the Holy Spirit, which is the earnest of our inheritance, _until the redemption of the possession_."
The last of these words is the equivalent of the Old Testament phrase rendered in Exodus xix. 5, and elsewhere, "_a peculiar treasure_ unto me"; in Deuteronomy vii. 6, etc., "a _peculiar_ people" (_i.e._, people of _possession_). The same Greek term is employed by the Septuagint translators in Malachi iii. 17, where our Revisers have substituted "a peculiar treasure" for the familiar, but misleading "jewels" of the older Version. St Peter in his first epistle (ii. 9, 10) transfers the title from the Jewish people to the new Israel of God, who are "an elect race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people _for God's own possession_." In that passage, as in this, the Revisers have inserted the word _God's_ in order to signify whose possession the term signifies in Biblical use. In the other places in the New Testament where the same Greek noun occurs,[56] it retains its primary active force, and denotes "_obtaining_ of the glory," etc., "_saving_ of the soul." The word signifies not the possessing so much as the _acquiring_ or _securing_ of its object. The Latin Vulgate suitably renders this phrase, _in redemptionem acquisitions_,--"till the redemption of the acquisition."
God has "redeemed unto Himself a people"; He has "bought us with a price." His rights in us are both natural and _acquired_; they are redemptional rights, the recovered rights of the infinite love which in Jesus Christ saved mankind by extreme sacrifice from the doom of death eternal. This redemption "we have, in the remission of our trespasses" (ver. 7). But this is only the beginning. Those whose sin is cancelled and on whom God now looks with favour in Christ, are thereby redeemed and saved (ii. 5, 8).[57] They are within the kingdom of grace; they have passed out of death into life. They have but to persist in the grace into which they have entered, and all will be well. "Now," says the apostle to the Romans, "you are made free from sin and made servants to God; you have your fruit unto holiness, and the end eternal life."