Throughout my Christian life, I have heard the phrase “sealed by the Holy Spirit.” The Spirit is the believer’s guarantee. Based upon Eph 1:13-14, many say that these phrases teach the eternal security of the believer. The word seal means that God has placed His name on us. We belong to Him, and we are secure. The Spirit is the guarantee (down payment) of our future glorification. 

Of course, the believer is eternally secure. I believe Eph 1:13-14 is talking about the Church, and how each believer is placed in it by the Spirit. That certainly supports the idea of eternal security. 

But these phrases also occur in 2 Cor 1:22. Paul says that God “has sealed us and given us the Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee” (emphasis added). Not surprisingly, many Evangelicals think of Eph 1:13-14 when they read these words. The identical Greek words are used by the same author (Paul).  

I glanced at a few popular, conservative commentaries, and that is how they understood 2 Cor 1:22. They say that Paul is proclaiming the eternal security of the believer. 

Let us consider the context. In 2 Cor 1:15–2:1, Paul is explaining to the Corinthians why he had not visited them earlier. He had changed his plans. He explains that he was not being fickle. Instead, he did not want to come to them in sorrow. He knew that if he had come, it would have been an unpleasant visit because some were saying that his “yes” did not mean “yes.”

In the middle of this discussion, Paul tells the Corinthians that Christ had established them, and that God had anointed them (v 21). God is the One who had sealed them with His Spirit as a guarantee. Would Paul say, “I did not come to you because I have eternal security. I know I am going to be in the kingdom”? That doesn’t make sense.   

Without checking on whether anyone interpreted these phrases differently from Eph 1:13-14, I tried to figure out what Paul was saying. It seemed that he was talking about his ministry and those who worked with him. He was defending himself and his apostleship. Christ had established Paul as an apostle. God had placed His name on Paul as an apostle. Paul was God’s man. God had given him the Spirit to carry out his duties as an apostle. The Corinthians had seen the power of the Spirit at work in him. There was more of that power available. Paul was not fickle. When he did not go to Corinth, he was doing what the Lord wanted him to do. In the very next verse (v 23), Paul says that he calls God as his witness. He was not saying, “I call God as my witness that I have eternal security!”  

Paul was defending his God-called apostleship. The work of the Spirit was the seal of his apostleship. He acted with God’s authority. Those were my initial thoughts. 

But I wanted to see if others saw the problem of using 2 Cor 1:22 to support the Biblical doctrine of the eternal security of the believer. I was glad to find that that was the case. 

A leading Greek lexicon says that the word anointed in v 21 can mean that Paul had been set apart by God for special service under His supervision (BDAG, p. 871). In a discussion about seals in the first century, Garland gives some other options, even though he seems to favor eternal security in this verse. He says that seals were used to show the truthfulness of something. They guaranteed the quality of goods or proved the identity of something. Earlier (1 Cor 9:2), Paul told the Corinthians that they validated him as an apostle. Paul had received the guarantee of the Spirit in the sense that he was obligated to do the work God had called him to do. The Spirit guarantees Paul’s integrity (Garland, 2 Corinthians, 106-107). 

Lange is more forceful. He says Paul presents God as having anointed him and his assistants, bestowing on them the things needed to complete their duties. The sealing of the Spirit occurred when the apostles were consecrated to their offices (Lange, 2 Corinthians, p. 23).  

Pratt agrees with Lange. He says Paul reminds the Corinthians that God had anointed him for his task. One of the main reasons for doing so was to defend his integrity (not his eternal salvation!) (Pratt, 1 & 2 Corinthians, 307-308).

Second Corinthians 1:22 is a lesson for us. We must not assume that a passage means what we think (or hope) it means. We must look at the context. However we word it, Paul is not saying that he is eternally saved, even though he was. He was telling the Corinthians that God had called him to be an apostle. He was doing that work with integrity.