“The Spirit is also the firstfruits of the eschatological consummation: ‘we ourselves, who have the firstfruits [aparchē] of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies’ (Rom. 8:23).
The statement is even more remarkable for its cosmic vision than it is for its stirring eloquence. What is now and what is yet to be belong to the same order of reality. Believers are already adopted sons of God (cf. Rom. 8:12–17).
Yet from another point of view they await the adoption as sons in the sense that the resurrection of the body will express and consummate this already experienced reality.
In the Greek Papyri, the term aparchē is used of the birth certificate of a free-born citizen, and in view of Paul’s statements about children and inheritances it might seem attractive to think of the possession of the Spirit as the guarantee of our legitimacy as children of God.
But an agricultural rather than a legal universe of discourse is more likely here. In Paul’s Jewish world, the firstfruits were both the beginning of the harvest and the pledge of its coming fullness.
This the Feast of Pentecost celebrated. As such, aparchē serves well as a description of the Spirit’s new covenant presence.
To have the Spirit is to have not only the guarantee of the final redemption, but to possess already that which (or better, the One who) is definitive of that final condition, namely the Spirit of Christ.”
–Sinclair B. Ferguson, The Holy Spirit, ed. Gerald Bray, Contours of Christian Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 178-179.
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