Definition
Earnest (Gr. ἀρραβών arrabon; also: down payment, pledge) is the New Testament term for the Holy Spirit as the first installment or guarantee of the future full inheritance. The term appears in 2Cor. 1:22, 2Cor. 5:5, and Eph. 1:14. The arrabon is a legal concept from Hellenistic commerce: a down payment that both guarantees the seriousness of the pledge and puts the full payment in prospect. For Jones, the earnest is the key concept through which the Pentecostal experience is understood in both its eschatological limitation and its eschatological promise.
Usage in the Corpus
Stephen Jones
Jones places the earnest-motif at the heart of his feast-day pneumatology. The Pentecostal experience is real and salvific, but not the fullness — it is the deposit. “Pentecost gives us also the earnest of the Spirit (2Cor. 1:22; 5:5; and Eph. 1:14). We have received an earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession — that is, the redemption of the body (Rom. 8:23).” Elsewhere more sharply: “The apostle Paul says, of course, that we have received only an earnest, or down payment, of the Spirit (2Cor. 1:22; 5:5).”
The earnest-concept functions in Jones as a critique of any pneumatology that regards the Pentecostal experience as the endpoint. The believer who remains with the earnest has not yet received the full inheritance. The redemption of the body — the glorification at the Feast of Tabernacles — is the fullness toward which the earnest points. Pentecost is the phase of being led by the Spirit in the wilderness; the Feast of Tabernacles is the Promised Land of full indwelling. This makes the earnest also a motive of hope: the Spirit now present as down payment guarantees the coming fullness. [Jones, The Laws of the Second Coming, Ch. 10]