Signet, Wax, and Fire

True religious experience

Archibald Alexander was the first professor at Princeton Theological Seminary. In his book Thoughts on Religious Experience, he writes about how true religious experience makes an impression on us like a signet ring on a wax seal. He writes in the preface:

There are two kinds of religious knowledge which, though intimately connected as cause and effect, may nevertheless be distinguished. These are the knowledge of the truth as it is revealed in the Holy Scriptures; and the impression which that truth makes on the human mind when rightly apprehended. The first may be compared to the inscription or image on a seal, the other to the impression made by the seal on the wax. When that impression is clearly and distinctly made, we can understand, by contemplating it, the true inscription on the seal more satisfactorily, than by a direct view of the seal itself. Thus it is found that nothing tends more to confirm and elucidate the truths contained in the Word, than an inward experience of their efficacy on the heart.

I recently listened to a Tim Keller sermon in which he cites this analogy of Alexander’s, and below is how Keller expands on the idea:

Back in those days, of course, when you wrote a letter, the way you sealed it was you took your signet ring, usually your family’s seal, and you took a piece of wax, and you brought a little flame to it, and as you soften the wax, you put your seal down on it, and the seal molded the wax into the form of the seal and sealed the envelope. And then when [the recipient] got the envelope, you would see whose seal it was.

And he says, “Well, the truth of the Bible is like the signet ring. And your heart is like the wax. And if you just bring the signet ring to the wax without the flame, without the fire, either it will only superficially create a kind of…facsimile of the ring, and it won’t actually shape it, or if you keep pushing it’ll crack the wax.”

And he says, “If you just bring God’s truth, the authoritative, biblical truth, into people’s connection to their hearts without fire,” he says, “It will either make them superficial nominal Christians who say they’re Christians on the surface, but underneath they’re not shaped by it, or they’ll just be cracked, they’ll be crushed by the weight of the Bible and the authority of the Bible and they’ll run away screaming eventually, saying I can’t be good enough, I can’t live up to this, it’s just oppressive.”

You need the fire. What’s the fire? Well the fire’s in the Bible. It’s the gospel, and here it is:

All other religions have a God who speaks, and who gives you revelation. But, we have the only God, Christianity has the only God who comes to earth in Jesus Christ and goes under authority. We have the only divine authority who ever went under authority. He obeyed his parents (Luke 2). But then eventually, as we saw, he obeyed the Bible. He followed the Bible, and at the very end of his life when he said, “Not my will but thine be done,” he did the Father’s will and he was crushed. He went under authority and he did it all. Why? Even though it destroyed him in the end. Why? For you! For me! Now there’s an authority you can trust. Nobody’s ever loved you like Jesus Christ because nobody’s ever given up what he’s given up. Nobody’s ever sacrificed what he sacrificed…Why would you want to trust someone like that?

There’s the fire. You see it?

This is such a profound analogy, and Keller did a wonderful job elaborating on it further.

If we simply hammer our hearts with the truth of God’s Word over and over, our hard hearts will either be imprinted with some shallow facsimile of Truth or be cracked by its overwhelming weight.

In order for the Truth to stick, in order for the Truth to imprint our hearts, our hearts must first be softened by the good news that Jesus died to defeat death and that he rose so that we might rise.

I hope that this Holy Week and Easter weekend you might let the fire soften your heart so that the Truth can mark you in a real and lasting way.