Job 38:14

Seals

Clay under the seal. Job 38:14

Have you ever played at making seals? It is a fascinating game. All you require is a lighted candle, a stick of sealing-wax, a piece of paper, and a or a signet ring from father or mother. Hold the sealing-wax in the candle-flame until it is soft enough to drop on the paper. When you have dropped the spot of wax take your die or signet and stamp it quickly, evenly, and firmly in the hot wax. Keep it there for a minute, then raise it gently, and you will find that the motto or crest or initials on your die will be imprinted on the wax. You may not make a very neat job the first time you try it, or even the third time, or the thirtieth the wax may look black and smoked, the impression may be faint at one part, or the drop of wax may not have been the right shape, and a piece of the seal may be missing. It is all a case of practice, and practice makes perfect. Go on trying if your parents don't mind.

If they do, I'll tell you of an easier, cheaper, and safer way to make seals; it requires neither wax nor candle nor paper only the seal or signet and your own willing hand. Press the die for a short time on the back of your hand. When you raise it you will find the device stamped perfectly on your flesh. Of course it will fade in a few minutes, but, since it costs nothing, you can do it over and over again, till you grow tired of the game.

Most of the seals we are accustomed to see are made of wax, but seals have been and still are made of other materials of metal, for instance. In the Middle Ages the Popes used to attach leaden seals called bullae (from the Latin word bulla meaning a circular ornament) to their decrees, and that is how we read in history books of Papal “bulls.”

Sometimes, but rarely, the seals were made of gold. When a Pope wanted to confer a title on a monarch he sealed the document with a golden seal. When one of the Popes gave King Henry the Eighth the title of “Defender of the Faith,” he sealed the paper with a golden seal; and you can see that very seal today if you look for it in the British Museum.

But the kind of seal of which our text speaks is much older than that given to Henry the Eighth. It is a seal made of neither metal nor wax, for the material on which it is stamped is clay. It was the kind of seal used by the Babylonians and Assyrians thousands of years ago. They took the moist clay and they stamped it with the die, and then they baked it hard in the oven or in the sun. There still exist some of these ancient clay seals with the marks where the string or strip of leather was fastened to them. And you may see too the very dies or stamps, or matrices, as they are called, which made the impression. These early dies were not shaped like ours; they were often round like a roller, and as they rolled over the soft clay they left a figured impression behind.

Boys and girls, I think we are rather like that piece of clay. When we come into the world we are like the smooth soft mass without any marks on it, but as life rolls on it leaves, as the roller leaves on the clay, a lasting impression on us. But though we may be like the clay in some ways we are unlike it in this that we can choose the kind of impression or pattern that will be stamped on us. We can say whether it will be a good and beautiful impression that we shall bear, or whether it will be one both distorted and ugly. It all depends on who holds the die. If we go to Christ and say to Him, “Here is my life all before me, help me to make it good and beautiful; help me to make the very best of it; help me to stamp it truly and well” if we say that to Christ, He will take the die into His own hand, and He will stamp our life for us.

And what do you think the impression will be? Why, it will be just a portrait of Himself. In olden days kings had on their royal seals their own portraits, and when they stamped anything with the royal seal everyone knew it belonged to the king for they saw his image there. So with Christ's seal. Others looking on us and seeing the impression on our clay will say, “They too belong to Christ.”