This Week's Focus Passage

Sanctify them in the truth: thy word is truth

Focus Passage: John 17:17

‘Sanctify them in the truth: thy word is truth.’

The words above in our focus passage for this week are very near the center of John, chapter seventeen; that portion of the Word of God that is so often referred to as Christ’s high priestly prayer. Indeed, it most assuredly is the prayer of our Great High Priest for His people. While this verse is not in the precise center of that prayer, it is near enough to be thought of as something of a fulcrum for the entire supplication of our Good Shepherd for His sheep. He has besought His Father to sanctify them. He asked His Father to sanctify them in the truth. Just what is it to be sanctified? A difficulty in determining an answer to this question is the reality that sanctification is an ongoing, or progressive, activity. Not only so, but it is an activity of both God and the believer.

This last statement brings forth the need for qualification. There indeed is a work in sanctification that the child of God is called upon to do, while there is an act of sanctification that is alone the prerequisite of God. Even in the context of our focus passage, two verses later Jesus speaks of sanctification once again when He has said in what may be considered something of a commentary on verse 17, ‘And for their sakes, I sanctify myself, that they themselves also may be sanctified in truth.’ It is evident to those that believe in the sinless perfection of our Lord and Savior that He is not speaking of His being ‘made holy’ for He is absolutely holy and righteous in all His being and ways. The sanctification of which He speaks in verse 19 brings forward two different understandings of ‘sanctify.’ In the case of our Savior’s sanctifying Himself, it speaks of His setting Himself apart for the work which the Father had given Him to accomplish. In the case of the latter usage it speaks, as does verse 17, of the progressive sanctification of the people of God, those for whom Christ ‘was made unto us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption.’ In other words, and simply, the redeemed of the Lord are those being sanctified. These two features that are indissolubly connected are brought together beautifully in the Ephesians passage, 1:4, ‘even as he chose [set us apart] in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy [HAGIOS; same root as HAGIOZO; sanctified] and without blemish before him.’ It is thus taught in the Word of God that the elect are the ‘set apart’ ones that will be being ‘set apart’ and will be ‘setting apart’ themselves unto the Lord. These are the twin perspectives of sanctification; the objective and the subjective. ‘Work out your own salvation [sanctify yourselves] with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, [to sanctify] for his good pleasure.—Philippians 2:12-13.

It is because God must work in us if we are to do anything at all toward our becoming what He has determined we shall be, that Christ prays to the Father, ‘Sanctify them.’ We can do all things only in the strength of Christ; without Him we can do nothing, yet are we responsible to do much although no merit accrues to us but only to the glory and honor of the merit and grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore to ‘sanctify’ is both to set apart as well as to make holy; that is, to set apart unto holiness. So that when Jesus has prayed, ‘Sanctify them,’ He has prayed for ‘them’ whom the Father has given Him that they would be conformed to the image off His Son, which is to say that they would be made holy. Charles H. Spurgeon, in his own inimitable and beautiful manner, expressed these realities with the following comments; He has said;

“[Jesus] would have each of us consecrated unto the Lord, designated and ordained for divine purposes. We are not the world’s, else might we be ambitious; we are not Satan’s, else might we be covetous; we are not our own, else might we be selfish. We are bought with a price, and hence we are his by whom the price is paid. We belong to Jesus, and he presents us to his Father, and begs him to accept us and sanctify us to his own purposes……..Bind the sacrifice with cords, even unto the horns of the altar. Sanctify us, O Lord. Let us know, and let all the world know, that we are thine, because we belong to Christ.”

Yet it is not simply, ‘make my redeemed to be holy,’ it is that the Father would sanctify them ‘in the truth,’ or, ‘through the truth,’ with the blessed reality uttered, that ‘thy word is truth.’ ‘Sanctify my sheep through thy Word, Father,’ would not be a misstatement of our Savior’s expressed desire. The Word of God is most assuredly the most favored, the most blessed, means of grace that our Savior has purchased for His people with the precious coinage of His shed blood. It is most remarkable that we sinners, albeit saved sinners, can and do oftentimes take such an inestimable blessing for granted; we must sadly confess that we have done just that more frequently than we would care to admit. Salvation is about the Truth of God. Christ is not only the Way to heaven and eternal Life, He is the Way, and the TRUTH, and the Life.

The eighth chapter of Zechariah’s prophecy is marked by the fact that of the fourteen chapters in that book, there are five instances of the use of the word ‘truth,’ and they are, all of them, found in the eighth chapter. The third verse sets the stage; surely it is not without reason that the city of David is called Zion, and the city of Truth, and the mountain of Jehovah of hosts; where Jesus dwells.

Thus saith Jehovah: I am returned unto Zion, and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem: and Jerusalem shall be called the city of truth; and the mountain of Jehovah of hosts, The holy mountain.

David Farmer, elder,

Fellowship Bible Church

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