Wholly Sanctified

And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:23

Simpson wrote two small books on the subject of this chapter, and they come at it from opposite sides. Wholly Sanctified is an exposition of a single verse, and it asks what it means to belong to God entirely. The Land of Promise is an exposition of a map, drawn from the book of Joshua, and it asks why so many who plainly do belong to Him possess so little of what He has given. The first is the doctrine; the second is the diagnosis. Read together they make one argument, and it begins with the word he would not let go of. Paul does not pray that the Thessalonians be partly sanctified, or sanctified in their religious department. He prays for the whole person, and then names the parts in case anyone should misunderstand: spirit, and soul, and body.

What the word means

Simpson began where the Old Testament begins, because the vocabulary comes from there. To sanctify is to set apart. When the vessels of the tabernacle were sanctified they were not morally improved — a bowl has no morals. They were transferred from ordinary use to God’s use. That is the root idea, and it is the reason sanctification is not primarily about the removal of faults.

If a man therefore purge himself from these, he shall be a vessel unto honour, sanctified, and meet for the master’s use, and prepared unto every good work. 2 TIMOTHY 2:21

There are two movements in it, and Simpson insisted on both. There is separation from — the withdrawal of the vessel from common service. And there is consecration to — its dedication to the owner who will now use it as He pleases. A great deal of holiness teaching stops at the first, and produces Christians whose religion is chiefly a list of things they do not do. Separation without consecration yields an empty vessel, scrupulously clean and used for nothing. The point of taking the bowl off the common shelf is to put it on the altar.

Spirit, soul and body

Paul’s threefold naming gave Simpson his structure, and he applied it concretely. The spirit is sanctified when a man’s deepest life is turned Godward — when his communion, his conscience and his sense of God’s will are governed by the Holy Spirit rather than by his own preferences. The soul is sanctified when the mind, the emotions and the will come under Christ. Simpson gave particular attention to this middle region, because it is where most Christians live and where most of the trouble is. Sanctified emotions are not suppressed emotions; they are affections attached to what deserves them. A sanctified will is not a broken will but a surrendered one.

And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind. ROMANS 12:2

The body is sanctified when its members are placed at God’s disposal — the eyes, the tongue, the appetite, the hands, the hours. Simpson took this literally and unsentimentally, and it is the point at which his teaching on holiness runs directly into his teaching on healing: the body is not a regrettable container for the soul but a temple bought at a price.

What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you …ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body. 1 CORINTHIANS 6:19–20

The One who does it

Now the sentence that Simpson regarded as the whole security of the doctrine, and which is almost always left off when the verse is quoted.

Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:24

Paul does not command the Thessalonians to sanctify themselves wholly. He prays that God will do it, and then adds that God is faithful and will. This is the guard against the two diseases of holiness teaching. It prevents despair, because the outcome does not rest on the believer’s capacity. And it prevents pride, because a work God performs leaves nobody anything to boast about. Present the vessel; God will fill and use it. Our part is the handing over; His part is everything that follows. And there is a mercy in the word preserved. The One who sets the vessel apart also keeps it, until the coming of Christ — a longer commitment than any of us would make about ourselves, offered by Someone who does not tire.

Three places

If God has promised to do it, why do so many believers live as though He had not? This is where the second book comes in. Israel’s history divides into three: Egypt, the wilderness, and Canaan. Simpson held — following a reading with a long pedigree in Puritan and Keswick teaching — that these correspond to three conditions in which people may be found.

Egypt is bondage. A person in Egypt has not been redeemed, and is a slave whether or not he knows it. The wilderness is the condition Simpson was most concerned about. Here are people who have genuinely left Egypt — the blood has been applied, the sea has been crossed, they belong to God — and who are going in circles. They are saved and defeated. They have real experience of God’s provision and no possession of anything. They live on manna, complain a good deal, and remember Egypt with a fondness that horrifies them. Canaan is the land of promise: not comfort, but possession.

Simpson made one point repeatedly, because the mistake is so common. Canaan is not heaven. We sing about crossing Jordan as a figure for dying, and it makes for good hymns, but it will not survive examination. There are giants in Canaan, walled cities, defeats like Ai, and years of warfare. Nobody fights battles in heaven. Canaan is a picture of the Christian life as God intends it now.

Every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon, that have I given unto you. JOSHUA 1:3

Note the tense. Have I given. The land is already theirs by grant; they enter into what is already theirs.

Why a generation did not enter

The wilderness generation stood at the border at Kadesh-barnea and did not go in. Simpson dwelt on the reason, because Scripture states it plainly and it is not what we would guess. They did not fail through weakness, or because the giants were genuinely too large. They failed through unbelief. Ten of the twelve spies reported accurately about the giants and inaccurately about God.

And they brought up an evil report of the land …and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight. NUMBERS 13:32–33

So we see that they could not enter in because of unbelief. HEBREWS 3:19

The writer to the Hebrews applies this directly to Christians, which is what licenses the whole comparison. He is not making a devotional analogy; he is arguing that the same danger stands over the church.

There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God …Let us labour therefore to enter into that rest, lest any man fall after the same example of unbelief. HEBREWS 4:9, 11

Between the wilderness and the land lies a river. The Red Sea is deliverance from Egypt — the cross applied to our guilt. Jordan, in Simpson’s reading, stands for the believer’s identification with Christ in death and resurrection: the end of the old self-directed life and the beginning of a life lived from another source. On the far bank the manna ceased and they ate the old corn of the land, which he took as a picture of the change from daily emergency supply to settled possession.

Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. ROMANS 6:11

Where to hold this loosely

Honesty requires two notes here. First, this kind of reading can be pressed too far. The Old Testament narrative was not written as an allegory of individual spiritual experience, and interpreters who treat every detail as a code have often ended up saying whatever they wished. The disciplined approach is to follow the New Testament’s own use: Hebrews 3 and 4 authorise the comparison, and 1 Corinthians 10 does the same. Beyond what Scripture itself draws out, hold loosely.

Second, Simpson taught that entire sanctification is normally entered by a definite crisis of surrender and faith after conversion — a crossing of Jordan. Many godly Christians hold this; many others, reading the same passages, see sanctification as the steady outworking of a union with Christ given at conversion, and object that the scheme creates two classes of believer in a way the New Testament does not. The objection has force, and it should be weighed. What survives every qualification is the substance: it is entirely possible to be genuinely redeemed and to spend decades possessing almost nothing of what God has given, and the reason is not weakness but unbelief. The border is not crossed by trying harder in the wilderness. Israel did not enter Canaan by improving its wilderness performance. It entered by going in.

Rest and conflict together

The most common misunderstanding of this teaching is that the land of promise means the end of struggle. Joshua makes that impossible. The conquest took years, and some ground was never taken at all, because certain tribes did not finish. The life Simpson was describing is one in which rest and conflict exist together — rest as the settled condition of the heart, conflict as the ordinary experience of the day.

And hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. EPHESIANS 2:6

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers. EPHESIANS 6:12

Seated, and wrestling — in the same letter, to the same people. And here the two books meet. The word wholly exposes the arrangement most of us actually operate. There is a part of life we have handed over — usually the explicitly religious part — and there are territories that have never come up in prayer at all: how money is spent, how a spouse is spoken to, what is watched alone, what is done with anger. Most believers can name theirs within a few seconds of being asked, which suggests they have known about it for some time. The book of Judges opens with a list of the places that were never cleared, and the rest of the book is the consequence. Unfinished conquest does not stay neutral; what is left becomes a thorn in the side. The area you have decided not to contest will not remain a quiet exception.

Keeping the surrender

A consecration once made does not stay made without attention, and Simpson was realistic about the leakage. The sacrifice is laid on the altar in a definite act — but Paul’s phrase is a living sacrifice, and a living sacrifice can get down.

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. ROMANS 12:1

If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me. LUKE 9:23

Daily. The handing over is renewed each morning, usually before anything has happened to make it feel necessary. The practice worth adopting takes about ninety seconds. On waking, present the day: the hours, the people, the interruptions not yet known, the temper not yet tested. Not a long devotion — a definite transfer of ownership, made in words, before the ownership is contested. Most believers who lose ground do not lose it in a crisis. They lose it in the accumulation of mornings on which the transfer was simply not made.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Name the territory you have never brought into prayer. You will know it immediately. Bring it now.

2. Check whether your holiness is chiefly separation from things. If the vessel is clean and unused, that is only half the doctrine.

3. Locate yourself honestly on the map — Egypt, wilderness, or land — and if you are circling, ask what report you have been believing about the giants.

4. Identify one promise of God you have never actually acted on. Put your foot on that ground this week.

5. Rest on 1 Thessalonians 5:24. Where you have despaired of change, remind God of His own promise to do it.

6. Present the vessel again tomorrow morning, and then get on with the day instead of monitoring yourself.

A PRAYER

God of peace, sanctify me wholly — not the religious part, not the part that shows, but all of it: spirit, soul and body.

I have been out of Egypt for years and I have possessed very little. I have believed accurate reports about the giants and false reports about You.

There is one place I have kept back, and You know what it is. I bring it now. Teach me to put my foot on the ground You have already given.

Faithful is He who calls me, who also will do it. I rest on that, because I have proved I cannot do it myself. Amen.