This lesson is in harmony with all we have seen. The first revelation of God's Holiness to Moses was accompanied with the command, Put off. God's praise, as Glorious in Holiness, Fearful in Praises, was sounded over the dead bodies of the Egyptians. When Moses on Sinai was commanded to sanctify the Mount, it was said, 'If any touch it, man or beast, it shall not live.' The Holiness of God is death to all that is in contact with sin. Only through death, through blood-shedding, was there access to the Holiest of all. Christ chose death, even death as a curse, that He might sanctify Himself for us, and open to us the path to Holiness, to the Holiest of all, to the Holy One. And so it is still. No man can see God and live. It is only in death, the death of self and of nature, that we can draw near and behold God. Christ led the way. No man can see God and live. 'Then let me die, Lord,' one has cried, 'but see Thee I must.' Yes, blessed be God, so real is our interest in Christ and our union to Him, that we may live in His death; as day by day self is kept in the place of death, the life and the holiness of Christ can be ours.[8]
And where is the place of death? And how can the crucifixion which leads to Holiness and to God be accomplished in us? Thank God! it is no work of our own, no weary process of self-crucifixion. The crucifixion that is to sanctify us is an accomplished fact. The cross bears the banner, 'It is finished.' On it Christ sanctified Himself for us, that we might be sanctified in truth. Our crucifixion, as our sanctification, is something that in Christ has been completely and perfectly finished. 'We have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.' 'By one offering He hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified.' In that fulness, which it is the Father's good pleasure should dwell in Christ, the crucifixion of our old man, of the flesh, of the world, of ourselves, is all a spiritual reality; he that desires and knows and accepts Christ, fully receives all this in Him. And as the Christ, who had previously been known more in His pardoning, quickening, and saving grace, is again sought after as a real deliverer from the power of sin, as a sanctifier, He comes and takes up the soul into the fellowship of the sacrifice of His will. 'He put away sin _by the sacrifice of Himself_,' must become true of us as it is of Him. He reveals how it is a part of His salvation to make us partakers of a will entirely given up to the will of God, of a life that had yielded itself to the death, and had then been given back from the dead by the power of God, a life of which the crucifixion of self-will was the spirit and the power. He reveals this, and the soul that sees it, and consents to it, and yields its will and its life, and believes in Jesus as its death and its life, and in His crucifixion as its possession and its inheritance, enters into the enjoyment and experience of it. The language is now, 'I died that I might live: I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I that live, but Christ that liveth in me.' And the life it now lives is by the faith on the Son of God, the daily acceptance in faith of Him who lives within us in the power of a death that has been passed through and for ever finished.
'I sanctify myself for them, that they themselves also may be sanctified in truth.' 'I come to do Thy will, O God. In the which will,' the will of God accomplished by Christ, 'we have been sanctified through the one offering of the body of Christ.' Let us understand and hold it fast: Christ's giving up His will in Gethsemane and accepting God's will in dying; Christ's doing that will in the obedience to the death of the cross, this is His sanctifying Himself, and this is our being sanctified in truth. 'In the which will we have been sanctified.' The death to self, the utter and most absolute giving up of our own life, with its will and its power and its aims, to the cross, and into the crucifixion of Christ, the daily bearing the cross--not a cross on which we are yet to be crucified, but the cross of the crucified Christ in its power to kill and make dead--this is the secret of the life of holiness--this is true sanctification.
Believer! is this the holiness which you are seeking? Have you seen and consented that God alone is holy, that self is all unholy, and that there is no way to be made holy but for the fire of the Divine Holiness to come in and be the death of self? 'Always bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus, that the life also of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal body'--is the pathway for each one who seeks to be sanctified in truth, even as He sanctified Himself; sanctified just like Jesus.