They Who Are Sanctified - Hebrews 2:11

What it means in modern language to be sanctified and why in order for man to become sanctified it requires a separate sanctifier.

Author: Randy Pritts

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Today's Text:

Sanctified?

In modern times, a person could go through most of their adult life without knowing what it means to be sanctified. It is a word that the modern belief system has absolutely no use for. In the ancient Greek, there were at least two major words for this and two related but separate concepts each word conveyed. One concept suggests being set apart, standing out, being made foreign or strangely different than most. The second depicts something or someone being made pure, being consecrated for a higher purpose. The author's concept today is of the second, in the process of being purified/consecrated to a higher purpose.

Man today has intellectually placed himself above the need to be purified, and there is certainly no higher purpose than his own. Man today is not dirty. He is evolving, and as such, each mistake he makes along the way is a side effect of the survival of the fittest; or if he makes the mistake enough times, he will learn by himself not to keep setting himself back by making it. Man is left alone to do what it is he feels is in his best interest. It is after all relative, purity suggests a superiority from all the rest.

The problem is that the man is not learning from his failing experience. He is making the same mistakes (if that is what you want to call them) as he did throughout the previous millenniums. He is just as violent today. He is just as hypocritical and duplicitous. He is just as contradictory and conniving. He is just as adulterous and murderous and idolatrous as ever before, if not more so. So what is the modern answer to all of this? Hide its' head in the sand? write it off as a stage in our evolution? write a law or two that can't be enforced? and put a feather in our cap and call it macaroni?

As for higher purpose, there is no higher purpose today than to not ruffle any feathers and conform to the will and direction of the mass. Do what you desire as long as you don't get caught and it doesn't hurt anyone or the public's conscience object. There is no one or no thing any higher the government (which is largely amoral and lacks resolvable conscience) other than one's own conscience to be held accountable to.

You see the problem I have with secular relative morality is that it provides nothing but an excuse to justify immorality.

He that Sanctifies

There is a problem biblically with the human heart attempting to purify itself: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” kjv@Jeremiah:17:9. How can the heart purify what it doesn't yet know is faulty? How can the heart satisfactorily address what it chooses about itself most often to deny? How can we wash the muck from our hands when the basin of our hearts is filled with only more muck?

Imagine a fish in a holding tank that has been tainted with heavy life robbing mercury. How does that fish, or those fish plural, change the water of the whole tank to refresh the water in its' own lungs. He can't. Not without the help of a "He who sanctifies" the water from outside or above.

What is missing to the modern framework is not the identification that the tank water has been contaminated, it is the realization that we by our own power and resource can satisfactorily do anything about it. First, we think the problems lays with others and not us. Second, most see the ill as being systematic or inbred or overly privileged, a product of the past requiring us to sever ties to the past. Our answer is to tear down, reinvent, reconstitute, redistribute. The problem is that anything we would replace the past with only stirs the waters, it does not replace the waters because there is nothing on earth that we can replace the waters with. Modern minds choose not to believe this, so they are condemned to follow the age old course of tearing down and building back up, chasing their tails convinced that they on their own can do this. Doesn't matter what they build back up, it is contaminated by the water just the same.

What this comes down to is the refusal to believe in a transcendent being above all of this; "to those who are defiled and unbelieving nothing is pure" kjv@Titus:1:15. Even in the case of the religious defiled, the emphasis is placed upon their own religious works and efforts at self attaining. See they believe in the transcendent, it is just that they don't surrender their self will. God or Christ might be there in the distance, but it is self they have tasked with the purification and repurposing.

Friend, there is only one sanctifier" that can actually perform this "sanctification".

"All of one"

The author here continues. HE that sanctifies and those being sanctified by Him are seen drawn to the inevitable conclusion of being "all of one". Perhaps you recall a quote from Jesus in one of His final super prayers. He prayed:

This is what "all of one" is meant to mean. One with the Father as Jesus and the Father are one. Such oneness carries the need for us to be washed clean and established in a higher purpose. Long before Jesus this was indicated by the prophet Isaiah saying:

and again by the prophet Ezekiel when describing the process:

Notice here how much of the work in this sanctification process is the Lord's and how much is not ours, not until afterwards. Seems that most religious people have it backwards. They take the work of Jesus as merely an example of how they could muster enough of their own determination to try to do something similar and good themselves. The work of Jesus though is not the mere example to follow, it is the cure to digest. Not many Christians are aware of or go any further than this and so the Church is essentially no different than the secular world surrounding it.

To the secular world, religion is all the same. Religion to them is in the realm of misfits and hypocrites pretending to be pious do-gooders; and it is no wonder. They know nothing of the Lord's work nor are they looking for any indications of it (in fact they are looking to disprove any indications of it). It is either all or nothing to them, one is either all saint and if not all sinner like them (but worse for having claimed to make the effort). There is no middle ground in their eyes, and there is no step by step or lifetime involved submitted to a continuing and divinely guided process.

Such is the state of things currently, the Christians and other religious seeking to sanctify themselves by their own formulations and theories and actions, the secular world with a peculiar bias clouding their eyes thinking that all comes to the same nothing. Then there is Jesus, asking "why is there no one down there that is willing to listen"? Of course He knows the answer, the question has been out there for a long long time, it is a rhetorical question each of us has yet to answer.

I tell you that the truest indication of our modern form of Christianity and what might possibly ail it can be easily diagnosed and measured by the measure of this "all of one"(ness) with its "He who sanctifies".

"For Which Cause"

The author's supposition behind this I believe is that it really shouldn't be all that hard for us to identify in one sense as one of our brethren. After all, He been tempted just like us, He has suffered just like us, He has hungered, He has had no pillow on which to rest His head. HE has sat down to talk with the scholarly and official men. He has broken bread with the lowly and the drifting and the despised. He has drunk at a distant well from the cup of a weary Samaritan woman. He has even experienced accusations and insults of the religious class. The death that He faced was a real death not an act from a play or a story line. The grieving sadness those whom knew Him felt was a real sadness, the kind that only happens between real friends and real family and real mothers. No, it is not hard to see Jesus as one of our "brethren".

But, the brethren aspect cannot end there. As expressed by Jesus earlier the "for this cause" includes "that they also may be one in us (Father): that the world may believe that thou hast sent me". "For this cause" - that is why the death/that is why the resurrection/that is why the ascension to the righthand throne/that is why the sending of the Holy Comforter:

This is the why and how of sanctification: "for which cause he is not ashamed to call them brethren".

Succour means to relieve or aid them. He who sanctifies them is a relief or aid to them that call Him Savior/Son of God/Captain of their fate/High Priest/Jesus.

Amen?

Comment Board: TheyWhoAreSanctified Tags: Jesus, Sanctification, Purification, Purpose, Hebrews, ,

Further Resources: dict:all Sanctification

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