1 Thess. 5:23–24:—“And the God of peace himself sanctify you wholly; and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved entire without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faithful is he that calleth you, who will also do it.”
THERE is no feature of Christianity more strongly emphasized by those to whom its establishment in the world was committed, than the breadth and depth of its ethical demands. The “salvation” which was promised in the “Gospel” or “Glad Tidings” which constituted its proclamation, was just salvation from sin and unto holiness. In other words, it was a moral revolution of the most thoroughgoing and radical kind. “Sanctification” is the Biblical word for this moral revolution, and in “sanctification” the very essence of salvation is made to consist. “This is the will of God” for you, says the Apostle to his readers in this very epistle, “even your sanctification.” A great part of the epistle is given, accordingly, to commending the new converts for the progress they had already made in this sanctification, and to urging them onward in the same pathway.
No moral attainment is too great to be pressed on them as their duty, no moral duty is too minute to be demanded of them as essential to their Christian walk. The standard the Apostle has before him, and consistently applies to his readers, falls in nothing short of absolute perfection, a perfection which embraces in its all-inclusive sweep the infinitely little and the infinitely great alike. In the verses immediately preceding our text the Apostle had been engaged, as is his wont in all his epistles, in enumerating a number of details of conduct which he wished, especially, to emphasize to his readers. They are not chosen at haphazard, but are just the items of conduct which the particular readers with whom he is at the moment engaged required most to have urged upon their attention. But the Apostle would not have his readers suppose that their whole duty was summed up in the items he enumerates. As he draws to the close of his exhortations he therefore breaks off in the enumeration and adjoins one great comprehensive prayer for their entire perfection: “But may the God of peace Himself sanctify you wholly: and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved perfect without failure, at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faithful is He that calleth you who also will do it.”
Here we have obviously a classical passage—possibly the classical passage—for “entire sanctification”; and it may repay us in the perennial interest which attends the discussion of the theme of “entire sanctification” to look at it somewhat closely, as such.
First of all, let us settle it clearly in mind that it is of “entire sanctification” that the passage treats. There can certainly be no doubt of it, if we will only give the language of the passage a fair hearing. It is so emphasized, indeed, and with such an accumulation of phraseology that it becomes almost embarrassing. The entirety, the completeness, the perfection of the sanctification, of which it speaks is, in fact, the great burden of the passage. In contrast with the details with which the Apostle had just been dealing, and which—just because they were details—could touch the periphery only of a perfect life, and that only at this or that point of the circumference, he here adverts to the complete sanctification that not merely touches but fills not the periphery only but the entire circle of the Christian—nay, of the human—life. It is a sanctification that is absolutely complete and that embraces the perfection of every member of the human constitution, that the Apostle here deals with.
Observe the emphatic repetition of the idea of completeness. May the “God of Peace”—and this very designation of God, doubtless, has its reference to the completeness of the sanctification, peace being the opposite of all division, distraction, hesitation and dubitation,—may the “God of Peace,” the Apostle prays, “sanctify you completely”—so as that ye may be perfect and wanting nothing that enters into the perfection of your correspondence to the ends for which you were created. And not content with this, he adds explanatorily, “And may your spirit and your soul and your body be preserved entire, perfect,” and not that merely, but “blamelessly entire, perfect”; “blamelessly”—that is, in a manner which is incapable of being accused of not coming up to its idea.
Observe further the distribution of the personality which is to be perfected into its component parts, of each of which, in turn, perfection is desiderated. Not only are we to be sanctified wholly, but every part of us—our spirit, our soul, our body itself—is to be kept blamelessly perfect. The Apostle is not content, in other words, with the general, but descends into the specific elements of our being. And for each of these elements in turn he seeks a “blameless perfection,” that the sum of them all—the “we” at large—may be, indeed, complete and entire, wanting nothing.