A Place Apart

Those words, "For their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth," have their own force and value also. Thus in the whole of His utterance in John 17, the Lord strongly takes a place apart from the world, and puts His saints in the like place, praying that they may be kept there. In this sense, I believe, He speaks of sanctifying Himself. Through all this Church age He is apart from the world and the earth, and sanctification depends on our communion with Him in that separated place. "The truth," testifying as it does of Him, links us with Him in that place. Sanctification is thus "through the truth," leading us to fellowship with an unworldly Jesus.
We may see instances of such sanctification from the beginning. When the ground was cursed for man's sake, holiness was separation from it as in the persons of the antediluvian saints. Uncleanness was cleaving to it, as did the family of Cain.
When the earth again corrupted itself, and God judged it by the scattering of the nations, holiness was separation from it as in Abraham. Apostasy was a clinging to it in spite of judgment as Nimrod did.
When Canaan was judged, Achan's sin savored of the, apostate mind, but Israel became a holy people by separation from it, and from all people of the earth by the ordinances of God and the sword of Joshua.
But Israel revolts. The circumcision becomes uncircumcision and with them all on the face of the earth or in the world becomes defiled, and holiness is separation from it in companionship with a rejected and heavenly Christ.