He Drove the Pegs

The engineer has been in the field since before the crew arrived, and by the time the vans pull up there is orange string running between wooden pegs across a stretch of wet grass that looked like nothing at all yesterday.

Twelve men and a flask of tea, standing round the outside of the lines the way people stand round the outside of a thing they have been told not to step on. Somebody's dog. Mud to the ankle. It is the first morning of a hall the parish has been saving for since before the youngest of them was born, and because it is that kind of building the minister has come out in rubber boots to say a prayer over the ground before the first spade goes in. He stands at the corner peg with his hands in his coat and thanks God for the field, and asks that what is built here be set apart, and uses the word holy twice.

At the back of the crew a laborer in his thirties goes still at that word, the way he has gone still at it his whole life. He grew up under it. In the house he was raised in, holy was a bar, and the bar was high and it moved, and he never once cleared it, and the people who used the word most were the people it was hardest to be near. He is not bitter about them. He has simply spent twenty years hearing holy and hearing not you. And here it is again, said over a field, and the old reflex is instant: a thing has been asked of the ground, and the ground has not measured up, and neither has he.

Except that when he looks at the field he is looking at the pegs. And he knows what pegs mean, because he has driven them. The engineer drove them. The ground did not do anything. It was wet grass yesterday and it is wet grass this morning, and the only difference is that somebody with the drawings came out early and set it apart, marked it off, said this bit and not that bit, for this and nothing else. The setting out is done to the ground. The ground does not clear a bar to be inside the string.

You are that laborer, or you have been him at some reading, in some room, hearing the word and hearing not you. And you have never once been shown the pegs.

Set apart is a thing done to the ground

Let me show you the drawings, because holiness has been described to you as a height and it is actually a boundary, and a boundary is set by somebody else.

Holy in Scripture means set apart. Marked off for God, for His use, His alone. That is the whole root of it: not clean by effort, not raised to a level, but taken and put on His side of the line. And the thing to see is who does the taking. When God calls a people holy He is not grading them. He is describing what He did. He set them apart for Himself, and then, only then, He tells them to live as what they now are.

Now read how the letter to the Hebrews says it happened to us. Not the tense of a demand. The tense of a completed job.

And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.Hebrews 10:10

We have been. Passive. Something was done to us. Through the offering of the body of Jesus, not through the reaching of ours. And once for all, which is a builder's phrase if ever there was one: it means the setting out is finished, the pegs are in, and nobody is coming back tomorrow to move the string because the ground had a bad night.

You have been set apart, and it was done to you, and the one who did it is God. That is the written word, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence about a finished offering and drives it into the ground where you are standing. Not my sentence over you. His.

Paul writes to the Corinthians, of all people, a church he then spends sixteen chapters correcting, and opens by calling them those who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be holy (1 Corinthians 1:2). Sanctified first, corrected after. He did not wait until they cleared the bar to call them set apart. He called them set apart because God had done it, and then he taught them how to live inside the string. The order is the whole gospel, and it is the reverse of the order you were handed.

The bar was never in the drawings

Now the weight, and I am going to name it plainly because you have carried it under a false name for a long time.

You were taught that holy meant a level, and you never reached the level, and so you concluded that holy was not you. Hear a builder on this. You were never asked to reach anything, because holy was never a height, and the bar you have been failing to clear was never in the drawings. God is the one who sanctifies (Leviticus 20:8 says it in His own voice: I am the Lord who sanctifies you), and a person being sanctified by somebody else is not climbing toward it, they are standing inside it. His Spirit is the one who does the sanctifying, day by day, from inside the string, not the one holding the bar.

I want to be careful here, because I have watched people take the bar away and put a lower bar in its place, and call that grace. That is not what I am doing. Set apart is serious. It is more serious than any bar, because a bar can be cleared and forgotten and a boundary set by God is permanent. I am not lowering the standard. I am telling you there was never a standard in that sense; there was a setting out, done by Him, and you are inside it. That is not softer than what you were taught. It is heavier, and it is carried by Him.

And the people who handed you the bar are not the enemy here. Many of them meant it as care. Some of them were carrying the same bar and it was crushing them too. This is not about them. It is about the pegs.

Living inside the string

So what does a person do with a field that has been set out? Not clear a bar. Build inside the lines. The line does not ask the ground to become something else. It tells the ground what it is for.

That is what the rest of holiness is: not climbing, but living as what you already are, on His side of the boundary, for His use, in the middle of ordinary things. Your Monday. Your hands. Your kitchen. Your name on the lunchbox on the tailgate of the van. The setting out did not remove you from the field. It marked you off inside it, among the other men, with the mud on your boots, for something.

You are His, right now, in the field, and there is no level you are climbing toward to become it, because becoming it was His work and it is done. Hebrews 10:10 says once for all, Corinth was told sanctified in Christ Jesus, and the Holy Spirit is the one making that a present fact in your body at the back of the crew rather than a doctrine on a page. Temptation will come across the string; it always does on every site. It does not move the pegs. It has no authority over where He drove them.