<p>17:17 <i>Sanctify them in the truth. Your word is truth</i>- The reference is to how the Levites were sanctified (1 Chron. 23:13 Heb.). The Levites were initially consecrated in God's eyes by their zeal to rid Israel of apostasy; this is what constituted them Yahweh's &quot;holy (sanctified) one&quot; (Dt. 33:8,9). They sanctified themselves to God, and He sanctified them. Through His allusions to this, the Lord was telling the disciples not to be frightened to stand alone from the Israelite community they knew; for it was deeply apostate. So often, the Lord is speaking of the development of a new Israel, with new Rabbis and Levites taken from the ranks of very ordinary and dysfunctional people who had believed in Him.</p><p>The teaching here is complemented and explained by :19: &quot;And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they may also be sanctified in truth&quot;. They were sanctified in Him; because the Lord was supremely sanctified, holy in character, He was fitted for Divine service <i>par excellence</i>. And all that was true of Him was to be true of those in Him, as Paul later develops. They were sanctified because they were in Him, the supremely sanctified One. So &quot;Sanctify them in the truth&quot; is parallel with being sanctified on account of being in Him. &quot;The truth&quot; is therefore a reference to Himself personally, as in 14:6. And that is confirmed by the statement: &quot;Your word is truth&quot;. The prologue is clear that the Divine word was the Lord Jesus personally, made flesh in Him. The &quot;word&quot; of God in His Son refers to all we have seen and known of Him in Christ. That is the ultimate &quot;truth&quot; by which we are to live. It is nothing but shoddy Biblical workmanship which superimposes the words &quot;Your word is truth&quot; over pictures of open Bibles. The Bible is indeed God's word and is true. But that is simply not in view here. God's word in John is clearly the Lord Jesus personally, who is &quot;the truth&quot;. If the Lord intended us here to understand God's word as the Scriptures which comprise the Bible, He surely would have used some other term apart from <i>logos</i>. And how can we be sanctified by a book, even an inspired one? It is simply not so that Bible reading of itself makes us sanctified. Verse 19 is quite clear that we are sanctified through being &quot;in Christ&quot;, on account of <i>His</i> sanctification.</p>