It is one thing to know, as a doctrine, that God sees my nature to be dead, and it is quite another thing for me to "reckon" myself as dead--to put off, practically, the old man and his deeds--to mortify my members which are on the earth. This, probably, is what many godly persons mean when they speak of progressive sanctification. They mean a right thing, though they do not put it exactly as the Scriptures do. The leper was pronounced clean the moment the blood was sprinkled upon him, and yet he had to cleanse himself. How was this? In the former case, he was clean in the judgment of God; in the latter, he was to be clean practically, in his own personal intelligence, and in his manifested character. Thus it is with the believer. He is, as one with Christ, "washed, sanctified, and justified"--"accepted"--"complete." (1 Cor. vi. 11; Eph. i. 6; Col. ii. 10.) Such is his unalterable standing and condition before God. He is as perfectly sanctified as he is justified, for Christ is the measure of both the one and the other, according to God's judgment and view of the case. But then the believer's apprehension of all this in his own soul, and his exhibition thereof in his habits and ways, open up quite another line of things. Hence it is we read, "Having therefore these promises, dearly beloved, let us _cleanse ourselves_ from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God." (2 Cor. vii. 1.) It is because Christ has cleansed us by His precious blood that therefore we are called to "cleanse ourselves" by the application of the Word, through the Spirit. "This is He that came by water and blood, Jesus Christ; not by water only, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is truth. For there are three that bear record, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood; and these three agree in one." (1 John v. 6, 8.) Here we have atonement by the blood, cleansing by the Word, and power by the Spirit--all founded upon the death of Christ, and all vividly foreshadowed in the ordinances connected with the cleansing of the leper.