III. “Golden Nugget” Promises
The first one is, “He hath said, ‘I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee’ ” (Heb. 13:5). The translation says, “He hath said.” But it is intensive in the Greek. “He Himself hath said.” That is, the Lord Jesus Himself personally made this promise. The word “leave” is not from the usual Greek word which means “to leave,” but from a word which means “to uphold” or “sustain.” In the Greek there are two negatives before the word “leave,” presenting a very strong negation. The promise is, “I will not, I will not cease to uphold or sustain thee.” Thus Paul can say “I am strong for all things through the One who infuses strength in me” (Phil. 4:13). We are assured therefore of the sustaining grace of God as we go through trials and testing times.
The word “forsake” is a composite of three words, “to leave,” “down,” and “in.” The first has the idea of forsaking one. The second suggests rejection, defeat, helplessness. The third refers to some place or circumstance in which a person may find himself helpless, forsaken. The meaning of the word is that of forsaking someone in a state of defeat or helplessness in the midst of hostile circumstances. The word means in its totality, “to abandon, to desert, to leave in straits, to leave helpless, to leave destitute, to leave in the lurch, to let one down.” There are three negatives before this word, making the promise one of triple assurance. It is, “I will not, I will not, I will not forsake thee.” Not only do we have the assurance of God’s all-sufficient sustaining power to hold us true to Him and in perfect peace as we go through testing times, but we have His promise that He will never abandon us, never desert us, never leave us in straits but will come to our help, never leave us destitute but will supply all our need, never leave us in the lurch but will see to it that we are rescued from the difficulties in which we sometimes find ourselves. He will never let us down.
The second promise is, “Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out” (John 6:37). Here again we have two negatives before the verb: “I will not, I will not cast out.” The words “cast out” are from one word made up of two words, the word “to throw” and a preposition meaning “out from within.” That is, our Lord is speaking of those who are in salvation, in the Father’s house. He gives us a double-strength promise that He will not throw us out of that house. But there is another word in the Greek which does not appear in the English, the word “outside.” Literally, the promise reads, “The one who comes to Me, I will not, I will not throw out into the outside.” Imagine a heavenly Father throwing His own child out. That is exactly what the Greek word means. This word “outside” is found in Revelation 22:15, where it is translated “without.” The New Jerusalem is spoken of in the previous verse, but “without,” that is, “outside, are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.” We have the solemn promise of our Lord that the Christian will never be ejected from the Father’s house and thrown into the outside where those are who have rejected His grace.
The third is, “If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you” (John 15:7). The words, “ye shall ask,” are in the you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto imperative mood, which makes them a command, and are to be taken in the sense of “I command you to ask.” “Abiding” implies fellowship with the Lord, “nothing between myself and my Saviour,” and dependence upon Him. To those who thus abide, God issues the gracious command, “ask whatever ye desire.” It is more than a command. It is a challenge. It is as if God said, “You meet the conditions, and I challenge you to ask, and then see how faithful and able I am to answer your prayer.” The word “desire” implies a desire that proceeds, not from deliberate forethought, but from inclination. This is a perfectly safe command and promise, because when we live in close fellowship with Jesus, our desires and our inclinations are His desires and His inclinations. The word “ask” is in the middle voice which speaks of the subject of the verb acting in its own interest. Therefore we translate, “ask for yourselves.” But as we live in intimate fellowship with Jesus, those things which we ask for ourselves, we ask, not for the purpose of gratifying a selfish desire, but for the purpose of glorifying Him. Prayers of that kind are answered.
The word “done” is not from the Greek word which means to do something in the sense of making something. That would imply taking something in existence and fashioning it to suit our needs. The word is from the Greek word meaning “to become, to come into existence.” God will if necessary bring into existence that for which we asked. The word “ask” is in the aorist tense which when used in a command means, “do at once what is commanded.” Thus as we are abiding in Jesus, we are commanded not to hesitate, but to ask at once. The translation reads, “If ye abide in Me, and my words abide in you, I command you to ask at once and for yourselves whatever ye desire, and it shall be yours.”The fourth promise is, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me, and I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. My Father which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand. I and my Father are one” (John 10:27–30). The expression, “they shall never perish” is a very strong one in the Greek. There are two negatives before the word “perish.” “They shall not, they shall not perish.” In addition to the double negative, there are three words which follow the word “perish,” which are translated by the one word “never.” The phrase is found in John 6:51, where it is translated “forever.” The Greek papyri give an instance where the crowd in a public meeting cries repeatedly, “the emperors forever,” using the Greek phrase found in this verse. The noun in the phrase means “eternal,” and has the same root as the adjective “eternal” in the words “eternal life” in verse 28. The English language creaks and groans in its effort to translate the Greek here. “They shall not, they shall not perish, no, not eternally.” The word “eternal” gives an infinite reach to the two negatives.
The word “man is in italics, which means that it is not in the Greek text, and is supplied by the translators to complete the sense. There are two words in the Greek language meaning “a man,” but neither is used here. The word “any” is an indefinite pronoun in the Greek. and the word “one” would complete its meaning better than the word “man.” The translation “anyone” is truer to the sense of the original. That includes Satan. The word “pluck” is literally “snatch,” and is often used in a bad sense as when death snatches its victim or where someone carries something off by force. When we consider the size of God’s hand, large enough to hold all of the oceans on earth, wide enough to stretch from where the east begins and where the west ends (Isaiah 40:12), we can understand why no one, including Satan himself, is able to snatch the believer out of its protecting care.
The word “gave” in verse 29 is in the perfect tense in Greek, which tense refers to a past completed action having present results. The aorist tense is the customary tense to use in Greek when the writer merely wishes to speak of the fact of the action. Whenever a writer uses another tense, he goes out of his way to do so, which means that he has some special information to convey to the reader. The perfect tense here is like a carpenter who drives a nail through a board, and then to assure himself that it is there to stay, he clinches it on the other side. The Father gave believers to the Lord Jesus as a permanent gift to be retained permanently by Him. And then, not only are we in the clasp of the hand of our Lord, but we are safely resting in the hand of God the Father. Two hands of infinite proportions are holding us in salvation. And the owners of these hands are one in essence, two Persons of the Triune God.
The fifth promise is, “Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life” (John 4:13, 14).
The first occurrence of the word “drinketh” is in a construction in the Greek which refers to continuous action, and the second use of the word in the original presents the mere fact of the action without reference to the progress of the action. The fuller translation therefore reads, “Every one who keeps on constantly drinking of this water shall thirst again. But whosoever takes a drink of the water which I shall give him shall never thirst.” The words “shall never thirst” are from a construction in the Greek in which there are two negatives before the verb, and a phrase which means “forever,” which comes after the verb. The idea is, “shall not, shall not thirst, ever.” A double negative in the Greek does not make a positive statement but only strengthens the negation. The word “forever” gives an infinite reach to the two negatives.
In the Greek text, John reports the Samaritan woman as speaking of a well of water, and our Lord as speaking of a spring of water, while both words are translated by the one English word “well.” The person who keeps on drinking of the wells of the world, lifeless, dull, brackish, polluted, stale, will thirst again. The world with all its sin does not satisfy, never can. But the person who takes one drink of the spring of eternal life never thirsts again.
The reason why one drink satisfies is that when the sinner takes one drink of eternal life, that one drink becomes in him a spring of water leaping up into a fountain of eternal life. The word “be” is in the Greek literally “become,” and the word “well” is from the Greek word meaning a “spring.” The one drink is itself a spring that ever keeps bubbling up, ever refreshing and satisfying the one who takes a drink of the water of life. This spring becomes a river of living water (John 7:37, 38), and this living water is just a symbol of the indwelling Holy Spirit who constantly ministers the Lord Jesus to the believer. And because Jesus completely satisfies, the person who takes one drink of this living water, never thirsts again. Have you experienced the truth of this promise?
Kenneth S. Wuest, Wuest’s Word Studies from the Greek New Testament: For the English Reader, vol. 19 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 25–30.
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