Verse of the Day 1.13.18: John 5:24
Text
24 Ἀμὴν ἀμὴν λέγω ὑμῖν ὅτι ὁ τὸν λόγον μου ἀκούων καὶ πιστεύων τῷ πέμψαντί με ἔχει ζωὴν αἰώνιον καὶ εἰς κρίσιν οὐκ ἔρχεται, ἀλλὰ μεταβέβηκεν ἐκ τοῦ θανάτου εἰς τὴν ζωήν.1
24 “Very truly I tell you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life.2
Today, C4C is studying John 5:16-30.
C4C Translation
Truly, truly, I say to you: the one who hears my word and trusts in Him who sent me has eternal life, and does not come into judgement, but has passed from death into life.
The word I translate trust is the the verb form (πιστεύω | pisteuō) of the noun usually translated “faith” (πίστις | pistis). As my homiletics professor recently pointed out, because English has no verb form for the word “faith” it is often translated believe.
I usually prefer “trust” — even “active trust” if warranted by the context — since, in our society, “belief” can be misconstrued as mere intellectual assent.
Though in this case, in which God (i.e. Him who sent Jesus) is in the dative case,3 pisteuō most likely means to accept God’s “disclosures without doubt or contradiction,”4 biblical faith often entails much more.
As opposed to just agreeing with a set of given propositions, biblical faith or belief often means “to entrust oneself to an entity in complete confidence… [with the] implication of total commitment to the one who is trusted.”5 And such faith — trust — manifests itself in faithful obedience (Rom 1:5, 16:26 cf. Ac 6:7, etc.).
Memorization
Memorize John 5:24 after watching a brief video tutorial demonstrating the How to Memorize Any Bible Verse in Less Than Five Minutes method below:
Sources
- Barbara Aland et al., eds., The Greek New Testament, Fifth Revised Edition (Stuttgart, Germany: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2014), Jn 5:24.
- The New International Version (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011), Jn 5:24.
- “The case that is regularly used for indirect objects and the objects of some prepositions. The dative refers to the person or thing to which something is given or for whom something is done.” Michael S. Heiser and Vincent M. Setterholm, Glossary of Morpho-Syntactic Database Terminology (Lexham Press, 2013; 2013).
- William Arndt et al., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 816.
- William Arndt et al., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 817.