John 6:39

Ver. 39. “ Now this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that which he has given me, but that I should raise it up at the last day. ”

The δέ is progressive: now. The will of the Father is not only that Jesus should receive, but also that He should keep those whom He gives to Him. And He has clothed Him, indeed, with the necessary powers to save His own, even to the end. He is charged of God with leading them to the glorious end of salvation and even with delivering them from death. Πᾶν, all, nominative absolute: put afterwards in its regular case in the pronoun αὐτοῦ. Was Jesus thinking perchance of the bread, also a gift of God, of which no fragment should be lost (John 6:12), and in comparison with which the gift of God of which He here speaks is infinitely more precious?

The object of the verb is a τι understood. The perfect has given transports us to a more advanced time than John 6:37 (gives). The gift is now realized by the faith of the man, on the one side, and the welcome of Jesus on the other. But the end is not yet attained by this. It is necessary first to prevent the believer from falling back into the state of sin which would destroy him again, then to free him at the last day from physical death to the end of presenting him glorious before the face of the Father. We find here again the two-fold action which Jesus described in John 5:21-29: the communication of the new spiritual life and thereby the gift of the resurrection of the body, which alone exhausts the meaning of the expression: bread of life. Reuss wished to apply the term the last day to the time of the death of each believer. But the passage John 5:29 proves that Jesus is thinking, not of a particular phase of each individual existence, but of the solemn hour when all the dead, laid in the tombs, shall hear His voice and shall have a bodily resurrection. Reuss objects that “mystical theology has nothing to do with this notion.” This only proves one thing: that “the mystical theology” which Reuss attributes to John is very different from that of the apostle. If this notion had so little importance to the author's mind, how is it that it reappears even four times in this passage and forms, as it were, its refrain (John 6:39-40; John 6:44; John 6:54)? It is beyond all dispute that the bodily resurrection is presented in this passage, as well as in the discourse of chap. 5, as the necessary crowning of the spiritual work accomplished by Christ in humanity. On this point, John is in accord with the Synoptics and with Paul (1 Corinthians 15). Bengel observes on these last words: Hic finis est ultra quem periculum nullum. On the inadmissibility of grace, see on John 10:28-30. In closing this first part of the conversation, Jesus again insists on the human condition of faith which must correspond with His own work, for it was this which was wanting to His interlocutors.