MATTHEW 7:23 — What “I Never Knew You” Really Means in Greek

MATTHEW 7:23 — What “I Never Knew You” Really Means in Greek.

A door in the Sermon on the Mount has been standing open for 2,000 years, and the people locked out of it are not the ones you would expect. Not atheists, not the openly rebellious, not the people who walked away from church and never came back. The people on the wrong side of this door are the ones who prophesied, the ones who cast out demons, the ones who performed mighty works in his name, with his words in their mouths, with results that anyone watching would have called anointed. And Jesus looks at them and says four [music] words that should stop every reader cold. I never knew you. The English word knew hides what the Greek makes [music] unmistakable. The word Jesus chose is not the word for knowing facts or having information [music] about someone. It is the word for the deepest, most intimate, covenant kind of knowing. The same word that appears in first-century marriage contracts and adoption papers. The same word the Hebrew Bible uses for the union between Adam and Eve and God’s election of an entire nation. And the word before it, translated never, means there was not a single moment when that knowing existed. Not lost, not faded, never there. When you trace that word back through the oldest covenant language in scripture, the verse stops being a theological puzzle and becomes the most personal question [music] Jesus ever asked. Not what have you done in my name, whether he knew you at all. The Sermon on the Mount is the longest continuous [music] teaching of Jesus recorded in any gospel. Three chapters, and it doesn’t end the way most people remember. The final movement is a series of warnings, each more severe than the last. The narrow gate, few find it. The false prophets, wolves in sheep’s clothing, recognizable only by what they produce. And then the passage no careful reader has been able [music] to set down for 2,000 years. Jesus says, “Not everyone who says to me, >> [music] >> ‘Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my father who is in heaven.'” Notice the doubling, “Lord, Lord.” In 1st century Jewish speech, repeating a name was not casual. It was the language of total devotion, of someone who has handed over everything to the person they are addressing. And then they make their case. “Did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, >> [music] >> and do many mighty works in your name?” Three claims, prophecy, [music] exorcism, supernatural power. These are not Sunday morning activities. These are the kind of resume items that would get a person invited [music] to speak at a conference, to lead a movement, to write the book other pastors quote from. There is a woman who has led the same Bible study for 11 years. She is the person people call when they don’t know what a passage means. [music] She has never missed a week, and she has never once, in 11 years, been sure that what she does reaches through the door. Not because she lacks knowledge, not because she lacks sincerity, because something in the space between her effort and God’s response has always felt just barely like a door she can describe from the outside, but has never quite stepped through. What does the Greek word [music] translated new actually mean? Because it is not the word you think it is. Two Greek words sit behind the English word >> [music] >> knowing, and the distance between them is the entire meaning of this verse. The first is oida. Oida means to know facts, to hold information, to be aware that something is true. It is knowledge you can carry without it changing you. The second is ginosko. Ginosko [music] means to know through experience, through encounter, through a relationship that has marked you over time. It is the difference between reading someone’s biography and sitting across [music] from them long enough that you know what they look like when they are tired. Jesus uses [music] ginosko. He is not saying, “I had no information about you.” Of course he did. He is listing their entire ministry resume in the verse before. What he is saying is that the other kind of knowing, the kind that only comes from being in the room together, was never there. Here is the detail that stops most people cold. Ginosko was not only a word found in [music] scripture. Archaeologists have recovered first-century Greek papyri from Egypt, everyday legal documents. [music] And ginosko appears in marriage contracts and adoption papers. It was the word a household used when it [music] formally recognized a person as belonging. The word that took a stranger and made them family. Not because [music] the stranger had earned it. Because the household declared it. And Jesus says that declaration was never made. The Greek word translated [music] never tightens it further, oudepote. Not at any time. At no single point. Jesus does not say, “I stopped knowing you.” He does not say, “You drifted and I lost track.” He says, “There was never a moment when the knowing existed.” The door had an address. It had a key. They stood in front of it for years, but the handle on the inside never turned. Ever. To understand how heavy ginosko actually is, [music] the word has to be traced back to Hebrew. When the Old Testament was translated [music] into Greek, the translation called the Septuagint, the translators needed a Greek word for the Hebrew yada. And they chose ginosko. [music] Yada is the deepest word for knowing in the Hebrew Bible. In Genesis [music] 4, the text says Adam knew his wife Eve. The word is yada. It describes the most [music] intimate union between two persons. In Amos 3, God says to Israel, “You only have I known of all the families of the earth.” The word is yada. God is not saying Israel is the only nation he has information about. He is saying Israel is the only nation he entered into a covenant with, the only one he declared as belonging to him. In Jeremiah 1, God tells the prophet, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.” The word is yada. The knowing comes before the existence. It is the language of someone who belongs before they arrive. And ginosko carries all of that weight into Matthew [music] 7:23. When Jesus says, “I never knew you,” he is using the covenant word, the word for the union between Adam and Eve, the word for God’s election of Israel. The word for the knowing [music] that precedes the womb, and he is saying it was never there, gone. But the verse does not end with “I never knew you.” Jesus [music] continues, “Depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.” The Greek word for lawlessness [music] is anomia, built from two parts, a, meaning without, nomos, [music] meaning law. And the paradox is that these are not idle people. The Greek word ergozamanoi means those who work. They prophesied. [music] They cast out demons. They performed mighty works. And Jesus calls all of it anomia, lawlessness. How can supernatural ministry done in his name be called lawlessness? Because the works were never connected to the ginosko. Activity in [music] Jesus’s name, severed from actually being known by Jesus, is not righteousness. It is lawlessness wearing [music] the clothes of relationship. A man builds a church from 12 people to 1,200. He preaches four [music] times a week. He can work through Romans without opening the book. And on the drive home, alone, he turns the radio on before the silence gets too loud, because the silence is where the question lives. Not whether he is good at what he does, whether anyone on the other side of [music] his prayers has ever said his name back. Here is the detail that stops most people cold, the direction. Jesus does not say, “You never knew me.” He says, “I never knew you.” They knew plenty about him. The emphasis [music] is on whether he knew them. This pattern runs through the entire New Testament. In John 10, Jesus says, “I know my own, and my own know me.” The word is ginosko, [music] and it starts with the shepherd. In Galatians 4, Paul writes, “Now that you have come to know God,” [music] and then catches himself, “or rather, to be known by God.” In 1 Corinthians 8, Paul writes, “If anyone loves God, he is known by God.” Not that he knows God. He is known by God. The foundation of belonging is not our knowledge of God. It is God’s knowing of us. The entire Sermon on the Mount has been building to this, moving the standard from the visible to the invisible. Do not just avoid murder. Do not harbor the anger. Do not just avoid adultery. Do not nurture the lust. And Matthew 7:23 is the destination of that entire movement. The most visible religious activity imaginable, prophecy, exorcism, mighty works, declared insufficient because the invisible thing beneath it, the being known, was never there. So, let’s bring it home because this stops being about a Greek word and starts being about you. You have been standing at a door. You know the address. You know the language. You have a resume that would make anyone standing in line beside you feel like they haven’t done enough. And the handle is on the inside. If you are watching this and you have served faithfully for [music] years, led worship, organized the outreach, shown up early to set up chairs, and stayed late to [music] stack them, and the moment you stop doing those things, you feel yourself shrinking like the doing is the only thing keeping you visible to God. Like if you sat still for a month, you would quietly disappear from his attention. That is not ginosko. That is standing at a door >> [music] >> and polishing the outside of it because opening it would mean finding out whether anyone is on the other side. And you have been polishing so long, you have forgotten the door was meant to be walked through. If you are watching this, and you have prayed the same prayer so many times, the words have worn smooth. You have tried the morning routine, the journal, the worship playlist at 5:00 a.m., the fasting, the reading plan that promises to get you through the whole Bible in a year. And every method works for 11 days, and then the old quiet returns. The same door, the same feeling that the signal is going out, but nothing is coming back. You are not failing at prayer. You are looking for ginosko through oida, trying to reach a person through a technique. And ginosko has never once, in the entire Bible, arrived through a method. It arrives through a person. If you are watching this, and your chest tightened [music] 4 minutes ago, if the phrase, “I never knew you,” landed somewhere you were not expecting it to land, >> [music] >> suppose if you have been sitting with a low-grade spiritual dread that you have never said out loud, >> [music] >> that maybe you have been standing outside the door your whole life and calling it faith. Sit with that [music] for a second, because the fact that it unsettles you is not evidence that the door [music] is locked. Dead wiring does not feel anything. The fact that this verse reaches you right now, in your chest, >> [music] >> and not just your head, is evidence that something on the other side of that door is still reaching for the handle. Paul caught himself in Galatians 4. He wrote, “Now that you have come to know God,” and then stopped, corrected the direction, or rather, “to be known by God.” The deeper reality was not that the Galatians had finally reached far enough. It was that God had reached them first. >> [music] >> The ginosko started from his side. It always starts from his side. The adoption contracts in those first-century papyri did not say, “This child has demonstrated sufficient qualification to belong.” They said, “This child is mine.” Period. The knowing was the declaration, not the reward for performance, not the payoff after years of polishing. The declaration that came before the child had done anything at all. You are not someone who needs to do [music] more. You are someone who needs to be found standing still. Archaeologists in Capernaum found 1st-century houses built directly [music] on basalt bedrock beside houses built on loose soil near the lake shore. Two foundations, same town, same street. When Jesus told the parable of the two builders at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, his audience could see both from where they stood. The difference was never the house. Both houses looked like houses. Both builders built. One stood, one collapsed. The bedrock was already there. The door was already open. The knowing, the [music] ginosko, the yada, the word that turned a stranger into family, was already waiting. It was never about building a bigger house. It was never about a longer resume >> [music] >> or a louder prayer or one more mighty work done in the right name. It was about standing on what was already underneath you. If you know someone who has been knocking on a door that was never locked, send them this.