Think Wink.

This morning I was reading and parsing 1 Corinthians 15:1-4 in my Greek New Testament to practice recognizing aorist indicative verbs, both active and passive/middle and in different persons and numbers. As I read through the Greek, two verbs stood out to me and I want to express what I saw in these verbs. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:1-4,

Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scripture, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.

The first verb is the Greek verb is sozesthe. It is the second-person plural, present tense, passive, indicative of the verb sozo. It means “to save, to rescue.” It is the verb the Bible uses when it talks about “being saved” and “salvation.” Most verbs in this passage are aorist indicative–hence the reason why I picked this text–and are either first-person singular, second-person plural, or third-person singular. Most of the verbs in this text are active. It wasn’t so much the tense that stood out to me as opposed to the voice of the verb. Unlike almost every other verb in these four verses, this one is passive. The saving action is done to the subject of the sentence, as opposed to an active voice has the subject performing the saving action. Simply put, we don’t save ourselves, we are saved by something outside of ourselves. When we take the gospel, receive it (parelabete) something outside of us saves us. Oh how sweet it is to know that there is one who saves us that is more powerful than we could ever hope to be so that our salvation is secure and safe.

The second verb is the Greek verb egegertai. It is the third-person singular, perfect tense, passive, indicative form of the verb egeiro which means “to raise, to raise up, to bring into being.” It is the verb from which we get the term “resurrection.” Now what stood out to me was not so much that this verb was a passive verb, that Christ did not raise himself but someone else raised him from the dead (namely God the Father). But rather it switched from the present tense and aorist tense that had been seen so far in this passage to the perfect tense. There is not perfect English equivalent to the Greek perfect tense. One familiar example that almost everyone of us is familiar with of the perfect tense is Jesus’ statement on the cross in John 19:30, “It is finished.” The perfect tense verb is a tense that says the action occurs in the past but the effects are still present in the present (primarily when the author was writing). Hence, Jesus died some twenty years before 1 Corinthians and almost forty years before John. But the effects of that death were present when John recorded that statement in his text. For Paul, Jesus rose from the dead some twenty years before Paul wrote this letter. But the effects of that resurrection was still present when Paul wrote this letter. When Paul wrote this letter, Jesus was very much alive. Jesus is alive right now as I pen these words. Jesus is very much alive as you read these words. Paul had no doubts because of the tense of verb. Jesus did raise to die again, like Lazarus and they boy from Nain. He rose to never die again. His life does not end. His body will never see decay.

Oh the wonderful beauties of the Koine Greek of the First Century AD. Even though you might have been able to pick this out of an English translation, there is something about reading original languages that makes this stand out even more than if you hadn’t read the Greek (or Hebrew/Aramaic). It is things like this that have led to my post last January about teaching a basic understand of the Biblical languages in Sunday. I hope that seeing the text from the eyes of the original language will ever bolster your study of the Scriptures to be deeper, more profound, and connect you with the living Christ who died for your sins and was raised for your justification (Romans 4:25).

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