What Does 3 John 1:2 Mean?
Beloved, concerning all things I pray that your way goes well and that you are whole, just as your living soul goes well.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.THE KEY
The same word for prospering appears twice: your well-being is wished for as a good journey, and that journey is already underway in your living soul.
THE MEANING
This verse holds your health and the course of your life alongside the flourishing of your living soul. It speaks of inner and bodily well-being as parts of one life, moving together.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
A flourishing inner life makes bodily well-being irrelevant.
THE ROOT
εὐοδόω
euodoō
GROWS FROM
εὖ + ὁδός (eu + hodos)
Well + road or way: a way that goes well, hence to have a good journey or prosper.
“your way goes well” in this verse is euodoō. The verb translated “prosper” appears twice in this verse. Its road imagery makes outward well-being and the soul’s flourishing part of one good journey.
ALSO GROWS
hodos: Way, road
ὁδός
The word’s road component makes prospering more than a static state: it carries the sense of a way going well.
euodousthai: To go well, prosper
εὐοδοῦσθαι
This is the form used for the wished-for prosperity; the same verb family also describes the soul’s flourishing later in the verse.
ψυχή
psychē
GROWS FROM
ψυχ-
psych-
The living self: life, person, living soul.
The verse speaks of the living soul itself as prospering. That puts the living person at the center of the picture, with health and life’s course held alongside its flourishing.
ALSO GROWS
psychikos: Natural, pertaining to the living self
ψυχικός
This related form shows the word family reaching into descriptions of lived human nature, not only an inward abstraction.
apopsychō: Faint, expire
ἀποψύχω
This related verb can describe life failing; here the living soul is described in the opposite movement, as flourishing.
THE PATTERN
Scripture speaks of human well-being across both bodily health and the living inner person.
Who releases all your crookedness; who heals all your sicknesses.A healing heart is the life of the flesh, but envy is the rot of the bones.And may the God of wholeness himself set you apart through and through, and may your whole breath, living soul, and body be kept blameless until the presence of our Lord Jesus, the Anointed One.THE THREAD
Always making request in my prayers, if somehow now at last, by the will of God, I might be given a good road to come to you.Romans uses the same Greek verb for a “prosperous journey.” In 3 John, that verb appears both in the wish for well-being and in the description of the soul’s flourishing, letting the road image join the two.
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