John 6:39 - Exposition

And this is the will of him £ (the Father) that sent me, that (with reference to) all that he hath given me £ I should not lose ( sc . τὶ ) anything, any fragment of it; i . e . from the entire mass of humanity thus given to me as the guerdon of my sacrificial work, given by the inward working of Divine grace which issues in their coming and reaching me, no solitary soul should be plucked out of my hand—should be let slip away into perdition or destruction. The claim of a Divine authority and absolute power could not be put more strongly. The care with which the Divine hand can protect every fragment of his universe, and hold it by its everlasting laws and keep it in the career assigned to it from the beginning, illumines this passage. Should the speaker not sustain this stupendous assumption, it is only too certain that he was giving utterance to the most reckless raving. These words cannot be honestly watered down to the language of the influence of an ethical reformer or prophetic messenger. Jesus proceeds to clinch his argument and reassert his claims as follows. But in proof of the very opposite of the supposition that I can drop one atom of this great charge, I will raise it up at the last day. Reuss applies this to the resurrection of each believer on the "last day" of each life, for he seems unwilling to find in the Fourth Gospel any such idea as that of the general resurrection. But cf. John 5:29 , and observe the repetition as in a wondrous refrain, John 5:40 , John 5:44 , 54, in which he again speaks of the "last day"—the final consummation of his redemptive work. The next verse shows that the Lord did discriminate between eternal life already bestowed here and now, and the great consequence of such possession in the complete restoration of body as well as life. It is in the continuity and perpetuity of the eternal life that we find the condition of the resurrection life. The "when" of this "last day" is not positively asserted here.