Psalm 30:5 and Rev 22:16. I just said what I think the verses mean.
Determining meaning is not about adding up the dictionary definitions of words to come up with some kind of meaning sum of a sentence. That isn’t how language works. Meaning is found in a whole utterance and is greatly determined by the discourse context of the utterance.
Hello,
Looking over this thread, I see what one person called “analysis paralysis”. If your real concern here is your friend’s faith, I wonder, if any of this discussion would really help. There are many things in biblical texts that are troublesome, and much of that trouble is brought on by our human insistance that the texts must be one thing or another, which is not to be determined any more.
Jesus Christ is the ground of our faith and our Savior. I understand that people can have doubts about the value of biblical texts as a source for essential spiritual information. But your friend seems to have some sort of faith. Help your friend to step back from the microscope, focusing on tiny fragments of the text, and look at the bigger picture, what the texts tell us. Help your friend slow down a bit (or a lot) and look at the author and perfector of our faith. No one comes to faith or encourages faith in Jesus by linguistics and detailed arguments about textual analysis.
There IS room for these kinds of matters, but they don’t sound like what your friend needs right now.
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