Charles Ellicott Commentary John 8:51

"Verily, verily, I say unto you, If a man keep my word, he shall never see death." — John 8:51 (ASV)

If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death.—It is better rendered, If a man keep My word. Our translation obscures the close connection with the thought of continuing in His word (John 8:31) and also with He that heareth my word (John 5:24).

This last passage (John 5:24) is the key to the words before us. Here, as there, the thought of judgment and death leads to the opposite thought of not coming into judgment, but passing out of death into life. Here, as there, the believer is thought of as possessing the true spiritual life, which cannot see death but shall pass into the fuller spiritual life hereafter.

Another interpretation of the phrase He shall never see death is “he shall not see death forever”—that is, “he shall indeed die, but that death shall only be in this world; it shall not be in the world which is forever.” This is the thought in the collect in “The Order for the Burial of the Dead”: “...our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the resurrection and the life; in whom whosoever believeth shall live, though he die; and whosoever liveth and believeth in him shall not die eternally.”

The following are the only passages in St. John where exactly the same formula is used, and a comparison of them will make it clear that it means, as does the Hebrew formula on which it is based, what we express by “never,” “certainly never,” or “by no means ever,” for the negative is in its strongest form (John 4:14; John 8:52; John 10:28; John 11:26; John 13:8).

The first and last of these passages refer to subjects (shall never thirst and shall never wash my feet), which do not admit any possibility of doubt. The other passages are all parallel to the present text, in thought as well as in word. In all these instances, there is the fuller meaning that for the believer who now has spiritual life and continues to live in communion with God, there cannot be death. He shall never see death.

What we think of as death is but a sleep (see Note on John 11:11). Death has been swallowed up by life, and physical death is thought of, in its true sense, as an entering into life.