Objection: 3 John 2 Is a Greeting and Cannot Be Claimed as a Promise
3 John 2:
Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.
If God wished above all things for Gaius to be in health and prosper, and did not wish above all things that you be in health and prosper, He is a “respecter of persons” who plays favorites. We know from various verses that God does not do this (Acts 10:34, Romans 2:11, Ephesians 6:9, Colossians 3:25, 1 Peter 1:17). His will for Gaius is equally His will for you – that you be in health and prosper, even as your soul prospers.
So it either IS or ISN’T God’s will for ALL men to be in health and prosper. If it ISN’T, John sinned by writing this wish in his letter. It would be wrong to use something as a greeting that was not the will of God and even more wrong to have that greeting become part of Scripture.
Those promoting this objection like to state that John’s wish was an “epistolary salutation” that was common even for unbelievers to use back then, and that even today, “I hope this letter finds you in good health” would be a salutation but not a doctrinal statement. The objection can go on to describe “sections” of epistles and claim that no doctrinal statement was ever set forth in the “salutation” section or the “thanksgiving” section that follows. If true, that would ruin one of the most powerful verses in the Bible – Ephesians 1:3, which thanks God who has already blessed us with every spiritual blessing. That powerful truth is from what they would call the “thanksgiving” section. I don’t think we can write off verses like that simply because they’re at the beginning of a letter.
But if you want to claim that John just greeted people in a theologically meaningless manner, we should consider his other writings – the Gospel of John, 2 John, 3 John and Revelation, and see if that’s his peculiar pattern.
I would hope that we would not write off “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” – an affirmation of the pre-existence and deity of Christ – just because it happens to be the very first verse in the Gospel of John.
1 John does not start with any kind of greeting; it just dives right into content, describing John’s eyewitness status to the Word of Life (Jesus).
2 John does open with a greeting, though no mention is made of health or prosperity.
Revelation starts with content without any kind of personal greeting.
So what John said in 3 John was not any kind of “stock greeting” that he used all the time – at least not in the other four books that he wrote.
One objector wrote that wishing good health was a standard greeting at the time, as in “I hope that this letter finds you in good health.” My question to the objector is simple: If that was really the standard greeting of that day, why does it not appear in any other letter in the Bible from John or any other author?
But even if you think it was only a greeting, it shows that John considered health and prosperity, not sickness and poverty, to be blessings. If he were convinced that sickness is a blessing in disguise, as some teach today, he would have written, “Beloved, I hope you get sick really soon so that God can add to your spiritual depth and teach you things, and you can spend all your money on doctors so that you can experience the additional blessing-in-disguise of poverty.”
Suppose for a minute that John intended the verse to be a greeting to Gaius when he wrote it. I think that’s a reasonable assumption. Paul did in fact write some initial greetings in his letters. However, the entirety of 3 John is part of the canon of Scripture. It would be shocking and horrible to suppose that only parts of 3 John are really Scripture and throw out the material at the two ends. We could really carve up the Bible doing that. Either 3 John 2 is Scripture or it isn’t. I hope you realize that it is.
Although part of the New Testament consists of letters written to others, they are in the New Testament canon because they apply to the Church as a whole. The fact that the letters were written to individual churches and individuals does not mean that they applied only to the recipient(s) of the letters! If that were true, it would wipe out the New Testament epistles completely, as well as the first part of Revelation. And since Luke penned his gospel account and Acts for someone named Theophilus, we would have to throw out those books, too.
So let’s see. If we can’t apply statements made to certain people in the Bible ourselves:
-- Only Nicodemus needed to be born again.
-- Only the Ephesians should have a revelation of the power and love of God.
-- God would only meet the Philippians’ needs, not yours.
-- Only the dispersed Jews should anoint the sick. (Believe it or not, someone actually said this.)
-- Only the pastor in Laodicea would ever need to repent of lukewarmness.
-- Only the disciples present with Jesus can speak in tongues and lay hands on the sick.
-- Only Timothy needed to stir up the gift within him.
And so on. Once you start down that road, you would have to rip out large chunks of the Bible and claim that they are not for the reader, but only for whom the letters were originally written.
It’s strictly an opinion that 3 John 2 is “only” a greeting, anyway. But given the other arguments above, I don’t think it matters. In order for this objection to have any validity, you must believe the following, which the objectors do:
1. The desire John expresses for Gaius was specific only to Gaius.
2. It was John’s desire, BUT NOT NECESSARILY GOD’S DESIRE, for Gaius to prosper and be in health. Thus, John expressed sentiments that could have been contrary to God’s will and yet that is part of Scripture.
Even if you think this was Gaius-specific, if it was GOD’S desire for Gaius to prosper and be in health, it must be His will for EVERYONE to prosper and be in health, because God does not play favorites, as we saw above. So the only way this objection could hold water is if you believe that JOHN wanted Gaius to prosper and be in health, but GOD did not. In other words, John was simply conveying a wish that was contrary to God’s will. If he were actually doing that, I don’t see how 3 John could have been included in the New Testament canon.
I will speculate that if John had said instead, “Gaius, I hope you get really sick and go broke, even as God uses that to draw you closer to Himself” that the objectors would have no problem taking that and running with it as theology, though that particular idea is blown to pieces with our New Testament cannon elsewhere in this book.
So here is where this leaves the objector. He must either admit that this wish, part of Scripture, reflects God’s known will for Gaius and everyone else, or produce evidence from another part of Scripture proving that somewhere else in the New Testament, a writer wished or prayed something for someone else that was contrary to God’s will. It would be too hard to claim that this one instance is the one place in the New Testament where a writer wished upon someone else something that was not God’s will.
I can’t find anywhere that fits that description. For example, wouldn’t God want to send “grace and peace” to all believers, not just the ones cited at the beginnings of Paul’s letters? Could it be God’s will NOT to bestow grace and peace upon any believer? Such statements might even fall into the “best wishes” category, but could you deny that these are God’s will for everyone? Does not God want all believers to have the spirit of wisdom of revelation in the knowledge of Him and to know the love of Christ? Paul prayed these things for the Ephesians (Ephesians 1:15-23, Ephesians 3:14-19), but they are clearly the will of God for ALL believers. In fact, praying Bible prayers for yourself is an invaluable aid to a strong walk with the Lord, and one that I heartily recommend and whose value I can vouch for from experience.
Bottom line: Unless someone can show that a stated prayer or wish by a gospel writer anywhere else was contrary to God’s will (don’t hold your breath waiting), we must conclude that this prayer/wish of John’s was God’s will along with all similar prayers and wishes, and that therefore it MUST be God’s will for you to prosper and be in health even as your soul prospers!
A final nail in the coffin of this objection is that John wished “above all things” that Gaius was prospering and in health. I can see a modern person saying, “I hope this email finds you well,” but not, “I hope above everything else that this email finds you well.” I’ll assume you’ve never written that to anyone. The unusual way John put this shows how important our well-being is to God.