John 5:40

5:40 but you are not willing to come to me so that you may have life.

John 6:37

6:37 Everyone whom the Father gives me will come to me, and the one who comes to me I will never send away. ¹ 

John 14:6

14:6 Jesus replied, ²  “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. ³  No one comes to the Father except through me.

Isaiah 55:3

55:3 Pay attention and come to me!

Listen, so you can live! ⁴ 

Then I will make an unconditional covenantal promise to ⁵  you,

just like the reliable covenantal promises I made to David. ⁶ 

Jeremiah 16:19

16:19 Then I said, ⁷ 

“Lord, you give me strength and protect me.

You are the one I can run to for safety when I am in trouble. ⁸ 

Nations from all over the earth

will come to you and say,

‘Our ancestors had nothing but false gods –

worthless idols that could not help them at all. ⁹ 

Matthew 11:28

11:28 Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.

[6:37]  ¹ tn Or “drive away”; Grk “cast out.”

[14:6]  ² tn Grk “Jesus said to him.”

[14:6]  ³ tn Or “I am the way, even the truth and the life.”

[55:3]  ⁴ tn The jussive with vav (ו) conjunctive following the imperative indicates purpose/result.

[55:3]  ⁵ tn Or “an eternal covenant with.”

[55:3]  ⁶ tn Heb “the reliable expressions of loyalty of David.” The syntactical relationship of חַסְדֵי (khasde, “expressions of loyalty”) to the preceding line is unclear. If the term is appositional to בְּרִית (bÿrit, “covenant”), then the Lord here transfers the promises of the Davidic covenant to the entire nation. Another option is to take חַסְדֵי (khasde) as an adverbial accusative and to translate “according to the reliable covenantal promises.” In this case the new covenantal arrangement proposed here is viewed as an extension or perhaps fulfillment of the Davidic promises. A third option, the one reflected in the above translation, is to take the last line as comparative. In this case the new covenant being proposed is analogous to the Davidic covenant. Verses 4-5, which compare David’s international prominence to what Israel will experience, favors this view. In all three of these interpretations, “David” is an objective genitive; he is the recipient of covenantal promises. A fourth option would be to take David as a subjective genitive and understand the line as giving the basis for the preceding promise: “Then I will make an unconditional covenantal promise to you, because of David’s faithful acts of covenantal loyalty.”

[16:19]  ⁷ tn The words “Then I said” are not in the text. They are supplied in the translation to show the shift from God, who has been speaking to Jeremiah, to Jeremiah, who here addresses God.

[16:19]  ⁸ tn Heb “O Lord, my strength and my fortress, my refuge in the day of trouble. The literal which piles up attributes is of course more forceful than the predications. However, piling up poetic metaphors like this adds to the length of the English sentence and risks lack of understanding on the part of some readers. Some rhetorical force has been sacrificed for the sake of clarity.

[16:19]  ⁹ tn Once again the translation has sacrificed some of the rhetorical force for the sake of clarity and English style: Heb “Only falsehood did our ancestors possess, vanity and [things in which?] there was no one profiting in them.”