4:34
My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me: Jesus used a metaphor to indicate that obeying God satisfied him like food.
Here are different ways to translate this clause:
• Keep the metaphor. For example:
This is what I eat, my doing the will of God, who sent me.
-or-
Doing what God, the one who sent me, wants is what feeds me.
• Change the metaphor into a simile. For example:
It is like I am eating when I do the will of him who sent me
• Change the metaphor to a simile and include some explanation of the simile. For example:
Fulfilling the will of God who sent me is like my food because that is what gives me strength
My food: This phrase is a metaphor that refers to something that provided necessities to Jesus. You may say that in other ways. For example:
It is like what I eat
-or-
For me it is meat and drink (Revised English Bible)
Him who sent Me: The Greek phrase that the Berean Standard Bible translates as Him who sent Me refers to God, who sent Jesus. In some languages it may be natural to translate this as a separate sentence. For example:
My food is to do what God wants! He is the one who sent me. (Contemporary English Version)
-or-
I feel satisfied when I am doing what God told me to do. God is the one who sent me ⌊to earth⌋ .
to finish His work: This phrase means to finish doing all that God wants. There are three ways of understanding this phrase:
(1) It refers in general to being completely obedient to God.
(2) It refers particularly to Jesus’ death on the cross.
(3) It refers to the specific work there at Sychar.
It is recommended that you translate this phrase literally so that all three options are included. Here are other ways to translate it:
to fulfill the work which he enables me to do
-or-
finishing the work he has given me (Phillips’ New Testament in Modern English)
-or-
to do what he wants me to do until it is completed
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