Verse of the day · October 13

What do ask, seek and knock mean in Matthew 7:7?

By the last word he is on the wrong side of a door somebody barred.

Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you:
Matthew 7:7

Ask, seek, knock: all three were ordinary street business. Asking is what a beggar does when he asks for alms, and what a traveller does when he stops somebody for directions. Seeking is what a merchant does going after one good pearl, and what anybody does hunting for something valuable he has lost. Knocking is what people do standing outside a house, wanting to be let in.

Jesus was preaching on a mountainside, and the orders just behind him were hard ones. Stop passing sentence on your brother. Get the plank out of your own eye before you go after the splinter in his. Do not press holy things on people who will only trample them. Somebody listening might well wonder how any of that is to be done, and the reply is to take it to God. Prayer had already come up a chapter earlier in the same sermon, as a duty owed to him. Here it becomes the appointed means of getting what a man needs — especially grace enough to obey the commands he had just given, some of which go straight against the grain.

The three words are not synonyms and they are not in a random order. Asking is a plain request. Seeking is a search you have to work at. Knocking is carrying on in spite of whatever is in the way. Seeking and knocking take a man further than asking does: he is to back his prayers with his own effort and go looking for the thing he prayed for. God gives knowledge and grace to the man who searches the scriptures for them, and power against sin to the man who keeps away from the occasions of it. To pray for a thing and then not lift a finger towards it is to put God to the test. And knocking means staying at the door. If it does not open at the first knock, wait and knock again — it is an insult to knock at a friend's house and walk off before he can reach it.

There is a second way the three words run, and it is about where the man is standing. We ask for what we want. We seek for what we miss. We knock at what we feel ourselves shut out of. And what he has lost is his God, his paradise, his own soul. Read like that, the line is not only a climb. He begins wanting something; by the middle word he is missing it; by the last word he feels himself shut out.

Something did the shutting. Sin shut and barred that door against us, and prayer is the knocking at it. The beggar is the picture again: he stands at a door of mercy, knocking, and will not be put off — and that door is not going to stay shut against him. He has nothing of his own to bring and no claim on the house except the claim God's own mercy has given him. And it is opened from the inside — "knock, and it shall be opened unto you," the verse says. Prayer is a sure refuge in any misery. And nobody wants a refuge until trouble has already found him.

Then the answers come back, matched to the commands one for one. What is given is given: not lent, not sold, and nothing is freer than a gift. What is sought is found, and what is found is God himself, and a man who has found him has enough. What is knocked at opens — a door no longer shut against him as an enemy and an intruder, but opened to him as a friend and a child. And what he comes into is the holiest place of all, entered by the blood of Jesus. Then he says the whole thing a second time: "For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened." Three commands, and six assurances — the same three answers given twice over. And every one means anyone: not the disciples only, but Jew or Gentile, rich or poor, educated or not, all equally welcome if they come in faith. The repetition is there for the humble disciple who cannot persuade himself that he has any standing with God at all.

Then the argument goes indoors, and he asks them: "Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?" Not even a sour-tempered, bad-natured man would do that to a child. And the cruelty would be in the likeness: a stone can be round and smooth like the loaves in use there, and in a boy's hand it would pass for one, which is the only reason anybody would hand it over — to mock him. It would fool him for a moment; it would not feed him. "Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent?" A serpent is somewhat like a fish — most like an eel. Bread and fish were what people ate where Jesus was standing: Galilee is fish country, and the disciples he had called from there were fishermen.

He put it to them like this: "If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?" They were not good men and he said so to their faces, and they still knew how to give their children good things and knew when to give them. That instinct is not their own invention, and the God who put it in them has infinitely more of it than they do. He is readier to give than the best parent who ever lived. The good things are not only meat and drink and clothing, but every supply of grace. Told again in Luke's Gospel, the same argument ends with the gift named outright, and the gift is the Holy Spirit. And the things most worth having from him are the ones no father on earth could hand across a table: to be forgiven, to be taught, to be made holy, to be saved. And grace to obey the hard commands he had just finished giving is one of the things prayer is for. Yet many a man asks an earthly father for something every day of his life and never asks the Father in heaven for anything at all.

Not everything a child asks for is handed over, either. The child asks for bread, which he needs, and a fish, which will do him good. Let him ask for unripe fruit, or for a sharp knife because he wants it to play with, and his father, kind as he is, knows better and says no. We often ask God for what would do us harm if we had it; he knows it would, and so he does not give it. Whatever a man asks for, according to the promise, will be given him, if God sees it fit for him. Conditions travel with it: asked in the name of Christ, asked in faith, asked in submission to what God wants. Which is why it is not a promise over any request at all. It is for the man who can ask for a thing and hand the decision back with it: we do not know what is good for us and he does, so the asking ends in thy will be done. And what arrives is not wages earned but a gift.

Both readings hold at once: a man pressing harder and harder, or a man with less and less — wanting, then missing, then feeling himself shut out. Either way the answers fit: given, found, opened. Asked like that, prayer is heard one way or another, every time. And behind all three answers is a father with a child in front of him, asking for bread and handed bread, asking for the knife and told no. A refusal given in love is better than a yes given in anger. One and the same affection produces both answers.

Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary, Adam Clarke, the Geneva Bible notes, B. W. Johnson and Albert Barnes. How these teachings are made

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