“I Never Knew You; Depart From Me”: What Jesus Meant in Matthew 7:21–23

Summary

Jesus says “I never knew you; depart from me” in Matthew 7:21–23, near the end of the Sermon on the Mount, to people who call him “Lord, Lord” and point to prophecy, exorcisms and miracles done in his name.
He does not deny their works. The test he gives is doing “the will of my Father who is in heaven,” and the next verses, the house on the rock, say what that means: hearing his words and doing them.
In the Bible, to “know” someone often means to choose or claim them; “never knew” means these people never belonged to him. The Greek word for “never” means not at any time.
Luke 13:25–27 has a parallel: a shut door, people who ate and drank with Jesus, and the reply “I do not know where you come from.”
The traditions differ on two questions: whether a Christian can be sure now of being saved, and whether grace, once given, can be lost. Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran and Methodist teaching hold that it can be lost and regained through repentance; Catholic teaching calls for firm hope rather than certainty of faith; the Reformed teach that true believers can be assured and never finally fall away.
The people in the passage plead their own record and never ask for mercy; the same sermon teaches Jesus’ hearers to pray “forgive us our debts,” and every tradition described keeps a way back for those who fall or doubt.

Jesus says “I never knew you” to people who call him “Lord, Lord” and point to miracles done in his name. The words come near the end of the Sermon on the Mount. He does not deny the miracles. “Knew” means claimed as his own: they never belonged to him. His test is doing “the will of my Father.”

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’” (Matthew 7:21–23, English Standard Version)

The best-known wording is the King James Version’s: “I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.”

Who is Jesus talking to?

He is speaking of “many” people “on that day,” the day of judgment, with himself as the judge. They are not outsiders. They call him Lord twice, and their defence is a list of three things done “in your name”: prophecy, casting out demons and “many mighty works.” Jesus does not say they are lying. John Chrysostom, the fourth-century bishop, took the gifts to be real and pointed to Judas, one of the twelve given “authority over unclean spirits” (Matthew 10:1): “even he too, wicked as he was, had a gift.” John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, drew the same lesson in his notes on the verse: “even the working of miracles is no proof that a man has saving faith.”

The verses follow straight on from a warning about false prophets, “who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves,” and who are known “by their fruits” (Matthew 7:15–16). John Calvin, the reformer of Geneva, read verses 21 to 23 as still aimed chiefly at false teachers, but he added, “This doctrine embraces all hypocrites, whatever may be their rank or station.”

What does “I never knew you” mean?

It cannot mean that Jesus lacks information about these people; he repeats their words and names their deeds. In the Bible, to “know” someone often means to choose or claim them as one’s own. God says to Israel through the prophet Amos, “You only have I known of all the families of the earth” (Amos 3:2). God was aware of every nation; the word means that Israel was his. Jesus uses the word the same way of his followers: “I know my own and my own know me” (John 10:14). Paul corrects himself in mid-sentence to make the point: “now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God” (Galatians 4:9).

To be known by Christ, then, is to belong to him. Paul writes of a seal on the church’s foundation: “The Lord knows those who are his” (2 Timothy 2:19). Calvin thought Paul probably drew those words from this passage, and he summed up what Jesus will declare: “That he never reckoned them among his own people, even at the time when they boasted that they were the pillars of the church.”

The Greek word for “never,” oudepote, means “not ever” in Thayer’s lexicon. Jesus does not say he once knew them and then stopped. Wesley’s note reads, “There never was a time that I approved of you: so that as many souls as they had saved, they were themselves never saved from their sins.” The verb translated “declare,” homologēsō, usually means to confess, and Calvin heard a reply in it: they confessed Christ with their tongues, and he “will confess on the opposite side, that their profession is deceitful and false.”

“Depart from me” repeats the words of a psalm: “Depart from me, all you workers of evil, for the Lord has heard the sound of my weeping” (Psalm 6:8). Matthew’s word for their wrongdoing is anomia, lawlessness, which the King James Version gives as “iniquity.”

Why doing the Father’s will is the test

Verse 21 sets the test before the scene begins: the one who enters is “the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.” Later in Matthew, Jesus uses the same phrase for his own family: “whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (Matthew 12:50). Augustine of Hippo, in his commentary on the sermon, warned readers not to “think that the mere fact of one saying to our Lord, Lord, Lord, belongs to those fruits.” The fruits, he wrote, are “to do the will of the Father who is in heaven.”

This does not turn the passage into a list of good deeds that earn heaven. The people who are turned away have such a list, and it is exactly what they plead. Calvin read the Father’s will as including faith in Christ, and pointed to Jesus’ words in John: “this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life” (John 6:40). The verses in Matthew, he wrote, “do not exclude faith, but presuppose it as the principle from which other good works flow.”

The end of the Sermon on the Mount

The sermon fills Matthew 5 to 7. It opens with the Beatitudes, which bless “the poor in spirit,” “those who mourn” and “the merciful,” and closes with four pictures, each a choice between two ways: a narrow gate and a wide one (7:13–14), healthy trees and diseased ones (7:15–20), those who say “Lord, Lord” and those who do the Father’s will (7:21–23), and two houses. The last follows at once: “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock.” The house built on sand, by the man who hears and does not act, falls in the storm, “and great was the fall of it” (Matthew 7:24–27).

“These words of mine” are the sermon itself, so the Father’s will is no secret test. It is what Jesus has just taught: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (5:44); pray “to your Father who is in secret” (6:6); forgive, “for if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you” (6:14). The same sermon teaches its hearers to pray, “forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors” (6:12). Building on the rock, in the sermon’s own terms, includes praying that prayer.

Luke’s version: the shut door

Luke has two parallels. In his shorter version of the sermon, Jesus asks, “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do what I tell you?” and tells of the two houses (Luke 6:46–49). The second is closer to Matthew’s words. On the road to Jerusalem someone asks, “Lord, will those who are saved be few?” Jesus answers, “Strive to enter through the narrow door,” and describes a master of the house who has shut the door. The people outside knock and plead acquaintance, not miracles: “We ate and drank in your presence, and you taught in our streets.” He answers, “I do not know where you come from,” and, “Depart from me, all you workers of evil!” (Luke 13:23–27). Being near Jesus and being known by him are different things. The story ends with others coming in: “people will come from east and west, and from north and south, and recline at table in the kingdom of God” (13:29). Matthew has another shut door in the parable of the ten virgins: “Truly, I say to you, I do not know you” (Matthew 25:12).

How Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Christians read it

Every tradition reads the passage as a warning against faith that stays on the lips. They part ways on two questions it leads into. Can a Christian be sure, now, of being saved? And can grace, once given, be lost? Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran and Methodist teaching all say that it can be lost and regained through repentance. Reformed teaching says that true believers never finally fall away, so those who seem to fall never truly believed.

Catholic

The Council of Trent taught that “no one can know with a certainty of faith, which cannot be subject to error, that he has obtained the grace of God,” and that no one should promise himself perseverance to the end “with an absolute certainty,” yet “all ought to place and repose a most firm hope in God’s help.” It also taught that those who “by sin, have fallen from the received grace of Justification” may “be again justified” through “the sacrament of Penance.”

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that grace “cannot be known except by faith,” so “we cannot therefore rely on our feelings or our works to conclude that we are justified and saved.” The same paragraph then quotes this chapter, “Thus you will know them by their fruits,” and says that reflecting on God’s blessings in our lives and in the saints “offers us a guarantee that grace is at work in us.” It gives Joan of Arc’s reply when her judges asked whether she knew she was in God’s grace: “If I am not, may it please God to put me in it; if I am, may it please God to keep me there.” The Catechism describes Christian hope in words close to this passage: heaven is “promised by God to those who love him and do his will.”

Orthodox

The Orthodox Church in America’s teaching handbook, The Orthodox Faith by Thomas Hopko, describes hope as “the assurance of the good outcome of our lives lived by faith in God” and “the confidence that, despite all darkness and sin, the light of the loving forgiveness of God is upon us.” An unsigned pastoral reply to a reader on the same church’s website explains that “Orthodox Christianity understands that we are ‘being saved,’ not ‘already saved.’” Orthodoxy, it says, “would say that one can indeed jeopardize one’s salvation, but that it is not realistic to say that one has ‘lost’ something that one has yet to experience or possess in its fullness.” Faith “must be active and living, manifested by works of righteousness, whereby we cooperate with God to do His will,” and however far a baptized person falls, “we always have the possibility to repent.” Chrysostom, a Father honoured in East and West alike, heard in verse 23 the end of a mistaken confidence: “For now indeed they suppose they are my friends; but then shall they know, that not as to friends did I give to them.”

Lutheran

Lutheran teaching joins a firm promise to a real warning. The Augsburg Confession says that faith “is bound to bring forth good fruits,” but “that we should not rely on those works to merit justification before God.” Martin Luther pointed troubled believers to their baptism: “Nevertheless I am baptized; but if I am baptized, it is promised me that I shall be saved and have eternal life, both in soul and body.” Lutherans also teach that faith can be lost. Luther’s Smalcald Articles say that when believers fall into open sin, “as David into adultery, murder, and blasphemy,” then “faith and the Holy Ghost has departed from them.” The way back stays open: the Augsburg Confession teaches that “for those who have fallen after Baptism there is remission of sins whenever they are converted.”

Reformed

Reformed churches teach that true believers cannot finally fall away. The Westminster Confession of Faith says that those whom God has “effectually called, and sanctified by his Spirit, can neither totally nor finally fall away from the state of grace.” Read this way, “I never knew you” describes people who were never true believers, however they looked. The Confession draws the same line when it turns to assurance: “hypocrites and other unregenerate men may vainly deceive themselves with false hopes,” yet “such as truly believe in the Lord Jesus, and love him in sincerity, endeavoring to walk in all good conscience before him, may, in this life, be certainly assured that they are in the state of grace.” A true believer, it adds, may have that assurance “shaken, diminished, and intermitted.” The debate between this view and the next is set out in our comparison of Calvinism and Arminianism.

Wesleyan and Arminian

John Wesley preached a whole sermon on these verses and the two houses. He warned against building on “my orthodoxy, or right opinions,” on doing no harm, and even on good works, and he told those who preach in Christ’s name to “learn to hang naked upon the cross of Christ, counting all thou hast done but dung and dross.” Unlike Reformed churches, Methodists teach that a believer can fall away and return. The Methodist Articles of Religion say, “After we have received the Holy Ghost, we may depart from grace given, and fall into sin, and, by the grace of God, rise again and amend our lives.” Even so, Wesley read verse 23 as Calvin did, as a word to people Christ had never approved. On assurance, Wesley taught the witness of the Spirit, which he described as “an inward impression on the soul, whereby the Spirit of God directly witnesses to my spirit, that I am a child of God.” His note on verse 23 ends with a question he put to himself: “Lord, is it my case?”

Should a Christian be afraid of “I never knew you”?

The passage is a warning, and every tradition above takes it seriously. It is not a verdict on someone who turns to Christ asking for mercy, and several details in the text point that way.

The people in the scene plead their own record: “did we not prophesy in your name.” Nothing in their plea asks for mercy. The sermon Jesus has just preached blesses “the poor in spirit” and “those who mourn,” and gives its hearers words for their failures: “forgive us our debts.”

Jesus also told his disciples where to put their confidence. When the seventy-two came back rejoicing that demons obeyed them, he said, “do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:20). In John’s Gospel he promises, “whoever comes to me I will never cast out” (John 6:37).

The churches disagree about certainty, but each of them speaks to a person who has fallen or who doubts. The Council of Trent teaches that those who have fallen from grace “may be again justified” through Penance. The Orthodox reply quoted above says that “we always have the possibility to repent.” The Augsburg Confession promises “remission of sins whenever they are converted.” The Methodist Articles say that “the grant of repentance is not to be denied to such as fall into sin after justification.” The Westminster Confession, which holds that true believers never finally fall away, says that a believer whose assurance has faded is “supported from utter despair” until it “may, in due time, be revived.”