Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.
Matthew 7:7-8 (KJV)
A man I have known a long time told me he had asked for the same thing every morning for eleven years and had started wondering what was wrong with the way he asked. Nothing in that sentence says anything is wrong with the way he asked. There is no condition in it anywhere, and the other gospel that carries it names what the Father hands over.
Nothing in the sentence narrows it
I went looking for a qualifier in the Greek and there is not one. No if, no unless, no clause about the state of the asker. Three commands, three promises, joined by and. The word behind every one is the ordinary Greek word for all, and no manuscript tradition softens it.
The second verse opens with for, so it gives a reason for the command instead of adding terms to it.
Luke tells it and names the gift
Both gospels run the same argument. If a son asks his father for bread he does not get a stone, and if he asks for a fish he does not get a snake, so how much more will the Father give. Luke adds a third pair, an egg and a scorpion, and puts the whole thing directly after a story about a man who gets what he wants from a friend at midnight for no better reason than that he will not go away.
Matthew ends that sentence with good things. Luke ends it somewhere else.
If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?
Luke 11:13 (KJV)
That is the same promise with the object named, and not a King James oddity: Westcott-Hort, the Nestle text, the Byzantine text and the one the King James worked from all read Holy Spirit here. Jerome’s Latin and the Greek text the Orthodox church authorized in 1904 read a good spirit instead, which still names a spirit rather than a thing. Matthew’s good things is the open hand, and Luke says what is in it.
Both pictures are about the father
Read the two illustrations again and notice who is being examined in them. The bread and the stone, the fish and the snake. Nothing in either picture asks what the son wanted the bread for, or whether he had been good that week, or how long he had been asking. A father handing over a stone would be monstrous, and that is the whole weight of the argument. Neither picture puts the son on trial.
It runs toward confidence. With God all things are possible turns out to work the same way, answering a question about who can be saved.
Every other promise carries a clause
This is where the sentence stops standing alone. I went through the New Testament for the same promise and found it in twelve other places.
Every one of them has a clause on it. In my name, five times across three chapters of John. If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, once more in John. Believing in Matthew, believe that ye receive them in Mark. If two of you shall agree. In faith, nothing wavering, which James attaches just after the promise rather than inside it. Because we keep his commandments. And the heaviest of them, in John’s first letter, is if we ask any thing according to his will.
That last one is worth reading slowly. The sentence stops at he heareth us, and the sentence after it does hand over the petitions we desired, but both of them are inside according to his will. What people carry away is the second half with the clause left off.
Not one of those clauses is in Matthew 7, and not one was spoken to the same room. Reading Matthew through them is a move the reader makes, and Matthew did not make it.
James names a way asking fails
Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts.
James 4:3 (KJV)
The word behind amiss is an adverb. It attaches to the asking, not to the thing asked for, and James then spells out what he means by it. He is not saying some requests are too large. A request can be made for a reason that turns it into an appetite with a prayer wrapped round it.
What this does not tell you
It does not tell you why the man has been asking for eleven years. Nothing in this series will tell you that, and any article that offers to is guessing at a life from a distance.
What I can say is that the verse itself does not put him at fault, and neither does anything in the paragraph around it. The sentence right after the how much more begins with therefore and turns the whole argument outward, into how to treat other people. Matthew is not building a procedure for getting things.
For a long time it read as a mechanism
What I had was a set of instructions, read as though the asking were an input and the thing asked for were the output, and the parts of the Bible that complicate it were fine print. What changed it was Luke, and specifically the plainness of Luke, naming the gift as if he assumed nobody would be disappointed by it.
The promise is that the hand opens. Matthew says what comes out of it is good, Luke says what it is, and neither of them is describing a list that comes back filled. What the two of them agree on is the father in the picture, who has never handed anybody a stone.