I originally thought this article would have a different title. When I decided to do an article on the word prevent, I fully expected my title to be something like “Prevent Is an Actual False Friend in the KJV.” I chose that as my working title because everyone that I have ever read or listened to regarding the word prevent in I Thessalonians 4:15 has claimed that it doesn’t have the same meaning that we ascribe to that word today. However, the more I studied this word and the underlying Greek word, the more convinced I became that prevent is the best word to use both here in I Thessalonians and in every other passage where it occurs in the KJV.

My wife recently led her class through a word study on worship, and I asked her to share her notes here for the benefit of my readers.

Many times, we look to our culture to answer questions about how we should interact with God. But every culture on the planet has sinful influences, so when we want to know more about God, we should look only to the Bible. A comment in my Sunday School class about the different ways people worship God led to this word study using the Masoretic and TR translated with KJV.

One of the major factors that led to the War of 1812 was the practice of impressment.  Under English law, a ship of the British navy could board any vessel and force just about any able-bodied British subjects on that vessel into naval service.  This practice often led to the impressment of American citizens into the British navy if Americans traveling abroad could not prove their citizenship. 
 
Because of this, America passed the 1796 Act for the Relief and Protection of American Seamen, which was designed to protect American sailors from being impressed into the navies of foreign nations.  Part of that protection consisted of giving American sailors certificates of citizenship to show foreign governments that they were in fact citizens of the United States.  Here is the text of the 1796 act requiring these certificates to be made available:

Mark Ward’s handling of the word let is a deliberate attempt to manipulate his audience into accepting a falsehood. This is a textbook case of deceptive framing—where key details are selectively presented, linguistic meaning is distorted, and critical context is omitted to shape a misleading narrative. Ward doesn’t address this supposed “false friend” very often. Apart from a passing reference in an article, I’ve only been able to find a single thirty-second segment devoted to this word in one of Ward’s videos, but the amount of deception that Ward managed to cram into that tiny segment of video is literally mind-blowing.

One of the joys of writing is seeing your work have an influence on others.  I published my first piece of online content twenty years ago on the first rendition of this website, and I've been blessed to experience a lot of that joy over the years.  When I started this blog, my goal was simply to catalogue a few of my studies in a format that I could access easily for my own reference.  That quickly morphed into sharing my work with others, and now, my articles are read by thousands of people all across the globe.  Writing has become a great responsibility but also one of my greatest joys.

Over the past twenty years, I've had the opportunity to make small but significant contributions in four fields of study, theology, history, law, and medicine.  To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of my website, I've put together a collection of my most memorable and, hopefully, my most impactful articles.

Mark Ward proclaims that the phrase wait on is a “false friend” based on a story about a woman misunderstanding Romans 12:7 and a single piece of evidence. Ward’s sole piece of evidence is that the Oxford English Dictionary says that the verbal phrase wait on which was used in Romans 12:7 is obsolete. That’s it. Ward didn’t bother to investigate this phrase any further than that. The OED said the phrase was obsolete, Ward believed it, and that settled it.

Out of all of Mark Ward’s so-called “false friends” that I’ve studied so far, the word convenient has come the closest to being an actual “false friend,” yet Ward has devoted remarkably little effort to studying and discussing this word. I’ve found Ward’s scholarship to be sloppy in general, but the section of his book devoted to the word convenient is even worse. If Ward actually wanted to prove his case with logic and reason, this term would be one of his prime examples, but I suspect that it lacks the emotional appeal to fit within his normal modus operandi. I’m going to begin by correcting Ward’s shoddy scholarship and presenting the case that he should have made before arguing against that case and demonstrating that convenient is not a “false friend” after all.

Mark Ward claims the word commendeth is a “false friend” he has “rediscovered for the twenty-first century.” Yes. Those are his exact words, and lest we think Ward is being facetious with that claim, he immediately follows it with “I’m not exaggerating.” I’m not entirely sure what Ward thinks he has rediscovered, but his video on this word is one of the worst examples of scholarship I’ve ever seen.

John 14:2 is a passage that is often brought up in discussions of the differences between the KJV and other translations, and it is no surprise to find the word mansions from this passage listed among Mark Ward’s “false friends.” In his video on this word, Ward follows the typical anti-KJV argument by saying that “there’s an obvious contextual conflict. What in the world does it mean for the Father’s house to have many mansions inside it? Mansions are houses.” Regarding the Greek word translated as “mansions,” Ward claims, “The word means ‘room.’” Room is the word that most modern translations use here, and it has become widely accepted as accurate. Ward claims that the KJV translators also understood the Greek word to mean room and that they only used the word mansion because that word used to mean “room.” Ward is mistaken on several counts.

Let me begin this article by explaining why I am going through these “false friends” in this order. I am not just choosing the “false friends” that are the easiest to refute. I was asked to review the “false friends” that Ward mentioned in his debate with Dan Haifley before moving on to the rest of Ward’s claims. This seemed reasonable to me since I expected Ward to have brought out his best examples for the occasion. I thought that this approach would allow me to deal with the most difficult and challenging words first before moving on to Ward’s weaker examples. Unfortunately, it appears that Ward did not use his best examples in the debate. (At least, I hope for the sake of his followers that those were not his best examples, that those are not the examples that have convinced so many young pastors to latch on to Mark Ward’s teachings.)