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S i d e b a r
Binding and Loosing in Greek
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This Rock
Volume 16, Number 3
 March 2005 
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Matthew 16:18–19 uses a very rare Greek construction—the future perfect periphrastic tense—which employs the future tense of the verb to be along with the perfect participle. According to Hewett:
"This tense . . . occurs rarely in the GNT [Greek New Testament], but the student will do well to be familiar with it. Consider Matthew 16:19 (two examples) and 18:18 (two examples): ‘Whatever you bind on the earth will have been bound [estai dedemenon] in heaven and whatever you loose on the earth will have been loosed [estai lelumenon] in heaven.’ The construction declares that a completed heavenly action and its continuing results will come to exist on earth upon the completion of a future earthly event" (ibid., 170).
Similar to John 20:21–23, we see that a future event of God’s power being released "from heaven" is contingent upon a future event of Peter and his successors (as well as the apostles and their successors in Matthew 18:18) acting on earth. This could be a dictionary entry for the definition of a priest.
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