to come up to someone or something, to approach so as to be in its presence
At its core this word is simple movement with a destination in view: a person closes the distance to someone or something and stands before it. The Gospels and Acts use it constantly in this plain way, for crowds, disciples, suppliants, and officials coming up to Jesus or to one another.
The same act of approaching carries deeper weight when the one approached is God. The letter to the Hebrews turns the ordinary verb into its key word for worship: believers "draw near" to God, to his throne, and to the heavenly Jerusalem. This is not a different action but the same approach lifted to its highest object, echoing how worshippers in the older covenant came forward to the altar and the sanctuary.
Once, in the Pastoral Letters, the word stretches further still: to come over to a body of teaching, to attach oneself to it and accept it. The thread holding all of this together is a person moving toward something to take up a relationship with it, whether a place, a person, God, or a teaching.
Nuances
Whether the verb here means to assent to and attach oneself to sound teaching, or carries its ordinary sense of approaching or applying oneself to it.
- majorityA figurative extension: to come over to, agree with, and hold to sound words, set against the false teacher who will not.; BDAG, s.v. προσέρχομαι; I. H. Marshall, The Pastoral Epistles (ICC)
- minorityThe ordinary sense, to approach or devote oneself to the words, without a separate figurative meaning.; G. W. Knight, The Pastoral Epistles (NIGTC)