I said:
"Biblehub.com shows the Greek word to be a perfect indicative active with the adverb "me", Greek for "not". So why do you claim it is a "present tense action"? You couldn't be more wrong."
I respectfully disagree. You have misapplied the Greek application to context.
So, basically, you are disagreeing with biblehub.com then. So I'm supposed to trust your "seems to imply" opinion over biblehub.com's work? Not gonna happen.
As further proof of this, Daniel Wallace points out:
"The idea seems to be both gnomic and continual: "everyone who continually believes." This is not due to the present tense only, but to the use of the present participle of πιστεύω, especially in soteriological contexts in the NT" (Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, pp. 620-621).
Even scholars have their "seems to..." moments. iow, they don't know either.
Regarding your obsession with "continually believes", which you take from the PIA: when a person comes to believe something (it can be anything), they don't just believe for a moment in time, and then go on their merry way not believing it.
But, everyone has changed their minds about something (it can be anything). At that moment, they no longer believe something (it can be anything) what they used to believe.
So when the Bible uses the PIA, it's just being obvious. I have never believed that the Bible would teach to believe "only for a moment in time" the gospel and you will be saved. That would be absurd, because it would be impossible to do.
Once you believe something, it takes more info before you would change your mind and not believe it anymore.
Jesus gave us an example of someone who did believe, and it was "continuous" UNTIL they changed their mind and fell away from their faith. The reason? Tests/temptations. That made them no longer believe. But before those came, they were believing continually.
In fact, it is impossible to not believe something continually. Whatever you believe you WILL CONTINUE to do so UNTIL something comes along that changes your mind/view.
Wallace further elaborates in a footnote:
-----------------------------
The present was the tense of choice most likely because the NT writers by and large saw continual belief as a necessary condition of salvation.
Or, what I said. All belief is continual. No one changes their mind/view moment by moment. Believing something one moment and then something else the next moment, and then back to the first thing, and on and on. That would be absurd.
So ALL believing is continuous. Those who belief in something (can be anything) in a yo-yo fashion (belief then non-belief, then back and forth) are just totally unstable and should be avoided.
The FACT that Jesus used the PIA for 'believe' in Luke 8:13 and followed that immediately with "for a while" proves your theory wrong. Once belief, as with the second soil, there is salvation and possession of eternal life. Then, after "a while", tests/temptation/etc come along and the person loses their faith. But, since they were given eternal life, Jesus SAID recipients shall never perish.
So, your challenge now is to prove that the gift of eternal life is given at some point distant to the moment of faith in Christ. Are you up to that?
Along these lines, it seems significant that the promise of salvation is almost always given to ὁ πιστεύων (cf. several of the above-cited texts), almost never to ὁ πιστεύσας (apart from Mark 16:16, John 7:39 and Heb 4:3 come the closest [the present tense of πιστεύω never occurs in Hebrews]).
I'm not impressed. Unless you can prove that Jesus gives the gift of eternal life sometime distant to the very moment of faith in Christ, you have no point.
Thus according to Wallace, the present active participle used here (JOHN 3:15; 16 and 18) as a substantive can carry the connotation of continuous belief as a condition in order to have eternal life (and thus also not perish).
As I have pointed out, ALL belief is continuous, except for those unstable yo-yo's who vacillate between belief and non-belief in a cycling fashion.