What Does 1 Peter 1:24 Mean?
For all flesh is as grass, and all its weight is as the blossom of grass. The grass dries, and the blossom falls.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away:THE KEY
What looks weighty in human life is as brief as a flower: it falls.
THE MEANING
Your embodied life and all that carries weight are vivid now, yet they do not last. The flower’s fall holds both truths together: human splendor can be real and beautiful without being permanent.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The verse undoes the belief that visibility, status, or recognition gives a person lasting weight.
THE ROOT
δόξα
doxa
GROWS FROM
δοκ-
dok-
The Greek word family carries the sense of what is thought, regarded, or esteemed; in this verse’s biblical vocabulary, doxa also carries the sense of weight.
“Glory” can sound permanent, but doxa points to what is regarded as weighty, and Peter compares that weight to a flower that falls. Human splendor can matter deeply and still be passing.
ALSO GROWS
dokeō: to think, seem, or regard
δοκέω
The family links glory with what is held in someone’s view or esteem.
doxazō: to glorify or honor
δοξάζω
What is glorified is treated as weighty, yet the verse places even this honor beside a falling flower.
endoxos: honored, reputable, or distinguished
ἔνδοξος
Even distinction, the quality people esteem, belongs to the flower’s brief season.
THE PATTERN
Human vitality and splendor are like field growth: vivid for a season, then gone.
The grass dries, the flower withers, because the breath of the LORD blows upon it; surely the people is grass.As for humankind, his days are like grass; like the blossom of the field, so he blooms.For the sun rises with its scorching heat, and dries the grass, and its flower falls, and the beauty of its shape perishes; so also the rich one withers in his goings.THE THREAD
But the word of the Lord remains for the ages. And this is the word that was brought to you as good news.The next verse sets what endures beside the grass and flower that wither and fall. Human splendor passes; the word reaching you remains.
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