What Does 1 Peter 1:6 Mean?
In this you leap, though for a little while now, if it must be, you ache in many-colored trials.
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
Wherein ye greatly rejoice, though now for a season, if need be, ye are in heaviness through manifold temptations:THE KEY
The same season can hold both joy and grief: testing can wound the present without erasing the hope that anchors rejoicing.
THE MEANING
Your joy can be real while many forms of testing bring grief in this limited present season. The sorrow names what the pressure feels like now; it does not cancel the hope in which your rejoicing is rooted.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
This undoes the belief that grief means joy is false, or that a joyful person must feel no sorrow.
THE ROOT
πειρασμοῖς
peirasmois
GROWS FROM
πειρ-
peir-
to attempt, test, or put through trial
The Greek noun translated “temptations” can also name trials or tests; its range is wider than a lure toward wrongdoing. The verse describes varied pressure that brings real grief, without suggesting that the pain is imaginary.
ALSO GROWS
peirazō: To test or put someone through a trial.
πειράζω
This verbal branch shows the testing sense held within the noun translated “temptations.”
peirasmos: A trial, test, or temptation.
πειρασμός
This is the same noun in its dictionary form, linking Peter’s phrase to other passages about testing.
λυπηθέντες
lypēthentes
GROWS FROM
λυπ-
lyp-
grief, sorrow, felt distress
“ache” in this verse is lypēthentes. The Greek form translated “heaviness” comes from λυπέω, “to grieve”; it names felt sorrow, not merely a weight. This word family also describes deep grief, so the verse holds sorrow and rejoicing together without asking the grief to disappear.
ALSO GROWS
lypē: Sorrow or distress.
λύπη
This noun makes clear that the heaviness in the verse is experienced grief.
lypeō: To grieve or cause sorrow.
λυπέω
This verb is the source of the form used here, presenting grief as a real experience of the present season.
perilypos: Very sorrowful or deeply grieved.
περίλυπος
The same word family can name profound sorrow, showing that rejoicing does not depend on emotional numbness.
THE PATTERN
Present distress can be fully acknowledged while joy remains rooted in something it does not erase.
Yet I will leap in the LORD; I will dance in the God of my deliverance.And not only that, but we also boast in the pressures, knowing that they work out a bearing up under.Count it all joy, my brothers, when you fall into many-colored trials.THE THREAD
Count it all joy, my brothers, when you fall into many-colored trials.James uses the same Greek noun πειρασμός (peirasmos, trial or testing) that Peter uses for “temptations.” Peter makes the emotional reality explicit: these trials can bring grief now while joy is still present.
Read the SDV Bible.
Every verse has a Deep Dive in the app.
The iPhone Bible app with the Selah Decoded Version.
Does something in this reading look wrong? Tell us