What Does Acts 10:15 Mean?
And the voice spoke to him again the second time, What God has cleansed, do not make common.
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
And the voice spake unto him again the second time, What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common.THE KEY
The verse makes your label answer to God’s act: cleansing comes first, and “common” cannot be the verdict afterward.
THE MEANING
God’s cleansing stands now as the decisive condition: what God has made clean is not common by your judgment. The verse exposes the human impulse to reinstate an old category after God has removed it.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie is that human judgment can undo what God has cleansed.
THE ROOT
καθαρίζω
katharizō
GROWS FROM
καθαρ-
kathar-
Clean; cleanse or purify.
The verb behind “cleansed” belongs to the same word family as “clean” and “cleansing”: God’s act establishes a changed condition, not merely a label. The sentence places that act beside a prohibition against reclassifying what God has made clean.
ALSO GROWS
katharos: Clean, pure.
καθαρός
This adjective shares the stem and names the condition produced by cleansing.
katharismos: Cleansing, purification.
καθαρισμός
This noun names the cleansing process or result, keeping the verse’s focus on what God has done.
κοινόω
koinoō
GROWS FROM
κοινο-
koino-
Common or shared; to make common, and by extension to treat as profane.
“make common” in this verse is koinoō. “Common” belongs to the family of κοινός, meaning shared or ordinary, and κοινωνία, meaning sharing in common. Here the command forbids placing in that ordinary or excluded category what God has cleansed.
ALSO GROWS
koinos: Common, shared, ordinary.
κοινός
This adjective is the source of the verb’s sense of making something common or treating it as common.
koinōnia: Sharing in common, participation.
κοινωνία
This related word makes the shared sense visible: “common” belongs to the language of what is held or shared in common.
THE PATTERN
When God cleanses, the former impurity no longer defines what has been made clean.
Remove my falling short with hyssop, and I am clean; tread me, and I am whiter than snow.How much more will the blood of the Anointed One, who through the breath of the ages brought himself near without blemish to God, cleanse our shared sight from dead works to serve the living God.If we speak our shortcomings into the open, he is steady and aligned, to release our shortcomings, and to cleanse us from all crookedness.THE THREAD
And he said to them, You know how unlawful it is for a man who is a Jew to cling to, or come near, one of another nation; but God has shown me that I should not call any man common or unclean.The same κοινός (koinos, common or shared) word appears, now attached explicitly to “any man.” The command reaches beyond what is on the table to the people you place in an excluded category.
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