What Does Acts 16:28 Mean?
But Paul cried with a loud voice, saying, Do yourself no harm, for we are all here.
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
But Paul cried with a loud voice, saying, Do thyself no harm: for we are all here.THE KEY
The jailer’s fatal isolation is interrupted by a fact spoken aloud: the whole company is still here.
THE MEANING
At the edge of a fatal act, another voice enters the moment: stop; we are all still here. Fear can make catastrophe feel complete, but the scene holds facts beyond what fear can see. Here, the prisoners’ presence changes what the jailer believes is happening and what he is about to do.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The verse undoes the belief that disaster is already complete and death is the only remaining act: the others are still present, so the jailer’s terror is not the whole reality.
THE ROOT
κακόν
kakon
GROWS FROM
κακ
bad, evil, harmful
The word names harm as something that can be done; it does not name the jailer’s nature. The same root appears in words for doing harm and for malice, showing that the warning interrupts a harmful act before it becomes his next deed.
ALSO GROWS
kakopoieō: do evil or harm
κακοποιέω
This branch makes the root active: harm is something an action can produce, fitting the urgency of Paul’s warning.
kakia: malice, wickedness
κακία
The root can name a quality of evil as well as harm done; here the focus is the specific harm the jailer is about to inflict on himself.
THE PATTERN
When terror narrows a moment to death, a living presence interrupts it by speaking what remains.
And as he lay down and slept under a juniper tree, look, a messenger touched him, and said to him, "Rise and eat."The LORD is near to those whose heart is broken, and delivers those crushed in breath.And when he had said these things, he cried out with a great voice, Lazarus, come out!THE THREAD
Love does not work evil on the neighbor. So love is the fullness of the instruction.“Ill” here is κακόν (kakon), the same Greek word used for “harm” in Acts. Romans places this harm within what love does not enact toward a neighbor; Acts turns the warning toward the self whose life is immediately at risk.
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