What Does Acts 5:20 Mean?
Go, stand and speak in the temple to the people all the words of this life.
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
Go, stand and speak in the temple to the people all the words of this life.THE KEY
The life named here has a voice: it is spoken openly where people gather.
THE MEANING
The verse places the words of this life among people, in the shared space of the temple. The movement from going, to standing, to speaking gives that life a public voice.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that living truth belongs only to inward experience; the words of this life are spoken openly among people.
THE ROOT
ζωῆς
zōēs
GROWS FROM
ζάω
zaō
To live; to be alive.
The phrase calls these words “of this life,” tying what is spoken to ζωή (zōē, life) as a living reality. This word family also reaches from being alive to making alive, giving the phrase a generative quality.
ALSO GROWS
zōn: Living; alive.
ζῶν
This branch makes clear that the root describes a state of being alive, not life as a detached idea.
zōopoieō: To make alive; to give life.
ζωοποιέω
This compound shows the family can name life becoming active in another.
THE PATTERN
Words from God sustain life and make it present among people.
And he bent you low, and made you hunger, and fed you with manna, which you had never perceived, nor had your fathers, so that he might make you perceive that humankind does not live by bread alone, but by every word that goes out from the mouth of the LORD does humankind live.This is my comfort in my bowing low, for your word has brought me to life.It is the breath that gives life. The flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you, they are breath, and they are life.THE THREAD
It is the breath that gives life. The flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you, they are breath, and they are life.John sets ῥήματα (rhēmata, utterances) beside ζωή (zōē, life), the same Greek word family that frames this verse. That makes the connection explicit: the spoken words are named as life itself.
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