What Does Matthew 7:18 Mean?
A good tree cannot make evil fruit, and a rotten tree cannot make good fruit.
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
A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.THE KEY
The fruit is the tree’s own work: what appears on the branch reveals the condition of the source.
THE MEANING
Your life bears the condition of what is alive within you: harmful fruit does not naturally come from a whole source, and wholesome fruit does not come from a rotten one. What appears on the outside makes that inward condition visible.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that a result can be separated from the condition that produces it; the fruit reveals the source.
THE ROOT
ποιεῖν
poiein
GROWS FROM
ποιέω
poieō
to do, make, or produce
“make” in this verse is poiein. The Greek verb is the ordinary word for doing or making: the tree “does” its fruit. The verse presents the fruit as the tree’s own work, bound to the nature of the source.
ALSO GROWS
poiētēs: doer, maker
ποιητής
The same root names the one who does something, echoing the tree’s fruit as its own expression.
poiēma: a thing made, workmanship
ποίημα
This branch makes visible the link between a source and what it produces.
καρπός
karpos
GROWS FROM
καρπ-
karp-
fruit, produce
Fruit is the visible produce of a living source. Its word-family also speaks of bearing fruit and of being fruitless, holding together the outcome and the capacity that gives rise to it.
ALSO GROWS
karpophoreō: bear fruit
καρποφορέω
This verb turns the noun into a process: the fruit is what the tree bears from its own life.
akarpos: fruitless, unfruitful
ἄκαρπος
The opposite branch shows that fruitfulness or its absence describes a source’s visible condition.
THE PATTERN
A living source is revealed by the kind of produce it bears.
And God said, "Let the earth sprout green growth, the seed-bearing plant, and the fruit tree making fruit after its kind, whose seed is in it, upon the earth." And it was so.For every tree is known by its own fruit. For people do not gather figs from thorns, nor do they gather grapes from a bramble bush.Can a fig tree, my brothers, bear olives, or a vine bear figs? Neither can a spring yield both salt and sweet water.THE THREAD
Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree rotten and its fruit rotten, for the tree is known by its fruit.The Greek words for “corrupt” (σαπρός, sapros, rotten) and “fruit” (καρπός, karpos, fruit) recur here. This verse makes the link explicit: the tree is known through its fruit because the two carry one condition.
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