What Does Matthew 7:20 Mean?
So then, by their fruits you will know them.
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
Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.THE KEY
Fruit is inner nature made visible: what a life yields is how the person becomes known.
THE MEANING
What your life repeatedly produces makes the nature shaping you visible to others. Recognition comes through the fruit itself, which can be seen and encountered, rather than through a claimed identity.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The verse undoes the belief that a convincing appearance or religious claim proves a person’s nature; what the life produces tells the truth.
THE ROOT
καρπῶν
karpōn
GROWS FROM
καρπός
karpos
Fruit, produce, yield.
“fruits” in this verse is karpōn. The image is not a label placed on a person, but what a living thing yields. The fruit makes the nature beneath it legible through its visible results.
ALSO GROWS
karpophoreō: To bear fruit or produce.
καρποφορέω
This verb names the act of yielding, showing that fruit is the outcome of a living source.
akarpos: Fruitless, unproductive.
ἄκαρπος
The same word-family can name the absence of yield, making what a life does or does not produce part of what can be seen.
ἐπιγνώσεσθε
epignōsesthe
GROWS FROM
γινώσκω
ginōskō
To know, perceive, or recognize.
“know” in this verse is epignōsesthe. This verb carries the sense of coming to recognize or perceive. The fruit is encountered evidence: what becomes visible lets the person be known beyond a name or appearance.
ALSO GROWS
gnōsis: Knowing or knowledge.
γνῶσις
This noun shares the knowing-root, linking recognition to what becomes known.
epignōsis: Recognition or fuller knowledge.
ἐπίγνωσις
This related form reinforces the movement from seeing evidence to recognizing what is there.
THE PATTERN
A source becomes recognizable through the fruit its life produces.
And he becomes like a tree planted by the channels of the waters, that gives its fruit in its season; its leaf does not wither; whatever he does, he breaks through.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.But the fruit of the breath is love, joy, wholeness, slowness to heat, kindness, goodness, trust, gentleness, a grip on oneself; against such things there is no instruction.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.Matthew 12:33 binds the same fruit-word, καρπός (karpos), to a form of the same knowing-root, γινώσκω (ginōskō). The tree’s nature becomes recognizable through the quality of what it produces.
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