Face
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ὄψις names the outward look of a person, action, or situation: the surface an eye can take in before any judgment is formed. " The crowd had reasoned from custom and appearance rather than from what the law itself, and the healed man's restored condition, actually showed.
Reader summary
Full entry for ὄψις (G3799) · Open the biblical lexicon
ὄψις names the outward look of a person, action, or situation: the surface an eye can take in before any judgment is formed. " The crowd had reasoned from custom and appearance rather than from what the law itself, and the healed man's restored condition, actually showed.
The BSB source-word alignment has 3 aligned rows for this entry. Common renderings include face (2), outward appearances (1).
The source-word alignment first shows this entry at John 7:24. Its strongest book concentrations include John (2), Revelation (1).
ὄψις names the outward look of a person, action, or situation: the surface an eye can take in before any judgment is formed. In John 7:24, Jesus confronts a crowd that has just condemned him for healing on the Sabbath: "Stop judging by outward appearances, and start judging justly." The crowd had reasoned from custom and appearance rather than from what the law itself, and the healed man's restored condition, actually showed.
ὄψις is not John's word for hypocrisy or deception; it simply names the visual, surface-level data a viewer registers. The correction in John 7:24 does not forbid seeing; it forbids stopping at seeing. Righteous judgment must reckon with the whole of what the law intends, not merely with the shape of an action on the Sabbath calendar. Teachers can use this word to press congregations toward judgments that account for a text's full intent rather than settling for its surface resemblance to a rule.
John 7:24 is easy to flatten into a general call to avoid judging others, but its context is specific: a crowd has just condemned Jesus' Sabbath healing without reckoning with what the healing itself displayed. ὄψις names the problem precisely. Scripture consistently contrasts surface-level human judgment with judgment that reckons rightly with God's intent, from Samuel's caution that 'man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart' (1 Sam 16:7) to Jesus' own correction in John 7:24.
Stop judging by outward appearances, and start judging justly.”
John 7:24 records Jesus' direct command, "Stop judging by outward appearances, and start judging justly," as he corrects the crowd's verdict on his Sabbath healing.
If a boy can be circumcised on the Sabbath so that the law of Moses will not be broken, why are you angry with Me for making the whole man well on the Sabbath?
The command sits inside John 7's wider debate over whether Moses' law truly forbids the Sabbath healing the crowd just witnessed, showing appearance-based reasoning displacing the law's actual intent.
Have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?
James 2:1-4 issues a parallel warning against showing favoritism 'according to appearance,' applying the same appearance-versus-righteousness contrast to how a congregation treats the poor and the rich.
BSB source-word alignment connects this entry to exact verse rows, English rendering, source form, transliteration, and parsing.
How English Renders ItA compact distribution from source-word alignment before the full evidence tables.
Greek word. Appearance or countenance visible to sight, emphasizing what is seen rather than inner identity.
Textus Receptus witness, full corpus Greek token appearances from Scrivener 1894 Textus Receptus in the full New Testament corpus.
3 Greek text appearances shown. Linked morphology labels have verse guides.
the features, outward appearance
Read versethe features, outward appearance
Read versethe features, outward appearance
Read verseFull New Testament corpus: 260 chapters, 7,957 verses, 140,628 tokens. Data source: honza/textus-receptus (data only), with authority check against byztxt/greektext-textus-receptus.
How this word appears across different grammatical cases and numbers.
This word appears as a noun across 2 case and number patterns. The form changes show how the word functions in a sentence; they do not change the basic lexical meaning by themselves.
Verse guides are not available for this word yet, so verse references remain plain evidence markers.
John 7:24 is easy to flatten into a general call to avoid judging others, but its context is specific: a crowd has just condemned Jesus' Sabbath healing without reckoning with what the healing itself displayed. ὄψις names the problem precisely. The crowd saw a Sabbath-day action and stopped there; they did not ask what the law's own purpose required of them.
Jesus does not forbid discernment. He forbids discernment that never moves past appearance to the substance a passage, a person, or an action actually carries. Preachers can use this text to press congregations to keep reading past the first impression a text or a person gives, especially when a surface reading conflicts with what the fuller context requires.
This word opens a teaching doorway on the difference between surface impression and righteous judgment: a congregation that stops at ὄψις repeats the John 7 crowd's error of condemning a genuine work of God because it did not fit an expected pattern. Teachers can use it to press hearers past first impressions toward judgments that reckon with a text's or a person's fuller intent.
It corrects readings that treat 'do not judge' as a call to suspend all discernment, when John 7:24 actually calls for a deeper, more accountable form of judgment, not less judgment. Frame ὄψις as the raw visual data a judgment starts from, not the standard a judgment should stop at.
John.7.24
Frame ὄψις as the raw visual data a judgment starts from, not the standard a judgment should stop at. Linguistically, ὄψις should be allowed to name outward appearance or look without carrying claims the cited passages do not make.
Scripture consistently contrasts surface-level human judgment with judgment that reckons rightly with God's intent, from Samuel's caution that 'man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart' (1 Sam 16:7) to Jesus' own correction in John 7:24.
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