When I say, "by their fruits you will know them", what's that mean to you? They ate "death", the fruit of Satan.
"When I say, 'by their fruits you will know them', what's that mean to you? They ate "death", the fruit of Satan."
When you say it, as when Jesus said it, I take that to mean that by looking at what people do and the outcomes the things they produce, you will be able to evaluate if they are good people or not. Thus, if you look at a group that some despise and others do not - such as the early Christians for instance - and you see an outpouring of real charity and the alleviation of human suffering, then you know these people are good.
Regardless of theological doctrines (or the lack thereof) the key reason we know the 19th Century Quakers and 20th Century Chinese Pentecostals are truly blessed by the Holy Spirit is the tremendous good they did in abolishing slavery and spreading the gospel in difficult circumstances. You know them by their fruits. That's what that means to me, and I would say that that's what that means as a general rule.
But when you say "They ate death, the fruit of Satan", it's highly imaged, but I don't get that out of the text. In the text, I have Adam and Eve eating fruit from a tree God has forbidden them. They do it at the serpent's temptation (the Genesis text doesn't say that the serpent is Satan, but we identify the serpent with Satan). God then comes and condemns them to death, and to exile from Eden, to pain and suffering and labor. God goes further and condemns not just them, but their offspring forever. It seems to me as though God is the one who metes out the death, not the fruit.