Love of the World?

I’ve recently been meditating on 1 John2:15-16 in the context of how Christians should “be” in the world. This is partly due to the sermon preached for my little congregation last Lord’s Day.

As I meditated on God’s Word I observed that while we must live disciplined lives, repudiating what we know to be wrong and living out what we know to be right, we must also walk with caution between the Law and Grace. I think that we must be prudent in what we consider evil and worthy of rejection and what is in fact good and a blessing for us as we sojourn through this essentially foreign land we call earth or the world.

In the verses from 1 John 2, it is easy to hear that we must reject the world—indeed isn’t that what John forthrightly tells us: “Do not love the world nor the things in the world” (1 John 15a)? So far, no problem. But here we must be careful to understand what exactly John is referring to when he speaks of the world. So we read in verse 16 that by “the world” (or more exactly the "things of the world") John really means or intends certain characteristics: the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life. These are the things we must be on guard against, not the world as part of God’s creation, fallen though it certainly is.

This “love of the world” we must reject or wake up to is illustrated well by the reaction of those neighbours and other contemporaries of Noah after he had been instructed by God that the earth—the world—was about to be destroyed by a flood (Gen. 6:13). We read in Matthew, “in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and they did not understand until the flood came and took them all away” (Matt. 24:38-39). Now “eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage” are not in themselves sinful and do not act as examples of the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life. It was the unthinking reaction to Noah and the looming reality of which he was the herald that illustrates the attitude of those who love the world. The description of Noah’s friends and contemporaries illustrates a kind of dependant stupor. They were oblivious—they “did not understand”—what was about to befall them or the reasons for it. It illustrates the need for a shift in one’s conscious awareness, a paradigm shift of extreme magnitude. The friends of Noah were on "auto-pilot" and could not understand that they needed an "attitude adjustment."

And it is here we must tread lightly. Too often it is the world as such—that is, the physical, tangible, and touchable created place we call the earth or the world—that we are warned against as being evil and worthy of rejection, rather than those qualities found within it as a result of Adam’s sin and subsequent fall and the cursing of the earth/world by God as a penalty for such disobedience. It is easy to think that we must employ our powers of discipline to reject the world—and many of the pleasures it yet affords—in order to be “good” Christians. One problem with this is that if we are not more critical in our thinking, we could easily be slipping into a quasi-Gnostic dichotomy of “physical equals evil; spiritual equals good.” Therein lies the real danger. The earth (and our physical bodies which are part and parcel of the earth) has been given to us as the venue in which we are to work out our salvation (with fear and trembling, knowing the dangers) and so we must be ever mindful of the implications of this fact. God did not remove His people from the earth or her temptations, rather He has put us here and has purposefully left us here so that through being in the world, we may, following in Christ (John 17:13-19), overcome it for our good. That we are to be in this world is God's will for us. To reject wholesale the world He has given for our sanctification is to reject His will and good purpose for His sons and daughters.

The world, we must always remember, was created by God. It was created “good, very good.” And while it has been cursed as a result of sin, it is nevertheless the world created by God and will be the only world until after the Judgment and the emergence of the new (Rev. 21).

To reject the world as such is a mistake for it is not itself evil and we are still blessed by God as an aspect of common grace (Ecc. 5:18; Matt. 5:45) but it is rather the heart of each and every person who has not understood the Fundamental Reality behind all appearances that is the real problem and from it proceed all the evils we must be on guard against.

Soli Deo Gloria.