Mass Hallucination

Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world. The world is passing away, and also its lusts; but the one who does the will of God lives forever. 1 John 2:15-17 NASB

Love – Love and lust. John distinguishes the two, but perhaps we aren’t so careful. After all, John was Jewish. His culture and history provided him with a rich sense of the difference. Our culture and history don’t give us the same advantage. We are a mixed bag of Greek, Roman, pagan and Hebrew ideas. In order to understand just what it means to “not love the world,” maybe we ought to start with the Hebrew idea of love.

“Love in the OT is a spontaneous feeling which impels to self-giving, to grasping that which causes it, or to pleasurable activity. It involves the inner person. Since it has a sexual basis, it is directed supremely to persons; love for things or acts has a metaphorical aspect. God’s love is correlative to his personal nature, and love for God is love first for his person and only then for his word or law. Yet even in the extended sense love has an element of fervor or passion except in the case of lesser objects.”^[1] Quell helps us realize that our Puritan idea of agape isn’t quite right. Love isn’t duty stripped from emotion nor is it religious conviction divorced from passion and pleasure. In fact, in Hebrew thought love desires! This is why lust can so easily disguise itself as love. Lust also desires, but what it desires is the possession and control of the object. Lust wants the world my way rather than being impelled to make the world into God’s way. Both verbs are about explosive energy. Both are about passionate extension. There is a razor’s edge between yetzer ha’ra and yetzer ha’tov and sometimes you must be cut to know which is which.

John exhorts us not to love the kosmon or the kosmo. What is the difference? Certainly we reject (at least in principle) the values of the world. Power, greed, money for its own sake, sexual license, abuse of the weak, injustice, pride—you can add to the list. One of the most disturbing aspects of today’s culture is the deterioration of classical values such as respect, dignity, fair treatment, honor and restraint. For most of us, our cultural heritage makes it fairly clear when these values are threatened. In principle, at least. But that isn’t quite the same as the personal application, is it? How many times have we let something slide because, even though we knew it implied deterioration of the values we wanted to uphold, there was some small loophole of advantage in the mix? Death of the culture by a thousand excuses. If Torah is the guide, then Torah is the guide and it really doesn’t matter how you feel about capital punishment or homosexuality or religious tolerance. It’s just much easier said than done. But at least we can agree—in principle.

But what about that additional phrase, ta en to kosmo, “the things of the world”? Now we aren’t talking about values. We’re talking about everyday choices concerning acquisition, engagement, effort, verbalization and judgment. The things of the world pass constantly through our hands and our heads. How many advertisements will you see today? How many suggestions to prosper yourself, advance, gain advantage or discover a “secret” will flood your world in the next twenty-four hours? We may easily dismiss the theory of loving the world, but it’s not so easy to dismiss the details. In fact, most of our sins are the trivial kind, the excusable ones, the tiny missteps that no one (?) will really notice.

Why don’t we see our sin for what it really is? The explanation, and exhortation, is complicated, but you can find an analysis here.

Topical Index: world, love, things, agape, 1 John 2:15-17

^[1] Gottfried Quell, in Kittle, Abridged TDNT, p. 5.