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Studiocam
Introduction
It’s been a long growing season for grass this year because the soil temperature has remained unseasonably high for quite a while, but nevertheless in the last couple of weeks I’ve started feeding a bit of ordinary quality hay in the late afternoon that I got at a good price to the suckler cows just to bulk them up a bit.
The first day I fed it I just threw some into the trailer and lobbed it over the fence … I just grabbed a big flap off a big bale to throw it into the field and immediately my hands closed onto some spiky little weed or other with spines too small to notice that went right down into my hands unobserved … but that damaged my hands immediately and took ages to get out.
Obviously, I dropped that flap of hay immediately.
It took a good while to pick those fine little spines out and now I know not to grab that stuff with my hands at all.
It is a no-no because (while the cows love it) that stuff is pretty destructive for human hands.
You mustn’t handle it.
You can’t SEE the threat, but it harms you.
Now in this short passage in 1 John 2:15-17 John tells his readers the most basic thing authentic believers really must NOT do (but that they really will need telling not to do because they naturally tend to do it and often can’t see beforehand that it WILL hurt). Then John gives two reasons to support what he’s saying.
This is relevant to us because we really do live in a world that does a lot of telling people to ‘follow their gut’, to ‘go with the flow’ or ‘to do what comes naturally’ … just as I would naturally grab armfuls of that hay … not seeing why not.
But John is saying that to do that is disastrous and he gives two very compelling reasons why.
But before we get to the reasons for it, John first of all tells us this big thing that authentic believers really need telling not to do, and spells out a bit of what he means by it.
Now, you might think it is self-evident, but we constantly need telling this …
• Don’t even think of doing this, v. 15
v. 15 “Do not love the world or anything in the world.”
DROP it - it’s got thorns in it!
Now, the body of the letter is going to have this constant theme of overcoming the world which reaches its culmination in 5:4-5 which says: “everyone born of God overcomes the world.
This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world?
Only the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God”.
So, the impermanent, temporary nature of ‘the world’ gives you the scaffolding from which the rest of the book gets built and from which all subsequent topics in the book hang.
John’s main point (from which the other sub-points emerge) is that in the light of eternity all the things in this world that people live for and build their lives around are temporary at best and from there they blend across into rebellion against God towards the worst end of the spectrum.
So the converse is the positive truth: only a life motivated by the desire to obey God and lived in obedience to His eternal values will survive the passing of this world, with all its desires and demands.
Living for this world and the things in it invests in what is temporary and passes.
Living for the will of God invests in what lasts for ever.
And that’s why John writes this, the first of ten imperatives or commands in this letter (2:24, 27, 28; 3:1, 7, 13: 4:1 (twice) & 5:21.
Loving the world (which is full of opposition to God) is portrayed as the opposite to loving God (because the world you are loving is opposed to God).
Loving the world is to want to get stuck into things that are fixed in their rebellion against God and His will.
So John is telling us that love for the world and for the Father at the same time is not possible.
We are about to have John spell out why loving the world and the things of this world is all investment folly.
• One life - invest it with the Father, vv. 15b-17a
vv. 15b-16 “If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them.
For everything in the world—
the lust of the flesh,
the lust of the eyes, and
the pride of life
—comes not from the Father but from the world.”
Loving the Father and the world, John is saying, is not possible.
Let’s look at that …
• Loving the Father and the world is not possible, v. 15b-16
vv. 15b-16 “If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them.
For everything in the world—
the lust of the flesh,
the lust of the eyes, and
the pride of life
—comes not from the Father but from the world.”
Now, immediately some wag is going to say ‘but God so LOVED the WORLD, that He gave His One and Only Son …’
So let’s just please deal with that …
What DOES ‘loving the world’ mean here?
In John 3:16, which so famously tells that God so LOVED the world, the parts of ‘the world’ that God loves are those for whom Christ is specified to have died!
God loved the world so much that He gave His One and Only Son … not to endorse the worldliness of the world but so that whoever IN the world, believes in the Jesus given for them might have everlasting life.
What we’re saying is that John 3:16 is very particular about defining the PEOPLE of the world for whom Christ died as being the referent of ‘the world’ in those verses.
So it is important to notice that what 1 John defines ‘the world’ as in these verses we’re looking at today … the referent of ‘the world’ here in these verses … is specified not as those who go on and believe in Jesus but as the desire of their flesh, the desire of the eyes and the pride of life!
What characterises ‘the world’ that we are NOT to love that 1 John is talking about?
• Desire of the flesh
ἡ ἐπιθυμία τῆς σαρκὸς is a subjective genitive so that what it is referring to is ‘that which the flesh desires’.
Now, σάρξ is almost always used with a negative connotation in Scripture to mean not the physical body but what the physical body of flesh desires … the impulses of human behaviour that arise from natural … even God-given … human needs.
In John’s Gospel ‘flesh’ is often that which is merely human as opposed to Divine - and God is all-holy but humanity is full of sin.
Of course, the desires of the flesh may be only natural, but fallen human nature takes those natural desires and drives people to satisfy them in ways God doesn’t intend, so:
· natural hunger gets subverted into gluttony,
· a little of the wine God created to gladden the heart (as Psalm 104:15 puts it) gets subverted into drunkenness and
· the sex that God created to cement the closest covenant in human relationships gets perverted into sexual immorality.
So Karen Jobes helpfully summarises: “The desire of the flesh is simply the desire for those things that pertain merely to this life, which, in the light of eternity, count for nothing (John 6:63).”
That verse in John 6:63 is where the Lord says to His disciples at a testing time:
“The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing.
The words I have spoken to you—they are full of the Spirit and life.”
Whereas a life, centred on the fulfilment of its physical desires BY WHATEVER MEANS IT PLEASES, gets spent on things of negative lasting or eternal value.
John associates flesh with the fallen world order, which lies under the power of the evil one.
And that evil one works also through ‘the desire of the eyes’ … the second characteristic of what John means here by ‘the world’.
• Desire of the eyes
Naturally enough ‘the desire of the eyes’ seems to suggest lust to readers in an age when pornography proliferates.
But in these verses it is set apart from ‘the desires of the flesh’, as well as from ‘the pride of life’, so that’s probably not what John means by this phrase.
What MIGHT he mean, then?
The overall context is about how temporary this world is, so this phrase probably refers to the short-sighted desire for only what you can see physically with your eyes.
Of course, we’ve really got quite a problem here because that almost defines our age and culture!
The whole of our scientific method is based on what you can observe – or see – by some means or other!
And the trouble with that scientific method CAN be that the things that are NOT seen are very real too.
As believers we need to recognise this and live for those unseen things too, as Hebrews 11:1-2 says:
“Now faith is confidence in what we hope for
and assurance about what we do not see.
This is what the ancients were commended for.”
The pride of the eyes needs to be met with the sure knowledge that it is the things that are unseen that are eternal … now THERE’s a thought!
There’s a small point to be made here about ‘eyes’ and ‘seeing’ in John’s writings.
It’s possibly important to notice that ‘the eyes’ in John’s Gospel is used twelve times in the story of Jesus healing the blind man in John 9.
That sign is a sign which makes the point that Jesus must heal spiritual blindness, allowing people to see not merely that which is of this earth and physical but that which has been revealed from above.
You get a similar distinction made in 1 John 1:1 where John hasn’t simply seen with his eyes but also perceived the SIGNIFICANCE of ‘that which was from the beginning’.
To sum it up quickly then, the point made here about the desire of the eyes is to NOT love the things of this world that look so real and tangible but have no (revealed) eternal value.
And then the last of these three things that ‘the world’ is about is ‘the pride of life’.
And the third thing that John tells us characterises ‘the world’ we are not to love is the pride of life.
I’m sure you’ve heard any number of sermons on all manner of moral issues, but have you ever heard a sermon on the pride of life?
• Pride of life
What IS this?!
To start with now, let me point out that this word here for life is not the word for ‘eternal life’ … ζωή
The word here is the much less common word in scripture: βίος, which really relates to the period or course of life, and then by extension, that by which life is sustained (resources, wealth, goods).
John is pointing to those people whose security is in their worldly wealth and ‘substance’ (what they’ve GOT), which makes them so proud as to overlook their need for and dependence upon Almighty God.
Proverbs 18:11 describes this attitude of mind:
“The wealth of the rich is their fortified city;
they imagine it a wall too high to scale.”
Now, these are the sorts of things that belong to ‘the world’ … all that is not of God, Christ, truth, light …
So, the first reason not to love the world was that loving the world is the opposite of loving the Father in the way that leads to life …
And the second reason to not love the world (in the way John defines that) now comes next here …
• What’s in the world is passing away, v. 17a
“The world and its desires pass away”
John shifts our attention now, then, to the second quality of the world …. it is TEMPORARY by nature and by definition.
You KNOW that’s the case.
You can SEE IT HAPPENING!
We have this thing in Physics called ‘Entropy’.
It is observable in the physical world.
It is a word that describes lack of order or predictability, the gradual decline into disorder in isolated systems.
Let me put this another way.
What do you have to do to make a metal component rust?
Or what do you have to do to get rid of the branch that has fallen off the tree?
Or what do you have to do with a woolly jumper to get it to rot down (eventually) into the Carbon, hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Sulphur that it is composed of?
Actually, the answer to all those questions is ‘nothing’, isn’t it?
You just leave it there for a bit and it just happens.
That’s because of the truth of what John is saying here: what’s in the world is passing away … and in fact it is doing that before your very eyes.
This world is not a safe place for your investments!
By investing in THIS world-stuff you invest in a very unstable and rapidly declining asset.
The world we observe, and the desires that characterise living for it not for God, are passing away.
But look here …
• Investing in living for God’s will invests in what will last, v. 17b
“but whoever does the will of God lives forever.”
Having been cleansed by Christ’s blood, John’s hearers have come to know God in New Covenant relationship and they have overcome the evil one.
This is the reassurance he gave in the preceding verses which we looked at last time, as John turned to fix his congregation in those house churches around Ephesus with his beady preacher’s eye and addressed them personally and directly.
In contrast to these readers of this book, the world and all that it desires (food, drink, sex, money, the things seen and the over-weaning pride in one’s life that rejects any need for God) … all that stuff (unlike them) is passing away.
Here’s the problem: we see the tangible things of this world as having lasting value because they look and feel so immediate, so tangible, so CONCRETE.
But it is in fact GOD Who is eternal and these other things do not last and have no eternal value … they are on the way out.
So it is only the one who has been brought out of reliance on things in this world and transferred their reliance on Almighty God, and His Christ and His Cross … turning away from the things of this world that people seek solace in and rely on but which are transient … only THAT person will last and will live for ever.
• Conclusion
These verses about what you love are all very revealing … they reveal whether you love the world or the Father.
And more than that, they reveal whether or not you will last forever.
You see, the fundamental human problem is the radical autonomy of the human heart.
It is the insistence of mankind on being their own god in their own time.
But we are NOT in our time but in God’s time, and we have a very inferior understanding of how the whole Creation fits and works together compared to His, Who is its Creator!
And what flows from this radical demand for autonomy from the human heart is what the Book of Judges repeatedly describes and then finally concludes with:
“In those days Israel had no king. Each man did what he considered to be right.”
Judges 21:25 thus concludes the history recorded in that book with blunt candour.
And there’s the problem in 1 John’s analysis here too.
When John commands us to not love the world or anything in the world he is inviting us to analyse our most basic life orientation.
For an academic theologian and author of technical commentaries on Scripture, Karen Jobes (again) puts it exceptionally memorably like this:
“If our lives are not directed toward God in our every decision of each day, then even our most passionate efforts and causes amount to polishing brass on the Titanic.”
I think the learned professor has got a very practical point there … and I love the way she ends her commentary on this passage by quoting my all-time favourite missionary hero C.T. Studd who writes:
“Only one life, yes only one, Now let me say, ‘Thy will be done’;
And when at last I hear the call, I know I’ll say ‘Twas worth it all’;
Only one life, ‘twill soon be past, Only what’s done for Christ will last.”
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