A word about the world

You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Therefore anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. James 4:4

Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. 1 John 2:15

There’s some pretty plain talking there, isn’t there?

James the brother of Jesus calls his readers “adulterous”, by which he means not that they are being unfaithful to their husbands or wives, but that they are playing fast and loose with God. Their “friendship” with the world amounts to “enmity” with God.

And John (almost certainly the son of Zebedee) tells his readers not to “love the world or anything in the world”.

In two little verses the word “world” occurs no less than five times – and not in a very good light. Christian, keep “the world” at arm’s length!

When I was a teenage Christian over fifty years ago the word “worldly” was much in use to warn us off various things. These weren’t only the out-and-out sinful things - they were taken for granted - but what you might call questionable things. Pop music was worldly; make-up was worldly; television (especially on Sundays) was worldly. Gambling; alcohol; the cinema; smoking; certain sorts of books, papers and magazines… worldly!

Things have changed. Which raises the question: have we “lowered our standards” (bad)?; or have we been released from a kind of Pharisaic legalism (good)? I’ll leave each of us to make up our minds on that…

Given that the New Testament uses the word “world” so frequently, and given that very often it gives it a bad press (as they say), let’s ask:  what in fact does it mean by the word? More to the point, what were James and John really saying in those curt little verses I have quoted?

At risk of stating the obvious, we can be pretty confident of certain things they didn’t mean. They weren’t referring to the “natural” world: the oceans and the mountains; beautiful flowers; the laugh of a baby; the glory of the night sky.

Neither were they talking about natural goodness, or “common grace”:  the love that springs up between husband and wife or between friends; acts of kindness or courage or compassion or sacrifice. Genesis 1 tells us that when God created the world it was “good”, even “very good”, and even though it soon became a fallen, sinful world – as we learn from Genesis 3 - it still contained much that is good and beautiful.

No. Usually when the Bible speaks of “the world”, it is talking about the world in its tragic corruption and separation from God. This is the world into which we are all born, and the longer we live the more likely we are to get sucked deeper and deeper into its “worldly” ways.

What James and John are reminding their readers of is that following Jesus means being drawn out of that world into a whole new dimension of reality – a dimension that is pure and holy. This, of course, is why conversion to Christ is marked by the act of baptism – a symbolic washing, a purification. This is why Jesus spoke of entering God’s kingdom as being “born again”; you are a new person who is setting out to learn what it is to live in God’s new world.

There are many New Testament passages which, so to speak, put flesh on the bones of this great truth. Here are just two…

First, Paul in Galatians 5:19-21: The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like... 

That’s quite a list!

The trouble with lists, of course, is that it’s very tempting to simply skim through them. May I suggest we take a few minutes to pray through that list, pausing for a moment on each item. We may be able to move on quite quickly, which is fine – but time spent pondering the one or two items that won’t allow our consciences to do that… well, that is time well spent.

(I would suggest too that once we’ve prayed our way through that list, we then go on to Paul’s next list, in verses 22-23, and repeat the exercise. What a wonderful contrast!)

And now here is Jesus, not enumerating individual sins, but challenging us with a simple metaphor: Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it (Matthew 7:13-14).

Doesn’t that sum up perfectly what James means by “not being friends with the world”? and what John means by “not loving the world”?

And doesn’t it sum up perfectly what a privilege it is to belong to the new, pure, beautiful and holy world that God is patiently and lovingly creating?

Holy God, thank you for the wonderful, beautiful world into which I have been born, and for all the good things I can enjoy. But please help me to hate all that is corrupt and bad about it, and to grow in the purity and holiness which are in Christ. Amen.