For all that is in the world--the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, and the pride of life--is not from the Father but from the world. Sermons I. THE APOSTOLIC PROHIBITION. "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world." 1. The world is not the material universe. This is a creation of God, and it vividly illustrates some of his infinite perfections. "The heavens declare the glory of God," etc. (Psalm 19:1-6). The light is the garment in which he robes himself (Psalm 104:2). The fertility of the earth is an illustration of his bounty and beneficence. A divinely inspired poet, having surveyed the creations of God, exclaimed, "O Lord, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches." We read, "The Lord shall rejoice in his works." There is in nature endless significance for our instruction, much that is vast and sublime to awe us, much that is beautiful to delight us, much that is bountiful to supply our needs, and much to lead our thoughts to God. There is a sense in which we may love this beautiful creation, and with all the more of warmth because our Father made it and sustains it! 2. The world is not the world of men as such, or mankind. It is not the world of John 3:16, "God so loved the world," etc. With the love of benevolence and pity God loved the world of sinful men. And we should cherish feelings of kindness and pity for those who do not yet know Jesus Christ - should love them as God loved the world. 3. The world here is the world of sinners as distinguished from those that are true Christians, or, as Ebrard expresses it, "unchristian humanity." By "the world" St. John does not mean the material, but the moral world, the heathen world. In his view, as Dr. Culross says, "the world is in sin. Its sinful condition is variously represented. It is in darkness; it knows not God; it finds his commandments grievous; it lies in wickedness; it is in death - not merely exposed to it as a penalty, but in it as a condition. The 'things' of it are such as these - 'the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.'... The 'world' of John's day we know, as to its actual condition, from other sources. Let any one turn over the pages of Tacitus, Juvenal, Martial, or Persius, with their often-unconscious disclosures of prevailing licentiousness and cruelty; and what he learns will put 'colour' into John's outlines. The same world - at heart - we still find in the present century, under modern conditions. It has grown in wealth. It has become civilized and refined. Law has become a mightier thing. The glory of science was never half so bright. But, looking close in, we still find the old facts - a dislike of God and love of sin, pride and self-sufficiency, a godless and selfish use of things, men 'hating one another,' selfishness fighting selfishness, an infinite mass of misery." "Neither the things that are in the world,... the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the vain-glory of life." By "the lust of the flesh "we understand the inordinate desire for sensual indulgences, the longing for the gratification of the carnal appetites. How prevalent is this lust! We see it in the epicure, in the wine-bibber, and in others in still coarser and more degrading forms. It is most terrible in its effects upon the soul. "The lust of the eyes," interpreted by the aid of other Scriptures, seems to mean the eager desire of possession directed towards temporal and material goods, or covetousness. It is not the desire to look upon pleasing, or beautiful, or sublime things, which is here condemned, but the sinful look of avarice. In confirmation of this view, see Proverbs 23:5; Proverbs 27:20; Ecclesiastes 4:8; Ecclesiastes 5:10; Luke 14:18, 19. Probably there is also a reference to the feeling of hatred and the desire of revenge, as indicated in Psalm 17:11; Psalm 54:7; Psalm 91:8; Psalm 92:11. "The vain-glory of life" is "the lust of shining and making a boasting display." It points to that which is so prevalent in our day - the desire for grand houses, and costly furniture, and fine horses and carriages, and rich and fashionable dresses; the effort to give luxurious parties and splendid entertainments, and to outshine our neighbours in our mode of life. These things are of the world, worldly; and- these things Christians are exhorted not to love. II. THE REASON OF THIS PROHIBITION. The reason, is twofold. 1. Because the love of the world excludes the love of God. "If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him." Man cannot love the holy Father and the unchristian world. These two affections cannot coexist in one heart. Either of them, by its very nature, excludes the other. And "the things that are in the world," the love of which is prohibited, are "not of the Father, but of the world." They do not proceed from him; they are utterly opposed to his character and will; and, therefore, affection to them cannot dwell in the heart that loves him. Sensuality and covetousness and vain-glory are irreconcilably opposed to love to God. 2. Because the world and worldly things are transient. "The world passeth away, and the lust thereof." "The world" is still the unchristian world. It has in it no elements of permanence. The darkness of moral error and sin must recede before the onward march of the light of truth and holiness. The principles and words which oppose the Church of God are transient; they are passing away. Shall we set our hearts upon such fleeting things? And the lusts of the world are evanescent also. The gratifications of the flesh and. of the senses quickly cease. The things which many so eagerly desire and pursue, the pleasures and riches, the honours and vain shows of this world, are passing away like dreams of the night. And even the appetite for some of these things fails. The time comes when the desire for sensual gratifications ceases. Indulgence in the pleasures of the world tends to destroy the capacity for enjoying them. When that time comes, the man of the world, sated, wearied, disappointed, regards these things bitterly and cynically, finding that he has wasted heart and life upon them. Therefore let us not love them. But, on the other hand, "he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever." The doing of his will is the evidence and expression of our love to him. Here, as so frequently in the writings of St. John, we see the importance of action. It is not love in profession that is blessed, but love in practice. "If ye love me, ye will keep my commandments." It is not the creed that is commended, but the conduct. He who thus acts out his love to God abides for ever. He is connected with a stable order of things. He is vitally related to God himself, and is an heir of immortal and blessed life. He is now a participator in the life of Christ; and to all his disciples he gives the great assurance, "Because I live, ye shall live also." By all these considerations let us not love the unchristian, unsatisfying, and perishing world; but through our Lord Jesus Christ, let us seek to love the Father with an ever-growing affection. - W.J.
For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. What then is the meaning of the phrase "desire of the flesh?" It is the desire which we naturally have to gratify our lower impulses, that animal nature which we share with the brutes, but which in man ought to be under the control of the superior faculty of reason. If we name this desire from its object, rather than from its origin or source, we might call it loosely "the desire of pleasure uncontrolled by a sense of duty." It is more difficult to ascertain the exact force of the "desire of the eyes." If taken literally, it would simply stand for a particular form of the desire of the flesh, a more refined and human form of sensual pleasure, the desire of seeing beautiful objects; but I am inclined to think that, so far as this is sensual, it is included under the former head, and that it is more in accordance with Hebrew ideas and with the facts of life to suppose that we have here a quite distinct class of desires, the desires of the intellect. But how, it may be asked, can the desire of knowledge be condemned as characteristic of the world. Knowledge is not dependent on society, like pleasure, and moreover the desire of knowledge is especially commended in the Bible. How then can it be to the discredit of the world, or make its influence more injurious, if it is accompanied by the desire of knowledge? The answer is that neither pleasure nor knowledge is in itself condemned in the Bible. The pleasure which is condemned in the phrase "lust of the flesh," is, as we have seen, selfish and predominantly sensual, unchecked by higher thoughts and feelings. And so by the "desire of the eyes" is meant primarily not the desire for truth as such, but the desire for a knowledge of the world, knowledge as contrasted not with ignorance and stupidity, but with simplicity, ingenuousness and innocence. How many owe their fall to an impatience of restraint and a curiosity which is attracted to evil rather than to good! How few remember that knowledge no more than pleasure can claim our absolute allegiance! We now come to the third of these worldly lusts, as they are styled in the Epistle to Titus, the "pride," or as the Revised Version has it, the "vainglory" of life, the desire to make a show, the desire of honour and distinction, which is as naturally characteristic of the active principle within us, as the desire of pleasure is of the passive or sensitive principle. Supposing this to be a generally correct account of St. John's analysis of the spirit of the world, it is evident that it corresponds with the common division of man's nature into the feeling, the thinking, and the willing part; the desire of pleasure corresponding to the appetites, the desire of knowledge to the intellect, while ambition, the desire of honour and of power, corresponds to the will. But human life consists in the exercise of these different elements of man's nature. How is it possible, then, that these gifts of God should be the source of the evil that is in the world? If man were perfect, as God intended him to be, this would not be the case. His various impulses would all work harmoniously together under the control of reason and conscience, enlightened and guided by the Spirit of God himself. But we know that, whatever we may hope for the future, this is far from being the case at present. At present every impulse is a source of danger, because it is not satisfied with doing the work and attaining the end for which it was implanted in our nature, but continues to urge us on where its action is injurious, antagonistic to higher ends and higher activities, and contrary to the will of Him Who made us. It is these blind unruly impulses which constitute the spirit of the world, and are employed by him, who is described as the prince of this world, to band men together in evil, and so build up a kingdom of the world, in opposition to the kingdom of God. St. John implies the unrestrained action of these impulses when he tells us they make up all that is in the world. If we can trust contemporary evidence, the historians and satirists of Rome, no less than Christian writers, the moral condition of society in the imperial city is not too darkly coloured in St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans. In the catalogue of sin and vice there given, two main lines of evil may be distinguished, which at first sight seem to be very remote from each other, but which are in fact closely allied, being continually associated together in history, as they are in Milton's famous line, "Lust hard by hate." Cruelty and profligacy were the most marked characteristics of the Caligulas and the Neros of Rome; they were the notes of that degraded aristocracy, in which even the women, dead to all sense of shame, were also dead to all feeling of pity, and could look on with a horrible delight at the sports in the arena, where gladiators were butchered to make a Roman holiday, and Christians were burnt alive at night in order to light up the chariot races of the emperor. And the profligacy of the capitol was faithfully copied in the provinces. St. Paul's epistles, with their constant warnings against impurity, show how deeply even the humbler ranks of society, from which the Church was mainly recruited, were infected with this vice of paganism. We see, then, that as regards the desire or lust of the flesh, the state of contemporary society fully bore out St. John's description of the world. How did the case stand with regard to the second point in his description, the lust of the eyes? Understanding this of the desire of knowledge, we find St. Paul in his Epistle to the Corinthians describing it as the distinctive feature of the Greek as opposed to the Hebrew, that the Greeks seek after wisdom; but "God (he says) hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise"; "Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth." So St. Luke mentions curiosity, which is merely the undisciplined desire of knowledge, as the chief characteristic of the Athenians, "all the Athenians spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing." Ephesus, where St. John is believed to have spent the latter part of his life, was especially noted for the study of curious arts, prying into forbidden things. Lastly, if we ask how far that third constituent of the worldly spirit, ambition, vainglory, the pride of life, was to be found in Paganism at the time of St. John's writing, we need not look further than the temple of Ephesus, which was held to be one of the wonders of the world; we need only think of the magnificence of the architecture, the splendour of the ceremonial, the frenzied enthusiasm of the multitudes which gathered at the festival of "the great goddess Diana, whom all Asia and the world worshippeth." How hard it must have been for the little band of Christians to realise that all this pageantry and power was but an empty show, destined in a few short years to vanish away; to feel that the weakness of God was stronger than men, that "God had chosen the base things of the world to confound the things which are mighty, that no flesh might glory in His presence." And if this was true of a provincial town like Ephesus, how much more of what was even then known as the eternal city, to which all the wealth and power and greatness, all the art and science and skill of the whole earth was attracted, where one man commanded the lives and fortunes of all, and was worshipped as God on earth, the only God whose worship was obligatory on all. It was such a world dominion as this, that St. John had in his mind, when he warned his disciples against being dazzled by the vainglory of life, when he spoke of the whole world lying in wicked ness, when he encouraged them with the thought that "He that is born of God overcometh the world." I think that what we have seen to be true of the pagan world of St. John's day, is also true of all the more marked historical appearances of the worldly spirit. Two such appearances may be especially noticed. One was that period of revolt against the Middle Ages, which preceded and accompanied the Reformation, the other was that period of scepticism which prepared the way for the French Revolution. In both we find the most influential classes of society, those which may be regarded as the truest embodiment of the worldly spirit of their time, characterised by the combination of these three elements, the love of pleasure, the love of knowledge, and the love of power. Enlightenment was the special boast of both eras, and the effect of this enlightenment was to shake off the old fashioned restraints of religion and morality and give free scope to the selfish instincts, whether in the direction of pleasure or ambition. Caesar Borgia was the natural outcome of the first era; Napoleon Bonaparte of the second.(J. B. Mayor, M. A.) By "the lust of the flesh" I understand the animal needs and appetites, the physical strength and vigour. There is a period in life when the desires of the flesh exercise immense influence and subtle power over the imagination. They seem to promise illimitable delight and inexhaustible pleasures. The imagination runs through the world and sees everywhere alluring forms which point to intoxicating joys. That is not an unusual experience. It is common to all of us in the heyday of youth and strength, and I only allude to it to ask — Have you considered that this is passing away? Do you know that the gamut of appetite and passion is very limited after all? You can soon reach up and strike the topmost note, and downward and strike the lowest. Do you know that these violent delights have violent ends? They are soon exhausted, and the hungry passion is satiated, and the promise which it made is found a cheat. It is so. It is so if for no other reason than this — because physical life itself fails. Youth is soon gone; manhood is soon passed; old age is soon reached. You are not what you were. Already the keen edge and zest of earthly appetite is blunted. You dislike, perhaps, to admit it, and yet you know in your hearts that the best cup of wine which life has to give you is already drunk, and that life will never prepare again for you the like.(W. J. Dawson.) The eye is the portal of innumerable delights. It is "the meeting place of many worlds." Through it there stream in upon the mind the vision of beauty, the revelation of sciences, the pomp and pageantry of earthly power, all the bright, shifting splendour of human glory. Have you ever considered that riches appeal mainly to the eye? It is the eye which interprets to a man the stateliness of the house which he has built, the beauty of the gardens which he has laid out, the picture's charm, the statue's grace, the horse's symmetry — in a word, all those costly embellishments with which wealth can adorn life. To the blind man they are nothing. To be blind is to lose almost everything that riches can bestow. Yet, says John, the lust of the eyes, too, is a fading passion which is soon satiated. The first house a man buys looks better and bigger to him than any house he owns afterwards. The first picture a man owns brings him more genuine pleasure than all the others put together. That lust of the eye which desires to add house to house and land to land has a lessening pleasure in its acquisitions. Like the lust of the flesh, after all it is a life of sensation, and all sensation is limited and soon exhausted. You, perhaps, have set your hope in some such direction as this. You desire to be rich; your eye lusts for the luxurious abodes of wealth and the circumstance and state of social greatness. When the lust of the flesh fails, the lust of the eye often develops; and the man who has lost the one frantically tries to recoup himself by flying to the other. But it is vain. The miseries of the idle rich, their ennui, their listlessness, their discontent, their imbecile thirst for new sensations, their perpetual invention of new and artificial joys, remind us how true are the words of John, that the lust of the eyes, too, passes away.(W. J. Dawson.) It may signify either the pride of power or the pride of knowledge.1. Take it, for instance, as the pride of power. Take it in regard to that great and splendid empire with which the apostles were familiar. It seemed built to last forever. To be a Roman was to be armed with an invincible defence. It was a proud boast which clothed the meanest man with dignity. The tramp of the legions of Rome echoed in every city; the silver eagles were borne in triumph through all the world; its laws had imposed civilisation upon the most barbarous peoples; and its power had crushed nation after nation. There was no sign in John's day of any overthrow. Yet this solitary man told the truth when he said, not merely that it would pass away, but that it was passing away. He recognised that mysterious law of God, which seems to give to nations their chance and strengthen them with universal victory, and then depose them, lest one good custom should corrupt the world. Egypt, Chaldea, Babylon, Greece, all had had their day, and ceased to be. And so it would be with Rome. We today know that it has passed away. 2. And it is true of the pride of knowledge. The noblest pride of life, because the highest, is the pride of knowledge. Yet that, too, is transient. Nothing shifts its boundaries so often. Nothing is so illusive. Nothing passes through such strange and rapid transformations. The knowledge of Galileo would be the ignorance of today; and if Isaac Newton were alive now he would have to go to school again. A century, a half-century, a single decade, is often sufficient to thrust the most brilliant discoveries into oblivion. The steam engine has sup planted the coach; but the steam engine is already passing away, and in fifty years' time will be supplanted by some greater and more serviceable power. The telegraph has bound nations together and has made all nations neighbours; but the telephone is becoming its rival, and in another century, and less perhaps, men will hear each other's whispers round the globe. A thousand illustrations might be given of how knowledge perpetually effaces its past. Nor is this a mournful truth. It is no tolling bell which announces that the world is passing away. It is rather a trumpet. It means that God's law is progress: and that is a glorious truth for those who can understand it. (W. J. Dawson.) Pleasure, profit, preferment (called here "the lust of the flesh," etc.) are the worldling's trinity, to the which he performeth inward and outward worship.(J. Trapp.) ? — The world is not altogether matter, nor yet altogether spirit. It is not man only, nor Satan only, nor is it exactly sin. It is an infection, an inspiration, an atmosphere, a life, a colouring matter, a pageantry, a fashion, a taste, a witchery. None of all these names suit it, and all of them suit it.(S. Faber.) People JohnPlaces EphesusTopics Boastful, Boasting, Cravings, Desire, Earthly, Father's, Flesh, Glory, Isn't, Lust, Nature, Ostentation, Pride, Sinful, Vain, World'sOutline 1. He comforts them against the sins of infirmity.3. Rightly to know God is to keep his commandments; 9. to love our brothers; 15. and not to love the world. 18. We must beware of antichrists; 20. from whose deceits the godly are safe, preserved by perseverance in faith, and holiness of life. Dictionary of Bible Themes 1 John 2:16 1466 vision 4030 world, behaviour in 1175 God, will of 6746 sanctification, means and results Library Youthful Strength'I have written unto you, young men, because ye are strong, and the word of God abideth in you, and ye have overcome the wicked one.'--1 John ii. 14. 'What am I going to be?' is the question that presses upon young people stepping out of the irresponsibilities of childhood into youth. But, unfortunately, the question is generally supposed to be answered when they have fixed upon a trade or profession. It means, rightly taken, a great deal more than that. 'What am I going to make of myself?' 'What … Alexander Maclaren—Expositions of Holy Scripture Ephesians, Peter,John River and Rock The Commandment, Old yet New Thirtieth Day. The Unction from the Holy One. January the Twelfth Two Opposites The Difference Between Walking by Sight, and Walking by Faith The Witness of the Spirit A Bundle of Myrrh In Him: Like Him What God is to Us. Brooks -- the Pride of Life That to Him who Loveth God is Sweet Above all Things and in all Things But Since no Man is Worthy to Come Forward in his Own Name... Moreover, the Sophists are Guilty of the Merest Trifling when they Allege that Christ Is... The Last Day. Add to This, and Here is Cause to Cry Out More Piteously... (On the Mysteries. Iii. ) But, Again, Lest by Occasion of this Sentence... Evidences of Regeneration. The Work of Jesus Christ as an Advocate, What Passes and what Abides The Fourfold Symbols of the Spirit The World Our Enemy. The Wilderness: Temptation. Matthew 4:1-11. Mark 1:12, 13. Luke 4:1-13. 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