Do not love the world, nor the things in the world. If any one 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. And the world is passing away, and also its lusts; but the one who does the will of God abides forever. 

First notion: bummer. The truth is, I like a lot of things in the world—I might even love them. This “hate the world” stuff sounds dualistic, and the main reason I’m still a Christian (from the angle of my experience) is that I discovered the difference between Christianity and Manichaeism. And then, John just plum damn trashes the world, saying it consists entirely of “the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life.” Come on, John. What about fly-fishing? What about the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, football in the fall, the films of Federico Fellini? What about the tinsel-thin sheets of paper, the top grain cowhide binding, and the intricate mechanisms of publishing and distribution that got the very words you’re writing to me? In light of all that, you’re going to reduce the world to lust and pride?

“Yes,” he would say. “But I’m talking about the world; you’re talking about the earth and the common grace that’s on it.”

Ah. So,  by the ‘world,’ you mean the social matrices of fallen powers, vocabularies, and values that corrupt what’s on earth?

“Yeah. Traces of heaven remain, but there’s a whole lot of hell abroad.”

Fair enough.

After all, I have plenty of experience with the lust and pride. Pride and lust take matter (the good things I alliteratively mentioned above) and puts them to their worst use. As Milton says, “So little knows/Any, but God alone, to value right/The good before him, but perverts best things/To worst abuse, or to their meanest use” (Paradise Lost IV.201-204). Pride doesn’t come from the earth—it comes from us who walk it.

Lust goes from fishing to devouring waters, fighting over shoreline, and ignoring barbless hook regulations. Pride turns football into a barely suppressed gladiatorial competition and covert imperialism. The flesh rejoices in Fitzgerald’s descriptions of decadence and doubts the final tragedy of Gatsby’s life—it’s the same with Fellini’s descriptions and diagnoses. Finally, lust and pride forget literature, film, and publishing, and goes straight to making pornography and exploiting the rest of the world with it, souls tied to dying animals.

So—do you love that matrix? No. No, John, you were right.

It is good news, then, that the world is passing away along with its lusts. God made the earth and we who make the world on it; but he didn’t make our pride, our lust, and their matrix. That’s on us.

I often feel that most of my trouble comes from being strung between realities: time and eternity, finitude and infinity, necessity and possibility. I’m bound to my body (and really, I have no problem saying that I am my body—among other things); my body is bound to space and time; and I have to live each day in the world. At the same time, I’ve subscribed to this worldview that tells me the world’s view is wrong. But it’s not just the world’s view—it’s mine, too. Being my body, my first inclinations are rarely aligned with God’s will. In Emerson’s words, “The soul says, the man and woman shall be one flesh and one soul; the body would join the flesh only” (“Compensation,” Emerson’s Essays, Harper Perennial p. 75). So would I join the flesh only—and often.

“But the one who does the will of God abides forever.” There it is—the Bible’s positing the eternal again—the old unbearable burden.

Or is it a blessing? It’s not too hard for me to accept that eternity is in our hearts. That component of Kierkegaard’s description of the self, then–a synthesis of temporal and eternal–seems unavoidably valid. My honest doubt is whether or not the eternal even exists for anyone. John says it does. Huh. That thing in me—a longing for timelessness—has its reason, you say? Yes. But only for the one who does the will of God.

John begins with the love of the Father. This love is the differentiator between the world’s and the Lord’s. Do you love to fly fish but find yourself fist-fighting anglers interloping on your secret stream? Do you secretly love the parties and affairs in Gatsby more than it’s final squaring to reality? Do you really love watching corners get crack-blocked more than you like to see receivers lope directly under forty-yard passes and into end zones? Do you covertly cherish Guido’s harem-fantasy though Fellini exposes it’s absurdity? Does that disturb you about yourself? If yes, then—good. Perhaps the love of the Father is in you. Do you know that about yourself, resent it, but find your shameful penchants incorrigible? Welcome to life (for most—maybe there are genuine incarnated angels out there who can’t relate–along with purely carnal people, devoid of conscience).

Do you want out of the matrix, though? There’s no easy way—but there is a way. God came into the world, “became flesh” (John 1:14—which proves the Bible’s equivocal use of “flesh,” along with Genesis 2:24), and made the way. He became the conduit for the Father’s love into our lives. In accepting Christ as the way, we receive new natures, new marching orders, and new values. And though abiding by those values is supremely hard, God is gracious and has made it so that we succeed in Him, irrespective of our performance. We receive his performance record and inherit a wealth the world cannot contain. Thus, the things on earth preserved by his grace become ours to enjoy and share as gifts rather than worldly artifacts for consumption.

And abiding in Christ who fulfilled God’s will, we abide forever.