The overall theme of 1 John could be summarized by the phrase Authentic Christianity. John has been urging authentic Christians to test themselves as to their obedience, and as to their love. After a brief digression about the church, he turns now to the "world."
1 JOHN 2:15
15 Μὴ ἀγαπᾶτε τὸν κόσμον μηδὲ τὰ ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ. ἐάν τις ἀγαπᾷ τὸν κόσμον, οὐκ ἔστιν ἡ ἀγάπη τοῦ πατρὸς ἐν αὐτῷ·
15 Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
Μὴ ἀγαπᾶτε τὸν κόσμον "Do not love the world." We expect to find μή as the negative with an imperative (pres. imv., ἀγαπάω). The verb ἀγαπάω can mean a little more than the generic "love here" (it certainly doesn't have any connotation of the undeserved love in the heart of God); it can mean "show love" or "long for" in any worldly sense in this context.
The world (κόσμος) is anything found in this lifetime in this place. It is any way of living apart from God's way. This is underscored even more by John's addition, μηδὲ τὰ ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ "or anything in the world." Anything we love that is not God—including goods, child, fame and wife—becomes an idol and divides us from God.
The conditional sentence is a present general (ἐάν with subjunctive followed by the present tense, here ἐστιν, showing a general truth: If anyone loves the world, the Father's love isn't in him.
1 JOHN 2:16
16 ὅτι πᾶν τὸ ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ, ἡ ἐπιϑυμία τῆς σαρκὸς καὶ ἡ ἐπιϑυμία τῶν ὀϕϑαλμῶν καὶ ἡ ἀλαζονεία τοῦ βίου, οὐκ ἔστιν ἐκ τοῦ πατρὸς ἀλλὰ ἐκ τοῦ κόσμου ἐστίν.
16 For everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father but from the world.
John hints about sinful desires coming from what we see; yet John is fond of describing Christ as the true light of the world, the light that gives light to the dark world. So what we see in the darkness, no matter how well we see it or how it makes us feel, is seen and craved in sin ("everything that does not come from faith is sin," Romans 14:23). John's readers would probably have been able to come up with many of the same examples from the Bible that we could: Eve saw the fruit and fell into sin (Genesis 3:6). David saw Bathsheba bathing and fell into sin (2 Samuel 11:2). The drunken man sees "strange sights" and his mind imagines "confusing things" like a man sleeping high on top of a mainmast (Proverbs 23:33-34). In Joshua's time, a man named Achan looked at the ruins of fallen Jericho and coveted the belongings of the dead and plundered them, for which he was executed (Joshua 7:1-26).
Some think that John's list, "cravings, lust and boasting" encompass all the sins of the world, as does the temptation and sin of Eve (Genesis 3:1-6) and the temptation of Christ (Matthew 4:1-11). But Jesus came into the world to forgive all the sins of the world. He is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. And God loved the world; he loved it so much that he gave his only Son to save it.
1 JOHN 2:17
17 καὶ ὁ κόσμος παράγεται καὶ ἡ ἐπιϑυμία αὐτοῦ, ὁ δὲ ποιῶν τὸ ϑέλημα τοῦ ϑεοῦ μένει εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα.
17 The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever. (NIV)
In John's books, the "world" (Greek cosmos, κόσμος) stands for those things that oppose God. The world "did not recognize" Christ (John 1:10). The world could not (yet) hate the apostles, "but it hates me because I (Jesus) testify that what it does is evil" (John 7:4). "The prince of this world will be driven out" (John 12:31). "The world cannot accept" Christ (John 14:17). "If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first" (John 15:18). Satan "leads the whole world astray" (Rev. 12:9). The spirits of demons "go out to the kings of the world" (Rev. 16:14). The whole world is under the control of the evil one (1 John 5:19). And anyone who denies Christ does the work of the devil and of the Antichrist (2 John 7). But the world and its desires also "pass away," παράγω, here in an active sense but more importantly in the present tense—this is happening already. The world is winding down to its destruction and the sinful, fallen world will not last forever.
Jesus took the sins of the whole sinful fallen world into himself. Christians like to amuse themselves by thinking of a man loading gifts onto a sleigh and bringing them to good boys and girls (a legend based on an actual event--but we'll speak about it some other time). But think of what Christmas actually means. It's about a single spectacular gift from God, but it's also about what that gift truly means: One man loaded all of our anti-gifts; all of our sin and guilt and rebellion, and he loaded them all onto his own shoulders and carried them out of our lives. And not just the sins of good girls and boys, but the sins of every wicked and corrupt and fallen sinner in the whole... world.
The sins of the world. Everything that opposed God: forgiven by God. That's something to praise him for. Forever.
