Contemporary and Ancient Kosmic Systems; 1 John 2:15
1 John 2:15 NASB "Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him."
All worldliness is merely an expression of the thinking and the logical extension of the thinking of Satan. Two things characterise the thought of Satan at the time of his fall in eternity past. First of all there is the emphasis on autonomy, meaning self-law or independence, where the creature has the right to think and live independently of God, where the creature is going to be the final reference point for defining reality. This is going to express itself both in terms of religious ideas as well as philosophical ideas. On the other hand, it is antagonistic or hostile to God and so it is going to express itself in all of its concepts ultimately in ways of attacks on God. As such the cosmic system not only has various religious systems but various philosophical systems. Almost every philosophical system has as its starting point something in the creation. When the starting point is in the creation rather than in the thought of the creator you have started with an autonomous principle that will always end up in conclusions that are antagonistic to the Word of God and antagonistic to Scripture.
Loving the world, therefore, is a major problem for the believer because it is a way of thinking that produces a way of living and action that is antithetical to God's plan, purposes and procedures. But we grow up inside that cosmic system. The world system describes another word that we can use that relates to it: culture, human viewpoint culture. There is a vast array of cultures in this world but every one of them has as its starting point something in the creation.
Worldly thinking is something we all grew up with, and not one of us grew up apart from it. The whole process of the spiritual life is a process of getting rid of that cosmic thinking and replacing it with Bible doctrine.
The danger for the Christian life is clearly illustrated in a quote from Francis Schaeffer:
"Apart from Christ, anything which seems to be spiritual power is actually the power of the flesh. The real problem is this. The church of the Lord Jesus Christ, individually or corporately, is tending to do the Lord's work in the power of the flesh rather than of the Spirit. Though we know the power of the Holy Spirit can be ours we still ape the world's wisdom. We trust its forms of publicity, its noise, and imitate its ways of manipulating men. If we fight the world with copies of its own weapons we will fail because the devil will honour these with his own, but our Lord will not honour these with us for that does not give Him the glory. They may bring some results but they will not be the ones the Lord wants. Our hand will be empty of honour for God because He will not be getting the glory. We must not try to serve the Lord with our own kind of humanism and egoism. In this war if Christians win a battle by using worldly means they have really lost."
The problem with worldliness is that it imbeds a value system and an approach to life and a solution system that we don't even question; it comes right out of our mouth. Every single one of us has a sin nature and if we don't deal with it in terms of sin it is not going to be properly dealt with, it may just be whitewashed over. The sin nature is motivated by a lust pattern which is going to move everybody in one direction or another.
The world in which we live in today is a postmodern world, and postmodernism affects the way all of us think. Gene Brown:
When we moved into a society of relative thinking we abandoned the thinking that travels with absolutes. You can see examples of this all around you continuously as people on their own determine what is right and wrong and freely challenge any accepted norms and standards. Even those of us fed on absolutes find ourselves being sucked into dividing up guilt or explaining why we or someone else is not responsible for their actions. In relative thinking one is only interested in answers; truth is not an issue and can even be considered something of a problem in that is narrows the field of answers. Absolutes demand belief; relativism just demands answers. Hebrews 4:2 describes one of our major problems today. We have now embraced philosophical and religious concepts that do not require belief, only acceptance or answers. Dallas Willard of the University of Southern California stated this clearly when he said that when we parrot the accepted clichés and politically correct jargon as though we believed what is really happening is that we are only giving the right answers..."
That is, we have a facade that looks right. Jesus called the Pharisees whitewashed sepulchres that on the inside were dead men's bones. On the outside there is this facade of applying the Word and obeying the Word, giving all the right answers and having all the right things to say.
"… To believe something requires absolutes, even if it is a lie but an absolute nevertheless."
In postmodernism all cultures have equal value and you can't judge one over against the other. That is the kind of thinking that dominates today. We have to have a historical intellectual process here to understand it; we can't just think that this has just happened. In human viewpoint there are three basic systems of thought: rationalism, empiricism, and mysticism. Logic and reason are not necessarily wrong; it is the independent use of logic and reason that is wrong. Historically what happens is that rationalism and empiricism always produce a reaction of some form of scepticism, because ultimately when we push it far enough human reason and human experience always are going to fall apart. They can't provide ultimate answers. So the result is scepticism. That is the problem we see in postmodernism. If everything is relative there is no truth. We all know that the basic problem with that is that if there is no truth, is it true that there is no truth? So ultimately it implodes upon itself because it is illogical. And it is a form of mysticism because the emphasis then shifts from reason to emotion. Mysticism is based upon the idea of some sort of inner private experience, some sort of intuitive flash, into the ultimate meaning of life. Its development is non-logical, non-rational and non-verifiable. It is irrational; just the opposite; it rejects reason and logic as unnecessary. All of these represent human attempts to face life, describe life, understand life, and to understand life's problems.
In contrast the biblical Christian believes in the priority of revelation: that God has spoken and on the basis of the objective revelation of God we can understand things. God is understandable, logical and rational, and meaning is communicated through language. In postmodernism language is fluid. It is nothing but a cultural invention in order to gain power over people. So they attack the very core of meaning itself and the expression of meaning in language, and try to destroy all meaning and logic.
How did this come about? It begins after the Reformation in a period called the Enlightenment, starting in the 1600s and lasting until about 1780. Descarte is the father of rationalism; John Locke is the father of modern empiricism, and together they form the thinking of the Enlightenment. There were good aspects to the Enlightenment and negative aspects but ultimately the Enlightenment is based on the assumption that man on the basis of human reason and intellect alone can come to the ultimate answers to solve all of man's problems. It is called the Enlightenment in contrast to what went before, referred to as the Dark Ages. What does that conjure up? We've all heard that term, it conjures up images of a bunch of Catholic priests in a monastery trying to impose horrible things on people. It is an attack on Christianity. There were good things there and there were bad things there but the terminology "Enlightenment," the term itself, is an attack on Christianity.
In the history of thought rationalism and empiricism dominate until a German philosopher by the name of Immanuel Kant comes along and makes a radical shift in the development of thinking. All of this is what is called modernism. The core of modernism is that man can solve problems on his own on the basis of reason: ultimately everything is rational, everything has meaning, and man can on his own understand all of reality. But Kant came along and said that life really consists of two spheres. There is an upper sphere which he called the noumenal and a lower sphere that he called the phenomenal—all the different things that we see, the details of life, everything that we cam know. In the noumenal we have ideas, absolutes, and God. But for Kant you can't know the noumenal, so there is like a brick wall there and man has no idea what is upstairs. In his mind man has a sort of translating device that categorises all of reality. So when you look at things "out there" all you can know is your own perceptions. You can't know things as they are, you can only know things as you perceive them. Well that destroys all absolutes and all universals; you can only know what you, you can't know what anybody else knows. So this begins to break down the whole concept of knowledge.
So we see an assault on and decline in thinking. Always in history when rationalism and empiricism are rejected they are always replaced with scepticism and existentialism. Existentialism basically says the only way you can find any meaning in life, since we can't find it through reason and experience anymore, is if we create the meaning for ourselves. Existentialism, then, ultimately becomes bankrupt because it starts off with borrowing too much from rationalism and empiricism. Then we end up in the modern era of what is called postmodernism which as its roots as far back as the 1930s-1950s with certain thinkers, but it is those intellectual thinkers and those ideas that kind of filtered down in the universities and colleges, down into the classrooms, and destroys all kinds of things in terms of absolutes.
The Scripture teaches us that we are not to be conformed to the thinking of the world around us. In order to fulfil that we have to understand something about the thought forms of the world around us and how it impacts our view of everyday events.