The world is corrupt, it lies in sin, it has rejected the Savior-God come in grace. It is not only that man has been cast out of Eden because he was a sinner-which is true, and suffices for his condemnation-but there is more. God has done much to reclaim him. He gave the promises to Abraham, He called Israel to be His people, He sent the prophets, and, last of all, His only Son. God Himself came in grace, but man-as far as he could do it-cast out the God who was in the world in grace. Therefore the Lord said, "Now is the judgment of this world." The last thing God could do was to send His Son, and He has done it. "I have yet," He said, "one Son, my well-beloved; may be they will reverence him when they see him. And they took him, and killed him, and cast him out of the vineyard." The world is a world which has already rejected the Son of God; and where does it find its joy? In God or in Christ? No; in the pleasures of the flesh, in grandeur, in riches: it seeks to make itself happy without God, that it may not feel its want of Him It would not need thus to seek happiness in pleasures if it were happy; formed by God with a breath of life for Himself, man cannot be satisfied with anything less than God.
Read the history of Cain. Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod. Then he built a city, and called it after the name of his son, Enoch. Afterward Jabal was the father of such as have cattle (the riches of that day), and his brother's name was Jubal, the father of all such as handle the harp and organ. And Zillah bare Tubal-Cain, an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron. We have here the world and its civilization complete; not having God, they must make the world pleasant and beautiful. It will be said, But what is the harm of harps and organs? None, surely; the harm is in the heart of man, who uses these things to make himself happy without God, forgetting Him, flying from Him, seeking to content himself in a world of sin, and to drown the misery of this condition of alienation from God by hiding himself, in the corruption that reigns there. The elegance which man affects makes him only too often slip insensibly into this corruption which he seeks to conceal with mirth.
But the new man, born of God, partaking of the divine nature, cannot find its delight in the world- it shuns that which would separate it from God. Where the flesh finds its happiness and its pleasures, the spiritual life finds none. James speaks of actual corruption, but he does not speak as though one part of the world were corrupt, and another pure; on the contrary, it is defiled and corrupt in its principles, and in every way. He who is conformed to it is corrupt in his walk The friendship of the world is enmity against God. Whoever will be the friend of the world is the enemy of God. We must keep ourselves pure from the world itself. We have, indeed, to pass through it, and to be, in passing through it, the epistle of Christ, undefiled by the world which surrounds us, as Christ was undefiled in the midst of a world that would not receive Him. J. N D.
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