“Don’t love the world,” John writes in the passage above, but in another place he tells us that “God so loved the world . . .” So God loves the world, but we’re not supposed to?
You already know the solution to this “contradiction” . . . the words “world” and “love” are used in different senses, and we’ve got to be careful that we understand their nuances.
Tomorrow we’ll explore them a bit, focusing more on the “loving the world” part than we do on the “not loving the world” part (something I addressed not too long ago).
Truth is, God loves the world, and he expects us to as well. He put us here to take care of the earth–to steward, develop, and enjoy it–and that mandate hasn’t changed.
He wants us to love the people of this world and to enjoy their artistic and creative abilities. He wants us to love their whole selves–bodies and souls that are created in his image.
But of course there’s a worldly ideology that we avoid . . . a perspective that makes the material world an ultimate value.