Sense: world system
n. — the people constituting the world whose values, beliefs, and morals are in distinction and rebellion to God’s.
Do not love the world [κόσμος] nor the things in the world [κόσμος]. If anyone loves the world [κόσμος], the love of the Father is not in him.
1 John 2:15 (NRSV)
But wait, I thought “God so loved the world?” But here in 1 John, the author tells people not to love the world. How do we explain the complexities of our relationship to the world? The Bible Sense Lexicon helps us by breaking down the meanings of words like κόσμος into their various senses. For instance, we find two different sense of κόσμος just in today’s example verse:
On the other hand, the usage in “For God so loved the world” is annotated with the sense “world populace.” To gain a better understanding of the concept “world” in the Bible, consider entering “world” into the Bible Sense Lexicon search box and examining the concordance entries of senses like “world sytem,” “world populace,” and “world (creation)” in conjunction with one another. An exercise like this will help to clue us in to the complexities of our relationship to the world in its different facets.
What is the Bible Sense Lexicon?
Sense of the Day is based on content from Logos’ Bible Sense Lexicon, which organizes biblical Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek words by meaning based on a variety of semantic relationships. Sense of the Day provides examples of senses in context, along with insight into their application for theology and interpretation.
The Bible Sense Lexicon is a Logos dataset available in Logos 5 Gold and higher base packages. If you’re enrolled in the Logos Academic Discount Program, you can also find the Bible Sense Lexicon in the Biblical Languages base package. Take your studies even further by exploring semantic domains, engaging the biblical text like never before.
Learn more about the Bible Sense Lexicon.