St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that, "every temptation is either from the world or the flesh or the devil."
Even though we could benefit from a deep dive into each of these three categories, I'd like to spend some time during this upcoming week (during our Locals livestreams) unearthing this idea of "the world" and what it means to battle it.
If I tell you, "you must battle with the world or go to Hell!" You might accuse me of being hyperbolic or a fear monger or a sensationalist. But this is essentially what the Bible teaches:
St. John says, "Do not love the world or anything in the world"? St. James seems to take it a step further when he writes, "anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God." St. John elsewhere says, "the whole world lies in the power of the evil one."
You get the picture. Whatever this world thing is, the Bible takes it as a serious threat from which we need to remain unpolluted.
I'll leave you with one little quote from Aquinas to get our gears turning:
The world tempts us either by attaching us to it in prosperity, or by filling us with fear of adversity. But faith overcomes this in that we believe in a life to come better than this one, and hence we despise the riches of this world and we are not terrified in the face of adversity. “This is the victory which overcomes the world: our faith."
Let me know your thoughts below. Let's be humble. Let's come to the conversation not as master's but as students, and see what we can learn from the Scriptures together.
