Week 4 – Escaping the world’s corruption

Corruption. If you live in the world, you know. 

These days, we are drowning in corruption – politicians throwing around threats and money, bribery, cover-ups, covert racism – the list goes on and on. 

But corruption isn’t new.

The idea of corruption goes all the way back to Genesis. Genesis details how God created the heavens and the earth, light, water, land and sky –  everything functioning in beautiful symbiotic harmony. 

Genesis 1:31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. 

In other words – everything was superb, there was no corruption.

We know what happens next though, don’t we?  Adam and Eve fall prey to Satan and his seductive temptation, which leads them to disobey God and introduce sin into God’s masterpiece.  And just like that, creation is corrupted. 

Adam and Eve’s sin was the start of the same corruption that Peter referred to in our passage. And that first corruption of the world, was, like all corruption, caused by evil, or sinful desires. 

In Adam and Eve’s case, the desire was to know and rely on their own knowledge of good and evil rather than relying on God’s wisdom and instruction. In other words, the same fundamental desire we all struggle with – stepping outside the kingdom of God and stepping into the kingdom of self.

So, how can we escape the corruption that lives inside us – those sinful inclinations to rely on self rather than God?

It’s a big question, one that humans have been searching to understand for centuries.

But if you think about it, it’s a matter of simple physics – we can only do one thing at a time and we can only be in one place at a time. So, if you think about it like that, we are participating in God’s kingdom, we are, by default  abiding with Him – in those moments, we are not living in sin. It’s a pretty simple idea, really.  

Think about it, spending our days with our head down, muttering to ourselves “Don’t sin…don’t sin… don’t sin”, never works. Because will power is feeble.

The only means of escaping corruption is participation. We must be actively engaged in building God’s kingdom, or as our verse says, participating in God’s divine nature. You see, when we draw close to God, we find less time, inclination and opportunity to fall into our fleshly desires. The gospel’s instruction is not simply to cut out all sin and call it a day, but to be pro-active in our faith – that is, following him, serving others and emulating his love in the world. And as we participate in God’s nature, so we begin our own transformation, naturally growing towards Christ-likeness. 

The nuts and bolts of participation in God’s divine nature are; spending time with God in prayer, reading and meditating on his Word, fellowshipping with other believers, serving His people, listening and encouraging others.. the Bible is full of ways for us to participate in God’s divine nature (which is why reading it is so important).

The gist is that a life full of love for our Heavenly Father will naturally result in minds and hearts that  bend towards God’s light. Just like an apprentice becomes a little closer to becoming as skilled as their teacher with every hour they spend with him, so we become a little more like Jesus when we spend our time participating in His Kingdom instead of our own.