THE OLDER I get, the less I am able to take my body for granted. In the last few years, for example, I’ve had to radically change my eating habits. Why? I’m trying to keep my cholesterol and triglycerides down without medication, and unfortunately, it’s a genetically uphill climb. So, I now eat nothing made with white flour, and only minimal amounts of sugar. Goodbye cheese. I eat lean or other healthy proteins, and lots and lots of vegetables.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not complaining…much. I actually enjoy what I eat. But every once in a while, I do long just a little to eat some fried chicken, skin and all, and chase it down with a big slice of apple pie.

Meanwhile, pass the tofu, please.

As humans, we are spiritual beings, created in the image of God. But we are also inescapably corporeal. It’s not as if our “real” self was only soul or spirit and our bodies just an inconvenient and fragile shell. We don’t just have bodies; we are bodies. That’s how God created us, on purpose. He made us embodied beings and pronounced this to be good. Moreover, the biblical hope is not that we will someday shed these bodies of ours, but that we will live for eternity in resurrection bodies, bodies as they were meant to be.

Bodily existence in itself, therefore, is not a bad thing; again, that’s how God made us. The pleasure of a good night’s sleep, or a delicious meal, or the smell of a freshly bathed baby are all gifts to be enjoyed. The problem is not bodies, but bodily existence in a fallen world, in which otherwise legitimate desires can be distorted or even become idols to be worshiped.

That’s the perspective we need to understand what John says next in his letter. He has already told his readers not to love the world or anything in it. He then elaborates:

For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world. (1 John 2:16, NIV)

The word “lust” here may be a little misleading. More generally, it signifies strong desire, and it takes on either a positive or a negative meaning depending on the context. In the Upper Room, for example, Jesus told his disciples, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer” (Luke 22:15). “Eagerly desired”: literally, it’s “I have desired with desire,” using the same word translated as “lust” here in 1 John. Surely no one would render Jesus’ words as “I have lusted with lust”? Not only would that be inappropriate, it simply doesn’t fit the context.

Having said that, however, the word is most often used in the New Testament to describe how our desires can be sinful or out of control. Like John, Paul also talks about the lusts or desires of the flesh (e.g., Rom 13:14; Gal 5:16; Eph 2:3). Paul uses the word “flesh” in a manner reminiscent of John’s use of the word “world”; it signifies opposition to God.

But the word “flesh” doesn’t have to mean that. At root, it can simply mean that we’re made out of…well, meat. Humans and animals alike are flesh and bone, and neither are sinful for that reason alone.

Does it matter to our reading of John? I believe it does.

My concern is that a phrase like “the lust of the flesh” may make us think of sexual sin, as if John were picking some random vices to illustrate a sinful kind of worldliness. Is that what he means? Maybe. But it seems more likely that John means something more sweeping as I suggested earlier, something like “the desires that come with bodily existence in a fallen world.”

Think, for example, of our desire for food. We have a perfectly natural desire for things that are both nutritious and tasty. But we live in a world in which corporations purposely engineer food that has little to no nutritional value but hooks us into wanting more (please don’t put a bowl of potato chips in front of me!). A desire that is meant to nourish us is twisted in a way that makes us want what’s bad for us.

Nor is there anything wrong with sexual desire in its proper context; it’s a gift from God. But people use that desire as well to market goods and make money. It’s so common that we hardly blink an eye when provocative images are paraded before us, as if it was all perfectly normal to exploit sex for profit.

So again, when John mentions the “lust of the flesh,” he’s not speaking simply about sexual sin, but how the world twists God-given bodily desires. Similarly, when he speaks of the “lust of the eyes,” he means the urge to have whatever we see. When he speaks of the “pride of life,” he’s pointing to all the ways we have learned in this world to boast of our accomplishments apart from God, to make ourselves worthy by the world’s standards.

That’s why Eugene Peterson paraphrases the verse this way in The Message:

Practically everything that goes on in the world—wanting your own way, wanting everything for yourself, wanting to appear important—has nothing to do with the Father.

We are creatures of flesh and bone. Desire is part of bodily existence. But desire is not the problem. Bodies are not the problem. The world is the problem, because it beckons us away from God.

We live in the world. But as we’ll see, as Jesus taught, we don’t have to be of the world.