<p>2:16 <em>For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the vain glory of life, is not of the Father but is of the world</em>- The initial reference was to how the Jewish world was full of these things. The Pharisees were covetous (Lk. 16:14), and the Jewish religion was big business; the religious leaders were the wealthiest people in Palestine. The Sadducees had no belief in an afterlife, and were totally hedonistic. This is why later in Revelation, John will later describe the Jewish system as &quot;Babylon&quot;, obsessed with wealth and pride, drunk with the blood of the Christian prophets and martyrs. In Jn. 8:44 the Lord had characterized the Jewish world as doing the lusts of their father; these various lusts are summarized as the lust of the Jewish world which was in process of passing away as AD70 approached (:17).</p><p>John speaks of how we are tempted by &ldquo;the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the vain glory of life&rdquo;, alluding to the very things which were Adam and Eve&rsquo;s temptation in Eden. Adam is set up in Scripture as &lsquo;everyman&rsquo;; on almost every page of the Bible there are allusions back to him. Thus Jezebel&rsquo;s provocation of Ahab to sin is presented in the same terms as that of Adam and Eve; Israel &ldquo;like Adam have transgressed the covenant&rdquo; (Hos. 6:7).&nbsp; Paul sensed that as the serpent deceived Eve by his subtilty, so the minds of the Corinthian Christians were being deceived by false reasoning (2 Cor. 11:3 = Gen. 3:13). The sinner chooses or accepts the words of the &ldquo;tongue of the subtle&rdquo; (Job 15:5 &ndash; the same word is used about the serpent in Gen. 3:1). The frequent command: &ldquo;You shall not covet&rdquo; (Ex. 20:17 etc.) uses the same Hebrew word translated &ldquo;desire&rdquo; when we read of how Eve &ldquo;desired&rdquo; the fruit (Gen. 3:6); yet Israel &ldquo;desired&rdquo; the wrong fruit (Is. 1:29). In all these allusions and they exist in almost every chapter of the Bible we are being shown how human sin is a repetition in essence of that of our first parents. The insistent emphasis is that we should rise above and <em>not</em> be like them.</p>