kosmos

Underneath every use of this word is the idea of order. The Greeks used it for an orderly arrangement, and it became their word for the universe itself, seen as a single ordered whole rather than a random scatter of things. The Bible takes that up: the world is what God made and holds together, with a beginning and an arrangement that is his work, not its own.

When the New Testament uses the word this way it is pointing to creation as a whole, the sum of everything that exists in heaven and on earth. It can look back to the founding of the world before time, or forward to its end, but the focus is the made universe as a single thing with God behind it.

This is the root from which the other meanings branch. The same word narrows to the earth where people live, then to the people themselves, and finally to those people as a society that has turned against God. Knowing that the base idea is an ordered whole keeps those later, darker uses from looking like a different word.

From the whole universe the word narrows to one part of it: the earth, the stage where human life happens. To go out into the world, to come into the world, to be the light of the world, is to move within this human realm. It is the place a person is born into and leaves at death, the place where things are bought and sold and where the gospel is to be carried to every corner.

From the place it slides naturally to the people in it. "The whole world" can mean simply everybody, all of humankind. This is the sense in the most famous line that uses the word, that God loved the world and gave his Son for it. Here the world is not yet the enemy of God; it is the mass of people God reaches out to save.

These two shades, the inhabited earth and the people who fill it, are close enough that a single verse can hold both at once, and the line between them is often soft. What they share, and what sets this meaning off from the bare universe above, is that the focus has come down to earth and to human beings.

This is the word's hardest and most loaded sense, and it carries much of the weight of John's Gospel and letters and of Paul. The same human world that God loves is also, when looked at another way, a settled order that does not know God and stands opposed to him. It has its own ruler, its own wisdom, its own desires, and its own way of judging, all of them running against the way of God.

It is not a separate place or a different set of people from meaning two; it is the same humanity seen as a system in rebellion. That is why the New Testament can say in one breath that God loves the world and in the next that a believer must not love the world. The world here is not the planet or the population but the whole way of living that has organized itself apart from its Maker, the air a person breathes before God breaks in.

Because it is an order and not just a crowd, it can be spoken of almost as a power: it hates, it persecutes, it has a spirit, it passes away. To be crucified to the world, or to overcome the world, is to be cut loose from that entire system, not to leave the earth. This is the sense that most needs guarding, because the plain English "world" hides how sharp the opposition is.

This is the oldest meaning of the word and the one that has almost dropped out of view by New Testament times, surviving in a single verse. Before it ever meant the universe, the word meant an orderly, pleasing arrangement, and so it came to mean the way a person is arranged or decorated: ornaments, fine clothes, an attractive get-up.

It is the same root idea of order that runs through every other sense, only applied to a person's appearance rather than to the cosmos. The English word "cosmetic" comes straight from this use. In its lone New Testament appearance it names exactly the kind of outward decoration that is set against the lasting beauty of character.