Of him who was evermore coming into the world, it is said, In the world he was, and the world was made (came into being) through him, and the world recognized him not. The κόσμος is a term specially used by St.
John to denote the ordered whole of the universe, viewed apart from God (see Introduction). Sometimes this is emphasized by the pronoun, "This world," when it is contrasted with the higher and heavenly "order" to which the Lord's personality belonged, both before and after this manifestation in the flesh.
From being thus the scene of ordered existence apart from God, it rapidly moves into the organized resistance to the will of God, and therefore it often denotes humanity taken as a whole apart from God and grace.
It may be the object of the Divine love and compassion (John 3:16), while the redemption and deliverance of the world from sin is the great end of the ministry and work of Jesus (verse 29); but throughout this gospel "the world" is the synonym of the adverse power and order of humanity, until it is illumined, regenerated, by the Spirit of God.
The world here signifies humanity and its dwelling place, considered apart from the changes wrought in any part of it by grace. The three assertions concerning the world drop the imagery of light and life, and by their emphatic concatenation, without the assistance of a Greek particle, tell the tragic story of human departure from God.
Thus only can the mystery of the previous verses be explained. At the very forefront of the argument of the Gospel is put a statement which concedes the strange perplexity of the rejection of the incarnate Logos.
Not only does the entire narrative illustrate the awful fact, strange and inconceivable as such an idea appears when baldly stated, but the author generalizes the antipathy between the Logos and the world into a more comprehensive, damning, and yet undeniable, proposition.
From the beginning, though the world came into being through the Logos, though he was in the world, in every atom of matter, in every vibration of force, in every energy of life, yet the world, notwithstanding all its power of recognizing the fact, yet the world, as concentrated in an antagonistic humanity, did not come to know him fully ( ἔγνω).
This is the lesson we learn from all the melancholy and tragic perversions of his glorious perfections which every heathenism and every cultus, and even every philosophy, has perpetrated. St. Paul says precisely the same thing: "The world by wisdom knew not God" (see also Romans 1:19-22, which might be taken as an inspired commentary on the whole passage).
And the awful statement is still, with reference to the majority of men, true, that "the world knoweth not God, neither the Father, nor the Word, nor the Holy Ghost."