The first letter of John contains an exhortation for the church to resist worldliness. The apostle paints the world as the kingdom of darkness, under the power of evil, and he gives clear guidance to his readers: choose the light rather than the darkness. "Do not love the world or anything in the world" (2:15). In the next verse (click here to view the whole passage), John describes three examples of worldliness: the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. Of the three, the first and the third are easy to understand: illicit sensual pleasure and boastful materialism. But what about the middle warning? What does John mean when he warns against the lust of the eyes?

Many commentators see this simply as an amplification of the first warning. According to this interpretation, the warning against lust warrants elaboration, because the eyes, more than the other senses, tempt the believer toward sexual immorality.

Yet the flow of the argument seems to suffer if the second is merely a reiteration of the first. Something else, or at least something more, seems to be in John's mind. More likely it refers, in addition to sexual lust, to anything that entices the eye. Lust of the eyes is the tendency for us to be captivated by the outward, the visible, and the tangible. In C.H. Dodd's words, it is the "tendency to be captivated by the outward show of things, without inquiring into their real value." The "lust" that John has in view here then is an instability, a rootlessness and a restlessness.

Josef Pieper makes an eloquent application of John's teaching to modern times: "[The lust of the eyes] surrounds itself with the restlessness of a perpetual moving picture of meaningless shows, and with the literally deafening noise of impressions and sensations breathlessly rushing past the windows of the senses."

Modern restlessness is the product of our technologically driven culture, and Pieper suggests it is an inclination that is not limited to the eyes. Writing prophetically in a pre-video era, J. Gresham Machen lamented the sterility and "unrelieved drabness" that technology brought to modern life. The modern American "has to have somebody else amuse him all the time. Leave him alone for five minutes, and he has to turn on his radio. It seems to make very little difference to him what the radio gives forth. All he wants is that some kind of physical impact shall be made on his ear-drums. ... Turn off his radio even for a moment and the appalling emptiness of his life is at once revealed." This "lust of the ear" can be as dangerous as the lust of the eye.

In our day, however, nothing so powerfully introduces these temptations as the television. When Christians condemn television, often they focus their attack on sex, violence, or the advertising-induced consumerism. Generally, such criticisms are valid and important, but they miss the greater problem with television: the lust of the eyes that it generates by its instantaneous, transient, and never-ending flood of moving images. As Marshall McLuhan noted, when we watch it, it is massaging us all the time, not only during its perfidious commercials. The overpowering and hypnotic effect of its images erode critical thinking and discernment at all times, whatever the content.

Bruce Edwards has written that television demands only one commandment. "Watch and do not speak. Watch and do not act. Watch and remain still, placid, passive. Watch: unself-consciously, docilely, imperturbably. Watch: losing yourself in the mediated world, ignoring your own."

What is wrong with such modern restlessness? The assault of these images deadens our sensibilities. Perhaps no one understood this better than Andy Warhol. Capitalizing on our culture's lust of the eyes, Warhol's pop art cynically strung together a repetition of images, from Elvis to soup cans to car wrecks. The effect, according to Gene Veith, was that "the tragic and trivial were reduced to banality."

As Ken Myers has written, the lust of the eyes induces careless habits and atrophies the cultivation of Christian virtues. Restlessness is "likely to be an obstacle to prayer, to concerted reflection, and to attentiveness to the needs of others."

We are distracted from our Christian vocations, turning from the world of our neighbors toward virtual worlds, artificial worlds, and passive worlds. Further, it erodes an appreciation for permanence and stability in our lives, privileging instead the novel and the ephemeral. Our TVs and PCs and VCRs especially bind us to the transitoriness of this world.

In 1 John, the apostle sees these temptations as folly. It is foolish to desire the world, because the world and its desires are passing away. When we become addicted to the transitory things of this world, we are closed to the permanent things, to God and to the imperishable eschatological world that is dawning.

Lust of the eyes, therefore, robs us of our heavenly-mindedness. By recklessly pursuing the tangible and the visible, we can all too easily forget that faith is being certain of what we do not see. Moreover, in our addiction for more and more images, and more and more information, we have conflated wisdom and information. The Bible, however, carefully distinguishes the two, and we must allow wisdom to place limits on our appetite for information. In short, Christians must place limits on the lusts of their senses, and restrain themselves by developing technological asceticism.

In John Updike's "Rabbit" tetralogy, we see graphically illustrated the spontaneous, undisciplined, and lustful character of modern life. The frenetic pacing of the narrative accelerates with every volume, a point that can be substantiated by Updike's references to television. There were three references to television programs in Rabbit, Run, 19 references in Rabbit Redux, 26 in Rabbit Is Rich, and finally, 38 in Rabbit at Rest. In the end, Rabbit finds relief from his restlessness only in death: ". . . but enough. Maybe. Enough."

Ironically, John (the apostle, not the novelist) suggests that Rabbit's visual restlessness is caused by blindness. It is the children of the darkness, blinded by sin to spiritual realities, that have the lust of the eyes. By contrast, only the children of the light, who know another source of relief from worldly restlessness, can obey the Johannine commandment to keep themselves from idols. They have had their eyes opened to God's spiritual glory. Only they can rest in the truth that "Fading is the worldling's pleasures, all his boasted pomp and show; solid joys and lasting treasure none but Zion's children know."