What Does John 17:16 Mean?
They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.THE KEY
The verse separates where you live from what you come from: the world’s order can surround you without being your source.
THE MEANING
Your belonging is not defined by how fully you fit the world around you. The verse places your source alongside Jesus’ own: you are present in the world, yet the world’s order does not define where you come from.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that being surrounded by a way of life means your identity must come from it.
THE ROOT
κόσμος
kosmos
GROWS FROM
κοσμ-
kosm-
To order or arrange; by extension, an ordered arrangement or world.
The Greek word can name both the world and an ordered arrangement. Here, “not of the world” speaks to source and belonging: the world’s order surrounds you, but it is not the order you come from.
ALSO GROWS
kosmeō: Arrange, adorn.
κοσμέω
The related verb makes the sense of ordering visible: the “world” is also an arrangement of life and its measures.
kosmikos: Worldly; belonging to this world.
κοσμικός
This branch names what takes its character from the world, sharpening the verse’s distinction between being present in it and deriving your nature from it.
THE PATTERN
Belonging is shaped by the source that forms you, not simply by the world in which you stand.
A Psalm of David. The earth is the LORD's, and what fills it; the inhabited world, and those who settle in it.Do not take the shape of this age, but be reshaped by the renewing of your mind, so that you may test what is the good, well-pleasing, and complete will of God.If you were out of the world, it would love its own. But because you are not out of it, but I picked you out of it, therefore the world hates you.THE THREAD
If you were out of the world, it would love its own. But because you are not out of it, but I picked you out of it, therefore the world hates you.John 15:19 repeats the same phrase, “not of the world,” using the same Greek word kosmos. It opens the distinction further: the world’s response does not decide your source or belonging.
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