The Fashion of This World Is Passing Away

Anyone who has ever walked into a great theater after the play has ended knows the strange melancholy of that moment. Just a little while before, from the audience, everything seemed whole: the palace with its columns, the window with its garden in the background, the horizon stretching far beyond the walls. The light fell on that world and gave it the weight of reality. We believed in the king who entered through that door, we suffered over the news that arrived through that window, we dreamed over the horizon painted in the distance. But now the curtains have opened from the other side, the spotlights have dimmed, and someone in coveralls has begun striking the set. And then one discovers what was always there without anyone seeing it: the column is lightweight wood, the garden is canvas stretched over a frame, the horizon is less than two meters deep. There was no palace. There was the appearance of a palace. And that appearance is now being taken apart piece by piece, carried off to storage, waiting to become something else tomorrow. This is exactly the word the apostle Paul chose to describe the entire world we live in. Not a cathedral word. A backstage word. A word for scenery being struck once the lights come up for real.

He wrote it almost in passing, in the middle of practical advice to a restless church, the way someone drops, without warning, the sentence that holds up everything else: "for the fashion of this world passeth away" (1 Corinthians 7:31). In the original, the word is schēma — figure, outward form, configuration, the way a thing presents itself to the eye. It belongs to the same family as that other word which opened this book at the very beginning, syschēmatizō, the "conforming to the pattern" of Romans 12:2. And the coincidence is no accident; it is the key to the whole work. The costume of the age, the very thing we are called not to be molded into, is made of the same material as the scenery that passes away. To conform to the world is to dress in the clothes of a theater that is being struck. Paul tells the Corinthians to use the world as those who do not abuse it, to buy as those who do not possess, to weep as those who do not weep, to rejoice as those who do not rejoice — and he gives the reason in a single breath: all of this that you see, this arrangement of things that seems permanent, this fashion of the present age, is in motion. It is passing. The Greek verb is in the present tense, and a present that is also a crossing: it is passing, at this very instant, as you read. It is not that one day, in some distant future, the set will come down. It is that it is already being struck right now, before eyes that have grown accustomed to not seeing the motion.

Nature, for that matter, has never hidden this truth from us; it was the heart that learned not to hear it. The wildflower opens in the morning, dazzles at noon, and by evening is already drooping, and the prophet used it precisely as a mirror of human glory: "All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever" (Isaiah 40:6-8). The wave that seems to command the whole sea breaks on the shore and vanishes without a trace. The greenest leaf of summer is the very one autumn will carry off. The entire visible world keeps pronouncing, without pause, the same gentle word: passing, passing, passing. And yet it is precisely in the face of this world that dissolves before our very eyes that the age builds its most stubborn faith — the faith that it will last. There is something almost touching in this blindness: a man surrounded on every side by things that pass, swearing that his will remain. It's like living in a sandcastle at the water's edge and hanging pictures on the walls forever.

And here is the deepest value the age sells us, the assumption underneath all the others we have walked through together: permanence. The fashion of this world never announces itself as fashion. It presents itself as solid ground, as the only possible reality, as that which always has been and always will be. The appetites we've examined in these pages — the possessions that accumulate, the status that gets displayed, the pleasure that gets consumed, the self preserved at any cost — all of them spring from the same silent promise: this will last. It's worth building here, because this stays. The age convinces the heart that the shop window is eternal, that the race has a finish line worth reaching, that the throne is made of stone, that the name a man makes for himself among other men will be remembered forever. It hides the nails in the wood and the seams in the canvas. It switches off the work lights and leaves only the spotlights on. It makes us swear, from our seats, that the palace is real. And that is why Paul's sentence is so quietly revolutionary. It does not condemn the theater for being beautiful. It merely reminds us, with an almost terrible serenity, that it is theater — and that the theater ends.

It was against this illusion of permanence that the Lord Jesus told one of his simplest and most serious stories. Two men built houses, he said. From the outside, they might have looked identical — the same roof, the same whitewashed walls, the same door facing the road. The difference lay where no one was looking, in what was underneath, in the foundation no one sees once the building is finished. "Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock." And the other, "that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not," he compares to "a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand" (Matthew 7:24-26). Notice something that usually goes unremarked: good weather revealed nothing. As long as the sun shone, the two houses looked equally solid, equally well finished, equally worth envying to anyone passing on the road. No one, looking from outside on a clear day, could have told which one stood on rock and which on sand. Only when "the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew" did the truth of the foundation appear. One remained standing, "for it was founded upon a rock." The other "fell: and great was the fall of it" (Matthew 7:25-27). And the fool, in Jesus's story, is not the man of obviously depraved life. He is simply the man who built on what does not last.

And this is where the entire fashion of this world is dismantled at a single stroke. Building on the sand, in the parable, is not building an obviously scandalous life. Sand holds up too, for a while. Sand also supports walls, also bears the furniture, also shelters a family through many days of sunshine and celebration. The drama is subtler, and for that reason deeper: sand is exactly the material of schēma, the fashion that passes away. Whoever raises his life on the values of the age is not building on nothing — he is building on something that looks solid and is, at this very instant, being struck like scenery. He is investing his whole life in what has already been judged and condemned to pass away. That is why the Lord crowned these teachings with the boldest sentence ever spoken about the duration of things: "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away" (Matthew 24:35). Linger on that sentence, because it overturns everything. The only two things any human being, in any era, has always taken as the very height of solidity — the sky overhead and the earth underfoot — enter, from Jesus's own mouth, onto the list of what passes away. And his word, which the age dismisses as fragile, dated, outmoded, is placed outside that list, in the one place that does not move. Listen closely to what is being said, because it is the exact reverse of the fashion of the world. Everything that looks like rock is, underneath, sand. And exactly what the world judges to be fragile sand — the word of a crucified Teacher — is the Rock.

Gather with me now, reader, the threads we have been weaving since the first page, because the hour has come to tie them all into a single knot. We saw, at the beginning, that there is a god of this age who has blinded the minds of unbelievers (2 Corinthians 4:4) — and we now realize that his greatest blindness is precisely this, making us look at the set and see eternity, swearing by a canvas palace. We saw that there is a mold, a costume worn without ever having been chosen, and we heard the invitation not to conform to it, but to be transformed by the renewing of our mind (Romans 12:2). We saw the invisible current, the course of this world, the air breathed without noticing, that spirit which works in the children of disobedience (Ephesians 2:2), and we learned that only one who first sees it as a current can resist it. We mapped the scheme's three appetites — the lust of the flesh, which is pleasure; the lust of the eyes, which is possession; and the pride of life, which is status — and confronted each of them with a word from the Kingdom, until we heard from the apostle the verdict that now rings out with fresh and final force: "the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever" (1 John 2:17). We saw the cross dismantle, one by one, the age's wealth, status, self-preservation, and cleverness, teaching us that life is found by losing it, that greatness comes through serving, that the foolishness of God is wiser than men. And we saw the disciple learning, at last, to live as a stranger and a pilgrim: inside the age, with his feet on the same ground as everyone else's, but not belonging to the age, having no lasting city there. All of this, we now realize, was converging on this chapter. All these threads were, in truth, a single thread, and its name is this: the fashion of this world passes away. The blindness passes. The mold passes. The current passes. The three appetites pass. And the stranger can only be a stranger because he knows the foreign land is not eternal — because he has another homeland that is not struck when the lights go out.

It must be said, honestly, that seeing this costs something. It costs because the fashion of the world did not seduce us by accident; it touches real desires, real fears, real wounds. Building on the sand is comfortable, and more than comfortable, it's what everyone around us is doing. There is a loneliness in no longer swearing by the palace when the whole audience is still applauding the set. There is a genuine grief in letting go of what we learned to call eternal and discovering it was only passing through. Whoever begins to live as a pilgrim feels, at first, the absence of the house more than the joy of the road. And the age knows this, and so it presses harder: it mocks hope as naivety, calls the refusal to accumulate weakness, treats as a fool anyone who doesn't chase what everyone else is chasing. I won't promise that it will be easy to see what we have come to see. Watching the set being struck strips us of a comfort many people would rather not lose. But it's here, exactly at this point of cost, that the liberation lives — because what costs us to let go of is also what held us most tightly. The truth that hurts in the first instant is the same truth that, in the next instant, opens the door. Whoever has never wept over the loss of the sand house has never known what it is to live on the rock.

And how does this reach down into the ground of an ordinary life, yours and mine, far from any metaphor? It comes down in a thousand small, concrete ways. It's the person who, faced with the shop window promising to complete her, pauses for a second and asks herself whether that thing will still exist ten years from now — and finds that desire loosens its grip once she remembers it's all scenery. It's whoever stops measuring his own worth by the number of eyes watching him, because he understood that the audience gets up and leaves, but the One before whom we live never rises to go. It's the decision to invest time, money, and affection in what survives death — a soul, a word of truth, a hidden act of service — instead of pouring them into what rots. It's the father who chooses presence over impressing, the worker who chooses the integrity no one sees over the applause everyone sees, the person who forgives because he knows that the debt of pride won't last as long as the peace he trades for it. Renewing the mind isn't some distant ecstasy; it's this daily re-education of the eye, this humble question repeated before every choice: will what life is asking of me pass away, or will it remain? And when the answer comes, it almost always simplifies everything.

But it would be a betrayal of the Gospel, and of the very heart of this book, to end it on the striking of the set, as if the last word were the curtain falling on an empty stage. It is not. The last word of the Scriptures is never what passes away; it is what remains. Because the same Lord who said heaven and earth would pass away is the one who opened, at the end of the whole book, the vision of "a new heaven and a new earth," and the voice that declared from the throne: "Behold, I make all things new" (Revelation 21:1,5). The old set is struck not so that we're left in the dark of an empty, cold theater, but because what was only ever being staged finally gives way to what is true and everlasting. The Kingdom Jesus preached was never one more piece of stage dressing among others; it is the Rock that was already there before the first set was ever built and that will still be there when the last one is carried off to storage. And upon that Rock — not by fleeing the world, not in a bitter exile far from other people, but in their very midst, with your feet on the same ground and your heart on another foundation — one can finally build a house that the rain, the floods, and the winds cannot take. This is where fear is transfigured into hope, and that transfiguration is the last gift these pages want to leave with you. Knowing that everything passes away is not news that saddens the Christian; it is news that sets him free. Free to open his hands and let go of what was going to slip through his fingers anyway. Free to love people and things without clutching them with the claw of despair, to use the world without abusing it, to weep over losses without the helplessness of one who has no hope, and to rejoice in blessings without turning them into idols, because the treasure was never in what is struck and stored away, but in the One who remains. The man who knows the sand house will fall does not build with less love; he builds in the right place.

And the renewing of the mind, that golden thread we asked for back in the introduction and followed through this whole book, is precisely this, now seen in full light: ceasing to call eternal what is scenery, and beginning to call eternal what actually remains. It is not merely trading one behavior for another, nor putting a religious costume on over the costume of the world. It is a change in the way of seeing, and for that reason it is a metamorphosis, a transformation that comes from within and remakes the whole of life from the root up. It is looking at the shop window that never seems to run dry and seeing, behind the shine, the lightweight wood and the nails. It is hearing the word the age swears is outdated and recognizing in it the one thing still standing when the painted columns have returned to dust. It is walking through the world as a pilgrim who loves the road without mistaking it for the house. This is the renewed mind: a mind that has relearned what carries weight and what doesn't, what lasts and what gets struck like scenery, and that therefore can no longer be dragged along however the current of time happens to pull. It stays in the river. But it knows how to swim, because it knows where the river goes and where it does not go.

We have come, then, to the end of a long walk, and I want to leave you standing — not on your knees out of fear, but on your knees out of hope. I did not write these pages so that you would start fearing the world, but so that you would stop belonging to it without realizing it. The fashion of this world is powerful, it is ancient, it is seductive — but it has one weakness none of its charms can hide for long: it passes away. It is passing away. It has already begun being struck while you were reading this book. And for you, who have come this far, only the simplest and most decisive question of all remains, the very one Jesus left hanging in the air at the end of his parable: what are you building your house on? Do not put on the costume of what is being stripped away before your very eyes. Do not raise your walls on sand that only looks firm because the sun is still shining. Build, today, on the Rock of what does not pass away — on the word of the One who promised that his words shall not pass away. And do not build tomorrow, once the rain has already started falling and the floods are already rising; build while the sun is still shining, because it is in fair weather that it's decided who will remain standing in the storm. Return to the world, then, no longer as one who belongs to it, but as one who walks through it with open eyes — someone who has learned to use the road without mistaking it for the house, to love without clinging, to live in the age without being of the age. The scenery will go on looking beautiful for a while yet, and it's fine to admire it; just don't swear by it anymore. Because the fashion of this world passes away. And precisely because of that, blessed be God, it never was, and never will be, your home. Your home is another one, older and firmer than anything the eye can see — and it is being built, stone upon stone, in every thought you let the Lord renew.