Ye adulterers and adulteresses. — The phrase may seem to flow naturally after the former ones, but the Received text, from which our version was made, is wrong. It should be, ye adulteresses! as accusing those who have broken their marriage vow to God. The sense is familiar to us from many passages in the Old Testament, in which God speaks of Israel in a similar manner, e.g., Psalms 73:27; Isaiah 54:5; Jeremiah 2:2; Ezekiel 16 passim; Ezekiel 23:37-43; Hosea 2:2. Again in the New Testament: Matthew 12:39; Matthew 16:4; Mark 8:38; Revelation 2:20-22; Revelation 17:1; Revelation 17:5; Revelation 17:15, &c.; St. Paul’s description of the church (2 Corinthians 11:2), espoused “as a chaste virgin to Christ;” and comp. 2 Peter 2:14, specially the margin. “God is the Lord and husband of every soul that is His;” and in her revolt from Him, and love for sin, her acts are those of an adulterous woman.
Know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? — i.e., the state of being an enemy to God, not one of simpler enmity with Him. There cannot be a passive condition to the faith of Christ: “he that is not with Me is against Me” (Matthew 12:30). Renunciation of the world, in the Christian promise, is not forsaking it when tired and clogged with its delights, but the earliest severance from it; to break this vow, or not to have made it, is to belong to the foes of God, and not merely to be out of covenant with Him. The forces of good and evil divide the land so sharply that there is no debatable ground, nor even halting-place between. And if God be just, so also is He jealous (Exodus 20:5).
“Let us not weakly slide into the treason:
Yielding another what we owe to Him.”
Whosoever therefore will be (or, wills to be) a friend of the world is the enemy of God. — The choice is open; here is no iron fate, no dread necessity: but the wrong determination of the soul constitutes it henceforth as an ally of Satan. “Woe unto you, when all men speak well of you” (Luke 6:26), for the world, as our Lord has taught us, must “love its own” (John 15:19). And the sooner the soldier of Christ learns to expect its animosity, the better will he give himself up to the battle. (Comp. Matthew 6:24; Luke 16:13.)