What The World Hates...

I always try to make the distinction between what the Bible calls a church, and what we think a church is…the Bible speaks of the church as the collected body of true believers in Christ Jesus, while we think the church is a building like this and all the people contained within it. This I say so that we understand this: one, there is that which God has brought together; the collected body of believers; two, there is the physical church which man has created, and within the man created church we are seeing a decline in the true believers within it, most times starting with its pastor.

Now, in looking at the man created church and its decline in true believers, we must ask why a decline in believers in Christ is there. First, people are not happy with what the Bible has to say. Second, pastors are more concerned with quantity than quality. They want more people in the building, regardless of what they believe, then having people in the building who believe and trust in Jesus regardless of the number of them. Now I mention the physical church and its decline because this type of church does not want to be hated, so they adapt to the world’s thinking and are shielded from the hatred of the world. Jesus said this about the disciples, the world does not hate you, because you are still one of them, but they will soon come to hate you as well.

How did we get to a point where there are those that sit in a church who don’t believe what is necessary to be saved, let alone what it is to be a true Christian? Well, this is a problem of leadership. The prophet Hosea said it like this: “Like people, like priest,” Jesus even lamented that people don’t rise above their teachers. The physical church has been so busy over the last 30 years trying to find ways not to offend non-Christians, trying to find ways to take the offenses out of the Christian doctrine, designing approaches to nonbelievers that don’t create hostility or rejection, weaving in the changes and delusions of society into the physical church operations, that it has created a church movement that is void of the truth of the word of God. In most cases, it is far from the truth of God that I wonder why they even use the Bible at all.

“If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you, ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’

If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you. If they kept My word, they will keep yours also. But all these things they will do to you for My name’s sake, because they do not know Him who sent Me. If I had not come and spoken to them, they would have no sin, but now they have no excuse for their sin.

He who hates Me hates My Father also. If I had not done among them the works which no one else did, they would have no sin; but now they have seen and also hated both Me and My Father. But this happened that the word might be fulfilled which is written in their law, ‘They hated Me without a cause.’

John 15:18-25

In these Scriptures, Jesu is using the word “world” in two senses, one for the current time and place; referring to the Jewish religious leaders, the people who were “following the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,” the God of the Old Testament, the creator God as the world; also, for the physical world as the Christian doctrine spreads through it, leading up to today and beyond. One thing the disciples knew for sure was that the Jewish leaders hated Jesus Christ, and they hated Him with a passion. At one time I thought that I would never understand the Bible, it looked so daunting to me. But since I believed in God, He gave me illumination into what it says, and that illumination is a continuing process. But one of the things that I got that the Jewish leaders didn’t get, and they were supposed to know the Old Testament inside and out, was that God would come to earth and dwell with us in that of the Messiah. And in fact, Jesus is God incarnate, but they never recognized Him. In fact, they fully rejected Him, and He says here, “They hated me.” And He says, “They hated Me before they hated you.”