For What Cause Does the World Hate Jesus?

Tom: We’re continuing with the gospel. We’re in the Gospel of John 15. It’s taken us a while to get here, Dave, and you know, our encouragement to our listeners to read God’s Word, and if they’ve never read the Bible before, we continue to encourage them to begin with the Gospel of John, and, [laughing] I’m sure they could go a little faster than we are here.

But you know, you read it to become familiar with it, you have content within your heart and mind, and that’s what the Holy Spirit works with. You begin to be…not just a hearer of the Word. You take it in and then you are a doer of the Word, and this is when you see God really manifest in your life to use you to His glory.

Dave: Now, Tom, I’m going to take issue with you on that. They could go…well, I guess they could go faster than we do…

Tom: Dave, if they went one word a day, they could…

Dave: Now wait a minute, Tom, please! We are only spending…how many minutes do we spend on this? Twelve?

Tom:  Twelve…yeah, and thirty seconds.

Dave: Okay. And we do it once a week—twelve minutes once a week. Now don’t make it out because weeks and weeks and weeks have passed, and we’ve only gotten so far…we haven’t been at this fulltime, you know, okay? So I don’t think we’re going too slow, and if they sat down and meditated on the Word of God, I don’t think they would do it any faster than we have.

Tom: You know, Dave, one of the things I like to do when I have the opportunity to take a pulpit somewhere—usually I’ll take a chapter out of the, you know, out of one of the epistles in the New Testament, and I’ll read through it, from beginning to end. And then I’ll say, “Hey look! That took 3 ½ minutes!” You know, whether it be…whatever epistle, it’s usually three to four minutes, you can read through an entire chapter. And I say, “Hey, who’s got 4 minutes? Who’s got 3 minutes?” You carry around a little Bible with you, and you can be parked waiting to pick your child up after school or at soccer practice, and you can get through a whole chapter in 3 ½ minutes.

Dave:  Or you can carry it in your heart and you can recite it to yourself wherever you are.

Tom: There you go… But in any case, Dave, that’s a little faster than we’re going.

Dave: Okay. Just reading it. But when you read it, you should think about it.

Tom: That’s true. We’re to ponder it. We’re to meditate upon it. And that’s why you hide it in your heart.

Dave: That’s what the Bible says about that fruitful man in Psalm 1: “In his law [that is, in the Bible, in God’s Word] doth he meditate day and night.”

Tom: Mm-hmm. So our encouragement to one and all is to search the Scriptures daily, read God’s Word.

Dave: Amen!

Tom: And live it out. That’s exhortation to ourselves, right?

Dave: Absolutely.

Tom: We are in John:15:25But this cometh to pass, that the word might be fulfilled that is written in their law, They hated me without a cause.
See All...: “But this cometh to pass that the word might be fulfilled that is written in their law: they hated me without a cause.”

Why would somebody do that?

Dave: Tom, that’s a tough word: “hate.” And we were talking about Haj Amin al Husseini. No doubt that he hated Jews. No doubt that Hitler hated Jews. The Muslims hate Jews. But here comes Jesus. Yes, Jesus is a Jew. And you look at this. You’ve got that word all through here. Let’s go back to verse 18 for a minute: “If the world hate you, you know that it hated me before it hated you…” The end of verse 19: “I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hated you.” Then it goes on, “If they persecuted me, they’ll persecute you. They’ll do these things unto you for my name’s sake.” Verse 23: “He that hateth me hateth my father also.” All through here it’s talking about being hated, and people hating Christ. Wow! What was there about Him that was hateful? It wasn’t that He was mean, nasty, selfish. No. He was good. That’s why they hated Him, because as Jesus said back there in John 3: “This is the condemnation: light has come into the world and men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil.

So He showed up the sin, and He would not compromise. He would not lower Himself to their level, and that should be the same with the Christian, and that would be why…one of the reasons why a Christian would be hated, because we are true to Christ. We’re not of the world.

Tom: It’d be the only reason.

Dave: We don’t compromise. It should…that’s right. It should be the only reason. But of course, Jesus said, “They hated me without a cause.”

So there really was no just cause why He should have been hated. So they hated Him because He revealed their sin. Because His life judged them and made them uncomfortable. They wanted to continue in their sin and rebellion against God. But the purity, the love, the compassion, the humility, the life of Christ condemned them! And so they hated Him.

In…well, it’s written in their Law. So what they were doing to Christ, here’s the perfect Son of God of whom the Father could say, “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased…” The hatred the world had toward Him was a fulfillment of prophecy.

Tom: But then the good news. I mean, it’s tough to talk about persecution and suffering for Christ’s sake. But it says, verse 26: “But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me.” It’s interesting—the Holy Spirit, called the Comforter, He also convicts of sin.

Dave: He’s called the Spirit of truth. And, Tom, if we dare go back and just relate something…I’m sure we’ve talked about it months ago…this delusion of so-called Christian psychology. And what is it? Well, it’s an attempt to integrate the Bible, what God has said, with the so-called wisdom of men. And then what it says is the Bible is not complete. God did not give us all the answers we needed, and we needed some help from Freud and Jung and Rogers, because of course they didn’t understand counseling in those days; they didn’t understand the human personality, etc., etc.

Wait a minute! God is our Creator. This is the Manufacturer’s Handbook. I think He understands it a whole lot better than anybody else. So to say…

Tom: It says He’s given us all things that pertain to life and godliness, Peter writes.

Dave: Absolutely! Jesus talks about the Comforter in John:14:17Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you.
See All..., and He calls Him the same thing, the Spirit of truth, “…even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth Him not, neither knoweth Him.”

Now we’ve got a very clear statement…well, we haven’t quite gotten to it yet. When we get to John:16:13Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come.
See All..., it says, “When he the Spirit of truth is come, he will guide you into all truth.” Now if the Spirit of truth who guides into all truth cannot be seen and received, understood, by the world, then don’t tell me that Freud or Jung or Rogers or Maslow or any of them knew anything about truth—the truth, okay? Because that is only given by the Spirit of truth.

But you know that familiar saying, the mantra, really: Why do you go to Freud and Jung?

Tom: “Because all truth is God’s truth.”

Dave: Yeah. Well, all truth is God’s truth. Okay, well, that’s true. I won’t quarrel with that. But what do we mean by truth? Not 10 X 10 is 100. We’re not talking about facts. Jesus said, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” He said, “I’ve come to bear witness of the truth.” He said, “Because I tell you the truth, you believe me not,” okay? So this is the truth of God contained in His Word, revealed only by His Holy Spirit that no one but those who are indwelt by the Holy Spirit and led of the Spirit can know and understand.

Well, that, as you’ve said, that is all we need, is it not? “He’s given us all things that pertain to life and godliness.” Christ has come to live His life in us. Jesus Christ living in me, this is my hope! This is salvation. He does not need any help from Freud, who couldn’t help himself. The guy was a basket case. He was a mess. In fact, Freud is a fraud, and they know that today better than they did a few years ago when I was saying it just as loudly then as now, but they didn’t want to hear it.

Okay, so, we have the truth of God. Jesus said, “Thy Word is truth. I am the truth.” Then let us stick with this—the Word of God, which is all we need. Not all that you need to repair your engine or to fly an airplane. All we need, as you said, for life and godliness. To be happy, to be fulfilled, to be the person that God wants me to be—I’ve got it here.

And He will, it says, “The Spirit of truth which proceedeth from the Father, he will testify of me.” So He brings us the things of Christ, the teachings of Christ, who is the truth. Christ comes and indwells us by the Holy Spirit, and you also shall bear witness because you have been with me from the beginning.”

And, Tom, I want to come back…I know our time is gone…and talk specifically about that, because I think that is a very important statement from Jesus Christ. You…there’re going to be special witnesses—they’ve been with Him from the beginning. We are witnesses, too, but not in the special way that the disciples were.