Do you know what the world hates? I mean, really hates? Love. Genuine love. That’s right. All their protestations aside, all their singing about what the world needs now is love, sweet love, all their desires to buy the world a Coke and teach it to sing in harmony, when they are confronted with genuine love, they hate it. They believe they love. Love is love, no matter who or what you love. Love doesn’t discriminate. Love consumes whatever it desires. They do love, but their loves are disordered. They love death and all that destroys. When they come face-to-face with genuine love, it must be eliminated.
In his Farewell-For-Now Address, Jesus told his disciples of the love he and the Father had for them and commanded them to abide in his love. Abiding in this love will mean that they will love one another in a way that produces a fullness of joy (Jn 15:9-17). This joyful, loving community will have strong families, with husbands and wives being faithful to one another in well-ordered homes. People whose lives have been devastated by sin will find a place of redemption and restoration. These people will live quiet, peaceful, productive lives, doing good for their surrounding communities. If Jesus’ disciples do all this, surely the world will welcome them with open arms.
Not so. Jesus follows up everything he says about his disciples forming a loving community by telling them of the stark reality that the world will hate them. “The world,” in this context, is God’s created order under the control of sin and Satan, who was the ruler of the world before Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension (cf. Jn 16:11). The hate of which Jesus speaks is the enmity God set between the woman and the serpent, between her seed and his seed immediately following the fall (Gen 3:14-15).
The God-ordained enmity placed between the woman and the serpent and her seed and his seed reveals two fundamentally different ways of seeing and ordering the world. Our mere existence as a loving community loyal to Christ is a threat to them. The two can never be reconciled. One must be defeated. Jesus and his disciples are the woman’s seed and, therefore, hated by the serpent and his seed. At times, the hatred is highly emotional and expressive. We see it in the verbal and physical abuse of the enemies of Christ’s church, whether the protests of the deviants in our country or the persecution of Christians in other countries. But hatred need not be highly charged. It may simply be settled opposition that is quite civil. But make no mistake, whether loud, obnoxious, and violent or polite and courteous, the enmity is there. They are the enemy. We are to love our enemies, but part of loving our enemies is recognizing that they are, indeed, enemies.
We must be careful to draw the antithesis in the right place. The line is not between Jews and Gentiles, whites and blacks, Europeans and Asians, or any other such ethnic division. There are people on both sides of the antithesis in every one of these groups. The antithesis is drawn between those loyal to Christ and his enemies. Don’t draw the line in the wrong place.
Jesus didn’t tell his disciples these things to discourage them but to prepare them (16:1). Don’t be surprised or discouraged when the world hates you. They hated Jesus. They will hate you. This enmity will exist until our mission is complete and Satan is fully crushed under our feet (Rom 16:20). If the world hates you, you might just be doing something right.