John 15:18-25 They hated Me without cause

John 15:18-25 Jesus now talks about the consequences of being His friends. The world will hate and persecute them. By this He means specifically the world system, that social and political structure that exists in humankind. Abstractly, we might think the world system would be value neutral, and reflect the values and believes of whatever individuals participate in it. But Jesus knows that the whole world lies in the power of the evil one. (I John 5:19) Therefore it actually reflects the evil one's values and beliefs, and therefore it hates Jesus (as will be demonstrated shortly) and consequently it will also hate His friends and followers. The world does this because it does not know the Father. The people in the world do not know the Father, so they persecute His emissaries.

          Jesus now engages is some judgment. The actions of people in the world would not constitute sin if they did things in ignorance. But now that Jesus has come and spoken to them, they are responsible for their response, and consequently their rejection of Him is sin. They have no excuse. The word prophasin suggests that it is pretext or pretense for their sin that has been removed. We say 'ignorance of the law is no excuse', but in God's kingdom, ignorance is an excuse. (See Luke 23:34) But once revelation has occurred that pretext for doing the wrong thing is gone, and missing the mark becomes sin. And this is done to reveal the truth of men's hearts - that they sin not because of circumstance or ignorance, but they sin because they hate the Father and therefore they hate His Son, and therefore they will hate His friends. Jesus quotes Psalm 69:4 to emphasize that the Father sent Him in love, and the world hated Him without any cause. Psalm 69 is the cry of distress, written by David, of a person whose life is threatened by both natural circumstances and adversaries. In some respects it could be considered prophetic of the suffering of Christ, except that verse 5 refers to folly and wrongs of the petitioner. John had previously quote Psalm 69:9, in John 2:17 on the occasion of Jesus’ cleansing of the temple, as something that the disciples remembered. Here Jesus directly quotes a different verse of the same Psalm. Jesus might have been reflecting that in fact the reason they hated Him was because He had confronted religious hypocrisy and exposed as sin the hearts and actions of the religious establishment.