I have told you this, so that when the time comes you will remember that I warned you. I did not tell you this at first because I was with you.
While Jesus was with them, he was the object of attack and not them (15:18), and while He was with them, He also protected them, but all of that is about to change because He is about to leave them. The timing is significant that when he began to announce his approaching death, he also began to declare that His disciples must be willing to lose their lives if they wanted to really find them (Mark 8:31-38).
John 15:18 “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first.
Mark 8:31-38 He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. “Get behind me, Satan!” he said. “You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.” Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul? If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.”
Jesus is telling them these things now, not to discourage them, but so they could avoid the real danger of what was to come. Jesus desired the coming persecution to not be a difficulty to their faith, but instead to actually strengthen it. This desired result did not always happen. Pliny, the governor of Bithynia, wrote to Roman emperor Trajan that some of the people he was examining to see if they were Christians admitted “that they had been Christians, but they had ceased to be so many years ago.” Barclay notes that “Even admidst the heroism of the early church, there were those whose faith was not great enough to resist persecution and whose endurance was not strong enough to stay the course.” However, most were true to Christ due to his preparation of them. Their response must have been quite similar to that of William Tyndale when he was persecuted for trying to give the Bible to the common people by translating it into English. His reply to their attempts to kill him was, “I never expected anything else.” See (1Peter 4:12, 1John 3:13)
1 Peter 4:12 Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you.
1 John 3:13 Do not be surprised, my brothers, if the world hates you.
Why should I complain of want or distress,
John Newton
Temptation or pain? He told me no less;
The heirs of salvation, I know from His Word,
Through much tribulation must follow their Lord.
There will be bad times in our walk with Christ. It is not all blue skies and balmy days. All kinds of weather make up a year and so it is with us. Often new converts are wrongly told that their new life in Christ will be all sweetness and good, while in fact we have become active enemies of the devil when we convert and he does his best to bring adversity, pain, and death to our doors. Jesus never painted a rosy picture of what following Him would mean (Matt 7:13-14), so why do we? We try to bribe people into the Kingdom, when we should be honest with them like Jesus is.
Matthew 7:13-14 “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.
Christ told His disciples (and us) about the bad things to come so they (and we) would be prepared for them when they came. As quoted before, “forewarned is forearmed.” A sailing ship that meets the storm with all of its sails fully set will most surely sink, but if the radar is watched and the weather reports heeded, it will be ready when the storm hits and there will be no loss.
There is another advantage to be gained by the warnings of Jesus. When the foretold bad things come upon us, it gives us more confidence in Him and in His ability to take care of us. What we believed before now becomes experiencial knowledge.
Jesus gives us warnings, too, but they often seem invisible to us until they happen and then He makes them come alive from His Word to strengthen us in our time of need. Maclaren tells the following:
“The old Greeks used to send messages from one army to another by means of a roll of parchment twisted spirally round a baton, and then written on. It was perfectly unintelligible when it fell into a man’s hands that had not a corresponding baton to twist it upon. Many of Christ’s messages to us are like that. You can only understand the utterances when life gives you the frame round which to wrap them, and then they flash up into meaning, and we say at once, ‘He told us it all before, and I scarcely knew that He had told me, until this moment when I need it.’”
It is a good thing for us that He doesn’t reveal all we are going to go through all at once, or we would quit the race. But with the turning of the page in His revelation to us also comes the grace to go through the tribulation we are faced with at that time. He never leaves us nor forsakes us, and He always helps us through.