Blinded Eyes, Hardened Hearts

But this happened that the word might be fulfilled which is written in their law, “They hated Me without a cause” (John 15:25).

This is a terrible indictment upon those who prided themselves in keeping the Law of God to the letter and punishing those who disobey even the smallest part of the Law. This was the assessment of Jesus toward the Jews, they hated Me without cause. John Brown wrote, “There was nothing in Christ to provoke hatred in any but morally disordered, depraved minds. Nothing in His character, it was faultless; nothing in His doctrines, they were all true; nothing in His laws, they were holy, just and good. He never had done the world any harm: He had spent His life in bestowing favors on men. Why, then, did they hate Him, why did they persecute Him, why did they put Him to death? They hated Him because they hated His Father.”

All of this came to pass in order to fulfill what was said by King David in the Psalms (all of his psalms were experiential while some of his psalms were prophetic). (Psalm 35:19) Let them not rejoice over me who are wrongfully my enemies; nor let them wink with the eye who hate me without a cause. (Psalm 69:4) Those who hate me without a cause are more than the hairs of my head; they are mighty who would destroy me, being my enemies wrongfully; though I have stolen nothing, I still must restore it. 

Jesus’ point was that if David could be so hated by his enemies, and he was God’s anointed king, how much more would the world hate Him, and He is the sinless Son of God. The world hates Jesus because His holy and righteous life exposes our sinful and wicked lives. The world hates Jesus because He spoke God truth while we are blinded by Satan’s lies. The world hates Jesus because He loves us and gave His life for us to save us from destruction while we love ourselves and seeks to destroy ourselves and others. The world hates Jesus because He is the only source of genuine salvation while we either have a better way of salvation through our own efforts, or we believe we don’t need to be saved. 

Make no mistake - to ignore or reject Jesus as the only true Lord and Savior is to hate Jesus Christ, and to hate the Father who sent Him. We do not have to remove ‘In God We Trust’ from our currency or from the courtroom; we do not have to ban prayer and Bible study from public school campuses; we do not have to demand that people refrain from using the name of Jesus in public prayer; we do not have to stand opposed to the moral and ethical principles that God has taught us in Scripture, etc., to demonstrate how much we hate the Lord. All we have to do is ignore Him publicly and personally, do our own thing, live our own lives, set our own goals and chart our own course to reach those goals without God in our lives, to demonstrate how much we hate Him. Jesus said it clearly and definitively, (Luke 11:23) He who is not with Me is against Me, and he who does not gather with Me scatters. There is no ‘gray area’, no ‘middle of the road’, no ‘straddling the fence’. A person is either with Jesus, or against Jesus - and the only road to the Father is to be with Jesus. All others have spiritually blind eyes and hardened hearts. Amen.

Pastor Martin