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R.E.O. White

If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. 

If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you. 

Remember the word that I said unto you, The servant is not greater than his lord. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you; if they have kept my saying, they will keep yours also. 

But all these things will they do unto you for my name's sake, because they know not him that sent me. 

If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin: but now they have no cloke for their sin. Joh 15:18-22  [see John 15:9-16:4]

 

The besetting weakness of modern Christianity is sentimentality. That is, the naïve belief that all people, given a fair chance, would be saints; the pathetic illusion that in God's world good will triumph without struggle, without cost; the unrealistic persuasion that order, protection, and reform may be achieved without resort to force; the foolish assumption that all points of view will be found to have truth in them, given sufficient "understanding."

Strangely, this tendency to self-deception is frequently miscalled "faith," and the underlying sentiment, that all is in reality well with the world but for some superficial and temporary indisposition, is supposed to be "basic Christianity." Christian thinkers of great influence have indeed striven to show that evil is unreal, a mere absence of good.

How anyone can reconcile such dangerous fantasies with the stark realism of Jesus passes comprehension. His words and warnings are often almost ruthless - "better not born," "better a millstone about his neck and drowned" are his verdicts on certain people; a rogues' gallery of acutely observed and bluntly described men of violence, revenge, avarice, heartlessness, folly, and deceit fills his parables. His call to discipleship at once warns that a cross may be the reward, with no privileged protection from the wild winds that blow or the floods that rise. And when he commissions his men for future tasks, he paints no rosy dream of fame and adulation, with a grateful world applauding. In fifteen verses, "hatred" and its characteristic manifestations in persecution, ignorance, murder, and revenge are mentioned fourteen times.

--The Night He Was Betrayed, R.E.O, White,


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