John 15:19

19. The world Five times is the world named in this verse. And what, truly, is this so-named world? It is, of course, not the physical frame of the globe, nor is it the human race as such. It is the living, fallen, unregenerate race, with whom self-interest is supreme; to whom right is a word of feeble meaning, and holiness a term of disgust; to whom sin is a trifle or an unreality; to whom God in his true attributes is offensive, and of whom Satan, but dimly disguised, is the actual god. This world is a realm of sordid appetite, of turbulent passion, of unprincipled ambition; a kingdom of evil, in which, were the inhabitants not mortal, and occupied with compulsory labour, there would be a complete likeness and sameness with hell. Were God to render the bodies of unregenerate men at once immortal, men would become fiends and earth a pandemonium. No wonder, then, that one being the incarnation of goodness, should be the central object of its antipathy.

World would love its own Were the apostles of this same world they would be the objects of such love as the world entertains, namely, the affinity of evil with evil. It would shed its grim smile upon them as its own, and welcome them into the compact and strife that the world affords and enjoys.

Because… not of the world Chosen by him from the world, the affinity of the world is broken and the antipathy is established. And it is not merely the antipathy of unlikeness. For the world hates them because, by assuming to be better than the world, the world feels itself to be by them condemned. And their mission of reproof, of warning, of threatening, and of reformation, is accepted by the world as a rebuke, an attack, and a war. Hence the world is in arms against them unarmed. It is the war of the many with the few; of the powerful with the weak; of the fierce with the mild; of the armored with the defenceless. But still he now propounds a consolation and justification. And these are threefold. First, they share this hatred with their Lord, John 15:20; second, that hatred guiltily strikes against God the Father, 21-25; and third, they co-operate in their testimony with the holy Comforter, 26, 27. Then, through the entire sixteenth chapter, does the Lord expand this struggle between the Comforter and the world before their view, closing with the grand trumpet peal of triumph, Be of good cheer, I HAVE OVERCOME THE WORLD! Such is the joyous close of the Lord’s earthly ministry to his apostles. His Gospel is a gospel of ultimate triumph.