Luke 21:17

“And you will be hated of all men for my name's sake.”

And all this will happen to them because for His sake they will be hated by all men. By ‘all men', of course, He means the generality of mankind. In contrast with the love of Christians for one another, and the general tolerance of society, they will always be open to hatred at any time, a hatred aroused by false fervour and the activities of wicked men, and which once aroused will affect the majority (compare Acts 13:50; Acts 14:5; Acts 14:19; Acts 17:13; Acts 19:28). They will never be able to be sure of how the world will react against them. That is why they will be ill-treated in the synagogues, put in prison, and brought before kings and governors. Beginning in Acts all this happened both in Judea and elsewhere. Indeed in the first two centuries it was often at the instigation of the Jews that it happened (compare Revelation 2:9; Revelation 3:9), until they at length in later centuries in their turn became the persecuted.

Jews today try to paint over the part played by their leaders in the death of Christ, and their own behaviour to Christians in the first two centuries after Christ when they often acted as informers in a way that resulted in many Christian martyrdoms and imprisonments, preferring to concentrate on their own later persecution by so-called Christians. But any persecution, whether by Jews or by Christians, is totally indefensible, and both broke God's Law. Each was equally heinous. For whether Jews love us, or hate us, we must certainly love them, for Christ's sake, if not always for their own, and they are supposed to do the same (Leviticus 19:34).