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Luke 21:16–18
“You will be delivered up even by parents and brothers and relatives and friends, and some of you they will put to death. You will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But not a hair of your head will perish.”
Various difficulties inevitably plague our lives in this fallen world. At some point or another, before Christ returns, all of us will have to deal with job loss, disease, natural disaster, political upheaval, or something else that characterizes life in a created order that suffers under the ravages of sin. Without minimizing the hardship that attends these ills, however, one misery stands out as perhaps the worst of all—betrayal by a friend or family member. What could be worse than to have someone whom we trust hand us over to our enemies?
Many of us have experienced the betrayal of someone close to us. Maybe the person repeated a confidential matter to someone else. It could be that the individual abandoned us. If someone has betrayed us, we well know the hurt and sense of helplessness that attends it. Yet even here, some betrayals are worse than others. Some betrayals can cost us our lives.
In the early church, many Christians were killed because they were betrayed by friends and family and handed over to governing authorities who hated the followers of Christ. Jesus warned that this would happen, as we see in today’s passage (Luke 21:16). The New Testament Epistles testify that our Lord’s words came true even during the Apostolic age. For instance, the book of Hebrews was written to encourage early Jewish Christians to persevere in the faith because of the very real possibility that they would be abandoned by their non-Christian relatives and friends or even handed over to death. Moreover, Jesus Himself was betrayed by one of His friends—Judas Iscariot—and handed over to authorities who would put Him on trial and secure for Him the sentence of death (22:3–6).
Christ warned His disciples that many would betray them and that all kinds of people would hate them, even putting them to death (21:16–17). Yet Jesus said also that not a hair of their heads would perish (v. 18). In context, He was mostly dealing with what would happen around the time of the fall of Jerusalem. Thus, He could have been referring to the fact that the early Christians largely escaped death during the Roman siege of Jerusalem in AD 70, since they took to heart Jesus’ prediction of that event and fled the city. Even so, His words have broader application to those who die for Christ in any generation. The hair on our heads cannot permanently perish, for we have eternal life through faith in Jesus (John 3:16).
Coram Deo Living before the face of God
Matthew Henry comments, “Though we may be losers for Christ [in the sense of losing our physical lives in the present] we shall not, we cannot, be losers by him in the end.” To cause our physical death is the worst thing that the enemies of the church can do to us, but such death is never the final word for the believer. We live on after death if we believe in Christ, and we will be resurrected to rule and reign alongside Him in the new creation (2 Tim. 2:12).
For further study
- Proverbs 17:9
- Isaiah 24:16
- Matthew 10:26–33
- 2 Timothy 2:9–13
The bible in a year
- Isaiah 65–66
- 2 Thessalonians 1