Religion, as a part of Satan’s world system, hates the branches of the divine organism for the expression of the Triune God (15:18). Many religious people would not consider religion as a part of Satan’s worldly system. But, in the eyes of God, religion is a department of Satan’s world. When we come to chapter sixteen, we shall see that the Lord told His disciples that the religious people would consider killing the Lord’s followers as a kind of service offered to God. Although the religious people served God in name, they served Satan in actuality. Hence, the so-called religion is actually a department of the satanic system, the world.
We must be separated from the world because it is against the church. The world, as a satanic system, is against the Body of Christ. The world hates the Body, it hates the branches, and it hates the church. The church is the Body, an organism of the Triune God, but the world is a system of Satan. Satan’s system always opposes and persecutes the organism of the Triune God. We must realize deeply that the church, the branches, the Body, is the organism of the Triune God. The Triune God is living within and expressing Himself through this organism. Your body is an organism in which your very being lives and through which your being is expressed. Likewise, the Triune God needs an organism such as the church, the Body of Christ. The Triune God wants to live in and manifest Himself through such an organism. But Satan, the enemy of God, has organized a system known as the cosmos. This cosmic world is an organization systematized by the enemy of God. The purpose behind the enemy’s cosmic system is to oppose the church as the organism of the Triune God, the Body of Christ. Therefore, we must have nothing to do with this world. We are out of the world, having been separated unto the organism of the Triune God.
As branches who have been chosen out of the world, we should have nothing to do with the satanic system of religion (v. 19). However, among almost all Christians there is a mixture. By the Lord’s mercy, we want to stand apart from the system of any religion and stand with the church in a pure way, not having any mixture at all. The system of any religion is originated by Satan to frustrate and damage the proper church life. For the church to be the organism for the expression of the Triune God, we have to be separated from any kind of religion.
The Lord told His disciples that if they were willing to follow Him in the way of life, they must be ready to suffer persecution (vv. 20-25). If we are willing to experience the Triune God as our life, to be mingled with the Triune God, and to be the mutual abode with the Triune God, we must be prepared to suffer persecution from religion. The persecution of the disciples was not to come from the so-called secular world, but from the religions that worshipped God and seemingly loved Him. The Lord was telling His disciples that because of Him the religious people would persecute and even kill them. We have seen that the disciples, as branches of the vine, are the Body of Christ, the organism for the life and expression of the Triune God, and that the world, as a cosmic system, is the organized system of Satan. In the eyes of the Lord, the religious system, as part of Satan’s system, is the world that will hate the disciples.
The religious world persecutes the people who follow the Lord in life because they, as the branches of the true vine, are one with the Lord, acting and doing things in the Lord’s name. Because the religious people do not know the Father who is the source of the Lord, they hate the Lord’s true followers. Because the religious people hate the Father in the Son (v. 23), they also hate the Son’s followers. This hating and persecuting are their sin in the eyes of God (vv. 22, 24). By all of this we can see how evil religion is, even the religion formed according to God’s holy Word. Here we see the subtlety of the enemy in religion.