(Matthew 24:9–10)
"Then they will deliver you to affliction, and they will kill you, and you will be hated by all nations because of my name. And then many will stumble, and will betray each other, and will hate each other."
(Nearly all (John is exception) the Apostles became martyrs for Jesus' sake.)
This passage shows the uncompromising honesty of Jesus. He never promised his disciples an easy way; he promised them death and suffering and persecution. There is a sense in which the real Church will always be a persecuted Church, as long as it exists in a world which is not a Christian world. Where does that persecution come from?
1). Christ demands a new loyalty; and again and again he declared that this new loyalty must surpass all earthly ties. The greatest ground of hatred in the days of the early Church was the fact that Christianity split homes and families, when one member decided for Christ and the others did not. Christians are those who are pledged to give Jesus Christ the first place in their lives—and many a human clash is liable to result from that.
2). Christ demands a new standard. There are customs and practices and ways of life which may be all right for the world, but which are far from being all right for Christians. For many people, the difficulty about Christianity is that it is a judgment upon themselves and upon their way of life in their business or in their personal relationships. The awkward thing about Christianity is that anyone who does not wish to be changed is bound to hate it and resent it.
3). Christians, if they are true Christians, introduce into the world a new example. There is a daily beauty in their lives which make the lives of others ugly. Christians are the light of the world, not in the sense that they criticize and condemn others, but in the sense that they demonstrate in themselves the beauty of the Christ-filled life and therefore the ugliness of the Christ-less life.
4). This is all to say that Christianity brings a new conscience into life. Neither the individual Christian nor the Christian Church can ever know anything of a cowardly concealment or a cowardly silence. The Church and the individual Christian must at all times constitute the conscience of Christianity—but it is a human characteristic that there are many times when we would wish to silence conscience.
Christian believers can take hope in the accurate way Jesus' prophecies were fulfilled in the first generation of the early Church. There is no credible dispute with the accuracy of the fulfillment of these first century prophecies.
Since a significant portion of the "Olivet Discourse" also applies to the generation before Jesus' second coming we can be sure these prophecies will also be fulfilled as spoken by Jesus.
Jesus made other specific promises to His Church:
“Don’t let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, and trust also in me. There is more than enough room in my Father’s home. If this were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am. And you know the way to where I am going.” (John 14:1-4 ).
"After saying this, Jesus was taken up into a cloud while they were watching, and they could no longer see him. As they strained to see him rising into heaven, two white-robed men suddenly stood among them. Men of Galilee, they said, why are you standing here staring into heaven? Jesus has been taken from you into heaven, but someday he will return from heaven in the same way you saw him go!”
(Acts 1:9-11).
