<p>17:14 <i>I have given them Your word, and the world hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world</i>- The Lord's gift of &quot;Your word&quot; surely doesn't mean that He presented them with a copy of the Bible, as it were. &quot;I... give&quot; are words found on the Lord's lips in John concerning His gift of the Spirit (4:14), of Himself on the cross as the bread of life (6:51), His glory (:22) and of His &quot;example&quot; in Himself and the person He was (13:26). The gift He gave in the immediate context was of the Comforter (14:16,27). God's word was &quot;made flesh&quot; according to the prologue, in the person of Jesus (1:14). Again, as noted earlier in John, &quot;word&quot; refers not simply to the literal Bible, but the expression of all a person is. God's &quot;word&quot; to men was in His Son, and the Lord had given Himself to the believers.</p><p>The disciples don't record much of the opposition they personally received. But here the Lord tells the Father that the Jewish world &quot;hated&quot; the disciples; in fulfilment of His comment that the Jewish world would &quot;hate&quot; any who testified of its wickedness (7:7). John develops this idea in a pastoral context in saying that it is the world who hates the Lord's people, and any who hates his brother in Christ is therefore of the world (1 Jn. 2:9,11; 3:15; 4:20). This all implies that the community of believers to whom John wrote had hatred against their brethren, and this marked them out as being of the Jewish world and not in fact believers at all. And the same powerful logic must be applied to all hatred within the church.</p>