For you, brothers, became imitators of the assemblies of God which are in Judea in Christ Jesus; for you also suffered the same things from your own countrymen, even as they did from the Jews;
There was likeness in respect to the nation from which both suffered, viz., Jews, and those their own countrymen; in the cause for which, and in the evils which, they suffered, and also in the steadfast manner in which they suffered them. Such sameness of fruits, afflictions, and experimental characteristics of believers, in all places at all times, are a subsidiary evidence of the truth of the Gospel (Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown 387).