Intro to Jude Part 1 (Wednesday Evening Bible Study)

Intro to Jude (Part 1)

• Jude
• 1 Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and a brother of James: To those who are the called, loved by God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ. 2 May mercy, peace, and love be multiplied to you. 3 Dear friends, although I was eager to write you about the salvation we share, I found it necessary to write, appealing to you to contend for the faith that was delivered to the saints once for all. 4 For some people, who were designated for this judgment long ago, have come in by stealth; they are ungodly, turning the grace of our God into sensuality and denying Jesus Christ, our only Master and Lord. 5 Now I want to remind you, although you came to know all these things once and for all, that Jesus saved a people out of Egypt and later destroyed those who did not believe; 6 and the angels who did not keep their own position but abandoned their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains in deep darkness for the judgment on the great day. 7 Likewise, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns committed sexual immorality and perversions, and serve as an example by undergoing the punishment of eternal fire. 8 In the same way these people—relying on their dreams—defile their flesh, reject authority, and slander glorious ones. 9 Yet when Michael the archangel was disputing with the devil in an argument about Moses’s body, he did not dare utter a slanderous condemnation against him but said, “The Lord rebuke you!” 10 But these people blaspheme anything they do not understand. And what they do understand by instinct—like irrational animals—by these things they are destroyed. 11 Woe to them! For they have gone the way of Cain, have plunged into Balaam’s error for profit, and have perished in Korah’s rebellion. 12 These people are dangerous reefs at your love feasts as they eat with you without reverence. They are shepherds who only look after themselves. They are waterless clouds carried along by winds; trees in late autumn—fruitless, twice dead and uprooted. 13 They are wild waves of the sea, foaming up their shameful deeds; wandering stars for whom the blackness of darkness is reserved forever. 14 It was about these that Enoch, in the seventh generation from Adam, prophesied: “Look! The Lord comes with tens of thousands of his holy ones 15 to execute judgment on all and to convict all the ungodly concerning all the ungodly acts that they have done in an ungodly way, and concerning all the harsh things ungodly sinners have said against him.” 16 These people are discontented grumblers, living according to their desires; their mouths utter arrogant words, flattering people for their own advantage. 17 But you, dear friends, remember what was predicted by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ. 18 They told you, “In the end time there will be scoffers living according to their own ungodly desires.” 19 These people create divisions and are worldly, not having the Spirit. 20 But you, dear friends, as you build yourselves up in your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit, 21 keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting expectantly for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ for eternal life. 22 Have mercy on those who waver; 23 save others by snatching them from the fire; have mercy on others but with fear, hating even the garment defiled by the flesh. 24 Now to him who is able to protect you from stumbling and to make you stand in the presence of his glory, without blemish and with great joy, 25 to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, power, and authority before all time, now and forever. Amen.
  • Jude is a bewildering undertaking for most, unless you get to the background and context of the letter. There are two verses which are well-known at the end of the letter, but outside of verses 24 and 25 (read above), Jude is largely unknown and seldom read
  • The reason for its difficulty is that it is written out of a background of thought, against the challenge of a situation, in pictures and with quotations, which are all quite strange to us. Without doubt, it would hit those who read it for the first time like a hammer-blow. It would be like a trumpet-call to defend the faith
  • James Moffatt calls it a fiery cross to rouse the churches. But, as J.B. Mayor, one of its greatest commentators has said, “To a modern reader it is curious rather than edifying with the exception of the beginning and the end.”
  • When we understand Jude’s thought and disentangle the situation against which he was writing, his letter becomes of great interest for the history of the earliest Church and by no means without relevance for today. There have indeed been times in the history of the Church, and especially in its revivals, when Jude was not far from being the most relevant book in the NT. Let’s start with the substance of the letter
  • Meeting the Threat
    • It had been Jude’s intention to write a work on the faith which all Christians share; but that task had to be laid aside in view of the emergence of people whose conduct and thought were a threat to the Church. In view of this situation, the need was not so much to expound the faith as to rally Christians to its defense. Certain individuals who had insinuated themselves into the Church were busily engaged in turning the grace of God into an excuse for open immorality and are denying the only true God and Jesus the Lord. Theses people were immoral in life and heretical in belief
  • The Warnings
    • Against these intruders, Jude marshals his warnings. Let them remember the fate of the Israelites. They had been brought in safety out o fEgypt, but they had never been permitted to enter the promised land because of their lack of belief. Despite receiving the grace of God, it was still possible to lose eternal salvation by drifting into disobedience and faithlessness
    • Some angels with the glory of heaven as their own had come to earth and corrupted mortal women with their lust; and now they were imprisoned in deepest darkness awaiting judgement. The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and their destruction in flames is a dreadful warning to everyone who similarly goes astray
  • The Evil Life
    • These intruders are visionaries of evil dreams; they defile their flesh, and they speak evil of the angels. Not even Michael the archangel dared to speak evil even of the evil angels. Michael had been given the task of burying the body of Moses. The devil had tried to stop him and claim the body for himself. Michael had spoken no evil against the devil, even in circumstances like that, but had simply said: “The Lord rebuke you!”
    • Angels must be respected, even when evil and hostile. These evil people condemn everything which they do not understand; and spiritual things are beyond their understanding. They do understand their physical instincts and allow themselves to be governed by them as irrational animals do
    • They are like Cain, the the murderer; like Balaam, whose one desire was for gain and who let the people into sin; they are like Koran, who rebelled against the legitimate authority of Moses and was swallowed up by the earth for his arrogant disobedience
    • They are like the hidden rocks on which a ship may come to grief; they have their own in-group in which they mix with people like themselves, and thus destroy Christian fellowship; they deceive others with their promises, like clouds which promise the longed-for rain and then pass over the sky; they are like fruitless and rootless trees, which have no harvest of good fruit; as the foaming spray of the waves casts the seaweed and the wreckage on the beaches, they cast up shameless deeds like foam; they are like disobedient stars which refuse to keep their appointed orbit and are doomed to darkness. Long ago, the prophet Enoch had described these people and had prophesied their divine destruction. They grumble and speak against all true authority and discipline as the children of Israel murmured against Moses in the desert; they are discontented with the lot which God has appointed to them; they are dictated to by their lusts; their speech is arrogant and proud; they pander to and flatter the great for the sake of gain
  • Words to the Faithful
    • Having made clear his disapproval of the evil intruders in this torrent of denunciation, Jude turns to the faithful. They could have expected all this to happen, for the apostles of Jesus had foretold the rise of evil people. But the duty of all true Christians is to build their lives on the foundation of the most holy faith, to learn to pray in the power of the Holy Spirit, to remember the conditions of the covenant into which the love of God has called them, and to wait for the mercy of Christ
    • As for the false thinkers and those who indulge in loose living, some of them may be saved with pity while they are still hesitating on the brink of their evil ways; others have to be snatched like pieces of burning wood from the fire; and Christians must have that godly fear which will love the sinner but hate the sin, and must avoid contamination from those they seek to save
    • There will be with them the power of God who can keep them from falling and can bring them pure and joyfully into His presence
  • The Heretics
    • Who were the heretics whom Jude blasts, what were their beliefs, and what was their way of life? Jude never tells us. He was not a theologian, but a plain honest leader of the church. He denounces rather than describes the heresies he attacks. He does not seek to argue and refute. But from the letter itself, we can deduce three things about them
      • They were antinomians—people who believed that the moral law did not apply to them
        • Antinomians have existed in every age of the Church. They are people who pervert grace. Their position is that the law is dead and they are under grace. The prescriptions of the law may apply to other people, but they no longer apply to them. They can do absolutely what they like
        • Grace is supreme; it can forgive any sin; the greater the sin, the more the opportunities for grace to abound (Romans 6). The body is of no importance; what matters is the inward heart. All things belong to Christ, and, therefore, all things are theirs. And so, for them there is nothing forbidden
        • So, Jude’s heretics turn the grace of God into an excuse for flagrant immorality; they even indulge in shameless unnatural conduct, as the people of Sodom did. They defile the flesh and do not consider it to be a sin. They allow their animal instincts to rule their lives. With their sensual ways, they are likely to wreck the Love Feasts of the Church. It is by their own lusts that they direct their lives
      • The Denial of God and of Jesus
        • Of the antinomianism and blatant immorality of the heretics whom Jude condemns, there is no doubt. The other two faults with which he charges them are not so obvious in their meaning. He charges them with denying Jesus Christ, our only Master and Lord. The closing is to “the only God our Savior”, a phrase which occurs again in Romans 16:27 and I Timothy 1:17. The reiteration of the word only is significant
        • If Jude talks about our only Master and Lord, and about the only God, it is natural to assume that there must have been those who questioned the uniqueness of Jesus and of God. 
        • As so often in the NT, we are again in contact with the type of thought which came to be known as Gnosticism. Its basic idea was that this was idealistic universe, a universe with tow eternal principles in it. From the beginning of time, there had always ben spirit and matter. Spirit was essentially good; matter was essentially evil. Out of this flawed matter, the world was created. Now, God is pure spirit, and could don’t possibly have contact with matter because it was essentially evil
        • How then was creation brought about? God put out a series of divine powers; each of these were further away from Him. At the end of this long chain, remote from God, there was one who was able to touch matter; and it was this distant and secondary god, who actually created the world
        • As they grew more distant from God, they grew more ignorant of Him—and also grew more hostile to Him. The one who created, at the end of the series, was both totally ignorant of and hostile to God
        • Having gone that far, the Gnostics took another step. They identified the true God with the God of the NT, and they identified the secondary, ignorant, and hostile god with the OT. As they saw it, the God of creation was a different being from eh God of revelation and redemption. Christianity, on the other hand, believes in the only God, the one God of creation, providence, and redemption
          • This was the Gnostic explanation of sin. It was because creation was carried out, in the first place, from evil matter, and in the second place, by an ignorant god, that sin, suffering, and all imperfection existed
          • This Gnostic line of thought had one curious but logical result. If the God of the OT was ignorant and hostile to the true God, it must follow that the people whom that ignorant God hurt were in fact good people. Clearly, the hostile God would be hostile to the people who were the true servants of the true God. The Gnostics, therefore, turned the OT upside down and regarded its heroes as villains and its villains as heroes
          • So there was a sect of these Gnostics called the Ophites, because they worshiped the serpent of Eden; and there were those who regarded Cain, Korah, and Balaam as great heroes. It is these very people whom Jude uses as tragic and terrible examples of sin
          • Not only did these heroics deny the oneness God, they also denied our only Master and Lord Jesus Christ. That is to say, they denied the uniqueness of Jesus. How does that fit in with the Gnostic ideas as far as they are known to us? According to Gnostic belief, God put out a series of divine powers between Himself and the world. The Gnostics regarded Jesus as one of these divine powers. They did not regard Him as our only Master and Lord; He was only one among the many who were links between God and human beings, although He might be the highest and closest of all
        • One other hint that alludes to the Gnostics. In verse 19, Jude describes them as people who “create divisions and are worldly, not having the Spirit.”
          • Gnostic thought put divisions between those who were ignorant and those who could fully understand God. And the ones that could fully understand God were the elite. It is clear that this kind of belief inevitably produced spiritual snobbery and pride. It introduced into the Church the worst kind of class distinction
        • So the heretics whom Jude attacks were people who denied the oneness of God and split Him into an ignorant creating God and a truly spiritual God. They denied the uniqueness of Jesus and saw Him as only one of the links between God and human beings, and they created class distinctions within the Church and limited fellowship with God to the intellectual few
      • The Denial of the Angels
        • It is further implied that these heretics denied and insulted the angels. It is said they reject authority, and slander glorious ones. The words authority and glorious ones describe ranks in the Jewish hierarchy of angles. Verse 9 is a reference to a story in The Assumption of Moses. If Michale, the archangel, on such an occasion said nothing against the prince of evil angels, clearly no one can speak evil of angels
        • The Jewish belief in angels was very elaborate. Every nation had a protecting angel. Every person had an angel. All the forces nature, the wind, the sea, fire, and all the others were under the control of angels. It could be said that every blade of grass has its angel
        • Clearly, the heretics attacked the angels. It is likely that they said that the angels were the servants of the ignorant and hostile creator God and the Christians must have nothing to do with them. We cannot quite be sure what lies behind this; but to all their other errors, the heretics added the despising of the gangles, and to Jude this seemed an evil thing