Jude 8-16 (Wednesday Evening Bible Study)

Jude 8-16

• Jude 8-9
• 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!”
  • Jude begins this passage by comparing the evil intruders with the false prophets whom Scripture condemns. Deuteronomy 13:1-5 tells us what is to be done with the person described here as “relying on their dreams”, who corrupts the nations and seduces the people from their loyalty to God
  • Such a prophet is to be mercilessly killed. These people whom Jude attacks are false prophets, dreamers of false dreams, seducers of the people and must be treated as such. Their false teaching resulted in two things
    • It made them defile the flesh
      • We have already seen the direction of their teaching on the flesh. First, the flesh was entirely evil, and there fore of no importance; and so the instincts of the body could be given their way without control. Second, the grace of God was all-forgiving and all-sufficient, therefor sin did not matter since grace would forgive every sin. Sin was only the means whereby grace was given its opportunity to operate
    • They despised angels
      • Celestial powers and angelic glories are the names for ranks of angles within the angelic hierarchy. This follows immediately after the citing of Sodom and Gomorrah as dreadful examples; and part of the sin of Sodom was the desire of its people to misuse its angelic visitors
      • The people whom Jude attacks spoke evil of the angels. To prove how terrible a thing that was, Jude cites an instance from the apocryphal book, The Assumption of Moses
        • The story in The Assumption of Moses is this. The death of Moses is told in Deuteronomy 34:1-6. This story goes on to add that the task of burying the body of Moses was given to the archangel Michael The devil argued with Michael about the possession of the body. He based his claim on two grounds. Moses’ body was matter; matter was evil; therefore the body belonged to him, for matter was his domain. Second, Moses was a murderer, because he killed the Egyptian he saw beating an Israeli. And if he was a murderer, the devil had a claim on his body
        • The point Jude is making is Michael was engaged on a task given to him by God; the devil was seeking to stop him and was making claims he had no right to make. But even under those circumstances, Michael spoke no evil of the devil but simply said: “The Lord rebuke you!” If the greatest of the good angels refused to speak evil of the greatest of the evil angels then surely no human may speak evil of any angel
  • We don’t know what the people Jude is writing against were saying about the angels. Perhaps they were saying they did not exist, or they were saying they were evil. 
• Jude 10
• 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.
  • Jude says two things about the evil intruders whom he is writing against
    • They criticize everything which they do not understand
      • Anything which is out of their sphere of operation and their experience they disregard as worthless and irrelevant. I Corinthians 2:14; “ 14 But the person without the Spirit does not receive what comes from God’s Spirit, because it is foolishness to him; he is not able to understand it since it is evaluated spiritually.” They have no spiritual discernment, therefore they are blind to and contemptuous of all spiritual realities
    • They allow themselves to be corrupted by the things they do understand
      • What they do understand are the sensual instincts which they share with animals. Their way of life is to allow these instincts to have their way; their values are values of the flesh. Jude is describing people who have lost all awareness of spiritual things and for whom the things demanded by their animal instincts are the only standard
    • The terrible thing is that the first condition is the direct result of the second. The tragedy is that no one is born without a sense of the spiritual things; but it is possible to lose that sense so that spiritual things cease to exist
      • We may lose any faculty if we refuse to use it. We discover this in such simple things as games and skills. If we give up playing a game, we lose the ability to play it. If we give up practicing a skill, we lose it. We discover this in such things as abilities. We may know something of a foreign language; but if we never speak or read it, we lose it
      • We can all hear the voice of God; and we all have animal instincts on which the future existence of the race depends. But if we consistently refuse to listen to God and make our instincts the sole force behind our conduct, in the end we will be unable to hear the voice of God and will have nothing left to take control of us but basic desires. It is a terrible thing for people to reach a stage where they are deaf to God and blind to goodness; and that is the stage which the people whom Jude is writing against had reached
• Jude 11
• 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.
  • Jude now goes to the history of Israel for parallels to the wicked people of his own day; and from it he draws  the examples of three notorious sinners
    • First there is Cain who murdered his brother Abel. In Hebrew traditions, Cain stood for two things
      • He was the first murderer in the history of the world. It may well be that Jude is implying that those who delude others are nothing other than murderers of the souls of men and women, and therefore are spiritual descendants of Cain
      • But Cain came to stand for something more than that. In the writings of Philo, he stands for selfishness. In Rabbinic teachings he is the type of the cynical man. In the Jerusalem Targum, he is the depicted as saying “there is neither judgment nor judge; there is no other world; no good reward will be given to the good and no vengeance take on the wicked; nor is there any pity in the creation or the government of the world.” To the Hebrew thinkers, Cain was the cynical, materialistic unbeliever who believed neither in God nor in the moral order of the world and therefore did exactly as he like
      • So Jude is charging his opponents with defying God and denying the moral order of the world. It remains true that those who choose to sin still have to reckon with God and to lear that no one can defy the moral order of the world and escape the consequences
    • Second is Balaam. IN OT thought, in Jewish teaching, and even in the NT, Balaam is the great example of those who taught Israel to sin. In the OT, there are two stories about him. One is quite clear. The other is more obscure, but much more terrible; and it is this second story which left its mark on Hebrew thought and teaching
      • The first is in Numbers 22-24. There it is told how Barak attempted to persuade Salaam to curse the people of Israel, because he feared their power. Balaam was asked five times and offered large rewards. He refused to be persuaded by Barak; but his envy and greed stand out; it is clear that only the fear of what God would do to him kept him from striking a dreadful bargain. Balaam already emerges from this story as a detestable character
      • In Numbers 25 we find the second story. Israel is seduced into the worship of Baal with dreadful and repulsive moral consequences. As we read later (Numbers 31), it was Balaam who was responsible for that seduction, and he perished miserably because he taught others to sin
      • Out of this composite story, Balaam stands for two things
        • He stands for the greedy and envious person who was prepared to sin in order to gan reward
        • He stands for the evil person who was guilty of the greatest of all sins—that of teaching others to sin
      • So Jude is accusing the wicked people of his own day that they are ready to leave the way of righteousness to make gain, and that they are teaching others to sin. To sin for the sake of gain is bad; but to teach another to sin is the worst sin of all
    • Third there is Korah. His story is in Numbers 16
      • The sin of Torah was that he rebelled against the guidance of Moses when the sons of Aaron and the tribe Levi were made the priests of the nation. That was a decision which Korah was not willing to accept; he wanted to exercise a function which he had no right to exercise; and when he did so, he perished terrible along with all his companions in wickedness. Korah stands for those who refuse to accept authority and reach out for things which they have no right to have. 
      • So Jude is charging his opponents with defying the legitimate authority of the Church and therefore preferring their own way to the way of God. We should remember that, if we take certain things which pride incites us to take, the consequences can be disastrous
• Jude 12-16
• 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.
  • This is one of the great passages of denunciation and revilement of the NT. It is a blaze of moral indignation at its hottest. James Moffatt writes, “Sky, land, and sea are ransacked for illustrations of the character of these men.” Here is a series of vivid pictures, every one with significance
    • They are like dangerous reefs which threaten to wreck your love feasts
      • This is the one case in which there is doubt about about what Jude is actually saying; but of one there there is not doubt—the evil intruders were a danger to the love feasts
        • The love feast was one of the earliest features of the Church. It was a meal of fellowship had on Sundays, and to it people brought what they could bo be shared. It was a lovely idea that the Christians in each house church could sit down to eat in fellowship together. No doubt there were some who could bring much and others who could bring only a little. For many of the slaves, it was perhaps the only decent meal they ever ate
        • But soon the meal began to go wrong. We can see it going wrong in the church in Corinth, when Paul declares that  there is nothing but division during their shred meals. They are divided into cliques and sections; some have too much while others get nothing to eat; and the meal for some has become a party. Unless this meal was a true fellowship, it was a travesty; and very soon it had begun to misrepresent its name completely
      • Jude’s opponents were making a travesty of the feast. In ordinary Greek the most common meaning for “dangerous reefs” was a submerged or half-submerged rock on which a ship could be easily wrecked. In the love feast, people were very close together in the heart, and there was the kiss of peace. These wicked people were using them as a cover for gratification of their lusts. It is a dreadful thing if people come into the Church and use the opportunities which its fellowship gives for their own ends. These people were like sunken rocks on which the fellowship was in danger of being wrecked
    • These wicked intruders revel in their own cliques and have no feeling of responsibility for anyone except themselves. These two things go together, for they both stress the essential selfishness of these people
      • They revel in their own cliques without a worry. This is exactly the situation which Paul condemns in I Corinthians. The love feast was supposed to be an act of fellowship; and the fellowship was demonstrated by the sharing of all things. Instead of sharing, the wicked kept to their own group and kept to themselves all they had. In I Corinthians, Paul actually goes to the lengths of saying that the love feast could become a drunken party in which people grabbed everything they could get. People can never claim to know what church membership means if, in the Church, they are out for what they can get and they remain within their own little group
      • They are shepherds who only look after themselves. They Greek literally means “shepherding themselves”. The duty of a leader in the Church is to be a shepherd of the flock of God. The fans shepherd cared far more for himself than for the sheep which were supposed to be within his care. Those who feel no responsibility for the welfare of anyone except themselves stand condemned
      • So Jude condemns the selfishness which destroys fellowship and the lack of any sense of responsibility for others
    • They are waterless clouds carried along by the winds and fruitless trees
      • These two phrases go together and they describe people who make great claims but are essentially useless. There were times in Palestine when people would pray for rain. At such a time, a cloud might pass across the sky, bringing with it the promise of rain. But there were times when the promise was only an illusion, the cloud was blown on and the rain never came. In harvest time, there were trees which looked as if they were heavy with fruit, but gave no fruit at all
      • At the heart of this lies a great truth. Promise without performance is useless, and in the NT nothing is so unsparingly condemned as uselessness. No amount of outward show or fine words will take the place of usefulness to others. As it has been put, if a man is not good for something, he’s good for nothing
    • They are wild waves of the sea, foaming up their shameful deeds
      • After a storm, when the waves have been lashing the shore with their frothing spray and their foam, there is always left on the shore a fringe of seaweed and driftwood and all kinds of unsightly litter from the sea. That is always an unattractive scene, but in the case of one sea it is uglier than in any other
      • The waters of the Dead Sea are so full of salt that they strip the bark from any driftwood in them; and when such wood is cast up on the shore, it gleams bleed  and whiee, more like dried bones than wood. The deeds of the wicked are like the useless and unsightly litter which the waves leave scattered on the beach after a storm and which resemble the skeleton-like relics of the Dead Sea storms
    • Wandering stars…
      • This is a picture taken directly from the Book of Enoch. The stars are sometimes identified with he Agnes; and there is a picture of the fate of the stars which, disobedient to God, left their appointed orbit and were destroyed. The fate of the wandering stars is typical of the fate of those who disobey God’s commandments and take their own way
    • Jude then confirms all this with a prophecy; butt he prophecy is again taken from Enoch
    • In verse 16, Jude tells us three characteristics of the evil intruders
      • They are discontented grumblers
        • He uses two pictures, one which the Jewish readers would be very familiar with, and one which the Greeks would be familiar with
          • The first describes the discontented voices of the murmurers and is the same as is so often used in the Greek OT for the murmurings of the Israelites against Moses as he led them through he wilderness. Its very sound describes the low mutter of resentful discontent which roe from the rebellious people. These wicked people in the time of Jude are the modern counterparts of the murmuring Israelites in the desert, people full of sullen complaints agains the guiding hand of God
          • The second is made up of two Greek words—to blame, and one’s allotted fate or life. This was someone who was always grumbling about life in general. Nothing is ever good enough
      • They live according to their desires
        • To them, self discipline and self control are nothing; to them he moral law is only a burden and a nuisance; honor and duty have no claim upon them. They have no desire to serve and no sense of responsibility. Their one value is pleasure, and their only motivating force is desire. If everyone was like that, the world would be in complete chaos
      • They utter arrogant words, yet try to flatter those that can help them
        • It is perfectly possible for them to talk themselves up in front of people they want to impress and also to flatter and butter up those whom they think are important. Jude’s opponents are glorifiers of themselves and flatterers of others, as they think the occasion demands; and their descendants are sometimes still among us