13 August, 2000

Christianity In The Last Days, Part 4: Jude

As we continue our study of Christianity in the last days, today we are in the book of Jude.
Jude was one of the Lord's half-brothers, his parents were Mary and Joseph, he identifies himself as the brother of James.
According to Matthew 13:55, Jesus had four brothers, Simon, Joseph, James and Jude, and at least two sisters.
While Jesus was alive, His brothers did not believe He was the Messiah, but in the first chapter of the book of Acts, things had turned around, Jesus' brothers were in the upper room with Mary and the disciples.
We don't know a whole lot about Jude, where he lived, where he ministered, but apparently this book was written after 2nd Peter was written, because Jude quotes it in verses 17 & 18.
The apostate conditions that Peter had predicted would be coming, had already begun to occur by the time that Jude wrote, so it would be after 70 A.D., after Jerusalem was destroyed.

Something that really caught my attention, Peter had told his readers; "remember what I told you, remember what you've learned, remember the words of the prophets of old." Jude does something similar.
Jude talks a lot about things that happened all the way back at the beginning of Genesis, and he tells us why they are important, why we need to know them.
Something that is good about getting older, is being able to remember things that happened years ago, and see a pattern develop, recognize a trend, start to get a sense of how things fit together, understand how life works.
That is an advantage that age has over youth, but it takes time, some things just take a while to mesh.
That is why it is so great to have the Bible, it gives us a longer view of life, we can trust it; and when we integrate the Bible with whatever else we know, then we can make sense out of our lives.
Without the Bible, and it's large scale accurate memories to add to the limited memories we have, we are too small to make any sense out of life, we aren't around long enough to get the big picture.
The Bible overcomes that flaw for us, and in us; Praise God.

If you have your Bibles with you today, and I hope you do,- if you aren't already there, turn to the Book of Jude, verse 1.
Verse 1; "Jude, the servant of Jesus Christ, and brother of James, to them that are sanctified by God the Father, and preserved in Jesus Christ, and called:"
Jude starts out by telling us who he is, and then he tells us who we are:
We are the ones that God the Father sets apart for Himself. He makes it His responsibility to be the one that sanctifies us, and make us like Jesus.
Are you frustrated because you earnestly desire to grow in grace and be more like Jesus, and it seems like it's taking too long?
Be patient; Jude reminds us that we are God's "work-in-progress", He's the one sanctifying us. All we need to do is cooperate. And Please Do!

It also says; "preserved in Jesus Christ, and called." Isn't it wonderful to know that our salvation is not something we thought up, but He called us?
And our salvation is not something that we have to try and hang on to, but He preserves us? That's wonderful.
If I had to preserve myself, I'd be at risk before the day was over, but I am preserved in Jesus. What is in Jesus; stays preserved. Amen?

Verse 2; "Mercy unto you, and peace, and love, be multiplied.
:3 Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints."
Jude is saying here; "I was all set to write you about the things of the faith, and I would have written like Mark or Luke does, but instead, something more needful came up: the defense of the faith.

The phrase he uses here; "earnestly contend"; - in the Greek: epagonizomai - agonizing- this is what athletes do when they go until it hurts, and then go some more.
We are Christian runners in the Maranatha Marathon, and we need to be prepared to run until it is an agony, and then run some more. Plan for it to hurt, that's what Jude is telling us.
Earnestly contend. Agonize! Epagonizomai.

He also uses the phrase; "the faith that was once delivered to the saints."
There are certain groups around that claim "latter revelations", or "ongoing revelations".
The Mormons claim that the Bible was not completed until Joseph Smith got a few "new revelations" in the 1800's.
There are some charismatic groups around today that claim that God regularly speaks to them in divine revelations, giving new insights, or giving them various "words of wisdom." Be careful. Don't be naive.
Jude says that we should contend for the faith that was once delivered to the saints.
In the book of Daniel, we are told that in the last days, knowledge will increase. We will know more about what God is doing in the end times than the Christians 2,000 years ago knew, but it will not be any different, it will just be a little bit more.
It will not be any new revelation that changes anything that we already know about the faith. It may fill in a few gaps here or there, but it won't change anything.

Verse 4; "For there are certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ."
Who is he referring to here? Turn to Matthew 13:24; "Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his field:
Mat 13:25 But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way.
Mat 13:26 But when the blade was sprung up, and brought forth fruit, then appeared the tares also.
Mat 13:27 So the servants of the householder came and said unto him, Sir, didst not thou sow good seed in thy field? from whence then hath it tares?
Mat 13:28 He said unto them, An enemy hath done this. The servants said unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up?
Mat 13:29 But he said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them.
Mat 13:30 Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn."

Now skip down to verse 36; "Then Jesus sent the multitude away, and went into the house: and his disciples came unto him, saying, Declare unto us the parable of the tares of the field.
Mat 13:37 He answered and said unto them, He that soweth the good seed is the Son of man;
Mat 13:38 The field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one;
Mat 13:39 The enemy that sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels.
Mat 13:40 As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire; so shall it be in the end of this world.
Mat 13:41 The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity;
Mat 13:42 And shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Mat 13:43 Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Who hath ears to hear, let him hear."

Jesus knew ahead of time that there would be a Judas among His disciples, and He also knew ahead of time that there would be Judas's in the church. Tares among the wheat. Weeds without any fruit.
Some people work real hard trying to find fault with the church, but they don't need to go to that trouble, Jesus tells us right here that there will be bogus, so-called believers mixed in with the real thing.
Jesus says that there will be in His kingdom -Christianity- (especially so called Christianity); those that offend, and those that do iniquity.
Christianity is a very large, very diverse body of people and beliefs, and it goes from the genuine article, of which I truly believe that we are a typical local assembly, all the way to groups that are totally apostate, but still call themselves Christian, and would therefore be a part of His kingdom.
Just because a person, or a group of people calls itself "Christian", doesn't make it so. Tares are still tares, and some day they will get gathered up and tossed into the fire with the rest of the weeds.

Turn back to Jude verse 4, where he refers to certain men who creep in unaware; notice their method of corrupting the saints: lasciviousness.
Sexual immorality. Adultery, homosexuality, pornography. Lasciviousness is the opposite of chastity or purity.

If you have been here any time at all, you have heard me take a stand against legalism in the church, legalism is a corruption of the Gospel.
There is also an opposite corruption, and that is lawlessness. The church is not under the law, neither is it free to do just; whatever.
Lasciviousness in the church is sexual immorality under the disguise of freedom, sexual sin under the disguise of grace.
God's grace was never given to us so that we could go out and live immoral lives.
Jesus did not go to the cross and die for sin so that we could turn around and live fast and loose.
Liberty and freedom in Christ is not a license to sin. Never was, never will be.

People that think or teach "casual grace," or "easy beliveism" are what Jude describes in the end of the verse; "denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ."
Jesus is Lord, and his Word has much to say about sexual immorality. God has not called us to be prudes, but He has called us to be pure, we need to know the difference, and we need to live it.
I was looking up Christian resources on the internet last month, and ran up on a cult which has the word "Christian" in it's name, and the leaders teach that it is OK for Christians to engage in group sex, and get involved in "exchanging spouses."
This is exactly the lascivious sin that Jude is referring to, and also exactly what Jesus is speaking of when he talks about those who are tares among the wheat, having no fruit, getting gathered up and burned.
Jesus tells the disciples; let things just go along and grow for now, but there is a day coming when the weeds get weeded out.
Homosexuality, adultery, pornography, it is all lasciviousness, and it all denies the Lordship of Jesus Christ, because it pretends that we can have salvation on our terms, our sinful, immoral, worldly terms, and not on His terms.
Beloved, that dog won't hunt. It's just not going to happen. Jesus is Lord, and we aren't, and if we don't get saved on His terms, we don't get saved at all. And His terms call for purity.
Chastity is an old fashioned word, but it still applies to Christians.

Verse 5; "I will therefore put you in remembrance, though ye once knew this, how that the Lord, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed them that believed not."
When God brought the Israelites out of Egypt, all of them came out, but not all of them had faith in God.
Exodus 12:38 refers to a "mixed multitude." Some of them were Hebrews, some of them weren't, some of them were believers, some of them weren't, it ran the spectrum, a mixed multitude.
Kind of like Christianity today, a lot of people that are members of churches are not believers, they have never trusted Christ for salvation, they have never been born again, a modern mixed multitude.

Over in Hebrews chapter 3, and the first part of chapter 4, Paul explained to the Jewish Christians back then what happened at the exodus.
God had provided those people there a means of salvation, a means of deliverance, just as Jesus has provided a means of deliverance for "whosoever will."
But even though Jesus has finished His work on the cross, even though the atonement is complete; when there is no faith, there is no salvation.
It is great to come out of Egypt by a miracle and the mighty hand of God, but if you don't trust him to take you to the promised land, then you'll die in the wilderness. No faith? No salvation.

Verse 6; "And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day.
:7 Even as Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire."
This word in verse 6; "habitation" is very interesting, it is only found in one other place in the bible, and that is in 2 Corinthians 5:2, where it refers to the glorious body that believers will have after the resurrection.
So this word; "habitation"; it refers to a body of some sort.
We don't really know what sort of bodies the angels have, but apparently some of the fallen angels chose to assume material bodies, earthly bodies of some sort, and then engage with human beings in sexual behavior.
Verse 7 says that they went after "strange" flesh. The Greek word "strange" here, heteros; refers to another of a different kind.

All of this gets back to what we have mentioned before concerning Genesis 6, which speaks of the sons of God and the daughters of men.
Jude also speaks of them having a total preoccupation with sexual perversion of every type, because it refers to "giving themselves over" to sexual activity in the same fashion as Sodom and Gomorrha.
Jude is giving us this background of history, illustrating well known sins from history to show that it's not just history, because history repeats itself.
Heads up! Watch out! This same type of sin will corrupt the church unless watchfulness is maintained.

Verse 8; "Likewise also these filthy dreamers defile the flesh, despise dominion, and speak evil of dignities."
Now he is back talking about those that creep into the assembly, and the King James translators used the words "filthy dreamers"; we would say that they have a dirty imagination.
They teach things that corrupt people, sexual permissiveness, immoral behavior, and they don't like anybody to have authority over them.
They want to be free to do and say whatever they want, and they also have the curious habit of badmouthing the glory of God and also the other angelic powers.
That's what that phrase "speak evil of dignities" means. It seems contrary to the way we ought to do things, but even though the devil is our enemy, note that not even the archangel Michael runs him down.
That's what it says in the next verse: "Yet Michael the archangel, when contending with the devil he disputed about the body of Moses, dared not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee."
If the archangel Michael does not dare to bring any verbal abuse or rebuke against one of God's other spiritual creatures, even if it is the devil, that gives us something to think about.
It is apparently not appropriate for us to insult any of the angels of God, wether they are on our side, or the enemy's side. God will rebuke the ones that need rebuking, at the appropriate time.
I don't understand all I know about this, but I guess I can certainly do what I'm told, wether I understand it or not, Amen?

Verse 10; "But these speak evil of those things which they know not: but what they know naturally, as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt themselves."
There are liberal churches in the world where the pastors or elders pooh-pooh the idea that there are devils, or angels, or spiritual realities that are unseen.
Some of them have all kinds of strange ideas about Jesus, that he was not really God, or that he didn't really die on the cross, or that he didn't rise from the dead, or that He will not really come again, you name it, they'll teach it.
And they will ridicule spiritual truths, and ridicule and mock people that take the Bible literally.
If you have never been snickered at, or treated like a moron, because you believe what the Bible says about demons, cherubim, seraphim, or the 2nd coming, then you need to get our more, you are leading a sheltered life.

In the second half of this verse, Jude says that even though these unbelievers will mock and insult the things that they don't believe in, or can't understand, because they are "too intelligent, too sophisticated", they will then turn around and act like animals.
All the liberal denominations support evolution, as opposed to God's special creation. They teach that man came from the animals, and then they wonder why people act like animals.
They teach that man came from the brute beasts, they condone abortion, and then they wonder why our young people learn the lesson too well, and now we have children killing other children.
They teach that man is just a highly evolved animal, that the survival of the fittest is the truth, and then can't understand why men and women act like animals, they hurt and attack each other, and fill up the abuse shelters.
They teach that man is just a cosmic accident, and then wonder why young people reject moral absolutes.
If man is just a cosmic accident of time, space and matter, then there are no absolutes, pragmatism is the only thing that matters. If it works, do it.
If it feels good, do it. If evolution is true, then morality becomes whatever public opinion says it is.
And if society begins to show signs of corruption, if it begins to show signs of breakdown or decay, then only the strong will survive, and the movie "Mad Max" shows us the future of man, society, and religion.

That's why Jude says, by the Holy Spirit; "what they know naturally, as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt themselves."
When the church has leaders in authority that are unsaved, having only natural wisdom, then the church becomes corrupt from the top down.
Corrupt leaders have a great tendency to corrupt those around them as well. They corrupt themselves, and then they corrupt others.

Verse 11; "Woe unto them! for they have gone in the way of Cain, and ran greedily after the error of Balaam for reward, and perished in the gainsaying of Core."
Three different men, three different types of rebellious worship contrary to God.
Maybe someone else can think of something to add to this, but I suspect that most false teachers will fit into one of these three categories:

The first type of rebellion is the sin of Cain; trying to offer a bloodless sacrifice, a bloodless offering.
The second type of sin and rebellion in worship is using the office of a prophet or priest for personal gain and ignoring the will of God, that was the sin of Balaam.
The third type of sin in worship, is denying the revelation of God, denying the Word of God.
Since we went over Balaam in detail last week, we'll skip him today, and focus in on Cain, and also on Korah.

Turn to Genesis 4:1 "And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the LORD.
:2 And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.
:3 And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the LORD.
:4 And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the LORD had respect unto Abel and to his offering:
:5 But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect. And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell."

Both of them brought an offering, but only one brought an acceptable offering.
Nowhere in the first couple chapters of Genesis does it say that God told them what kind of offering to bring.
We need to ask the question; did God tell them what kind of offering to bring and Cain disobeyed? Or did they just guess, and Cain guessed wrong?
I don't know that I can prove it, but I am firmly convinced that God told Adam & Eve how to worship Him, how to bring an offering, and Cain just decided that he had a better idea.

The first time that we find the word worship used in the Bible is when Abraham took Isaac to Mount Moriah, and was going to sacrifice him to God.
The first time that we see blood shed in the Bible is when God made coats of skins to cover Adam and Eve after they had sinned.
Those coats of skin speaks to us of the idea of atonement, a covering for sins, brought about through the shedding of blood.
Hebrews 9:22 tells us that without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins.
True worship always reminds us of shed blood, and points us toward the cross of Christ.
Old Testament worship pointed forward to the cross, and our worship points us back toward the cross.
So although the Bible does not tell us that Cain knew what kind of offering God wanted, I firmly believe that he did, but rejected it, and decided that his way was just as good.
God said no. The worship of God, approach to God, acceptance with God always comes through the cross, through the atonement of Jesus Christ, and all the Old Testament is filled with pictures, types, and object lessons pointing to that ultimate truth.
Cain had to have known the truth, and rejected it. Jude tells us that the false teachers that will come into the church will teach the same lie, that approaching God does not need to be through the cross of Christ.
They will ignore or deny the shed blood of Christ, and teach salvation by works, higher wisdom, spirit guides, expanded consciousness, anything but the truth of the cross. That is the way of Cain.

How about the gainsaying of Korah? Turn over to Numbers 16:1 "Now Korah, the son of Izhar, the son of Kohath, the son of Levi, and Dathan and Abiram, the sons of Eliab, and On, the son of Peleth, sons of Reuben, took men:
:2 And they rose up before Moses, with certain of the children of Israel, two hundred and fifty princes of the assembly, famous in the congregation, men of renown:
:3 And they gathered themselves together against Moses and against Aaron, and said unto them, Ye take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the LORD is among them: wherefore then lift ye up yourselves above the congregation of the LORD?"

We will not read all the account, due to the shortness of the allotted time, but essentially Korah and his followers challenged the authority of Moses and Aaron.
They had forgotten, or disregarded that Moses and Aaron did not make themselves leaders, God chose Moses and Aaron, and called them to do the work that He planned to do.
But even more important than that, God was using Moses to convey His Word to the people, communicating His Word through Moses.
To challenge Moses in this situation, was to challenge the authority and authenticity of God's Word.
"Gainsaying" is an old English word that means to contradict, oppose, or speak against.
Jude says that false teachers will come and oppose the authority of God's Word, they will deny it's inspiration, and they will set themselves up as authorities over against it.
The Roman Catholic church has a long history of setting itself up as an authority equal to the authority of the Word of God.
They teach that only the church has the authority to interpret the Word through tradition, Papal directives, or whatever.

That is the gainsaying of Korah, but the Roman Catholic church is by no means the only church group that does that. There are plenty of them. And sometimes we even do it ourselves.
Anytime we read something in the Bible and for whatever reason we decide that it doesn't apply to us in our special situation (because we don't like it, it's not convenient, or we don't want it's authority over us in this situation); it's hello Mr. Korah.
The gainsaying of Korah; denying the authority of God's Word over my situation.
Be careful beloved, that one gets real close to home. Some of us need to take a long look in the mirror on that one.

False teaching, and false teachers. They have been around for centuries, they will be around as long as the church remains.
What we need to careful of is that we don't have any of them here, and that we don't become one of them ourselves.
We are halfway through the book of Jude, this is a good stopping point, Lord willing, we will finish the second half of the book next week.