Jude - part 1

Now, we will read the epistle of Jude together. Jude, I could say chapter one, but that's redundant, unnecessary, Jude 1, meaning verse 1. Jude, the servant of Jesus Christ, the brother of James, to them that are sanctified by God the Father and preserved in Jesus Christ and called mercy unto you and peace and love be multiplied. Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you and to exhort you that you should earnestly contend for the faith which was once for all or was once delivered unto the saints.

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. I will therefore put you in remembrance, though you once knew this, how the Lord, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed them that believed not. 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.

Even as Sodom and Gomorrah 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. Likewise also these filthy dreamers defile the flesh, despise dominion, and speak evil of dignities. Yet Michael the archangel, when contending with the devil, he disputed about the body of Moses, durst not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee.

But these speak evil of those things which they know not, and what they know naturally as brute beasts in those things they corrupt themselves. 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 Korah. These are spots in your feasts of charity, when they feast with you, feeding themselves without fear, clouds they are without water, carried about by winds, trees whose fruit withereth without fruit, twice dead plucked up by the roots, raging waves of the sea foaming out their own shame, wandering stars to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever.

And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints to execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against him. These are murmurers, complainers, walking after their own lusts, and their mouth speaketh great swelling words, having men's persons in admiration because of advantage. But beloved, remember ye the words which were spoken before of the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ, how that they told you there should be mockers in the last time, who should walk after their own ungodly lusts.

These be they who separate themselves, sensual, having not the spirit. But ye, beloved, building up yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Ghost, keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life. And if some have compassion making a difference, and others save with fear pulling them out of the fire, hating even the garments spotted by the flesh, now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy, to the only wise God, our Savior, be glory and majesty, dominion and power both now and ever.

Amen. The book of Jude is a fitting prelude to the revelation which follows it, because in it we understand that the apostasy that we were thinking about yesterday, which was predicted by Peter, has now actually arrived in Jude. It isn't seen to be something future as much as it is to be something that has already infiltrated the church, and or churches, let me use that expression.

Let's talk a little bit about who Jude is, as far as we can tell, and about some background material for this short book. It turns out that the Lord had two disciples named Judas, one is Iscariot, of course. He also had a disciple named James.

So when we read in this book that Jude is the servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James, it might be tempting to think that those are the two being referred to, but I think all of you are aware that that turns out to be impossible. First of all, James, the brother of John, was put to death with the sword by Herod, right? Acts chapter 12. So he's out of the picture long before this book is written.

Second, if that Jude was the Judas who was an apostle, not Judas Iscariot, but the other Jude, then he would have undoubtedly identified himself as an apostle. In fact, in verse 17, he would not have talked about the apostles as if they were another group separate and distinct from himself. So it is much more likely, and I think all of us are quite agreed on this, that the Judas and the James that are mentioned in the first verse of this book are actually the Lord's half-brothers.

Now, we know from Luke and Mark that the Lord had half-brothers and half-sisters. We can assume that Mary and Joseph, after the Lord was born, continued to live together and to have children. We even know some of their names.

There was a... I'm going to give you their Hebrew names. There was Jacob, there was Simeon, there was Judah, and there was a Joseph, and then there are sisters. Unfortunately, we don't know their names.

So that's four of the tribes of Israel, classic Hebrew names. Jacob, Joseph... Well, Jacob was the father, of course, Joseph, Simeon, and Judah. Here's Judah and Jacob, or as we prefer to call it, Jude and James.

I think you're all aware that the fact that James occurs in the Bible was a sort of a, shall I say, courtesy that was shown to King James himself, who wanted to see his name appear, but that's the name Jacob. Now, if that be the case, why does he not call himself the brother of the Lord at the beginning? Well, I'm not going to actually tell you why that. We're going to just... We're going to bring that out in the discussion.

He identifies himself as the brother of James. And why does he identify himself as the brother of James? Because of James's prominence in the Jerusalem assembly. So we'll discuss that that is one of his ways of showing not so much a credential, but to link himself.

It was very important for gospel writers to link themselves with others to show that they were in fellowship in the doctrine that they were preaching. Now, Jude is a letter that almost wasn't written, and I'm afraid the letter that almost wasn't written is rarely read today. And when I say almost wasn't written, it's because Jude had other things in mind.

He's writing to churches probably very similar to the ones that Peter was writing to, probably planted by Paul. And again, this is an expression that Paul and Peter and now Jude are all in fellowship with each other. And the time of the writing is likely about 68, 69.

This is just a surmise. It seems to be before the destruction of Jerusalem, but after the death of Peter. Questions have been raised as to why Jude is so similar to 2 Peter 2. There are a couple of ways of looking at this, and I'm going to suggest them now, but we'll flesh them out when we talk about this later.

There are some people who want to keep them fiercely independent. They say no gospel writer would depend on anyone else. For example, when Mark and Matthew and Luke have so much material in common, they actually had no collusion whatsoever, and the Spirit of God independently spoke to all of them, and all of the similarities are either coincidental or happened to be the way the Spirit wanted things worded.

But I'm going to suggest to you that Luke actually says that he used sources, and I suggest one of them was Mark. That's a different discussion, but I'm making this point. That does not do damage to inspiration at all.

So it's very, very possible that Jude was reiterating and affirming some, not all, of Peter's material, changing some of it for his purposes, modifying it for the message that he wanted to give, but still also showing commonality and fellowship with that material by using it or at least applying it. We'll talk more about that. I don't know what my brothers think about that.

Now, as far as the structure of Jude is concerned, it begins in soothing tones and ends in refreshing and encouraging tones. So it's very sweet at the beginning and very sweet at the end. It's decidedly sour in the middle.

But that's the way I think this kind of truth should be presented. We begin with the things that we can be thankful for. We begin with the positive, but we don't skirt around or give short shrift to the negative when it needs to be said.

But then we again end with encouraging tones. So we begin with a threefold blessing of the believer, and we end with a threefold doxology. We begin with being kept by God, and we end by being kept ourselves or keeping ourselves in the love of God.

In fact, we talked this morning about the chiastic structure of Isaiah 52, 53. Jude is a perfect chiasm. And without going through all the A, B, and the C prime and the D prime, we won't be able to do that up here.

I would need a chart. The pivot point is verse 11. We have this trio here, the way of Cain, the error of Balaam, and the gainsaying of Korah.

And you can show that there's a symmetry around that verse so that what is ultimate at the end and what begins match, and then you move in one stage at a time and find that we are being steered to verse 11, which kind of summarizes the central portion. You might call it the judgment portion or the warning portion of the book of Jude. Now I'm not one for long introductions or reading my outline, so I'm actually not going to say too much more.

I want to get right into the material. But when I do so, or as I sit down, I would like to ask any of my brothers to contribute any background information they have or helpful ways of looking at the epistle may be different from my outline. First of all, are we in agreement then that Jude is the half-brother of the Lord Jesus? And if we are agreed in that, why do we think it is that he does not call himself the brother of Jesus Christ, but rather he calls himself the bond slave or bond servant of Jesus Christ and the brother of James? These are very telling things.

Yeah, very good. I think James also does the very same thing, doesn't he? There's no sense of familiarity, no sense of disrespect in any way in his address. And so here as well, James speaks of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Keep yourselves in the love of God and so forth looking. He gives absolute reverence as well as recognition of a vast difference between himself as a servant and Christ and his exalted position. So if anyone could have had the right to have spoken of our brother, the Lord Jesus, it would have been James and Jude.

But they never once even hint at intimating that in their addresses of him. He was probably among those of his family, the Lord's family, who didn't think he was doing too well, sort of beside himself. Now he's got saved.

Things have changed. And he's went from his brother to his savior. And he's no longer going to take a physical relationship, a spiritual one.

Can we link it with what? Oh, it's not working. Can we link it with what? Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5, where he says, though we have known Christ after the flesh, henceforth know we him no more in that manner. Right.

I think that's a very similar sentiment. Right. It's said today that some Christians would call Christ their brother and his actual brothers wouldn't do it.

That's a good point. Sorry, John. Go ahead.

He's actually imbibing then the teaching of the Lord Jesus himself, who is my mother or my sister or my brother. And he was possibly there when that statement was made. And now he himself is accepting what the Lord Jesus taught.

The Lord calls us his brothers, therefore Hebrews 2, he is not ashamed to call them brethren. But that's not a prerogative that we should take upon ourselves because the scripture doesn't give us precedent for it. And I can say as a relatively younger person getting older, but I'm trying to appeal to people my age and younger, let's not succumb to the common thing we see in the evangelical world of calling Jesus by his first name alone in a very flippant way.

When the Bible refers to Jesus, it's referring to the man who lived here and it was, it refers to the days of his flesh. For example, the times in Hebrews, when we see the name Jesus, we'll call it alone. That is without Lord and without Christ.

James, at the same time, I don't think Lord Jesus Christ needs to be said every time we mention him when we're talking swiftly in the gospel. That can become a little bit of vain repetition as well. I think we should take the kind of savvy that the New Testament writers use and give him his titles, Jesus Christ, Lord Jesus, or Lord Jesus Christ.

Isn't it true, brother, that all of the disciples always refer to him as, if they're referring, Lord? The only one that didn't refer to him as the Lord was Judas. Good point. Both before and after his resurrection, it is the Lord, right? Is there the thought that the slave of Jesus Christ is of a higher rank, if you will, than merely a brother after the flesh of Jesus? Absolutely.

The brother after the flesh role has no meaning, and so James abandons, or in this case, Jude abandons that because it's much more privileged and it's a greater blessing to be a bond slave in his service and to be in his spiritual family, if you will. The expression bond servant, doulos, bond slave, is extremely hard to translate in English because of the connotations of the word slave with chattel slavery and antebellum America. But a slave is not a servant in the sense of someone who shows up and punches the clock at eight o'clock and leaves at five and expects some payment.

It is someone who has sold himself or has been obtained for complete service, whose mind and will bends to the master's, who is completely available for the master and subservient to his will. And so the word bond slave has often been used, and yet even that word isn't a modern American word, or a Canadian word. So we can use the word slave as long as we understand it is not a degraded thing like American slavery, but it is a noble thing.

So it would be correct to speak of the Lord as a bond slave, but not a bond slave of men? Correct, yes. Only of the Lord, or of God, of his Father. I was thinking, maybe a little different here, Judas Iscariot, he covered up his actions, an apostate, but now Jude unmasks the apostates, shows what they really are.

Right. The latter part of verse one, we have a trio of things, and I think Brother Duncan was telling me how many he counted up. There's a large number of trios, triplets.

As I thought, there's 22. 22 triplets. We'll try to catch some of them on the way through.

It's not so difficult. We have the first one right here, called, and depending on which text we follow, sanctified or loved, and then preserved or kept. That's the same word, just two translations of it.

And then we have mercy, peace, and love. That's our second triplet following that. Now, he's going to begin with a three-fold description of God's people.

They have been called and sanctified and loved are two variants that are found here. I think, personally, the word loved is more likely. That's what Mr. Darby and the revised version prefer here.

The two words in Greek, by the way, sound very similar, so that perhaps is the confusion. Not that both couldn't be true, but to be called and to be loved by God the Father and preserved in Christ Jesus is probably the best way to read that portion of the verse. Would you see the whole Godhead active here for the blessing and the preservation of the people of God amidst this dangerous apostasy? So, you're suggesting called by the Holy Spirit, loved by God the Father, and preserved in or for Jesus Christ, or even by Jesus Christ.

By would be the best way. Do you see the second triplet relating back to the first triplet in verse number two? Can you help us with that? Well, mercy would relate to the calling. Peace relates to the preservation and, of course, the love, either to the sanctification or the love in the first reference.

So why does he begin with this in this letter dealing with apostasy? Why would this be so comforting, I guess, to take here of the Lord? Or even soothing. Soothing, okay. Comforting is maybe a better word.

Those who are called have the extreme privilege of hearing the gospel call and responding to it by faith. Those who are loved by God the Father and preserved in Jesus Christ can take enormous confidence in the security of their salvation. And even though there are others who deny, as we will understand here, both by their words and by their life, the truth that we believe, yet ultimately our preservation isn't dependent on how careful we are or with what we contribute to it, but ultimately it's left with God.

He's going to use this word kept, preserved, reserved multiple times in this letter, isn't he? And here at the beginning, before he gets to what God is preserving for judgment, you're preserved in Christ. Both in a negative and a positive way because even those who are going to be kept for judgment, same word, the same will of God that will bring us into ultimate blessing will bring them into ultimate doom. So in verse 24 we're going to be kept again from stumbling, but in verse 17 we have to keep ourselves in the love.

So that's a good symmetry and again we have our contribution with dependence on God overriding everything, we have the responsibility to be diligent, as Peter would say, and to grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus. Now mercy, peace, and love is kind of an unusual sequence, grace, mercy, and peace we're used to from the pastoral epistles, and then normally we have grace and peace. But mercy, peace, and love, mercy, let me approach this word, not to spend too much time on this, but I think there may be some misunderstanding frequently about it.

Often we hear this, let me just set it up this way, grace is God giving to us what we don't deserve and mercy is God withholding from us what we do deserve. That's fine, that may be true, but the word mercy really doesn't mean the withholding of wrath. The word mercy has to do with God's compassion.

It has to do, not so much with our sin, but with our frailty and our misery. Mercy is the response of God's heart to the hardships and the miseries of sin and what it has brought into our lives. The who is it that showed mercy, the Lord asks in Luke chapter 10, and of course the Good Samaritan was the ultimate expressor of mercy by having compassion.

But the word mercy is not just a feeling, it's not just an emotion. There is an emotional word, the mercies of God describing God's heart, that's the word oiktermos, but this is eleos, which is the word for giving help based on compassion and concern and having a heart moved for people's misery. Would you concur with that, you plural? So grace actually springs out of God's mercy.

Which may be one reason for the, well grace isn't part of this trio, but yes it does, I think it springs out. But mercy leads to peace just as grace as we saw yesterday does. That's our portion because God is a merciful God and then finally his love, his unmerited favor toward us, which is a similar concept to grace.

In fact we can say that grace is expressed by agape love. So we're supposed to take a lot of encouragement from this and we ought to. Another plug here, when you're zooming through these epistles, don't blow by the introductions and assume that they're just there to take up space, right? There's very, very important truth in these words.

So these things were all needed in these difficult days and they also weren't true of the apostates. Not at all. Well, the God who provides them for us will multiply them to us and it isn't a bad idea to do what Jude does here and that is for us to pray for each other, that God will multiply these things in our lives.

This is a prayer. When he's expressing that it may be happening, that it may be so, this is really an expression of looking to God that these things may come to pass for them. Then we have another soothing word, beloved.

And we'll see beloved at the beginning and we'll see beloved at the end and Jude is very concerned that these people understand that not only are they loved by God, but they're loved by Jude and they should love each other and take great solace in the fact that although there are some that hate God and ultimately are working for their undoing, yet they have the common bond of a common salvation, a common Lord and a common love and that we as a community and as a family ought to express that to each other. So another of your triplets, beloved, he does it here and he does it in verse 17 and he does it later on towards the end, the word beloved. So this would be his motive for writing to them, he has a real love for them.

And I think we could emulate this when it comes to ministering the word or preaching this because of our love for the Lord's people, not just to correct them. Isn't it true that every writer of the New Testament epistles always refers to those to whom they were writing as beloved? And so we learn the principle that our brother Labrius stated. Maybe especially when we have corrective ministry or have to handle or tackle some very, very thorny and difficult matters like this.

We need to express the fact that this is not some sort of tirade we're going on, that this is going to be carefully couched in faithful words, but we're going to understand the motive is love and the approach is going to be as soft as possible. And often the writers commend the Lord's people before they do correct them. The Lord himself would teach us the character of that love, John 13, as I have loved you so you to love one another.

So it's not the example of man, it's an example of the Lord Jesus. Very good. Well, we've seen this word diligence before.

Jude is going to be diligent to write to them. Peter wanted us to be diligent, and this is a good Christian word. But Jude's diligence was diverted into another channel here because what better thing to write about than our common salvation? We had like precious faith in 2 Timothy chapter 1. Every believer has the same faith and we looked at that mainly objectively I think yesterday as something that we share.

Here the result of that faith, our salvation. And salvation is a big word, as you know. We talk about being saved and getting saved.

But of course the initial salvation that we all enjoy today hasn't been completed yet. And salvation's day will be completed when we are called home and receive our resurrection bodies. Then the whole saving act of God will be completed.

We have a common salvation. There's two ways to look at that and I'm interested in what others think. First of all, of course, your salvation and my salvation are the same salvation by the same Savior.

They're of equal weight and equal value. But this word common can also mean what is shared and what is enjoyed between people. That is, we have fellowship.

We share and we gain mutual strength from discussing and understanding the salvation that we all have. How do my brothers think of common salvation? I've appreciated the latter viewpoint. Isn't it true that it's one of three descriptive terms, at least three descriptive terms in the New Testament? So we've got so great salvation, Hebrews 2. It's called eternal salvation and that's Hebrews, is it Hebrews 5? And then we've got this expression, the common salvation, that which believers share and can appreciate together.

So that's essentially what fellowship is, isn't it? And in the epistle, there were those that were going to be, that are seen as being disruptive of that fellowship. And it's another, sorry, go ahead. So Titus speaks of the common faith, something similar here.

Nothing common about it, it's what we all hold. Not run-of-the-mill faith or some, you know, that sort of meaning of common or plain faith, but rather it's what is shared between us. The word, probably in the early translators, back home in Britain, you'd have the grass dairy outside a housing estate and it'd be called the common.

Now, it wasn't that there was something wrong with it. It was equally accessible and usable for everyone in the area. So that's what the word meant in the early days.

But Jude said, there's something more pressing. I find it necessary to write to you, exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints. This is undoubtedly the most famous verse in the epistle of Jude.

I think maybe for some believers it's the only one they know, but not after today. We'll know them all after today, but it's a very important concept. Jude is looking at the faith objectively.

He's talking about the body of Christian truth. We might call it the apostles' doctrine. The words of the apostles of the Lord Jesus that occurs later in this book is the same expression.

Now, this means that both in oral content called faithful sayings that were distributed among the Christians and in some extent books of the New Testament which were already written. We know for example from Colossians 4 that the book of Luke was already in circulation. We know from 2 Peter 3 that these people had Paul's letters and so these were in circulation.

Now, Jude himself is writing one that will ultimately be in the canon. The apostle John had not completed his writings yet. So what he is saying is that the essential faith has been given once for all to the believers and that having been completed, nothing more will be added to it.

Now I need some help here. One thing I just said was that the writings of John and obviously Jude's own writing itself was not yet written. It was being written as he talks about the faith that was once for all delivered.

Frequently though, we use this verse and I'm going to suggest we rightly use it but I want to defend this position to say that this refers to the completed canon of Scripture. But it isn't quite completed yet. Can any of you give me help on that? I had thought that all of the revelation relative to divine truth had been given and John is really, I hate to say, filling in the details in his writings, in his revelation, but all divine truth had been given.

Everything that John gives us really is already in Scripture just being fleshed out, if you will, in his writing. This book is a good example of that. There's no doctrine in this book that is not already part of the faith and already encouched in other writings and in faithful sayings.

Rather, this book affirms those things, has fellowship with them, and then spends much of its time in warning us against deviating from them. To support our brother Higgins, what he has said there, didn't the Lord teach that himself in the upper room? Because he said to the 11 who were there after Judas had left, he said that the Holy Spirit shall come and he will guide you. The immediate believers who were there in his presence into all truth, so that by the time that those apostles had died, all truth was resident and extant with them.

Maybe David, while you're dealing with that, another scripture that sometimes is misunderstood is when Paul is writing in Colossians and he says it was given unto him to fill up the word of God. And yet some will say, well, Peter wrote and James wrote and all of these other men wrote and John wrote all of his later. So in what sense did Paul fill up? Is it just mainly the teaching relative to the church that he crystallized for us? Is that what is in view? Or how do you view that? I think, yeah, the revelations that were given to Paul concerning the New Testament assembly that were unique to Paul, he had fully discharged at that point.

Now this being the case, this faith, the body of truth, what we might call the apostle's doctrine, as we mentioned yesterday, always viewed as a singular when it's seen in its totality so that we either take it or leave it. Hopefully take it. But, you know, here's what I'm getting at.

We have people that, of course, the confusion today is that there isn't just the local assembly as there was back then. So we have so-called Christendom, as people call it. We have denominations, full in some cases of great believers, but who have not been fully shown the truth of scripture regarding gathering to the Lord's name.

Now they will say to us, let's just agree on the things that we have in common. Let's drop this down to lowest common denominator. We believe in the same Jesus and the same Lord, and the rest is just details.

So forget the details. Let's not talk about what we disagree about. Let's concentrate on what we agree about.

Now this seems a very genial, very logical thing to do for many of the disagreements of life, but it won't work for this. The faith is a singularity. Now there are people who take the blessings of it, and they receive eternal life, and they don't go farther than that very much.

And that's to be a spiritual dwarf and to be stultified. God's intention is that we would advance in that truth, and by accepting the whole gospel, that we would believe it all and practice it all. He gives us no right, as I said yesterday, to cherry pick and to a la carte our way through and smorgasbord His truth and say, I'll take a little of that and a little of that, but I don't like this.

That's not our call. This is the faith, once for all given to the saints. So you need to contend for someone likely, you know, who's likened this to Desi Nehemiah, with a sword in one hand and a trowel in the other, building yourselves up in your most holy faith.

So contending, just to get your illustration there, you would say then contending is the sword and building yourself up in your most holy faith is the trowel. It's a pretty strong word, contend. But how do we equate that with what Paul writes to Timothy, the servant of the Lord must not strive but be gentle unto all patient? The servant of the Lord must not be contentious and argumentative.

That is, going for argument for its own sake. This warfare, of course, also doesn't involve guns and, you know, swords. It's not Ireland.

This, yes, this isn't the Crusaders' verse, okay? This is, the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds. This is spiritual warfare. But you're correct, William.

As you well know, this is an extraordinarily strong word. We take agonizomai, which is a word that means to contend, agon, is the same word we get agony from. Now this isn't agony in the sense of pain, but it has that degree of fervor and strength and verve to it.

This is a very strong word. And now, to make it even stronger, you add a prefix, ep-agonizomai. So now you have an extremely strengthened word that is to contend with the greatest possible effort and vigor.

So this is not something that will happen with, you know, careless reading of scripture. It's not something that will occur just by, you know, having to imbibe things in meetings and not spending your own time developing your personal convictions based on studying the scripture. We need, in order to contend for the faith, to know the faith.

Would you all agree? Mm-hmm. David, we passed over, I know time is of the essence. Could you just say a word about, it was needful for me to write, I felt pressed in.

How does this fit in with the doctrine of inspiration? I think it's the Holy Spirit who put that pressure upon him. Perhaps he had heard something that the churches that Peter had written to, or perhaps others, were starting to be infiltrated. We're going to find that, you know, these people, certain men, in verse 4, had crept in.

They have crept in. This has already occurred. So the Spirit of God not only directs which words will be written, but which topics will be covered.

Is that what you're getting at? Very good. I don't think it's the same word. The Lord Jesus spoke of being constrained.

I'm pressed in. He spoke of that as far as his baptism and so on. How am I straightened till it be accomplished? I don't think it's the same word, but it's the same concept.

I have no other way I can turn. Just for clarity, brother, I sort of thought that you might be suggesting that the faith was associated with the assembly primarily. I don't think it is.

Just clarify. Verse 4, what they were doing, they were practicing licentious lives and they were denying the lordship of Christ. And essentially, that's why we have to contend for the faith.

I agree with you, Brother Duncan. The reason I brought the assembly in was more illustrative, that the entire Bible needs to be taken and be accepted as God's message to us and God's instruction for us. So that a Christian today who only wants to contend for the deity of Christ, but has no interest in Pauline teaching on the New Testament assembly, has not really accepted the whole gospel.

Of course. Okay, that's my point. The contention here is for very fundamental things.

They weren't arguing about whether you should have two cups or one cup at the breaking of bread. They were arguing about whether Christ is God, right? And whether Christians need to be worried about controlling and beating their body into some sort of subjection or allowing it to run amok, as you were saying yesterday. These very fundamental things are what are under attack here.

So when it's called the apostles' doctrine, it's something to be taught. When it's called the faith, which was once for all delivered unto the saints, it's something to be trusted. Something to be trusted.

So as we read our New Testaments, we find all the doctrines of the gospel concerning the Lord Jesus. When we go to the Old Testament, we find the pictures, the examples, the lessons, the experiences that are taught in the New Testament. So I don't go to my Old Testament and look for doctrine.

And this has been a problem of old in my history, where doctrine is formed out of the Old Testament scriptures. If I can't find it in the New, it's not to be taken from the Old. And I think that's important, to make that difference.

Right. All the Bible is written for me, but not all of it is written to me, is one distinction. In this dispensation, we are guided by the epistles.

I don't want to, as I say, go any farther on the local assembly, but to make this final plug, that that actually is a defense of the person of Christ. And I know you believe that, brother, that the truth of the assembly is not some sort of peripheral extra, but rather is very much important in God's honoring his Son in this dispensation. And the lordship of Christ is key to the function of the assembly.

It's the only place on earth where his headship is seen, other than in families, right? And it's the main place it is seen. So Jude had a change in direction of what he was going to write about. You had omitted that in your opening remarks, brother.

So are we to take it, then, that what he was originally going to write about, he wasn't actually being inspired by the Spirit of God to complete that task. But as he's in that process, the Spirit of God comes upon him, and he's redirected. Yeah, I think so.

Yeah, okay. It's like, brother, when you're driving to a meeting, and you're halfway there, and you change the subject you were going to speak on. Why did you do it? Sometimes it's on the way to the platform.

The only distinction is that's not inspiration. It's perspiration. Perspiration.

But don't you find out that you've got something on your mind, and then something comes on your heart and distorts what's in your mind, and there you go. That's the Spirit of God. Sometimes afterwards you wonder if you should have changed it.

It would seem as though Paul had questions in his own mind as he penned 2 Corinthians. And it was not until the Spirit of God brought about the change that he was conscious that God had led him to write that. Very good.

Now, while you were talking about the local assembly and so on, it does say now that they crept in. Where did they creep into? Well, we know at least that they were engaged in the love feasts, which we'll talk about later, which were, shall we say, peripheral assembly functions. These epistles here are not written Peter and Jude to local assemblies.

I think it's very important to understand that. At the same time, the historical context was that these believers were gathered into local companies. So this kind of thing happens in assemblies.

Now, some people will say, well, what business do the assemblies have having these sorts of people in fellowship? It's not that they would have been in fellowship if they were really living and known to be living in the way that is discussed here. But the problem was that they had infiltrated and that they were not, at the beginning at least, obvious in what they actually were doing in their life and teaching. Now, contending for, I realize that we're spending some time on three, but it's very important.

What do we have to say? What does this verse have to say to a Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon? What does this verse have to say to a Catholic church, which believes that it has the right to continue to modify and even to add to the scriptures? With this verse, I mean, to ask this is to answer it, but I want to bring this sort of thing out. Does this verse speak to those issues? Well, it's saying that faith was never changed. Right.

I mean, that's obvious, isn't it? Not once upon a time, but once for all. Right. So no one has any right to change that.

It's amazing how the Pharisees and the Sadducees didn't seem to believe some of the doctrines, but they never tried to change the scripture, did they? God gave this as a deposit, and we are the stewards of that deposit. It was given once and once for all. The Greek word hapax means once for all time.

I'll give you another example of its use. 1 Peter 3.18. For Christ also hath once for all suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God. Now, you and I know that that was a one-time event.

It was a historical event on April 3rd, 33 A.D. At 3 o'clock in the afternoon, he said it is finished, and he died. We know that. Once for all.

In the same way, the scriptures, when God had completed this revelation, were given once for all. They were not to be added to or subtracted from. So, a modern-day prophet who says that he has new revelation, a person who wants to add scriptural books like Joseph Smith, is flying in the face of this very clear evidence.

And, Carl Urry, with that is, it is God who gave the faith. The church did not determine the faith. The faith determined the church.

And that is a very important thing. But we just changed the word in verse 1. What right have we to do that? Are you talking about the textual variant in verse 1? Yes. See, I am a young believer.

I have got my Bible. They authorize me to read it. I come to the meeting.

Now, this verse is not in the original. Or this word does not really mean this. This means this.

Yet, I have been told I cannot add to or subtract from the word of God. And here, Mr. Preacher is changing it. Can you explain why this happens? Are you ready for this? Absolutely.

The preservation of the word of God is in a wealth of manuscripts which agree with each other to the 99% level. The places in which they disagree with each other affect no major doctrine. No truth has been lost.

All of it is there. However, the best reading in certain verses remains somewhat uncertain. Just as when the reading is certain, the meaning is sometimes uncertain because of ambiguities.

This is where we need wisdom. But lower criticism, which is not the same as higher criticism, which is a method of approaching the text to determine what was the most likely reading, is the method that we use to seek. And often we are left with a situation, like Jude 1.1, where there are two possibilities, and we need to consider both of them.

I don't know if that satisfies you. Yeah, I think you're right. And at least to my knowledge, I don't know of any major doctrinal issues that are at stake, if there's any at all, that are at stake with the different renderings.

Correct. That's a very important topic, but would be a little bit of a troublesome digression to go farther in. It's just good for young Christians when we touch this.

It's a great question. Now, verse 4, certain men have crept in unnoticed. Long ago they were marked out for this condemnation.

These are ungodly men, and this is one of the first places, the first place where we meet this term ungodly, which will be a key word for the whole letter. They want to pervert the grace of our God into lasciviousness or lewdness, sexual immorality mainly, and they want to deny the Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ. Now, as I said earlier, if these men had marched in and proclaimed what they believed and how they were living, they probably would have been rebuffed.

That's not the way Satan works. We understand today in the United States that there are terrorists embedded in our culture. Hopefully not too many, but, I mean, we faced this on 9-11.

We had to face it. They don't say what they really believe. They come in and try to mainstream themselves, but in the end they're inveterate enemies of our country and of ourselves, and then it takes a 9-11 to show that.

This is a very similar idea. There are people who are consciously infiltrating, pretending to be Christians. If they weren't pretending to be Christians and didn't have some sort of profession, they wouldn't have been allowed in.

You could put it that way. But their reason for being in there is to change the truth, change the assembly, and to pervert God's truth. So there were men, plural, that crept in.

Was this like a stealthy underground movement of men? There seems to be a cohesiveness about what they were about. Is that conspiratorial? Yeah, yeah, right. Well, it's hard to reconstruct, but we do know that these people, and this goes back to what Brother Dunsire was saying yesterday, were kind of proto-Gnostics.

If you call them Gnostics, this is anachronistic, because Gnosticism in its full form was not in existence quite yet. But, of course, it comes out of a Greek philosophy that's older than the New Testament. And I think there may have been at least, just as Judaizers, I think, were very organized in their attempts to infiltrate the church, so I think these libertines may well have been.

Do you have a thought on that? That's the way it appealed to me, that there was a movement about this. When I was out in Zambia, just to give you an idea, and probably the culture here is a little bit like that, the people don't live in their houses, they sleep in them, and they sit outside in these little huts. And there are many false religions about Zambia.

And what happens is those teachers come, and we did the same thing. You come into the village, you sit down, and the people come round, and you talk to them. So, and I can see these men would come in, they'd come into the villages, they'd come into the towns, and they would go into the marketplaces, and they would speak to people.

And people would be impressed with their language, with how they would speak, and what they would teach. And they would be caught unawares. And before they know it, they're getting tangled up in the wrong teaching.

Very easy, and it happens over in Zambia, it happens so much. And it's happened in this country. But now we sit in our houses, and we don't talk to people.

We don't have the same liberties in the marketplaces that other countries do. So if you go back to that kind of environment, you can see they're not coming into the assembly, they're coming into your social structure. And they're being listened to, and given place.

Going from house to house, would you... The same idea. That's right. We would encourage Bible study by all means, right? But at the same time, is there a note of caution here so far as little groups of study here, little groups of study there, independent from the assembly? I'm glad you brought that up.

I was hoping to bring that up too, so you're leading right into where I was going. First of all, let me say one thing. One of the popular church structures today is to have a big pavilion megachurch.

Big infrastructure, a huge budget. But understanding that's a cold and kind of impersonal place. So you break up into what are called small groups.

Now, one group is for ex-homosexuals, and one is for women over 40 who have three kids. I'm making that up. But they're separated into interest groups, we might say.

And what that has done, assuming that this whole organism is supposed to be a body and functioning as one, it breaks it up into small fragments that have very different interests and ends up causing a complete lack of unity. Now, that's out there. What about the assembly? How do we guard against that? Well, it's great when people meet in their homes and have a little informal Bible study.

I think instead of watching a movie or playing Parcheesi, that's a good thing to do. But I think we need to be cautious about having meetings where the whole assembly is not invited and perhaps not even welcome, where overseers are not present and are not at least aware of what's going on. Many times false doctrine is brought in to houses around tables by people who are very genial and seem to have reasonable ideas.

I think it's very important that the teaching of the assembly should be under the auspices, in some ways, of the overseers. And not only that, but God intends the assembly to come together as a whole. All of us, young and old, new believers and old believers, in general, should be together for any teaching meetings so that we can all say amen, right? And affirm what is being taught as true.

Can you help us with the next expression, then? In what way, then, were these men before of old ordained to this condemnation? Right, we get the word ordained and we think, oh no, is this double predestination? Did God want these people to be damned and He determined their individual fates ahead of time? Absolutely not. That's not what this means at all. It means that the destruction, the judgment and the outcome of these people was predicted in the Old Testament.

And the people who behave this way, we know what they're going to end up like. And in case we're not sure, we're about to find out, right? It segues right into the next portion. So it's not the individuals themselves.

It is rather the character of this type of person. So the condemnation was written before in the Old Testament. And because of the lifestyle that these people have adopted, they themselves have indicated we are heading for that condemnation.

We are choosing that for ourselves. See, those who came with false prophecy had to be tested. And then there was a judgment if it was wrong.

So here are men coming with things that are wrong. And we've got the textbook to test it, the Word of God. And you find it's wrong, deal with it.

Of course, that principle extends in the Gospel, too. Sinners will be judged. And they continue in their sin.

They put themselves in the place where they will be judged. Correct, yes. God has not foreordained anyone to damnation, any individual.

The Bible never teaches that. And that's coming from someone who believes in personal election of those who were saved. That's compatible.

That is compatibilism. That's what the Bible teaches. Now, moving on.

No further comments on that one, please. We're going to look at the grace of our Lord being turned into lewdness and denying the only Lord and our Lord Jesus Christ, the only Lord God. Again, I'll come to that in a moment.

How could grace be turned into lewdness? Now, this is a word in the King James that says, It's a word mainly for unrestrained sexual activity but could be any sort of flagrant open sin. It's when people not only go into sin full time but do it in a shameless way, public. They don't care.

It began surreptitiously, but now it becomes public. And they're trying to draw people into this lifestyle. Is grace really a reason for that? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? What does grace have to do with sin? It's an abuse of grace or really a misunderstanding of grace, that if the grace of God can forgive sin, then we'll just allow the grace of God to continue to cover us in our lives.

As you said, quoting from Romans 6, sinning that grace may abound. If my sin has more abounded unto His glory, then let me just keep sinning, and He'll get more glory by forgiving me and showing grace. Can it be that they're mixing with the believers and claiming to be under grace? And now as we talked about Gnosticism and the lascivious side of it, now they are teaching that this is okay under grace.

Is that what you mean, Brother David, by ungodly antinomian apostates? You like that? I like that, but that's what you meant, isn't it? Okay, ungodly, we figured that one out. That word asebeia in our Greek text is a word for people who have no fear of God, who have no respect for authority, as we see in this book, but specifically have no time for God. There is no fear of God before their eyes.

Antinomian is, I guess it's a big word, but it means no law. They will not be brought under any rules or regulations. They will not take truth in an absolute sense and subject themselves to it.

Apostates means to stand away literally from something that you once professed. We've discussed that word yesterday. It's a very accurate description of what we're reading about.

So is that why it's the Lord God and the Lord Jesus Christ? They won't bow to His lordship. Is this a denial by action or a denial by teaching of confession or both? I would take it both. I mean, these ideas have consequences, right? So grace is God's solution to sin.

It's not His tolerance towards sin. There are some people who say, well, in the old days, God just wiped people out when they sinned, but now He's gracious, which means we can sin all we want and still have remission, and it's not a problem. No, that's not grace.

That's receiving the grace of God in vain, 2 Corinthians 6. Those who receive God's grace actually receive with it the solution to sin, not only the forgiveness of sin but the power to overcome sin in their lives. Where sin abounds, grace does much more abound. When grace abounds, sin no longer does.

When grace is active, sins diminish. They do not increase. But they don't diminish because grace is forcing it on people who are unwilling, but rather grace working in our hearts causes us to hate the very sin that God hates.

And as our hearts are changed, we will voluntarily and lovingly turn away from sin. This is what salvation does to us. Grace diminishes sin.

It does not increase it. So don't misunderstand the fact that God doesn't come down in swift judgment on the sinner as any sort of tolerance. It's rather His patience with them so that His grace might work.

Grace will never enable deciviousness. Where we find this kind of leadership in Christendom where those that profess to be believers are indulging in liberality and licentious behavior and so on, very often we find that they are really opposed in a hostile way to the true gospel. Not only are they promoting sin, but they're hostile against the lordship of Christ, His claims of authority, His majesty, His dominion.

So can we be clear as we're going on? Just to make sure there's no difficulty. The people in verse 4 are unsaved. The people in verse 5 are believers.

And the people in verse 5, He's speaking to you, can never become the people in verse 4. Very good. Yes, these, these, these, these keeps on occurring in the text which is referring to those apostates. And here He says, but I want to remind you, you believers, you people who are kept by the power of God.

Right? So a true believer can never become an apostate. That's true. In the true meaning of the apostate.

Right. Can apostate become a true believer? No reason why not. When they give away, when they leave their apostasy, as long as they're in that state of mind, they'll never be saved.

Why does it say in Hebrews 6 it's impossible? While they're in that state. But God's still got mercy and grace. And if a man in such a state relinquished it at all and turned to Christ, would Christ reject him? Question is, he probably would never relinquish it because he's under the motivation of Satan.

Hebrews 6 as well doesn't mention salvation, it mentions repentance. I mean, let me just chime in on this, maybe just an opinion. I tend to agree with you, Duncan, on that.

We talk about people who can't be saved. I'm not sure anybody can't be saved until death, and then they can't be saved, personally. But apostates, as long as they continue in apostasy, will never be saved.

They must repent of that entire structure. Now, apostasy can both be seen as a step function, if you will. It's either you have it or you don't.

But there's also a gradient where we need to be careful that we can apostatize from certain things that we once believed. And this is why it's so important to understand that when God gives us the Scripture, we must accept it and believe it and obey it all. But that's something we can reaffirm from later on.

Well, we've spent the first hour on the first four verses, but I'm not too upset about that. I think we can put the accelerator on now. Sure.

The word for repent, though, is— Repeat the question, David. Sorry, Josh, thank you for that question. I would agree with your first statement, absolutely.

Judas is the apostate par excellence, right? He knew not only the truth, but he knew the truth with a capital T. He knew the Lord Jesus. When he saw what had happened when he betrayed him, he repented, quote, unquote. The problem is, again, looking at the original words, that's a different word.

True repentance is to change your mind, metanoia, right? To change your mind about who God is and who you are and to receive God's verdict on your sin and to receive God's promise of salvation. What Judas did was he regretted, at a very human level, what he had done, but his heart was not changed. Metamelomai, a different word.

And so, therefore, he did not truly repent. Would you agree with that? Yep. Like Balaam, we're going to be dealing with Balaam.

Let me die the death of the righteous, but he wanted to live the life of the wicked. Right, very good. There was no repentance.

Now, he goes into the Old Testament now to bring some examples of people for you, as you were saying, Duncan, there for the believers, to warn them about the fate of people who deny our Lord God and live lives of lewdness. The Lord, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterwards destroyed those who did not believe. Can you help us why, on the chronology, yesterday and Peter, when we were looking, they were in their chronological order.

Here, they're actually, well, the chronological order, Jude moves away from him. And an associated question with that is that when it was Peter, Peter focused on the deliverance of some out because that was one of his purposes. I presume that that's not what Jude is focusing on here.

Right, yes. I agree. This is the deliverance of the righteous in the midst of the unrighteous is not Jude's focus.

He's talking only about the apostates and therefore only their fate. Now, the order he chooses must be deliberate. Some people have suggested this, that the unbelieving Israelites died a physical death, that the angels were locked up for a future day of judgment, but that Sodom and Gomorrah, even though that was a temporal judgment, is seen as emblematic of eternal judgment.

That's the expression here, examples of eternal, the vengeance of eternal fire at the end of verse 7. So that we see the progression of what God's judgment is to these types of sinners. First of all is physical death. Second is retirement in hell.

And third is ultimate destiny in the world, fire. That's possible. Would you say something? Sure.

I would concur. So we learn that there's no chronological order, there's always a theological order. That's your suggestion.

Could you also see, first of all, the root of unbelief? What it means to his rebellion and what it means to his licentious living. When he's dealing with the apostates, where he's dealing with unbelief, rebellion against God, and then the licentious living that would link with Sodom and Gomorrah. A moral order.

It's a moral order. That's probably still characterized by people, teachers today. Those things.

In other words, you're saying unbelief is the root matter in all of it. Not believing in the word of God in the context of this false teaching. And we found it in the news, they love to print those things.

The immorality that's associated with many false teachings. As we noted yesterday, the opposite is true for the believer. Being grounded in truth.

That leads to holy living and it assures hope for the future. What does it mean, David, that they once knew this? It's not that they once knew it and don't know it now. Once for all knew it.

Right. I think they received the deposit, the very kind of deposit. I suspect it's the same concept as verse three.

The question is whether as a receiver of it, at some point a steward of this sort of truth, you haven't been given to it, given it as a gift for your own use and for the passing on unadulterated to others. Were they guilty of perhaps not remembering? Did they need to be reminded as Peter brings us to his epistle on the eve of that? They once knew it. Now, you could also say they hadn't forgotten it and that he's just reminding them of things they hadn't forgotten.

But I'm not sure. I think he's reminding them here whether the word remind occurs or not. What do you think, Brother Billson? Well, that's the key to the remembrance, isn't it? I want them to see it now.

Although he stole them before and bring them up again, because he had to teach a lesson. That's just to explain. And so it's part of my teaching.

You may know it, but I'm repeating it. And, you know, when we listen to ministry, sometimes we say, well, I've heard all that before. Well, could you go up and give the address? Could you speak on it? Well, you can't.

Listen to it. Listen to it at the end. And that's God's principle, the repetition of his word.

Faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the word of God. There's something wrong with the spiritual that we don't want to hear the truth again. And that's certainly true in gospel.

I think all of us should be gospel addicts. We just love to hear it preached again. We know it, but we want to hear it again.

Both because we love it and it means something richly to us, but it strengthens our faith and encourages us. And ministry is no different than that. Can I ask you a verse 6 about the angels? You can ask, yeah.

That was good, Billson. These fallen angels, just on the face of it, these fallen angels are not free agents now roaming around. They are lock-up police.

So, would you say that that does not sound like Paul Lucifer, those that touch Baal with him, in that there are still demons? There is. But, Raul, this is a more specific case. I think that's something we can come confidently to, that this is a specific case.

The question is, which case? Is it one we are not informed of or one that we are informed of? Let me just say a couple of things here. The first thing I want to say is it's really not a good idea to be dogmatic because we don't have all of the answers.