Jude 8-17
hear the word of the living God,
Jude, beginning at verse eight. It says, yet in like manner,
these people, also relying on their dreams, defile the flesh,
reject authority, and blaspheme the glorious ones. But when the
archangel Michael contending with the devil was disputing
about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous
judgment, but said, the Lord rebuke you. But these people
blaspheme all that they do not understand, and they are destroyed
by all that they, like unreasoning animals, understand instinctively. Woe to them, for they walked
in the way of Cain and abandoned themselves for the sake of gain
to Balaam’s error and perished in Korah’s rebellion. They are
blemishes on your love feast as they feast with you without
fear, looking after themselves. waterless clouds, swept along
by winds, fruitless trees in late autumn, twice dead uprooted,
wild waves of the sea, casting up the foam of their own shame,
wandering stars for whom the gloom of utter darkness has been
reserved forever. It was also about these that
Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied, saying, Behold, the
Lord comes. or came with 10,000 of his holy
ones to execute judgment on all and to convict all the ungodly
of all their deeds of ungodliness that they have committed in such
an ungodly way and all of the harsh things that ungodly sinners
have spoken against him. These are grumblers, malcontents,
following their own sinful desires. They are loudmouthed boasters
showing favoritism to gain advantage. Yes, this is the word of the
living God. It’s a dark passage. We’ve watched several public
trials lately. Maybe in the news, maybe you’ve
watched some of the minute-by-minute, play-by-play of these trials,
but there was the trial of the couple men in Georgia that killed
a young man jogging through a neighborhood. There’s the fella that killed
a couple folks up during one of the riots last summer. And
then just Friday, I think it was, the police officer who misjudged
her weapons and took the life of a young fella. Her trial ended,
she was convicted. And we watched these trials,
we watched the outcomes. But I wonder if you watched the
beginning of the trial where the prosecutor laid out their case.
This is who this person is. This is what this person is like.
And this is what the person did. And we’re gonna show to you exactly
why they did what they did, how they did what they did. And we’re
gonna show you without a shadow of a doubt, they say, with great
confidence that these people need to be convicted and thrown
in the jail, thrown under the jail, that sort of thing. That’s
the job of the prosecutor. Well, that’s kind of Jude’s job
here. We say from time to time in the
church, watch out for false teachers. We say from time to time in the
church, watch out for selfish people. Watch out for people
who will lead you astray. You know, they’re selfish, they’re
just here for themselves, here for gain, that kind of thing.
And we might say that and just gloss over it. Well, Jude here
is saying, no, this is a really nasty situation. This is a really
big issue that you need to be warned of, and you need to be
on the lookout for, and if you don’t, you’re gonna get swept
up in their mess. Now, here’s their situation.
Remember, the early church was a process to get established. Jesus came. He would teach in
the synagogues. The synagogues would pick up
Jesus’ teaching. They would see his life and ministry.
And over time, as people came to faith in Jesus, the tradition
kept the church going. And so the apostles came. They
established the church after Jesus’ death. We’ve read of that
in our study in Acts. But it took a while for these
things to get written down and codified and for common practices. In fact, the first really couple
hundred years of church history are the church under growing
pain saying, who are we? What do we believe? And what
do we do? What’s our faith? What’s our
practice? That’s all we have. The creeds coming along for a
couple hundred years, but also how do we practice what we believe? And so, You would have in a case
like these churches Jude is writing to, you’d have itinerant preachers
coming through. There’d be Paul and the apostles passing through,
but guess what? It was pretty lucrative. And so you get false
apostles. And it’s really not that much
different today. How many churches do we have in America? Well,
probably too many. Some have said we need a good
dose of persecution and that might clear out some of the junky
ones. But in America, you can get a preaching gig if you want
to. You can set up shop and it’s a pretty lucrative gig if you
can do it. And people all over our country
do it. They just find a good movie theater
and they set up shop. They do quite well. It’s a thing. And so maybe the warning of Jude
ought to come to us in our day. And we catch the backside of
it. This message is called the fruit of the flesh. And it’s
not till later we see what some of these folks are into and what
they are up to. It’s good, though, to have faithful
pastors, faithful ministers, faithful servants like Jude,
though, to say, hey, look out, look out now. And so by the power
of the Holy Spirit, he’s issuing a strong warning to the church.
Look, these folks have crept in among you. They’re apostates.
He tells you who they are, what they do, and what they’re like,
and therefore what’s coming the church’s way. They are in your
midst. and he is exposing them so that
they can be rejected. And there’s four things he speaks
of in this passage. He speaks of godless dreamers.
He speaks of their godless counterparts in the Old Testament. He speaks
of their godless fruit and then of their godless future. The
first thing he speaks of, though, is these are godless dreamers. Verse eight says, in like manner,
these people also, relying on their dreams, defile the flesh,
reject authority, and blaspheme the glorious ones. You probably
bumped into these kind of people in church. They come in the middle
of the church and they say, God told me. And what do we immediately
do when somebody says, God told me? Ooh, really? We should listen
to you. Actually, we don’t. We kind of
get the willies, right? The hair on our neck stands up and we
kind of step back, lest lightning strike them and hit us, because
we know better. But people say that all the time
in the church. God told me this. Look at, watch,
I really don’t, but turn on the TV and look at the most influential
TV preachers, and I know I’m gonna get in trouble for this,
women teachers who only teach women and have these big followings,
they always use the language, God told me, and I am telling
you. And they never open their Bible
and say, God said, God says, it’s always that way. God told
me. They’re these mystical types. They live in a fantasy world.
They believe they receive revelation. They believe they receive new
or unique teaching. And it goes over and against
the authority of the scripture, the authority of the church,
and it wreaks havoc. But that’s the world we live
in, and that’s the way these folks creep in sometimes. We
are quick to say, oh, this person is special. This person is anointed.
This person has it all together. Therefore, to listen to them,
none of those are the marks. of a true Christian teacher.
But notice what verse eight says, Now remember, if you look back
to last week’s study, their counterparts in the past were Sodom and Gomorrah. Their counterparts in the past
were the angels who fell from their place of glory. Their counterparts
were also the Israelites who rebelled in the wilderness. Now,
if you look forward tonight in verses nine and 10, he’s gonna
talk about their godless counterparts in days of old. And so you have
sandwiched, in the passage we’re looking at tonight, you have
sandwiched around these people, One set of Old Testament examples
of how bad people were. And then tonight, another set
on the other side of how bad these folks were. So what kind
of point is Jude making? Don’t put up with them in the
church. Don’t listen to what they’re saying. They are polluters,
rebellers, and slanderers. So think about these godless
dreamers for a minute. And we want to think about three
things that they do. They pollute, they rebel, and they slander.
They pollute, they defile the flesh, they live in excess, they
live unrestrained lives, and these are generally in the area
of sexual and homosexual lifestyles. They pollute themselves and they
are in leadership in the covenant community. Now, we don’t have
to think really hard for an example of that today. What has the church
in America embraced? The mainline church, the mainline
churches. They’ve embraced homosexuality. They’ve embraced promiscuity. They’ve embraced a life outside
the sacredness of marriage. And how do we think that’s gonna
go well? Well, they’re nice, they’re kind,
they’re learned, they have their degrees, and on and on. But we get a strong warning here
from Jude. We get strong warnings from other
places of scripture. That’s not gonna go well to put
in charge of the church, polluters, rebellers, and slanderers. So
they pollute. They also rebel, these godless
dreamers. They are against the authority
of God. They scorn God. They set aside his law. They
hold contempt for Christ. That’s not a hard place to go
and find examples in this world. You go to these churches today,
these mainline liberal churches, and what do they say? Not listen
to the word of God, listen for it. It might be, but it might
not be the word of God. That’s up to you. And so somehow,
some way, we judge the word of the living God, it does not judge
us. And it’s for you to decide. It’s
like those stories, choose your own ending. Well, you can choose
your own ending all you want, but I can tell you what it will
be if you rebel against God and his authority. They scorn God,
they set aside his law, they hold it in contempt, and most
likely in this context, they’re what we call antinomians. I’m
saved, I can live like I want and just ask for forgiveness.
These godless dreamers are also slanderers. They blaspheme, their
lips speak against or speak evil of others, including Almighty
God. They run their mouths. You find
a person who wants to be in charge, but they’re not in charge. And
what do they generally do? They generally tell everybody how
they are in charge. And it’s a vision of grandeur, we might
say. They’re not in charge. They want
to be in charge. And so they tell everybody they’re in charge.
And if you didn’t know better, you might think they’re in charge. But
they are slanderous. And how does a person like that
elevate themselves to power? Well, they talk down. Well, the
elders just didn’t get that decision right. If I had been on the session,
I would have made this decision and it would have been better
and the church would have been blessed. So therefore, it begins to sound like Absalom,
doesn’t it? He set up shop outside the house of David and he said,
you can go in there if you want. My dad, he’s a good king. You’ll
get some good dealings from him, but just stop here at my gate.
and I’ll give you better judgment. But these folks have no care
or concern about those they supposedly serve. They’re just building
a kingdom for their own ends. And so these godless dreamers
are polluters, they’re rebellious, and they are slanderous. Why
does he give special attention to this type of behavior? Well,
it’s dangerous. It’s dangerous. And he gives
now a couple of examples of their counterparts in the Old Testament.
Look at verses 9 and 10. Speaking of blaspheming the glorious
ones, it says, when the archangel Michael, contending with the
devil, was disputing about the body of Moses, he did not presume
to pronounce a blasphemous judgment, but he said, the Lord rebuke
you. Now remember Moses, when he died, God took him on Mount
Nebo and showed him the promised land. God said, you won’t go,
but I’ll show it to you. And so Moses saw it from afar.
And what does it say about the burial of Moses? God buried Moses. And where did he bury him? Don’t
know, why? Because we would probably go
and worship at that spot. And so apparently in the unseen
world, Michael the archangel disputed with the devil about
the body of Moses. And it says, even the archangel
Moses did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment. But he
said, kind of in the spirit of St. Paul, the Lord rebuke you. Vengeance is mine, saith the
Lord. It’s not our job to execute vengeance or judgment, but we
let the Lord do the rebuking. And so maybe one of the marks
we ought to look for in a servant of God is they let the Lord do
the rebuking. They let the Lord do the judging. But this is one example of another
Old Testament Another history past example of what these people
are like. And as Jude is writing to folks
who would have known their Old Testament Bibles, they would
have known the law, the stories, they’d have been familiar with
these references, they’d have been like, yeah, that’s a good example. That’s
a good example, that’s a good example. So, you live within
God’s limits. These godless dreamers set up
shop themselves. They rebel against God and his
word. They live by dreams. God told me they are blasphemers. And what are they doing? They’re
running their mouth for their own gain and they are not living
within the limits of God and his word. And so we ought to
be very careful to look at who we listen to and to look at who
is the influential person in our lives. Are they living within
God’s limits? But the other side of the coin
is if you’re a leader. If you’re a leader and you’re running your
mouth, if you’re a leader and building a kingdom for yourself,
you need to be careful not to get outside of God’s boundaries,
because he will take care of business. Well, besides these
godless dreamers who pollute and rebel and slander, and besides
the example given to Michael and the devil, he says of them,
it’s a rather dark statement, Verse 10, these blaspheme all
they do not understand and they are destroyed by all that they,
listen to that, they are unreasoning animals and understand instinctively. They’re dogs, right? What do dogs do? They eat and
they chase. That’s what he’s based them down
to. Animals these are base creatures.
They have no logic and no reason they live by instinct and they
are ignorant and they are presumptuous and They are going to destroy
the covenant community and they’re going to destroy the church There’s
a question though What can we learn from people like that when
they’re in our midst and when they’re teaching their things?
What what do we have to learn from them? Well, not not a thing. I not a thing. And it’s good
in our time, we’re down the path of history where we have a book
of order, we have a book of discipline, we have a Presbytery, we have
pastors, we have elders, we stand on the shoulders of giants throughout
church history. It’s pretty easy for us to say
we have all the safeguards in place. But it is pretty common,
I’ll tell you, to have ungodly people leading a church. I can tell you from experience
to sit in a room of leaders where someone is either not a Christian
or unqualified to be in office. It is a futile effort. It is
like literally beating your head against a concrete wall. You
get nowhere, you get nothing done because the buck usually
stops with them. So this description of godless
dreamers ought to warn us to be very careful who we let in
our fellowship, but especially into leadership. Notice their
godly, or their godless counterparts, that’s the second, thing we want
to look at, verse 11. Just a quick reminder of Cain,
Balaam, and Korah. Cain was an unbeliever. He did not worship according
to God’s standard. We assume that God taught Adam
and Eve how to worship. Adam and Eve would have taught
their children how to worship. They knew what was acceptable and
what was not. Abel offered to God an acceptable sacrifice. Cain did not. What happened with
Cain? He got upset and he went and
killed his brother. And so he displeased God and he couldn’t
handle God judging his worship. And so he got angry and killed
his brother. God was merciful to Cain. He
came looking for him, and he put a mark on him, and that mark
was to say, don’t anybody touch Cain. The mark of Cain was to
protect him as he wandered about in the land east of Eden. And so God in his mercy was kind
to Cain, but Cain was an unbeliever whose worship was not accepted.
He did things his way, and he murdered Cain. when God did not
approve him, he hated and he killed. And so what might be
Jude’s little analogy here that we ought to think about? Those
who sneak in the church unnoticed and do their own thing, their
own way for their own gain, they really hate you and they really
want you dead. And it may be physical death,
but it’s for sure spiritual death. That’s how serious Jude is here.
Well, then he goes to Balaam’s error. True shepherds serve,
false shepherds serve their own yins. Remember Balaam was gonna
sell Israel and God prevented it. Remember Balaam’s donkey
kept rubbing him up against the wall and kept preventing the
thing from taking place. But Balaam was looking for wealth
and prestige. He was looking for a payday and
he got enticed and he took The bait, and he was willing for
Israel, for God’s covenant community to be cursed for a few pennies.
What does that sound like? That sounds kind of like Judas,
doesn’t it? Selling the people of God for a bag of silver. And so here again is an example
of active deceit for personal gain. And that’s very common
in today’s church. We ought to be looking out for
that. Then there’s Cora’s Rebellion. Remember about 15,000 people
decided Moses was no longer their man. I know we pick on the Baptist
sometimes around here. This is really a congregational
thing. What do the congregationalists do when they don’t like their
preacher any longer? That’s right, they take a vote. And this was
the first example of why congregationalism doesn’t work. 15,000 people rose
up and said, we’re not Moses men anymore. We’re tired of Moses. We’d like Miriam. It’s time to
have a female preacher. something of that nature. And
so they raised up a stink. They used their influence. They
went about the camp and they rose up against Moses. And I have a good friend, a good
pastor who told me a very encouraging thing a couple of years ago when
we were going through a hard time here. I was telling about
some of the behavior of some of the people in the church that
didn’t like the ministry here. And this person said something
to me that was very encouraging. It also was unflattering. He
said, it’s not against you that they’re doing this. It’s against
the Lord. And sometimes we take a lot of personal hurt when the
church rejects you or says something nasty about you. You know, we
don’t like the preacher, whatever he did. And yes, it hurts us. There is all that, but it’s against
the Lord. And when in the church or when
in the company of God’s people, Korah’s rebellion pops up, It’s
not against Moses. It’s against the God of Moses.
And what does God do? He takes the life of 15,000.
The earth opened, the fire came down, the plague came upon them.
They refused God’s men and they were destroyed. So what is Jude
saying about these godless dreamers and their godless counterparts
in the Old Testament? Well, we shouldn’t mess around
with who’s in our church and especially who’s leading our
churches. It’s interesting how gullible
church folks are. You can have your doctrine right.
You can know your catechism and somebody can come into the church
and they can be as godless as can be underneath, but they put
on a suit, they put on a tie, you know, their hair looks nice
and they come in our church and we say, oh, how wonderful. You’re
just such a nice person. And then what’s the next thing
we do? You’d make a great elder. You’d make a great deacon. And
so many churches have done that over the years. One of my teachers
said it so well, nothing has destroyed the church more than
evil persecution and rotten leaders. And so we ought to be slow and
careful and let people prove themselves as they come into
the church because it can be destructive and it can destroy
us. So we have these godless dreamers,
they’re godless counterparts in the Old Testament. The third
thing we have is their godless fruit. Now, lest you think Jude
is gonna get any nicer, notice some of the things he says of
them, beginning in verse 12. These are blemishes on your love
feast, as they feast with you without fear, looking after themselves. These are waterless clouds swept
along by the winds. These are fruitless trees in
late autumn, twice dead, uprooted. These are wild waves of the sea
casting up the foam of their own shame. These are wandering
stars for whom the gloom of utter darkness has been reserved forever. These are pretty significant, pretty deadly characteristic
traits. This is the fruit of the godless.
You’ll go home tonight and maybe because of the weather, it’ll
be foggy. You’ll go home tonight and you’ll get on a road and
there’ll be a yellow sign that says slow down for the curve.
And depending on where you live, what passage you take, you’ll
have various warnings along the way. Maybe your car has these
alert systems. Some of you might have these
newer cars and it tells you to brake. It senses with its sonar, not
sonar, that’s water in it, whatever it is. These cars have these
days, they have the little system that warns you of people around
you. And so it tells you to break.
You have these warnings. So lest you be devastated, lest
you end up in a wreck, lest you overshoot the curve, lest you
end up in a ditch or wrapped around a tree, you heed the warning
signs. Well, he’s going to give here
some warning signs. These are reefs. What’s a reef? It’s an
underwater object. You can be cruising along in
your boat. And just below the surface, there’s a reef. Off
the coast of North Carolina, there’s Frying Pan Shoals. And you don’t take your boat
through that wide swath. In fact, there’s a channel that
takes many extra miles to get to the mouth of the Cape Fear
River where it is safe. Frying Pan Shoals is a great
place to fish if you have a shallow boat and you know where you’re
going. But if you’re in your you know, your $250,000 Grady
White, you’re gonna rip your Yamahas off the back. And many
people have done that, but these reefs are just below the surface. So they look good, they sound
good, but you’re gonna be cruising along as a church and great damage. Verse 12 says, they are blemishes
at your feet. Love feast. The moment for the
early church of great intimacy, eating together, fellowshipping
together, enjoying feasting together. And these are around your tables,
blemishes on your love feast. The other translation is reefs. They’re the underwater hazards. The second picture is clouds.
It’s been a pretty dry year. We watch our weather forecast.
It might rain. We need a little rain to fill
the water table back up. And we get a cloudy day and it’s,
you know, 50% chance of rain. And we look at those clouds and
say, wouldn’t it be nice if it rained? Just got my yard fertilized. I’d like
some rain on it. I’d like the drought conditions to disappear.
And what do we do? We go through a whole dreary
day. Gloomy, sad, no rain. Empty clouds. They promised something.
but they produced nothing. Great expectations, but no rain. That’s another image here. Then
they’re like trees who all year they look good, all year they
bud and they give the signs of an autumn producing, but they
are twice dead. and in autumn they give no fruit.
They only need to be uprooted and replaced. We know of Christ
speaking of trees very often. A tree is known by its fruit.
A good tree produces fruit. A bad tree does not produce fruit.
A bad tree doesn’t produce fruit. It should be yanked up, cut up,
tossed in the fire. So another example there. Then
there are waves. You know, you go to the beach
and you get yourself a boogie board. As a kid, you’re so excited. It’s windy, the waves are choppy,
and you get out there and it’s almost like the waves quit when
you get out there. And you get out there and there’s
those little floaties, you know, they just go up and down. But
none of them will ever, you know, really let you hang ten like
you’re in Hawaii. And it’s a big letdown. You spent
your money on your little boogie board and you get out there and
you fight the surf and there’s just nothing. Well, these are
empty talking people. They are swells. And it says
the foam of their waves is their shame. And then lastly, it speaks
of them as stars, not the fixed stars, not the stars like the
North Star in the heaven or the constellations by which we could
navigate the sea. But these are shooting stars.
They flash and they’re gone. They are bright and they are
shiny and they are worth looking at, but they are unfixed and
they are gone in a moment. And so what is the godless fruit? Well, it’s dangerous, it’s deceptive,
it’s useless, it’s unruly, and it’s disobedient. And at the
end of verse 13, it says, in the latter part, these are those
for whom the gloom of utter darkness has been reserved forever. The godless future of these teachers
is found in verse 14 through 16. That’s the last thing we
want to think about. Godless dreamers, godless, their counterparts
in the Old Testament. We just looked at their godless
fruit, now their godless future. It says, it was also about these
that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied, saying, behold,
the Lord came with his 10,000 of his holy ones to execute judgment
on all to convict the ungodly of all their deeds of ungodliness
that they have committed in such an ungodly way. Of all the harsh
things that ungodly sinners have spoken against him, these are
grumblers, malcontents, following their own sinful desires. They
are loudmouth boasters showing favoritism to gain advantage. Jude’s not being very nice. Where’s
his charity? I mean, isn’t there some good
in these people? No, this is what happens when
godless people Get in the church and they do godless things masquerading
as godly, but it it leads to a godless future. This is what
we might call the scared straight program, right? Remember was
a kid you get taken to the jail and they shut the door and made
it clink. and they rattled the key. I remember going to the
old Burlington jail, the one on the side of Fisher Street,
and they put us in the jail, slammed the door, and all of
us were scared. You don’t want to end up in jail now, do you? Or
for prom, every year at prom, they had a staged drunk driving
accident. You don’t want to drink and drive
at the prom. So this is the scared straight
program. Be vigilant is what Jude is telling us. Watch out.
But there’s hope in all this. This has been pretty dark, a
lot of doom and gloom. Christ is coming. Christ is coming
to judge those who have spoken against him. He will judge those
who’ve rebelled against him, and he will judge those who have
rebelled. He knows. He sees, and he will
judge. But our task, remember the great
charge that Jude gives to his hearers, we can’t forget, we
heard it the first week, is to contend for the faith. We’ve
got to stand up for the faith. The other thing is we have to
reject these voices. There is one voice we ought to
hear, that is the voice of the shepherd. And when we ever begin
to hear fake shepherd voices, we ought to sound the alarms.
And that’s what Jude is doing. I want you to think about this
in a different way. This is God, our savior, Christ,
protecting his bride. And so before we think, oh, this
is harsh, this is mean, these are nasty passages, talking bad
about people, probably good people, this is Christ taking care of
his bride. And we ought to take great joy
that Jesus loves his church this much. Let’s pray together. Our Father, we thank you that
you tell us to be on the lookout for those who are godless, those
who are seeking their own gain and who would destroy the church
along with them. We thank you and praise you that you have
given us watchmen to watch the way and to teach the way. And
we pray that you would keep us faithful, strong, and true, listening
only to the voice of the true shepherd, Jesus Christ, our savior.
We ask all this in his name, amen.