Jude, the brother of James, warns the churches, likely around 90 A.D. about false teachers who have infiltrated the churches:
“Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James, To those who are called, beloved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ: May mercy, peace, and love be multiplied to you. Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. For certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our on Master and Lord, Jesus Christ” (Jude 1:1-4).
Jude is likely writing to Jews who survived the total destruction of Jerusalem in 60 A.D. He is anxious to encourage them as God’s children and to emphasize that their common salvation lies in the faith that was so powerfully delivered to the saints – the apostles – of Jesus Christ. But a new urgency has arisen, the need to contend – to fight – for the Christian faith in opposition to people within the church who are perverting the grace of God into open sensuality and even denying Jesus, our only Master and Lord. So Jude goes back to square one for a review of the truth:
“Now I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus, who saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe. And the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day – just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire” (Jude 1:5-7).
Jude reminds his people that Jesus saved Israel and brought them out of Egypt, while totally destroying those who did not believe. There were also angels who did not believe and were punished for eternity in a pit of fire. And note carefully that sexual immorality was at the heart of their sin. Judas points out that the people who have perverted the church are now behaving pretty much the same way:
“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’” (Jude 1:8-9).
Is this beginning to sound like our times today? I say yes, it does:
“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. These are hidden reefs at your love feasts, as they feast with you without fear, shepherds feeding 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” (Jude 1:10-13).
Jude was writing at the end of the first century after Christ, but he could have been describing certain leaders in America in the 21st century, on both sides of modern politics! Sexual immorality has not changed, and modern leaders flaunt their behavior in similar “reef-like” ways.
It is easy for us to become discouraged, as Jude seems to be, while today we watch the greatest country in the world unravel.
But there is great hope! Hurry back for Part 2 and the prophecy of Enoch!