Jude 3 Beloved, while I was
very diligent to write to you concerning our common salvation, I found it
necessary to write to you exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith
which was once for all delivered to the saints. 4
For certain men have crept in unnoticed, who long ago were marked out for this
condemnation, ungodly men, who turn the grace of our God into lewdness and deny
the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ. 5 But I want to remind you, though you once knew this,
that the Lord, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterward
destroyed those who did not believe. 6 And the
angels who did not keep their proper domain, but left their own abode, He has
reserved in everlasting chains under darkness for the judgment of the great
day; 7 as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities
around them in a similar manner to these, having given themselves over to
sexual immorality and gone after strange flesh, are set forth as an example,
suffering the vengeance of eternal fire. 8
Likewise also these dreamers defile the flesh, reject authority, and speak evil
of dignitaries. 9 Yet Michael the archangel, in
contending with the devil, when he disputed about the body of Moses, dared not
bring against him a reviling accusation, but said, "The Lord rebuke
you!" 10 But these speak evil of whatever
they do not know; and whatever they know naturally, like brute beasts, in these
things they corrupt themselves. 11 Woe to them!
For they have gone in the way of Cain, have run greedily in the error of Balaam
for profit, and perished in the rebellion of Korah. 12
These are spots in your love feasts, while they feast with you without fear,
serving only themselves. They are clouds without water, carried about by the winds; late autumn trees without fruit, twice dead, pulled up
by the roots; 13 raging waves of the sea, foaming
up their own shame; wandering stars for whom is reserved the blackness of
darkness forever.
Those who speak falsely, or speak falsehoods, have no
fear of God.
The record of those who do speak falsely is not good.
Jude, (most likely Jesus’ half-brother,) relates the less-than-hopeful future
of those who do. To see that more clearly, all we need to do is look to the
past to see how God has dealt with those who have brazenly opposed His message,
or His messenger.
Sometimes we may think those who oppose God somehow
escape His notice. They do not. Jude writes an important reminder of that fact.
If nothing else is made clear here – and there is plenty made clear - it is
that God is watching men’s hearts, and that He opposes those who oppose Him.
It has often been said, (and it is a true saying,) that
you plus God is a majority opinion. It may not seem like it, and it may not
feel like it, but it is true and always has been. Pleasing God must be our only
motivation, even when, (especially when,) all the world is against us.
Jude speaks to the observable fact the world is a
battleground for Christians. Of this world he exhorts we who believe to contend
for the faith, which can only mean at some point we have to stand for it.
-Pastor Bill
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