Book of Jude
Part 2
May 19, 2013
“I will therefore put you in remembrance, though ye once knew this, how that the Lord, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed them that believed not” (Jude 1:5). Jude jogged the people’s memory. He used several incidents in their history to demonstrate the righteousness of God. He’s didn’t write a new thing for them; he simply reminded them of information they already knew that was passed down through their generations. Charles Haddon Spurgeon wrote, “As for the root facts, the fundamental doctrines, the primary truths of Scripture, we must from day to day insist upon them. We must never say of them, ‘Everybody knows them’; for, alas! everybody forgets them.” Jude knew this and was making sure the people recalled the basics of their faith.
Jude began with the wilderness experience of the Israelites. That is, even though God had heard the cry of the Israelites pleading with Him to free them (Exodus 2:23-25), and God used Moses to remove the Israelites from the bondage of Pharaoh’s slavery in Egypt, and even though God promised to protect them, He still punished the people who blatantly sinned against Him.
When God brought the Israelites out of Egypt, He brought them to Kadesh Barnea, the edge of their Promised Land. He promised to protect them from the Canaanites as He had from Pharaoh, but when the spies came back from searching the land, only two faithful Jews reported what a marvelous land it was and that they could take it. These two were Joshua and Caleb. Only 2 of 12 trusted God to keep His Word. The other ten described themselves as grasshoppers in the land of giants. They could see only the size of their opposition and not the omnipotence of their God.
David Guzik wrote, “The warning through Jude is clear. The people of Israel started out from Egypt well enough. They had many blessings from God along the way. But they did not endure to the end, because they did not believe God’s promise of power and protection.” This cost them 40 years in the desert and the deaths of many unbelieving people.
The living God whom they knew had been on the mountain with Moses, and the same God who had produced water from a stone, manna from heaven and birds so plentiful the people became sick of eating them, is the God who they turned from to worship man-made idols of wood, stone, brass etc…
Linking this verse back with verse 4, we see that the false teachers and false prophets will not go unpunished. Anyone of faith, turning their hearts after the false prophets will also not go unpunished. Jude was warning them and us Christians to beware: We must endure as we run the race to win the prize of the upward calling in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3:14)
“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” (verse 6). Jude next spoke of the angels who sinned. Satan’s sin against God was such an absolute apostasy that he was thrown out of God’s Heaven and never allowed back in. His sin was in wanting to be higher than God. His five “I will” statements proved his adversarial position.
“I will ascend to heaven.
I will raise my throne above the stars of God.
I will sit on the mount of assembly in the recesses of the north.
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds.
I will make myself like the Most High. (Isaiah 14:13-14)
Understand that anytime the word cloud is used symbolically, it means the Shechinah Glory of God. Satan wanted to be equal to God or even become God. Satan was the first “false teacher” we could say. He taught the angels his theology and ¼ of the angels followed him in sin. When satan was tossed out of heaven, so were those angels. When satan is tossed into the Lake of Fire, so will be those angels.
But there is another class of angels who sinned against God. Here Jude quotes from the Book of Enoch, which is not in the cannon of the Bible, but is still a book the people then were familiar with. These angels saw the women of earth and thought them beautiful and the angels lusted after them. “And it came to pass when the children of men had multiplied that in those days were born unto them beautiful and comely daughters. And the angels, the children of the heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to one another: 'Come, let us choose us wives from among the children of men and beget us children.' And Semjaza, who was their leader, said unto them: 'I fear ye will not indeed agree to do this deed, and I alone shall have to pay the penalty of a great sin.' And they all answered him and said: 'Let us all swear an oath, and all bind ourselves by mutual imprecations not to abandon this plan but to do this thing.' Then sware they all together and bound themselves by mutual imprecations upon it” (Enoch 6:1-6).
Did you notice what Semjaza said? “I alone shall have to pay the penalty of a great sin.” He, and the angels who followed him knew what they were planning to do was a “great” sin. They understood that to take on human form and have relations with earth beings was wrong and against what God had made them to do. Let me pop your bubble right now. In the cutesy movies where we see angels coming to earth to perform a task in someone’s life and they fall in love with their assignment and decide to become human and live among humans speaks to this very premise. We get chills to see love win out, but, if it were based in truth, this would be a “great” sin.
It’s not sure how they could have done this. Angels can take on human form for a short while, so perhaps that was the way. We just know that they were evil and they taught the “secrets of Heaven” to the people of earth. One angel taught them how to make swords, shields, make-up for the eyes. Another angels taught them astrology and numerology. Still another showed them showed them the act of homosexuality, and got them involved in fornication. All of these sins, and many others led to bloodshed and death. When Michael, Uriel, Raphael, and Gabriel saw the blood being shed in the earth, they spoke with God, and He devised a special punishment for the angels who the men such wrong behavior. These beings would now be referred to as “fallen” angels and their punishment was eternal captivity. “And the Lord said unto Michael: Go, bind Semjaza and his associates who have united themselves with women so as to have defiled themselves with them in all their uncleanness. And when their sons have slain one another, and they have seen the destruction of their beloved ones, bind them fast for seventy generations in the valleys of the earth, till the day of their judgement and of their consummation, till the judgement that is for ever and ever is consummated. In those days they shall be led off to the abyss of fire: and to the torment and the prison in which they shall be confined for ever” (Enoch 10:11-14). These angels are already captive in chains and will one day live with satan, in the Lake of Fire for all eternity because they gave up their place in Heaven with God.
“Even as Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire” (verse 7). Now Jude reminds the Christians how God’s judgment affected Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities. These were cities that God had blessed in abundance. When Abraham’s and Lot’s possessions became too large to dwell together in harmony, they had to divide their possessions and find separate places to dwell. Lot “beheld all the plain of Jordan, that it was well watered” (Genesis 13:10) and that it was “even as the garden of the LORD” (Genesis 13:10) and he chose that place as his own. This was a place of mighty blessing, and yet the people turned to fornication, which is having relations with any old body you like without benefit of marriage. It’s bed hopping, if you will. And they turned to the gross sin of “strange flesh” which is homosexuality. Here Jude is making a direct reference to Genesis 19 where the men of Sodom wanted to have sex with the angels who had come to destroy the cities. Sexual sin was rampant, but so were idol worship and other sinful behaviors.
Jude’s point here was that, even though Sodom, Gomorrah and the surrounding cities were blessed beyond measure, they were judged for their sin and destroyed. The lesson here is that, just because someone seems to have it all, it doesn’t make them above the judgment of God. We reap what we sew: Blessing for blessing and judgment of sin. The future of those men is the Lake of Fire. The same goes for the false teachers who have infiltrated the Church. Unless they repent and begin to teach the absolute truth of the Word of God and the Gospel of Jesus the Christ, their eternal abode is with the devil.
Peter tells us the very same thing Jude does about false teachers. "By covetousness they will exploit you with deceptive words; for a long time their judgment has not been idle, and their destruction does not slumber. For if God did not spare the angels who sinned, but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved for judgment; and did not spare the ancient world, but saved Noah, one of eight people, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood on the world of the ungodly; and turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into ashes, condemned them to destruction, making them an example to those who afterward would live ungodly" (II Peter 2:3-6 NKJV).
“Likewise also these filthy dreamers defile the flesh, despise dominion, and speak evil of dignities” (verse 8). Here Jude is connecting the false teachers who “defile the flesh” and who “despise dominion” with Sodom and Gomorrah. They were then, and are now, filthy dreamers. That is, they claim to see visions and have prophetic insight that will teach truth, yet their truth is blasphemous and unholy.
“Despise dominion” meaning they despised or rejected authority. That’s because they wanted to be the authority, so they rejected God’s authority and they rejected the authority of the church leadership which God had instituted. David Guzik made a fine point with, “Today, our culture encourages us to reject authority and to recognize self as the only real authority in our lives. We can do this with the Bible, by choosing to only believe certain passages. We can do it with our beliefs, by choosing at the “salad bar” of religion. Or we can do it with our lifestyle, by making our own rules and not recognizing the proper authorities God has established.”
What Judges 21:25 said about Israel, “…every man did what was right in his own eyes,” spoke to the people in church then and speaks to us now. Their false teachers didn’t want to walk in the authority of the Word of God or according to the laws of society. They spoke “evil of dignities” which was the apostles and the church leadership. They didn’t want to be told what to do or how to think. Neither do the false teachers and prophets today walk according to the righteousness of God’s Word. And they lead many astray.
