On game shows, when there's an incorrect answer, there's often a loud buzzer or a big red X. Wouldn't it be helpful if the same thing happened when false teachers pop up? Too often, however, the deception from false teachers is subtle.
Sometimes it seems attractive. Today on Truth for Life, we'll learn how we can recognize false teachers and their lies. Alistair Begg is teaching from Jude verses 8 through 10. You should remember that when Jesus in the Passion Week, while they were eating, said to his disciples, Truly I say to you, one of you will betray me. And they were very sorrowful, and began to say to him one after another, Is it I, Lord?
Surely I'm not the one. Now, when we turn to the Bible, we come to the Bible as sinners. Some of us saved sinners, others of us in search of salvation or perhaps running from it. But we come to the Bible conscious of our own weakness. We come to the Bible aware of our own folly.
We come to a study of a passage like this prepared, I hope, to recognize how easily tempted we are to sidestep from the path of obedience—especially if the path of obedience is unappealing to us, especially if the path of obedience reorientates our priorities and directs our lives in a way that we don't want to go. We must make sure that we beware of the response of the Pharisee who, when he stood to make his prayers in a very public arena, was prepared to say, God, I thank you that I am not like other people. So who are these people? Because he addresses them in that way, doesn't he? He says, certain people and these people. Well, we need to know that they're church people. They're in the church, you see.
They're influential people, they're ungodly people, they're fearless people, and they're unashamed people. And it is because of the fact that they have managed to ingratiate themselves in this context that Jude writes out of a serious concern for the welfare of the congregation. And that's why he begins by telling us, This is what you have to do. In the opening verses, you must contend for the faith. By the time we get down to 17 and following, he's explaining why this needs to be done. He'll remind them of the predictions of the apostles who said, In the last days there will be scoffers following their own ungodly passions, seeking to do whatever they want themselves. So what you need to do is contend. Why you need to do it is because of the gravity of the situation. And how you're going to do it, we will get to, finally, in verse 20 and following.
Very, very clear. And last time, in verses 5, 6, and 7, he gave us three examples from the past. But then you get to verse 8. And he says, Yet nevertheless, despite all of this, these people… And then he goes on to describe what happens. Instead of the people that he is warning his congregation about, learning from the example, facing up to the reality of God's justice and God's judgment, they actually decide to follow the pattern of the people who found themselves under the wrath of God. They pay attention to only that which pleases them. They lead immoral lives. And all of this, Jude is pointing out, is happening right under your noses. That's the point that he's making. He's writing to the congregation, and he's saying, You need to realize something that has happened here.
This is not a potential situation. This is a real situation. They're filthy dreamers, they defile the flesh, they despise authority, and they speak evil of dignities. So you have this picture, don't you? Filthy fantasies showing utter contempt for authority, refusing to learn from history, choosing instead to rewrite it according to their dreams. When you come across people like this, you will be able to detect them.
The language is all the same. Any time I encounter them, and you say, Well, do you know their names? No, this is these people, this certain kind of people, these people who are marked by these characteristics. This is the kind of thing they'll be telling you. And if you're not alert, you may be swept up by them.
Well, we don't really pay much attention to the Bible. We have visions. We have dreams.
We go direct. We have fresh revelation. Or, Here's a new twist. Or, Here is what this really means. Here is what this really means.
You've come across that, haven't you? I know you have your Bible, and I know you know a bit about it, but if you come to my study, I can tell you what it really means. Now, Paul was dealing with the same thing. That's why he says to Timothy, in his final letter, he says, You better be aware of the fact that you will run up against this. These people have an appearance of godliness, quoting 2 Timothy 3.5. They deny its power, they creep into households, they capture weak women burdened with sins and led astray by various passions. They prey on the vulnerable, with a concoction of unspiritual nonsense aligned with immorality.
Now, the thing to notice—or a thing to notice—is that this is not new. Six centuries before Jesus comes, God is warning his people about the prophets who have arisen from within them, who are drawing people away after them, and you read there all these centuries before, and it's the same story. We have dreams, we have answers, and if you follow us, you will have a really, really, really good life.
Who are these people? I earnestly urge you, he says, to contend for the faith. Now, we've noticed that Jude is very fond of these triplets, his threes, and here in verse 8 you will notice—and we needn't go back through it again, really—but there are three basic charges against these individuals. I wrote down three words in my notes—pollute, reject, slander. Yet in like manner these people also, relying on their dreams, defile the flesh, or they pollute it. Just like verse 7, what was going on in Sodom and Gomorrah—right?—a complete loosening of the boundaries of the framework of sexual morality, a complete overturning of that which God has given for the abiding perfection and well-being of humanity itself. These individuals do that, he says.
They were doing it then, and here you will notice they are polluting things now. Secondly, they reject authority. They reject authority, as in verse 6, where you had the angelic rebellion.
The angels overstepped their boundaries. They did not want to submit to the authority of Almighty God and the place in which he had set them. And in the same way, says Jude, you will notice that these people—go back up to verse 4—they deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ. And again, you will find these people alive and well. They say things like this, God is still speaking.
Well, of course he's still speaking. But what they actually mean by that is that he's contradicting himself, that he's now saying new things that the Bible that he has given to us, secured through all this time—the authoritative Word of God—is now being overturned, reinterpreting the Bible to fit the culture instead of abiding by the authority of God's Word, that it is a timeless Word. Loved ones, listen carefully. I'm listening carefully to this warning, to this exhortation. Contend for this faith.
In surprising circles, there is a real unsettling of the roots in relationship to many of these things. Despite the warnings of God's Word, certain people continued in this way, polluting, rejecting, and slandering the glorious ones. Blaspheming the glorious ones.
They slander the angels. And I am assuming—and you can do with this as you choose—I'm assuming that the reason he mentions this is in relationship to the role that was assigned the angels in the giving of the law. Because after all, the one thing that these people, these certain people, are doing is detaching themselves from the law of God. Therefore, if the angels stand at the forefront of obedience, as it were, then they'd want nothing to do with it. And this, of course, ties in with what was given to us in verse 5, where the people that had been led out of Egypt wandered and died in the wilderness because they rejected the terms of obedience given them in the covenant. God said, Do this and you will live.
If you don't, you won't. And his law made it perfectly clear—a law which, as we saw or tried to see last Sunday night, as Paul says in Romans 7, is holy and a commandment that is holy, righteous, and good. Well, there you have it.
Pollution, rejection, and slander. And then to verse 9, where we have another little triplet. We have Michael, we have the devil, and we have Moses. We should just read it again and pray under our breath for understanding. 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 he said, The LORD rebuke you. Now, notice verse 10, because it's key.
But these people… You see? So he's pointing a big contrast here. If the archangel Michael didn't presume to overstep the bounds of authority, what in the world do these people think they're on about? Now, Jude has written in a way that would be immediately accessible to the initial readers of the letter. And in this respect, the initial readers had an advantage that we don't have. And the advantage is that when he makes mention of this kind of thing, they would be familiar with certain Jewish history that was part and parcel of their lives. And what he's actually doing here is he's quoting from Jewish material from a particular story about the assumption of Moses, which ran, if you like, alongside the unfolding of the canon of Scripture.
And so he's able to refer to it in the way in which people could say, Oh yeah, I get what he means. But according to the Jewish tradition, the devil argued with Michael over Moses. Despite the position that Michael had, he did not make a pronouncement, says Jude, on his own authority. But he said, The LORD rebuke you. Now, again, the book is parallel to the Scriptures. It's called The Assumption of Moses. You can read about The Assumption of Moses in Deuteronomy 34. Nobody knows to this day where Moses was buried. There's a real kinda mysterious little bit to the departure of Moses when you read at the end of Deuteronomy. And, of course, it's not surprising that people—these kind of people with minds different from mine, but good minds, nonetheless—they want to go in and try and fill in the background for us.
And so that's where much of this stuff comes from. The argument, presumably, was about Moses being allowed into heaven. And the devil is saying, Moses should not be allowed into heaven. Presumably, because, he would claim, Moses murdered that Egyptian guy.
And therefore, I don't think he should be allowed into heaven. Michael refuses to side with the devil, and he defers to Almighty God as the lawgiver and the judge. Because he recognizes that not even the archangel Michael can declare Moses innocent. Not even Michael can defer the accusations or remove the accusations of the law.
He simply didn't dare to. Because he recognizes that only the sovereign, almighty, gracious God can do that. And he is the God of mercy and of judgment. Only God can pronounce the judgment, and only God can provide the cleansing.
That's the point. That's why verse 9 is in here. If the archangel Michael could not speak on the basis of his own authority, on what possible authority could these people speak—these certain people who reject and deny the Lord and Master Jesus? To verse 10. But these people, but these people, they slander or they blaspheme all that they do not understand.
They sneer at anything they can't understand. And by doing what they just feel like doing, they find themselves living by animal instinct. They participate in their own destruction. And remember, the underlying issue is these people pervert the grace of God into sensuality. Surely, for more reasons than I or we recognize, we are studying Jude right now, this day, at this period in Western culture in the United States of America.
If ever there was an expression of the reality of what happens to a society, to a life, to a family, to an individual that turns its back on the truth of the living God, it is here written in the pages of Scripture. This is what they do. And they weren't out there. They were in. They were part and parcel of it. They were speaking at conferences.
They were writing songs for people to sing. They were engaged in all of this. The problem as they saw it was the law and a call to obedience was something had to be set aside.
They would say such notions would be defined simply in terms of legalism. Don't go there. Don't listen to that. Find the freedom. Find the true freedom by indulging whatever your desires and instincts are.
The fact that they may run contrary to the Scriptures, don't let that be a bother to you at all. We have had dreams about this. We know about this.
We can fix this for you as quickly as ever. So the result of rejecting God's perfect plan leaves them in the realm of irrationality. Isn't that it? But these people blaspheme all they do not understand. They're destroyed by the things that they, like unreasoning animals, understand instinctively. It's not uncommon that people say, Where did common sense go? Where did basic biology go? Where did objective truth go?
Where did this all go? Well, there you have it. Behind the legitimization of sexual immorality in every case lies a flat-out rejection of God's authority. Whether it is you as a young person deciding that sex is whenever you want it with whoever you want it, and God says, No, it absolutely is not. And you say, Well, I don't like that.
Don't worry, you'll be able to find somebody within the context of the framework of Christendom that will tell you, It's not a problem. I have a far better answer for you. And that is to face up to our rebellion, to face up to our disinterest, to acknowledge that we are dressed in rags. We're a walk in shambles by our own endeavors. We find ourselves too quickly in the second half of Romans chapter 1. We never planned to get there, but we thought we were so wise and we became foolish. We exchanged the truth of God for a lie. We began to worship created things rather than the Creator himself.
We listened to nonsense and so on. Oh, you say, Well, then, am I finished? No, you're not finished. You're at the very point of departure.
Because the same God who pronounces judgment on that, which violates his profound plans for us as revealed in his Word, is the same God who says, Come here, and let me take those rags off you, and I will give you clothes. I will give you clothes such as you have never known. I will give you freedom. I will give you peace. I will give you contentment.
I will give you all that I plan to give you. Do not believe the lie. And for those of us who are in the church, stay awake.
Stay awake. Don't let's live in sleepy hollow. No, no.
The urgency of Jude's letter is on account of the gravity of the congregation's problem, and it is in light of the reality of the judgment of God. Oh, there won't be one. Oh, yes, there will, because we know there will. Our conscience tells us that they will.
So we say, Well, I should just go get myself another outfit somewhere, get rid of these rags, or do a combination, a little bit of rag, a little bit of something. No, he'll never satisfy. He'll never work. God knows this. God's way is best.
Some of you are boys and girls. You're listening to me even now, and you're saying, I'm not sure I get all of this. Get this. God's way is best. Keep your story simple.
Obey your mom and dad. Stop your nonsense. Trust Jesus.
Trust him. You're listening to Alistair Begg on Truth for Life. We trust that you have benefited from listening to Alistair's teaching today, and we also want to make available to you a book from Alistair, a brand new book written for children titled, C is for Christian, an A to Z treasury of who we are in Christ. This is a fun and colorfully illustrated hardcover book in which Alistair shares with children ages five and up the joys of experiencing God's love and care. He teaches what it means to follow Jesus by presenting 26 words that explain what it means to be a member of God's family. Ask for your copy of the book, C is for Christian, today when you donate to support the ministry of Truth for Life.
You can give online at truthforlife.org slash donate, or if you'd prefer, you can call us at 888-588-7884. As you read the book, C is for Christian, with your younger children or your grandchildren, you'll be teaching them what it's like to be a member of God's kingdom, and you as well can learn more about what Jesus has revealed about his kingdom as you read Alistair's book, The Christian Manifesto, and today that book is available to you as a free download. The e-book is available online. The Christian Manifesto unpacks the extraordinary instruction Jesus gave in his well-known sermon on the plane. You'll learn how the Lord's countercultural teaching is the path to great blessing. You can download the free e-book, The Christian Manifesto, it comes with a corresponding study guide. Request your copy at truthforlife.org slash manifesto. Thanks for listening today. Tomorrow we'll learn from three examples of how false teachers can destroy a church. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life where the Learning is for Living.
