Don’t Forget This! (Part 2 of 2)

In the Little Epistle of Jude we are warned that no one escapes God's judgment, not even the angels. Today on Truth for Life, we'll hear an important warning and a word of encouragement as Alistair Begg teaches from Jude verses 5 through 7. Being part of the visible people of God is no guarantee of eternal security, unless it is combined with a living, personal faith in the Lord Jesus.

Now, that's nothing other than Calvin says in his Institutes. He says, All that Christ has done for us is of no value to us, so long as we remain outside of Christ, so long as we remain in our unbelief. We look back to the great deliverance of the cross. We look forward to the day when we stand before him. It is the very continuance that bears testimony to the reality of the work of Christ, a saving reality, in our lives. That's why Jude is about to go on and say, Keep yourself.

Keep yourself in the love of God. These people were in the crowd. They had come out. But they were not, actually. They were circumcised people, Jews, but they weren't circumcised in their hearts. Their hearts were full of unbelief. They were rebels. They rebelled against God's rule. They doubted God's promises.

They were reluctant to believe his promises. And so God determines that that should be their end. The way in which we continue and keep ourselves in the love of God in short order is that we heed the warnings and we trust the promises. And you must allow the warnings to be warnings. Every time you come across a warning, don't say, Well, that couldn't possibly be me.

Of course it could. The warnings are there, and the promises are there. And when we neglect them, then we neglect the means that God has appointed in order to keep us all the way to the end of the journey. So we are not like those who perished in the wilderness. People want to comment on whether they were lost eternally or whether they only died physically.

Whichever way, it doesn't really matter in one sense, because Jude is applying it to the reality that is confronting them in the present time—namely, not all those who say to me, Lord, Lord, Lord, did we not cast out demons in your name? Did we not do this? Did I not preach all those sermons? Did I not do all this? I would say to them, Depart from me.

I never even knew you. Sober, isn't it? Well, that's the first one.

Gets worse from there. Now we go to the angels who didn't stay in their place, the angels who jumped out of their angelic box, as it were. Verse 5, and the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority but left their proper dwelling, the proper dwelling, the place of God's appointing, came out of their place, came out of the plan of God for them.

He's kept them now in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day. You see what he's saying here? He's saying, Listen, all of this is in light of that.

I appeal to you, he says, that you will not allow this kind of thing to take a hold within your congregation. Certain people have crept in unnoticed—flattering people, attractive people, undermining people, surreptitious people. And if the angels ended in this way, don't you think you ought to pay attention? That's what he's saying. And it seems absolutely clear, then, that what he's referring to here is what took place in Genesis and chapter 6.

And you may want just to turn there, in case you're unfamiliar with it. When man began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God—what happened? And the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive, and they took as their wives any that chose. Then the LORD said, My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for his flesh his days shall be a hundred and twenty years. And the Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man, and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown. So you have this cross breeding, and you have these giants that are created, and these giants begin to exercise their influence, leading to what God does in the flood.

So, they left their proper place, their assigned spot. They crossed the divinely appointed boundaries to engage in sexual immorality. Remember, he says, the people that are in your thing now, they will take the grace of God, and they will corrupt it and make it a mechanism for all kinds of sexual deviance. He says, Remember of what happened to the people who were left in the wilderness, and remember of what happened to the sons of God, to the angels, who used their privileged position as a springboard for perverse activity.

Surely that was what was happening. Think about this. Think about the dreadful stuff that happens in local churches where men—usually men—in God-given positions of authority use their position of authority by a means of manipulation to engage in that which runs entirely contrary to everything God has ordained. We don't have to look far for these illustrations. And what you're dealing with here is something that really stretches our minds—preacher, natural, angelic beings, those who exist beyond the ordinary course of nature, these sons of God who derive their existence from God, and yet they are given a rank and they're given a place that is actually superhuman. It'd be very easy to get lost in this, but you know this, don't you? When angels appear on earth, they almost inevitably appear in human form, and they're almost exclusively male. Think, for example, later on in Genesis when Abraham entertains the three angels.

They're not all flapping around like this. He gives them the meal, they have the meal, they're eating their thing. You say, Well, I don't know how that works. Welcome to the club!

I don't know how it works, either. Remember Hamlet, he says, There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. And there are.

Now, I have to be honest and tell you that one of my great heroes, John Murray, that I quote with frequency, exegetes Genesis 6, saying that these sons of God are actually the sons of Seth and that they are not angelic beings. I shouldn't really have told you that, but I did. And I love John Murray, but I don't think that's right. And so I decided to go with two other men that I love.

One is Derek Kidner, who's gone, and the other is Alec Matea, who's also gone. And what they say is that what we have here, quotes, is an eruption of angelic beings copulating with human females in such a way that it is the, if you like, the ultimate expression now of human sin. It is a cosmic expression of how disrupted the universe is as a result of the fall of man in Genesis 3.

That not only do you have the destruction of the family, brother killing brother and so on, but by the time you've got to Genesis chapter 6, you have a climax, if you like, to the decline that begins in Genesis 3. And as bizarre as this actually may sound to us, we have to constantly—I have to constantly guard against a kind of rationalistic worldview that says it's not possible for these things to happen. Oh, yeah, they happened.

And you will notice what happened to them. The angels didn't keep their assigned place, and now they in turn have been kept—notice that little pun almost there? They have… He has now kept them in eternal chains under gloomy darkness.

I don't think we have to literalize that. I don't think we have to think of angels somehow or another in a cave or in a dungeon somewhere. I think it's perfectly okay to think of them living in spiritual darkness, unable to escape from the sentence of divine judgment. They cannot escape. This, of course, raises all kinds of questions, doesn't it, about spiritual wickedness in the heavenly places, about the nature of not only angelic visitation but demonic realities?

But that's not for this morning. His point, again, is straightforward, isn't it? Judgment is inescapable, and God's patience is not unlimited. God's Spirit will not always strive.

So, he says, these certain ungodly people won't ultimately get away with it. And then he says, and let me remind you too, that verse 7, just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise, in the same way, which helps us to understand verse 6, what was going on there, likewise indulged in sexual immorality, pursued unnatural desire, they serve as an example—we might say they serve as a classic example—by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire. Now, again, if you want to be students of the Bible, you're going to have to do your own homework on this. And you can read sometime in the week that follows, Genesis and chapter 19, where we have the story of the rescue of Lot and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

The destruction of a city that was a beautiful city, set in a beautiful place. Genesis 13 tells us that it was well watered everywhere. It was like the garden of the Lord. You remember Lot said, That looks like a beautiful place. I think that's where I would like to go.

I'd like to go and dwell in the cities of the plain." And that is where he went. His uncle Abraham goes off into the other territory. And it is in that context that this event takes place. Genesis 13 tells us that the men of Sodom were wicked, great sinners against the Lord. The fact that you have that statement there is in order to help us understand that, while we understand that everybody is sinful, he's saying that there was a peculiar sense of rebellion against God and endemic wickedness in the hearts of these people. Well, we learn that in chapter 13. In chapter 19, we then see it in evidence.

And we can't work our way all the way through it. But these two angels came to Sodom in the evening where Lot was sitting in the gate, we're told. And when Lot saw them, he rose to meet them and bowed himself with his face to the earth. "'My lords, please turn aside to your servant's house and spend the night and wash your feet. Let me show you hospitality. Do come in.' Oh no,' they said, we'd like to spend the night in the square."

Back to chapter 13. The men of Sodom were peculiarly wicked. Lot knows that. Lot says to them, No, no, trust me, you don't want to do that. You do not want to stay out in the square, not during the night.

You come into my house so that I may care for you. If you want to just look at verse 9. Before they'd gone to bed, all the men from every part of the city, both young and old, surrounded the house. Where are the men, the angels? Where are the men? Bring them out so that we can have sex with them. In the King James, so that we might know them.

The people who have grown shaky on addressing the issues of sexuality in the Bible that are taken care of in a very straightforward way have succumbed, I think, more to the cultural pressure than they have to dutiful observance of the unfolding of the Scriptures. And so they say that when he said, We want to know them, they just want to come out and have time with them and shake their hand and have a coffee and so on. They said, Give me a break. Hang on a minute. Don't let's just be silly, shall we? The answer to that is very clear.

That's not what it is, because you didn't have Lot's response, which is a staggering response. No, I can't send them out to you, but I've got daughters. I can send my daughters out. We'd like to know them, these men.

Well, no, you could know them. The men, you see, of the city have got a plan in mind, and that is just homosexual gang rape. That's what it is. So you read on in the story, And the LORD rained, rained down on Sodom and Gomorrah, sulfur and fire. The area had bitumen pits and so on. It was a perfect place for the thing to be dissolved in that way. And you're left looking at a city, the well-watered city, the beautiful place, the place that Lot thought would be a fabulous setting for him.

It's now a smoldering ruin. And if you look carefully in your imagination, you can see Lot's wife captured in a single frame, a reminder of the fate of those who, in terms of Hebrews 10.38, shrink back and are destroyed. The writer of Hebrews does this again and again. We are not those who shrink back and are destroyed, but we are those who continue and are saved. But those who shrink back will be destroyed. And perhaps, you see, there were some in the congregation to whom Jude is writing—don't let's forget, moving all around the Bible like this—that Jude is writing to people who have come in amongst them and who perhaps are saying, you know, we're free to do just about anything you want.

No, we don't have to live within the confines that God has ordained. And it may well be that the perverting of God's grace is so close to this incident that it would have sent shockwaves through the congregation. It should send shockwaves through the congregation. And what Jude is doing in this is he is simply saying to his readers, these things were a foretaste of a day that is yet to come. And when we are brave enough to bow down to this, we will immediately hear the voices of people saying, I don't know why you would pay attention to that Old Testament stuff.

We've never really liked that. We would be far better just paying attention to Jesus. And, of course, if you want to listen to Jesus, listen to him. Woe to the world for temptations to sin! For it is necessary that temptations come, but woe to the one by whom the temptation comes. And if your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life crippled or lame than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into the hell of fire. It brings us again, doesn't it, to Romans 1 and what we looked at?

And the fact that this moral license—or immoral license, better—that is prepared to endorse, to cultivate, to encourage the kind of dreadful rebellion against God's beautiful plan and purpose, in the giving of the world, in the creation of marriage, in the establishing of the boundaries. And yet, within short order, we're liars. We're cheats.

We're engaging in homosexual activity. We're not obeying the Word of God. Unless, in responding to the grace of God, we become part of the company to which Paul refers when he says, And such were some of you. But you've been washed, you've been cleansed, because Jesus is a friend of sinners. We don't have time, but if you think about it, when Jesus says, Woe to you, Capernaum!

Capernaum! If the things that had been done in you had been done in Sodom and Gomorrah, they would have stayed the course. Woe to you with all of your Bibles and all of your conferences and all of your assurances.

All of these benefits. These are staggering words, aren't they? I quoted Manton last week, and I'll end with Manton this week. He says, The angels had the blessings of heaven, the Israelites of the church, Sodom of the world, but the angels on their apostasy lost heaven. The murmuring Israelites were shut out of Canaan, and the Sodomites were, together with their fruitful land, destroyed. Now, what is a word to us this morning? Well, it's a word of warning for sure, but it ought to be at the same time a word of encouragement. We're going to get to the point where he does say, Keep yourselves in the love of God. It's the same thing that Paul says to Timothy when he writes to Timothy, and he says to him, Timothy, evil men and impostors will go on from bad to worse. But as for you, continue in what you have believed and have become convinced of. Knowing those from whom you learned it and how from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. How do you keep yourself in the love of God? Heed the warnings and trust the promises.

Or, if you like, trust and obey. You're listening to Truth for Life with Alistair Begg. Alistair returns shortly to close today's program. It is a privilege for us to open God's Word with you each day on Truth for Life, and we're thankful to our Truth Partners, listeners like you who give each month so that we can hear Alistair on this daily program.

Truth for Life is 100% funded by your donations, so whether you're listening today through radio or a podcast or on our website or our mobile app or anywhere else, this program is made possible by Truth Partners. And today would be a great day for you to join this vital team because we will say thank you when you join by inviting you to request a brand new book written by Alistair for children. It's titled, C is for Christian, an A to Z treasury of who we are in Christ. This is Alistair's first children's book. In fact, he teaches through the alphabet to explain words that describe what it's like to be a Christian and how amazing it is to be part of God's family. Children ages 5 and up will learn how to praise God, how to thank him, how to worship Jesus as they discover the many blessings that come from being his friend. You can request your copy of the book, C is for Christian, when you sign up to become a Truth Partner at truthforlife.org slash truthpartner or call us at 888-588-7884.

And you can also request the book with a one-time donation at truthforlife.org slash donate. Now here is Alistair to close with prayer. Father, how we bow down before you, we come as beggars to the food of your Word, we come as though scratching the surface of the immensity of what you have left to us in the Bible, and we pray that you will help us to get the big story here—the warning that sounds out, the appeal that is made to contend for the faith, the reminder that the ground of our salvation is in the work of Christ. And the evidence that we are in Christ is that we continue to heed the warnings, continue to trust the promises, the very means that you have chosen to use in order to bring us safely to glory. So accomplish your purposes in us and through us, we pray. For Jesus' sake, amen. Amen.

I'm Bob Lapine. Wouldn't it be helpful if false teachers had neon signs attached that identify them as deceivers? But too often they blend right in with the congregation or with good teachers. Tomorrow we'll learn how we can recognize them. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.