Did God really say that? What we're actually dealing with in Jude is a virus. It is a virus that Jude says is now present in the church—those to whom he writes, these people whom he has already described who are perverting the grace of God, suggesting that the grace of God provides a license for them to do as they please, to believe what they want, and in a far more devastating way, to be the catalyst for encouraging others to imbibe this dreadful potion. And he's not writing about it, as we've seen, in a theoretical way. He's not suggesting that this is a possibility that may happen. If you have the text in front of you, you will see that he says in verse 4 that these certain people have crept in unnoticed.
They are actually there. Now, he's about to make the transition from this great word of warning, which has really begun in verse 5, and all the way through to 19. But before he gets to 20, to the encouraging side, the positive side of things, he takes a final glance, if you like, at these individuals. He wants the people to know about their character, and he wants to know about the devastating impact that it will have upon them if they succumb to the teaching of these people. And in the same way that it was a challenge to Jude to write as he wrote, so it is a challenge to me to preach what he wrote.
And what does he say? Well, first of all, he recognizes the real danger of forgetfulness. The Bible has a lot to say about remembering, about fastening our minds on things.
But you must remember, beloved. He begins in verse 17. He's already reminded them back in verse 5. He said to them there, I want to remind you, although he once fully knew it, I need to just keep telling you these things.
It's pastoral ministry. Peter, as the pastor, writes in 1 and 2 Peter along these lines. He says, I'm stirring you up by way of sincere reminder. I intend always to remind you, he says, even though you know these things, even though you're firmly established in the truth, so that in years to come, he says, you will remember this. So it's vital, you see, that the readers of Jude's Gospel—Jude's letter, which is all about the Gospel—and that includes us, because we are readers of Jude—it's vitally important that they and we understand the message of the Gospel, that we understand the nature of truth, because it is only in being made aware of the truth that we would be able to identify error. You don't learn how to deal with counterfeit money, apparently, by spending your time looking at lots and lots of counterfeit bills.
You learn how to identify the counterfeit by embedding in yourself a complete understanding of what the truth actually looks like. And so, the reason for Jude's concern about these people, to which he refers, is that those to whom he writes may not succumb to that error—that we are dealing here with the material that has been entrusted to the apostles. Remember, Jesus said, I'm going away, and the Holy Spirit will come, and he will lead you into all truth. And the truth of the Gospel embedded in the hearts and minds of the apostles is then inscripturated for us and given to us in the Scriptures. And when Peter refers to it, he says, if you want to know what has happened in the delivery of Scripture, it is this.
Men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. The Bible is not a collection of sort of religious documents all tagged together—having a strength in and of itself, a literary strength. You hear people saying, Well, I love the literature of the Bible. I don't know a thing about what it means, but I do love the literature of the Bible.
Well, that's at least a start. But whether we love the literature of the Bible or not, we know that God's Word is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path. And therefore, the warnings of Jude are vital for us. When Paul left the Ephesian elders, he warned them, From among your own selves will arise wolves, who will draw people away from you. They must have said to one another, I don't think that will ever happen here.
But it did happen. Peter says the same thing. The apostolic predictions must be remembered, says Jude.
What did they say in their predictions? Well, verse 18 tells us, They said to you, In the last time there will be scoffers. Now, people are asking at the moment, because of the chaos of our world, do you think this is the last time? Answer, Yes.
Why? Well, because the last time began with the incarnation of Jesus and will end with the return of Jesus. But if you're asking me, Do I think it is the last time of the last time of the last time? Well, I'm going to take a pass on that one, because apparently Jesus said nobody knows these things, and so it would be really alarming if I could answer it unequivocally for you. There is no doubt, though—and Jesus makes this clear, Matthew 24—that the forces of evil will be more visible and more audible in the prospect of his imminent return. And for that reason, and in light of that, it is of absolutely crucial importance that the people of God are standing firm on the truth of the Word of God. Because the battleground, actually, in every generation is the battle for the Bible. It's what begins in Genesis 3, when the serpent comes and clear instruction has been given by God to Adam and Eve.
You can enjoy all of this, but you can't touch that. And the evil one comes, and what is his opening gambit? Did God really say? And then he perverts it. He says, Did God really say that you're not allowed to eat of any of the trees?
Well, God never said that at all. The subtlety of it and the innuendo of it and the creepy dimension of it is to be found in the scoffers who will be arriving. Because, as we've seen in the letter, they're marked by certain things. They rely on dreams, they follow their own godly passions, and basically, they have an approach to the Christian life which says, My feelings trump the facts. In other words, it's my experience of things that allows me to adjudicate on what should happen or what shouldn't happen. My experience, my subjective response to truth, is the issue, not the objective reality of the truth itself.
So language, then, is made to mean different things. And you can see this in evident in churches, in mainline churches in the British and American world. Over a period of time, pastors in those churches decided that the best thing they could do if they were going to reach the world was to get rid of all the hard parts. If you get rid of all the hard parts, then the people will say, Well, that's nice, we got rid of all the naughty bits, and now I can come and have a great time.
Well, guess what? People then discovered there's nothing left when you take away the hard parts. It must be the hard parts that make sense of it. But think about it in contemporary terms with the manipulation of language that is represented in the culture and is embedded in the church. So notions… He takes, for example, a word like phobia, which means an irrational fear of something. That word has now been transmuted to be used as the response of anyone who makes a moral jurisdiction on anything at all. So if you make a moral response, say, Sorry, that is immoral, then it is a phobia. And phobia is, of course, then attached almost directly to bigotry. And so, before you know where you are, you're on the receiving end of the absolute deconstruction of language, and you have no basis upon which to make meaningful dialogue.
You end up with the chaos that we have. No, you see, if I could say one thing to you, it would be this, in relationship to this. The blessing that attends our faithful interest in the Bible is a blessing that is found nowhere else. You see, I'm a pastor, but I'm first of all a Christian. I need to read my Bible. I need to read my Bible. I need to read my Bible when I don't want to read my Bible. Why do I need to read my Bible? Well, because it is food for my soul.
Now, the challenge of it, in terms of this context, is a real challenge. Because the people who make these calculations tell me, tell us, that in an encounter such as this—as I speak to you now, those of you who have not already drifted into the second sphere of anesthesia, those of you who are still relatively compass mentis, those of you who, by lunchtime, have only retained thirty percent of what you have heard. Thirty percent. Less than a third. And by the time it gets to Saturday night, before you're ready to come back next Sunday, it will be down to five percent.
Five percent. So what do we know? Well, we know a number of things. That unless a congregation, unless individuals, become men and women of the book on their own, in their home, there is no way in the world that a twenty-five, thirty-three-minute address on a Sunday morning, unfollowed up by any activity in the rest of the day, will be able to sustain an army.
You can't march on an empty stomach. And so when people say, I think Begg is just being alarmist about this thing. Well, read your Bible. Read your Bible.
Now, verse 19. You gotta remember, the scoffers have said that their ungodly passions are the driving force for them, and he says, let me just tell you three things. It is they who cause division. First of all, it is those who cause divisions.
How do they cause divisions? Well, they cause divisions by perverting and distorting the truth. He says in verse 10 that they blaspheme the things they do not understand. In other words, these individuals are looking for a theology that will fit their ungodly desires. Their desires are not under the lordship of Jesus, they're not under the authority of God's truth, they are making their own plans, they're fulfilling their own passions, but they are not anti-religious. They're not anti-Bible. That's what makes it so scary. They are people who would be teaching Bible studies.
They would be coming to the church and saying, You know, I have a very nice Bible study that I could teach. It's on such and such. Be very careful. Be very careful.
Why? Well, look what he says. These are the people who cause divisions. They manipulate the Scriptures to support their instinctive behavior. Now, I think it's more than possible—in fact, I think it's probable—that these people, to whom he's referring, would be accusing those to whom he is writing, to the faithful, to the orthodox, that they would be accusing those folks of the very thing of which they're guilty. Does that make sense?
Yeah? So you've got these people about whom he writes, these people to whom he writes, right? And these people would be saying to these people, You orthodox people, you are the problem.
You are the cause of division. You people who make a fuss and a bother about contending for the faith once delivered to the saints. You people need to realize that society has moved on. It has moved on philosophically. It has moved on morally.
It has moved on in every which way. And so, if you want to be relevant, if you want to be accessible, if you want to be acceptable in a world with new views on everything, then you are gonna have to give up on this stuff about truth unchanged and unchanging. Is that you, Elijah, the troubler of Israel? You, troubler of Israel?
What does he say? I am not the troubler of Israel. You are the ones that are troubling Israel, because you have rejected the commands of God, and you follow the idols of your day.
That's what's happened. And that was what was happening in Jude's day. And loved ones, that is exactly what is happening in our day. The divisive person is the one, says Jude, who parts from the Word of Christ and not the one who holds to it. Then they are inevitably of the world. They're worldly people.
Well, we have to be careful. Jesus prayed for his followers that they would not be taken out of the world but that they would be kept from the evil one. James, when he writes, says that friendship with the world makes us an enemy of God. Paul writes to say, Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your minds. In other words, the true believer has been unearthed from the power source that was once his, where he was driven by his own agenda, his own personal longings, desires, foibles, whatever it must be. He lived in darkness, and Jesus came and transferred him into another kingdom so that he was light in the Lord. He was once dead, and he made him alive. He once was thinking only about himself and about how he could make sense of his life, and now he's become a person who has been made a new person from the inside out. And Jude is writing to them, and he's saying, These people are not those people. These people are working from, if you like, an inner spring. And that inner spring, that agenda, that driving force, is a godless agenda, where self and selfish desires actually reign.
It's such a sad place of life as well, isn't it? Worldly people, without God, without hope in the world, trying to make sense of our world, within the sphere of our own little world, finding our identity and our success materially, athletically, intellectually, saying, This is it. I've made it. I understand it. And yet, all the time, just becoming increasingly a crumbling relic. Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom or the strong man boast in his strength, or the rich man boast in his riches, but let he who boasts boast in this, that he knows me, the living and true God.
And how is it that God would come close to me because he comes close to me in Jesus and only in Jesus and only in the cross? These people had nothing—nothing—to say for this. And thirdly, and finally, they were devoid of the Spirit.
You can't live in defiance of the lordship of Christ and be filled with the Spirit. These people were just logically empty people. They were interpreting things in light of their dreams, which in their own minds allowed them to justify their behavior. And at the same time, even worse, to make their behavior the kind of pattern for other people that they would like to influence. And what Jude is doing is he's turning the tables on them.
He says, No, no, no. You're the ones that cause the division. You're the ones that are following your own animalistic instincts, and it's you. It's you that don't have the Spirit. What a prophetic word! This is essentially Bible logic. People would recoil from this. They'd say, How could he possibly say this?
After all… Well, he's just making obvious deductions. When the Bible is declared outmoded, the resurrection denied, the saving death of Jesus watered down, or the biblical guidelines on sex and marriage made amenable to people's greed, and all in the name of where the Spirit is leading us, we can be sure, writes Dick Lucas, that the Spirit is not leading us at all. Because the work of the Spirit of God is to magnify Christ and to drive home the authority and the sufficiency and the inerrancy of the living and abiding Word of God.
Now, what is Jude doing here? He's appealing to them. He's appealing them to contend for the faith.
The appeal has not been rescinded, and the need remains. Any reading of church history points to the fact that at certain points along the journey, there has always been the need for someone to stand up and say, Hey, wait a minute! In 1952, Martin Lloyd-Jones gave an address to the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. And he said in introducing his talk, For the last thirty years I would not have chosen such a course for myself.
A great deal of my time has been taken up with the task of maintaining and defending the evangelical faith. He had to make sure that the people under his tutelage understood the truth of the gospel. Five years previously, in 1947, he had been here speaking at Wheaton College, giving an address entitled Truth, Unchanged, Unchanging. And he says to the students, The modern world is desperately ill.
This is 1947. The modern world is desperately ill. People are now perhaps more unhappy than they have ever been. Young people, he said, there is only one cure for the world's sickness. Only one thing that can give to a man or a woman rest and peace. That is to know that Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God, has forgiven me. Has forgiven me. Not has made forgiveness possible but has forgiven me. That he came to die for my sins. That he has clothed me in the righteousness of Jesus and has promised to present me faultless before the presence of his glory on that great day. That is essentially the gospel.
That is not something that is achieved by us. It is something that is received from him. And receiving God's promises is not simply credence.
There are many of you here, I am absolutely convinced, are very, very clear about the fact that you believe what Jesus said about himself. That's credence. You believe the promises. But to be converted is more than credence. It is to be committed to the one who has made the promises.
And that is the fundamental question. Do you believe? Do you believe?
You, you, you! Not, do you believe there's a forgiveness? Jesus said, This is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.
So do you look on the Son? What is your only hope in life and death? That's what we sang earlier on. Were you saying in the truth of your own personal faith? Or is it just credence? That is Alistair Begg with an essential question for each of us to consider.
Are we resting in Christ alone? You're listening to Truth for Life. As we learned today, the evil one is crafty in his efforts to make us doubt biblical truth. That's why our mission at Truth for Life is to teach the Bible every day. We believe God speaks through his word to transform us, enabling us to resist the devil's schemes and reminding us that our security lies in God's providence and in his promises.
And we want you to be able to instill this kind of confidence in young children as well. To that end, Alistair has written a book titled C is for Christian, an A to Z treasury of who we are in Christ. This is a book written for kids age 5 and up to help them explore 26 words that describe the joy and blessings of being a Christian. Ask for your copy when you donate today to support the Bible teaching ministry of Truth for Life. You can give a gift through the mobile app or online at truthforlife.org slash donate. Thanks for joining us today. Jude urged his readers to contend for the faith. What should that look like today? We'll find out tomorrow. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.
