When Jude wrote his letter, the early church was confused about what to believe. And the same can be said for believers in our day.
How do we find clarity? We're going to hear the answers today on Truth for Life as Alistair Begg examines the way Jude closed his letter. We're looking today at verse 25. What Jude is doing at the end of this letter, which has covered all kinds of circumstances as we know, what he is doing, he's ending his letter by turning the gaze of his readers to the living God, turning them to God, the God with which his letter began. Verse 1, they are the ones who have been called and loved and are being kept by God. And so he ends his letter by confronting them with the greatness of God—his glory, his majesty, his dominion, his authority, and so on.
Very well. But you might say to yourself, Well, that's very interesting. I'm sure it must have been the kind of thing that people in Jude's day probably would benefit from. You might even find yourself saying, But here we are. And our lives are far more complex. Perhaps you're saying to yourself, I don't see how a consideration of God enables me to tackle the issues of life or to fix my problems. Why would you ever take time on this, Jude or Alistair, when, after all, think about all the issues of our lives that need to be addressed? We've prayed for those who are in hospital. We are concerned for our loved ones.
We think about the nations of the world, the concerns of our own nation, and so on. And someone might justifiably say, Surely, those are the issues that need to be addressed. You might even be as bold as to suggest that such a focus is unpractical, if not actually irrelevant. And so it is that I take up that challenge.
It might be an imagined challenge, I don't know. But I am purposefully delaying in concluding in order that I might address with us this very issue. I want to say to you that such a notion could never be further from the truth. Here we are, stumbling our way towards the halfway mark of the twenty-first century, discovering that our world becomes a strange, sad, painful, and disappointing place without God. When God is silent, our world is messed. So I want to say to us this morning, first to myself, you understand, when I studied the Bible, it was first to me. I get the immense privilege of doing this. So I've been thinking about this all week, and I've been saying to myself, Alistair, knowing God—knowing God—is absolutely, crucially important to you in the living of your life. It always has been, it is, and it always will be.
That's what I've been saying to myself. So then, having said it to myself, I thought, Well, then I'll come, and I'll say the same thing to you. You see, part of the problem with it lies in the fact that we're actually tempted to conceive of God in a way that suits us, that an individual is often found saying things like, Well, I'm sure that God is just like a bigger version of me.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Part of our reading today, wasn't it, in Mary McShane? Part of the reading was Acts 17, as it turns out, so I was reading it early in the morning.
And I was struck by the fact that when Paul is left in Athens, and he moves around, and he sees what's going on, and he's eventually invited to give a talk, where does he begin? God. God.
That's what he says. You've got all kinds of ideas here about deity, all kinds of idols. You've even got one to the unknown God, so he says, Let me start there. The God, who made the world and everything in it. That's the starting point. In other words, what he's saying to the people there is, You think you can encapsulate God.
You think you can sort of solidify him in a little place. God is so completely above us, the only God our Savior. You the only God.
How does that ring for you here in the twenty-first century? The only God. He's referred to him as the only Master and Lord Jesus Christ, back in verse 4.
That's the story of the Bible. The psalmist's words, There is none like you among the gods, O LORD, for are there any works like yours? For you are great and do wondrous things. You alone are God. Psalm 86 verse 10. Deuteronomy 6, which we often recite when we are sharing together in a baby dedication, as we will in the second hour. Here, O Israel, the LORD your God, the LORD is one.
And it's a declaration. Yahweh—Yahweh—is God. Our God is Yahweh. Now, despite the fact that the Jewish people recited that and recite that, if they're orthodox, on a daily basis, as the story of the Bible unfolds, we discover that the prophets have to say to the people who daily say, The LORD our God, the LORD is one, had succumbed to the notion of engaging with substitute gods. They had looked around on the nations, and the nations had shrines, and they had poles, and they had ideas, and they had drama, and they had all kinds of things going on.
And so there's a real challenge to the people. We declare that God is the only God. And yet Isaiah has to come in the Word of God and say to them, Why are you turning to all the gods of the nations? That's why we read Isaiah 44. And in that chapter, he simply shows the futility of doing so. What they were doing was they were imagining that it is possible to make from things that are less than human something which is more than human in the hope of finding in it the power that they need to navigate their lives. That's an amazing futility, isn't it?
That we're gonna make, look inside yourself and come up with an idea, fashion it. They can carry it around with you if you want. Set it up and set it down. Kneel at it if you choose.
This is a measure of insanity, isn't it? What does it mean? Well, it means simply this. Because you see, idolatry is actually the essence of sin. The essence of God's amazing grace towards us is that he puts himself in our place in order that he might do for us what we can do for ourselves. And the essence of sin is that we seek to put ourselves in his place so that we're gonna do and make the decisions as we please—setting out to satisfy myself, believing that in myself I have the power to be satisfied. Now, all of this because we're stuck on one phrase, To the only God our Savior. To the only God our Savior.
In a book entitled Culture and the Death of God, Terry Eagleton, who's a literary critic, lists several idols of the modern age. Enlightenment rationalists, he said, made a god out of reason. That's the Enlightenment. We have grown up. We have grown beyond God. We have discovered that we know more than anybody else ever knew before us. And since we have lived later than the people who live before us, later must be better, therefore we must be brighter, therefore we must know. That was the Enlightenment. We are living in the post-Enlightenment.
How did it do? Make your own deduction. The Romantics deified imagination. If we can conceive of it, if we can imagine it, nationalists then and now exalt the nation, worshipping the nation. Marxists offered an extensive analysis of sin and salvation, seeing it in political and in financial terms.
And in all of that, what you discover as you review things is this. When God is rejected, something else or someone else has to be concocted to replace him. You see, the rise of what we call the new atheists that has actually begun to fade a little as people realized the emptiness of it all.
The rise of the atheists is no threat to Western culture. We're not atheistic. We're polytheistic. We're polytheistic. When the people come and ask the question at the end of a survey that says, Do you believe in God? Now, what they should be asking is, Which God do you believe in? Do you believe in a God of your own fashioning?
Do you believe in the God of yourself? The fact of the matter is that the environment in which we live is an environment in which the truth about the God of the Bible is disappearing fast. Disappearing fast. Emerging in other parts of our world—in the southern hemisphere, in sub-Saharan Africa, in various places—where lives of people, families of people, congregations, are turning to the living God and finding him the answer to all their animism and to all their idolatry and to all the stuff that had bedeviled their lives all the way through. And now they turn, and they look back across to where we live our lives, and they say, How in the world can it be that this people, a post-Reformation people, a people whose foundations were built at least in deism, if not in sufficient theism, how is it that they can be now buying this stuff from us and wearing it around their necks and sticking it in the stores?
Why are they doing this? The answer is clear. Because they have dethroned God. God is dethroned. They no longer believe he is the only God. They no longer believe that he is the only Savior.
No, they have succumbed to it all. Or, if God is still around, for them he's not much of a God. David Wells, whom I admire so greatly, has done this masterfully in pointing it out in all of the work that he has written in the past.
And here's just one quote from him. It is one of the defining marks of our time that God is now weightless—weightless. Not that he is ethereal, but that he is weightless.
He has become unimportant. He rests upon the world so inconsequentially as to not be noticeable. Those who assure the posters of their belief in God's existence—listen to this—may nevertheless consider him less interesting than television, his commands less authoritative than their appetites for affluence and influence, his judgments no more awe-inspiring than the evening news, his truth less compelling than the advertisers' sweet fog of flattery and lies. This, he says, is weightlessness.
Weightlessness. Now we began this morning with a call to worship, which suggests that our grasp of things by God's goodness enables us to understand why it is that the psalmist exhorts us as he does. Come, let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord our Maker. We come as creatures to worship the Creator. We come as subjects to give honor to the King. We come as sinners in need of a Savior.
That's how we come. That's why we want to tell the children the story of Jesus. Because we need the story of Jesus. It's the story of God's love for sinners and of his sending his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to earth to redeem the lost. The story of Jesus is the story of good news for all mankind, because he is the only Master and Lord Jesus Christ. Listen. Either he is or he isn't. We're either involved in dealing with objective, historical, verifiable data and truth or we're involved in the greatest theological contract the world has ever seen in its entire existence.
There is no middle ground—no middle ground, no matter how we might try and create it. We need to be able to remind ourselves we were made in God's image to love him and to enjoy him. We were made capable of receiving communication from him and of enjoying communion with him. However, we have forfeited by our sin any right to know his favor.
Why? Because we doubt his goodness, we reject his wisdom, we rebel against his authority. And God in his love, seeing us in our inability to know and love him, to understand him and to serve him, God in his love decides to take the initiative and comes in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ to redeem us and to restore us, to make us his friends, bringing us into a relationship with him by making us know his love. Do you know that God loves you? He loves you. You might be the only person you've ever heard of loves you.
You may feel yourself the most unloved person in the world. The story of the Bible is this. The story of the Bible is salvation. Paul says, You know the Scriptures.
Timothy, they make you wise for salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. The story of the Bible is very simple. Salvation belongs to the Lord. The story of the Bible is straightforward. God saves us. We can't save ourselves.
The story of the Bible is very straightforward. We don't make God our friends. He comes and makes us his friends. We can't access God in our own time or on our own terms. We have to know him the way he declares himself. How does he declare himself?
He's the only God coming to us in the only Son, the only Savior, working in us by the Holy Spirit. Now, you say, Well, this is a bit of an overemphasis, is it? I don't think so now, for a moment.
No, no. This is eternal life, says Jesus, that they know you, that they know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. Oh, the people say, Surely, this is good for folks in Jude's day. We don't really need this, do we? We've grown up, we've grown on. Well, let me suggest to you that the absence of this at a deep, visceral level is the explanation for the rather tawdry influence of American evangelicalism that is rich on the horizontal and poor in the vertical—services that begin with man and his need rather than God and his glory, issues that suggest that somehow or another that God who made us is unable to care for us, that we must care for ourselves. We're like a silly man up on the top of a ladder, and his wife knows he's in such a precarious position, and he shouts down to her, Leave me alone, I've got this covered! And then you hear the collapse that comes after that—boom!
And now he's lying on the floor, and she has to bite her tongue from saying, I told you before you went up there that you couldn't possibly do this. Leave me alone, I've got it covered. The prophets had to address that, because that's what the people were saying. And so Jeremiah 9, he says, Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom. There's nothing wrong with wisdom. God is the author of wisdom. The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord. But when that becomes your thing, let not the mighty man boast in his might, strength. Let not the rich man boast in his riches.
But if any was going to boast, boast in this. That he knows and understands me, the living God. Hmm. Incidentally, you and I can have a head full of information about God without ever taking to heart the reality to which those truths point. It's not simply about creed. It's about commitment. Knowing God gives us focus.
Gives us focus. Knowing God gives us a framework. The truths about God map the journey of a man or a woman's life. The truths about God. That's why we want to teach the children. Listen, hey, God made the whole world.
Now, tell me that again. Oh, that sounds like, indoctrination. Yeah.
Exactly. You shall indoctrinate your children while you walk along the road, when you lie down, and when you get up. Doesn't it use the word indoctrination? You shall teach your children. Because otherwise it would be very unfair to them, wouldn't it? You don't teach them that their left hand is their right hand or their right hand or their left hand or whatever it is.
No, you've got to do this. You've got to know where you are in the world. You've got to tell yourself that knowing God is the framework that allows me to navigate my life, that tells me the understanding of history, that it is not cyclical, that it's linear, that we began and we're moving to a destination. And the destination is outlined for us in the Bible. Focus, framework, and a foundation. The truth about God underpins everything.
When those truths are denied or ignored, the substructure collapses. We shouldn't be surprised in any way at all, because Jesus, in his masterful storytelling, made it as clear as it could be, Everyone, then, who hears these words of mine and does them, will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat on that house, but it didn't fall, because it had been founded on the rock.
The rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and doesn't do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand, and the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it. And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority and not as the scribes. Who has authority? Only our only Lord and Master, Jesus Christ. That's why Jude ends in this way. Now let's go to the word glory.
Just a joke. Let's pray. Our God, our Father, write your Word in our hearts, we pray. You know exactly where we are on the journey of life. You know whether our focus is on Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. You know where we have built our foundation. Lord, if we're tempted to build it on our money or our brains or on our strength of body, God grant that even this day there might be that great dethronement of ourselves and the enthronement of you, the living God. And we ask it in Christ's name.
Amen. You're listening to Alistair Begg on Truth for Life. We are learning today how to keep our focus on God. I hope you've been benefiting from this study in the book of Jude.
If you missed any of these messages or you'd like to hear them again, you can listen for free online at truthforlife.org. The series is simply titled A Study in Jude. And if you'd prefer to own Alistair's teaching through the complete book of Jude, it's available on a USB drive for our cost of just $5.
You'll find the USB in our online store at truthforlife.org slash store. Now today we're offering a book that will help you stay focused on God in a world that often challenges biblical truth. It's a new book titled Future Proof, how to live for Jesus in a culture that keeps changing. This timely book explores how followers of Jesus can engage with a society that is rapidly moving away from a biblical worldview. The book Future Proof probes into key questions each of us should consider, things like what is our role as lights in a dark world?
And what is the role of the church in such times? Again, the title of the book is Future Proof. You can request your copy when you donate to support the Bible teaching ministry of Truth for Life.
You can give through our mobile app or online at truthforlife.org slash donate. I'm Bob Lapine. What has the greatest influence on your worship? Is it the Bible teacher, the songs being sung, the crowd, the amount of sleep you got the night before? Tomorrow we'll examine the answer. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.
