The Letter That Didn't Want To Be Written (Part1) | Wade Branch

Good morning, everyone. Great to see everybody who's

here today. I'm just so thankful that you

are here. Commitment's a hard thing and

the more in any organization, anyone tries to generate

commitment and how to create commitment within a group of

people, that's the hardest thing for any business to to do.

If you're a company and you want to try to get people to come

once to your store or as an employee to do the right thing

once, that's easy. But to generate commitment over

a long period of time to where people know they can count on

you and trust in you is a hard thing to do.

Thank you all for being committed.

Thank you that I knew this morning it wasn't just going to

be me and, and my wife here this morning, that there was going to

be someone to hear the gospel, someone to commune with, to

share our, our memorial of our Lord with.

And I'm just thankful for every single person who's here today.

And I'm excited to be leading our study in the book of Jude.

Maybe I should rephrase that. I'm thankful to be able to study

the Bible with you. Jude's not easy.

And if you've read Jude before, you know, there are a lot of

challenging things and there are things that we just don't know

maybe anything about. And so we're sometimes given a,

the, the door cracks open for a minute and then it closes shut

again. And sometimes we don't have

complete knowledge of, of all the things we're going to cover.

So I've never heard a study on the book of Jude.

And maybe you will get something out of this as I have, but I, I

wanted to share what I've studied with you because that's

the directions my study went. And I think God, I believe with

all my heart, God put into Scripture for a reason.

And so we need to study it. And who am I to skip over it if

I just might not know everything.

So we're going to go into the book of Jude and it's, I have

the title up here, the letter that didn't want to be written.

And I think you'll see what I mean in just a minute.

There are a lot of warnings in this letter, similar to 2nd and

3rd John. So I hope I'm not giving you an

overdose of warning letters, but that's what the gospel writers

gave us in some circumstances. They had to warn these churches.

They had to give the information to equip these churches in light

of their circumstances. And now obviously, 2000 years

later, every issue that may have come up has now grown and we are

seeing the fruits of that around us.

And so we have to make good decisions and we have to

evaluate things with a godly perspective.

And hopefully this letter will help us do that.

Verse one. And we're going to spend more on

the time on the introduction maybe then we normally would.

But verse one says Jude, a bondservant of Jesus Christ and

brother of James, a bondservant of Jesus Christ.

Well, first of all, I think it's important to understand this

name. Jude is just a shortened name of

another name. That name is in Hebrew.

It's, it's Judah. You think back to the Israelite

nations, the tribe of Judah that was a very important tribe in

the nation of Israel. That's that's Jude.

That's his name. It's just a shortened version.

Many commentators believe or the reason by shorting his name to

Jude is to try to create a distinction between Judas

Iscariot. So people don't read this and

think oh that's the same person we're talking about, different

person. But it's his Greek version of

his name is Judas, so it's all the same name.

It was a very common name and there are 6 people we read about

in scripture named Judas. So maybe we can narrow this

down. What Jude are we talking about?

Well, it clarifies for us. It's the brother of James.

So if there are all these Judases and we know of 1

specifically that has a brother named James, this might give us

a good indication of who this Judas is.

If you go to Matthew 13, verse 55, it says is this not the

Matthew 13:55

carpenter's son? Is this not his mother called

Mary? They're talking about Jesus.

Is this, isn't this this common person we know and his brothers,

James, Joseph, Simon and Judas, these people are seeing Jesus

and they're like, is this the guy you're talking about?

We know him, we know his family, we know his his dad, just a

common Carpenter. And so we have a clue here as to

who this Judas might likely be. It's very likely the brother of

Jesus, but maybe we should specify the half brother of

Jesus. And you're wondering mate, how

is it a half brother? Is there another man involved?

Well remember, God is the father of Jesus and Mary is his mother.

So there's only one way for him to be the brother of Jesus, and

it's not through Joseph his father.

They may have had the father be Joseph, a different person than

Jesus had, because Jesus's father is God the Father, and

the conception was not from a mortal man.

So he, Judas, is likely the half brother of Jesus.

And that also makes James the half brother of Jesus, which

many scholars believe. That's who wrote the book of

James. So I may be doing a series on

letters from the brothers of Jesus, but he said he says that

he's the brother of James. Why did he not just come right

out and say I'm the brother of Jesus?

If that's the case? If that's the case, that is

really Jesus's brother. That's a pretty big deal.

Well, if you look at James's letter, he says almost the exact

same thing. Now this is not an uncommon way

to start a letter, but he says the same thing.

James, a bond servant of God and the Lord Jesus Christ.

So why did he not just come around and say, why didn't these

guys say I'm the brother of Jesus?

Listen to me. I think it's because it's a sign

of humility. There's no name dropping going

on. There is no special treatment

because if anybody could, you know, be seen as on par with

Jesus, his followers, maybe, maybe other high religious

leaders could say they're on par with Jesus.

But man, his brothers, they're on the same level, right?

They didn't claim that. And they humbled themselves

before the Messiah when they realized who he really was.

They're acknowledging we are like everybody else, simply

servants of the Master. I believe that's why they start

out their letters without some accolade to themselves.

But there's also more as to why they might have not put

themselves on that pedestal. If we look back in the Gospel

accounts in the book of John in chat, in verse one, it says

after these things Jesus walked in Galilee for he did not want

to walk in Judea because the Jews sought to kill him.

That's a pretty good reason not to want to go to Galilee, I

think, because people are trying to kill you there.

Now the Jews Feast of Tabernacles was at hand.

So the question is, what is this Jews Feast of Tabernacles?

It's a very important feast in the Jewish culture and in their

religion. And it is these these are some

summary points about it. Number one, this was a time that

was supposed to remember the, the Israelite people were

supposed to come together to remember their time in the tents

in the wilderness. So when they were out in the, in

the wilderness all those years and they were meeting around

this common Tabernacle, that Tabernacle is a tent.

It is a temporary dwelling for the presence of God.

And so for all those years that they would pack up their tent,

pack up all their houses, they would move through the

wilderness day after day. This is supposed to remember

back to that time, back to when they were in the wilderness.

And it's a time to remember God's provision in the

wilderness. We remember the things that God

did. We're going to talk about in a

minute to provide for them. It's a time for them to look

backward and remember that. It's a time to look forward to

the Messiah who would give them a permanent land and a permanent

dwelling with protection and everything that was going to

come with that Messiah. And maybe the most important

part for this context, it is one of the three pilgrimage feasts.

So we just said that the Jews are seeking to kill Jesus,

right? Well, now there's a specific

place in Judea, in Jerusalem, where all these Jews are coming

together for. So all the more reason to avoid

this place, right? Well, his brothers therefore

said to him, depart from here and go into Judea.

That's the region where Jerusalem is, where the where

the feast is going to be, that your disciples also may see the

works that you are doing. For no one does anything in

secret, while he himself seeks to be known openly.

If you do these things, Jesus show yourself to the world.

For even his brothers did not believe him.

So they, they know Jesus situation, but maybe they're not

really in touch with Jesus because if they were really

understanding what was going on with Jesus, they might not have

said that. Or maybe they were thinking,

hey, this will scare him into his senses.

There are passages that kind of implied that some of these

people didn't kind of thought Jesus was out of his mind.

What do you think you're doing here?

You're calling yourself the Messiah.

And so maybe they thought, hey, if he goes down there to

Jerusalem, that's going to make him kind of watch his, watch

what he says, humble himself up a little bit.

Whatever it was, they were out of touch because they didn't

believe in him as the Messiah. And they said, go on down to

Jerusalem. If you want everybody to know

about you, go down there. Now, does this remind you of

anyone in the Old Testament whose brothers did not believe

him and who rejected him? Joseph, which ironically that's

the Hebrew name for the name James.

But anyway, that's a another conversation.

Joseph was given a hell, a heavenly calling by God.

God gave him those dreams and he was seeing prophetic dreams

played out. He was rejected by his brothers.

He was sold for the price of a slave, and he was sold to the

world power of the time. During Joseph's day, the world

power was Egypt. They were the prominent power

and he had a good name through his life.

He was also unjustly condemned with two criminals. 1 was

acquitted and one was not, but Joseph ended up being sold into

slavery and cast out from his brethren for their salvation.

Does that sound like anybody else to you?

Clicker doesn't want me to stop there.

Jesus was given heavenly calling.

He was rejected by his brothers, as we've just read.

He was sold for the price of a slave.

He was sold to the world power of Rome to do the crucifixion.

He had a good name through his life.

But he was unjustly condemned with two criminals. 1 was

acquitted and one was not, and he was cast out for their

deliverance. That's just kind of a side

tangent we're taking here for a second, but Jesus had brothers

who did not believe in him until when?

Well, we learned that after his resurrection, his brothers were

there at some point. They saw and observed just like

everybody else around him. They had to learn and to come to

a realization. This was the Messiah.

And I believe that is one of those two brothers who is

writing here as we consider James and Jude the writers.

I think this is very similar to what Judah, the brother of of

Joseph, who sold him into slavery.

It's very similar to what this Judah or Jude is saying.

Take me as your servant. If you remember back into the

story of Joseph, where Joseph is sold into slavery and his

brothers Joseph is sold into slavery and he has risen his way

up the ranks to where he is. He is way up there in the

Egyptian rule. His brothers come into town

seeking help from the Egyptian government, right, because

they're they're starving. And at some point one of those

brothers, Judah, stands up for the rest of his family.

He was their family was about to be taken prisoners.

And that brother Judah stepped out and said, take me as your

servant. Let this Benjamin go.

Judah stepped out and said take me as your servant.

And in a similar way, I think that's Judah's message when he

writes this letter. Who cares if I'm the brother of

Jesus? I just want to be his servant.

I just want to serve him. And it's a disposition of

repentance and surrender. I tried to throw in a lot of

kind of skin to surface information.

I'm sorry if that was a little too fast or not clear at all,

but Jude is a bond servant of Jesus and that's that's how he

starts out his letter to those who are called, sanctified by

God the Father and preserved in Jesus Christ.

This is all part of his greeting.

So who is Jude writing this letter to?

He's writing it to people who have been called sanctified and

preserved. That's Christians.

It's all in the past sense. So he's not writing this as an

evangelistic letter reaching out to people who might become

Christians. We learn about how that happens

in other writings. It's to people who have already

been saved, now called to those who are called.

Doesn't it give you comfort to know that God called you, that

you weren't banging on his door begging for him to open and to

save you, and he had just had to do something about the riffraff

because you were banging on his door?

God called you and God came to you while we were dead in our

sins, and He offered us salvation.

God called you, and it's up to us to respond to that call.

We are sanctified by God the Father.

What does that fancy word mean? Sanctified just means to be made

holy, to be set apart. Set apart from what?

Set apart from whatever is going to be condemned and to put into

a place of being saved your soul.

Sanctification or setting apart from salvation is the most

important job that could be ever done for you.

I'm so thankful by that is God the Father who sanctified our

soul. Your plumber may have done a

terrible job on your house and you may have had some some

crummy work done and that way it may cause consequences for your

life and for your house. But the one who did the most

important job for your life ever is a job that is done surely and

confidently. We can be confident in that.

We are sanctified by God the Father and preserved in Jesus

Christ. Jesus Christ has a power to

protect and to watch over our souls and to be preserved beyond

the grave. In this life He will protect and

provide when we are with Him and in the grave, He will preserve

us beyond any decay that can happen to our soul.

Your body might decay, but your soul is preserved in Christ

Jesus. And He's reminding them of this

at the beginning of the letter. He says, mercy, peace, and love

be multiplied to you. Verse 3.

Beloved, while I was very diligent, that word means eager

to write to you concerning our common salvation, I found it

necessary to write to you exhorting to you to contend

earnestly or to struggle for the faith, which was once for all

delivered to the Saints. So he starts out by saying I was

really eager and excited to write to you about positive

things, about sharing in our common salvation.

Common doesn't mean like a normal, it's just kind of

common. It means the shared salvation

I'm writing. I wanted to write to you about

our wonderful shared salvation, but I found it necessary to

write to you exhorting, encouraging, challenging you to

contend earnestly for the faith. OK, so his first instinct was a

share in the positive. But what they had to know during

this time is it was not always going to be this simple.

And there was going to be some challenges, some nuance, and it

involved contending for something.

So as we go through this letter, you might wonder, how do we

contend earnestly for the faith? And we're going to break this

down in a minute, but that word contend means to struggle for.

And some commentators have said that word means to agonize over.

It means to struggle for something.

And how do we do that? The number one is we have to

realize that we all have a part in this struggle.

He's writing to the called, sanctified and preserved, not to

the preacher, the elder and the Deacon.

The called, the sanctified and preserved is all of us.

We all have a role and a responsibility in the struggle

for something. The struggle is for the faith.

So we need to, number one, have an expectation to be part of the

struggle #2 as you're going to see.

Contending for the faith is mostly in this context.

As he writes, righteous living. It is belief applied and it is

staying in our God-given place and we're going to see what that

looks like as we go throughout this letter.

But that's if we go back to these kind of four things or

these ideas, all the rest of it will take care of itself and

everything else will lines up with these goals.

Righteous living, having your belief applied and staying

within our God-given place. Now, as many people look at this

passage, they quote it saying we're to contend earnestly for

the faith. That means we're to fight for

the faith. And so when we talk to people,

we are defending the faith every day.

That's what a lot of the the typical references to this

passage point out. And so I will say it is true

that we need to struggle and wrestle and contend with others

about truth to preserve and to protect truth.

But that's not really what Jude spends time talking about.

But it is true that that's one way in which we struggle to

fight for truth. And we can also contend for

truth and contend for the faith by not supporting other things.

OK, That's there's a whole conversation to be had about

that. But those are also true, but not

really what Jude spends time talking about, contending for

the faith, counter examples he gives.

There's a long list and I've just kind of pulled out a couple

of things to give us the idea. There are some counter examples

of what it looks like when people are not with the faith.

It's sexually immoral. They don't show their faith

through action. They speak evil of what they

don't understand or they talk about about authorities.

They follow what feels good. They're motivated by greed.

They're empty clouds. You're going to see what that

and other illustrations mean later on.

They're shameful, they're complainers, and they cause

divisions. Now, that's just an A rough

outline of what it means and what it doesn't mean to contend

for the faith. OK, But let's let's focus on a

couple other words here. It says to contend earnestly for

the faith. Notice it does not say to

contend earnestly for my beliefs.

If we treat all of our conversations as we interact

with people, as we are struggling and working and

agonizing to make sure the faith is upheld and followed.

If it is, if it's supposed to be, it's mine.

This is my beliefs. Things become personal attacks

very easily and it can lead us to being very defensive with how

we respond to people. Like everything is a fight, like

everything is a an argument to be won.

And that is not our job. He he calls us to contend

earnestly for the faith. So what that this tells us is

this is not a call to be contentious for the faith.

Being contentious is someone who's just always against

everybody and always out there to start a fight in our

disposition. We're not to be contentious

people and our attitude. We're not to be contentious and

our outlook, if we just seek contention, everything is a

fight. Everywhere is a battle against

people. I think we're missing the point

of what it means to really contend for the faith in Jude's

writings. There's a difference between

working against something as your main motive versus working

for something. And Jude calls us to contend for

the faith. That has to be our goal.

If we are contending to defend my beliefs, as a lot of the

world wants to say, you got to stand up for what you believe

in. Well, it's not really about what

I believe. It's about the faith.

PowerPoint is messing up my format.

The faith is supposed to be right here.

We should be working toward contending and fighting for the

faith. Now, if that is our main goal

and others have the same goal, it's supposed to be us and

others have the same goal of contending for the faith, we are

going to have a much better relationship.

We're going to have better conversations.

We're going to have higher quality and more impactful

discussions. If we establish that our goal is

to contend for the faith and not everything is a fight.

Not everything is going to be US against other people.

Now, it doesn't mean that doesn't end up happening, but

that's not our motivation. This allows us to find common

interest with people, proper motivations and even clear eyes

to see our own faults. So after this, he says, I found

it necessary to write to exhorting you to contend or

struggle for the faith which was once for all delivered.

Some people try to tell you maybe in other religions that

scripture has been tainted over time because man has been

involved in scripture and translating and things like

that. And because of that, scripture

is no longer reliable and so they had to do revamps of it.

There's other there's groups who have put out new scripture to

fix the problem. Jesus says heaven and earth will

pass away, but my words by no means will pass away.

We know that scripture was given for US one time and we don't

have to worry about it being tainted in any way.

Remember, I was talking to someone this week.

When we translate Scripture, it comes directly from the original

language in the Greek. It's not a trail of translations

that slowly get further and further away from the truth.

It is all translations go back to the Greek or the Hebrew.

That's the goal, that they all go back to the original.

Things are not tainted as some people like to tell you or

challenge you in. So why is there a need that they

struggle for the faith? And here's where he opens up

this argument of why it's so important. 4 Certain men have

crept in unnoticed who long ago were marked out for this

condemnation. So these people may have been

creeping. Maybe they didn't realize they

were creeping, or maybe it was a slow change over time.

Or maybe they were intentionally creeping in and Christians

around the may not have noticed. They may have been unnoticed,

but they weren't unnoticed by everyone.

These people were marked out a long time ago.

They were marked out for this condemnation.

The phrase marked out means to be written about openly.

So it's not some like backdoor mysterious thing here.

It's things that were written about openly.

And many times in Scripture, or when Scripture says this, it is

referring back to the Old Testament.

In Romans 15, verse 4, it says the same thing.

Romans 15:4

Whatever things were written before, that's the same Greek

word used for marked out long ago.

This for whatever things were written before were written for

our learning that we through the patience and comfort of the

Scriptures might have hope that Scripture says the same word.

These people were marked out long ago.

So we can start to see that these are likely people who are

written about in the Old Testament, things that have been

prophesied about. Who are these people who are

marked out for this condemnation?

They are ungodly men, he says. Ungodly means to not follow God,

to not be godly in action, in heart.

Ungodly men who turn the grace of our God into lewdness.

Lewdness is sensuality. It's living for self and for

pleasures and for what I want who turn the grace of our God

into lewdness and deny the only Lord God in our Lord Jesus

Christ. When we live in a lewd or a

self-serving way and do not follow in a godly way, we deny

Jesus as Lord. What does Lord mean?

It means Master and these people who crept in, who may be

unnoticed among you, these people are denying that Jesus is

even their master because of how they're living.

As we're seeing here, the the counterexample to contending for

the faith is those people who are not living right, He says,

But I want you to be reminded. But I want to remind you, though

you once knew this, he feels the need to remind them.

Why? Because perspective wanes.

We forget, we say we lose focus on things that are important to

our application in the moment. You know what this also tells

me? It tells me that these people

knew the references he's about to make.

He's about to refer back to the Old Testament.

He's about to make cross scriptural references.

So as you read the Bible, if you don't find those connections,

you, they don't work in your mind.

Like there's no hyperlink there. It doesn't take you to a place

in your mind. I hope you will see this as a

challenge to study your Bible so that like these readers, you

will be able to know when the writer is making a reference and

you're going to know exactly what here he's talking about, he

says. But I want to remind you that

though you once knew this, that the Lord, having saved the

people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who

did not believe. So these readers would have

understood the Jewish history and what had happened and that

the Lord, some translations just say Jesus, this is the one who

should be the Lord of their life, the one who's their

master. This same Jesus, having saved

the people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those

who did not believe. So just like these people crept

into the church unnoticed, these people were saved out of the

land of Egypt and they were destroyed.

Those who did not believe. So the the the kind of flow of

thought here is there are people who started well, seemed good,

but are not legitimate. Therefore, we need to contend

for the faith because of this. And as we read those who did not

believe, that is a hyperlink, a connection to Romans 14.

So if you click on that link in your brain, it takes you to the

place where they were supposed to go into the land of Canaan.

And we'll talk about that more in a minute.

But leading up to the land of Canaan, you're saying these

people didn't believe? Well, why should they have

believed? They had the plagues, They were

stuck in Egypt, and so God did many miracles to get them out of

there. The first plague, if you

remember, he turned the the river into blood.

Can you imagine seeing that? I'm assuming fish came up dead

floating down the river. Can you imagine being an

Israelite in this world? The greatest power on earth,

You're slaves in this great nation.

And all of a sudden God steps in and he makes a distinction

between you and everybody else. And the first thing he does to

make that distinction and to try to get you out of there is he

turns their great river into blood.

I can't imagine what that looked like, how that must have

decimated their, their daily life, what that would have

looked like and how they how would have shaken things up.

You saw that these people saw that miracle and later they did

not believe these people saw the miracle of the frogs where God

sent frogs to cover throughout Egypt.

He took that plague away and he brought another one.

He brought the plague of gnats and looks and scholars say these

were likely biting gnats. And these people came out, the

animals came out the people they were, this land was filled with

gnats, not just like we might run into in our backyard.

There was a, this was a plague. These people had the plague or

they saw the plague of the boils.

And this is where you really start to see a strong

distinction between the Israelites and the Egyptians.

The Egyptians had boils break out of their whole body.

And these these sores, they were, they were super painful.

I can't imagine. And you're an Israelite looking

around you and saying, this isn't happening to me.

God is stepping in to Get Me Out of here and he's setting me

apart as different. They saw this.

They saw the, the, the plague of the locusts that came through

and wiped out all their crops. He's they saw these plagues, God

pulling in all these natural wonders.

They had the plague of darkness where for three days the sun

didn't come out. We have lights, we flip on.

They did not. Can you imagine the confusion,

the chaos, the the, the fear when the lights go out, it gets

dangerous. For three days, these Israelites

were in awe of what their God was doing for them.

They saw this and finally we didn't cover all the plagues,

but finally they had that last plague where the destroying

Angel came through and killed every first born, but not their

families. And God let and and Pharaoh let

them out. He said get out of here, be

gone. And so the the Israelites got

out of Egypt and he saved them. They saw that.

You think that's the end of it? No.

Then from there they had to get out and cross the Red Sea.

And their scholars say that this might have been the path they

took. There's all kinds of pinpoints

that we're not going to go through to try to defend why

that might be, right. They think this might have been

the great location of that crossing.

You're like, that's not as impressive as I might have

thought. The Bible says it went through

the heart of the Red Sea. Well, that's a conversation for

another time. But if you think that is a small

feat where scholars think they might have crossed, this diagram

shows that this is a 10 1/2 mile wide section.

And on this location there's a land bridge that they say, but

it reaches a depth of 2500 feet. Now the Red Sea at its depth

gets times over deeper than that.

So it could have been deeper than that.

But let's just think for a second.

These Israelites who later did not believe he said and Jude,

they saw this as they came out of Egypt.

They were fleeing from the the Egyptians who are pursuing them.

And they go through this Great Wall of water that may that was

likely up to or more than 2500 feet deep.

And we know that it was a long journey.

If we know there's a long journey, it was likely that part

of this was at night. Can you imagine trying to get 3

million people through a river, bred pregnant women, children,

old, elderly, how long this would have taken to get all

these people across this river or this the floor of the Dead

Sea for 10 1/2 miles? That would have taken a long

time. It was likely this might have

happened at night. And that's where the pillar of

fire that God was leading them by would have likely come into

play here. And that's part of why scholars

say it was at this location, because there is a location, it

looks like it is sand that's been super heated.

Scientists say to 3000° that melted the sand to a point that

it is a hard ground. And along this path, they have

found none other than Egyptian Chariots.

They saw this. The Israelites saw all this

happen and yet they did not believe this is the tallest

building in the world, the Burj Khalifa that stands around 2500

feet high. They saw a wall of water some

2500 feet high. Can you imagine walking through

there? And then, as they, as we've

already said, as they got through the other side, God

closed the waters of the of the Red Sea and they covered up the

Egyptian army to where they were not.

They didn't have to fear them coming after them, because in

that long stretch of land, you could fit a whole lot of

soldiers that were then swept into the sea.

So you think about the Red Sea crossing.

Is that it? Is that all these people saw Who

had a chance to believe? No.

Then later on they get out into the wilderness.

I'm not going to cover all the things God did, but another one

of the things he did was he gave them water out of a rock.

They're walking through the desert.

They were starting to complain and they got out of the Red Sea.

But now we're going to go out here and we're going to starve

and we're going to die of thirst.

And so God tells Moses to strike the rock, and he strikes the

rock and water comes out enough to satisfy the whole nation of

Israel. They think they may have found

where that is. This is just their estimation.

Here's what it may have looked like.

We don't know if this for sure is the exact site, but that rock

split. They saw that they saw water

come out of a rock. And the last one I'm going to

touch on, they heard God's voice on Mount Sinai.

It was so terrifying to them. As we read it was it was covered

in lightning and smoke. It was so terrifying to them.

They begged, Don't let him talk to us, Moses.

You go up on the mountain, you talk to him.

Bring us back the message. They were so afraid of him.

You mean they saw all that and didn't believe?

How? How do you see all these things

that we've talked about as the Egyptians and still people were

destroyed because they didn't believe?

Well, what does that mean? Does that mean that they didn't

really think God was real? That's not biblical belief.

When it says that, it says even the demons believe in tremble.

Belief does not mean you think it's true.

Belief is about action. We fail to respond in biblical

belief when we do not act in light of spiritual realities.

We know well they knew it well. They knew all these things.

They'd seen it all. They knew what they were

supposed to do. They knew who was talking to

Him. They knew what His goal was in

for them, but they did not act in light of those spiritual

realities. They knew.

In Psalm 95 we hear a little bit more of God's reaction to this.

For 40 years I was grieved with that generation and said it is a

people who go astray in their hearts and they do not know my

ways. So I swore in my wrath they

shall not enter my rest. That's what Jude's talking

about. These people were destroyed

because after they saw all that, they get to Canaan and they get

to the edge of this great land. They send in those spies and

those spies come back and the majority of them, except for

two, say it's it's scary in there, man.

It's real bad. They got giants in there.

We don't stand a chance. We thought they looked like

giants, that we thought we looked like grasshoppers, and

they thought the same thing. We were puny.

And they started to grumble and complain.

You just brought us out here to die.

We got all this way out here and instead of thinking about the

Egyptian deliverance, about the Red Sea crossing, about talking

to God on Mount Sinai, about water coming off rocking, bread

coming from the sky, you know what?

They focused on their fear and they complained against Moses.

That is their unbelief. It wasn't that they didn't think

about God being real. It was that they didn't act

according to what they knew to be true.

And well, these clickers have no heyday up here.

God gave them plenty of time and plenty of reasons to respond

now. And the connection here is there

are certain ones who have crept into the to the church who may

think they're unnoticed, but they've been identified a long

time ago along with people just like them who've done this for

years to God. These people aren't new.

They're not sneaky. They're not shouldn't be shocked

that they're here. They've been doing this for a

long time. These certain ones who are doing

this in the church are doing the same thing who started out in

belief, but they didn't come through.

We're about to finish up here and we'll continue in another

lesson. But verse 6 says and the angels,

so he's moving on to another counter example of people who

did not and the angels did not keep the angels who did not keep

their proper domain, but left their own abode.

He has reserved an everlasting chains under darkness for the

judgement of the great day. There's a lot of debate about

this meeting and there are some passage in Scripture that might

leave you with your head scratching.

And like I said, there are sometimes the door creaks open

and then closes shut. We don't have all complete

knowledge of this. So what I'm going to talk about

is the thing, same thing that everybody agrees on.

No matter what you interpret some of the depths of this

passage to be diving into the lesson that everybody needs to

take away from this and everybody does take away from

this is that going outside of your natural place and order and

operation and authority and morality designated by God and

set in place by God, going outside of that always leads to

judgement. He talked about the nation of

Israel already people who who this has happened to physically,

you saw it happen. He's talking about now, even in

the spiritual realm, things that we have only clues into.

But he's like, hey, it's happening here too.

This is a universal principle. If you go outside of what God

has set up and authority and morality and his bounds, He says

there's judgement there. Nobody disagrees about the point

of this passage. So if you are wondering, that is

100% the point that is being made here and we can know of

that and these certain ones who are doing almost the same thing.

So what we do know for sure is there is a rebellion that

happened among the angels. We learn about that from Isaiah

14, how the host of heaven fell in Revelation 12, verse 4 says

Revelation 12:4

there's a third of the host of heaven that's talking about the

stars of heaven. Those are referring to the

angels. There was a section of the

angels who fell in rebellion to God who went outside of their

realm. And so we know that has been an

issue in the spiritual realm as well as the physical realm.

And finally, as Sodom and Gomorrah in the cities around

them, in similar manner to these, having given themselves

over to sexual immorality and gone after strange flesh, are

set forth as an example, suffering, suffering the

vengeance of eternal fire. So he's making that connection

between the people in the church during Jude's time who are

ungodly. He's making a connection between

them, the angels who went outside of their realm.

And also in a similar manner, you had the people of Sodom and

Gomorrah who gave themselves over to sexual immorality.

They're doing the same thing. These people are not new and

they went after strange flesh. They went outside of their God

ordained boundaries. That's homosexuality.

That's what he's referring to. They went outside of a boundary

God set. They're set forth as an example,

suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.

If you know what happened to Sodom, Gomorrah, we've talked

about that recently. I'm not going to go over all

these extra slides, but in the Old Testament, the sun had risen

up on the earth when the Lord entered Zoar.

Then the Lord reigned brimstone and fire and Sodom and Gomorrah

from the Lord out of the heavens and he overthrew the cities, the

plains, the inhabitants and all that grew on the ground.

God rained down on those cities. His point he's making is this

isn't new and the same thing happens to it every time.

And we talked about in a previous lesson, Hebrews, how

scientists have found things they think was the site of that

and these have suffered the vengeance of eternal fire.

Some people want to tell you that hell is a is a metaphor.

I don't think Sodom and Gomorrah would would agree with that so

far. We're going to pause here in

this letter. It's a heavy note, but I want to

take away these kind of key points so far.

We have a place in God's world. It is a highly honoured place

where we are called sanctified. Some translations in places that

were sanctified say beloved, they're both true.

Absolutely. And we're preserved.

We have a great place in God's world and we have a role to

play. We have a struggle, we have a

work to do, and it's important. It's vital for God's purposes

and for the church that we are a part of as we struggle for the

faith. And He will give us support,

just like He showed the Israelites all those wonderful

things that gave them reason to believe.

He will give us support for what we're going to do.

But we need to remember, like Frank prayed this morning, most

importantly, that God is glorified.

This is not our story. It's not about us.

We really like to make it about us as Americans.

It is about God and his glory. And within that we must stay

within our God-given bounds to glorify Him and to put him

first. And so I know it may have been a

heavy study this morning, but I hope we can leave with

confidence that as we seek him in faith, as we contend for the

faith that we realize that God is watching.

This has been going on for a long time.

May we evaluate ourselves as we go through what else this might

look like for people who are not following the faith so that we

can be sure and confident and joyful in His presence as we

share in this wonderful gift that He's given us of salvation

and common inheritance in the sun.

I hope you are in that position of a safe place this morning.

If you're not, you can be added to the church.

You can be saved by the blood of Jesus.

The Bible says that if we hear the Word, we can respond in

belief. Mark 16 and 16 says he who has

believed and is baptized will be saved.

We have to believe. We have to have a surrender that

goes along with that belief though, as we've learned today.

And we have to be willing to confett, to be willing to

repent, to go the way that God is asked that shows true belief,

and to confess. The Jesus Christ is the Son of

God and we can be baptized for their mission of our sins.

And if you haven't done that today, you can do that.

Or if you need the prayers of the church to get on the right

path to make sure you are going the direction of godliness and

not the direction of these people who are crept in.

I don't think anyone hears that. I'm not implying that.

But if you need assistance in any way, we'd be happy to help

you while we stand and see.