Video Transcript: Jude: Fight for Faith

That doesn't mean what today is labeled the Roman Catholic Church, but Catholic is kind of the universal epistles, or epistles of the New Testament, letters of the New Testament that were written by people not named Paul primarily. And so we have the epistle of James, the first and second letters of Peter, first, second and third letters of John, and then the letter of Jude. And we're going to look at the book of Jude.

Who was Jude? Well, he introduces himself by saying, Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and a brother of James. Jude was a son of Mary and Joseph. And being a son of Mary and Joseph, that made him a half-brother of Jesus and a brother of James, Joseph, Simon, and the sisters that were born to them through Mary and Joseph.

So, he's the brother of James, half-brother of Jesus, but he doesn't describe himself as brother of Jesus, but as servant of Jesus. When James and his brothers and sisters were growing up with their oldest half-brother, Jesus, they weren't overly impressed by him, and neither were the people in town that grew up with them, or that saw Jesus grow up. When they heard that Jesus was allegedly teaching great things and doing mighty things, they said, isn't this the carpenter's son? Isn't his mother's name Mary? And aren't his brothers James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas? Judas is also Judah or Jude.

All three names are the same thing. You can understand, though, why we have a book named Jude rather than Judas, because Judas is a name that has some other things associated with it, like the betrayal of the Lord Jesus Christ. That was a different Jude or Judas.

But this was Judas, the half-brother of Jesus. Then aren't his sisters with us? Where then did this man get all these things? And they took offense at him. So, if you were one of Jesus' brothers growing up with him, people thought that Jesus was just one more of the bros who wasn't very impressive, the carpenter's kid.

And it wasn't just the people who were around them that weren't very impressed by Jesus. The Bible said at one point when he began his ministry that his family said, he's out of his mind. Even his own brothers did not believe in him.

Maybe that should get us free of the notion that if only we had been there, if we'd have been first-hand with Jesus, we would have had such an easier time believing. Evidently, you could be his half-brother and not believe in him. His brothers and sisters didn't believe in him while they were growing up with him or even when he was doing his mighty works of ministry.

Only after the risen Lord appeared to James and to others in the family did they put their faith in him. And then, no longer did Jude refer to him as my older brother that I don't really believe in, but instead he calls himself a servant of Jesus Christ. And I think before moving on with the content of Jude, just a reminder how dangerous it is to be familiar with Jesus.

A lot of you didn't grow up in the same place and couldn't call Jesus your half-brother, but since you could talk, you knew that name Jesus. You were familiar with him. And sometimes, sometimes familiarity breeds contempt.

Ah, Jesus is just kind of part of the furniture of growing up. You know, we learn not to wipe our nose. We learn to believe in Jesus.

We learn to be polite. And we learn a bunch of stuff from our parents that when we grow up and get smarter, we know better than they do. And maybe Jesus is just part of that.

Some of what we grew up with that we now know better than. It's dangerous. It can be a great blessing to grow up with Jesus, but it can also be dangerous to have that kind of familiarity where I know, you know, I'm familiar with all this.

There's nothing really amazing and remarkable about him. Well, Jude grew up that way, but he came to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. And so who is Jesus now in Jude's eyes? He's not just that familiar older brother that sometimes he thinks is crazy and he doesn't believe in.

But now he sees Jesus as the Messiah, as the Lord God, as the Savior. He introduces himself as Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ, and that makes Jesus his master. He uses the word Christ, which means Messiah.

It's just the Greek word for the Hebrew word Messiah. So Jesus is the Christ and he's our only sovereign and Lord, Jude calls him. So no longer is he just the unbelieved in older brother, but he is Messiah and Lord and he's Savior.

Near the end of the letter, Jude speaks of the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that will bring you to eternal life, the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ. And that's what carries you to eternal life. Jude has a very different view of Jesus now than he did growing up in the same household.

So that's who Jude is. And in short, that's who Jesus is. The Lord, the Savior, the God who brings you to eternal life by his mercy.

Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and a brother of James, to those who have been called, who are loved by God the Father and kept by Jesus Christ. Mercy, peace and love be yours in abundance. Dear friends, although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt I had to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints.

For certain men whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you. They are godless men who change the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ, our only sovereign and Lord. Though you already know all this, I want to remind you that the Lord delivered his people out of Egypt, but later destroyed those who did not believe.

And the angels who did not keep their positions of authority, but abandoned their own home. These he has kept in darkness, bound with everlasting chains for judgment on the great day. In a similar way, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion.

They serve as an example of those who suffer the punishment of eternal fire. In the very same way, these dreamers pollute their own bodies, reject authority and slander celestial beings. But even the archangel Michael, when he was disputing with the devil about the body of Moses did not dare to bring a slanderous accusation against him, but said, the Lord rebuke you.

Yet these men speak abusively against whatever they do not understand. And what things they do understand by instinct, like unreasoning animals, these are the very things that destroy them. Woe to them.

They have taken the way of Cain. They have rushed for profit into Balaam's error. They have been destroyed in Korah's rebellion.

These men are blemishes at your love feasts, eating with you without the slightest qualm, shepherds who feed only themselves. They are clouds without rain blown along by the wind, autumn trees without fruit and uprooted twice dead. They are wild waves of the ocean foaming up their shame, wandering stars for whom blackest darkness has been reserved forever.

Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied about these men. See, the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of his holy ones to judge everyone and to convict all the ungodly of all the ungodly acts they have done in the ungodly way and of all the harsh words ungodly sinners have spoken against him. These men are grumblers and fault finders.

They follow their own evil desires. They boast about themselves and flatter others for their own advantage. But dear friends, remember what the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ foretold.

They said to you, in the last times there will be scoffers who will follow their own ungodly desires. These are the men who divide you, who follow mere natural instincts and do not have the spirit. But you, dear friends, build yourselves up in your most holy faith and pray in the Holy Spirit.

Keep yourselves in God's love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life. Be merciful to those who doubt. Snatch others from the fire and save them.

To others, show mercy mixed with fear, hating even the clothing stained by corrupted flesh. Now to Him who is able to keep you from falling and to present you before His glorious presence without fault and with great joy, to the only God our Savior, be glory, majesty, power and authority through Jesus Christ our Lord before all ages, now and forevermore. Amen.

This ends the reading of God's word and God always blesses His word to those who listen. It's one of the shortest books in the Bible and one of the hardest hitting. And when you think about the book of Jude, I want to emphasize three main themes in three different messages and kind of take three strands that run throughout the book.

The first is to fight for the faith and for those who are challenging or undermining the faith. And along with that, to fear the eternal fire, to fear the punishment that awaits those who reject the truth and all who follow them and to keep being kept. That may sound kind of strange, but the epistle begins by saying you're called and you're kept by Jesus Christ.

And then at the end, it says he's able to keep you from falling. So there's these bookends of God keeping you. But you also need to be kept to build yourself up in your most holy faith, to pray in the Holy Spirit, to keep yourselves in God's love.

There is something you need to keep on doing as God keeps on keeping you. So those are the three strands that run through Jude, the three areas that we're going to look at in three different messages. First of all, to fight for the faith.

That's what we're going to focus on now. And the first thing to be said about that is expect evil attacks. Don't be shocked.

Don't say, oh, never saw that one coming. I can't imagine that there would be false teaching, that there would be wicked people who would be leading others astray by their ideas and by their example. Expect it because these are men whose condemnation was written about long ago.

He says at the beginning of the letter and near the end, he says, now, remember what the apostles told you this was coming. So in fighting for the faith, don't be caught by surprise. Expect error.

When you live in a time such as ours, we live in the time between Jesus' first coming and his second coming, and we live in a time of rapid transition in history. We live in a time when many of the churches of Europe have grown mostly empty, and we see a lot of the same thing going on in churches in the United States, when church involvement and belief in Christian orthodoxy has slid very, very rapidly. And a lot of that happened when different ideas about the Bible and its authority, different ideas about the deity of Jesus Christ, different ideas about the need for Jesus' blood to wash away our sins, different ideas about the reality of his resurrection and the truth of his miracles.

These things were all brought in in the in the mid to late eighteen hundreds in the churches, in the seminaries and institutions of education. And as those things were taught by those alleged to be leaders in the church, there was a huge slide in doctrinal belief, then in church attendance, then in what is considered moral or immoral behavior. This is the time we're living in.

And it is not a time to panic. It is not a time to say, oh, no, now the church is lost. Christ will build his church.

The only question is whether you're going to be part of it or where you're going to be following the liars and the evildoers who have slunk into the church and done their thing. It's not like we weren't warned, but you will get what you want. That is one of the great dangers, of course, of our own time.

We can say, oh, these teachers, they're bad. Well, in another place, the Bible says they will deliver what itching ears want to hear. You wanted it.

You got it. You can find what you want. If you want people to pander to you and tell you exactly what you want to hear, they're out there.

They've always got improvements on the gospel to make it easier to believe, but no longer worth believing. They've always got improvements on Christian morality to make it easier to live by, except it's not worth living by anymore. Expect such things, and especially in the time in which you live, expect such things instead of panicking, instead of going into woe is me mode, realize that it is a great opportunity to live in such a time that there is a time when Christ is calling you to stand clear and firm and to expect the evil attacks and not give in to them.

Believe next in the gospel to expound gospel truth. The faith that is once for all entrusted to the saints, the word faith can be used in different ways. Sometimes faith refers to trusting, to counting on Jesus, to receiving Christ as your Savior.

But sometimes faith is referred to as the faith, and there it's not so much the act of us trusting, but it is what is proclaimed in the gospel. It is the fact of the faith and the faith has a definite content. It's been delivered to the saints once for all.

It doesn't get improved on in later times. You don't improve on the faith as delivered in the New Testament. It's been once for all delivered to the saints.

Anybody who claims to be improving it or tweaking it is harming it and detracting from it. So we need to expound gospel truth. Those of us who hold to the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Apostle Paul said to brothers, I want to remind you of the gospel that I preached to you and which you received and on which you have taken your stand.

For what I received, I passed on to you as of first importance that Christ died according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised again on the third day according to the Scriptures. And then he goes on to expound on the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the forgiveness of sins, the life of the world to come. But he says, this is the gospel that I preach and you take your stand on it unless you believed in vain.

So there is this need to know that there is the faith, the truth of the gospel delivered to the saints, the truth of God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, of Jesus Christ and the way of salvation in him, of the need for salvation because of our own sin, of the need for the Holy Spirit to create in us trust and to receive the Lord Jesus Christ and to see that truth. These are the very essence of gospel truth that's been delivered once for all to the saints and testified to in the Scriptures. And so if you're going to fight for the faith, you need to expect those evil attacks.

You need to hold firmly to that gospel truth and nothing else. And then you need to know who the villains are and what they're like. And Jude spends a considerable amount of time on that.

He doesn't say much about the gospel truth itself. He says, I wanted to write to you about the salvation we share. And now he assumes that they know the basics of the faith because it's been delivered to them.

They know it. And now he's going to spend most of his time exposing enemy agents as he's urging them to fight for the faith. And I just want to highlight eight things that come out in the book of Jude, in the letter of Jude about these enemy agents.

They are sneaky. They are godless, immoral, animalist, rebellious, greedy, divisive and ruinous. First of all, they're sneaky.

Certain men whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you. Our Lord Jesus himself said, watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves.

They appear to be among the sheep, but they are sharpening their teeth and they have the nature of wolves. The Apostle Paul wrote of people who are false apostles, deceitful workmen masquerading as apostles of Christ. And no wonder for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.

It is no surprise then if his servants masquerade as servants of righteousness. So they come claiming to be like apostles, but they're fake apostles, false apostles, deceitful workmen. When I read that phrase, deceitful workmen, an image came to mind.

I had seen a show where some people were called upon to renovate the U.S. Capitol building. And they were workmen on the U.S. Capitol building. And as they did their work on the U.S. Capitol building, they identified all of its weak spots and then passed along to terrorists where the charges should be planted to blow it up and destroy the whole Congress.

Those are deceitful workmen. You think they're just making the building a little better and they're planting the explosives. That's the picture that you get here of deceitful workmen who act like they're building it up and they're blowing it apart.

When you read of Satan masquerading as an angel of light, when that was written in the Bible, do you think people actually imagined that it would come true exactly like that? That someone would come along and say, an angel appeared to me and he was the angel Gabriel. And he gave me this book straight from heaven. And it's called the Koran.

And if you read it, you will find that Jesus is not the son of God. You will find that you do not need to be saved by his death because he didn't even really die at all. You just need a law from Allah.

And if you keep it, you will be saved. And it was an angel, allegedly, who gave Muhammad that revelation. The 1800s, a man named Joseph Smith said he was visited by the angel Moroni and Moroni gave him something called the Book of Mormon.

The faith was not once for all entrusted to the saints. The New Testament is nice, but it's not enough. Muhammad said, yeah, those other writings were fine, but here's the final and best writing which clarifies it all.

And Joseph Smith said the same thing. Sure, the New Testament couldn't agree with it more, except it doesn't mean quite what people have been saying it meant all along. And if you read the Book of Mormon and listen to my teachings and to the teachings of the Mormon religion, then for the first time, you will really understand what the gospel and who Jesus Christ is.

So you have people claiming revelation even from angels, but bringing a message which denies Jesus Christ, our only sovereign and Lord. And in both cases, those were not just brand new religions. Islam is not a religion that appeared from nowhere.

It claims to be the true continuation and successor of Judaism and Christianity. Joseph Smith claims to be recovering the true church of Jesus. It's the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints, but it's now recovering what came among those who were the original followers of Jesus.

But in both cases, the faith once for all delivered to the saints was not enough. A new book had to be given. It's done in different forms as well.

As I mentioned before, there were seminaries and pastors who offered new insights from the experts. And we now knew in this age of modern equipment that miracles don't happen. Rudolf Bultmann, one of the foremost Bible scholars in Germany, said in the age of the wireless, in the age of the radio, we can no longer believe in miracles.

That's, you know, I'm working on a logic class and I just cannot get that syllogism. Radios, therefore, no miracles. I cannot follow that line of reasoning.

But there was a notion that if you live in a technological age, the inference is that God doesn't do amazing things anymore. And so you had this whole, you have all of these people who are still holding lofty degrees, who are called reverend, who hold important positions, but aren't teaching the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints. They're sneaky.

And Jude says that such people are godless men who deny Jesus Christ, our only sovereign Lord. He compares them to the Israelites who didn't believe in God's power and reality. He quotes Enoch's prophecy about people who do ungodly things in the ungodly way and have ungodly thoughts and so on.

They're ungodly is the repeated word that he uses for them. And he also just describes them as people who do not have the spirit. Godlessness can mean not believing that God exists at all.

Nowadays, you know what? In some churches in Europe and here, you're considered a troublemaker if you think that a preacher should believe that God exists. I'm not joking. There are atheists who say, what do you mean I can't be a pastor just because I don't believe in God? I believe in left-wing politics.

That's even better. But they literally don't believe in God, but they believe in their own form of do-gooderism. And they think a church exists.

Literally, you can be an atheist, know God at all, and ought to be able to lead a church of like-minded people. You can have situations where people, as I said, don't believe in miracles. That's just being godless.

Because the reason you don't believe in miracles is you do not believe that there is someone great whose power is beyond what you can observe in the natural world. You don't believe in prophecies about the future because you don't believe in the God who knows the end from the beginning and who directs all of history according to His will. You don't believe in Him.

You may say you believe in some sort of little godlet here or there, or God is the existential decision that I somehow make to make my life different, but that ain't God. God does as He wills with the powers of heaven and the peoples of the earth. And so, when you believe in the real God, you believe that miracles can happen.

You believe that He intervenes in history. You believe in the resurrection of the dead. You believe that the Bible speaks from Him, that He inspired it, that it is given to us as His final revelation.

Once again, it's being godless to say that this is a human document, and we're just going to analyze it the way we would any other human document and see what nice insights are in it, discard the things we disagree with. That's denying God as the source of the Scriptures. So, there's a variety of forms that godlessness takes among false teachers, and we need to be aware of each of those.

Along with this sneakiness and this godliness is the tendency to promote and to practice what's immoral. What does Jude say about them? He says there are people who change the grace of our God into a license for immorality. The kind of teaching in particular that he was dealing with were people who highlighted how nice God is.

And certainly, the Bible declares the grace of God, the forgiveness of God, the mercy of God, the kindness of God. But when that is used to say, and now we do whatever we please, because grace encourages us to be ourselves and to do whatever we feel like doing. And the Bible says that then that's changing the grace of our God into a license for immorality.

James is going to say something similar in his general epistle. He says, what good is it, my friends, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? It's just stone dead faith. As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead.

Faith that doesn't change you isn't real faith. That's the upshot. So, people who change the grace of our God into a license to do whatever you want are false teachers.

He speaks of Sodom and Gomorrah that gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion. I remember when I read a bunch of essays by C.S. Lewis, one of those was called Rejoinder to Dr. Pittenger. You say, who was Dr. Pittenger? Yeah, well, that's the point.

But anyway, he wrote a reply to Dr. Pittenger who didn't like his book on miracles. And he didn't like his book on miracles because he didn't like supernatural things, basically. And later on, a few years after C.S. Lewis died, Norman Pittenger came out of the closet.

He'd been homosexual all along. He didn't believe in any of the other stuff. But he started attacking doctrine.

But beneath it all was his desire to make space, not just to get rid of the miracles, but to make space for immorality. And people who like sexual immorality and perversion find the living God very inconvenient and the revelation of the scriptures very inconvenient. And in an age that is soaked in pornography, in people shacking up, in people getting divorced whenever they please so they can go with somebody else, it's going to sell well to change Christian morality.

He says these dreamers pollute their own bodies. Another of the leading liberal scholars of the 20th century was Paul Tillich, lived a very promiscuous life and then promoted liberal doctrine, which no longer emphasized the salvation through the blood of Jesus Christ or his resurrection, and certainly not living by the Christian teaching of morality. And lately, of course, there's very reliable reports of the kind of some of the people who've reached high up in the Vatican and who live utterly licentious and wicked lives.

That doesn't mean everybody there does, but you've got to be aware that behind certain kinds of teaching and structural realities are some very evil and perverted and corrupt people. And we shouldn't spend all our time blasting away at others, but we do need to spend a little of our time that way because God does and Jude does. We need to realize that there are people like that.

And when they write their books, they sound really learned. And if you look at their lifestyle, they are disgusting. So, be aware of that, that that can be a factor in how false teachers are actually behaving and the kind of lifestyle that they're going to be leading others into.

When you're analyzing what happened to the churches in Europe, in Britain, you'll find that the shift in sexual morality went hand in glove with the great falling away of church attendance and belief in Christian orthodoxy. These things are not totally separate. People, as I said before, get what they want.

If they want to behave a certain way, then they need to believe a certain way, and they will change their beliefs to suit their behavior. They're rebellious. He compares these false teachers to the angels who didn't keep their positions of authority but abandoned their own home.

He says they not only pollute their own bodies, but they reject authority and slander celestial beings. They don't take angels seriously as these mighty and powerful beings. And by contrast, Jude says even the archangel Michael, the mightiest and most glorious and powerful and splendid of all angels, when he was dealing with the devil in a dispute over the body of Moses, he didn't even directly take the devil lightly or speak ill of him.

He just said, the Lord rebuke you. Even the greatest of angels simply appears to the Lord when he's dealing with another of those mighty powers, those angelic powers. And you've got people talking about God as though he's something unimportant in a little book.

And speaking of angels as though they're a fantasy from somewhere long ago, from some benighted age. And they have no clue what they're talking about. They know nothing of the splendor and might and power of the angels.

They know nothing of the terror and evil plots and immense power of Satan and the fallen angels. They know nothing of the world of the supernatural. And they try to pretend that they're the big shot in the universe.

They want to be number one. That's what the fallen angels wanted. They wanted to be number one instead of God.

And behind all of this other stuff about false teachers is they want to be number one. They reject authority. They have an authority problem.

Korah, when you read his story, we'll get into it more in a future message. But his main goal was to say, aren't I just as good as Moses and Aaron? Why should they be leaders and not me? There will be scoffers. They're going to think they know better than the faith.

And so Jude is not very nice. But remember, it's not Jude just talking. It is the voice of God speaking through him.

The voice of the Holy Spirit speaking through about these rebellious, polluting, authority-rejecting scoffers. And he says, you've got to ignore them and not listen to them. Elsewhere in the Bible, he calls them dreamers.

And the notion of these sneaky, godless, immoral, rebellious dreamers is something that runs all through the Bible. Isaiah 56 speaks of dreamers. It says that Israel's leaders, their prophets and politicians are people who get drunk and say, hey, tomorrow is going to be better than today.

Yeah, it's going to be wonderful. Israel's watchmen are blind. They all lack knowledge.

They lie around and dream. They love to sleep. Probably mostly because they've got a hangover.

But they were drinkers and fools. And that's part of why they're called dreamers. But there's another meaning to being a dreamer as well.

Dreams sometimes brought revelation from God. And often they didn't. God says, I've heard what the prophets say who prophesy lies in my name.

They say, I had a dream. I had a dream. Let the prophet who has a dream tell his dream.

But let the one who has my word speak it faithfully. I'm against those who prophesy false dreams. They tell them and they lead my people astray with their reckless lies.

Yet I did not send or appoint them. Sometimes you even read people today who, their books sell better if they claim that something happened to them firsthand. If you just write a book about the future, about heaven, about what God says in the Bible that He has prepared for those who love Him, some people might buy that book.

If you say, I was to heaven and back, and here's what it was like. You know, write one about a near-death experience. Or, as in one notorious case, write one about your kid's near-death experience.

And make up a little if you have to. Make up a lot if you have to. And that thing will sell like hotcakes.

Because in our time, personal experience or claims to it trump the Word of God. Claim that Jesus spoke to you directly and your meditation book will, you know, just write Jesus speaking in the first person and your book of meditations will sell like crazy. If all you do is write a book of meditations on what the Bible says, who needs that? Well, let the dreamers talk about their dreams.

But if you've got a word from God, if you've got the written Word of God, then you tell what God says. And I can't control who listens. I can't control what I say.

And if you start listening to what I said during my nap or during a hangover, don't go there. Listen to what I say, what I've studied the Word of God and meditated on it and get up in this pulpit and say what God tells me to say. That's when we need to hear the Word of God and not the dreamers.

So, you have these sneaky, godless, immoral, rebellious dreamers. And he goes on to say they're animalists, they're greedy, they're divisive and they're ruinous. What do I mean by animalist? Well, instinct rules them.

What they understand by instinct like unreasoning animals, as Jude puts it. They follow their own evil desires. They follow their own ungodly desires.

They follow mere natural instincts and do not have the spirit. That's why sexual immorality in particular is characteristic of such teachings, because it's a strong urge. Okay, it's a strong urge.

And I was born with a particular urge. And that means, of course, that it's good, because I was born with it and I'm good, aren't I? So, any urge that I have must be good. This is the reasoning of those who do not have the spirit.

They do not have within them a power different from their own desires or urges, nor a power stronger than those that helps them to fight those urges. The same is true of the urge for other things, whether it's the physical desire that food rules. All the Bible speaks of people whose God is their stomach.

Basically, appetite rules. And the sad thing is you get entire systems of doctrine to defend the proposition that appetite is God. Appetite is the Holy Spirit.

Whatever your urge is, is right. And the point is that that's just animalistic thinking. And again, we get the kind of doctrine that goes along with it.

You find in the church now the explanation that, after all, we are only more highly evolved animals. That is simply a doctrine that supports the behavior of following your own evil desires, your own natural instincts without regard for what the Holy Spirit does in us. So, beware of animalist teaching.

There's an example of that, a very glaring example in the Old Testament. Hophni and Phinehas were the sons of Eli. He himself was devoted to the Lord.

He had his faults, and one of his faults was not reigning in his sons when they were rotters and keeping them from corrupting Israel. But they were the priests. And during their offerings, there was a certain protocol, and you respected the offerings, and then the priests would get some of the meat from the offerings after the offering was complete.

Well, they wanted the best cuts and make sure they got the best cuts. So, even before anything happened, they would spear the best parts of the meat from the Lord's offering and make sure they got their T-bone steak for dinner. And then, when they weren't stealing the prime cuts from the offerings, they were sleeping with the women who served near the entrance of the tabernacle.

So, their gut and their sexual urges, their belly and what's below the belt ruled them. That was Hophni and Phinehas. And God declared them dead meat, and they were killed.

They thought they could control God. They even brought the Ark of the Lord's Covenant into battle with them. And God says, you think you can just carry the Ark into battle, and now I'm going to fight for you when you treat my offerings and when you treat women that way? And they were killed.

They were animalists, and they died like animals. Well, another aspect is they're greedy. Shepherds who feed only themselves.

They've rushed for profit into Balaam's error. Balaam had a gift of prophecy. Along with that gift of prophecy, he had a hunger for money.

And so, he would sell his prophecies. And he could make Annette pronounce curses and maybe bad things would happen if he pronounced those. So, he was hired by a king to do that, but the Lord wouldn't let him issue the curses.

So, he didn't get to collect the money. Oh, was he disappointed. So, he gave plan B. He says, well, I can't curse Israel, but if you just get them to worship other gods and to hook up with your pagan women, you can get them that way without curses from me.

He got his payoff and he got killed. But rushing for profit into Balaam's error is saying, you know what, religion is a great racket. L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, wrote before Scientology was ever invented by him, the best way to make money is to invent a religion.

Then he invented one and idiots followed him. Some of our finest Hollywood movie stars and others as well follow the religion of the man who before he ever invented the religion said the best way to make money is to make up a religion. Then he made it up and they fell for it.

But, if you're good enough, if you're good enough and skilled enough at concocting what people want and what pushes their buttons, you can get rich. They boast about themselves and they flatter others for their own advantage. They're shepherds who feed only themselves.

And, you know, without saying too much about it, we live in a time where the number one form of Christianity in many places is the prosperity gospel. Huge churches in the United States, huge churches in Africa are teaching that if you have enough faith, you get rich. And they're focusing on the great reward of faith is money and prosperity and having everything go your way if only you have enough faith.

It's a denial of the biblical gospel. It is an exact replica of what Jude's talking about. Shepherds who feed themselves, who think that godliness is a means to financial gain.

And if you're looking out for false teachers, watch your checkbook. You know, if they need three private jets to do the Lord's work, you might want to reconsider. Another thing about them is that they are divisive.

These men speak abusively against whatever they do not understand. They're on the attack if they don't get it. They're grumblers and fault finders.

They're scoffers who are mocking what are the things of God. And these are the men who divide you. Now, once again, this is not what it's going to seem like.

You're going to have people who come along and they're going to say, you know, we need to tweak the biblical doctrine of creation. And if you oppose me, you are divisive. We're going to teach that the Bible contains portions of the Word of God, as well as a whole bunch of errors.

And if you've got a problem with that, wow, are you divisive. We are going to change Christian morality. We don't want to leave the church, far be it from us.

We are going to lobby for changes in our churches or our denomination's official position. And we're going to push and push and push for that. And we're going to make those changes.

And if you oppose the changes, you are a troublemaker. You are one of those who divides because all good Christians are welcoming at all times. And so, you have these people who are bringing the novelties, who are bringing the division and then accusing others of it.

Classic example was King Ahab. King Ahab was supposed to be king over God's people who was leading them in the ways of the Lord. And instead, he continued the worship of the golden calves and introduced new gods, the Asherah and the Baals and false gods in Israel.

And then when he ran into the prophet Elijah, the first words out of his mouth were these, is that you, you troubler of Israel? Elijah's answer was, I have not troubled Israel. You and Jezebel have troubled Israel. You are the ones who divide.

You are the troublemakers. And Jude wants to make it very clear, when there's new doctrines and new approaches to morality, and you think, oh, those old fuddy-duddies who are just standing for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints and they're inflexible. They won't bend.

They won't change to suit the times. They're just such a bunch of trouble-making stick-in-the-muds. You pay very careful attention to who really is causing the trouble and the division.

And be aware that the scoffers, the grumblers and fault-finders are really the ones who are finding fault with the true faith, finding fault with Jesus Christ, finding fault with the Bible, finding fault with the Christian way of living. And they're ruinous. They're clouds without rain blown along by the wind, autumn trees without fruit and uprooted twice dead.

They're wild waves of the sea foaming up their shame, wandering stars for whom blackest darkness has been reserved. If you're living especially in a land like Israel, and a lot of Jude's readers are Jewish as Jude was, those are areas that need rain. When it's dry, you need rain.

You know, I grew up on a farm in an area that doesn't have a lot of heavy rainfall. And you're hoping for rain to come at the right times. And when you see the clouds up there, you say, yes, we're going to get some rain.

And then a big old wind comes along and those clouds you were hoping for rain from, they blow away and everything is just as dry as it was. Jude says, that's what those teachers are like. They raise your hopes of a refreshing, life-giving shower.

And instead, it's all a bunch of hot air. Or to change the pictures, they're like autumn trees. They're twice dead.

Maybe the phrase twice dead has an echo of what the Apostle John speaks of when he says that the lake of fire is the second death. He may be hinting that they're headed for that second death, the lake of fire. But he's also saying they don't have any fruit and they don't have any root.

What's a tree without a root? If a teacher has no roots in the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints in the historic doctrines of the Christian faith, if they have no root, they're dead. And what about the fruit? Well, without any roots there, then the fruit of faith and of godliness just isn't there. There's just empty branches or rotting fruit.

Because the tree has died. Another picture is wild waves of the sea foaming up their shame. You go to the beach and you want it to be a beautiful time at the beach.

Maybe you went there hoping to do a little fishing or maybe you went there hoping to wade into the waves a little bit and enjoy the beach. And instead you got the waves are churning up and there's all kinds of crud coming up onto the shore and the water's filthy. That's what you're getting with these teachers.

You were hoping for something good and you got yuck, gross. Or you were looking for the North Star. You wanted teaching that would direct your life toward eternity, that would lead you to God, that would set your course.

And so you wanted to navigate by that North Star. And instead you fell for a planet. It was a wandering star.

It was just here and there and everywhere and you get way off course if you're setting your course by something that's moving rather than something that's fixed in the heavens. Or maybe a shooting star. It was impressive and then poof, it's gone.

Well, Jude goes into all these different pictures and you say, well, he didn't really give us a lot of doctrinal detail about the teachers in that. He just said a lot of insulting things about them. There are clouds without rain.

There are these rotten autumn trees. There are cruddy waves churning up. There are wandering stars headed for the outer darkness.

Why does he have to keep on insulting them and piling it on? Well, perhaps what we need is not just an accurate description of various heresies and then in the other column, a nice, polite description of what Christians ought to believe. It is helpful to have that, to have some clarity about some of the heresies. To have clarity about the faith once for all entrusted to the saints.

But you also need a sense of disgust at what is disgusting. A sense of danger about what imperils your life. We need to be awakened.

We need to sense and be outraged at what happens to our children when they are led astray by false teachers. At the danger that poses itself to us if we follow false teaching. We need these kinds of warnings and we need them in the tone that Jude gives them.

If you want nicer, you say, I prefer Jesus, the sweet and gentle friend. Go read Matthew 23 and then you'll say, boy, Jude was pretty nice. Read Matthew 23 and what Jesus says about false teachers and the brood of vipers and the whitewashed sepulchres with rotting corpses inside them and the other invective, the other nastiness that Jesus has to say.

Don't get nicer than Jesus. He was outraged not because He just wanted to be mean and insulting, but because terrible things are being done by false teachers and by those who lead you in the way of wickedness. And so, having said all that, expose the enemy agents and have a sense of disgust and of concern, deep concern about the impact they might have on those who are following in their path.

Expect evil attacks. Expound the truth once for all. Entrust to the saints.

Expose those enemy agents and realize what they're like. They are going to change God's grace and distort teaching to make an excuse to do whatever they want. Immorality.

And in doing so, they're denying the right of Jesus Christ to run their life. They're denying that Jesus is sovereign, that Jesus is Lord. So, contend.

Realize that there's a faith that's been given. Don't trust those who say I have improvements that make it more believable, but less worth believing. More easy to follow, but less worth following.

Fight for that faith. We pray, Lord, that You will help us to hear Your voice. Help us, Lord, also to feel the passion and the outrage of Your Holy Spirit at those who grieve the Spirit and who deny the revelation of the Holy Spirit and deny who Jesus Christ is for us.

Help us, Lord, to live in the joy of Your salvation and in the wonders of Your grace. A grace that saves us and also that continually changes us, making us more and more into the image of the Lord Jesus Christ. And then, Lord, as we go on, as we are dedicated to standing for the faith and fighting for it, help us also to hear Jude's call to snatch people from the fire and rescue them, to be merciful to those who doubt, to always rely and be kept by You.

We thank You, Lord, that amid all the trials of this life and all the attacks of the evil one, You have promised that our faith will not fail when we focus it on You and that Your church will prevail even against the very gates of hell. We pray in Jesus' name, Amen.