MINISTER, Rev. Thomas
O. Scarborough.
Jude. Introduction.
Today I am going to
begin a series on an unusual
little book in the New Testament.
This is the book of Jude.
We find the book of Jude just before the final book of Revelation.
Once again, we shall be
doing an exegetical
series -- that means that we shall be going through the book of Jude
verse by verse, and we shall treat it as God's
Word, and try
to understand what God is saying to us -- without modifying it --
without subtracting from it -- and simply letting the Lord speak
through this book.
This morning I am just
going to do an introduction
of Jude -- we shall be looking at who wrote
it, when
they wrote it, and also what the central themes of the book of Jude
are.
* * * * * * * * *
Now the book of Jude was
written by a man called -- Jude.
He introduces himself in verse 1 as the brother of James
-- note also that he introduces himself as a servant
of Jesus
Christ -- or
as a slave
of Jesus Christ. Now this is unusual,
because he is in fact the brother
of Jesus Christ. And this is partly why this little book found its
way into the Bible
-- it was written by the brother of Jesus.
If we go back to Matthew
13 verse 55, we read there how the people said concerning Jesus:
"Isn't this the carpenter's son? Isn't His mother's name Mary,
and aren't His brothers James, Joseph, Simon, and Jude?"
Now Jude was not
a prominent person.
It was James who was really well known, and it was James
who became one of the leading lights in the early Church.
Jude was also
a leader
-- but without any real claim to fame. He wasn't a leading
light. He
seems to have lived a simple life, without being at the centre of
events in the New Testament.
We know very little
about Jude himself -- but there is an interesting story from history,
that reflects upon him. That is that during the reign of the emperor
Domitian,
who reigned at the end of the first century, and wanted to destroy
the Christian Church.
And someone reported to
emperor Domitian that some of the family
of Jesus
were still alive -- the decendants
of Jude -- not Jude himself, but probably his sons and his grandsons.
So Domitian ordered that these descendants of Jude should be
summoned to appear before the Roman courts. It is said that he was
worried that these relatives
of Jesus
might become the centre of a revolution -- that people might gather
behind them.
But when these men were
brought before the court, they were dressed as labourers -- and their
hands were hardened by work in the fields -- and the Roman
authorities saw that these men were all just harmless labourers,
and so they were dismissed.
That probably tells us
something about Jude also. As far as we know, he was a simple
man.
* * * * * * * * * *
Now we see this
simplicity,
in fact, in this book
of Jude. His plainness and his straightforwardness come through very
clearly in the book of Jude.
Now Jude speaks about
issues of great importance
in this little book -- but unlike many of the other writers of the
New Testament, Jude does not enter into finer theological details.
He doesn't write a treatise.
But in this letter of his, he simply speaks from the heart.
The famous commentator
William Barclay said: "(Jude) was not a theologian,
but... (he was) a plain honest leader of the Church."
Another commentator
(Moffatt) said about him: "(Jude) does not seek to argue
and to refute,
for he writes as one who knows
when round indignation is more telling than argument."
So there is a moral
authority about Jude that does not in fact need
any sophisticated arguments, or any carefully crafted words. Jude is
a man who writes in spiritual
power, but he
does not come with any great intellectual persuasion.
* * * * * * * * *
And there is a lesson
here for us today as well.
When we are dealing as
Christians with untruth around us, or with immorality, we don't need
to be clever -- we don't need to have all the right words, or the
perfect arguments. That is what lawyers do. It is good enough to
have a good heart -- as Jude did -- and to deal with matters from a
position of spiritual
strength, and spiritual
peace.
The Bible tells us:
"Test the spirits."
(1 John 4:1). It doesn't say: "Test the statements -- or even,
test the words, or test the arguments." It says: "Test the
spirits."
What is the spirit
we are dealing with here? What is this spirit?
So basically what Jude does in this little book is to test the
spirits.
And he does it in a powerful way.
* * * * * * * * *
Now the book itself is
written fairly late in relation to the other books of the New
Testament. It is a latecomer to the New Testament. There are hints
in this book of Jude that it comes at the end of the first generation
of the Church.
Let us look at verse 17:
"But, dear friends, remember what the apostles of our Lord
Jesus Christ foretold." Notice that this verse is in the past
tense. It is
talking about the apostles as though they are now history. Most of
them, by this time, are dead and gone.
We do know that the
apostle Peter
was still alive when Jude wrote this letter -- because Peter quotes
from
this book of Jude -- if we look back at the second letter of Peter,
Peter borrows quite a lot of the powerful language of Jude in a small
section of that second letter of Peter.
Peter was martyred when
he was 70 years old, in the year A.D. 69 -- so the book of Jude was
written of course before the year A.D. 69.
* * * * * * * * *
Another interesting
thing about the book of Jude -- now looking back over Christian
history
-- is that this little book went through phases
of popularity. It went through times of neglect,
where hardly anybody paid attention to it -- but it also went through
times of great popularity.
And what is particularly
interesting is that this book became most
popular during the great revivals
of the Church. Wherever the Holy Spirit was doing a great work in
the Church, and shaking the Church out of its complacency, that is
where this little book of Jude became very popular.
The commentator William
Barclay says: "There have indeed been times in the history of
the Church, and especially in the revivals
of the Church, when Jude was not far off from being the most relevant
book in the New Testament."
And another commentator
(Moffatt) says that Jude has "been a fiery cross to rouse
the Churches".
* * * * * * * * *
An interesting point
about the book of Jude is that Jude never planned to write
it. In fact he planned to write something else.
Jude writes in verse 3: "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."
So Jude was intending
to write about salvation
-- instead he felt compelled to write about some people who had
slipped into the Church -- in verse 4, they secretly
slipped in -- and it seems that Jude never again got the chance to
write that letter that he planned -- in verse 3.
But the fact is, Jude
did more for the Church by writing this urgent
little letter than he probably would have done by writing a long and
scholarly treatise. This little letter, as I said, has been a
bombshell
in Church revivals.
And we learn
something important here. Sometimes the things that you and I have
planned
are not the things that are going to bring the greatest blessing to
the kingdom of God.
The things that I have planned
are not necessarily the things that are going to bring the greatest
glory to God.
While Jude thought he
had been sidetracked
here, with his letter of Jude -- he had to write about something that
he had not planned
to write about -- that thing he hadn't planned to do became the one
thing that God used most mightily of all the things he ever did.
There are many examples
of this happening in the Christian Church. God often does His
greatest work, not with what we have in mind -- but with something
completely different. There are so many examples from history, I
just wouldn't know where to begin.
And the same applies to
your life and mine. What I achieve for God's kingdom doesn't depend
on my plans -- it depends on what God is going to do with me, by His
grace.
If you are going to
touch your family, or touch your community, or touch your Church, it
may very well not come about through what you have planned --
it may very well come about through something completely
different -- something that the Lord has planned instead.
Also, your effectiveness
for God's Kingdom does not depend on your position in life.
You don't need to be in a certain position to be used mightily for
God. When we reach heaven one day, we will quite likely find
that some of us who were in the humblest positions brought about
by far the greatest things for God's Kingdom.
The main thing is that
you and I should remain people whom the Lord can use -- people
who are in step with the Lord -- who will be filled with His Spirit
when that moment comes that the Lord will use us.
*
* * * * * * * *
Now this morning I am
not going to go into any great detail in the book of Jude -- this
morning we shall simply be taking an overview of the book of
Jude, to see what Jude's concerns are as a whole.
And let us begin by
looking at Jude's introduction in verse 4: "For certain men,
whose condemnation was written about long ago, have slipped in among
you."
Verse 4 then summarises
the whole thrust of this book of Jude. Certain men have entered
the Church -- they have insinuated their way into the Church --
that means that these were men who seemed to be fine Christians at
first -- they said all the right words -- they seemed to be
wonderful Christian people -- but as Jude says here, they are reefs
under the water.
*
* * * * * * * * *
So it is possible for
people to say all the right words, and seem to be wonderful
Christian people -- but still there is something fundamentally wrong.
And there are two things
specifically that these men have brought with them into the
Church -- two things specifically which are wrong, which Jude
pinpoints.
Let us read the second
part of verse 4 -- and let us notice that word "and",
which shows us that there are two main points here. The second part of verse
4: "They are godless men, who exchange the grace of our God
into a licence for immorality -- and deny Jesus Christ our only
Sovereign and Lord."
There are the two points
-- we shall expand on them only briefly this morning, just to
try and gain a general understanding as to what the book of Jude is
about.
Let us also read verse
5: "Though you already know this," says Jude, "I want to
remind you that the Lord delivered His people out of Egypt, but later
destroyed those who did not believe."
*
* * * * * * *
Let us look at the first
problem that Jude addresses. He is talking here about men
who seem to have understood the grace of God -- but he says, in
verse 4, that they have turned this grace into a licence for
immorality.
And then verse 5
underlines this -- the Lord delivered His people out of Egypt -- and that
deliverance was an act of God's grace -- an act of God's
undeserved mercy -- but after the deliverance, the Israelites did not
believe, and so they were barred from the Promised Land.
Notice that these verses
are talking about a kind of half-way state in a person's
spiritual life.
They are talking about
people who have come out of Egypt -- they people who know all
about God's saving grace -- but these people have not reached a point
where will be allowed to enter the Promised Land -- that is
eternal life.
What is missing?
The fact is that many
people today have understood the wonderful grace of God -- and
because of this, they seem to be perfect Christians.
They can talk about
God's undeserved mercy -- they can talk about His saving grace --
about His forgiveness through Jesus -- but there is something
absolutely crucial that is missing -- and that something is true
repentance.
You find many Christians
-- even ministers -- who say that God's loves everybody -- who
say even that it all right to live a lifestyle of licence, to
use the word we find here in verse 4.
But they have not
understood repentance.
They have not come to
that point where they have understood that they are dead in their
sins and their trespasses -- that point where, as I said two
weeks ago -- they realise that only God can now raise me up from
such a condition of death -- where they come before the Lord with
repentance, and cry to Him to have mercy on them.
They have understood
God's grace, but there never came a point in their lives where they
repented. And I am not talking about those everyday prayers that we
say for the forgiveness of our sins -- but about a place in your
life where your whole life is changed -- where suddenly the whole
of your position before God becomes clear, and you
understand that you need to enter into a new relationship with Him --
that grace is not enough -- you need repentance.
That is why the apostle
Peter said on the day of Pentecost: "Repent, and be
baptised every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the
forgiveness of your sins."
Here we have the word
forgiveness -- it is related to grace -- but it comes at the end of
the apostle's message. His first word is "repent".
*
* * * * * * * *
Let us look at the
second problem that Jude addresses -- at the end of verse 4.
"And -- these
people deny Jesus Christ our only Sovereign and Lord."
How exactly do they deny
the Lord?
As we go through this
book of Jude, we discover that these men are part of the Church
fellowship -- they take part in Holy Communion -- they speak
beautiful words in the Church -- Jude says they are flattering with
their beautiful words -- they even give messages from the Lord.
We have already seen
that they deny the Lord Jesus by their license -- by their
immoral behaviour -- "immoral" here means morality that is not in
line with God's Word. The popular understanding of
immorality is not the same as the Biblical
understanding of
immorality -- it is easy to confuse the two.
But there is another
clue here in the words of Jude -- an important clue, that is
repeated in the book of Jude -- Jude says: "They deny Jesus
Christ our only Sovereign and Lord."
*
* * * * * * * *
One of the
characteristics of people who have understood God's grace, but not the need
for true repentance -- and for the atoning death of Jesus Christ --
is that such people believe that God's grace will lead
everybody to heaven. All they see is grace.
And what these men in
the book of Jude were probably saying is that there were other
prophets and teachers who could show the way to heaven. If we
look at the history books, we know that there were men at that
time who were teaching this.
Jude says here that
Jesus Christ is our only Sovereign and Lord. God is not merciful to
those who have not come to know Him.
And here we return again
to the important point of repentance.
One of the things that
clearly separates Christianity from every other religion in the
world is that the other religions don't know the concept of
repentance. There is no clear teaching of repentance. They
sometimes use the word repentance -- but it is not at all the same as
Christian repentance.
The other religions say
that you can still please God by the things that you do --
and that if you do enough good, God can overlook the evil. And
as long as God can overlook some of the evil, there is no need
for total repentance.
The reason why Jesus is
our only Sovereign and Lord is that only He died on the cross to
make atonement for our sins. Only He requires repentance
before He covers us with His saving blood.
God is not only a God of
grace, but He is a God of holiness and of wrath, who requires a
moment in our lives where we come before Him with repentance, and
ask Him for mercy through Jesus Christ.
These are the two points
that the whole of the book of Jude is based upon -- of course
the book of Jude will tell us far more than this -- what I have
said this morning is just a very brief introduction.
*
* * * * * * * *
Do you believe in God's
grace -- in His undeserved mercy towards the sinner?
If so, have you also
come to a point of complete repentance, and surrender in your life?
Can you look back and say: "I came to repentance?" Or do
you look back and all you see is that God is a God of grace? Then you
need to go back to base, and see whether you have truly
understood the salvation message.
If you would like to
know this morning just how to commit your life to the Lord, I
shall have -- as usual -- some booklets in my hand at the door.
Please ask me for a copy, and you can have one with our compliments.
This will explain to you
exactly what to do to come before the Lord with true
repentance.
AMEN.
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