Jude, Infiltration

Jude 4 For certain men have crept in unnoticed, who long ago were marked out for this condemnation, ungodly men, who turn the grace of our God into lewdness and deny the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ.

Jude’s indictment of these men begins with this verse. He says that certain men have crept into the church unnoticed. The image Jude is attempting to portray is one of stealth and secrecy. They did not come boldly, but slipped in like the wedding guest in the parable Jesus told, who was found without a proper garment, Matthew 22:11-13. In fact, this passage in Matthew corresponds quite well with the content Jude is addressing.

Though these men have humanly crept in without notice, under inspiration of the Holy Spirit Jude writes that such men were long ago marked out for such condemnation, like Pharaoh in the days of Moses. God put Pharaoh in that position at that time so He might demonstrate His sovereignty and power to men, Romans 9:17, 18. As difficult as it may be for us to grasp, the Lord foreknows all men; He knows who will believe and who will disbelieve and He places us in history as He sees fit. Pharaoh’s purpose was to resist God, so that God might demonstrate to Israel (and Egypt) the impotence of the Egyptian monarch and his deities (Exodus 12:12), contrasted to Yahweh and His absolute power. With these certain men, their condemnation was foreknown to God, who, like He did with Cain, marked them out for His judgment alone.

The offenses of these men are then listed. First, Jude ascribes ungodliness to them. They are ungodly men. To be fair and entirely honest all of us are ungodly until we are born again through faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ. That does not mean that we behave like serial killers; it means that we are, as the word implies, without God. The prefix “un,” has two meanings, and both equally apply here. The first is, “not.” When someone is not lucky, they are unlucky. The second definition is, “the opposite of.” For instance, if you want to disengage a lock, you must unlock it. So these men are ungodly in the first sense because they do not have God. They are ungodly in the second sense as well, because they embody or typify (as do we all) the opposite of a holy God.

But knowing their spiritual state, being unsaved men, what are they doing in the church Christ founded, (see Acts 20:28 and Matthew 16:18)? These men are first determined to turn, or transform, the grace of God into lewdness. The idea here is sexual depravity. Jude describes the sin of license; the notion that since we are set free from sin when we are saved, we are free TO sin, BECAUSE we are saved. This is patented nonsense, which Paul dealt with quite efficiently in Romans chapter 6. The crux of Paul’s argument is that having died to sin and been set free from it, we have concurrently been set free to serve our Lord. Christ is to have dominion over us, not sin; the one we submit to in obedience is our true master. We were, one and all, once slaves of sin, but having been purchased through the blood of Jesus Christ, we are now His slaves, whose will we obey. Since Christ abhors sin, and in fact died to set us free from it, the Christian should find the idea of wallowing in sin after being liberated from it abhorrent. It cost our Lord His life to separate sin from the sinner without us suffering eternal darkness as a consequence. To traipse back to it so lightly reveals a gross misunderstanding concerning the gravity of what has been done for us.

Their second offense is that of denying God and His Son, Jesus Christ. The Apostle John, likely countering incipient “Christianized” gnosticism in his epistle, wrote, “Who is a liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist who denies the Father and the Son. Whoever denies the Son does not have the Father either; he who acknowledges the Son has the Father also,” 1 John 2:22, 23. If we deny that Jesus is Savior and God, then we also deny the Father, who set His seal on the Son (see John 6:27) and testified that what was said of Him was truth. Gnosticism claimed that Christ was not God in the flesh and that when He returned from death He did not possess a physical body. John counters these claims in his epistle, and it would seem that some similar heresy had arisen among Jude’s former church fellows.

All cults make Jesus Christ less than He is according to the Scriptural account. He is a great teacher, an angel, a former man ascending to godhood (similar to what the serpent taught in Eden), a god but not THE God, the only and true God. In this every cult falls short of the true Jesus, and therefore deny Him and His salvific power, as well as the Father who sent Him. Religion will always try to bring you into conformity to their rules and dogmas, but the Bible wants to conform you to the image of Christ, the Son of God, the only name under heaven by which we must be saved. To deny this fundamental and utterly essential facet of the Christian faith is to deny the claims of the Lord and the church’s purpose on earth. It renders the gospel moot by turning it, or transforming it into a different gospel worthy of God’s condemnation. Such men do so to turn people after them, because they crave power and authority over others. Paul warned as much, “Also from among yourselves men will rise up, speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after themselves,” Acts 20:30. Peter adds, “But there were also false prophets among the people, even as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Lord who bought them, and bring on themselves swift destruction,” 2 Peter 2:1.

Jude does seem to be alluding to this verse in Peter’s epistle when he writes that such men were marked out for this condemnation. Peter warned that these men, being false teachers, would deny the Lord who bought them. False teachers will, without fail preach falsehood by virtue of their very nature. They do not submit to truth, so they will continue to spout Satan’s lie that he has peddled since Eden. In the Garden Satan offered religion as a substitute to faith in God. His ministers likewise refuse to give place to Jesus, acknowledging that He is who He claims to be, and permitting the Lord His rightful throne in our lives. They do not believe, and bereft of the Spirit, all they may do is corrupt and pollute sound doctrine and mingle carnal, natural morality with God’s holiness. The ensuing results, as we will shortly see, are catastrophic.