'Contending for the Once-for-all Faith'
Jude 1-25 July 16, 1989 (Second in brief series on Jude)

TEXT COMMENTS:

v. 5 'Lord' should be 'Jesus'; on two counts: strong MSS support, and the principle that the more difficult reading is to be preferred. (Agrees with many other NT statements, e.g. 1 Cor 10; Heb 11) The believers of the old epoch did not know him by his NT name, Jesus Christ, but they trusted and loved the same Son of God that we do, and were saved by him as we are today.

v. 9 No mention of this in OT (probably drawn from a Jewish work The Assumption of Moses. This along with the citation from the Book of Enoch, written in the period between the OT and NT, in v. 14 has provoked much discussion. How can Jude quote from non inspired books. Well many plausible answers: So does Paul without assigning biblical authority to them; may be that he knows from the Lord himself that this is a reliable piece of history; may be using his opponents weapons against them without making any judgment of the truth or falsehood of these texts themselves.

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Christian history is the history of controversy over the truth, over the faith once entrusted to the saints. From its beginning, the supporters this Christian faith have had to fend off every manner of error, modification and corruption of the truth.

The OT is full of this, of course, as the prophets expose and condemn the falsehoods which have been accepted into the mind and practice of God's people. And it is no different in the apostolic period. Indeed, much of the NT has this pathological purpose, of warning the church of the encroachment of error, of exposing false teaching and false teachers.

And so it has continued to be. Athanasius, Augustine and many other church fathers fighting off the heresies concerning Jesus Christ which the Arians taught, or concerning grace and salvation which the Pelagians taught, or concerning the church and its purity which the Donatists taught. Luther and Calvin and the other reformers restoring to the church the truth concerning justification by faith alone as that truth is laid down in holy Scripture, a grand and fundamental truth which had been eclipsed by the medieval church's compromise of this sacred principle. Or our Scottish forefathers, laying down their lives for the principles of the Lordship of Christ and the spiritual freedom of his church, as the political powers of the day sought to bring the church into subjection to themselves.

From the apostles to our own day, it has been necessary to contend, to fight for the truth, to defend it against those, within the church herself, who would abandon it or exchange it for their own ideas and opinions. Most of us do not have a great deal of difficulty accepting the necessity of that. We are not troubled by the fact that the truth must be defended against direct attack or subtle misrepresentation.

But, the practice of contending for the truth is another matter. Here we find our problems. One problem for many of us is the severity of tone and language which one finds in the NT when it is contending for the truth.

Jude minces no words! 'dreamers,' 'unreasoning animals', 'blemishes at your love feasts,' 'wild waves of the sea foaming up their shame' and so on. Where is loving your enemies and judging not lest ye be judged in language like that? But in this Jude is by no means unique. Paul warns the Philippians to beware of the dogs, by which he means the false teachers seeking to undermine the truth in that church. We wonder if we could or should ever speak of people in such terms, however wrong their doctrine.

Then, we have, most of us, had enough experience of folks who have imbibed a controversial spirit and are always finding fault, always criticizing others in the church.

We know people who seem to take delight in exposing the errors of others and of laying them low and some who are very accomplished at this. These are like the philosopher, Edgar Brightman's polemicist acquaintance of his, who, Brightman said, not only always annihilated his opponent, but dusted off the place where he had stood. Church History is littered with controversialists like John Bale, the English reformer, who was so bitter and coarse in his criticism of those who refused to accept the reformation that he gained for himself the nickname, 'Bilious Bale.'

And some of us have grown up in traditions which, because of a spirit of controversy and penchant for controversy and determination to wage war on every one's falsehoods, became negative, and bitter, and defensive in a way quite ugly and not at all in keeping with the love of Jesus Christ and the good news the church is called both to proclaim and to adorn.

And we have seen in the church and, many of us have far too often seen in ourselves, how quickly controversies which are supposedly about the truth and for the truth, become, in fact, unseemly squabbling between proud and vainglorious people more interested in being themselves victorious than in winning another to the truth as it is in Jesus.

All of this makes some of us wary to imitate Jude in his controversial spirit and in his contention for the truth. And that cannot be right. The Holy Spirit himself taught Jude his language and his technique in controversy, and Paul's and Jesus' too. And it is good to remember with what strong language our Savior dealt with those who were confounding the truth about God, about sin, and about salvation. 'You brood of vipers', 'Woe to you, you hypocrites, you whitewashed tombs' and many like things he said.

Now, we could stop here and notice how the Bible is also careful to stress the importance of gentleness and love in the management of our controversies on behalf of the truth. Paul might well call a false teacher a dog, but he also told Timothy, in 2 Tim 3:25, to instruct gently those who oppose him, in the hope that God would grant them repentance leading them to the knowledge of the truth. This Biblical balance and tension between mincing no words in exposing error yet always and only motivated by love and in keeping with the meekness of a truly Christian character, is that for which Augustine was famous in his controversial preaching and writing. They said of him that he was fortiter in re, suaviter in modo,

strong in the matter, but gentle in his manner.

We could also point out that Jude is speaking clearly of false teachers who have departed so far from the truth and who have overturned such fundamental doctrine that they cannot be Christians at all and that no one who follows their teaching can be a Christian. He can say of them, in v. 4, that they already stand condemned, or damned, for the views they hold and the teaching they are seeking to spread in the church of God. No doubt, one of the great errors often made in Christian controversies on behalf of the truth as it is found in Holy Scripture, is not to make a very clear distinction between errors which amount to real unbelief in Christ and errors which genuine believers, brothers and sisters in Christ may unwittingly entertain and proclaim, thinking themselves all the while and wanting to be faithful to the Lord and to his Word. Paul deals, for example, very differently with the Corinthian Christians and the errors of thought and life which had made their way into that church, than he deals with the false teachers in Philippi or Galatia who were subverting the gospel.

So, it is certainly possible to say much more in the way of rounding out the picture of contending for the faith which we are given in such bold strokes and with such sharp edges in Jude's urgent and controversial letter. But, it is Jude that we have before us, not another passage of the Bible, and so we must listen to Him and to the Holy Spirit speaking through him. And when we do, we cannot avoid the conclusion that contending for the faith, that defending the truth, that standing firmly against falsehood's appearance in the church is the important calling of every generation of Christians and of every Christian himself or herself as he or she may have opportunity.

I. This is so, in the first place, says Jude, because the truth will always need defense. There will never be a time when contending for the faith is not necessary.

Jude's letter serves to remind us that combining the malevolence of the Devil, his hatred of the truth, with the weakness and sinfulness of human nature, the truth, the true faith is always in jeopardy in the church. He makes the point in two ways.

First, he simply lays it down as a rule that wherever the truth goes, falsehood will come right behind it to undo it. It is a fact of life, a condition of the church's existence. He reminds his readers in verse 18 that the apostles had already warned them that false teachers would come who would scoff at the truth they had taught in the Lord's name. Paul and John are full of warnings of the same kind.

And it is remarkable and demoralizing to see how accurately they predicted the future. The church had no sooner set out on its conquest through the world than it was beset more by error from within than from opposition from without. And throughout the history of the church since those early days, the church has again and again recovered the truth only to lose it again or exchange it for some obvious falsehood, in a mere generation or two. A single generation after the Puritan period in England and Scotland, that period of such deep and rich Christianity of a genuine Biblical kind, I say, a single generation later, true and living faith in Christ, a true grasp of the gospel was so rare that when Whitefield and Wesley came preaching the new birth and justification by faith in Christ, virtually the whole church rose up in angry opposition to their message.

And what of our own day? The very unbelief--the very same--against which the evangelicals protested so warmly and often so nobly when it made its way earlier in this century into the great churches of our land, is now, in almost precisely the same manner, making headway in those same evangelical churches.

The day will never come in this world, when we can relax our vigilance on behalf of the faith once delivered to the saints. It will always have its detractors, someone will always come forward to suggest another doctrine and another way than that of the faith once for all entrusted to the saints.

And, for that matter, the falsehoods will always be the old standbys. What was the falsehood Jude was exposing? He says in v 4 that these teachers were antinomians--that is they were arguing that if you were a Christian you didn't have to live a godly and a devout life before the Lord; and, paradoxically, they were legalists at the same time. In one way or another--Jude does not specify--they were minimizing Jesus Christ and the decisiveness of his work for our salvation; no doubt, saying that while he did something, we must do something too to earn our salvation.

And throughout the ages there have always been many in the church who have preferred their sins to a holy life and some form of self-salvation to the humbling but liberating truth of the Bible alone, grace alone, faith alone, and Jesus Christ alone. Count on it: the PCA, young church, evangelical church, anti-liberal church that it is, the memory of her battles with unbelief in the churches from which she sprang still fresh in her mind, will soon be challenged to defend these very foundations of our faith from attacks that will come from within her.

Then, says Jude, we must always be prepared to contend for the faith, because of the subtlety of error and the slippery way it insinuates itself into the mind of the church.

We may well sometimes think that any Christian, any church would immediately detect a legalist, or a denial of Jesus Christ, or sinful license and rebellion against God's authority masquerading as Zinn liberty, but it is not so.

The Devil is craftier than any of us knows. One of the reasons why Jude used such caustic language to describe these false teachers was no doubt because so few in the church were recognizing them for what they really were. He says himself in v. 4 that these men had secretly crept in among the saints. The church had not recognized them as the enemies of their salvation which they were.

We would like to think that all heretics snarl and drool and twirl their mustaches, but it is not so. You remember my telling you how J. Gresham Machen, who was to become the champion of Biblical Christianity in the protestant world in the 1920s and 30s, and who had been raised in a godly family and had been a convinced Christian from his youth, nevertheless, while studying in Germany early in the century came completely under the spell of the arch-liberal of the day, Wilhelm Hermann, because Hermann was so alive, and was so full of religious zeal. I have done enough graduate study in theology to know from my own experience that orthodox men are not necessarily the most attractive or compelling or interesting, nor necessarily the most exciting or most excited by their religious vision.

These men troubling the church in Jude's day were probably personally quite attractive, they were probably quite sincere--their motives may well have been fundamentally selfish as Jude says in v 16, but they may have genuinely felt otherwise. They thought they were right and that they were doing good. They probably lived quite moral lives, as the world counts morality, as the Pharisees had lived before them. But Pascal was only being faithful to the Bible when he wrote: 'Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.' Most of the real evil in the world is accomplished by utterly sincere people.

So Christians and the believing church must contend for the truth because that work is perpetually necessary, both because of the perennial appearance of error and because of its subtlety in insinuating itself into the mind of God's people.

II. Second, Jude says, we must ever contend for the faith once-for-all delivered to the saints because this contending, this controversy, is simply love refusing to budge, it is simply one of the most important ways in which Christians can practice that Christ-like love which always protects and always rejoices with the truth.

Jude would not have been unaware of the truth which John Newton wrote: 'There is a principle of self which disposes us to despise those who differ from us.' He was not unaware that controversy, ostensibly for the truth, can often be waged in pride and for only selfish ends. But, he also knew that controversy for the truth could and ought to be waged for the purest and the highest of ends, indeed, for love itself.

It is love which constrained Jude to write his urgent, stinging letter, first because he saw so clearly the true issue of heresy, and the stakes that were involved in accepting false teaching in the church of God.

What is at stake here, he urges them to recognize, with their well-being upon his heart, is 'the punishment of eternal fire' (v 7); 'the judgment of God' (v 15); 'the fearful, terrible fate of those who die under God's wrath' (vv 22-23); and 'separation from God and from the joy of heaven' (v 24). Jude is not concerned about losing adherents to his party, he is not worried that these Christians will no longer call him master; he is terrified that they will fall under the wrath of God and be destroyed and their children after them for abandoning the truth which the Lord had taught them through his apostles.

This week I read the results of a survey of 3,907 ministers and people in another Presbyterian Church in our land. These results were published in the denomination's official magazine. Just 5% of the ministers and 16% of the laity thought that the Bible should be taken literally; more than 3/4 of all respondents agreed with the statement: 'I don't believe people who have not heard of Christ will be damned, but I do desire to share the love of Christ with them'; only 47% of the lay members agree that prayer is talking with God and that God answers prayer. Those views--which make us fear for the salvation of these people--did not develop by accident; they were taught by teachers who will one day have to answer to God for leading so many astray and for convincing so many to think about life, about God, about salvation in a very different way than the Bible teaches them to think about those things.

Jude was looking into the same pit and into the same tombs in hell into which Dante would later look with all the power of his sanctified imagination.

We entered through the portal unopposed;
And I, who was most curious to see
What punishments the fortress might contain,
Gazed round about me as I stepped within.
On either side I saw a wide expanse
With anguish filled, and torments horrible.
...here the tombs were everywhere about,
Save that they were more bitter to behold.
For round about those many monuments
Flames were scattered, so that they were heated
Brighter than iron e'er was made to glow.
The covers everywhere were lifted off,
And from each tomb there rose such piteous groans
As only souls in torment could produce.
I asked my master: 'Tell me, who are these
Who, buried in these sepulchres, proclaim
Their anguish with such piteous laments?'
He answered: 'The archeretics lie here,
With all their followers, of every sect;
The graves are crowded more than one would think.

Now that is only Dante's imagination, but when we read in God's holy Word that false teachers are sons of the Devil and of the lake of fire prepared for the Devil and those who do his work, we are not able any longer to brush aside Dante's picture or to think that Jude was overzealous in his urgent appeal to these believers to be rid of those false teachers and all they taught.

God! fight we not within a cursed world,
Whose very air teams thick with leagued fiends--
Each word we speak has infinite effects--
Each soul we pass must go to heaven or hell--
And this our one chance through eternity
To drop and die, like dead leaves in the brake...
Be earnest, earnest, earnest; mad if thou wilt;
Do what thou dost as if the stake were heaven,
And that thy last deed ere the judgment day.

That is the spirit, that is the mind, that is the heart of Jude as he writes to save his hearers, to deliver them from what may well destroy them. They have no appreciation of how dangerous are these falsehoods with which they are flirting. But Jude, the brother of the Lord and of James, knows only too well. And so he writes his passionate, urgent, desperate letter. And it is love for these saints and hope for their salvation which puts all of the edge and all of the pungency and all of the sting in Jude's faithful pen.

And, then, secondly, it is love which compelled Jude to write his controversial letter and to contend for the faith, because this false teaching was an attack on the Lord Jesus Christ. So Jude says in v. 4. It was not only that these false teachers were jeopardizing the eternal life of this church; they were denying the Lord, they were robbing him of his rightful honor in his own church. They were minimizing Jesus Christ whom all Christians ought to spend their days and nights magnifying.

Jude would have no doubt that the Lord was able to defend himself and didn't require Jude's help; but he would have heartily agreed with John Calvin that even a dog barks when his master is attacked and with Charles Spurgeon who said, 'To part with truth to show charity is to betray our Lord with a kiss.'

You remember my often telling you of Charles Simeon, the Anglican stalwart at Holy Trinity church in Cambridge, England in the later years of the 18th and early years of the 19th century. He was a man who strove with might and main to contend for the truth, when that truth was widely scorned in his own Anglican church; and he succeeded in a marvelous way in defiance of the most bitter opposition. And there arose in Holy Trinity church over the years of his ministry a great congregation of both learned and simple folk who loved the faith once for all entrusted to the saints.

But, as is so regularly the case, a generation later, things were not at all the same. E.S. Woods was the minister then and he was no Charles Simeon and in his memoirs he tells this story. He had asked one of the Cambridge Univeristy professors to preach in the Holy Trinity pulpit and in that sermon, the professor had denied all the Bible's grand truth of redemption in Jesus Christ. The next day, an old Sunday School teacher came to the vicarage to tender his resignation. He had been unable to sleep all night, he said, because there, in Charles Simeon's old pulpit, Bible truths had been belittled. Woods adds his own comment, 'I could scarcely control my amusement.' Sleeplessness over departures from apostolic Christianity was to him a matter of amusement.

But that noble Sunday School teacher was Jude, the Lord's own brother, come back to life, bearing his master's reproach and unable to keep silence when the church participates in the denial of her Lord and Savior. May no believing Sunday School teacher in this church ever be compelled to do such a noble thing.

We need, and will ever need, in this church, in this denomination, in this generation of Christendom, contenders for the faith once delivered to the saints. Men and women who can speak with the purest of motives, with clean all-men-loving hearts, for the safety of the brethren and the honor of Christ. Men and women whose love for people and for Christ constrains them to speak when falsehood is being insinuated into the mind of the church. And I charge you all, in Jude's name, and in the Holy Spirit's name, to contend for the faith of Jesus Christ, remembering what our Savior said:

'Whoever acknowledges me before men, I will also acknowledge him before my Father in heaven.'

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