"Contending for the Faith"
Jude
November 9, 1997

Text Comment

I'm going to make just a few comments on the text as we read it this morning, leaving some other matters for comment the next several Lord's Day mornings.

v. 1 There is no good reason for doubting the evidence of the NT and of early Christian writings that this Jude is the brother of the Lord, a younger, perhaps the youngest, son of Joseph and Mary. He is the third of the four sons mentioned Mark 6:3 and fourth in the list of four in Matthew 13:55. That would make him, of course, also the brother of James, the author of the letter that bears that name in the NT. The early church called James and Jude "the brothers of the Lord," as we read in 1 Corinthians 9:5, but from the earliest times it was understood why neither James nor Jude identified themselves as the Lord's brothers in their writings. They preferred to think of themselves as his servants, perhaps especially because they remembered that during the days they knew him in their family circle they did not believe in him. What memories this man must have had! What regrets and what thanksgivings!

No one knows to whom this letter was sent. It was obviously sent to a specific group of Christians in a particular place who were facing a particular crisis, but who those Christians were and where lived is not known.

v. 4 Now, as you may remember, the very interesting feature of this short letter is that a great deal of it appears as well in 2 Peter, especially 2 Peter 2:1-18. Indeed, of the 25 verses in Jude, fully 15 of them appear in whole or in part in 2 Peter. I won't trouble you with the long and complicated debates about this: whether Jude was first, Peter was first, or whether both of them borrowed from a now lost document. It is enough to say at this point that the scholarly consensus -- a consensus that includes both Bible-believing and non-evangelical scholarship --, is that Jude was written first and that Peter incorporated part of Jude's letter in his own, because he was facing false teaching of the same type that Jude warned against in his letter.

Now, in the following material, we encounter some unusual remarks. We'll leave them for a later time.

Apparently there had been an outbreak of false teaching in a church known to Jude the brother of the Lord. He had, as he tells us in v. 3, apparently already some plans to write to these Christians about salvation in Christ -- one wonders what that letter would have been; perhaps something like Paul's to the Romans! -- but quickly laid aside those plans when the news of these false teachers arrived. He immediately picked up his pen, wrote this stirring tract, and sent it in haste before it was too late.

Origen, at the beginning of the 3rd century, says, "Jude wrote an epistle, tiny in the extreme, but yet full of powerful words and heavenly grace."

Taking 2 Peter and Jude together, it is still not possible to give a detailed account of the false teaching that was threatening the church. In some way these men denied the Lordship of Christ; certainly they minimized the law of God. Apparently they claimed to have a deeper knowledge, a greater insight into the world of the Spirit that emancipated them from the requirements of morality. Jude and Peter are both very stern in condemning their worldliness and immorality. In any case, like many false teachers who would follow them in history, they taught in a manner that was crafty and plausible and, for that reason, very dangerous. Further, Jude doesn't hesitate to accuse them of base motives, of seeking personal gain by their teaching, and of corrupt practices, insinuating themselves by flattery and so on. No doubt they would have denied and resented these accusations, true as they may be.

Now, in treating one by one the minor letters of the NT we have already considered 2 John which is like Jude in being a fiery warning of the evil and the danger of heresy. That we encounter a similar warning also in Jude is a reminder to us of the emphasis placed on pure doctrine in the Bible and the New Testament. NT Christianity, like it or not, has a controversial character and so does the Christian living taught in the Bible!

Jude's purpose, he tells us himself, is to stir up these folk to contend for the faith. John had a similar purpose and you will find the same in Peter, Paul, and the author of the letter to the Hebrews. And they were only following in the Lord's own footsteps, whose public ministry had been full of controversy regarding the truth. In this way we are taught, many times and many ways, to do ourselves what Jude urged upon these believers long ago. And it is a great deal that he urges them and so urges us to do! More than I think we often realize, a more difficult, a more challenging work than we know and a work that requires a greater subtlety and sophistication and a purer heart than often has been brought to it in the life of the church or in your life or mine.

For in urging us to contend for the faith, Jude is asking two very different things of us at one and the same time.

I. First, he is telling us that we are to brook no infidelity within the church to the teaching of Holy Scripture, that we are to bend every effort to preserve inviolate the Church's loyalty to the teaching of the Bible.

And he urges that upon us because clearly it will require a constant effort and zeal for the Lord's house to keep the church pure. And the reason is that within the church assaults on that purity will come all the time from every direction. We have the proof of that already in the New Testament. Paul is fighting Christian legalists in Galatians whose subtle recasting of the gospel threatened to overturn the Christian faith; Jude is fighting antinomians here who wish to make the robe of Christ's righteousness a cloak for their own sin; John wields his sword in two of his letters against Cerinthus who denied that the Son of God had come in the flesh. These are only some examples of false teaching refuted and condemned in the NT, heresies against which the church and Christians had to be put on the alert.

And as the apostles leave the world and the church makes its way into the following centuries, heresies spring up regularly and on every hand. Already in the 2nd century we find within the church denials of the apostolic doctrine of the Bible, of the way of salvation, of the incarnation of the Son of God, of the Trinity, the ministry of the Holy Spirit, and so on: Marcionism, docetism, Ebionism, gnosticism, and the like. No wonder one of the first great works of Christian theology should be a work entitled Against Heresies, Irenaeus' mighty work against gnosticism, a hybrid of Christianity and Graeco-Roman philosophy. And as the centuries pass, heresies new and old sprung up like weeds in the garden of God. In the 4th century the church was virtually overwhelmed by Arianism, in the 5th century the gospel of divine grace was subverted by Pelagianism, and so it went and so it goes today. One of Augustine's works mentions fully 100 heresies that had surfaced by his time. We could now count them in the thousands. Indeed all of those great men whom God raised up to defend the truth and to expose and refute the errors that surfaced in the church were doing, in a different way, what the martyrs did. Both were upholding the truth of the gospel: the one against the power of the world and the other against the wisdom of the world. [Warfield, Selected Shorter Writings vol. 2, 214]

As we said when considering 2 John, heresy surfaces on a Christian landscape, in any generation of the life of the church, in forms suited to make the falsehood most attractive and most persuasive. It is the natural order of things. As Abraham Kuyper put it, heresies appear according to a fixed law, like a mirage in the atmosphere, a deflection of the light of Christianity in the spiritual atmosphere of a given age.

For example, today various forms of universalism are on the rise in the Christian church, even the evangelical Christian church, or that part of the church that continues to think itself evangelical. In our relativist day, a day that no longer believes in truth, in absolutes, for many Christians, sons and daughters of the 20th century, it seems increasingly impossible to believe that God would damn large numbers of people for sins everyone is guilty of or for failing to embrace a particular set of doctrines. It seems to them intolerant and, therefore, unworthy of God. The idea that Muslims or Buddhists or even everyday American folk who are not followers of Christ are under the wrath of God, if not actually unbelievable to them, has become very unwelcome to them, an embarrassment that they now regularly conceal, a part of Christian doctrine they do not intend to bring up at parties!

No wonder, then, that theologians and preachers are beginning in larger numbers to bring up the possibility -- only the possibility at this point in evangelical Christianity -- that we could read the Bible a different way on this subject and perhaps discover that there are other routes to heaven than faith in Jesus Christ.

But take this bucket of cold water in the face from David Wells [No Place for Truth, 104].

"It is only our familiarity with the NT language that hides from us the explosiveness of the apostolic conclusions. Why were they so adamant about the preservation, appropriation, and propagation of this doctrinally framed teaching? The answer is that it is the "truth..." It is only by coming to know this "truth" that one comes to know God, for he can be known only through Christ who is the center and object of this teaching... The apostles asserted that Christ alone is the truth in the midst of a world that was more religiously diverse than any we have known in the West until relatively recently. We today are far closer in religious temper to apostolic times than any period since the Reformation. Indeed, most of the modern period in the West has been quite unlike apostolic times... It is, therefore, hard to imagine a more specious argument than the one advanced along many fronts today, backed actively by the World Council of Churches and implicitly by the documents of the Second Vatican Council, that the contemporary experience of religious pluralism is the reason that the apostolic formulation of faith can no longer be held! Such assertions make the apostles and even Jesus himself look like innocents who were spared the dreadful dilemmas that, sadly, we have to face with such flinty honesty, in the process divesting ourselves of the very truth that they insisted must be preserved."

Brethren, if we are Christians at all, we cannot still hear the fury in Jude's short letter against this false teaching and not believe life and death to be at stake in preserving the truth of God in the church of God. The NT demonstrates a measure of tolerance for pagans and paganism, even though Christians were persecuted by pagans, and even though these various philosophies and religions were deeply false and those who adhered to them must be lost. But, in the case of pagans, there was a measure of ignorance, and, as Paul would say, "God winked at" that ignorance. Those who sin apart from the law will be condemned without the law. But God did not wink at nor did Paul wink at those who betrayed the gospel within the church. "Let him be accursed," he said of such a heretic. Honorable enemies are always regarded with less hostility than traitors from within one's own camp. In the Christian warfare, if the pagans are the enemies, the heretics are the traitors and heresy their treason.

No brethren, if we are Christians at all, we believe that there is indeed a faith, once delivered to the saints. A foundation of truth first laid down by the apostles who were, it is clear in the NT, directly commissioned by Christ to make a full and authoritative revelation of his religion, which revelation was then, by them and a few others who were subject to them, written down for all time in the documents which we know today as the New Testament. What are these books of the NT, which have been handed down to us through the ages of the church, except the crystallized and perpetuated ministry of that apostolic band.

Why does Christianity produce so many heresies -- already many in the NT age and multitudes since? Because it claims that its message is absolutely true--the only true message about God and man--, one must believe it to be right with God, but its message is a message that cuts directly across the natural sensibilities, tendencies, and appetites of sinful human beings. And so there is always a powerful force at work, encouraged at all points by the Devil, to refashion the message to conform to those human desires.

I attended the reunion of my college class a few weeks ago. It was the 25th anniversary of our graduation. I enjoyed seeing again many friends, many of them not only continuing to walk with the Lord but serving him in some important way. But not everyone was there. We missed, for example, a woman who, when I knew her, was sweet, gentle, and devout. After college she suffered through a painful marriage and now lives near San Francisco, making her living as an author of books recasting Christianity to make it more acceptable to the feminist and the gay communities there. A recent book of hers was published by Ballantine with the title The God who Looks like Me: Discovering a Woman-affirming Spirituality. The blurb for the book announces that it illustrates how "patriarchal religious symbols" -- read God the Father -- have served to oppress women. Another college friend who lives in the Bay area and has kept in some kind of touch with her describes her approach as one designed to make folk who have left orthodox Christianity feel good about having done so, giving them a way of thinking that they are still Christians in the ways that matter. These folk Jude wrote against thought themselves Christians and their version of Christianity the true version.

I tell you, brothers and sisters, one reads books such as these, and there are many of them to read on many subjects today -- on God, on Christ, on salvation, on sexuality --, and one understands completely why Jude spoke in terms so stern, so unbending, so unforgiving of this false teaching. If Christianity is anything at all, it is what Christ's apostles declared it to be. And these people, still today as through the ages, are out to destroy that Christianity! And it is out of loyalty to Christ that we oppose those efforts with might and main and it is out of fear for our own souls and those of our children. You may well survive the penetration of the believing church by heretical views; it is much less certain that your children will! And so, you must count on it, if you would be a faithful Christian you will have to contend for the faith. Its enemies are everywhere, and many of them are in the church.

II. But, Jude is telling us not only to brook no infidelity to the truth within the church, he is also telling us only to contend for the faith when it is the faith that is under direct assault.

Here is the opposite problem. Christians have allowed killing errors to penetrate the church and multitudes have slipped into hell thinking themselves instead going to purgatory or heaven. Other Christians have taken their marching orders from Jude and fought against these errors. But, many of them, having got their fighting blood up, have continued to contend when the fighting was no longer for the faith once delivered to the saints but either over the sort of differences Paul acknowledges will exist in Christian churches or over the uncertainties of some who should be loved, taught, helped, and born with, at least until it is clear that their doubts have become actual unbelief. What does Jude say here, in v. 22: "Be merciful to those who doubt..."

I have no hesitation in saying that a failure to contend for the faith is a far more dangerous error and a far more immediate act of disloyalty to Christ than is a contentious spirit that produces divisions among true Christians, but the latter has done extraordinary harm to the Church's witness, to its spiritual power and effect upon people, and to the continuation of grace in the lines of generations. And as long as heresy has been a part of the church's life in the world, so has unnecessary and harmful contention among Christians. The NT has almost as much to say about the latter as the former! And, church history embarrasses us over and over again with the story of orthodox Christians taking aim at one another, contending not for the faith once delivered, but for their party or their particular viewpoint.

Read the account of the lifelong antagonism between Augustus Toplady and John Wesley. If anything will make your face red as a Christian it will be this humiliating tale of bitterness, unkindness, and dishonesty between two men who, of all men, ought to have known better. "Never," Bishop Ryle once wrote speaking of Toplady as a controversialist, "I regret to say, did an advocate of truth appear to me so entirely to forget the text, 'In meekness instructing those that oppose him.'" [Christian Leaders of the 18th Century, 381-382]. If ever two Christian men failed "to speak the truth in love," or "to keep no record of wrongs," or "always to protect, always to trust, always to hope," it was these two great champions of the Great Awakening and the gospel of grace, these immortal poets of the love of Christ, who fell into a contention over something other than the faith once delivered to the saints and were never able or willing to climb up out of it. They died still snapping at one another.

No, says Jude, the brother of the Lord. There is a contending that must be done and done with a vengeance. That is contending for our most holy faith. Contending for lesser things is only pride masquerading as the love of truth. After all, John Newton reminds us, "There is a principle of self, which disposes us to despise those who differ from us" [Letters, pp. 103-104]. Godly men and women must, therefore, be alert to the danger that controversy poses to the purity and gentleness that is to mark a Christian's heart.

As I was thinking about this sermon, there came into my hands a copy of a long letter written in August of 1937 by an elder in what would be the Bible Presbyterian Church in Seattle, the mother of what is now our Green Lake PC. It is written to an older woman in that congregation who apparently had asked for an account of the events that had recently transpired back East. These events were a meeting of the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions in late May of 1937 and the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of America in early June. That PCA was the church established the year before after Dr. Machen was drummed out of the large Northern Presbyterian Church for continuing to agitate against the heresies that were accumulating in the teaching of that once great church. His had been a heroic fight against exactly the sort of killing error that Jude rose up in anger against in his letter.

But now, one year later, within that new church, those who had fought against heresy in the old church were fighting again, among themselves, about issues that no one today, with a straight face, could describe as "the faith once and for all delivered to the saints." The subjects, the elder who wrote that letter and who was a participant in those events was proud to say, concerned premillennialism and amillennialism -- that is, what scenario of the end of time one thought was taught in the Bible -- and, even more, whether Christians could in good conscience drink wine. It was a bitter fight and it broke the church in two -- into the BPC in which denomination this church was originally formed, and the OPC.

The church divided over those issues and managed, in so doing, to tell the rest of the Christian world, that all of that contending for the faith once delivered to the saints that it had done in the old church was, just as their enemies had always claimed, really not fighting for truth and the faith at all, but just a natural cantankerousness. These were no Judes, the liberal Presbyterians could now say with triumph, but a bunch of cross-grained folk who couldn't get along even with themselves.

That sorry history is bitterly ironic when one looks back on it from this vantage point. For the side of the church that trumpeted its amillennialism back in 1937 now has as many post-mils among its ministers as it has a-mils and the side of the church that condemned all drinking of alcoholic beverages is now church by church returning wine to its communion cups.

One of the heroes of my life, Alexander Whyte, was so fearful of his heart succumbing to bitterness and to contentiousness and to the sins of temper that almost invariably accompany disputes within the church that he refused to contend for the truth even when it was, undeniably, the faith once for all delivered to the saints that was in dispute. His motto was, "If we cannot [manage controversy] with clean and all-men-loving hearts, let us leave all debate and contention to stronger and better men than we are." But his silence contributed in a substantial way to the betrayal of the faith and the onset of spiritual death in the Scottish Presbyterian Church.

But, I have known other men in long ago days and in my own day whose lust for controversy and whose inability to distinguish between the faith once delivered and matters of lesser importance led them and those they influenced to a contentiousness that did as much harm to the faith as it did good, that brought the faith into disrepute, and grieved the Holy Spirit. The great Howell Harris, leader of the Great Awakening in Wales, let a contentious spirit come over him that set him to fighting with his brethren about matters that should not have been the cause of deep division, and by so doing he brought the awakening in his part of Wales to a dead stop for 13 years.

I say, brothers and sisters, we will not understand Jude nor be able to obey him, if we do not hear both the command to "contend" and the qualification "for the faith once for all delivered." Many contend for other things and that is deeply wrong and unChristlike. But many are no longer contending for the faith itself and that is the same as betraying the Lord with a kiss.

Christianity is the truth, the one and only truth that sets men free. But it is truth that works through love and those who stand for that truth must also prove the love.

It is only to be true to the Bible and Christian history to say that Christianity thrives on controversy for it comes to the world with truth that the world does not wish to hear! Over and again God has used heresies to awaken the church again to the treasures of the truth that was delivered to her by the apostles and the prophets. As Paul said, these divisions must come. We must be, you and I, controversialists in the right sense, in Jude's sense. No one said that is easy. But Christianity is true, it alone is true, and you and I must keep ourselves in the love of God!

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