"The Antidote to Heresy"
Jude
November 16, 1997

Text Comment

v. 5 "The Lord" The best texts and very early ones have "Jesus." It is also, clearly, the more difficult reading, which is one important evidence of genuineness, other things being equal. In any case, in context, "the Lord" would almost certainly be a reference to Jesus Christ as "Lord" at the end of v. 4 indicates. One more NT statement, of which there are a number, of the activity of God the Son, the pre-incarnate Christ, as the member of the Godhead with which Israel had to do. If her faith was in the Lord who spoke to her delivered her and led her, then it was in Christ, even though she did not yet know him by that name. v. 6 One might have deduced this about the fallen angels from the small amount of information furnished in Holy Scripture, but Jude seems to be making reference to a version of this history that was circulating in Judaism of this time and in particular had been written down in The Book of Enoch, a pseudepigraphical writing of the inter-testamental period, material from which he will also refer to in vv. 14-15. In that story this fall of angels is not that in connection with Satan, but that of the angels, called the sons of God, who lusted after and then took for wives the daughters of men in the days of Noah. (We considered that interpretation of the history of Genesis 6 some months ago in a sermon on that passage, if you remember.) We'll leave the problem created by Jude's reference to a non-canonical source until v. 9. v. 7 In vv. 5-7 Jude has given a three-fold description of the punishments that must fall upon these heretics. In vv. 8-10 he proceeds to accuse them of three sins: lust, rebelliousness, and irreverence. v. 9 Jude appears to be drawing this material from the apocryphal work, The Assumption of Moses. This is what the early fathers tell us, though the details given here are not found in the portions of that work that have survived to the present day. According to this work, when Moses died God sent the archangel Michael to bury him. But the Devil disputed Michael's right to do so since Moses was a murderer (remember the Egyptian he had killed in Exodus 2). Further the Devil claimed to have authority over the material world and Moses' body was matter not spirit. Even so provoked Michael was not disrespectful, but left the matter in God's hands, saying only, "The Lord rebuke you." The argument is a fortiori. If Michael the archangel guarded his tongue in speaking with a celestial being, how much more should mere men. Exactly how these false teachers slandered celestial beings is not said. It is, as you may know, a standing problem that Jude should cite an apocryphal work as if it had some authority and was a reliable source of religious information. Does that mean that The Assumption of Moses ought to be in the Bible or that Jude ought not to be? Many different approaches have been taken. It is widely held that Jude was turning upon his enemies a text that they considered an authority, showing that even on their own principles they fail to measure up. In that case Jude would not necessarily be ascribing any authority to The Assumption of Moses. That is a more difficult position to take in the case of The Book of Enoch which he apparently referred to earlier and refers to later. Others have been willing to hold that these two works, in these particular instances, preserved accurate traditions. There are other theories. But Jude is the Word of God and so these questions are more interesting than important. In any case, there are allusions, not quotations, and all you have to do is to think of how many times texts from hymnbooks are quoted in Christian writing to see how much of a stretch it would be to canonize these non-biblical works on the strength of allusions to them in a biblical writer. Paul cites Greek poets without imputing authority to them. v. 11 Cain hated and killed his brother; Balaam, you remember, for money seduced Israel into idolatry and sexual sin by leading them into the worship of the Midianites, especially, apparently, by suggesting that the Israelites, since God was with them, could sin with impunity; Korah was insubordinate to the authorities God had established. v. 24 The NIV has it right in its paragraph heading. This is not a benediction as often as I have heard ministers refer to it as such and pronounce it at the end of a service as if it were. It is an ascription of praise not a pronouncement of blessing on the people of God.

Now, we saw last week that Jude's letter is an impassioned warning against a particular set of false teachers and their teaching that threatened to penetrate the church. We considered from this letter, last Lord's Day, the importance of contending for the faith, -- what Jude urges upon his readers in v. 3 -- and how that is to be done.

This morning I want to consider another aspect of this ever-timely concern for fidelity to the truth of God in the church of God. I want to consider how a believer and a congregation of believers are best to protect themselves against the inroads of error.

After all, most churches in the world, sooner or later, have succumbed. Indeed, is there any church, would we say, that there is any Christian church in the world that has long lived in the world in which real error is not now mixed with the truth. We certainly believe this to be true of the three great parts of Christianity in the world today: Roman Catholicism -- for all its virtues, we will not hesitate to say that it has embraced a set of dangerous errors, errors very similar in kind to those that were embraced by Israel in the ancient epoch, errors that have spiritually murdered forever large numbers of those who have belonged to that church through the ages. There has been a lively tradition within Roman Catholicism through the ages that has acknowledged as much. And so too with Orthodoxy, a church that has, again for all its virtues, allowed errors of sinister effect into its teaching and life, producing multitudes of people whose legalistic and ritualistic assumptions about salvation are virtually indistinguishable from those condemned by the OT prophets and the author of the letter to the Hebrews. And what would we say about Protestantism. By and large, with many exceptions, of course, it denies that the Bible is the Word of God, that Christ is the Son of God, and those and those only who believe in him are the church of God. It is a smorgasbord of the worst kind of errors.

The point being, that every generation of God's people is put on notice, not only in the Bible but in Church history of the ease with which Christians and the Christian church embrace killing error. It was happening already in the days of the apostles; it happened in new and different ways in the very next generation and it has happened repeatedly every since. And, it is happening today.

The first major work of evangelical feminism was published in 1974. This was Letha Scanzoni and Nancy Hardesty's All We're Meant to Be: A Biblical Approach to Women's Liberation. But in the years since 1974 Scanzoni and Hardesty have moved on, out of evangelical Christianity altogether, embracing homosexuality as a proper lifestyle and denying cardinal Christian doctrines of God and salvation. The Evangelical Women's Caucus also founded in 1974 of women who claimed an historically Christian doctrine of the Bible and the faith, but wished to advance a so-called evangelical feminism, is now long since departed from evangelical Christianity in its promotion of lesbianism, etc. It is very interesting to see, by the way, the same juxtaposition of theological error and licentiousness as here also in Jude's characterization of these false teachers of his day. It is also interesting to notice feminism's fascination with the occult, with spiritual beings and with secret knowledge, which was true of these false teachers according to Jude. Former so-called evangelical feminists are now witches. All of these folk assured us at the time that they were completely, loyal to biblical Christianity. No doubt they thought they were!

And the same development can be charted with regard to even more central theological issues such as the exclusiveness of the Christian gospel, the necessity of faith in Christ for salvation. We are living in a day that church historians will one day describe as a time of theological declension, of the abandonment of the biblical faith at several key points. I cannot be faithful to you as your minister without constantly alerting you to this fact. The same thing is happening in American evangelicalism that happened in a different way in the first third of this century, when the Protestant churches of our land weakened and to a great extent actually gave up their commitment to supernatural Christianity.

And the issue is not one that we can consider as only a theoretical one, as if we are largely immune because we belong still to a confessional church, committed to the historic doctrine of the Christian church. The price of faithfulness is constant vigilance; momentum for change can build up over many years and then suddenly break through into a church and produce apostasy very quickly. What is more, whether or not an individual believer or church sustains a true and living faith in Christ in the midst of much error, what will happen to children raised in churches that accommodate serious unbelief in the faith once and for all delivered to the saints is another question entirely. Accommodating evangelicals do not, by and large, produce accommodating evangelicals. They produce unbelievers -- whether as parents or as teachers or as ministers. We cannot be indifferent to what is happening in our own churches or in other denominations, for they will influence the spiritual culture in which our children will live, find their spouses, and raise their children.

But, still, the most important issue is our own fidelity. That is where it must all begin. And how is that to be preserved and protected in a world and a Christian church that is attacking the faith once and for all delivered from every side?

Jude urges upon us three responses to the threat of falsehood in the church. I have time but virtually to mention them, as Jude does himself.

I. First, Jude says, you must be constantly building yourself up in the faith: you must yourself, and we must together as a church.

That is, we are never safer than when we are getting stronger in faith, when we are pursuing our faith, when we are seeking more and more to establish ourselves in this faith. "Faith" here in v. 20, as in v. 3, is being used not of the act of believing, but of that which is to be believed, the substance of the Bible's teaching, the doctrines of the Christian faith.

You have to know what is true and by study and meditation come to see how true the Bible's teaching actually is. You need to come to understand how the doctrines of the Bible depend upon one another and agree with one another and are connected to one another, so that if someone wants to shave a point here or there -- with regard to the damnation of non-Christians or the overstrictness of biblical sexual ethics -- you will see immediately how that cannot be done without having, at the same time, to give up much more of the faith.

Erasmus' attitude at the time of the Reformation was that no one should make a fuss about doctrine, we could all just love God and love one another and not quibble about who teaches what. But Luther, wisely, saw things very differently. To him, Christianity was a matter of doctrine first and foremost because it was a matter of the truth and of faith. Faith is trust in God and Christ as they are revealed in the Bible's teaching. According to Luther, and according to Jude, Christianity was a religion of doctrine. "Take away assertions," Luther wrote, "and you take away Christianity." He went so far as to say, "I am not concerned with life, but with doctrines." "Others, who have lived before me have attacked the Pope's evil and scandalous life, but I have attacked his doctrine." Luther would not give an inch to Erasmus' undogmatic or non-doctrinal Christianity. For out of the doctrine comes the faith and then the life. Without the former there can be no latter. [In J.I. Packer's introduction to Bondage of the Will, 44]

He would not have denied at all that the Christian life is a three-legged stool, with doctrine, experience, and practice or obedience the three legs. One must have all three legs, but what Luther would have further said is that doctrine is the first leg of the stool. Lloyd Jones put it another way: "The man who isn't interested in doctrine, will never have a big experience."

What Jude is saying is perfectly obvious. The man or woman who will be blown away by every wind of doctrine is the one who hasn't learned the Bible's doctrines, hasn't prepared himself or herself to distinguish truth from error. And the same goes for a church or a congregation. As Polycarp, a few years later would write to the Philippians (iii), "If you study the Epistles of the blessed apostle Paul, you can be built up in the faith given to you." Count on it, it is our duty and our intention here to educate you in the Christian faith and to keep on educating you and ourselves until we leave this world. Jesus said in the great commission, "teaching them to observe everything I taught you." There are our marching orders!

II. Second, Jude says, you must, a congregation must, practice that faith, put it to use, and so prove its reality in flesh and blood.

We all know people who seem to know a great deal of doctrine but whose lives seem weak and lack the beauty of godliness. But Jude is not interested, nor is any other writer of Scripture, in doctrine for doctrine's sake. He wants us to learn the faith that we might embrace it and live it in our daily lives. To know about God's character and being so that we might love and trust him more; to know more of Christ's work so that we might banish our doubts; to learn more of the work of the Holy Spirit, so that we might learn to recognize creeping self-confidence and trust ourselves wholly instead to a present and active Spirit who bears witness with our spirits; to know more of God's law so that we might know how to live so as to please him, and so on.

Or, as Lloyd Jones says, paraphrasing Jude here in v. 20: "If your knowledge of doctrine does not make you a...man of prayer, you had better examine yourself again."

No, says Jude. Learn the faith and then put it to work. Keep yourself in God's love, which is the center of that faith once delivered to the saints. Put that divine love to the test, live by it, hold fast to God's love for you and the outworking of that love in the Gospel, as these teachers had not done. Live as God's beloved children, as those Christ redeemed by his own precious blood, as those granted liberty by him from sin, the flesh, and the Devil. As Jesus put it, "I have loved you; abide in my love." (John 15:9)

It is when the faith becomes only a compartment of one's life, merely the basic assumptions rather than the living force and principle of one's daily life, that one is vulnerable to the attractions of false teaching, and, believe me, there are always attractions. To keep oneself impervious to those attractions, one must find the Christian faith a living and a wonderful thing in his life, something he could no more part with than breath itself!

III. Third, and finally, Jude says, you must, a congregation must take the danger seriously; you must be alert to your susceptibility to error.

It was when David thought himself safe that he fell into his terrible sins and it is when churches suppose themselves too clear-headed and too committed to the truth to be endangered by error that they are most in peril. This was Alexander Whyte's foolish blunder in the case of the Scottish Free Church--that church that had passed through revival just a generation back, the church of M'Cheyne and the Bonars, of many great preachers of the gospel. He couldn't imagine the men he knew and loved and admired embracing any real heresy or killing error and so he continued to support them when they assured him of their pure motives and of their continuing loyalty to the faith once and for all delivered to the saints, when, in fact, they were conforming that faith to the spirit of the world and overturning the gospel in Christ's own church. By the time people woke up to that fact, it was far too late. The church was in the hands of those who did not believe.

But look at Jude's warning. There it is in v. 23. Save those who can be saved, but take care, he says, that you are not infected in the effort. The powerful image he uses is of someone trying to drag someone from a fire without being burned himself -- Clement in the 2nd century thought Jude was referring to sensual passion when he spoke of fire. Or, in another image, Jude pictures someone trying to take a corrupted garment, perhaps the shirt of a leper, holding it in the very tips of the fingers and taking it to the fire, so that one will not be infected himself.

The idea is that these false teachings send men and women to hell. If they weren't so very attractive and beguiling, multitudes of so-called Christians would not embrace them as they have through the ages, including a great many of whom better things were once thought.

I have been reading Billy Graham's autobiography at lunchtime. I'm now to my first lengthy evangelistic mission to Great Britain in the company of the evangelists, including Charles Templeton. He speaks warmly of Templeton's friendship and partnership in the work. But Templeton later went to a liberal theological school and bought the farm and turned his back on the faith he once preached. Who would have thought it of him beforehand. Not Billy Graham.

No, says Jude. Don't trust yourself. Don't imagine you have nothing to fear from heresy. Be on guard. See what it does to others smarter than yourself. See how many who used to believe as you do now, do no longer! See how powerfully, how subtly, the world works against you. Be on guard against the first stirrings of an attitude of indifference or accommodation.

I had an illustration of this come my way a few weeks ago. I had read about this in literature that had crossed my desk, like a great deal of similar announcements that are mailed to ministers and churches. This was an event, sponsored by a number of prominent evangelicals, names you would recognize, designed to foster a renewal of fasting and prayer in the American evangelical church. Pretty unobjectionable stuff, indeed, who would not want to encourage such an effort. But then I heard the rest of the story from a friend of mine who works in the press. The meeting was held, this meeting to promote fasting, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. Press releases were issued describing the meeting, its purposes, and identifying the participants. In one press release, media folk were told to whom to go, and I quote, "for the best sound bites." Did not the Lord Jesus say something about doing our fasting so that no one would know? Is there not something here that earnest Christians interested in fasting and prayer should immediately have noticed and done something about? Where would we be taken finally if we followed the path of worldly accommodation marked out for us here?

A Highland minister, who lived through the revival of 1860 in Scotland -- a revival Alexander Whyte also participated in as a college student -- once said that their experience produced such a watchfulness against sin and error, such a desire not to grieve the Holy Spirit who was working among them, that it was, he said, as though they were men "walking on ice."

Well, we would all know exactly what our duty was if we were in the midst of a day of the Spirit's power. But our duty today is just the same, whether or not we feel it as keenly, and perhaps it is more important now because in a day of smaller things we are still more vulnerable to the enticements of the world and the devil.

"Always watch and prayer?" the Devil taunts us. And we reply, "Oh, yes, always!" For, "peace shall follow battle, and night shall end in day!"