1878 119 It is an interesting characteristic of John that he enshrines in divine revelation the questions and observations of the less notable of the Lord's apostles. Thus what dropped from Andrew, Thomas, Philip, and Judas brother of James, is found recorded by him and by none of the other evangelists.
Of the last of these, but one saying is preserved, his memorable inquiry of our Lord how He would manifest Himself to His disciples, and not unto the world (John 14:22), and it is he who has given us by the Holy Ghost that short but remarkable letter known as the Epistle of Jude.
Comparing Mark 6:7, where we read that the Lord sent out the twelve by two and two, with Luke 6:14-16, where the apostles are enumerated in pairs, we gather the significant fact that Judas Iscariot, the first apostate from Christ, was accompanied when they went forth on their mission, by Jude who was characteristically that prophet whose burden would be the Christian apostasy. And this is the more remarkable as while Simon is coupled with his brother Andrew, and James with his brother John, Jude is separated from his brother, James the less, with whom his name is always previously connected, to be associated with the Iscariot.
He calls himself "bondsman of Jesus Christ," and addresses "the called ones beloved in God the Father, and preserved in Jesus Christ," praying that mercy, peace, and love may be multiplied unto them. The words, Beloved in God the Father and preserved in Jesus Christ," in this exordium, form the nearest approach we have in the Epistles to the introductory words of Paul to those to the church at Thessalonica which is addressed in each case as in God our Father end Lord Jesus Christ. Jude's Epistle is general in so far as it contemplates no particular assembly, and the word "mercy" implies that it is more individual than ecclesiastical. But it possesses distinct internal evidence that what obtained incipiently then in the house of God upon earth, and which in our day would characterise it, was looming prophetically before his soul, and he was inspired of the Spirit of God to portray it in the incomparably striking form in which it is presented to us in ten verses of the five and twenty that compose the Epistle. (Ver. 4, 8, 10, 13, 15, 16, 18, 19.) Probably nothing can be found in the compass of the whole word of God more profoundly solemn than the picture which the Holy Ghost gives in that half-score of verses, of persons figuring in the house of God and bearing the name of Christ. And that which imparts so terrible a character to such scriptures is the fact that they betoken the culmination of all iniquity beneath the eye of God; and the climax of every evil the world has witnessed, under the cloak of what professedly honours Christ our Lord. As we well know, the corruption of that which is best is the worst corruption of all, so we can readily understand that nothing could possibly be more obnoxious to the heart of our divine Master than that which the penetrating eye of Judas, not Iscariot, observed to have entered upon its development when he penned the impassioned strains which bear his name.
Were it a description of things in the outside world, whether civilized or barbarian, it would stir our souls in a far more measured way, but the definite language of the Epistle — "crept in unawares" precludes any widening of the sphere, marking off with precision that the scene is the house of God, and that the persons contemplated and depicted are professors of Christ. Seeing this, shall we wonder that God's "Faithful and true Witness" (Rev. 3:14), will presently spue out of His mouth the unfaithful and untrue witness, which as a professing body is figured in guilty Laodicea? Shall we wonder that judgment must begin of all places at the house of God? (1 Peter 4:17.)
The apostle had thought to write in a more general way of the common salvation, but as a divine watchman impressed with what he had discerned within, he is constrained to employ his pen upon the advancing apostasy and its issues, with the exhortations and encouragements which are divinely adapted for the saints in view of this awful corruption and desertion of what is due to the holy name of Christ.
The guilty agents in this apostasy — not "ordained" but "marked out beforehand," (compare Rom. 15:4; Eph. 3:3, etc.), are sketched from manifold points of view, and with unerring fidelity. With a few strokes of his pen does the apostle depict in verse 4, a rough outline of their grosser features — these dissolute deniers of the only sovereign Master, Jesus Christ! After which he rapidly introduces three salient but vastly different instances of earlier-committed apostasies, and the countervailing award of God in each case. First Israel, a people saved out of the land of Egypt, to be established for God in Canaan, according to His avowed purpose (Ex. 3:8), an unbelieving generation of whom apostatised from His word, and their carcases fell in the wilderness. Second, angelic apostasy, angels that excel in strength, that do His commandments, hearkening unto the voice of His word, kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, and they are reserved under darkness for the judgment of the great day. Lastly, heathen licentiousness in Sodom and Gomorrah, the going after strange flesh, contrary to what God has ordained, and what nature herself taught, equally apostasy in principle; they suffered the vengeance of eternal fire.
"Likewise also these dreamers," following which are a few more touches in the Holy Ghost's solemn pictures of the apostates — "They defile the flesh, they despise dominion, they speak evil of dignities." Yet the very highest created intelligence — the archangel Michael — dared not bring a railing judgment against Satan, when brought into conflict with him, but said, The Lord rebuke thee. We gather from what the Holy Ghost reveals to us here and only here, that the signal honour which for wise reasons God paid to Moses in burying his body (Deut. 34:6), stirred up the enmity of the devil, and gave occasion for collision between him and Michael, who may have been engaged in this service to Moses. Dominion and dignity had been vested in Israel's leader and law-giver, Satan despised it as now do they who are his agents; yet sharp as the contention was, the enemy failed to provoke the archangel into what would have been unbecoming the subjection which was coupled with dominion and dignity in his person. Unlike Satan he abode in the truth, and kept his estate. (Compare John 8:44.) This then is in marked contrast to apostasy, thus we have three instances of a compared, and one of a contrasted character.
Again he portrays the apostates, they speak evil in their ignorance, and corrupt themselves in what by mere nature they understand. "Woe unto them" — and now in the little space of one verse he accumulates three more representative cases of kindred character in which the divine displeasure had been incurred, and vengeance called for:
(1) the fleshly opposition of the murderer Cain, or unrestrained natural evil;
(2) error taught for reward to which the unhappy Balaam prostituted himself, or ecclesiastical evil; and
(3) the denial of God's authority vested in Christ His Prophet, Priest and King, typically set forth in Korah's rebellion against Moses!
There follow further expressive touches from the hand of the Spirit of God; these apostates were sunken rocks of terrible danger at the feasts of love or fellowship-meetings of the saints. Such holy scenes were violated by the presence of these remorseless sensualists who were there only to satiate their carnal appetites. The description then becomes crowded with striking imagery — they were as trees without fruit, or whose fruit was withered or blasted, rootless and fruitless, morally and spiritually dead; they were as clouds which carry and convey no refreshing rain, but are idly driven of wayward winds; they were as waves of the sea, lashed, as it were, by their passions and foaming out their own shame; yea, they were as wandering stars reserved to the gloom of darkness for eternity! What a picture!
And, solemn thought, their doom was impressively foretold many centuries before, for we now learn that, if left behind when the church is taken, this residuum of nominal Christianity, to be overwhelmed with unsparing judgment when the Lord returns personally to the earth. Enoch, the seventh from Adam, in the first recorded prophecy from the lips of man, had prophesied of the doom of these christian apostates when the Lord should be manifested, accompanied by the myriads of His redeemed saints! Thus, while the coming of the Lord as the Seed of the woman into this world had been first announced of God Himself in Eden in connection with His purposes of grace, we learn that the Lord's second coming had been the burden of the testimony of His first prophet in connection with the judgment of those who, in face of its fullest display, should most flagrantly abuse that grace.
The apostle finishes his sketch, "these are murmurers, complainers, walking after their lusts; and their mouth speaks swelling words, admiring persons for the sake of profit," adding these final touches, "mockers, walking after their own lusts of ungodlinesses. These are they who set themselves apart [compare Isa. 66:17, for sanctification to evil], natural men, not having the Spirit." The apostles of the Lord Jesus Christ (Paul, Peter, John) had spoken of them as such, and thus the prophecy of Enoch and the testimony of the apostles of three and thirty centuries later conveyed to the same focus, the Spirit of God with divine prescience having had these very persons who should be the corrupters and betrayers of Christianity before Him since the seventh generation of men, as we read in verse 4, "They who of old were marked out beforehand to this sentence;" that is, not as then condemned, but as those who should bring themselves into this judgment.
Is it not well that we should admiringly and adoringly recognise how perfectly the Holy Ghost has herein portrayed that state of things through which the assembly of God is passing? If anything is calculated to sustain the hearts of saints at such a time it is the reflection that we have to do with the living God who has foreseen every bit of trial and trouble in the church's history, and who has from its earliest days depicted with divine accuracy its persistent declension and final apostasy. In a day in which those masterpieces of licentiousness and apostasy, Mormonism and Christadelphianism, are found lodged in the branches of the great mustard-tree, no unusual degree of penetration is needed to discover a counterpart to this picture of Jude in the actual condition of much that now passes current under the name of Christ. Nor is it in such palpable enormities alone that we trace the fidelity of the prophet's testimony, for have we not heard that but a short time ago in the most noble and venerated of England's abbeys one of the most cultured and courted of the dignitaries of the Establishment, who is high in royal favour, in speaking of the cross declared that the execution on Calvary was a hideous calamity! While the true-hearted child of God must needs shudder at such disclosures as these which are every day coming to the front, he has the comfort of knowing that the very fulfilment of the prophetic scriptures of Peter and Paul, of John and Jude, who all wrote of these days, is in itself a powerful encouragement to personal faithfulness to our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ, as well as an incentive "to contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints," being convinced that these iniquities and profanities, which are more and more characterising nominal Christianity, form the prelude to that longed-for moment when our heavenly Bridegroom shall disclose His own peerless beauty and divine glory to the enraptured eyes and thrilling heavenly hearts of those beloved saints who constitute the church, His bride!
"But ye, beloved" (vers. 17, 20), how refreshing to observe that thus blessedly does the apostle distinguish the loyal hearted and holy brethren of Christ, introducing now the admonitions which so solemn, so awful a state of things as he forewarned them of, called for in respect to the saints of God. And it is
(1.) "remember" the spoken words of the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ. We are referred first of all to the paramount authority of scripture, the sure foundation and unfailing resource for faith in this day of evil.
(2.) "Building yourselves up on your most holy faith," the faith once delivered to the saints (ver. 3), being that upon which it is our privilege to be ever edifying one another. (Compare Rom. 15:2; 1 Cor. 14:26; 1 Thess. 5:11.)
(3.) "Praying in the Holy Ghost," for even our dependence, which such a state of things is calculated to produce, and the expression of it before the Lord, must be the work of the Spirit of God.
(4.) "Keep yourselves in the love of God," not making it or keeping it, but keeping ourselves in the blessed sense and comfort of it, nestling, as it were, in the genial warmth and holy joy of the divine affections.
(5.) "Looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life," even its consummation in glory when He receives us unto Himself.
(6.) "Making a difference," not drawing with saints the hard and fast lines of a rigorous legality, inflexible and unfeeling as a rod of iron, but in the grace of Christ distinguishing things that differ, and according to the heart of the Father having compassion where divine compassion may be shown, rescuing out of the fire, and nevertheless
(7.) "hating even the garment spotted by the flesh;" in other words, "the bowels of Jesus Christ;" for the sinning brother to be reconciled with holy hatred of the sin.
Our epistle closes with one of the finest doxologies which the Spirit of God has embedded in the pages of divine inspiration. After the exact depiction, complete exposure, and sweeping denunciation of the apostates, calculated to preserve the true-hearted from their machinations, and after the sevenfold exhortations which have been noticed, the saints are finally referred to the immutable resources we have in a glorified Christ, according to the ways and to the purposes of God. The wilderness way and the rapture into glory are concentrated in one verse! Is it the former? There is grace enough in His blessed heart and power enough in His mighty arm, in every exigency to preserve us from falling. Is it the latter? Than shall He present us faultless before the presence of His glory with exultation! — that which His own heart is set upon for its unmeasured joy is what will be the first operation of His hand, as it were, when at the long-waited-for word of the Father He comes forth from His throne
To "the only God our Saviour, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, might, and authority, from before the whole age, and now and to all the ages, Amen."