Manna Praxis

The Book of Jude: Contend for the Faith

Introduction

Today’s Passage: An Overview of the Whole Book

There is a moment at the beginning of this little letter that tells you everything about it. Jude has his pen in his hand and a subject already chosen. He means to write to these believers about the salvation they hold in common, the sweetest theme a man could take up, and you can feel the eagerness in the way he says it. Then something stops him. News has reached him about what is happening in the congregations he loves, and he lays the happy letter aside and writes a different one. “I felt it necessary,” he says, and that word necessary is the hinge of the whole book. Certain men had come in among them quietly, and they were teaching that the grace of God is a permission slip for whatever the body wants. So instead of a warm meditation on our common salvation, we get twenty-five verses of the most concentrated, most alarming, and finally most glorious writing in the New Testament. Jude piles up his warnings in threes: three judgments out of Israel’s past, three ruined men from the books of Moses, three pictures from earth and sky and sea. He calls names, he refuses to soften anything, and then, at the very end, when you would expect the letter to close on a note of dread, it opens up into one of the greatest doxologies in all of Scripture. Nobody who reads Jude straight through forgets the turn. The letter is fierce because the danger is real, and it is beautiful because the God who stands at the end of it is able to keep every soul entrusted to Him.

As you read, hold this: Jude sat down to write about the salvation we share and found he had to write a warning instead, twenty-five urgent verses that call you to contend for the faith once for all delivered, to keep yourselves in the love of God, and to trust the One who is able to keep you from stumbling.

The name and what it means

The word that governs this letter, the word Jude reached for when he changed his subject, is ἐπαγωνίζομαι (epagōnizomai), pronounced ep-ag-oh-NID-zoh-my (Strong’s G1864), and the English versions render it contend earnestly. It appears nowhere else in the New Testament. Jude used it once, at the exact moment he explained why he was writing, and then never again. Underneath it lies the ordinary Greek word for a contest, agōn, the struggle of the wrestler in the arena and the runner straining for the line. It is the family of words that gave us our English agony, and it is the word Luke uses for the Lord’s own wrestling in Gethsemane. Jude sets a preposition in front of it that means upon or for, so the sense is a strenuous effort made on behalf of something, a man throwing his whole weight into a struggle for a thing he loves. And notice the tense of it and the object of it. He does not tell them to contend for their reputation, their preferences, their party, or their opinions about matters the Scriptures leave open. He tells them to contend for the faith entrusted once for all to the saints, that is, for the body of truth about Jesus Christ that was handed down, delivered, deposited in the church’s keeping, and settled once and for all.

Now hear what the word is not, because this verb has been abused as badly as any word in the Bible. It is not a license to be quarrelsome. It is not a warrant for a sour spirit, a suspicious eye, or the pleasure some people take in being right at somebody else’s expense. If you want proof, you do not have to go outside this letter to find it, because Jude himself tells you at the end exactly what contending looks like when it reaches the ground. Have mercy on those who doubt. Snatch others out of the fire. Show mercy, mixed with fear, even to those whose lives are stained. That is the finish line of the contest. A man who is truly contending for the faith is not standing off at a distance enjoying his own orthodoxy; he is out at the edge of the fire pulling people back. The faith is worth fighting for precisely because it is what saves people, and if the fight ever curdles into contempt for the people, the fighter has already lost the thing he was defending.

The world of the book

The writer names himself in five words: “Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and a brother of James.” Those five words tell us a great deal. Jude is the English form of Judas, or Judah, one of the commonest names among the Jews of that century, so on its own it settles nothing. But he identifies himself by his brother, and there was only one James in the early church who needed no further introduction, the James who led the congregation in Jerusalem, who presided over the council in Acts 15, and who wrote the letter that bears his name. The Gospels name the brothers of Jesus, and among them stand a James and a Judas. So this is almost certainly a younger half-brother of the Lord Jesus, raised in the same house in Nazareth, who watched Him grow up and did not believe in Him during the years of His ministry, and who came to faith afterward, along with the rest of that family, when a crucified brother came out of the tomb.

Sit with that a moment, and then look again at how he introduces himself. He does not say the Lord’s brother. He had every earthly right to that title, and it would have opened any door in the ancient church. He says a servant of Jesus Christ, and the Greek word is doulos, a bondslave, a man wholly owned. He mentions his human brother James and passes over his human relation to Jesus in silence. He would rather be the property of the Lord than the relative of the Man. That single decision at the head of the letter tells you what kind of person is about to speak to you, and it takes the ground out from under every reader who has ever wanted a shortcut into God’s favor by way of pedigree or association.

As for the people he writes to, he does not name them. There is no city at the top, no congregation addressed, only “those who are called, loved by God the Father, and kept in Jesus Christ.” What he assumes about them tells us more than an address would. He expects them to know their Old Testament thoroughly, since he can allude to the wilderness generation, to Sodom, to Cain and Balaam and Korah with barely a word of explanation. He expects them to know Jewish traditions handed down outside the Scriptures. He expects them to remember the preaching of the apostles firsthand. And he expects them to gather for love feasts, the shared meals of the early church where the Lord’s Supper was kept, which is where the intruders had made themselves at home. Most likely these are Jewish believers in Christ, somewhere in the Greek-speaking world, and the trouble in their assemblies is the same trouble that keeps recurring wherever the gospel goes: someone discovers that grace is free and concludes that holiness is optional.

One more thing you will notice if you read carefully, and it is better to hear it plainly here than to be startled by it later. Jude bears a striking resemblance to the second chapter of Peter’s second letter. The same false teachers, the same judgments, the same images of waterless clouds and wandering stars, sometimes in nearly the same order. Believers who love the Scriptures have looked at those two passages for centuries and reached different conclusions about which came first, whether Peter drew on Jude, or Jude on Peter, or both on a common warning that circulated in the early church. Honest people disagree, the evidence does not settle it, and here is the good news: it does not matter in the least for reading either letter. Two inspired writers, facing the same corruption, sounded the same alarm. That the alarm was sounded twice should make us take it more seriously, not less.

The shape of the book

The one thread to carry

Carry this thread through the twenty-five verses and you will not lose your way: contend for the faith, keep yourselves in the love of God, and trust the One who is able to keep you from stumbling. Notice how the three fit together, because a great deal depends on the order. The letter begins with a strenuous command, and it ends by telling you where the strength for it comes from.

"Beloved, although I made every effort to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt it necessary to write and urge you to contend earnestly for the faith entrusted once for all to the saints." Jude 1:3 (BSB)

Once for all. That phrase settles what we are defending. The faith is not a thing the church invents in each generation, adjusted to the taste of the age. It was delivered, handed over, put into our keeping like a deposit, and our business is to guard it and pass it on intact, not to improve it. And the guarding is not done chiefly by argument. Jude tells the beloved what to do with their hands and their knees while the danger is at the door, and it is remarkably ordinary and remarkably personal.

"But you, beloved, by building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God as you await the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you eternal life." Jude 1:20–21 (BSB)

Build, pray, keep, wait. That is the whole defense, and every part of it is something an ordinary believer can begin doing this morning. Keep yourselves in the love of God, Jude says, which does not mean work at staying loved. It means stay where the love is, in the place where He has set you, the way a man out in the cold stays near the fire. And then, having laid a command on them that no one could carry alone, Jude turns and points to the only One who could ever guarantee the outcome.

"Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you unblemished in His glorious presence, with great joy—to the only God our Savior be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority through Jesus Christ our Lord before all time, and now, and for all eternity. Amen." Jude 1:24–25 (BSB)

Read that after the long catalogue of the fallen and you will feel the ground come up under your feet. Every page of this letter has been about people who slipped, angels who left their place, a generation that came out of Egypt and did not go in, a prophet who sold his tongue, men who feasted at the Lord’s table with nothing in them. And then the last two verses lift your eyes to the One who is able, and the word means He has the power to do it, and He does it, and it is His doing and not yours. He keeps you from stumbling now. He will present you unblemished then. And He will do it with great joy, which is a detail worth kneeling over, because the joy is His. Look back at verse one and you find He had already called you kept in Jesus Christ before He asked one thing of you. The whole letter is bracketed by keeping. So read Jude with your eyes open and your guard up, and read him without a trace of fear, because the God who tells you plainly how many have fallen is the same God who has promised that you will not. Learn the Word, contend for the faith with mercy in your hands, and give thanks.