Jude 1

Today’s Passage: Jude 1

Twenty-five verses, and not one of them wasted. Jude begins the way a man begins a letter he has been looking forward to, with a greeting so full of comfort that you could rest on it for a week: called, loved, kept. Then he tells you, almost apologetically, that the letter he intended is not the letter you are going to get. He had wanted to write about the salvation they share. Instead he must urge them to contend earnestly for the faith, because men have slipped in among them who treat the grace of God as a permit for whatever the body wants and who deny the Master who bought them. From there the letter turns severe, and it stays severe for a long stretch. Three judgments out of the past, a people, a company of angels, and two notorious cities. A contrast with an archangel who would not do what these men do casually. Three ruined men from the books of Moses. Then a string of pictures that come at you one after another, reefs under the water at the church’s own supper table, clouds that promise rain and give none, trees bare in the season when fruit should be hanging, surf throwing up its filth on the sand, stars that wander off into the dark. And then, right when you think the letter has nothing left but warning, comes the turn, two words that change the air in the room: But you, beloved. Remember. Build. Pray. Keep. Wait. Have mercy on the doubting. Snatch others out of the fire. And then Jude lifts his eyes off the whole ruined landscape and lands the letter where every honest look at danger ought to land, on the One who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to present you unblemished before His own glory, with great joy.

As you read, hold this: This letter is crowded with people who fell, and it ends with the One who is able to keep you from falling, so contend earnestly for the faith, go after the endangered with mercy in your hands, and rest your whole weight on the God who keeps what is His.

Jude 1:1–4 (BSB)

¹ Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and a brother of James, To those who are called, loved by God the Father, and kept in Jesus Christ: ² Mercy, peace, and love be multiplied to you. ³ 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. ⁴ For certain men have crept in among you unnoticed—ungodly ones who were designated long ago for condemnation. They turn the grace of our God into a license for immorality, and they deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.

Take the greeting slowly, because Jude is going to build the entire letter on it. Three things are said about the reader, and the reader does none of them. You are called, which happened to you when God summoned you and you came. You are loved by God the Father, and the verb sits in a tense that means the loving is settled and still standing. And you are kept in Jesus Christ, guarded, watched over, held. Fix that third word in your memory now, because Jude is about to spend twenty verses on people who were not kept, and then he is going to come back to this same word at the very end and hand it to you as a promise. Then look at how the man signs his name. He is a bondslave of Jesus Christ and a brother of James, and he says nothing at all about the fact that he grew up in the same house as the Lord. He would rather be owned by Him than related to Him. And his greeting is not the ordinary one. Mercy, peace, and love, he says, multiplied to you, not merely added. He is writing about the multiplication of danger, so he opens by asking God to multiply something better. Only then does he tell them why the letter exists, and you can hear the reluctance in it. He had every intention of writing about the salvation they share. He set it aside because he had to, and instead he urges them to contend earnestly (ἐπαγωνίζομαι) epagōnizomai, pronounced ep-ag-oh-NID-zoh-my. Strong's G1864, to contend earnestly, to struggle for. Epagōnizomai appears exactly once in the whole New Testament, right here, and Jude spends it on the sentence that explains his letter. Beneath it lies agōn, the Greek word for a contest, the arena, the wrestler’s struggle, the runner’s straining lungs. It is the family of words that stands behind our English agony. So Jude is not asking for an opinion or a raised eyebrow. He is asking for the effort of an athlete, wholehearted, sweating, unwilling to lose. But look hard at what we are told to contend for, because everything hangs on it: the faith entrusted once for all to the saints. Not our preferences. Not our party. Not the matters God has left genuinely open. The faith, the settled truth about Jesus Christ, handed over to the church as a deposit and closed. And do not miss that Jude himself will define what this contending looks like before he puts down his pen. It looks like mercy for the doubting and a hand thrust into the fire after someone. This word is not a permit to be quarrelsome, suspicious, or cold. A man contending for the faith is not standing at a distance admiring his own soundness. He is fighting for people, because the faith he is defending is the only thing that saves them. for the faith entrusted once for all to the saints.

Then comes the reason for the alarm, and it lands in four blows. First, certain men have crept in among you unnoticed. They did not storm the door. Nobody voted them in. They arrived at the table the way water arrives in a boat, quietly and from below. Second, they are ungodly ones designated long ago for condemnation, which does not mean God made them what they are, but that Scripture has been describing men like this from the beginning and their sentence was written down long before they showed up. Third, and this is the heart of it, they turn the grace of our God into a license for immorality. That is the whole counterfeit in a sentence. Grace is real, and it is free, and it covers everything, and therefore, they say, what you do with your body is a matter of indifference. Fourth, they deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ. Notice that Jude does not accuse them of denying a doctrine on paper. The word for Master is the word for an owner of slaves, and a man who insists on doing as he pleases with his own body has denied his Owner whatever his lips confess. Paul had already met this argument and answered it without a moment’s patience.

"What then shall we say? Shall we continue in sin so that grace may increase? Certainly not! How can we who died to sin live in it any longer?" Romans 6:1–2 (BSB)

And here is why Jude’s word for how they arrived matters so much. These were not honest believers who lost their footing. They slipped in unnoticed (παρεισδύω) pareisdyō, pronounced par-ice-DOO-oh. Strong's G3921, to slip in unnoticed, to creep in alongside. Pareisdyō is a word built out of small parts that each add something: dyō, to sink or slip in, eis, into, and para, alongside. Put them together and you have the picture of something sliding in sideways, at the edge, where nobody is watching the door. It was used of a lawyer smuggling a clause into a document, of an alien slipping across a border, of a stowaway. Jude does not say these men were raised up in the congregation and went bad. He says they got in. That distinction runs straight through this letter and it deserves your attention, because Jude is about to describe apostasy in the most frightening terms in the New Testament, and a tender believer can read those verses and begin to wonder whether the ground under his own feet will hold. Read verse four again. The men Jude is warning about crept in. They were never kept in Jesus Christ, as verse one says you are. They came in through a side door and they will go out the same way. Jude is holding up a warning, not threatening a kept child of God with being dropped. Understand that now and you will be able to read every hard sentence that follows with clear eyes and a steady heart. , from outside, wearing the clothes of the family.

Jude 1:5–8 (BSB)

⁵ Although you are fully aware of this, I want to remind you that after Jesus had delivered His people out of the land of Egypt, He destroyed those who did not believe. ⁶ And the angels who did not stay within their own domain but abandoned their proper dwelling—these He has kept in eternal chains under darkness, bound for judgment on that great day. ⁷ In like manner, Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, who indulged in sexual immorality and pursued strange flesh, are on display as an example of those who sustain the punishment of eternal fire. ⁸ Yet in the same way these dreamers defile their bodies, reject authority, and slander glorious beings.

Jude now reaches back into the memory of God’s people and pulls out three cases, and he introduces them the way an old man introduces a thing you have known all your life: although you are fully aware of this, I want to remind you. That is a kindness. The most dangerous truths are usually not the ones we have never heard, but the ones we have heard so often that they have gone quiet. So he wakes them up. The first case is the generation that walked out of Egypt on dry ground. They saw the plagues. They ate the Passover. They sang on the far shore of the sea. And then, at the border of the land, they did not believe God could bring them in, and their bodies fell in the desert. Deliverance out of Egypt was real, and it did not by itself make a believing heart. The second case rises higher: angels who did not stay within their own domain but left the station God assigned them, and who are now held in chains under darkness, waiting for the day of judgment. Whatever the details of that fall, the point is unmistakable. If height and glory did not protect them, no advantage will protect anyone. And the third case goes down instead of up, to Sodom and Gomorrah and the towns around them, whose sin Jude names without flinching and without elaborating: they indulged in sexual immorality and pursued strange flesh, going after what God had not given, past every boundary He had set. They are on display, he says, as an example. The word means a specimen set out where everyone can see it.

That third case has to be handled the way Jude handles it, and no other way. He states the sin plainly, in one clause, and moves on. He does not describe, he does not dwell, and there is not a trace of enjoyment in his voice. Any preaching that lingers over the sins of Sodom has already caught something of the disease it claims to be treating. And the judgment is stated with the same restraint and the same seriousness: the punishment of eternal fire. Scripture says that plainly, and it will not do to soften it into a figure of speech or hurry past it. Nor will it do to say it with satisfaction. The right posture toward a sentence like that is the posture of a man who has been rescued and knows it, and who therefore wants the people around him rescued too. Hold both together, and hold them soberly.

Then verse eight lands the point on the present tense: yet in the same way these dreamers. Dreamers, because they claim visions and revelations to justify what they are doing, and because men living this way are not seeing reality at all. Three things mark them, and they will be repeated. They defile their bodies, treating the flesh as if it did not belong to the Lord who bought it. They reject authority, which is the same denial of the Master from verse four, now working itself out as contempt for anyone who might tell them no. And they slander glorious beings, throwing words around in the unseen realm as casually as they throw them around in the visible one. Three ancient judgments, and every one of them fell on people who had every reason to know better. That is Jude’s warning, and it is not aimed at the trembling. It is aimed at the comfortable.

Jude 1:9–13 (BSB)

⁹ But even the archangel Michael, when he disputed with the devil over the body of Moses, did not presume to bring a slanderous charge against him, but said, “The Lord rebuke you!” ¹⁰ These men, however, slander what they do not understand, and like irrational animals, they will be destroyed by the things they do instinctively. ¹¹ Woe to them! They have traveled the path of Cain; they have rushed for profit into the error of Balaam; they have perished in Korah’s rebellion. ¹² These men are hidden reefs in your love feasts, shamelessly feasting with you but shepherding only themselves. They are clouds without water, carried along by the wind; fruitless trees in autumn, twice dead after being uprooted. ¹³ They are wild waves of the sea, foaming up their own shame; wandering stars, for whom blackest darkness has been reserved forever.

Let us take verse nine honestly and without any nervousness, because a thoughtful reader is going to notice something. There is no account anywhere in the Old Testament of an archangel disputing with the devil over the body of Moses. Deuteronomy tells us the LORD buried Moses in a valley in Moab and that no one knows his grave to this day, and that is all. The story Jude alludes to came from a Jewish writing that circulated in his time and is now largely lost to us. So Jude is drawing on something outside the canon of Scripture, and the same thing happens again in verses fourteen and fifteen with the prophecy of Enoch. There is no need to be anxious about this or to invent an explanation. Say it plainly. Quoting a source is not endorsing everything in it. Paul does exactly the same thing when he stands on Mars Hill and quotes Greek poets who wrote in praise of Zeus, and when he tells Titus that a Cretan prophet spoke truly about his own countrymen.

"As one of their own prophets has said, “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.”" Titus 1:12 (BSB)

Nobody imagines Paul was canonizing Cretan poetry. He found a true sentence in a book that was not Scripture, and he used it. What the Holy Spirit guarantees here is that the detail Jude lifts out is true and is being used rightly, not that the whole book it came from is trustworthy. Do not hide this, and do not make a crisis of it. Now notice why Jude wanted the story at all. The point is the restraint of the archangel. Michael, standing in a dispute with the devil himself, over the body of the greatest prophet Israel ever had, would not presume to hurl a slanderous charge. He handed the matter up: The Lord rebuke you! That is not weakness. That is a creature who knows his rank and refuses to step above it, and who trusts judgment to the only One who can judge. There is an old echo behind those words, from the day the LORD Himself answered the accuser standing over Joshua the high priest.

"And the LORD said to Satan: “The LORD rebukes you, Satan! Indeed, the LORD, who has chosen Jerusalem, rebukes you! Is not this man a firebrand snatched from the fire?”" Zechariah 3:2 (BSB)

Hold on to that last image. A firebrand snatched from the fire. Jude will use it himself before he is finished, and it will turn out to be what he wants us doing with people. But these men are the opposite of Michael in every way. They slander what they do not understand, which is the mark of a small mind at work in a large universe, and what they do understand, they understand the way animals understand, by appetite. Jude says they will be destroyed by exactly those instincts. The appetite that seemed to serve them will eat them. Then comes the woe, and three men out of the books of Moses. The path of Cain, who brought a worship of his own choosing and, when he was not accepted, hated his brother and killed him. The error of Balaam, a prophet who could speak true words and still sold his gift for a fee, and whose counsel finally corrupted Israel by seduction. And Korah’s rebellion, where men with a real place in God’s service grudged the place God had actually given them and demanded a higher one, and the ground opened under their feet. Self-chosen worship, religion for money, and rebellion against God-given authority. That is the whole line of descent, and every one of those three men held a position among God’s people at the time.

Then Jude reaches for pictures, and each one deserves to be seen rather than skimmed. Hidden reefs in your love feasts: rock just under the surface at the exact spot where the ship feels safest. These men are at the family table, eating in the fellowship of the church, and no one knows the hull is about to open. Shepherding only themselves: the shepherd who fattens on the flock, an image the prophets had used long before, a woe on the shepherds of Israel who fed themselves and not the sheep. Clouds without water, carried along by the wind: in a dry country nothing lifts the heart like a cloud on the horizon, and nothing sinks it like a cloud that passes over and gives you nothing. These men promise rain. Fruitless trees in autumn: not spring, when bare branches mean nothing, but harvest time, when a man walks out with a basket and finds the limbs empty. Twice dead, Jude says, dead in their barrenness and dead again by the roots, and pulled up. Wild waves of the sea, foaming up their own shame: surf that hurls itself at the shore and leaves behind a line of weed and scum, all noise and violence, and the only thing it produces is its own filth. And last, wandering stars: a sailor steering at night sets his course by the fixed lights, and a light that moves will put him on the rocks. For such stars, Jude says, blackest darkness has been reserved forever. A star that leaves its place ends in the dark.

Jude 1:14–19 (BSB)

¹⁴ Enoch, the seventh from Adam, also prophesied about them: “Behold, the Lord is coming with myriads of His holy ones ¹⁵ to execute judgment on everyone, and to convict all the ungodly of every ungodly act of wickedness and every harsh word spoken against Him by ungodly sinners.” ¹⁶ These men are discontented grumblers, following after their own lusts; their mouths spew arrogance; they flatter others for their own advantage. ¹⁷ But you, beloved, remember what was foretold by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ ¹⁸ when they said to you, “In the last times there will be scoffers who will follow after their own ungodly desires.” ¹⁹ These are the ones who cause divisions, who are worldly and devoid of the Spirit.

Enoch is the seventh from Adam, and Genesis gives him three lines and one shining sentence, that he walked with God and was not, for God took him. The words Jude quotes are not in Genesis. They come from a Jewish book written under Enoch’s name that was widely read in that century, and the same honest handling applies here as at verse nine. Jude is not telling us that the book of Enoch is Scripture. He is telling us that this particular word is true, and under the Spirit’s hand it is now Scripture, sitting inside the letter you are holding. What a thing to notice, too: the seventh man from Adam, standing near the very beginning of the human story, is already saying that the Lord will come with myriads of His holy ones to judge. The knowledge that God will finally set things right is not a late invention of anxious religion. It is nearly as old as the race.

Count the word ungodly in verse fifteen. It comes four times in a single sentence, and Jude has already used it in verse four and will use it again in verse eighteen. The Greek word means, at its root, without reverence, a life lived as though God were not there. That is the disease, and everything else is a symptom. Notice too that the judgment falls on deeds and on words: every ungodly act of wickedness, and every harsh word spoken against Him. We are careless with words. God is not.

Then verse sixteen gives the portrait a final, almost domestic detail, and it is the most searching line in the whole catalogue. These men are discontented grumblers. After the reefs and the waves and the wandering stars, we come to muttering. They are never satisfied, always complaining under their breath about their circumstances and about God’s arrangement of things, and their mouths spew arrogance, and they flatter people to their faces when there is something in it for them. Grumbling and flattery in the same sentence, and both for the same reason: neither one is honest, and both are about getting. Sit with that, because it is a great deal closer to home than sexual scandal, and Jude has put it in the same list on purpose.

And then, at verse seventeen, the letter turns. But you, beloved. He has called them beloved before and he will again, and it comes here like a hand on the shoulder. Do not spend your life staring at the false teachers. Remember what the apostles told you. Notice how ordinary the defense is: remember. You were warned that this would happen. Scoffers who follow their own ungodly desires are not evidence that the ship is sinking; they are evidence that the Captain told the truth. If you knew in advance that this was coming, then when it comes you are not shaken by it. Verse nineteen closes the portrait with three strokes. They cause divisions, which is what happens when men set themselves up as a superior tier of Christian and sort everyone else beneath them. They are worldly, living by the natural man’s appetites and instincts with nothing higher at work. And they are devoid of the Spirit, which is the plainest thing said about them anywhere in the letter. For all their talk of visions and freedom and higher knowledge, the Spirit of God is simply not in them. That is not a judgment we are able to make about our neighbors, and Jude does not invite us to try. But it does settle what these men were, and it settles that they were never among the kept.

Jude 1:20–23 (BSB)

²⁰ But you, beloved, by building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, ²¹ keep yourselves in the love of God as you await the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you eternal life. ²² And indeed, have mercy on those who doubt; ²³ save others by snatching them from the fire; and to still others show mercy tempered with fear, hating even the clothing stained by the flesh.

But you, beloved, a second time, and now Jude tells them what to do with their hands. Here is the answer to the question everybody asks when the danger is named: what am I supposed to do about it? And it is strikingly ordinary. There is one central command in these two verses, keep yourselves in the love of God, and everything around it tells you how. Be careful with that command, because it can be misheard as work hard enough and God will go on loving you, and that is not what it says. Verse one already told you that you are loved and kept. Keeping yourself in that love is what a man does when he is out in the cold and stays near the fire. Stay in the place where the warmth is. Do not wander off. And Jude gives three companions to that one command. First, build yourselves up (ἐποικοδομέω) epoikodomeō, pronounced ep-oy-koh-doh-MEH-oh. Strong's G2026, to build up upon a foundation already laid. Epoikodomeō is a builder’s word, and the picture inside it is specific. Oikodomeō means to build a house; the added epi means upon, on top of something already laid. So the word does not mean to invent a faith of your own. It means to keep laying courses on a foundation that somebody else already set. Paul uses the same word when he says that the church is built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus Himself as the cornerstone, and again when he warns each man to be careful how he builds on the one foundation that has already been laid. That is exactly why Jude reaches for it here. The false teachers were offering something new, a higher knowledge, a fresh revelation, a freedom beyond the plain apostolic word. Jude answers by pointing his people at a foundation already down and telling them to build on it, brick by brick, day after day. And it is worth noticing that he says yourselves, plural, and that the building is something a congregation does together. The way to be unshakeable when clever men come with novelties is not to be clever back. It is to go on quietly laying stone on the old foundation, in the Word, in prayer, with the people of God, until the walls are high and the wind means nothing to you. in your most holy faith, which is the same faith he told you to contend for back in verse three, the deposit handed once for all to the saints. Second, pray in the Holy Spirit, which is prayer that is not merely our own wishing dressed in religious words but prayer carried and shaped by the Spirit of God Himself, and notice that in a paragraph so concerned with men who are devoid of the Spirit, the mark of the true believer is that he prays in Him. And third, await the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ, which is where the eyes go. Build, pray, keep, and wait. Four ordinary things, and every one of them is available to you before breakfast tomorrow.

Now come two verses that get skipped in nearly every sermon about contending for the faith, and they must not be skipped, because they are Jude’s own answer to what contending looks like when it reaches actual people. Having spent sixteen verses on hidden reefs and wandering stars, Jude turns and describes three kinds of endangered people, and every response he prescribes is a form of mercy. First: have mercy on those who doubt. Notice he does not say correct them, or shame them, or put them out. In a congregation where false teaching has been at work, there will be people who are genuinely unsteady, who cannot yet tell what is true, who are shaken and half-persuaded and frightened. The instruction is mercy. Be gentle with a wavering soul. Second: save others by snatching them from the fire. That is not gentle at all, and it is not meant to be. It is the picture from Zechariah, a firebrand pulled out of the flames, and it is the action of a man who runs toward a burning house because someone is still inside. Some people are so far into the error that a quiet conversation will not do; somebody has to go in after them. Third: to still others show mercy tempered with fear, hating even the clothing stained by the flesh. Here are people so deep in a corrupt way of living that the one who goes after them is in danger himself. So mercy, still mercy, but with a holy caution, the way a man handles the clothes of someone with a contagion: he does not refuse to help, and he does not pretend the garment is clean.

Put those three responses beside the word contend in verse three and let them define it. Mercy, rescue, and careful mercy. Not one word about winning an argument. Not a syllable of contempt. Jude has been as severe about false teaching as any writer in the New Testament, and the practical instruction he gives his people is to go out after the endangered with mercy in their hands and their own hearts guarded. That is the shape of it. Be immovable about the truth and tender about the people, and never, ever let the fight for the faith become an excuse for enjoying anyone’s ruin.

Jude 1:24–25 (BSB)

²⁴ Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you unblemished in His glorious presence, with great joy— ²⁵ 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.

And now the summit. Look at where this letter has been. A generation that came out of Egypt and fell in the desert. Angels who left their proper place and are in chains. Cities burned. Cain, Balaam, Korah. Reefs, waterless clouds, barren trees, wild surf, and stars that wandered off into the dark. Page after page of the fallen. And Jude ends it by lifting his eyes to the One who is able to keep you from stumbling (ἄπταιστος) aptaistos, pronounced AP-tice-toss. Strong's G679, without stumbling, sure-footed. Aptaistos is another word that appears only once in the New Testament, and Jude spends it here. It is the ordinary word for stumbling, ptaiō, with the negative a fastened to the front, so it means not-stumbling, sure-footed, unfallen. It was used of a horse that does not stumble, the sound-footed animal a man could trust on a rough mountain track in the dark, and it was used of a man keeping his feet on a treacherous road. Now put that word at the end of this particular letter. Every image in Jude has been of a foot going out from under someone: a nation that could not stand at the border of the land, angels who left their footing, a prophet who slipped after money, men whose ground opened up beneath them. And then the last thing Jude says about you is that God is able to hold you upright. Notice carefully who is doing the keeping. Not you. Jude has just told you to keep yourselves in the love of God, and both things are true at once, but only one of them is the guarantee. Your keeping is real and it is commanded. His keeping is what makes the outcome certain. If the sure-footedness were yours, this letter would end in terror. It ends in a doxology. . Do not let the force of that contrast slip by you. It is not an afterthought or a pleasant flourish at the end of a hard letter. It is the point. The whole catalogue of ruin exists to make you look up, and when you look up you find not a warning but a Person, and not a demand but an ability. He is able. The word means He has the power to do it, and there is no hint anywhere that His power might come up short.

Then read the rest of the promise, because it goes further than you might expect. He is able to present you unblemished in His glorious presence, with great joy. Unblemished is a sacrifice word, the word for a lamb without spot or flaw, the animal that could be brought to the altar because there was nothing wrong with it. That is what He undertakes to make of you and to set before His own glory. And the joy in that sentence is the astonishing part. It is not primarily saying that you will be glad, true as that will be. The joy belongs to the presenting. He brings you in with great joy, the way a man shows off something he has made and loves. If you have ever wondered whether God is weary of you, put your finger on that phrase and leave it there. Verse one already said you were kept in Jesus Christ, and now verse twenty-four says He is able to keep you from stumbling and bring you home. The letter is bracketed by keeping, and everything severe in between sits inside those two arms.

And then the last verse, which has no room in it for us at all. 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. Four words for what belongs to Him: glory, the weight of His splendor; majesty, His greatness; dominion, His strength to rule; authority, His right to. And three times for how long: before all time, and now, and for all eternity, which sweeps up eternity past, this present hour with all its danger and all its false teachers, and eternity to come, and gives every part of it to Him. Notice that the whole thing comes through Jesus Christ our Lord. He is the only Master these men denied, and He is the way the ransomed reach the Father. Jude began by refusing to call himself the Lord’s brother. He ends by putting every good word he has at the feet of that same Lord. Amen, he says, and there is nothing to add to it.