AP

Jude 11-13  Woe to them!  They have taken the way of Cain; they have rushed for profit into Balaam’s error; they have been destroyed in Korah’s rebellion.  These people are blemishes at your love feasts, eating with you without the slightest qualm – shepherds who feed only themselves.  They are clouds without rain, blown along by the wind; autumn trees, without fruit and uprooted – twice dead.  They are wild waves of the sea, foaming up their shame; wandering stars, for whom blackest darkness has been reserved forever.

The actual identity of Jude remains a matter of debate, even among reliable Reformed Evangelical scholars (brother or other close relative of James the brother of Jesus?, or of another James?, or some other recognised early Apostle?).  Because of questions about its authorship, and its quoting of non-Canonical Apocryphal sources, it was not accepted into the NT Canon by some branches of the Church until the fourth century, but now it is.

Jude writes this letter with a very burdened heart because of heretical ideas that were creeping into the Church and causing great harm from within its own ranks.  It is interesting that the thing he was concerned about was people claiming to be followers of Jesus but living lives that were inconsistent with their profession of faith.  It seems that Satan uses two ‘opposite’ strategies to do his damage.  Before the sixteenth century Protestant Reformation he managed to convince people that faith in Jesus’ finished work on the Cross was not enough, but, in addition, we must earn our salvation by doing ‘good works’.  The destructive heresy that Jude was exposing was the view that we can enjoy salvation by faith without exhibiting the resultant good behaviour that will always flow from genuine faith!

I have just read “The Gospel According to Jesus” by John MacArthur Jnr, where he shows how this same heresy today is having such a detrimental effect on the Church in North America and throughout the Western World: people who want to enjoy the privileges of identifying as (even ‘born again’) ‘Christians’, but who, at the same time want to continue to pursue their fallen worldly lifestyle.  This heresy tries to gain credibility by disparagingly referring to the biblical doctrine that came out of the Reformation as ‘Lordship Salvation’, as if it isn’t the ‘real thing’!  This heresy maintains that we are saved by accepting Jesus as our Saviour, but if we claim that therefore we should also live with him as our Lord, we are going beyond the biblical mandate and undermining what the Reformers taught about ‘Grace Alone’.

This ‘modern’ heresy seems to be exactly what Jude was addressing in his short letter two thousand years ago, referring to its practitioners as “ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only Sovereign and Lord” (verse 4), and as being no different from “Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns [who] gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion.”  They are taking the same self-centred, lustful, rebellious path as Cain, Balaam and Korah in the OT Scriptures.  Wanting to have Jesus as Saviour without submitting to him as Lord is not an option – we must submit to his Lordship because we are saved (by grace alone), and not so that we will be saved! – there is a very important difference.

– Bruce Christian