Jude 1b

Jude’s Opening Greeting and the Book’s Historical Context

Well, we're in week two and we're still in verse one. How about that? Last week we learned two truths from verse one, for the half of verse one. And the first was that Jude is a book that is very similar to our time period today.

And it's a very important book for us because the same problems that we face in today's world, the same issues that we face in the church, and the same remedy that Jude argues for exists for us today.

The remedy that Jude describes in the book is that we hold fast to the word of God, that it's in clinging to the truth that we have defense from all of the things that are happening around us. And Jude begins his book with the truth about who we are.

He starts with himself in verse one, A, if you remember, he told us who he is. He's Jude, he's the brother of Jesus. He's the one who, at one point, abandoned him and mocked him and turned away from him, but yet he's the one who bowed down and worshiped him as well.

And while we're not the biological brother or sister of Jesus, we can identify with Jude's story, we can identify that at some points in our life we've abandoned Christ and that we've mocked him or we've turned from him or our lives have not been submitted to Christ.

But also like Jude, that's not the end of our story. For all who are in Christ have been ransomed by Christ, have been bought into relationship with him. He purchased us as slaves. And as we learned last week, a slave is not something of no status.

Of course, as a slave, you have no status in and of yourself, but you have a shared status. You have an alien status. You have a status of who you belong to because it is not who we are, it's whose we are.

That's what we learned last week. Because we are Jesus Christ, because we are his possession, we have his status, we have his worth, we have everything. So that's what we learned last week. Today, I want us to focus on four things.

First, I want us to do a little bit deeper dive into the book. Last week we looked at what led to the writing of the book, but this week I want us to actually look at the book itself a little deeper. And then when we're finished with that, I want us to look at three points that Jude lays out for us and he does it quite nicely.

Jude loves the number three. He tells us that we are called, that we are beloved by God the Father, and we are kept for Jesus Christ. So we're gonna look at each one of those three things and we're gonna find out what that means for us as the people of God.

So, a little background on the book. The book, like we said last week, I believe was written in the mid 50s to 60s, which means that persecution was on the rise. Jude lives in a world that was completely hostile to God and it was coming on multiple different fronts.

We believe that Jude wrote the book from Judea, that's Israel, so he would have been persecuted. He would have felt the reality of persecution from three different fronts, as it were. Imagine an island that's being attacked on three sides.

You would have had the Romans, who hated Christians because of one very simple reason. Christians worship Jesus Christ as Lord. Rome didn't care at all if you worshiped a billion gods. It didn't matter to them.

They just cared that Caesar was Lord, that Caesar was number one in your life. And because Christians said we can't worship anyone but Jesus Christ alone, Romans actually accused Christians of being atheists because they couldn't believe that you would never acknowledge Caesar as Lord, so therefore they must be atheists.

How could they believe in this peasant, messianic king from Nazareth? Now, this is a little background information. We don't find this in Jude, but the Romans would sometimes give exceptions to this rule, and they gave exceptions to the Jewish people, where the Jews did not have to follow emperor worship.

The Jews were an obstinate people. They were a very pesky people to the Romans. So the Romans felt, from a geopolitical standpoint, it was easier to just say, okay, Jews, you win. You don't have to worship Caesar as Lord, just don't cause any trouble.

You don't cause any problems, because as soon as you tell them they have to worship Caesar as Lord, they'll rebel, and then Rome has to send their armies, and they have to spend a lot of money on war.

So the Romans extended that to the Jews, but they did not extend that to Christians. That freedom to not worship Caesar as Lord was not given to early Christians. They were seen as a sect, as a heretical offshoot, and they were persecuted.

Jews would turn them in to the Romans at will, and they would mercilessly punish them or kill them. Now, that's kind of the backdrop of the Roman persecution. In a few years, Rome's gonna come in and burn the city of Jerusalem to the ground.

It's gonna scatter the church, and God's gonna use that event to spread the gospel all over the Roman world, because persecution often spreads the gospel. It's not the worst thing in the world, because God uses the pain and uses the persecution to spread his church, but I just say all of that to say that they were experiencing persecution at this time.

Christians were also being directly persecuted by the Jews. This is the second front of persecution. The Jews themselves were persecuting them because they could not believe that they would worship Jesus as God.

They knew that God is one, that he's one God. He's not a triune God. So the Romans thought that they were atheists. The Jews thought that they were heretics, and we see in the early stages of the book of Acts that Paul is persecuting them, the apostle Paul, who later would be a great advocate for the Christian faith.

He's persecuting them. He's enslaving them in jail. He's signing off on their murder, and we know that Paul wasn't the only one. This was a culture of death that was happening in early Judaism against Christianity, so we see that these two fronts are really opposed to the church, and that's the context that Jude is writing in, but to Jude, there was an even greater threat to the church.

There was an even greater sort of attack that was happening, more so than the Romans, more so than the Jews, and that was the infiltration of wolves into the flock of God. Jude believes that this has the potential to undo the church, not persecution by the Romans, not persecution by the Jews.

It's the infiltration of wolves that Jude is most concerned about, and what I want us to do is I want us to take a moment and just look at the book of Jude in whole. I wanted to do this last week, but I didn't have my four beautiful bookmarks to be able to do that, so this week, we're gonna read the book of Jude, and we're gonna talk a little bit about the context for which Jude is writing.

It says in Jude 1, Jude, a bondservant of Jesus Christ and a brother of James, to those who are the called, beloved in God, the Father, and kept for Jesus Christ. May mercy and peace and love be multiplied to you.

Now, beloved, while I was making every effort to write to you about our common salvation, I felt the necessity to write to you, appealing that you contend earnestly for the faith, which was once for all handed down to the saints.

So right off the bat, Jude is saying, I wanted to write you a happier letter. I wanted to write you a theological treatise about what salvation is and what it means that we're saved. He wanted to write that book, but that's not the book that he wrote, because as we'll see in verse four, problems are creeping into the church.

Verse four, it says, for certain persons have crept in unnoticed. Those who were long beforehand marked out for this condemnation, ungodly persons who turn the grace of God into licentiousness, that just means they use a license to sin, and they deny our only master and Lord Jesus Christ.

So what is happening is in the earliest parts of the church, people are coming in and they're preaching a different gospel. They're preaching a gospel that doesn't involve Jesus Christ. They're saying that you can do whatever you want, you can send however you want, and God's grace will just somehow cover that, and what Jude is gonna tell us is that they're not Christians.

They're not saved. It says, now I desire to remind you, though you know all things, once for all that the Lord, after saving a people out of the land of Egypt, subsequently destroyed those who did not believe.

So Jude is saying that those who are wolves in the church, their destination is destruction. He says, and angels who did not keep their own domain, he's talking about fallen angels, but abandoned their proper abode, he has kept in eternal bonds under darkness for the judgment of the great day.

So he's comparing false teachers and their destiny and their judgment with the judgment of the fallen angels. Just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, since they in the same way indulged in gross immorality and went after strange flesh, after exhibiting as an example and undergoing the punishment of eternal fire, yet in the same way, these men also by dreaming defile the flesh and they reject authority and they revile angelic majesties.

But Michael, the archangel, when he disputed with the devil and argued about the body of Moses, we'll talk about this passage. This is an apocryphal passage Jude is quoting. We'll talk about that in a couple of weeks.

It might seem strange to you. It's not in your current Bible. So I just point that out. Did not dare pronounce against him a railing judgment, but said, the Lord rebuke you. But these men revile the things which they do not understand.

So they revile God because they don't understand him and his character. And the things which they know by instinct like unreasoning animals, by these things they are destroyed. Woe to them for they have gone the way of Cain and for pay they have rushed headlong into the error of Balaam and have perished in the rebellion of Korah.

The picture that we see painted here is that these false teachers have come in and they're not welcome. They're not following after the Lord. They're not regenerate. They're not saved. And they are destined for destruction.

And it says in the last time, skipping down out of verse 18, the last time there will be mockers following after their own ungodly lust. And these are the ones who cause division, who are worldly minded, and who are devoid of the spirit.

So what Jude is saying in this book is that there's a greater threat than Rome. There's a greater threat than the Jews. There's a greater threat than the outward persecution and that's the infiltration of false doctrine and wolves into the true church of God.

And it will rip apart the true church. And if you don't believe it, history will bear this out. Every time that a church departs from the truth of the word of God, it is not long before they are completely dead.

Because truth is what Jude is telling us to contend for. Actually, the thesis of the entire book is verse three. After Jude's greeting, he says, "'Beloved, while I was making every effort "'to write to you about our common salvation, "'I felt the necessity to appeal to you "'to contend earnestly for the faith, "'which was once for all handed down to the saints.'".

So what Jude is saying is that at the center of all of this, that we are supposed to contend for the truth, for the beautiful mysteries of salvation. We're supposed to contend for the truth that is revealed in God's scripture.

Because the church is and always will be vulnerable to attack. That's a reality. As long as the enemy still exists, who steals, kills, and destroys, and as long as he is a roaring lion who seeks to devour those whom he may devour, the church is vulnerable to attack.

Because the church holds fast to the word of God. But here's the thing, we are not defenseless. We are not defenseless against the attacks and the schemes of the enemy because Jude says that we can contend for truth.

That is our defense. Every single attack, every attack that has ever come upon the church or come upon God is an attack on truth. Look at the scriptures. He starts with Eve. Did God really say? He's attacking truth.

He's attacking the word of God. Did God really say? He comes to Jesus when he's in the wilderness and he tests him three different times. You'll notice he tests him out of Deuteronomy. He tests him out of the book of Numbers.

Satan is trying to twist the word of God. That is his MO. He comes to modern denominations in the same way and says, is really scripture the word of God? Can you really trust this book? Is it really infallible?

Is it really inerrant? Is it really sufficient? And history, again, will bear this out that Satan begins to win in a culture when he starts perverting truth. But the church is victorious when she clings to it.

That's the point Jude is making. That we're to hold fast to the word of God and that is the weapon that we wield against all of the schemes and attacks of the enemy. Truth is important. We live in a culture where it's okay to be a Christian but it's not okay to have good doctrine.

Why do we need to worry about doctrine? But I tell you, doctrine is disproportionately important because Jude is saying that these men who have false doctrine aren't even Christians. Knowing our Bible and knowing what it says, doctrine is disproportionately important.

We can't just say because it's hard to study the Bible or it's hard to understand it that it's not important. That would be like a soldier saying, it's hard to work out and exercise, therefore I'm gonna let my body go and when I go out on the battlefield, I'm totally ill-equipped for the battle and probably gonna die.

Knowing the Bible is important. Knowing what doctrine is is important and of course, there's all kinds of doctrine. There's good doctrine, there's biblical doctrine, there's false doctrine, so we have to be discerning.

But to not have a robust view of who God is in the scriptures is to invite satanic attack in your life. It's to be ill-equipped and prepared for the battle that rages on every single day. Jude's saying that savage wolves are gonna come.

They're gonna come into the church. He's saying that by opposition, or by our opposition, that we're vulnerable to attack, but the truth of God is our defense. The truth of God is our defense. It's our individual defense, it's our defense as a church and we're called to contend for the truth by clinging to it.

The Threefold Hope of Being Called, Beloved, and Kept

Now today, I want us to look at the most magnificent truths. Some of them, the most magnificent truths you can find in the entire Bible, these three little statements that Jude tells us, that we are called and that we are beloved and that we are kept.

That truth, when we really understand what it means, will help us be able to face anything. There's nothing the world can throw at us if you know you're called. There's nothing the world can throw at you if you know you're loved.

There's nothing the world can throw at you if you know that you're being kept and preserved by Jesus, for Jesus, for all eternity. So I want us to lean into the truth so that we can cling to it, so that the wolves and so that the problems and so that all the things that society and Satan himself can throw at us won't shake us.

I want us to understand the truth. So we're gonna start in Jude 1, we're gonna finish in Jude 1, which is a really great accomplishment. Jude, a slave of Christ and the brother of James, to those who are the called, beloved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ.

Now notice he says the called. Jude is talking to believers, and the context of the book bears this out. He's talking to a remnant of believers who have faith in Jesus Christ. He's not writing to every single member of this church.

He's not writing to every single person who's heard the gospel, because remember he said, wolves have crept in. So he's not talking to them, that they're not the called. They're not the ones who are loved by God.

They're not the ones who are being kept. He's talking to the Christians here. And I think it's important for us to acknowledge right away that there's tens of thousands of churches in America that are gonna be meeting this weekend, and not every single person who's there has sincere faith.

Not every single person, Billy Graham even said that he would be surprised if more than 50 of people who attend church have sincere faith in Christ. Now I don't know if that's true or not. That's Billy Graham, maybe he was wrong.

But 50 seems hard, but the point is is that the church is not pure. The church has all kinds of people who come, and not all of them have saving faith. There's wolves. I think it would be easy for us, even as a church, to say this can't apply to us.

We're brand new. We're so biblical-centered. We love the Bible so much. We sing songs about the Bible. We read 14 chapters of the Bible per week in our services. Clearly it can't be about us, but Jude says they crept in unnoticed.

Jude said no one know. I was reflecting on this today. It is entirely possible that if not already, at some point in our season as a church, whatever the Lord gives us, a wolf will creep in. Someone, maybe even today, might not have sincere faith in Christ, may be used by the enemy as a wolf.

I don't believe that, I don't think that, but it says they crept in unnoticed. This is serious. We have to examine ourselves. We have to make sure that we're in the faith so that these truths that we're gonna talk about today apply to us.

Jude is effectively splitting his congregation into two parts. He's talking to the elect. He's talking to the faithful. He's talking to the ones who are saved, and he's talking to those who are marked out for destruction.

He's talking to the called, and he's talking to those who are under condemnation. That's the two groups that Jude is talking to. And on the surface, it's probably difficult to understand or ascertain which group a person falls into, because on the surface, they all go to church.

Jude doesn't accuse them of missing church services. He doesn't accuse them of being tardy or being late. No, I think they're there, and they're participating. So they're all going to the same church.

They're all singing the same songs. They're all listening to the same sermons, but yet there's something different about them. One is called, and one is not, and that's what I want us to explore. What does it mean to be called by God?

That's what Jude says, that we are called. What does that mean? Well, there's three ways the Bible talks about calling that I want us to understand. I'm going to hit two of them a little bit more than the third, but I'll start with the one that I'm not going to spend much time on.

And we talked about it in the Belgic Confession today. You can go outside, and you can look at the sky. You can look at the plants. You can look at things in a microscope. You can look at things in a telescope, and you can tell that we are not here by accident.

We were created by God, and there's this generic call that goes out to all human beings on the planet that everyone is without excuse. That calling will not save. It will only condemn, because if we reject the God who created everything, we are under condemnation.

The second call is a universal call. It's an external call. It's the gospel call. It's the call for Christians to go out into the world and to preach the gospel to all people, to all nations, to every tribe, tongue, and people.

That call can be rejected. That call, you can hear the gospel, and you can say, I don't want it. And then there's the third. The Bible talks about a call that cannot be rejected. The Bible talks about a call that you cannot turn away from.

The Bible talks about a call that we would call efficacious. It means it's effective. That means that it does what it says it's going to do. There's two calls that condemn, but there's one call that utterly saves.

And I want us to spend our time talking about that, because this is important to understand why Jude can say, you being called gives you hope. Being called doesn't give you hope if you just raise your hand and say, yeah, I'd like a savior who takes me to heaven, and then I go do whatever I want.

That's not the hope that we have. There's a deeper hope that if we understand this word call, that we'll understand what it means and why we can have hope. Now, I'll start with the universal gospel call.

That's the call that should go out to all people to repent and turn to Christ. That's our job as Christians to go out and preach the gospel. And again, some will reject that and some will accept it. But then there's this internal effectual call.

Remember, effectual means effective. While the universal call goes out to all people, there's also a calling that goes out to just believers. Notice that Jude calls these people the called. He doesn't say that you're potentially called.

He doesn't say that you made a decision. He says, no, as a status, you are the called. They're the ones who not only heard the gospel, but they responded to the gospel, and there's a difference in their calling.

And it's my contention that as we understand this, we'll understand what Jude is saying. Now, Romans 3 .12, let's start there. The gospel is preached to all people. It says in Romans 3 .12, there's none righteous, not even one.

There's none who understands. There's none who seeks after God. All have turned aside and together have become useless. There's none who does good, not even one. So what Paul is saying right off the bat is man in his natural state can't turn to God.

He can't repent. He's not righteous. Turning to Christ would be an act of righteousness, but yet Paul says there's none that are righteous. Turning to Christ would demonstrate that they have spiritual understanding.

Paul says they have none. Turning to Christ would mean that they're seeking after God. Paul says no one does that, so we have a problem. It's an impossibility to turn to God in our natural state. It's an impossibility to turn to God on our own human effort.

Sin has done something so profound to the fabric of humanity that we can't even seek God. Even if the gospel is preached, we can't understand it. We cannot turn to it. It's almost like a corpse lying in a coffin.

You can go up to it and say, repent, believe, and turn to Christ, and it's falling on dead ears, literally. Natural man in his natural state is dead. That's what Paul is getting at. Ephesians 2 says the same thing.

Don't feel the need to turn with me to every one of these verses. I'm gonna post this on social media so you'll have all of the references. We're gonna do a tour of the Bible for just a moment, so we'll be here for just a moment.

Don't wear your fingers out. Ephesians 2, one through three says, and you were dead in your trespasses and sins. The Princess Bride, great movie. We're not mostly dead. We're all dead in our sins, Miracle Max would tell us, in which you formally walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince and the power of the air of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.

Don't miss what he's saying there. We are dead in our trespasses and the only life that we have as non-believers is the spirit of Satan himself that's coursing through us, the spirit of disobedience.

So we're not only dead, we're animated by him, by Satan. That's the spirit that is working in the sons of disobedience. And it says that we too all formerly lived in the lust of our flesh, indulging in the desires of our flesh and of our mind and we were by nature children of wrath.

Without Christ, we're incapable of leaving our fleshly life, our worldly pursuits. We cannot indulge in godly desires. We're incapable of responding to the call of the gospel. We're incapable of repentance and we're only able to refuse God.

This is what Paul is saying. And this is not an isolated verse. This is kind of all throughout the New Testament. And I want to point out, if we left it here, no one would be saved. No one would be saved because we are all dead in our trespasses and we cannot turn to Christ on our own.

But Paul doesn't stop there. Paul goes on to verses four through nine and what he does there is he differentiates between the two calls that I've been describing. The gospel is preached and the Christian who turns to Christ because God has called him from death to life.

He differentiates these two in verses four through nine. Let's look at what he says. He says, but God, there's so much power in the word but sometimes and just it's a turn. You are dead in your trespasses.

You are, but God, you were dead. You were falling after your own sinful lust but look at what God did. God being rich in mercy because of his great love which he loved us with, even when we were dead and our transgressions made us alive together with Christ.

By grace you have been saved and he raised us up with him and he seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus so that in the ages to come, he might show the surpassing riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus for by grace you have been saved through faith and not of yourself.

It's the gift of God, not as a result of work so that no one can boast. Look at what he's saying here. He's saying, but God who is rich in mercy made us alive. He didn't say responded to our request to petition for life.

He said that we were dead lying in a coffin and he made us alive. It says that he raised us up with him. He doesn't say that we raised our gaze up to him. He says he raised us up, that he seated us with him, the only person working in this verse is God.

God is the one who is moving. God is the one who is working. He's the author of salvation and this has massive implications because what it means is that when we finally repent and when we turn to God, it means that before we could do that, God has first turned to us and God has awakened us and brought us to life because dead people can't do anything.

What it means is that God had to make us alive before we could even choose him. God must work against our sinful human wills in order to save us. God must work in spite of our spiritual death in order to make us alive.

God works against our rebellious nature to overwhelm us. He stood over our rotting spiritual corpses. This is me being poetic. Derek makes fun of me for this, so forgive me. He stood over our rotting spiritual corpses that were lying on a gurney bound toward hell and he resurrected us.

That's what happened. He went to the morgue and he brought us back to life. That's what Jesus has done. Without his work on us, there is no faith by us. Without Jesus's work in us and on us, there is no faith by us.

And what it means is his work is always effective. It's like an ER doctor when someone comes in after drinking and driving and they get into a major accident, their heart is stopped, they're lying on the table.

If the ER doctor doesn't shock them back to life, they're dead. And without God shocking us back to life with the power of the gospel, we are dead. The gospel being preached may be rejected by many, but no one who God determines to raise to life stays dead.

No one God decides to awaken remains asleep. That's what it means for him to have an effectual call. It's effective, it's always effective. He always saves who he intends to save. Why? Because our souls were dead so that we could not choose Christ.

He did that so that we could respond to him. There's many verses in the Bible that say turn to Christ. There's many verses in the Bible that say choose Christ. There's many verses in the Bible that say respond to him, love him, turn to him, but the point that I'm making is there's something that happens before that.

Before you can choose Christ, he has to awaken you. Before you can choose Christ, he has to bring you to life. It's almost like you wake up still lying in the coffin that has your name on it, and the first thing that you see is Jesus Christ standing over you, loving you, calling you to himself, and in the beauty of his gaze, you say yes, yes.

Yes, I accept you. You wouldn't have done that if he didn't bring you back to life. You would've been dead. It's in his work that we see him. It's in his moving that we respond to him. That has to happen first, and it says in Ephesians that he does this because he's gracious, and he does this because he's loving.

He does this because he alone is powerful enough to resurrect us. He does this, ultimately, there's something bigger happening more than just God loves you and me, and he does, and we celebrate that. There's something larger that's happening.

He does it for the surpassing riches of his glory. God saves us so that his glory will ring to the ends of the cosmos and further. His glory is why he saves. He does it for his namesake so that we could never boast, so that we could never think that, ah, I saved myself, and this is where I would disagree with some who say that I chose God because when you say that, what you're implicitly saying is that I was a little bit more spiritual than my neighbor.

I was a little bit more intelligent than my brother. I had something in me that told me I needed God, and I needed to choose him, and you're sharing the glory with God when you do that, and God says, I will not share my glory with another.

What we need to say is that I was made alive in Christ so that all I could choose was Christ, not in my sin, I chose Christ, and God responded to me. God worked on me, and I responded to him. That's what the Bible's saying, not that we reached our hands up to God and said, God, come down and save me.

God came down and saved us so that we would reach our hands up to him. That's what we're talking about, and I wanna show you this in Matthew 22, beautiful parable, and again, it differentiates the call of gospel being preached and God effectually calling.

I want us to see this. Jesus says to a group of people, the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding feast for his son, and he sent out his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding feast, and they were unwilling to come.

So what Jesus is saying metaphorically here is that one day he's gonna throw a feast. It's called the wedding feast of Christ, the marriage supper of the lamb. It's in Revelation, and only the people who have been invited are going to come, and while we are here on earth, we are to tell people the gospel.

That's what he said. He sent out his slaves. We're Jesus' slaves. Let's move on. Again, he sent out other slaves saying, tell those who have been invited, behold, I have prepared my dinner and my oxen and my fat and livestock, and they're all butchered and everything is ready.

Come to the wedding feast, but they paid no attention to him, and they went their own way, one to his own farm and another to his business, and the rest seized his slave, and they mistreated them, and they killed them, but the king was enraged, and he sent his armies, and he destroyed those murderers, and he set their city on fire, and then he said to the slaves, the wedding's ready, but those who were invited were not worthy.

Go, therefore, to the highways, and as many as you find there, invite them to the wedding feast. Those slaves went out into the streets, and they gathered together everyone that they found both evil and good, and the wedding hall was filled with dinner guests, but when the king came in, this is dramatic, what's happening here.

When the king came in to look over the dinner guests, he saw a man who was there who was not dressed in wedding clothes, and he said to him, friend, how did you come in here without wedding clothes? And the man was speechless, and the king said to the servants, bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness.

In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, for many are called by the gospel, but only few are chosen. Many are called, but only few are chosen. What Jesus is saying is there's three groups of people in this passage.