Jude 5

The Shepherd's Church

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Let's pray. Father God, I pray that as we examine your word tonight, that you would make it living and active.

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That Lord, you would cause it to stir our hearts and stir our affections and our minds, and that Lord, that you would raise our hearts up to you.

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That Lord, as we go through this verse, verse five, that we would see things in it that we haven't seen before,

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Lord, that we would see things in ourself, maybe, that we haven't seen before, and that Lord, we would be able to, at the end of this, magnify your great name.

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Lord, would you allow us as a people, would you allow everyone who is here, would you allow anyone who's not here, who's listening to this, would you allow us to be a people of the book, a people of the word, a people who rejoice in who you are and who you've revealed yourself to be.

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God, like the verse said earlier, would we remember, and would it always be on our minds,

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Lord, so that we can love you better. Lord, we ask that you bless this time.

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It's in Christ's name we pray, amen. All right, so I made a promise last week, and I am going to be made a liar.

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I said we were gonna go through verse seven, and I can't do it. Verse five is too good, so that's where we're gonna be today.

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Next week, we're gonna do, whether I like it or not, we're gonna do two verses, and we're gonna move on a little bit further along.

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So I want us to say that verse five is probably one of the richest verses that I've studied in this book so far, and I absolutely love it.

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As we've been going through the book, verses one through four have really drawn us into the theology of the book, and in those short verses, we found many things that we're supposed to root our lives in.

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We see that Jude is not only the one who's called to write this book, but he wrote it to a true church of believers who were called, beloved, and kept by God for Christ, and the reason that he's writing this book is because they're supposed to contend, because they're being infiltrated by theological kamikazes, by people who are coming into the church in order to destroy the church and rip the church apart, and what

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Jude is doing is he's telling them to band together and contend for truth. This is true in Jude's day, but it's also true in our day that we too are called to contend.

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We are called to stand up for truth because wolves, as we have learned, come into the church, and they come in in order to spread error, heresy, and in order to tear the church apart.

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Now, that's kind of the summary of verses one through four, but one of the key points that I want to mention here as we start today is that we are not fighting with people who are evenly matched.

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We are not fighting as underdogs. We are not contending with people who are equally matched with us.

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We are actually contending as victors because what Jude is saying to the people in his day and what the

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Holy Spirit would say to us today is that we are the true church of Christ. We are the blood -bought bride of Jesus Christ, and we don't contend as men and women who are on the losing side, and we do not contend as equals.

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We contend on the winning side with a God who has already declared victory in this area.

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When Jesus rose from the dead, he did not come out of the grave brandishing a sword saying, now it's time to finally get the war on.

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Now it's finally time to fight the forces of Satan. On the cross, Jesus said, it is finished. And when he died and when he rose from the grave, he ascended to the right hand of the

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Father to sit down on the throne in victory. Jesus is not standing up, he's not nervous in heaven.

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Jesus has proclaimed that it is finished, which means that we are being led by a

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God who knows the end from the beginning, and the battle has already been declared won.

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Jude says in this book that these people were long beforehand marked out for destruction, meaning that they cannot actually win, meaning that when they fight, they fight in vain because the wolf cannot subvert the plan of God.

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Satan himself cannot subvert the plan of God, which is good news, which means that we don't fight to win.

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We fight as winners. We fight as people who are on the side of victory. We're not underdogs.

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We've been given Christ's own authority to be witnesses in this world. And the reason that we fight is because we wanna see his rule and his reign permeate every square inch of our existence.

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We wanna see it infiltrate every facet of our lives. We wanna see it transform our families.

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We wanna see the glory of God transform our home and our life and our hearts and our marriages, our church, the people that we know.

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We wanna see every aspect of the glory of God infiltrating every facet of our life.

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That is what it means to contend for truth, to contend for God and to contend for his glory. Again, we don't contend to win anything.

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We contend to spread his victory. We contend to spread the victory that Christ has already won.

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We contend against wolves because they oppose our Lord and our Savior, Christ. We contend against error in the church because we are the spotless bride of Christ, and we look forward to the day when

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Jesus comes to meet his bride and that she's been made ready to meet her husband.

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So we contend for the church because we wanna see her purified and ready. We contend against sin in our hearts because God called us to be holy.

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We contend for the faith of others because we have affections for them, like the affections of Christ, and we wanna see their lives sanctified according to the gospel.

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We contend by spreading the good news of Jesus because we wanna see his lost sheep found.

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And what I want us to see today, in verse five, is that we do all this because Christ is both the

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Lord of salvation and he is sovereign over condemnation.

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Those are the two main things that we're gonna see today, that we're gonna see that Christ, Jesus, is the

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Lord of salvation, and we're also gonna see, not something that's taught, but something that's in the text, that he is sovereign over condemnation.

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So if you will, turn with me to verse five. That's where we're gonna be, unless a miracle happens.

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That's where we're gonna end, and we're gonna start this now. It says in verse five, now

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I desire to remind you. What a breath of fresh air. For verses four, which we've been looking at for two weeks, it was all about the wolf.

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Jude turns his attention now and says, I wanna remind you. I wanna talk to you.

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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.

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So this is rich theology, and there's a lot going on here. It talks about the theology of salvation.

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This verse talks about the theology of damnation. It talks about those who want to know

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Christ, how they come to know Christ, and it also talks about why men and women end up eternally separated from Christ.

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I think the point is clear that these verses are talking about unbelief leads to destruction.

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That is kind of the central point of verse five, but I love the way that Jude actually gets there, because he builds his argument, and he doesn't start with unbelief.

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He starts with reminding. The first point I want us to understand about this text is that Jude reminds

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God's people of doctrine. Jude reminds God's people of content.

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Jude reminds God's people of theology. He reminds them of data. He doesn't begin with how they feel.

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He doesn't begin with that time that they made a decision, or he doesn't cite when they were baptized, catechized, or when they joined the church.

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He starts with content. He starts with doctrine. He starts with a very important point that we are to consider.

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Now, the point that I would say that we are to look at here is that content, theology, is incredibly important.

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It actually is important so much so that what you believe will actually could be the dividing line between heaven and hell.

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What we believe could either save or condemn us. Of course, it's Jesus who saves us, but if we don't believe in this

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Jesus, then what hope do we have? We have to understand who he is.

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We have to understand what he's done. That's why Jude begins with this reminder. He reminds them of what they already know.

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In verse five through seven, he doesn't teach them new ideas. In verses five through seven, he doesn't teach them new theological understanding.

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He reminds them of what they already know. He uses three familiar

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Old Testament stories. He uses Israel in the wilderness and Exodus. He uses the angels in Genesis six through nine who were fallen, and he uses

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Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19, I think. So he uses these three

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Old Testament stories, and he assumes that they know these stories. He chooses,

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I desire to remind you, though you know. This is important. You can't remind someone of something that they don't know.

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You can't remind someone of something that they have not heard. So what Jude is saying is that his reminder right up front is an assumption that Christians will know the word of God.

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When discussing such weighty matters as these, as salvation and condemnation, it doesn't begin with our feelings.

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It doesn't begin with our circumstances. It begins with Scripture. He begins with the assumption that we would know what the text of the

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Bible says because these are the words of life. Men and women are looking for hope, and they're looking for encouragement, and they're looking for something that Jude is going to give them while they're a persecuted church.

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While wolves are infiltrating their church, they're looking for something to hold onto, and what Jude offers them is the

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Bible. Because knowing your Bible and understanding what it teaches and being equipped under the

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Holy Spirit's interpretation of the Scriptures, that is the way that you know God.

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That is the way that you know yourself. That is the way that you have hope. Jude is speaking to men and women who need hope, and he's saying that that hope can be found in the word of God.

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Now, how can Jude make that claim? Because he goes to the text. Verse five, verse six, verse seven, he goes to the

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Bible. He goes to the Old Testament. He goes to the Bible and the text that they know. He reminds them of the content that they know because apparently they had forgotten.

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The same is true for us today. How do we know anything? How do we know whether we're saved?

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How do we know whether we can have hope? How do we know that we're in right standing with God? It's not based on how we feel.

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It's not based on our performance. Some days you're gonna wake up and you're gonna doubt. Some days you're gonna wake up and you're gonna think,

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I don't know if God loves me today. I don't feel it. It doesn't seem real. Some days you're gonna feel like life is crushing you.

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And Jude is getting to the fundamental point here that it's not based on what you feel.

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It's not based on what anyone else has said. It's based on what God has said in his word.

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Salvation begins with belief in what the Bible says. Salvation actually is about content before it's about relationship.

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Now, you'll hear many pastors today who will say that all you need to have is a relationship with Jesus. But how can you have a relationship with Jesus if you don't know who he is?

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How can you have a relationship with this God if you don't know anything about him? We have pastors all over America who will say, you need to have a relationship, you need to have a relationship, but they fail to tell you who this

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God is. So therefore, how can you have a relationship with this God? Content has to precede relationship.

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You have to know who this God is before you can love him. Do you know that you're a sinner? How do you know?

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Did you wake up one day and you just thought to yourself, wow, I really am really wretched? No, you didn't.

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At some point, you came under the authority of scripture, and when it says that you fell short of the glory of God, you wrestled with that, you understood that, and you realized that your sin separated you from this holy

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God. It put you in a vulnerable state between him and you. Do you know that you can save yourself, or do you think that?

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Do you think that you can be good enough, that you can impress God by your works? Do you know that just one sin eternally separates you from God?

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Did you feel that? Did you intuit that? Did you have a dream about that?

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No, we learn that from the word of God. What we know is that this kind of knowledge doesn't come by intuition.

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This is not creaturely reasoning. What we know about salvation is from God's word, and therefore, the content must precede the relationship.

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Do you know God can save you? Do you know Christ is truly God, or that he was truly man, or that he was born of a virgin, that he lived a sinless life, that he died, that he was resurrected?

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All these things cannot come through intuition. These are data points that the

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Bible has revealed to us that we must know. Heaven and hell lie in the balance of what we actually believe, and God has revealed to us what we are to believe.

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I can't dream these things up. Jude is making a very important point that content precedes the relationship.

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It's the word of God alone that gives you the right beliefs, that gives you the right doctrine, that gives you the things that you must know for certain in order to have a relationship with God.

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The Bible says that anyone who confesses Jesus Christ with their lips and believes in their heart that the Lord rose from the dead and saved them from their sins, that person is saved.

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So therefore, you have to know those things before you can be saved. This is of the utmost importance.

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If you do not know Christ, and if you do not know who he is, then you are still in your unbelief, and if you're still in your unbelief, then you are condemned in that unbelief.

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Again, this is absolutely important. Jude is telling his church the reason these wolves are condemned and the reason anyone who does not follow

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Christ and does not believe is condemned is because of what they know and what they've rejected. There's many today who will come and say, we don't need doctrine, we don't need theology.

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Why bother and worry about that? That's boring. Just give me Jesus. How can you have

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Jesus if you don't even know him? It's impossible. That's one of the chief blunders in the

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American church. Jude is saying without right doctrine, there is no salvation.

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And that leads us to our second point. First point is that Jude is reminding us of content that we should know.

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The second point is he's reminding us because we forget. He's reminding us because we forget.

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We go about our day bombarded by a million different things. All right, our kids have schedules, our jobs have schedules, we have priorities and deadlines, we have favorite teams like Duke Blue Devils who are the best, we have television shows that we watch, we have plans to eat, we have plans to date and to vacate, we have weddings, funerals, downtime, me time, you time, sleep time.

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And after all of that is sliced up, what time is left for reflection? What time is left for God?

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What time is left for truth? By nature of our overcrowded lives, we are bound to forget.

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We are bound to struggle to not remember. Amid the sea of noises, our lives, the way that we have structured them, choke out

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God. The list of our tasks choke out our faith. The billboard signs tell you you'd be more attractive if you bought that watch.

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You would be more important if you had this amount of followers or if you did this diet or this trend.

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All day, every day, the world is marketing a false bill of goods. And if we are not reminding ourself of truth, we will forget.

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We will forget. If we're not preaching the true gospel to ourselves, a false gospel is being preached.

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Every commercial has a gospel claim in it that you're not enough, that you need this, that this product is what will make you better.

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If we're not reminding ourself of truth, we will forget. That's why Jude reminds his people, because they had forgotten who

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God is. They were discouraged because they had forgotten. They were not feeling hopeful because they had forgotten.

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They were walking around like Christian amnesiacs, lost in a sea of fog because they forgot who

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God is. One of my favorite pastors wrote a book, an incredibly hopeful book, called

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Spiritual Depression, Its Causes and Its Cure. His name is Martin Lloyd -Jones, and he said it like this.

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The main art in the matter of spiritual living is to know how to handle yourself.

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You have to take yourself in hand. It's an old way of saying, be the ruler of your life in that moment.

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Take yourself, kind of grab yourself and talk to yourself. Question yourself, he says. You must say to your soul, why are you depressed?

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What business do you have murmuring and belly aching? He says, you must turn on yourself.

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You must scold yourself, even condemn yourself in your unbelief. Exhort yourself and say to yourself, hope in God.

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Instead of muttering about in this depressed and unhappy way, you must go and remind yourself of God.

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You must remind yourself of who God is and what God is and what God has done and what

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God has pledged himself to do. And then after you've done that, defy yourself.

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I love that line. After you've reminded yourself of truth and your heart's still messed up and it's still chattering and all these things, defy yourself.

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Turn on yourself and say, I will hope in God. He said, defy yourself, defy other people who say these false things about you, defy the devil and defy the world and say like the man in Psalm 42,

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I shall praise God. We struggle to praise God because we forget.

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Therefore, what Jones is saying is we have to remind ourselves so that we can praise. Jude is saying that content not only precedes relationship, the right doctrine precedes worship.

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That we can't even worship God rightly if we don't have right thoughts in our head. When false thoughts come in and sabotage our heart, that's when we become unhopeful.

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That's when we don't trust. That's when we struggle. That's when we fear. That's when we have anxiety. To hope in God is to remind ourself of who

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God is. Jude's not writing to Christians who are lion -hearted defenders of the faith.

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He's writing to little lambs who had forgotten. He's writing to people who needed to be reminded.

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He's writing to normal Christians just like us who forget and need to remember and then forget and need to remember.

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The first thing Jude does in this book, the way he opens the book is he reminds them of truth.

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He doesn't start with niceties and he doesn't start with just introductory greetings.

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He starts with you are the called. You are the ones who belong to God. So why are you downcast?

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You are the ones who are loved by God, so why do you feel unloved? You are the ones who are being kept by God, so therefore don't fear.

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And God is not a God of meager and scarcity. You're the one who's having mercy and peace and love being multiplied in your heart.

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These are truths that the Christians are supposed to rest in, and these are truths so that they can contend because how could they possibly contend against the wolves that are in their church?

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How could they contend against the errors that were seeping into their church if they're in a state of forgetfulness?

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They would be utterly assaulted, tossed to and fro like the waves of the sea. Jude reminds these people of truth because truth is the antidote to spiritual depression.

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Truth is the medicine for the wayward heart. Truth is the shield for those who fear. It's the anchor for the hopeless.

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It's the remedy for when we struggle. God's word is a balm that heals our souls when we're in a spiritual desert.

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It's a two -edged sword that cuts on the way in and heals on the way out. It's a mirror that we can look at ourself and we can see who we really are.

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It's a seed that God plants within us that's gonna bear fruit. It's both the milk that nourishes us and it's the meat we cut our teeth on.

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It is a lamp when your life feels dark. It is a fire when everything feels cold. It ignites you, and it's a firm foundation like Shannon read earlier.

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It is the rock that we build our life on. That is what God's truth is. It's not sand, and when the storms of life come, your life is hopeless.

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When we build our life on truth, it leads to salvation because we have to know who God is.

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It leads to worship, and it leads to security in our walk with God when we know who

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God is. Jude reminds these forgetful Christians to recall the good old truths.

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He's not saying you need new. He's saying you need to remember the old. You need to remember the words of life.

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You know, the Bible's the only book that's a living book. Every other book is dead, just words on a page. This book is a living book.

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When C .S. Lewis wrote the Chronicles of Narnia, he wrote the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe, and then you have these kids who found out about this wardrobe, and they enter into it, and they get to go in this magical world where they interact with Aslan, and they have all of these adventures.

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Lewis's analogy is that the Bible is the wardrobe. It's not just a box.

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It's not just wood. It's not just some old dusty coats inside of a wardrobe. When you open up the pages of Scripture, it transports you to another world.

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It transports you to where God is. It's the only book that does that. That leads to our third point.

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Jude reminds us that Scripture is knowable, that it's complete, and it's perfectly authoritative.

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Like us, when Jude reminds us that Scripture is our only guide, the first thing that pops up in us is excuses.

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Yeah, that's good, but I can't know the Bible. I read it, and it doesn't make sense to me. Oh no, Jude says it's knowable.

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When you say, well, how do we know which books are supposed to be in the Bible? Jude says, oh, it's complete. When Jude said, or when our excuses perk up, and we say, well, what about psychology?

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What about anthropology? What about what the scientists say? And what about all these things? He says, no, no, no, no. The Bible's sufficient.

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It is all that you need. How do we know this from verse five? I'll show you.

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Jude says three powerful phrases, short, pithy little phrases that I think are absolutely incredible for us today.

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He says, though you know all things once and for all.

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Those three phrases. What he's saying is that Scripture is knowable, that you can know it, that your children can know it, that it doesn't matter what your

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IQ is or your EQ or anything else. You can know Scripture because God has made it understandable and knowable.

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He's saying that Scripture is complete. When Jude says all things, he's saying you can know all things. He's saying all the things in the

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Bible. And we know that because he quotes the Bible just after this. We'll talk about that in a second.

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When Jude says once and for all, he's talking about the authority and the finality of the word of God.

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And you may be thinking, Kendall, you've just went through three points and I don't see the word Bible and I don't see the word

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Scripture and I don't see Jude saying any of these things. How do we know that Jude is talking about the

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Bible? How can you make these points that he's gonna remind us of truth before it can even lead to salvation?

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How's he gonna remind us of the things that you've been saying? I'll give you three reasons why we know for sure that Jude is talking about the

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Bible. Number one, when Jude says once and for all, our ears should perk up.

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This is why reading the Bible in context is so exciting and so joyful at the same time.

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Look at what he says in verse three. Beloved, while I was making every effort to write to you about our common salvation,

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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.

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When Jude says once for all in verse five, he's saying the exact same word that he says in verse three where he's talking about Scripture.

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So in verse three, when he's talking about Scripture, he uses the same phrase in five, what if we know he's talking about Scripture here?

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That's the first evidence. He uses the same phrasing, the same words. The second is when he says all things.

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He follows up all things with three specific biblical examples. It's almost as if Jude is saying, look, you know all things that I'm talking about in Scripture.

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Let me illustrate it with three passages of Scripture. The fact that he does this, the fact that he says you know all things and then he quotes

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Scripture three times in a row means that the all things he's talking about refers to the

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Bible and he's illustrating his point with three passages in the Bible. He's not illustrating it with newspaper articles or first century magazines, which of course they don't have.

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He's illustrating it with the Bible. That's our second point. The third point is the clearest.

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The context of the book tells us that one of the major themes in the book of Jude is that Christians are to remember the words of God.

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That's a major theme. Look at what it says in verse 17. But you, beloved, ought to remember the words that were spoken beforehand by the apostles of our

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Lord Jesus Christ. So here we have verse three saying that these words are once for all.

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Verse five says that they're once for all and they're handed down. Verse 17 connects it all together and says these are the words that were handed down by the apostles and we know that that is the

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Bible. The apostles' teaching was written down, passed around, handed down, given to people in the congregation so that what we're talking about is the

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Bible. Jude is reminding his people with truth from Scripture and why is he doing that?

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Because he wants to set up his biggest point. There's two main points that Jude wants to make in this text and he wants to remind his people that you can trust the

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Bible, that it's reliable, that it's faithful and this is what he says because point number one of the two main points he wants to share, salvation is from the

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Lord. When his people are attacked on every side, the main thing he wants to show them is that salvation is from the

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Lord. Don't doubt because you're dealing with difficulties. Don't doubt because you're dealing with persecution.

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Salvation is from the Lord. He says you know all things from Scripture, once and for all the sufficient

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Scripture that the Lord after saving a people out of the land of Egypt, what he's doing is he's reminding them that salvation comes from the

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Lord but I'm gonna tell you, it gets even better than this. I was so pumped to learn this point this week and to be able to share it with you.

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When we hear the word Lord in the NASB, we think, well that means God the Father. That means

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Yahweh. That's the first member of the Trinity who was there in the book of Exodus and who saved his people from slavery.

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That's the God who went to war against the Pharaoh. That's the one who performed the signs and the wonders.

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He's the one who brought the plagues. When we see this, we think God the Father but that's not what

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Jude says. In the original Greek, he does not say the word

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Adonai. Adonai is the word for Lord. He says the word Iesus.

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That's Jesus's name. If you've ever wondered how to pronounce Jesus's name in Greek, it's

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Iesus, I -A -S -U -S, Iesus. What Jude is saying, and this is so cool,

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Jesus, the one who was saving a people out of the land of Egypt, Jesus, before he was born in a manger, saved his people in Egypt.

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Jesus, before he visited earth by the Virgin Mary and then came and died on a cross.

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Thousand years before that, he showed up in Egypt to save his people.

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Jude is saying that it is one and only Christ, that salvation is not just generically from the

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Lord, that salvation is from Christ and Christ alone, meaning that if you were in the past in Egypt, you were saved by Christ.

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If you were hanging on a cross beside of him, presently watching him, you were saved by Christ. And if you were like us who live on this side of the cross, or this side, depending on which way you're looking at me, you were saved by Christ.

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Salvation belongs to Christ and Christ alone. Now, you may be wondering, why would the NASB not just say that?

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Why would the KJV not just say Jesus? Why would these translations not do that?

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Well, we're gonna take a brief moment for me to be a nerd and explain this to you so that you can understand why this actually happens.

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There's not an original Bible that scholars can go to a library somewhere in Israel and check out for a day and translate their new copy of the

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New Testament or Old Testament and then turn it back in. There are tens of thousands of manuscripts.

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Some are whole New Testaments. Some are whole books. Some are fractions of books.

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Some are chapters or multiple chapters. Some are as small as a part of a verse.

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One of the oldest manuscripts we have is on a part of a verse in John, and it goes all the way back to 20 years after Jesus died and ascended.

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So what we have is tens of thousands of manuscripts, and scholars have to take all of them and study all of them and figure out what the original text was saying.

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Now, in the case of Jude, we have two textual traditions.

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One tradition says Lord, but it's not early.

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In fact, it's about 200 years and beyond the book of Jude. So what you have is the majority of the text saying

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Lord, but they're not early, they're very late. And then the minority of texts, the other textual tradition says

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Jesus, and it goes much closer to the date that Jude was writing. And actually, they're the most accurate and faithful text that scholars have identified.

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So the problem that you have, and the reason why the NASB says Lord is because you have two competing opinions on what this verse says.

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The majority text says Lord, but the better and smaller text says

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Jesus. That's why the ESV has chosen to translate it, and I think rightly.

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Now, I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus saved a people out of the land of Egypt.

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That's why the NLT and the NIV translate it rightly as Jesus, because that's what the oldest text actually say.

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And I'll tell you why this happens. When a scribe grabs a manuscript and he has a little church, let's say that we're a first century church, and me or someone else, we're translating the

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New Testament for you to read. And they come upon a challenging text.

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Let's just say we read Jesus was in Exodus. Well, how can that be? Jesus wasn't born yet.

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So then they think maybe people will have questions. And if people have questions, maybe they won't understand the

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Bible. So what they do is a loving thing by trying to interpret the text for their readers.

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This is the same reason why the NLT, the NIV, the ESV, and NASB, this is why they all differ, because you have translators who are trying to get the meaning of the text, but sometimes they choose different words.

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So what happened was the scribes in the ancient world were trying to explain the text in a way that helped people understand it, but we lost until we found those older manuscripts, the original meaning

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Jesus. Now, I think that this is incredibly important that we translate it

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Jesus, because Jesus is the one who is central in salvation. He's the one that is the one working for the salvation of his people from the past, present, and the future,

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Old Testament and New Testament. No matter what side of the cross you stand on, it's Jesus who you're saved by.

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And this text alludes to the fact, and I think it becomes even more clear when we look at the verses that Jude is referencing.

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Jude says that once for all you're reminded of Jesus who saved his people out of Egypt.

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What is he talking about? He's talking about the Red Sea, where God comes down and rescues his people.

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The armies are chasing the people, and God comes down and saves his people. And what

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I wanna show you is that Christ was there in Exodus, and he's the one who saved his people.

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Let's look at it, it's in Exodus 14, we're gonna start in verse 15, so that we can see

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Jude's point that Christ is at the center of salvation. In Exodus it says, then the

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Lord, that's Yahweh, that's God the Father, said to Moses, why are you crying out to me?

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Tell the sons of Israel to go forward, and you lift up your staff and stretch out your hand over the sea and divide it.

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And the sons of Israel shall go through the midst of the sea on dry land.

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As for me, behold, I will harden the hearts of the Egyptians so that they will go in after them, and I will be honored through Pharaoh and his army.

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This is a point that I want us to tuck away for a moment. God is glorified in the destruction of Egypt, and he says so right here.

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He says, I will be honored by Pharaoh and his army through his chariots and through his horsemen, and then the

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Egyptians will know that I am the Lord when I am honored and glorified through Pharaoh, or through his chariots and his horsemen.

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Some in this passage are about to be rescued, and some are about to be destroyed, and God is going to get glory for both.

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That's what this text is saying. Now, what I want you to see starts in verse 19.

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Here, we've seen God the Father is rescuing his people for his own glory. Look at what it says in verse 19.

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It says, the angel of God who had been going before the camp of Israel moved and went behind them.

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And you're like, so what? It's an angel. No, it's not. This is

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Christ. Scholars agree universally that this is Christ. I'm gonna prove to you from the

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Old Testament that this is the Son of God. This angel of the Lord is the same angel of the

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Lord who showed up just a few chapters earlier to Abraham, and Abraham bowed down and worshiped him.

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God does not share his glory with another. So if an angel is being worshiped, it's either a demonic angel who's trying to steal worship away from God, or it is

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God himself. You do not worship an angel if it's not God. There's angels in the

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Old Testament who are worshiped and they say, get up, don't do that. This one receives it.

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He receives the worship because he's God. This is the same angel of the Lord in Genesis chapter 16 who shows up to Hagar.

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And not only does she worship this angel, she says that you are the

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God who sees me. Hagar interacts with this angel and she not only worships him, but she calls him

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God, the God who sees her. This is the same angel of the Lord who shows up to Samson's parents,

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Samson the strong man in the book of Judges. And he shows up and he prophesies that they will have a son and they worship him and the angel does not rebuke him.

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This is the same angel of the Lord that shows up to Joshua and he worships him and the Lord does not rebuke him.

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This is the same angel that a pagan king called Nebuchadnezzar, he put three men into the fiery furnace and then they were not destroyed.

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And he looked up and he saw four men in the fiery furnace and he said, who is that? It must be the son of the gods.

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This angel is none other than the second person of the Trinity, God in the flesh. And it's

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Jude who says that this was Jesus who saved his people.

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He's the one who went before them, leading them to the Red Sea. Now he's behind them because he's standing in between them and the armies of hell.

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He's spurring them on, he's protecting them, he's pushing them forward, he's helping them and he is standing between them and their enemy so that God might be glorified in their salvation and so that God might be glorified in Egypt's destruction.

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Christ is there to save his people. God is getting glory. Now, same angel that shows up in Exodus 23.

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So we've had Jesus leading his people, saving his people at the Red Sea. Look at what it says in Exodus 23.

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Behold, I am going to send an angel, this is God talking, before you to guard you along the way and to bring you into the place which

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I have prepared for you. Be on guard before him and obey his voice. Do not be rebellious towards him for he will not pardon your transgressions.

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What's happening here is that God is sending an angel before his people to lead them to the promised land and they are to obey him and they are to not rebel against him for he will not pardon their transgressions.

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Since my name, God's name is in him but if you truly obey his voice and do all that I say then

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I will be an enemy to your enemies and I will be an adversary to your adversaries for my angel will go before you and bring you into the land of the

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Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Canaanites, Hivites, Jebusites and all of the ites. God is not sending his people to be led by any old angel.

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He is sending his people to be led by Christ. We know this for three reasons. Number one, it says to be on your guard before him.

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It says to fear him. In the Bible it says fear God alone and here

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God is telling them to fear this angel. The second reason is it says do not be rebellious towards him for he will not pardon your iniquities.

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Who alone but God can forgive sin? Who alone but God can hold your sin in what it is and not forgive you?

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This angel has the power of forgiveness or condemnation in his hands.

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This is God in the flesh. The last evidence that we have that this is

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Jesus is that it says that he has God's name in him. In Isaiah 42, eight it says,

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I am the Lord, that is my name and I will not give my glory to another.

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How is it that this angel has the same name as God unless that he is God? So either

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God is lying to us, which we don't believe, or this is

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Christ who led his people to the wilderness, who led his people through the land and who took them to the promised land.

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Now we should not be surprised that this is what Christ is doing because what he is doing for us is he is enacting the gospel.

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He is going to the people who are enslaved and he is saving them and what we ought to realize about this is that this is such a brilliant picture of the gospel because we are not like Egypt or not like Israel.

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We're not enslaved to Egypt, but we are enslaved to our sins and we don't have Egyptian taskmasters whipping us on the back, but we have been enslaved to an even worse and wicked taskmaster in Satan.

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We have been enslaved in the bonds of our sin. We've been crushed by our inability. We were enslaved to Satan himself and like the people of old,

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Christ had to come to rescue us. While we were trembling in our inability, sitting like ducks, when the fiery walls of hell were surrounding us, ready to overtake us,

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Christ stepped in between us and hell. Just like he stepped in between Israel and Egypt when the waters were surrounding them,

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Christ stood in between us and hell to rescue us, but something different happened.

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In the Old Testament, Christ led his people successfully through the waters and if you remember, the waters came crashing down on top of their heads, but not in the

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New Testament. Jesus walked his way to the cross and the powers of sin and death and hell came crashing down on him.

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In the Old Testament, the enemies of God were crushed. In the New Testament, for our freedom,

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Jesus Christ, the son of God was crushed. He was crushed to rescue us.

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He was crushed to deliver us. Everyone thought it was over.

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The disciples scattered. The armies of hell, the choirs in hell were all shouting and rejoicing, but three days later, unlike any

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Egyptian charioteer, none of them came out of the water. Jesus Christ came out of the grave. Jesus Christ came out of the grave, freeing us from slavery, freeing us from the shackles and what

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I love about this passage is that he did not just come to the Old Testament to show us justification, to show us how we would be saved.

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He led his people to the promised land just like when we are saved, we are being led and we are being cultivated and we are being made into the image of Christ as we walk through the wilderness of our life.

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Just like the people of Israel walk through the wilderness en route to the promised land, we have 40, 50, 60 years on this planet to walk with Jesus before we meet him in the promised land, the new

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Jerusalem where heaven and earth collide and we are with God in a garden land for all of eternity.

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Jesus goes back into the Old Testament to show us justification, how we are made right with God and he goes back into the

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Old Testament to show us how we are sanctified, being constantly made more and more like him.

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Jude has built his entire argument on the fact that Christ is at the center of salvation and he demonstrates it in the book of Exodus and in the book of Numbers and that leads to our sixth point, that salvation is not only from the

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Lord but also condemnation. Now, we would wanna end our sermon at the salvation part because that's the good news and you might even say this is kind of a buzzkill, we don't wanna talk about condemnation.

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How is it that Jesus is also the same one who eternally saves and eternally condemns?

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Jude has a point in this but we can't know the point until we actually go back into the text that he's describing.

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He says in the book of Jude, verse five, that after Jesus saved a people, he destroyed them.

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After he saved them, those same people he destroyed. Why? Because of their unbelief.

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We assume that the people of God, after they watched this miraculous event happen where the waters were parted on their behalf, water and dry land are separated, they walk through safe, none of them die, we would have thought that they would have been grateful.

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We would have thought that they would have loved God and worshiped him and adored him and that you wouldn't have heard a peep out of any one of these people but that is not the way the story goes.

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En route to the promised land, the people complained against God at almost every single turn. They complained when they were hungry and they complained when they had bread.

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They complained when they had meat. They complained when they had water. They complained when the water didn't taste right.

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They complained when Moses stayed up too long on the mountain. They complained because this living God wasn't enough for them so they made a metal cow.

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These people complained so much that Moses literally wanted to die. Talk about a bad day in ministry.

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Moses says in Numbers 11, 10 through 15, now Moses heard the people weeping throughout their families.

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Each man at the doorway of his tent and the anger of the Lord was kindled greatly and Moses was displeased.

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So Moses said to the Lord, why have you been so hard on your servant? And why have I not found favor in your sight that you have laid the burden of this people on me?

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Was it I who conceived all of these people? Was it I who brought them forth that you should say to me carry them in your bosom as a nurse carries a nursing infant to a land which you swore to their fathers?

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Where am I to give meat to all these people? For they weep before me saying, give us meat that we may eat.

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I alone am not able to carry all of these people's burdens because they are far too burdensome for me.

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So if I have found favor in your sight, please kill me at once. That's what

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Moses says. I've never had a day at any job I've ever worked where I said,

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Lord, if I have found favor in your sight, just kill me now. These people were so obnoxious to Moses who was zealous for God that he wanted to die.

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These people who had seen the wonders of God, who had seen the glory of God, who had seen the miracles and the mighty workings of God, hated

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God. And they complained constantly until their complaints piled up to heaven in the purest and revilest form of rejection imaginable.

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In Numbers 13, the whole thing comes crashing down. If you remember Numbers 13 is where the people of Israel are finally following Christ.

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They get to the land of promise. And they're standing outside of the land and they send 12 spies into the land.

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And if you remember, 10 of them came back with a bad report and only two of them came back and said, no,

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God is with us. And the hearts of the people turned away from God and they rejected him.

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And they said, we will not enter the land. Actually, what they say in Numbers 14, one through 10 is shocking.

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Then all of the congregation lifted up their voices and they cried and the people wept that night. And all the sons of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron and the whole congregation said to them, would that we had died in the land of Egypt.

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The Israelites are looking at God and saying, your freedom is worse than death or would that we had died in this wilderness.

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Why is the Lord bringing us into this land to fall by the sword? Our wives and our little ones will become plunder.

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Would it not be better for us to return to Egypt so that they said to one another, let us appoint a new leader and return to Egypt.

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And then Moses and Aaron fell on their faces in the presence of all the assembly, the congregation of the sons of Israel.

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Joshua was one of the faithful spies and Caleb, the other faithful spy of those who had spied out the land tore their clothes.

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They were in such disarray. And they spoke to all the congregation of the sons of Israel saying, the land which we passed through to spy out is an exceedingly good land.

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And if the Lord is pleased with us, then he will bring us into the land and he will give it to us.

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A land which flows with milk and honey. Only do not rebel against this

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God and do not fear the people of the land for they will be our prey.

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Their protection has been removed and the Lord is with us. Do not fear them.

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But the congregation in an insane fit of rage said, stone these men.

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And then the glory of the Lord appeared in the tent of meeting to all the sons of Israel.

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Moses pleaded with these people but they outright rejected God. And after he pleaded with them, he turned to God in order to plead on their behalf.

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And God said this, I have pardoned them according to your word, Moses. But indeed, as I live, all the earth will be filled with my glory.

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Surely all the men who have seen my glory and my signs which I have performed in Egypt and in the wilderness, yet they have put me to the test these 10 times and have not listened to my voice shall by no means see the land which

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I swore to their fathers, nor shall any of them who spurned me see it. The Lord pardoned them in so much as they were allowed to live a natural life in their twisted, mangled, hating of God lifestyle, but their destruction was still complete.

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They would never enter the land. They dug their graves just inches from the border.

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They would die with God opposing them, refusing to let them into the land.

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They were going to die in the damnable sin of unbelief. They were gonna die rejecting God. And did you see what it says?

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God says, I have pardoned them according to your word, Moses, but indeed, as I live, all the earth will be filled with the glory of God.

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Even in their destruction and even in their salvation, God is glorified.

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What a mystery. That God is good in the saving of his people and that God is also good in the condemnation of sinners.

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That God is the one who will get glory in the salvation of sinners and that God is also the one who will get glory for his perfect righteousness and justice when sinners are condemned to hell.

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All of this is what Jude desires to remind us.

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And I share all of this context with you so that you will have a full view of God. God is glorious.

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God is radiant in his perfections and his splendors. And he is glorious in the salvation of his enemies.

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And he's also glorious in the condemnation of his enemies. And in both,

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God is praised. God's responsibility, Jesus's responsibility is salvation.

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Our responsibility, and this is where we will end, our responsibility is to believe.

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Our responsibility is to believe the words of life, to believe who

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Christ is. To forget who God is is for God to forget who you are.

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These unbelievers in the Old Testament had their memories erased. They lived as unbelievers. They lived in their unbelief.

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And because of that, they could not enter into the land of promise. What I want us to see is that even when the storms attack, even when we deal with problems, we can have hope if we have belief in Christ.

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If we believe who he is, there's nothing that can take that away from us. But if we remain in our unbelief, if we remain in our sin, then there is no hope.

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So we must believe. We must believe. Let's pray.

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Father, there's a lot in verse five.

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And Lord, it's beautiful to think that this man Jude built such a robust argument to showcase your glory.

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And Lord God, I don't pretend to understand it completely. Lord, I don't dare even say that I understand it in part.

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But God, I know that you are glorious, both in the salvation of men and in their condemnation.

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You are made glorious when you call and you pour your love out and you keep those who follow you and who believe in you.

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And Lord, you have marked out for condemnation and you get glory even for those who refuse to repent and rebel and remain in their unbelief.

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Lord, let us not think that you are only the author of salvation, but Lord, you are sovereign over everything.

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Everything is in your hands, everything is in your control and you are good and you are glorious in both.

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Lord, I pray that for us today who are followers of Christ and who believe in you, that we would rejoice in the fact that because of no good works of our own and because of no merit and no good standing, no righteousness, no anything, that you have poured out your love on us and you have saved us and you have welcomed us into your family because of the saving work of Christ and Christ alone.

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Lord, I pray as we take the cup and as we take the bread that we would remember what you have done and that we would celebrate it.

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And Lord God, I also pray that as we yearn for heaven and as we yearn to see your justice roll down from the mountaintops and as we yearn to see this world made right,

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Lord God, I spend so much of my time thinking, how long, oh

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Lord? Lord, when will you come back and make all things new? Lord, even in that, let us trust that you're sovereign.

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Let us trust that you're in control and let us trust that you are good and that you are working out these things according to your plan and your purpose.