Here’s a little tip, if you want to be invited  to speak about something write a book about it.  

As soon as you’ve written a book people will  say, “Come and speak to us.” And I want to say,  

“Why don’t you read the book?” Nevertheless,  I’m going to do what Andrew has asked me to,  

and that is speak to you about the letter of  Jude. And the first thing to do with this letter,  

as every other letter, is to read it. So let  me read it to you. If you’ve got your Bible  

you can open your Bible. It’s the last  book in your Bible, except Revelation.  

It’s one of the shortest letters in the  New Testament and it’s one of the most  

important and yet it is also one of the  most neglected. So let’s read it together: 

“Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and a brother of  James, To those who’ve been called, who are loved  

by God the Father and kept by Jesus Christ:  Mercy, peace and love be yours in abundance. 

“Dear friends, although I was very eager to  write to you about the salvation we share,  

I felt I had to write and urge you to contend for  the faith that was once entrusted to the saints.  

For certain men whose condemnation was written  about long ago have secretly slipped in among you.  

They are godless men who changed the grace of  our God into a license for immorality and deny  

Jesus Christ, our only sovereign and Lord. “Though you already know all this,  

I want to remind you that the Lord  delivered his people out of Egypt  

but later destroyed those who did not believe.  

And the angels who did not keep their positions  of authority, but abandoned their own home,  

these he has kept in darkness, bound  with everlasting chains for judgment  

on the great day. In a similar way,  Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding  

towns gave themselves up to  sexual immorality and perversion.  

They serve as an example to those who  suffer the punishment of eternal fire. 

“In the very same way, these dreamers  pollute their own bodies, reject authority,  

and slander celestial beings. But  even the archangel Michael [or Mikael]  

when he was disputing with the  devil about the body of Moses  

did not dare to bring a slanderous accusation  against him, but said, ‘The Lord rebuke you.’  

Yet these men speak abusively against whatever  they don’t understand and what things they do  

understand by instinct, like unreasoning animals,  these are the very things that destroy them. 

“Woe to them! They have taken the way  of Cain, they have rushed for profit  

into Balaam’s error, they have been  destroyed in Korah’s rebellion. 

“These men are blemishes at your love feast,  eating with you without the slightest qualm,  

shepherds who feed only themselves. They are  clouds without rain, blown along by the wind,  

autumn trees without fruit and uprooted,  twice dead. They are wild waves of the sea,  

foaming up their shame; wandering stars for whom  the blackest darkness has been reserved forever. 

“Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied  about these men, ‘See, the Lord is coming  

with thousands upon thousands of his holy ones  to judge everyone and to convict all the ungodly  

of all the ungodly acts they have done in the  ungodly way, and of all the harsh words ungodly  

sinners have spoken against him.’ These men are  grumblers and fault finders, they follow their  

own evil desires; they boast about themselves  and flatter others for their own advantage. 

“But dear friends, remember what the apostles of  our Lord Jesus Christ foretold. They said to you,  

‘In the last times there will be scoffers  who will follow their own ungodly desires.’  

These are the men who divide you, who follow mere  natural instinct, and do not have the Spirit. 

“But you, dear friends, build yourselves up in  your most holy faith and pray in the Holy Spirit,  

keep yourselves in God’s love as you wait  for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ  

to bring you to eternal life. “Be merciful to those who doubt;  

snatch others from the fire and save them;  to others show mercy mixed with fear, hating  

even the clothing stained by corrupted flesh. “To him who is able to keep you from falling  

and to present you before his glorious  presence without fault and with great joy,  

to the only God our Saviour, be  glory, majesty, power, and authority,  

through Jesus Christ our Lord, before  all ages now and forevermore. Amen.”

I’m going to do an unusual thing  tonight. I’m not going to give you the  

fruits of my study; they’re in the book.  I’m going to take you back into my study  

when I first read this little  letter and first preached on it,  

and I’m going to share with you my thoughts  as I prepared this letter for my congregation.  

I had not read it before. Like most Christians,  I neglected it. In fact, there’s hardly a verse  

in this little letter that anybody quotes. Did you  notice that? It’s all new, it’s all strange to us,  

and some bits of it are very strange. When I first read through a book, I don’t read it  

once like I’ve just read it. I read it maybe ten  times and I have beside me always some blank paper  

and a pen. I write down anything that occurs to  me as I read it through and through and through.  

These are some of the notes I made at that  time. I noticed that this writer has a habit of  

writing in threes, fours, fives, and sixes.  He keeps repeating himself in different ways.  

For example, in one verse he appeals  to Cain, to Balaam, and to Korah,  

and three times he’s appealing to somebody  in the Old Testament to draw a lesson out. 

Then sometimes he mixes his metaphors. There’s one  verse where there are four different metaphors.  

The metaphors are about clouds, trees, waves of  the sea, and stars. He obviously studied nature,  

and like his Lord before him, he could draw  lessons from nature. But he would bring four  

different lessons from nature in the same  verse. Then he spoke in fives and sixes.  

Here’s man who doesn’t object to mixing his  metaphors or repeating himself to make a point. 

The next thing I wrote down is that some of the  things he quotes are not to be found in the Bible.  

Where in the Bible do you read about an archangel  arguing with the devil about Moses’ body? It’s not  

in my Bible. So where’d he get that from? Then he  talks about angels being locked in dark dungeons  

for a very long time. Where did he get that?  Then he mentions Enoch. Now the only thing  

I knew about Enoch was that he went for  such a long walk with God one day that  

God said, It’s too far for you to get back  home, you better come and live with me.  

And “he walked with God and he wasn’t”, a lovely  way to go, but not very nice for the relatives.  

But that’s all I knew about Enoch. Did you know anymore? Did you know that he  

was the first ever prophet, to warn people about  God’s judgment? He had a son called Methuselah -  

strange name. It means “When he dies it will  happen.” Can you imagine Methuselah going to  

school on the first day and the teacher saying,  “What’s your name?” “When I die it will happen.”  

That’s a strange name to give a boy. And  yet Enoch meant him to have that name,  

because Enoch believed firmly that on the day  his son died the judgment of God would come. 

And that’s exactly what happened. It’s why  Methuselah lived longer than anybody else,  

969 years he lived. That speaks to you of the  amazing patience of God. God waited nearly a  

thousand years before judging that generation.  Sure enough, on the day that Methuselah,  

Enoch’s son, died it began to rain. It didn’t  stop raining until there was a gigantic flood  

that wiped out a whole generation because  Enoch’s great-grandson was a man called Noah,  

and Noah was building an ark for years in the  middle of the country, miles from any sea.  

It was all due to Enoch’s prophecy. Yet Enoch is  not recorded in your Bible as being a prophet,  

and nothing of what he said is in your Bible, and  yet here it is in Jude. Where did he get it from?  

So I made a note on my paper, I must find out  where he was getting all his information from,  

because he wasn’t getting it all from  the Bible. He got some of it from  

the Old Testament, but not all of it. Where’d  he get the rest? So I write these things down. 

Then I noticed that there are  hardly any quotable quotes  

in this little letter of Jude. Have you ever heard  any of it quoted in the pulpit or by Christians?  

The only two bits I’d ever heard quoted  were something from the beginning  

about defending the faith once delivered to  the saints and something from the end, “Now  

unto him who is able to keep you from falling,”  which in my day was often used as a benediction  

at the end of a service in church. That  bit was quoted, but nothing in between  

did I ever hear quoted from the  pulpit. It’s a strange little letter. 

So then I, having written down so  many things that I needed to find out,  

I started asking some very basic questions.  Number one, who was this guy, Jude?  

Now he must have been one  of two things. The letters  

and the books of the New Testament have only  come to us because their writers were prominent  

in the early church, either prominent  because they were one of the apostles  

or prominent because they were a direct  relative of Jesus. And that is the case here.  

He was Jesus’ half-brother for after Jesus  was born Mary had at least six other children. 

We know the names of the four boys she had  and we know that they had sisters - at least  

two - so Mary had at least six more children after  she had Jesus. And one of them was called James,  

and he wrote a letter in the New Testament not  far away from this one, just a few pages earlier  

you’ll find it, the letter of James. This is  his brother and his proper name was Judas. 

So why doesn’t it say, “The Letter of  Judas”? Well I think you can guess.  

He was not very fond of that name. That was the  name of the apostle who betrayed Jesus for money.  

So he shortened his name, as we shorten names. We  talk about “Pete” for Peter and “Jim” for James.  

And so he was called “Jude” for Judas  and therefore didn’t share the name that  

had become such a bad name in the public  reputation. Why then didn’t he say, “I’m a  

brother of Jesus,” or at least a half-brother of  Jesus? Well he must have remembered with shame  

how Jesus’ brothers didn’t believe in  him, and teased him, and mocked him  

until after the resurrection. Then things  happened, even to Jesus’ brothers. Actually,  

of the twelve apostles at least five were  Jesus’ own relatives. Did you ever realize that? 

Jesus had an amazing impact, first  on his own family before anyone else.  

That’s why so many of them were at the wedding in  Cana of Galilee where Jesus did the first miracle.  

They were there because they were relatives,  part of the larger family of Jesus.  

So five of the apostles were his relatives,  his cousins, but none of his brothers were,  

not until after he rose from the dead.  And then with shame they confessed that  

they’d been entirely wrong. But then, they’d  lived with him for so many years, you can  

understand why they didn’t believe he was anything  more than an older brother, but then they realized  

that they had been walking with the Son of  God. And that so humbled them that none of them  

ever said they were Jesus’ brothers afterwards.  James didn’t say it, Jude didn’t say it.  

They simply said, both of them, said,  “We are slaves of Jesus Christ, he bought  

us.” Now something must have happened to those  brothers for them to take such a humble attitude. 

So that’s who wrote the letter. My next question  is who read it? The answer is we have no idea.  

There is no name of a place; there are no  names of people. It’s almost as if Jude  

was bending over backwards to keep his readers  anonymous and not to make them ashamed in public,  

because something bad was happening among them.  

So we come to the third and the most important  question of all: why did he write this letter?  

There must have been a big reason. And indeed, he  tells us. He said, “I was eager to write to you  

about the salvation we share together.  But,” he said, “I wrote to you reluctantly  

because I had to change my letter;  something was happening among you  

that made me write a different kind of letter.” Correspondence corresponds. What do I mean by  

that? I mean that when you read a letter it’s  like listening to one side of a conversation  

and you have to guess what the other side is.  These wretched mobile phones—have you sat in a  

train or a bus and had somebody sitting next to  you speaking loudly on a mobile phone and you  

can’t hear what the other person’s saying?  You have to guess what it corresponds to. 

So let’s say I’m on the phone on a bus and I said,  “Hello? Has it arrived? It has! Congratulations!  

How much does it weigh? Hmm. And what colour  is it? Hmm. And is it petrol or diesel?”  

Now you see, your brain has been trying to figure  out what was happening at the other end, and you  

got it all wrong, you thought it was a baby. When  I said, “What colour is it,” your mind went crazy.  

But you see, that’s what you’re doing when you  read a letter. Something was happening at the  

other end, and you’ve got to put that together,  and be a bit of a detective and find out what  

was happening at the other end that made Jude  want to write a letter reluctantly to them?  

And the answer is a bit disturbing. He said, “There are men who’ve secretly  

wormed their way into your fellowship  who are going to destroy it.  

They’ve wormed their way in without you  realizing,” probably coming in one by one,  

“And they’ve come in with false teaching.”  

And nothing destroys a church more quickly  than people coming in with wrong teaching.  

Notice that they hadn’t started the church; they’d  come in and taken it over. That’s one of the marks  

of false teachers, that instead of doing their  own work they try and take over other people’s.  

Beware when that happens. But these men had come  in and they had two fundamental bad teachings. The  

first was about the grace of God. Can there  be bad teaching about that? Yes there can. 

The second was about Jesus Christ himself.  What were they teaching that was wrong? Well,  

the first thing they were teaching  is what we call “cheap grace,”  

or even “free grace” it’s been called - the idea  that God is so gracious in his attitude to us that  

it doesn’t really matter what we are like, what we  do; he loves us and will forgive us all our sins.  

It’s cheap grace. I’ve just come back from  Singapore, and I deliberately felt I should go  

there to challenge a false teaching about grace  that is spreading through the world through the  

internet. It’s also coming from Canada, but the  main source of this false idea of grace was in  

Singapore. I prayed that God would open the door  for me to go and counter that teaching, which I  

found everywhere in South Africa, for example. It was destroying churches,  

and it was teaching that grace is always  there and is unconditional forgiveness.  

That means that there’s no need for repentance;  that you can be forgiven your sins without  

repenting of them. It also means that the  teaching is that when you come to Christ all  

your future sins are forgiven as well as your  past. So Christians never need to confess sin,  

in spite of that verse in 1 John that says, “If we  sin and if we confess our sins he is faithful and  

just to go on forgiving us our sin.” But that is  said to be not for Christians by these teachers.  

So here is a teaching that as soon as you’re  saved, it doesn’t matter what you do thereafter,  

grace will cover your sin. It’s already forgiven,  there’s nothing more to forgive. And therefore  

you are once saved, always saved, and are  absolutely sure that you’re going to heaven. 

So I went to Singapore when I was given  the opportunity to speak about grace,  

about grace as undeserved favour of God,  but not as unconditional forgiveness.  

Now that was one thing that was being taught  here two thousand years ago, that grace  

would cover all the sins,  past, present, and future,  

so that nothing could separate you from  God’s love by the way of your sinning.  

That’s one thing. The second thing they  were teaching was that Jesus Christ  

is not the only Saviour and Lord. Therefore  they were questioning the uniqueness of Christ,  

and again, that was one other subject that I  concentrated on in Singapore. I concentrated  

on grace and the uniqueness of Christ. But we now live in a country where comparative  

religion is being taught in schools.  Little children are being taught that  

there is Jesus and his religion, and Mohammad  and his, and Confucius and his, and Buddha  

and his. So in this comparative religion,  which compares Jesus with other people  

and other religious founders, people get the  idea that all religions are much the same  

and that it’s a matter of personal preference  and choice. That was being taught here,  

that Jesus was not the only Saviour and Lord. He  was not unique; he was one of others, one of many. 

Now these two things were deadly errors.  They were cancer in the Body of Christ,  

and cancer has a way of spreading  and affecting different organs and  

shutting them down so that they can  no longer behave as God meant them to.  

False teaching of this kind is a cancer  in the Body of Christ, and sooner or later  

will destroy it. The truth is nobody was ever  able to destroy the Church from the outside.  

When the Church is opposed from outside by  persecution it grows in both quality and quantity.  

As I travel around the world I go to  countries where the Church is growing  

and getting stronger and bigger, and yet they’re  under great pressure. And I come back to little  

old England where there’s no pressure on the  Church or very, very little and we’re dying. 

If you want to find a healthy church, go to  a country where the church is under pressure  

from outside. It almost seems as if the Church  grows on the blood of the saints. ‘The blood of  

the saints is the seed of the Church.’ The more  opposition there is to the church from outside,  

the more quality Christians you get inside.  Therefore the more quantity will follow.  

But where there is indifference from outside, the  Church becomes complacent, comfortable. The devil  

knows that, and therefore, if he wants to destroy  a church he has to get people into the church  

and destroy it from the inside by questioning  the faith that was once delivered to the saints.  

And many, many churches, even in this country,  have died because of false teaching that came in  

and questioned the faith once delivered to  the saints, which we can find in the Bible. 

It was written down for us. This is  the whole point of studying the Bible.  

That is the faith once delivered to  the saints, and there is no other.  

Indeed, Paul says, “If anybody comes into your  church and preaches another gospel, curse him.  

Let him be anathema,” which means curse him.  That’s what Paul used to say when this happened.  

But let’s go back to the epistle to Jude. Jude  says, “These men who have crept in with these two  

major false teachings, their  doom was written about long ago.” 

So he begins the letter by pointing to two things.  Number one, the corruption they are bringing  

into the Church and, two, the condemnation  that was written against them long ago.  

He appeals to those writings to prove  his point that their doom is sealed.  

So if you have the notes I gave you,  look at the page that is headed “Jude.” 

There are two things that come out in  the major section of the little letter,  

verses four to nineteen; first, their corruption  

and, secondly, their condemnation that was written  long ago. But let’s look at the whole letter  

first. When I’m studying a book of the Bible  I want to see the structure, the shape of it,  

and I can’t get any further until I’ve seen  the structure and where the writer is heading.  

And as I read through again and again this little  letter, I learned that it’s in three sections.  

First, the first section is all about the past.  The second section is all about the present  

and the third section is all about the future—a  

very simple shape, or structure, to the letter. But then these are three different parts of our  

existence; we all have a past, we all  have a present, we all have a future.  

But we have a different attitude to those three.  We have to, because they are different. None of us  

can change the past once it’s happened. Even God  himself cannot change the past once it’s happened.  

He’s almighty, he can do anything, but he cannot  change the past. Halleluiah for that—nobody  

can put Jesus back in the tomb. It’s  happened; it’s finished; it’s past.  

The one thing you can’t do  with the past is change it. 

But what you can do is learn from it, and  that’s the whole point of studying history,  

finding out what’s already happened. That’s  why I’ve written a book about Church history,  

because I find that most Christians have  no idea where the Church has been for two  

thousand years. Therefore we can’t learn  from their mistakes or their successes,  

we just don’t know about it. I hope every one  of you is willing to study Church history. 

If you find that a bit too  difficult and scholarly,  

then may I recommend you get my book? It’s called  Where has the Body Been for Two Thousand Years?  

And it’s a simple account of what has happened to  the Church since Jesus’ day. We need to know that,  

because most of the mistakes we  make today have been made already  

by the Church in the past. We can learn from  them, but we can also from their success. 

When I gave those talks originally in the church  

at Guildford we finished every evening  by singing hymns from that era.  

I found Christian hymns from every hundred  years for the last two thousand years,  

most of which we knew without realizing where  they’d come from. It was a real exercise in  

Christian devotion to sing the songs about Jesus  that had been written for two thousand years.  

It’s so refreshing to do that instead of just  learning the last six months of choruses.  

To get the riches of the devotion of Christians  through centuries by singing with them  

is a real treat. Well now, we learn from the past. But we have to live in the present,  

and especially a present that has been influenced  by the past. We have to live with it. We have to  

live with the different denominations,  most of which started a long time ago.  

Salvation Army came out of Methodism.  General Booth was a Methodist minister,  

and here we are in a building that has  inherited his traditions and his ideas.  

Whatever church you belong to,  unless it’s very recent in origin,  

is inheriting traditions from the past. But  you’ve got to live with those in the present.  

There wouldn’t be such deep  divisions within the Church of Christ  

if we all knew where the divisions had come from  and where we’d inherited our traditions from. 

So learning from the past, living in the present,  

and for the future, we can’t do anything about  that except look to it. We look to the future  

and use our dedicated imagination to explore  the future. But we’re not able to change  

it yet until we’re in it. So we have a different  attitude to the past, the present, and the future,  

and that all comes out in this little  letter. The first major part of the letter  

is what we can learn from the past. Then he has  to tackle the problem that the situation is still  

with them, it’s still happening, and they’ve  got to live with it. How are they going to cope?  

What should they be doing about it? And then finally, to lift their spirits he says,  

Look with me to the future. Lift your eyes above  all this, fix your eyes on God and what he’s able  

to do and get your eyes off these false teachers.  If your focus is too much on human beings  

then you’ll get into trouble. Lift your eyes.  When the outlook is bad try the up-look.  

That means lifting your eyes to the God who was  and who is and who is to come. He’s the God of  

the past, the present, and the future, and that  comes out in the third section of the letter. 

So now let’s turn to the first part  of the letter, learning from the past.  

I’ve separated his teaching about the corruption  of these men from the condemnation of these men.  

Though as we shall see, he has cleverly interwoven  the two. But let’s look at them separately.  

There are six things in the Church that  will be corrupted by the presence of  

false teachers. First of all, their Creed will be  corrupted, what they believe is going to change.  

Secondly, their Conduct will be corrupted  because what we believe affects how we behave,  

and if we believe the wrong thing, it won’t  be long before we’re behaving the wrong way. 

Thirdly, forgive my alliteration here, their  Cogitation, that’s a word that means the way  

we think, the way we recognize reality. So  these men will corrupt the way we think.  

Fourthly, our Character will be corrupted, our  character is the sum total of the way we’ve lived.  

Sow a deed and reap a habit, sow a habit and reap  a character. If things go wrong at the beginning  

then our characters will be corrupted, this is  how the cancer spreads in the Body of Christ.  

It will then spread on to our Conversation;  the way we talk to each other will be affected.  

And finally, our motivation will be affected,  what Compels us to do what we do will be changed.  

Now the cancer will spread right through  these six things. They’re all mentioned  

in the letter of Jude. One after another  becomes contaminated by this false teaching,  

and it just goes on until it  spreads and it’s death to the Body. 

Now he says, “Their condemnation was written  long ago.” So he’s going to appeal to the  

writings he knows from long ago. Now there  are two such writings that he can appeal to;  

on the one hand is scripture, the Old  Testament, what we know as the Word of God.  

The other is Jewish tradition, which  is not necessarily all wrong or bad.  

Clearly, some of it Jude considers is good and  true. So in this way the New Testament is giving  

attention to Jewish traditions.  

We notice this, that in the five condemnations  of writing from long ago, three are from the  

scripture and two are from tradition. Turn over the sheet to the other side.  

I’ve analyzed the structure of this first  section, from verse three to verse nineteen,  

to show you that Jude is alternating.  He alternates between their corruption  

and their condemnation. And that’s the structure;  it’s an amazing structure once you’ve realized it,  

once you’ve seen it. Then you notice something  else that alternates. On the side of their  

condemnation, he quotes first from scripture  then from tradition, then from scripture again,  

then from tradition again and finally from  scripture again. This whole little letter is  

very carefully put together; it’s astonishingly  complicated in structure and yet clear. 

He’s saying, “They corrupt your creed and this is  what will happen to them according to scripture.  

They will corrupt your conduct and this is  where this will lead to according to tradition.”  

He goes through the six corruptions and  each time he says, “And this is what happens  

as a result of that corruption  to the people who cause it.”  

And therefore, he’s referring  constantly to the judgment of God. 

Let’s therefore go through this first  section in a little more detail.  

The first thing to be corrupted is their creed,  what they believe. And I told you that the  

false beliefs of these teachers were  that grace is a license for immorality.  

Paul had found the same thing, “Shall we sin that  grace may abound?” It’s the same problem. If you  

overemphasize grace, you open the door for sin.  If you get grace wrong, then sin will come in.  

(Oh you’ve got the outlines, good.)  Then the Lordship of Christ is denied. 

Now he appeals to scripture and God’s  judgment in three ways. First of all,  

the exodus generation: two and a half million  people came out of Egypt, two got into Canaan.  

What happened to the rest? They  died in the wilderness. Why?  

They could have got into Canaan in less  than a fortnight having left Egypt.  

It was just fourteen days’ journey to Canaan and  they could have got in. But when they got to the  

border they sent spies in, twelve of them, one  for each tribe. And they came back and ten of them  

said, “It’s hopeless, we’ll never get in. For one  thing, there are huge walls around their cities,  

they’re impregnable. We’ll never break those  walls down. And for another thing, they’re all  

taller than we are.” The Jews were little people  and the people in Canaan were big people, giants. 

So ten of the twelve spies said, “We’ll never  get in.” The word of the Lord came and said,  

“The Lord will carry you in on his shoulders,  and on his shoulders you’ll look over the walls.  

By his power, by shouting ‘Halleluiah,’  the walls can collapse,” and  

forty years later they found that’s what happened  with Jericho. The walls were no barrier to God.  

On God’s shoulders they were giants  themselves, they looked down on the Canaanites. 

I remember riding on my dad’s  shoulders as a little boy and  

I looked down on everybody. I  was up there on his shoulders;  

I was the tallest of them all. That’s what they  should have felt like, had they gone on believing  

in the God who brought them out of Egypt and  drowned the Egyptian army in the Red Sea.  

Had they not stopped believing, they’d have been  in the Promised Land in less than two weeks. 

Yet they wandered around in the desert for forty  years. God kept them out of the Promised Land.  

When they finally went in, there were only two  that went in of those who had originally left  

Egypt, and they were the two spies who said,  “God will see us through, God will get us in;”  

one was Joshua. That’s what happened to them. In  other words, those who stopped believing had to  

spend forty years’ wasted time in the wilderness  and died before they ever saw the Promised Land.  

What a lesson written long ago, for these people  have come in with new teaching that is not  

the belief they started with. Then the next was the fallen angels who  

came out of their estate. This is a reference to  Genesis 6. Now God had made life in three layers:  

angels, human beings, animals.  The one thing God had forbidden  

was sexual intercourse between any of those three  levels, whether between angels and human beings or  

between human beings and animals, there is clear  biblical prohibition of such sex. Yet in Genesis 6  

the angels came down and saw human women, had sex  with them, and produced a kind of funny “hybrid”  

species which the Bible calls “Nephilim,” which  is usually translated “giants.” But we don’t know.  

It was a species that God never  intended; half men, half angel. 

In the same way, if you read Leviticus, you’ll  see that when men have sex with animals,  

that also is totally contrary to  God’s will for them. God has clearly  

forbidden that. But the angels broke that, and  men broke it, and men are breaking it today too.  

So those angels, having left their estate  - we know there were two hundred of them -  

and it was in the area around Mount  Hermon that they had this illicit sex. 

It was then that occultism was introduced to the  human race. The angels introduced it. They had  

left their position and they brought the worst  side of the supernatural with them. It was from  

then on that the human race started dabbling in  the occult, and people are still doing that today.  

They are imprisoned, those angels, those  two hundred angels. Where did I get all  

this information? Not from the Bible, but  from the book of Enoch actually, which is  

the source for something that comes up later. The third example he gives of their condemnation  

is Sodom and Gomorrah. They weren’t the  only two cities; there were four cities  

in the Jordan Valley, south of the Dead Sea.  They were given over to sexual immorality  

as these interfering teachers were. And  look what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah,  

they were burned up with some inflammable material  in the very earth underneath them. You know that  

we have records in Jewish history that the fire of  Sodom and Gomorrah was still burning in Jesus’ day  

two thousand years later? So that anybody living  in Jerusalem could just take a fifteen minute walk  

out into the Judean wilderness and they could  look south and see the smoke of Sodom and Gomorrah  

in the days of our Lord. This mentions  the fire that goes on forever. 

Next, your conduct will be corrupted because  theirs is. They pollute their own bodies,  

they reject any authority outside  themselves, and they slander the angels.  

He counters that with an appeal to -  not scripture, but Jewish tradition,  

where the archangel Michael disputed with the  devil over who should bury Moses. Moses we know  

died outside the Promised Land, he died  within sight of it, but he died on Mount  

Nebo. But there is no burial mentioned and  there has never been a grave discovered. 

So what happened to Moses’ body? The answer is  an angel was sent to bury Moses and his name was  

Michael, or Mikael, the chief angel. He came to  bury Moses and found standing over Moses’ body,  

Satan himself. And Satan said, “This body’s mine,  because Moses was mine.” Instead of rebuking him,  

instead of arguing with him, the chief  angel of all said, “The Lord rebuke you.”  

He wasn’t going to. He had such respect  

for angels and for Moses that he didn’t argue  with the devil. He said, “The Lord deal with you.”  

That’s the right attitude, which  these false teachers didn’t have. 

Then comes the way they thought, their cogitation.  

It says these men—notice that he says, “These”  and “Those” all the way through. “These are the  

men who are infiltrating you,” “Those are the  people in the past who did the same thing,”  

and what happened to them. Now he says, “These,  whatever they don’t understand they abuse.”  

If they can’t get their mind  around it they have to mock it.  

That’s a very common failing in human beings. If  it’s something we don’t understand we abuse it.  

We say things against it that are silly  because we don’t understand. Not only that,  

they not only abused what they didn’t understand,  they did understand some things but purely,  

like unreasoning animals, going by instinct.  What they did understand they understood  

in the wrong way, by animal instinct. So their condemnation was written in  

the lives of three Old Testament people - Cain,  Balaam, and Korah. If you know your Old Testament  

you know what they all did. They also did this  rebellion against things they didn’t understand.  

Cain, you know what he did, and he killed  his brother out of envy. The first murder  

in human history was motivated by envy.  Balaam was the man who, for financial gain,  

tried to give false prophecies about God’s  people, and he had to be rebuked by his donkey.  

Incredible that an ass should humble that  man and show him up as he did; I like that.  

I tell wives who complain to me about their  husbands that the Lord can speak through asses.  

That usually convinces them that the  Lord can speak to them through their  

husband, but that’s another story. Korah was in rebellion against Moses.  

You know what happened to him, there was  an earthquake, and the earth opened up and  

Korah fell in, and the earth closed again. That  was the last you saw of Korah, and he rebelled  

against Moses’ leadership. These men with their  false teaching don’t like authority. They rebel  

against recognized authority. Their character  - they will affect the rest of the characters  

because they’ve affected their own. And we have four vivid pictures of  

useless character. Fleeting clouds that  promise rain but never produce any,  

fruitless trees that look as if they’re going  to produce a lot of fruit and produce nothing,  

rootless and fruitless, dead. Foaming  waves—have you ever stood in a harbour  

and watched the way the waves come in and bring  a lot of debris, and rubbish, and foam, and dirt?  

There’s nothing so dirty as a  sea of waves and foam coming in. 

And falling stars, when you  see a falling star, it’s  

ever so bright and it’s gone in such a short time.  This is the character of these false teachers,  

they appear so bright for such a short time  and people follow them, and then they’re gone.  

So often in Church history people have  followed false teachers who have disappeared so  

quickly - unless they’re speaking the truth. You  can say that I’ve often answered a query on the  

phone, “What do I think of the latest thing from  America?” And I say, “Ask me in two years’ time.”  

They never do, because in two  years time nobody’s talking  

about it. I think you know what I mean here. The latest Christian craze that crosses the pond  

and suddenly everybody’s talking about  it, and “What do you think about this  

and what do you think about that?” They  ring me up as if I’m some sort of guru  

and they ask me, “What do you think about this?”  And I say, “Ask me in two years’ time,” and  

nobody’s ever come back to ask me. If only we  all would deal with things like that instead of  

suddenly saying, “It’s the latest thing and  all the Christians are talking about it.”  

But these crazes are just what they  are, they’re crazes, they’re novelties. 

You stick with the faith once delivered  to the saints and you’ll be alright.  

Don’t follow the latest novelty, the  latest craze. Don’t get a Mecca complex,  

“Where is God moving? I must save up and  buy an air ticket and go and see it.”  

We become a kind of Mecca crazy group  of Christians wanting to go here, there,  

and everywhere around the world to find out  where God is working. Listen, God is here  

and he would work here if we believe it. We don’t  need to chase around the world to find God—falling  

stars. And that’s where he turns to Jewish tradition  

again and mentions Enoch and his prophecy, which  is not in the Bible unfortunately. I wish it was.  

Enoch prophesied against ungodly people, and that  word kept coming in, four times in one sentence,  

“What the ungodly say, and in their  ungodly way, and how they behave  

as ungodly people,” ungodly, ungodly, ungodly.  Therefore it was Enoch who gave his little boy,  

who was born when Enoch was sixty-five years  old, and he gave him the name Methuselah,  

“When you die it will happen.” What a name to  saddle on a boy. 969 years later Methuselah died,  

and on the day he died the rain came and a whole  generation was blotted out. If only they’d listen  

to Enoch, Noah’s great-grandfather, they’d have  been ready for the flood. But nobody listened. 

Their conversation; you can tell  

people you should avoid who’ve come into  your church and come in as grumblers,  

self-centred talkers, boasters, and flatterers.  Those are four nasty types of conversation.  

Sooner or later that will spread and the  cancer will spread. One grumbler produces  

another grumbler. And flattery is out of place in  a Christian fellowship; Christians don’t flatter  

people in order to benefit from them.  Their conversation gives them away.  

So he then turns to the condemnation,  scripture, and he says, “If you remember  

what the apostles taught, you’ll know that  this is exactly what they said would happen.” 

You read the apostle Paul;  

in one of his letters to Timothy he says, In  the last days people will scoff. They will only  

listen to preachers who tickle their ears, they  will go after novelty, they won’t be interested  

in the faith once delivered to the saints.  They want to know, ‘What’s the latest thing?’  

I got asked that by a lady in the street.  She said, “What’s the latest word from God?”  

I said, “Do you want the two-hour  or the four-hour answer?”  

She didn’t seem to have  enough time, so she left me.  

If you’re only interested in the latest bit from  God or the latest idea, the latest craze, the  

latest move of God—that’s  what it’s called now—listen,  

focus on the faith once delivered to the saints. Hold on to that, there’s a rock in it  

and you’re much more secure. The  apostles warned us, scoffers will come in  

to the Church—people who are sarcastic,  people who make jokes about serious things,  

people who scoff at preachers. It’s so easy,  but the apostles told us it would happen,  

and it’s happening here in the  fellowship to which he’s writing. 

And finally, their compulsion,  their motivation, they are divisive.  

Their ambition is to divide the fellowship  between those who follow them and those who don’t.  

They follow their natural instincts, they do  not have the Holy Spirit, and that’s the final  

condemnation of these men who’ve crept in. They’ve  come in with false teaching, with weak characters,  

with immoral behaviour. They’ve come in with  all this because they don’t have the Spirit,  

and that’s the last word in the  first section of the letter. 

So now let’s turn over and go back to the  other two, much shorter sections of the letter  

and then we’re finished. It’s still going on, not  only in the day of the readers of this letter,  

but in our day. There are false teachers in  the churches today and who are not willing  

to preach or teach the faith once delivered to  the saints - in other words, the New Testament.  

So how do we cope with that? What  do we do about it? I find here an  

interesting omission from the letter of Jude.  He doesn’t tell them to do anything about them. 

He doesn’t say, “Shut them up.” He doesn’t  say, “Put them out.” He doesn’t say,  

“Leave them alone.” I’d have thought he would  have told us, what do you do when false teachers  

get into your church. He didn’t say, “Go  to another church.” He didn’t say anything.  

Mind you, the letter of Jude would  be read aloud in the fellowship,  

and therefore they would be warned from  the scriptures, from Jewish tradition.  

Enough warning had been given to them in  Jude. I wonder what those false teachers  

were thinking as the letter was read. I hope  they’d be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.  

I hope that they would repent of what they’d been  teaching. But my sad experience is it’s not easy  

for people like this to repent. If they didn’t  repent, I hope they would leave the fellowship  

and get out and take their  false teaching with them. 

But it’s interesting that Jude says, I want  you to be more concerned about yourselves  

and about the victims of these false teachers  than about the false teachers themselves.  

Leave them to God, let God deal with them. He  will do. God has noted what they’re doing and he  

will not let them off. “Vengeance is mine,” says  the Lord, “I will repay.” It almost seems as if  

Jude is saying, ‘Leave these teachers to God,  don’t you try and put the situation right.’ 

But he does say, Here are some  things to do for yourselves  

when these things are happening in the Church.  First of all, build yourselves up in your faith.  

How can we do that? By studying  the scripture for ourselves,  

by feeding on the faith once delivered to the  saints. I thank God that I’ve been able to  

help so many people in churches where  they’re not getting the right teaching,  

and where feeding on tapes and DVD’s has kept  their faith, and built them up in the faith and  

edified them. The word “edify” is the same as the  word “edifice.” You build yourself up by studying  

the Word of God, and I thank God for the privilege  of teaching the Word, so that people can build  

themselves up in the faith, whether they’re  getting good teaching in the Church or not. 

In fact, there are even churches that would  have been closed down by the authorities,  

but where they’ve been kept open by  feeding the congregation on DVD’s.  

That’s just thrilling to me. So the first concern  for yourselves, “Build yourself up in the faith,”  

study the Word of God for yourself. Be  sure that your faith is being built up,  

whatever else is being destroyed.  That’s the first thing you should do. 

And the second thing you should do is to pray  in the Spirit. Nobody can stop you from praying.  

Now praying in the Spirit may be a special  thing, I have the feeling it’s a reference to  

praying in tongues, because that is especially  a gift of the Spirit when you don’t know  

how to pray yourself. When you are so perplexed  and troubled by what’s happening that you don’t  

know how to express it in prayer, let the Spirit  take over. Let him put the words in your mouth;  

pray in the Spirit and he will guide your lips  to the right kind of prayer. You may not even  

know what you’re praying about yourself, but  it will be the right kind of prayer for God,  

and that’s the major reason for that lovely gift  of tongues. It’s a gift to know how to pray when  

you don’t know how to pray, when you just don’t  know what to pray for - then pray in the Spirit.  

That’s the word here. The third thing is to submit -  

to keep yourself in God’s love. Once  again, these teachers will be leading  

people away from God’s love, but you keep  yourself in God’s love. How do you do that?  

Well Jesus told you how. He said, “I keep my  Father’s commandments and I stay in his love.  

You keep my commandments and you’ll stay in  my love.” That’s how you keep in God’s love,  

by being obedient and submissive to God  and obeying what he tells you to do.  

Don’t listen to human beings and do  what they tell you to do. Listen to God,  

and do what he tells you to do.  That’s how you keep in God’s love. 

I’m tempted to write a fourth thing  there. Would you like to write it in, D?  

After C, Submission, write D, Expectation.  

As you wait - for what? As you wait  for the coming of Jesus Christ.  

All true Christians are eagerly waiting for Christ  to reappear. He’s coming back and it’s one of the  

major motivations of the Christian life, that  he’s coming back and he’s going to take over.  

Whatever misleading false teachers there  have been, the true Teacher is returning  

and you’re waiting for him.  Keep your eyes fixed on that.  

Now that’s how we’re to look after ourselves  when there are false teachers around. But we  

also should be concerned about others, those  who are being affected by that teaching.  

And he mentions three categories of people. First of all, those who are still wavering;  

who are still not sure whether to believe the  new teachers or to believe the old teaching.  

Waverers, people who are sitting on the fence but  don’t know which way they’re going to go. Well,  

we’re to have a special attitude to  them. They are in real mental doubt,  

“tossed around by every wind of doctrine,” says  Paul. That’s the affect of false teachers, they  

raise doubts and people feel uncertain about it.  Well, help them, love them, show mercy to them,  

pay special attention to them, and seek to build  them up in the faith once delivered to the saints.  

Do anything you can to help them. I  know people in churches who’ve started  

a Bible study group in their home to help the  waverers, to help them back into the truth. 

The second group are those who are in mortal  danger, they’ve gone a bit further into the new  

teaching, and they are in mortal danger. They  should be snatched, ‘kidnapped’, seized in any  

way you can and brought to their senses before  it’s too late - a brand plucked from the burning. 

Finally, there are those who’ve  gone over to the false teachers,  

those who’ve fallen for it, and who  are now sharing their immoral living,  

and still the word “mercy” comes in. We still  need to be merciful to those who’ve fallen for it;  

it could have been us, but it was them. And  we should have a special sympathy for them.  

At the same time, you can’t help somebody  without the fear that you could be dragged in.  

There’s a healthy fear in Christians.  Jude puts it in a very blunt form here,  

“You should be afraid even of contaminated  underwear.” That’s a very direct and practical  

application. They are living immoral lives and  they will have contaminated even their clothes,  

so be fearful of contamination yourself.  It’s a healthy fear. Be merciful to them,  

but fear being contaminated  yourself—very practical advice. 

Finally, in this very short letter, have you been  surprised at how much teaching there is in it and  

how much help there is in it? I certainly was when  I first really studied it. But now, look to the  

future and look to the God of the future. We have  this amazing verse, which is the verse that most  

Christians are more familiar with than the rest of  the epistle. It’s a lovely hymn of praise to God,  

and there are two major things about  this God that we should look to. 

First, he is an able God. “To the God who is  able,” I want you to notice the word is “able.”  

It is not the word “certain.” God is not  “certain” to prevent us from falling.  

He is not certain to present us faultless  before his throne, but he is able to  

if we are willing. That’s the big “if.”  

There’s no teaching in my New Testament that once  saved, always saved; far from it. But he is able  

to complete what he’s begun in  you. He’s able to stop you falling.  

He’s able to protect you. He’s able to  present you faultless, and that’s the  

whole point of salvation, to be made perfect  and presented faultless before his throne. 

Just to lighten things a bit,  my wife is a great believer.  

Her faith, in a sense, is simpler than mine, I’ve  read too much. But there’s one thing I teach that  

my wife really doubts. It brings her to the  edge of unbelief, and that’s when I tell her  

that one day her husband will be perfect. Now for  some reason she finds this difficult to believe.  

She actually said to me, “If I based my  faith on experience, I can’t believe that.  

But,” she said, “I’ll try and  base my faith on the Word of God.”  

God is able to do it. But that doesn’t mean he will do it.  

We need to be willing to be made perfect. Of  course I have to believe that my wife will one  

day be perfect, but that’s much easier for me to  believe than for her to believe the other way.  

But that is why he’s saved you,  he wants to make you perfect,  

and he will not be content with anything less  than that. He is able to present you faultless  

before the throne of his majesty,  and that’s what he wants to do.  

That’s why your salvation is not complete yet,  neither is mine. I’m on the way of salvation  

but I won’t be fully saved until I’m perfect  because he wants to make a brand new universe,  

a new heaven and a new earth, brand new, but  he will only put in it people who are perfect. 

The last few pages of your Bible make that  quite clear, nothing unclean will be allowed in.  

Nothing impure, nothing imperfect  will spoil that world for him  

or for other people or for themselves.  It’s a perfect place for perfect people,  

and salvation is being made faultless.  There’s both a negative and a positive here.  

The negative side is that he’s  able to prevent you from falling,  

but the positive side, he’s  able to present you faultless.  

The ability of God to do those two things, nobody  else has. It’s his ability that is mentioned here. 

You see, not only is he able to keep you. That’s  only one side of the story. The other side is,  

“Keep yourselves in the love of God.”  There are two sides to being kept.  

He has one part to play and we have the other. He  is able to keep, but we need to be willing to be  

kept. We need to go on trusting him. And you won’t  be kept unless you keep yourselves in his love.  

Now that’s the truth of the whole of the  New Testament. Do you know that there are  

over eighty warnings in the New Testament  against losing your salvation? Over eighty!  

God couldn’t have made it clearer. That’s why Paul towards the end of  

his life says, “He is able to keep that which I’ve  committed to him.” But at the same time he says,  

“I have kept the faith.” Do you see the two  sides? They go together all the way through.  

Yes, none can pluck them out of his hand. But  we can jump out of his hand, because those  

who are kept in his hand he says are, “My  sheep who hear my voice and who follow me.”  

If we go on believing he is able to keep  us from falling and present us faultless.  

He’s able to do that. So that’s his ability. And then we  

turn from that to his sovereignty, his authority.  He is the only God. The word “wise” somehow crept  

in there. It doesn’t say he’s “the only wise  God,” as if there are a lot of foolish ones.  

It doesn’t say that. He is the only God, and to  him belong all majesty, all dominion, all power.  

And alongside his sovereignty is his  eternity; he was, is, and always will be -  

always there. Look to this God. Take  your eyes off the false teaching;  

take your eyes off those who are misleading and  destroying the Church of Christ from the inside.  

Fix your eyes on him who has the ability and  the authority to see you through to perfection.  

Amen. Do you know what that word means? It means  certainly, surely, absolutely. It’s not a kind of  

“Amen,” question mark. It’s not that at all. It’s  the strongest affirmative in the Greek language.  

Jesus constantly used it. He would  say, “Verily, verily,” “Truly, truly,”  

and what he actually said was “Amen,  amen; certainly this is true.” 

Well, we’ve come to the end. Or have we?  Not quite. Having gone through all this  

in preparation in my study, the last thing  I do then is to retranslate the letter  

into my own language. I do it by writing out the  letter in black there and leaving plenty of space  

between and then writing my own translation  or paraphrase in red in between the lines.  

And then I know I’ve understood it. When you  can translate a part of the Bible into your own  

language you’ve understood what it means. So I’m  going to finish by reading the whole thing again  

in my paraphrase, which is what I read  to the people I taught this letter to: 

This letter is from Judas, though  I prefer to be called Jude,  

one of the bought slaves of King Jesus and  a brother of James, whom you all know. I am  

addressing all those over there who have heard  and responded to the call of God our Father  

enjoying the love of his family and have so far  been kept safe by your relationship with his Son,  

Jesus. May you experience more and more  of his underserved mercy, inward peace,  

and loving care. My dear friends, I had fully  intended to write an encouraging note about  

the wonderful salvation you and I share, but  I now find I must send you a solemn warning,  

and appeal to you to fight on for the old faith  which was first given to the believers once and  

for all. I have heard that certain men, who shall  be nameless, have sneaked into your fellowship.  

They are not in touch with God; their sentence of  doom was pronounced and recorded years ago. They  

distort the amazing grace of our gospel into  an excuse for blatant immorality and indecent  

behaviour. They deny that the Messiah, Jesus, is  the only true Head and Lord of all. Now I want to  

remind you of some facts you are already familiar  with, which warn us not to trifle with God.  

Remember that he brought a whole nation out of  slavery in Egypt, yet destroyed most of them  

because they would not go on trusting him. Nor  were his angels any more exempt than his people.  

When some of them deserted their proper place  and function he took them into custody and is  

keeping them in the lowest and darkest dungeon  until their trial on the great day of judgment.  

Likewise, Sodom and Gomorrah  gluttoned themselves with debauchery,  

hankering after forbidden pleasures  just as the angels had done.  

Their fate in the fire that burned for  so long is a sober omen for us all.  

In spite of such examples from the past,  these interlopers abuse their own bodies,  

despise the authority of the Lord, and  deride the angels in glory. In contrast,  

when the archangel Michael argued with the  devil about the disposal of Moses’ body,  

he did not presume to condemn him for slander  directly, but simply said, “The Lord is the one  

to reproach you.” Yet these men among you don’t  hesitate to malign what they don’t understand, and  

the little they do understand  is based on natural instinct,  

rather than supernatural inspiration,  as if they were animals without reason.  

Woe betide them! They walk in the same way  Cain went, they plunge into Balaam’s blunder  

for the same profit motive; sharing the rebellious  attitude of Korah they will come to the same ruin.  

They think they are shepherds, but they’re  not interested in feeding the sheep,  

only themselves. They’re like clouds driven  away by the wind before they drop any rain.  

They’re like uprooted trees in the autumn,  with neither leaves nor fruit; dead as dead.  

Like crashing wild waves of the sea, casting  up the foam of their shameful behaviour,  

like shooting stars destined to  disappear down a black hole forever.  

It was about such as these that Enoch in  only the seventh generation after Adam  

made a prophetic announcement, “Look out,  the Lord is coming with hoards of angels  

to carry out his sentence on all the godless  people for their godless deeds which they  

have done, and all the godless words they have  spoken against God himself and his godly people.”  

These infiltrators are discontented grumblers,  always complaining, pursuing their own ambitions,  

full of big talk. They even use  flattery to gain their ends.  

But you, my dear friends, need to remember the  sombre predictions of the apostles themselves.  

They said that as history entered the final  stages there will be those who are contemptuous  

of godliness while they pursue and practise the  very opposite. The result will be splits among you  

initiated by those who follow their fleshly  impulses, strangers to the Holy Spirit.  

As for you, my dear friends, reinforce  yourselves by becoming more mature in your faith,  

praying regularly in the way the Spirit leads  you. Stay within the boundaries God lovingly set  

for you as you patiently wait for the return of  our Lord Jesus Christ and the everlasting life he  

will bring in new bodies. Deal gently with those  who are wavering between you and the interlopers.  

Do anything you can to rescue those who’ve already  gone over to them, as you would snatch a child  

from a burning house. You must even feel  compassion for the villains themselves.  

But alongside that, keep a healthy fear of being  contaminated by them, even by their stained  

clothing. Now let’s praise the one, the God who  is able to keep you from slipping into all this,  

and enable you to stand before his  glorious throne, blameless and jubilant.  

To the only God who can save us and bring  us to glory belong radiance, majesty,  

all power and dominion before all time, all  through history, and forevermore. Absolutely true!

And finally I’m going to sing to  you because my wife isn’t here.  

She can’t bear me singing. But when I went to  New Zealand for the first time I came across a  

couple called Dave and Dale Garrett who were the  first to write modern choruses based on Scripture.  

They called it “Scripture in Song.” They took the  last two verses of Jude and turned them into a  

song, set music to them. We’ve tried to find the  music and we can’t. Have we found it? Wonderful!  

…..Now you really know it. (Singing)  

Now unto him who is able to keep, able to keep you  from falling and present you faultless before the  

presence of his glory with exceeding joy. To the  only wise God our Saviour be glory and majesty,  

dominion and power both now and forever. Amen. Well, goodnight and thank you for listening.

YouTube Transcript:
The Book of Jude

Video Transcript

Paste YouTube URL

Get Our Chrome Extension

Get Instant Transcripts: Just Edit the Domain in Your Address Bar!

YouTube Transcript:The Book of Jude

Video Transcript

Paste YouTube URL

Transcript Extraction Form

Get Our Chrome Extension

Get Instant Transcripts: Just Edit the Domain in Your Address Bar!

YouTube Transcript:
The Book of Jude