Jude vs 1-2 Overview and Greetings
Jude · Andrew Molloy · Nov 7, 2021
Jude, No. 01
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/49261924564309

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

The book of Jude is what we're starting today. The first two verses that we're going to cover is Jude 1 and 2. Jude, a bondservant of Jesus Christ and brother of James, to those that are called, or who are called, beloved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ, may mercy and peace and love be multiplied to you.

So I'm going to do an overview of the whole book, and then we'll look at these two verses that we have for today. So the overview begins with when it was written. We'll start out simple here, 66 to 69 AD. Constable thinks it could have been written up to 80 AD.

Jude's audience, This is what I think, and Constable, I think, thinks something different, but, and another commentator mentioned this, that the audience is not specific. It's kind of a broad audience that he's writing to, to those who are in Christ Jesus, or who are called, beloved of God.

So, that's very general. Not like Peter, as I illustrate here in Peter's letter, he says, to those who reside as aliens scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, Bithynia, who are called, very similar to how Jude begins his epistle. So, those are specific churches, specific people. Jude is more general. However, Constable says that he thinks Jude has a targeted audience in mind.

One that knows well the Jewish Old Testament and all the characters depicted in this short letter of Jude engaging in acts of apostasy and he names them by name and they're all Old Testament characters. So, he thinks that this is a Jewish congregation somewhere or a series of Jewish congregations. And that could be true, it makes sense. But we'll look at that a little later.

Macaulay brings up this point, what I say in point D here, the epistle of Jude is a B-side letter or a second draft, or like a second unit letter, maybe a bullpen letter, because he did not intend to write this little letter to these people. What he did intend to write, he makes clear in verse three. He says, beloved, while I was making every effort to write to you about our common salvation, he was going to do a general Episcopal letter or, you know, one that just talks about common salvation. But then he felt it necessary to write to them, appealing them to contend earnestly for the faith that was once for all handed down to the saints. So he got stopped in, maybe he even had the other letter done, but it didn't go out. Maybe it did, but he had to write this letter. The Holy Spirit led him to write this letter. And it makes sense, which we'll see later in the lesson.

The message of Jude is about apostasy, and I'd say it's divinely placed. It's the penultimate book just prior to the book of Revelation. And right at the start of Revelation, in Revelation 1-3, the Lord Jesus Christ addresses the seven churches. And there I have them listed. And those churches have something about them, one thing that's a little situation of apostasy. They're falling away in some different way. So Jude occurs right before that.

And then not only Jude is right at the end of the Bible, but Peter's second letter is placed at the end of our scriptures. Peter's second letter was written maybe the same year as Jude, in 66. McGee says it's 66 AD. As we know, the second letter of Peter is very similar to Jude. A lot of people say that Jude borrowed from Peter or Peter borrowed from Jude. But we'll look at that when we get into those verses that kind of cross over. Paul's second letter to Timothy has a bit about apostasy written just about the same time.

So, the Holy Spirit really had all these men writing about this issue concurrently, right before there was about a 30-year break before John wrote the the Book of Revelation and the 30-year break before the Lord Jesus Christ revealed himself to John and talked about the seven churches.

So, it's very well placed. The theme of Jude, I think, and we'll see what the other teachers think, but I think the major theme is warning about the present apostasy. It's a book of warning. The minor theme, I think, is at the letters, the end of the letter, and how to contend or fight for the faith is the secondary theme for it. Macaulay calls Jude a battleground, a battleground letter, and I like this. And I'm using his outline, and I think you did too, Roger. Yeah, I did. For the lesson. It's a really good one, and we'll see how it is.

First of all, he says that the book of Jude has two groups of people, emphasizes two groups of people in direct conflict with each other, and that's why it's a battleground. The first group of people is the beloved, and you see verses 1, 3, 17, 24 verses, and that's his audience, the beloved of God. they're pitted against certain men, Macaulay calls, he just says, Jude calls them certain men, he calls them ungodly persons, or they're referred to as these men in the letter, or these, and you can, the men isn't stated there, but these, the same certain men. And those are in seven verses of this short, like 25 verse, letter, seven out of the 25. So there you have the certain men versus the beloved.

That's what Macaulay, that's how he came up with his outline. And it's a big one. Yeah, I like that. I like the fact that, you know, he doesn't name them, there's certain men. Yeah, certain men. Kind of in the, what is that? Even the third, yeah, he doesn't. It's a little bit distant. Or maybe there's several from around, you know, there's too many maybe to mention. Right.

So the outline of the Book of Jude, this is constable introduction, verse one, two. We're doing that today. Then the purpose of the letter is three and four next week. And that's when we'll talk about how This comes up that another letter was going to be written, however, Jude had to write this letter. So, Macaulay says, he divides up the book of Jude in four reasons why the beloved, the first audience, should contend for the faith. And four reasons.

God always judges apostasy in five through seven. And he gives examples of Israel angels, Sodom and Gomorrah, all judged. The second reason is the consequences of apostasy in verses 8 through 11. And in verse 11, there's this woe unto you warning. and the consequences are, you know, you're going to perish. And Jude is telling his beloved to avoid this. The third reason, the results of apostasy in 12 and 13, verses 12 and 13, And he gives this really nice poetic description of the results of apostasy and how there's emptiness and stars wandering in the darkness, wandering stars and things like that, and just just how in darkness and your dry clouds and things like that. So we'll look at that. And then the fourth reason that Macaulay gives in the outline is the doom of the apostates, verses 14, 15, and 16. And the doom is certain judgment.

Then Macaulay says, there's a section on how to contend for the faith. in verses 17 through 23 by doing four things, four verbs, four verbals as they call them. But I found five, so I'm gonna give you five. He gave four, but I found five and maybe I'm wrong. I doubt Macaulay is wrong, but I have found five. We'll see what we see. So he says, the first verb is building yourselves up in your faith.

It's a present active participle, ending in ing. Praying, another participle, a verb, present middle, so you're really involved in praying, in the spirit. And I think that's what they're talking about in the other class next door today is praying in the spirit, one of the ministries of the Holy Spirit, which is interesting. And then You are to keep yourself in the love of God.

And that's a verb, but that's now an imperative. Aristactive imperative. Have mercy on some. Another imperative. It's present active imperative. So there's three imperatives. I found three imperatives. The third imperative I found was save or rescue who you can. And that's a present active imperative.

So see, I see five, one, two, three, four, five, A through E. And in Macaulay's, he was giving a lesson live. He said, there's four, so I don't know. And it sounded like he was doing it from the very room you're sitting in now. He was at Holly Hills when he was giving that lesson. because he said, I don't know, his grease pencil broke or something. He always throws them on the floor. Yeah, he threw them and he says, that's how we do it in Kansas City. And he mentioned Denver. So I think he was visiting here. So it's kind of funny.

So there's your outline and then the conclusion versus 24 and 25. Now here's, when I first started looking at Jude, I was terribly confused about who wrote the book of Jude because you had Ironside saying one guy and you had the others saying another, another Judas. So this, I had to make up an Excel little spreadsheet for myself to keep all these Judases And James straight, because he introduces himself as the brother of James. So up top, we have Judas Iscariot, which, as you can see, is all blacked out.

That was easy. I got through that. Then the second Judas is this apostle named Judas Thaddeus. He's the son of James. He's referred to as James or Judas, not Iscariot. Then third, you have Judas, who is Jude, who's the brother of James, and they're both half brothers of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So then I put them on the X, what is that, the X axis. What are those called, Roger? X and Y axis? Yeah, the X axis. And then the Y axis. That's the abscissa. Yeah. And then the Y axis there is James, the oldest apostle, son of Zebedee, brother of the apostle John. But he died very early, you see, in 44.

Then there's James, son of Alphaeus. is referred to as James the Lesser, or he's an apostle too. Then you have James, who's not an apostle, who's the brother of the Lord, half-brother of the Lord Jesus Christ, writer of the book of James, that's not too much in dispute. He's referred to as James the Just, or he's a pillar of Jerusalem, an elder, a bishop of that church. And then finally, you have one mention of this James, father of Judas, who's also called Thaddeus.

So you can cross-reference James, the father of Thaddeus, with Judas Thaddeus, Jude Thaddeus, and you have that green pot there possible. So anyway, as you can see, if you go through each of these, pick a guy and then go over to the other James, and you can see that it just doesn't work out because Thaddeus, for instance, is the son of James, so he can't be James, son of Zebedee's brother because, you know what I mean? Time out, Andrew, time out.

So I was doing, I will go into, but that's what I was doing. I was trying to figure this out. But anyway, the main thing is that authorship right there in gold. And that's Judas, writer of this book, is the brother of James. Both in blue, you cross-reference them, and there you go. There's all the guys who believe that Jude, the half-brother of Jesus, is the author.

So there you go. And I had to do that. So anyway, here we go. Here's verse one. Jude, a bondservant of Jesus Christ and brother of James, to all those who are called beloved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ. So Jude, as we said, is the half-brother of the Lord. And maybe you, Roger, or Bob, or Roy, will come up with a different writer. We don't know. We'll see. We'll see.

Jesus had other family, James, Simon, Joseph, and very likely two sisters, Salome and Mary. And how I referenced these in that charge, but in Matthew 13, 55, this verse that says, isn't this not the carpenter's son referring to Jesus and his mother called Mary and his brothers, James and Joseph and Simon and Judas.

So that's how they get that, you know, James and Jude were the brothers who wrote the epistles. James and Jude were not believers while when Jesus Christ was doing his ministry. We see that in John 7, 5. So they both must have become believers after they saw him resurrected from the dead, and then Jesus, you know, visited James. A lot of commentators mention this, that Jew does not mention his familial relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ.

And only like the other apostles, he describes himself as a bondservant or a slave, doulos, much like Paul does. Regarding James's brother, James, that brother becomes a pillar of the church in Jerusalem. Paul visited him after his conversion, and James was a strong moral character, even keeled and wise. They called him James the Just, the writer of the Epistle of James.

Ironside says this, this is interesting, what a withering rebuke are these two lovely examples, meaning James's book and Jude's book, the introductory words of devotion to Christ to those who thoughtlessly speak or write of our brother Jesus, or use similar terms, All calculated those distract from the glory of him who once a lowly man in this scene of humiliation is now as a man by God Exalted to be prince a prince and a savior made in resurrection both Lord and Christ So the next point I have is that Jude instead of him attaching himself in his fleshly relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ, instead attaches himself to his older brother, right, James, the writer of the other epistle, who's revered, and they're natural brothers. One commentator said that Jude could have been ashamed Of his when he was in the flesh, he didn't believe is his half brother.

Jesus was the Messiah or was the son of God. James and Jude were not apostles. I don't know if I mentioned that before, but. Jude 17, Jude mentions the other apostles, so he mentioned those separate from himself, so that's how we know that Jude was not the Jude who was an apostle, and that's another reason for the authorship of the half-brother Jude as the writer of James, or writer of Jude.

I was thinking here in point nine that James and Jude probably had a very intimate, unique view and first-hand knowledge of Christ's humanity, because they knew him as a kid, as a teenager, as a young man, knowing him before, you know, he revealed his ministry and his deity, so that when he was resurrected and they saw him after his death, that must have just hit them like a ton of bricks, more so than like Peter or John, because Peter and John only knew him when he started this ministry. James and Jude knew him his entire life. And so I'd make that point that that must have been a real, that's probably contributing factors why they became believers after he's resurrected.

I don't know. Yeah. So was Jude among the disciples? Was he among the 12? He was not, was he? No, but James was. No, James was not either. No. You'll want to refer to my chart. Because it is confusing. There's another Jude, a Judas, who's an apostle. There's another James, who is an apostle. So there's two James apostles and one Jude apostle. But this other Jude is not an apostle.

And that's why I had to start out by figuring out who I was talking about a few weeks ago when I started that journey. Okay, so let's look at this, to those who are called, and the word called is an adjective, it's pletos. Yes. Can I just run through that once more? Sure, so there's two James that are apostles, but neither one is the brother of Jesus. Is that what you're saying?

Yes, James son of Zebedee and then there's James son of Alpheus and those are the two apostles of the twelve right and then Then there's a Jude who's called Thaddeus who's an apostle so there's a three people who can be, who are apostles, and that one Jew, Thaddeus, could have written the book of Jude here. But then Jesus had two brothers, James and Judas. James and Jude, who were half brothers, that weren't apostles. However, after the resurrection, they hung around the apostles a great deal.

They gathered in the room. And if you read through, and I didn't go into it, but if you read through some verses in Acts, you'll see that they mentioned the apostles, and then they say, and Mary, the mother of Jesus and his brothers, And one time it mentions James and Jude, and so that's how we know that these two, James and Jude were not apostles.

Okay, thank you. Yeah, if that makes sense. It does, thanks. Okay, so klektos is, we're invited, it's an invitation, like an invitation to a banquet, where we're invited to eternal salvation in the kingdom of Christ. We're divinely selected and appointed. Vines has kleitos meaning an effectual call, meaning that with godly effect. It's the same word kleitos as Romans 828, we are called according to his purpose. It's interesting if you look at, My lesson is from the New American Standard, but if you look, if you have a King James, the word kleitos called is at the end of the verse.

It's to those who are sanctified in God the Father and in Christ Jesus kept. And then it puts this called at the end and Kelly calls this, it's left hanging there at the end of the verse. And that's the young literal translation, I believe. So here's the Greek inner lineary for this verse one of Jude. Jude of Jesus Christ, a slave, brother and of James. To the ones by God, the Father, having been loved and for Jesus Christ, having been kept called. See how that called is put at the end for emphasis, given emphasis in the Greek. It's pretty cool, but for clarity, when we do it in English, they change it around.

So, more on that, from Romans 8.30, to those who he calls, he predestines to be conformed to the image of a son.

Those who are called are justified and glorified, Paul says in Romans 8.28 through 8.30. Now the called ones, the kletos ones, he addresses, are also beloved of God the Father. Agapeo is the Greek word.

It's a perfect passive participle. So it's a completed, accomplished action in the past. We are loved in the past. But that goes for once and for all time, it's in the perfect tense. So, we are the objects of God's unique divinely sourced love, which is Zagapi love, once and for all, with abiding permanence, is how I describe that there in point two.

Note that we are beloved in God the Father, and not beloved by God the Father. But both are true, right? So, that gives us a permanent fixed position in God, or in Christ, and deals with our identification, doesn't it? We're placed in the death, burial, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, so we're in Him, we're beloved in God the Father.

So that's an interesting little point of how Jude puts this in the first verse. We are kept, next word kept, tereo, perfect passive verb. We are guarded and carefully attended to by God. Some versions of the Bible have that we are preserved. The King James Version has we are preserved in Christ Jesus.

I'm gonna dwell a little on this tereo bird. It's very important because it's so rich, and we'll look at that. It's also used in 1 Peter 1-4 that we covered a few books ago in this class. To an inheritance, incorruptible, undefiled, and unfading, reserved in the heavens for you. And that word for reserved is tereo. Another verse is 1 Thessalonians, we've also covered that several weeks ago, right?

Not too long ago. 1 Thessalonians 5, 23, now may the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely, and may your spirit and your soul and your body be preserved, arrived, complete, without blame at the coming of the Lord, our Lord Jesus Christ. So, Here, the scripture, the Holy Spirit is telling us that, one, our inheritance is safeguarded, or kept, or guarded, safeguarded. Not only our inheritance, but our body, soul, and our spirits are safeguarded and kept by God. And then Jude, in this verse one, says that we ourselves are safeguarded, kept, protected, preserved by God for Jesus Christ in the heavenlies. And I just think that's a, I'm making that point because a lot of things are kept by God, our inheritance, body, soul, and spirit, and we ourselves. all the same word. And this, I'm gonna get to this, one of the points of this lesson is to, there's more on this word kept.

Point D here, while our inheritance is kept or guarded in heaven, under the watchful eye of God, we are being garrisoned, and this is Weist's words, we are being garrisoned about by God's protecting care for it. The guard has never changed. It is on duty 24 hours a day, year in and year out, until we arrive safely in heaven. And that's Weist. Now, this is where I wanna give this other kind of aspect to this word, tereo, or kept.

So in Constable's commentary, he mentions this student of his who has this argument that Jude, that one of the themes of Jude is kept as well. So, this student said that the main verse of Jude is verse 11, the warning in verse 11. It's, woe unto them. And it's a strong warning. And this chart looks kind of difficult, but it's It's easy, so we'll go through it a little. But this student, his name is Brian Baker, and this is a constable student, says that Jude is a chiasm.

It's a mirror image in writing. And you can see on the top, before that pin that I have in the middle, you see that pin is at verse 11, woe to them. Well, A through M on the top, if you fold the paper along at the arrow at verse 11, fold the paper, it matches up perfectly to the A and the B and the C and the D and the E down below. So it's a mirror image in writing, a chiasm. And I know that, Vern, our friend Vern, would always talk about chiasms and mirror images in writing, like every Sunday. Maybe. Well, yeah, he was doing Isaiah and Isaiah was a very long book, but and he just, he mentioned it a lot. And so I never saw it. I never really saw it. But this one, I see.

That's cool. So, you see, let's go to the top, A. To those who are kept in Christ Jesus, that's our word, Torah. Now, go to the bottom, A, the very bottom. to Him who keeps you from falling. That's Torah. See how A is kept and A down below is kept? Look at B up top, mercy. And then B down below, have mercy on some. And then C, common salvation. C down below is wait for eternal life. D, up atop, contend earnestly for the faith. And D, down below, is build yourselves up in the faith.

So it's, even the words of his kaya, this kayasam he found, match. Another one that is really cool, look at El up top. El up top, like reasoning animals in verse 10. That's El up top, before verse 11, before the pen. Now look at El down below the pen. Balaam's unreasonable, he mentions unreasoning animals two times.

So this chiasm is basically perfect. And you can see that there's four terahos, or four keps, in this chiasm. And the pin of the chiasm is right at verse 11, woe to them. So it's kind of cool. I like this. I like this little, and this is the first time I've ever seen a chiasm that I've understood, but I understand very well. Yeah, it's impressive. Yeah, it is, this guy. What's his name? His name is Brian Baker. Let's get him on the phone. Let's not. I don't, yeah. So, but he was a student of constables.

So, verse two, may mercy and peace and love be multiplied to you. Be multiplied is a verb phrase. It's aorist, passive, optative. And Roger, weren't you talking about that? So it's, we're very familiar with it. It's an expression of a strong wish or desire. I call it a wish word. Some say it's a fourth class conditional statement. I don't know about that. I don't know if those classes, those conditional classes go beyond three, but someone mentioned that. And then be multiplied, the Greek word is plethuno, is to cause, to increase, but multiplying it is, has this exponential characteristic to it, you know, two times two, four times four.

So, it sort of expounds on itself. So we're having mercy, peace, and love being exponentially increased to you, is Jude's prayer. These three things, mercy, peace, and love, being made plenteous to you. Mercy is Elios, peace is Irenae, and then the love of God that is sourced by God himself is a word we're all familiar with, agape, so that's God's love. So three things being multiplied.

The Greek interlinearity says it well. It brings out the fact, this optative, is it a tense or a mood? Optative, it's one of those. Anyway, the optative mood. Okay, optative mood, thanks. You can see it in the Greek. mercy to you and peace and love, may it be multiplied. So they put the may with the multiply, which, so it keeps that, and that's why it's optative, but in English they take that may and they put it at the beginning of the verse. But I think they should have left it like the Greek inner linear has it. A lot more clear that way, isn't it?

I observe here that love and peace are two of the fruits of, I'm sorry, I said fruit, but I shouldn't say fruit. I'm gonna say fruit of the spirit. In Ephesians 5.22, two fruit, two fruits. Mercy is alias, as I said. A weast, he quotes this gentleman named Trench. And I like this. I've never heard this before. This was a learning experience for me.

But mercy, he, Trench says that mercy has to do with misery. the ministry of Christ in mitigating or assaging or removing our misery. So, and specifically the misery of enduring the consequences of sin or sinfulness or the, you know, the kind of destruction our old man kind of puts in our wake. We're miserable about that.

And mercy is a ministry of Christ in lessening that. Trench says that Elias or mercy precedes charis or grace in salvation. So, he says that God had pity, he had a pitying love on a pitiful world, with a pitying love, agape love. So, that in charis, or in grace, then he gave his only begotten son, because he pitied the world. And that's the word for mercy. I thought that the mercy rule in Little League, if you think about that, it's an excellent definition for Elias or mercy. And that is, if you have two teams of little boys playing Little League, and one team goes up by 10 or more, like in the fourth inning, There's a 10 run spread. They just call the game. They said, okay, that's it. The game is done. Four innings.

It's the mercy rule. So I thought, wow. So you're taking these little boys and my stepson has been on the winning side of that and the losing side of the mercy rule. But what you're doing is you're lessening the misery of the losing team and you're taking pity on the losing team. and you're saying, okay, let's just quit this and go home and get some ice cream. I think they need that in college football too.

Yeah, they do. Mercy rule. Right, they do. And you see that some coaches don't have any mercy in them, right? You see the coaches that run up the score, against the team, and they do it with glee. I think maybe the head coach of the New England Patriots does that. I just heard that he ran up a score the other week.

But yeah, I like that misery having to do with, or Elias and Mercy having to do with misery. So, my final point here is that verse two is so simple. And it's so direct that even Wiest can't expand it. Is Keithley. Yeah, Keithley could do it. Possibly, Keithley probably did it, but Wiest is expanded and explained. It's exactly how you see it there above. So it's so simple. So there you go. There's the overview of Jude. And we'll get those Jude and Judases and Jameses straight in the next coming weeks, I'm sure. That's great.

Any thoughts or anything? Andrew, what do you think is the purpose of a chiasm? Just a literary thing? Oh, well, here I gotta give credit to Vern again, because he really drilled this in our heads. It's just how they wrote the Hebrews, the Jewish, The Jewish authors wrote, that's how they wrote. They wrote in poetry patterns, right? Chiasm is a Hebrew poetry pattern. And so, all of Psalms are poetry patterns. You have Isaiah, there's little poetry patterns in all of the Old Testament that we don't see in English, but Jewish people who can read Hebrew, and especially those people back then, the ancient, writers and the ancient hearers of Hebrew can hear those poetry patterns really well. So it's a Hebrew poetry pattern that was employed in the Old Testament a lot, and Verne called it, he said, he always mentioned the Hebrew poetry pattern, remember it by going Hal, Phil, and Phil, Hal, Phil, Phil. I don't know who the second Phil was, Was it Phil Amidon? Do you remember? Was it Phil Mills? Yes, one was Phil Mills, but there's another Phil. So I don't know who that was. But anyway, that's how he had us remember it.

And that's just... That's ingrained in my head, and I just know this. So, a chiasm is a Hebrew poetry pattern. Jude, I think, it looks like he's employing that here. It looks good. So, there you go. All right, so let's... The poetry pattern, would they use for like to help? remember yeah yeah i kind of think so yeah exactly right yeah because psalm of the psalms of course are songs right and so they could sing the psalm and with a melody and they remember it and so that's how uh they remember things in songs, and they remembered things in these poems that would rhyme. They wouldn't rhyme, but their theme would rhyme, and they'd use the same words. And you see it, if you look at Baker's little poetry pattern there, you see how the words fold in on themselves. It's like a little origami. paper, kind of like that.

Shall I close in prayer? Yes, let's go. Our Lord and Savior, we thank you for this opening up of Jude and we pray that it brings us, it enters our hearts and we can apply it in recognizing things that are falling away in our world and we pray that your son will come quickly for us and we pray these things in Jesus' name, amen.