Jude vs 24-25 Conclusion and Benediction

Okay, we are concluding the book of Jude this morning. Last two verses, if I have that correct. That's correct. Okay. And so, it's verses 24 and 25, and they read like this. They, In 24, Jude says, now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to make you stand in the presence of his glory, blameless, with great joy. 25, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ, our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority before all time, now and forever. Amen. And really, we could just end the book of Jude right there and go home, because it's such a nice benediction there.

Closing a lot there, too. So, let's look at verse 24. Now, to him who is able to keep you from stumbling, we'll look at that part A. That word now is a is a changeover for Jude. He's changing over from what he discussed before, and that basically the whole book has been the character and fate of these false teachers that are cropping up in his day and time. So, by way of review, he calls them, as Chester Macaulay said, they're certain men. who crept in unnoticed, in verse 4, and these men who are false teachers are marked out for condemnation by God and who turn the grace of God into licentiousness and they deny your master and my master, the Lord Jesus Christ.

And that's their great sin right there. They also are devoid of the Spirit, we learned in Jude. They're worldly-minded, and they cause divisions in the church. In verse 19, they are mockers, falling after their own lusts and for gain, and they lead others that way, too. So, I'm just doing a brief, quick review of Jude here on this first slide.

But then he says, with the exception of, he says, but you, and I think it's in verse 20, but you, beloved, building yourselves up on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit. So, they're building themselves up, and we are too. We are to pray in the Spirit, and we are keep We are to keep ourselves in the love of God. And so, one of those commentators described those three things, A, B, and C, building yourselves up, praying in the Holy Spirit, and keeping yourselves in the love of God.

He described that as immunization against falling into the wiles of these false teachers. I like that word, immunization. And not like we've ever heard that word before in the last two years, is it? Good word there for that. And so, we are to keep ourselves from these false teachers and when we can, save others that get ensnared in the false teaching and weren t able to keep themselves grounded in the truth.

And that s from last week s verses 22 and 23. So now he says now, now he turns to God himself in contrast to all that went before and God's fact certain abilities to keep them from stumbling and to make them stand in his presence. So that's where we're at here in the book of Jude. Let's look at that first phrase from Jude 24a. God is able to keep you from stumbling. And we will first look at this.

Well, first of all, he has the power to keep you from stumbling. because that word there, able, is the word dunamai, and you see the word dynamite in there very closely, probably where we get our word for dynamite. It's God's omnipotence at work. He is able. It's a verb.

It's a present middle participle, so it stresses the fact that God is, is both the agent that is doing the keeping and that he's involved in the ultimate outcome and that's keeping us kept. here, and it's just from stumbling here, but there's a lot of other things we are kept from in our Christian life.

The word for keep is not tereo, which it is in other places in Jude here, it's phulaso, and that's to watch or guard, lest one escapes or snatched away or is harmed. It's a protective guard Same word, fulaso, as the shepherds keeping their watch over their flocks by night. So it's a shepherding kind of guard. Toreo, the other word for keep, is more of a keeping safe and reserved, keeping the value of like gold or, you know, Fort Knox, because it's valuable, keeping in that sense of the word.

God's desire is to keep us. That's His purpose. In Jude 1, the very first verse of the epistle of Jude, it says, we are called, we are beloved, in God the Father, and note the standing and the state we have, the positional truth there, called Beloved of the Father, and we are kept for Christ Jesus. And that word for kept there is the tereo word.

1 Peter 1.5, we are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation.

Andrew Murray, I was reading a little of him this last week, and he was talking about this 1 Peter 1.5 passage. And he says, not only is, because it's talking about in 1 Peter 1, that we have an inheritance kept in heaven for us. So, and that word is tereo. So, it's guarded and it's reserved for us in heaven. At the same time, we are kept for the inheritance. by God. And that agrees with this, how we are kept by God from stumbling in Jude 24.

So, it's a double keeping. And he made this, he gave this story or this analogy about a father, and the father has some children. and the father works all of his life to develop, amass a large fortune by working hard and doing the right investments to have an inheritance for his children because he wants them to live a good life and not have to worry about finances. So, leaving them an inheritance But Murray says, what if he works all that time to build up this inheritance, but then lets his kids run wild in the streets and not go to school and just sort of do their own thing and sort of run wild and not grow up well, and so not train them up well. He's keeping an inheritance, but he's not keeping his children for that inheritance. So, but God does both, doesn't he? So, that was his point of that story, and I like that analogy.

So we are kept, phulaso, as well, besides the inheritance, we are kept from stumbling. Here is the real subject of Jude 24. And that stumbling word is Aptistas, A-P-T-A-I-S-T-O-S, it's transliterated. And we says it involves not only the act of tripping, but then the resulting fall that comes from the trip. So you're going to trip and you're going to fall. So it's all that.

Last week we were talking about verses 22 and 23, and William Kelly, we didn't get to it, but here are the three classes of believers or people caught up in the web of false teaching from 22 and 23. He gives three classes, a lot of other people just have two classes that are discussed in 22 and 23. So he has one, a disputatious class, one's causing disputes that are to be convicted and silenced. Then the other class is those who are to be saved and snatched out of the fire. And then there's those who are to be compassioned with fear. hating the garment spotted by the flesh. So you see the three classes of people there. And this all tends to complete the danger to souls from getting ensnared in false teaching.

So my question is, and I think I'm getting this and you might want to chime in here. I'm, can we conclude that the three classes from verse 22 and 23, or two classes if you want to go that route, of people that are to be saved, did they stumble? And that's, is that why Jude here in 24 says that God is able to keep you from stumbling? So, you could, I looked at it this way, if you have this optistos word for stumbling, these believers in 22 and 23 either tripped slightly and recovered or they really tripped and flailed almost to the end. You've done that before when you trip over something and you almost go down, but you recover or some will do a full face plant, right? A full on face plant and maybe go to the hospital. So, Yeah, I wonder if there's a relationship between the stumbling class, the word for stumbling here in 24, and these people from the previous verses.

It's an interesting theory, and I think there is. I haven't seen it in any other commentaries, but I wanted to make that observation for you. That's good. Yeah. Yeah, we do that often here in Telluride because the sidewalks are so, it's such a mess in some places. Right. And then uneven sidewalks, so you can see how, I'm an expert at this stumbling. Yeah. Let's look at this last part of June 24.

And that is, God is able to make you stand in the presence of his glory, blameless, with great joy. And I put it in parentheses there that God, who is all-powerful, part of his essence, and he's able to, he's the one doing that, right? And I just inserted that.

So, the word for stand is an aorist active infinitive. So, it stresses that God is doing it, and it's a fact that he's doing it, and he's doing it for us here, and he's in the present tense. So, well, it's aorist, but there you go. It's also in the present condition, isn't it? We'll go back a bit. I make another observation here in this part of Jude 24.

You know, I read that at first and it looks, it's a positional statement, isn't it? God is able to make you stand in His presence of His glory, blameless, with great joy. So, it's a positional truth and we're all familiar with positional truths. But then I was wondering, I read it, when you read it a little more, do you see a future reality of you standing in the presence of His glory, blameless, with great joy? Could it be that Jude is describing a future, a real event? Or is it both? Is it both a present positional privilege in Christ and a physical future reality at some time in the future, but both true at the same time? And I think that's true.

This phrase, in the presence of, you see the Greek word there, katanopion, I think, K-A-T-E-N-O-P-I-O-N. I spell it because Ron Merriman always spells things out on his recordings, so. That's good. Yeah, so if I butcher the pronunciation, people will spell it and they'll know how to say it on them for themselves. But that word is before the face of, or before the presence of, or in the side of. is what that, it was a beautiful word, really.

But the context here in Jude is, and Kelly brings it, William Kelly, it kind of harps on this a lot, is that we are raptured here in Jude, in Jude 21, because Jude is talking to the church, we as members of the church, and in Jude 21, it says, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting anxiously for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to eternal life. So, you see that highlighted. And if we are waiting anxiously for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to return to eternal life, you know, what are we waiting for there? It sounds, and if you put it in the present tense, it sounds a lot like we're waiting, as in the book of Thessalonians, right, for the rapture, right? It's a very rapturous sort of wording there.

And then, Kelly also brings this up, Jude is the example of Enoch, and Enoch was taken up, wasn't he? He was pre-raptured. And that's his big example in the book of Jude. So we have in Jude 14, Enoch, the seventh generation from Adam, prophesied, saying, behold, the Lord came with 10,000, 10,000 of the saints. And I changed the word. It really reads in the King James, behold, the Lord cometh with 10,000 of his saints. But it's in a, it's not in a, it's not It's not really prophecy.

Jude saw this. He was like, you know, Ezekiel and like Daniel and like John, who witnessed some things in the future happening. Kelly said that, you know, Enoch saw this. He was given this vision of, and what is that? That's, what is the Lord coming with tens, thousands of his saints? Sounds to me like it's the second coming, doesn't it? I mean, and then Merriman kind of got me onto this.

And he was the only one, he said, think of this, think of Enoch, who was seven generations from Adam, he was close to Adam in his life, in his lifespan, not too far away, seven generations, way before Noah And he gave this prophecy. And look at how detailed that prophecy is of the second coming. So Merriman concluded that those people pre-flood and not too far off from the creation when Adam and Eve lived, they had this information and it's pretty clear that of the second coming because Enoch prophesied it and someone wrote it down and kept it and it was, you know, it made the rounds in that early generation. Now, you'd expect to see that in the Old Testament You know, you'd expect to see in the New Testament, but it's really incredible how Enoch made that prophecy way back when.

So what is his glory? It's the effulgent radiance of God. I like that word, effulgent. And it's a brilliant radiance, right? And we here at Holly Hills define the glory of God as the sum total of his infinite, God's infinite attributes, his holiness, righteousness, omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, his love, his immutability, his grace, his mercy, his sovereignty, and the fact that he's spirit. So when you put all those things together, you get glory, and you get the light, and you get radiance.

The word blameless, Constable brings out that it's not without sin, so you're not sinless, but blameless means, in the Greek, having no justifiable ground for accusation. And this is the basis of Christ's death. We see from Colossians 1.22, we are presented holy, blameless, and beyond reproach.

In 1 Corinthians 1.18, we are blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.

And then Ephesians 1.7, we are holy, blameless before him in love. So, a lot of instances of the word blameless in the New Testament, specifically from Paul. uses that word a lot.

Another verse in Ephesians 5, verse 27, where he's talking to husband and wives, he says in there, verse 27, that he might present the church to himself, and it ends with, without blemish, Oh yeah, yeah. In the marriage section there, right, in Ephesians. Marriage, and it's also, yeah, talking about the churches. Yeah, okay, thanks.

So it's a wonderful statement here of our standing and our state and our status before God, that we are able to stand in His presence. blameless and with great joy, right? And this is not through any help, I'm speaking for myself, but through no help of my own. He places me there. So wonderful positional statement there. On to Jude 25 now. To the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ, our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority before all time and now and forever. Amen. And this is really the concluding benediction here in Jude, last verse.

So Ironside says, and I'll just let him speak for it, because he does it so well here. What a pian, which a pian is a P-A-E-A-N. I didn't know what that word was, but it's a lyric of thanksgiving or exaltation, sort of a psalm. So what a peon of holy exaltation with which to close this letter, which has drawn so dark a picture of the dangers besetting the path of the man of faith. God lives and reigns. His power is limitless. His grace is boundless. His glory and majesty shall to all eternity remain unsmirched by all the evil thoughts and ways of ungrateful and insensate men, insensate men.

So he uses a lot of 19th century words there. You get the picture. It's a beautiful summary, though, of the Book of Jude. And I'll quote him again, because he does so well here. It is for the Christian to pillow his head. upon these blessed and soul-inspiring truths, and thus rise above all discouragement, and so go on in holy confidence to more than conquer." And I like that word picture there of us pillowing our head on the truth, on these truths. That's a very serene picture. of the rest we can have in these truths.

So he says some more, Ironside, his eternal purpose is working out. And when all the ages of time have run their course, the last remains of sin will be banished to the lake of fire, and the sinless ages of eternity will have been ushered in. Then shall God be all and in all forevermore, and none dispute His authority or seek to distract from His glory again.

So just... He has a way of saying, phrasing things that are really wonderful. Yeah, and especially in this commentary to this verse. It was really nice. He did all my work for me, so I just let him do it. More on this, yeah, you know, Ironside mentioned God's eternal purpose there in the last phrase there, you see, his eternal purpose is working out. So, then that got me to thinking about kind of the way we describe God's eternal purpose, right, here at Holly Hills. And I think this is a good, we use this a lot, right, Roger? I think it's, I think it boils everything down to really, if you boil everything away, I think it's a good, statement of God's purpose, his eternal purpose, and that is to, one, declare his glory, two, to reveal his glory, and then to share his glory, number three, and then to finally be glorified, right?

So those are his, if you take everything away, you can, my dad used to say, you can interpret scripture to those kind of four things, you know, what's going on here. So in Psalm 19, one, the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament show us his handiwork. So there he is declaring his glory, the first aspect.

John 1.14, and the word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. And so I put that down, that verse is him revealing his glory, right, through Jesus Christ. It's the revelation of his glory in flesh on the earth. Matthew 17, two. Jesus was transfigured before Peter and John and his face shown like the sun and his garments became as white as light. So that's him revealing his glory physically to Peter and John.

John 17.6 He says, I have manifested your name to the men whom you gave me out of the world. So manifestation, manifesting is a word of revelation. Then in John 17, 22 and 24, I combine those two together. The glory which you have given me, I've given to them that they may be one just as we are one. Father, I desire that they also whom you have given me be with me where I am so that they may see my glory which you have given me. And that's Christ sharing his glory with us. of the third aspect of this eternal purpose of God.

And of course, in 2 Corinthians 3.18, it's a verse of sharing, God's sharing his glory with us. But we all with unveiled face beholding, as in a mirror, the glory of the Lord are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory. So we're sharing in that. Just as from the Lord, the Spirit. And he's also revealing to you there, He's revealing the story there too.

A couple more verses, because my dad gave these four things, but he never really gave, I haven't found really, where he really gives all the scripture references to it. Maybe he does somewhere, but. He did that someplace, but I can't recall it. Or maybe I have more. It's probably, if you have this computer file, it's probably there somewhere.

Yeah, I'll dig it up. But I thought of this one, Romans 11, verses 33 and 36 kind of combined here, where Paul is basically glorifying God. He says, oh, the depths and the riches of both the wisdom and the knowledge of God is how unsearchable are his judgments and unfathomable his ways from from him and through him and to him are all things to him be glory forever amen so there's paul glorifying god that fourth aspect and then uh We have Revelation 4, in the throne room of God, and when the living creatures give glory and honor and thanks to him who sits on the throne, to him who lives forever and ever, the 24 elders fall down before him. who sits on the throne, and will worship him who lives forever and ever, and will cast their crowns before this throne, saying, worthy are you, our Lord and our God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and because of your will, they existed and were created." So there you have a final, in the throne room of God, yet future. glorifying God. And then I have, I thought of one more here. And suddenly there was an angel with a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, goodwill towards men.

Now the pop quiz for today is for one of you to name where that comes from. I did not reference it. Of course, you know. I think we have an answer. Yeah. So I thought it was too obvious to put that down, especially since we just got done with Christmas, right?

So we're all up on loop two. So one comment, I forget who it was, but I like this. this commentary, and one commentary said that, you know, Jude is a lot about the apostasy and how it's progressive in nature. And he said in Jude's time, it was a small storm the size of a fist, this apostasy that was creeping up in Jude's time and Peter's time and Paul's time. But in today's time, it has grown and metastasized to a storm that looks more like this, right? That's where we're living today. So that's how big this apostasy is in our world.

And I like that. I like that analogy by way of review. I went back to what Bob Bob has a terrific summary of. the letter of Jude from Darby, quoting Darby. And Darby says, the epistle of Jude develops a history of apostasy of Christendom from the earliest elements that crept into the assembly to corrupt it down to its judgment at the appearing of our Lord. But as moral apostasy, by turning the grace of God into lasciviousness, In John, they are gone out. Here, they have crept in, these false teachers, corrupting. It is a very short epistle containing instruction presented with much brevity and with the energetic rapidity of the prophetic style, but of immense weight and excessive bearing.

And that, again, was in Bob's lesson from Jude 3 and 4. And Bob also said in that same lesson, the essential reason that Jude wrote this letter, he said was in verse three. Jude says in verse three, beloved, while I was very diligent to write you concerning our common salvation, I found it necessary to you, exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith, which was at once delivered to the saints. So we have a nice summary there of Jude.

And then finally from William Kelly, you know, because we talked, a lot of people talk about this. He was really bothered that commentators and academicians would say that, you know, Jude is just a mere copy of second Peter because of the similarity between the two. Or one said that maybe Peter is a copy of Jude. But Kelly says that it falls to Jude, not Peter, to speak of Enoch and how he's taken out of the scene altogether. And in Peter, Noah is the great figure that he uses, whereas in Jude, it's Enoch is the figure.

And Kelly says that Peter looked at it, viewing this apostasy, and he looks at it as a question of unrighteousness. And he looks also at the teachers. He stresses that teachers are the guilty parties in that unrighteousness. Generally, they do it for gain of fame or some earthly motive of the kind that is not of God. Whereas Jude looks at it deeper, in a deeper light. Jude doesn't make so much of the fact of the teachers, the awful thing that Jude saw in the apostasy was that the church, the body of saints, who ought to be in the light of God, in this world of darkness, that they were actually had become the seat of the worst evil of Satan by letting in through carelessness the false teachers and the corruptors.

So he says there's, they discuss the same things, but there's a different take on each. The Holy Spirit is using the same examples, but trying to make a point of a different point with the two writers. So, there we are, the book of Jude. And that's it. Good book. Yeah, excellent. Yeah. Just a thought, along the parallel lines that you've been talking, look at how in each case of the growth of the men who the Lord used to speak for by his spirit.

Peter and Paul and James and Jude and John, which we're going to pick up next, I've been so impressed with. In each case, you quoted what John wrote there in Revelation, but he has many more in his, both the Gospel and his three letters of praise about our Savior. And here's Jude, you know, an unbeliever during Christ's lifetime, his half-brother, watching Christ in the family, watching James, another half-brother, and in both cases these half-brothers came to believe and trust and worship their older brother as God. The awesomeness that is, is significant, but also that in each case, I was taken back to David where he is overflowing like Jude here with words of comfort and encouragement. I'm going to read from 1 Chronicles 29 because I thought it was so parallel to what Jude says here. Wherefore, David blessed the Lord before all the congregation, and David said, blessed be thou, Lord God of Israel, our father, forever and ever.

Thine, O Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty For all that is in the heaven and in the earth is Thine. Thine is the kingdom. O Lord, Thou art exalted as head above all. Even in the Old Testament economy and think, God revealed Himself majestically, didn't He?

Yeah. doing the same thing in his closing. He opens with encouragement, and he closes with encouragement in the face of all of these that are apostatizing. Right. And it could have been that Jude had that passage of Scripture in mind. You know, maybe he was probably reading... I don't know. I just thought it was so parallel.

Well, because he, you know, he quotes this passage from Enoch, you know, so it could be that, yeah, he had David's praise there, or David glorying God in 1 Chronicles there in mind, because this is a benediction that is, you know, it's kind of It goes, it's a lot more detailed than what Paul gives, and it has a lot in there, especially in 25 there, right? Sort of a benediction on steroids. It's a lot there with, you know, God's majesty and his dominion and authority. And it's interesting that he says before all time, before all time, now and forever, you And we only occupy that now.

You know, that's the time frame when we get to decide, like David and these men, is God God? Yeah. Is my own brother really God? I mean, can you imagine him thinking that? Yeah. Yeah, excellent. Through Jude's mind. I mean, wow. Yeah. Yeah, wow. Okay, well, I'll close up in prayer here.

Our Heavenly Father, we thank you for this wonderful book, and we praise your holy name. You certainly do have all the majesty and dominion and authority, and we glorify your name. Just give us that, put that on our lips and keep that in our hearts today and throughout our week and throughout the rest of our lives, Heavenly Father. And we pray these things in Jesus name, amen.