Books of James & Jude - Remembering how the Lord acted - Jude 1:5-7

So we're picking up in this small book of Jude, verses 5 through 7, so we'll cover three verses today. The title of today's lesson is called, Remember How the Lord Acted. So we're going to be doing some remembering today. And we're picking up with just a quick outline here as a review. I'm using Constable. his outline, just to kind of give us a little bit of context for where we've been.

Verses 1 through 2 covered the introduction to the Epistle of Jude. Verses 3 through 4 were what I'm calling the purpose of this epistle. I think Constable is right in saying that. Some call it a theme, but I think the purpose here, the idea of contending for the faith. And then, verses 5 through 16 is where we're entering today.

We're entering into this area of warnings against false teachers. And so, If you remember back, Jude was very focused on writing about the common salvation that he shared with these believers. He sat down, he started to write the book, he was going to write about common salvation. And the Lord put upon his heart to deal with this area of apostasy and the false teachers that those believers in the book of Jude were dealing with. And so there was a shift. And that's one of the unique aspects of the book of Jude is this shift that he experienced as he sat down to write the book.

So go ahead and read the first 5-7 verses. Though you know all things once for all that the Lord, after saving a people out of the land of Egypt, subsequently destroyed those who did not believe, and angels who did not keep their own domain but abandoned their proper abode, he has kept in eternal bonds under darkness for the judgment of the great day, just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, since they in the same way as these indulged in gross immorality and went after strange flesh, are exhibited as an example in undergoing the punishment of eternal fire. So Jude, in these verses, begins the warnings of the false teaching that these believers were being challenged with. And he goes into three specific examples, and we're going to look at each of those today.

What I did want to do is... I've got some cut-off on my font here, so you'll have to look and see if you can... Is it...? So, I just wanted to remind us of the purpose, this idea of contending earnestly for the faith, and it's quite interesting to notice how little action that Jude communicates to the believers in terms of how to contend, or the word literally is fight for the faith. And so we've talked about how the faith is the whole body of truth, which is in reference here, and we saw that in verse 3, which is covered in weeks prior. But God's Word is a complete unit of revelation that we now have complete access to.

Now we must remember that Jude, they didn't have complete access to the entire New Testament, which we do today, but they had a far greater amount At least we know for sure that they had information regarding the faith in terms of the context of what we're talking about today. So these are going to be Old Testament examples. We're positive that they had teachings surrounding the faith in these areas. And so while we would see the faith being completed in the Book of Revelation, the audience for Jude would not have had that complete amount, but they would have everything that we're talking about with regards to apostasy in this book.

I brought up a few different points. I've spent quite a bit of time looking at the entire Bible as a framework of thinking. And so I was privileged in my college years to come across a guy by the name of Charlie Clough. And Charlie saw in the university setting how It was so prevalent to take the Word of God and to separate it from other pieces and then pick it apart and destroy it. He being in a teaching role at Texas Tech University found that there were many teachers at the collegiate level who were picking off Christians by separating portions of the Word of God and then shooting it down.

He likened it to the way that the B-52 bombers would go into battle and they were told to stick in formation. And the moment that one of those planes got out of formation, it becomes very easy for the enemy to focus in, target on that that diverted airplane and literally take it down. But when they stuck together, they had a much stronger force against the enemy. And so he likens the idea of taking the Word of God and separating it into small pieces in order to pick it apart and tear it apart. as to that B-52 illustration. And so he put together a framework called the Bible Framework, bibleframework.com.

It's roughly 250 lessons that goes through and focuses on the 22 major doctrines of scripture. through the Old and New Testament and shows how they all interconnect and that one cannot exist without the other, 21, so to speak. And we see in scripture constantly the reference back to the Old Testament and New Testament referring to other New Testament authors. And we even see Christ himself on the road to Emmaus teaching from Moses and the prophets to make sense of what was going on with his own resurrection. And so to contextualize teachings, even in the New Testament, one needs to understand the base content of the Old Testament. And there are many of those doctrines and many of those teachings that continue to crop up in the New Testament regularly. And we're going to cover several of those today.

But I mentioned 2 Timothy 3, 16-17, that all scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, so that, and I underline, the man of God may be adequate and equipped for every good work.

If you want to find yourself adequate and equipped, for every good work, you're going to be able to understand scripture in larger degrees as you spend time in the word. And the more you understand the larger context of scripture, including the Old Testament, the more equipped you're going to be. And the reason is you're going to be able to remember and recall what apostasy looks like. In this example, that's where we're saying to be equipped to handle apostasy, you need to understand the fullness of God's Word with regards to certain areas of apostasy that Jude's going to talk about. And so I just wanted to put that in context for us today.

The Old Testament and the New Testament form the entire framework of truth that work together, and that together is very important. They do not work against one another, but they work together to enable believers with a divine viewpoint. And that was a term that Charlie coined in my mind years ago, and I've continued to use it. I'm very aware of my human viewpoint. I know in the flesh, in the sin nature, how I tend to think. And the Bible tells us that. We can go to Romans 1 and quickly get a perspective on the human viewpoint.

But the divine viewpoint is the full counsel of God's Word, not just the New Testament, not just the dispensation of grace. Those are important to understand. Truth is progressive, and we misunderstand what truth applies to us, but it doesn't mean that we still don't understand the truth that doesn't apply to us today in the same way, because it still has a foundation to the truth that we enjoy being appropriated to us as the church today. So, it works together, what we call this divine viewpoint. So the ability to recall this truth and believe it in light of the opposing human viewpoint is what makes us adequate, equipped for every good work. And that's that second Timothy 3, 16-17. So when we say THE faith, we're talking about the entire body of revelation that God's given us in full. without any excuses or parts and pieces that don't seem to fit.

Whether they apply to us today and there to be a ruling principle for us is yet a different perspective altogether, but the truth is still a component of divine viewpoint. How God dealt with Israel, how God dealt with Sodom and Gomorrah, how God dealt with the angels, all of these things that we look at today are a very complete portion of how we view the divine perspective. And so that's what we, when we say contending earnestly for the faith, that's where we're going with that.

One thing I did want to mention here, and we're not going to go through this today, we'll look at some of the relationships that Jude has to 2 Peter and the verses we're covering, but I did find a chart that's quite incomplete. I think there's a lot more. We're going to cover some today that are not even listed on this chart.

But I think it's good to know that, and Vern calls this a divine commentary. You know, we run off and find commentaries all the time to help us understand Scripture, right? That's kind of one of the easy things to do is, what does this guy say? What does that guy say? And I've always appreciated something that Vern communicated to me when I first attended Holly Hills, and that is, you know, when I look at, when I allow the Scripture to interpret Scripture, I'm not having to worry about divine inspiration. I don't have to worry if they got it right or wrong. When I'm looking in commentaries, I have to have a critical mind and I have to be sure that I'm not being carried away with a system that maybe is underlining what their perspective is.

But when we have a book that has a parallel book, much like James had the Sermon on the Mount, Jude has second Peter, and so when we have these divine parallel commentaries, we can gain further insight into some of these scripture references that happen as we look to see how Jude saw this, and man, Peter saw it almost the exact same way, except he had this one differentiating perspective.

And we look at the Gospels that way too, you know, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. We don't get the fullness of Christ's life and ministry with just one book. We see an angle. But then you have the commentary of the other three that come in and give other angles and other perspectives, and it fleshes that story out in a very unique way. For lack of a better term, we just call those the divine commentaries. They're scriptural parallel commentaries. And so we have these with 2 Peter and Jude, and we'll be looking at some of that today.

So, let's jump into verse 5. So Jude has already spoke of the reality of apostate teachers deceptively and secretly entering in to the church in an effort to destroy truth. So that was verse 4. And now he transitions. He says, now I desire to remind you. And what we're going to see here is that Jude is calling attention to believers to watch for these things, just as As we look at these three examples today, he's saying, look at your own situation in light of these examples. Remember these things.

And so the word desire here, to have or experience something with the implication of some reason, planning, or will to accomplish the goal. He desires to remind them he is of the will, he is based on a thought that he had, likely when he was sitting down to write the book about common salvation, and then the Spirit laid upon him the desire to communicate warnings against apostate teaching.

That desire became very strong and he sat down and he thought through it with the Holy Spirit in terms of how can I reason with these believers in such a way that I can protect them from the apostasy that they're facing. So his desire was reason. It was thought. It wasn't just a whim or a feeling. He thought this thing through. It came out of the seat of his will to communicate. And he used the word remind. And so we define that by causing to recall and to think about again. And so there's some interesting aspects to the idea of reminding ourselves.

But these believers have a framework of divine viewpoint. They had teaching in these areas already. So this word helps us understand that they were already mature in, at least in the Old Testament teachings. And they've already sat under the teaching that Judah's encouraging them to recall. So it's one of those things where they're not hearing this for the first time. He's saying, remember, recall what it is that you learn. Judah assumes that these believers already know something from God's word in the Old Testament that pertains specifically to this issue.

And I think that's one of the ways that we as teachers, whether we are children or whether we're encouraging and teaching one another in the body, we're constantly reminding ourselves of those things that we already know. And this isn't one of those things where you go into a test and you're like, I don't really know the answer, I kind of forgot it. And it's like you really maybe never even knew it and it's easier to say you just couldn't recall. Well, this is not that instance.

This is an instance where these believers knew it, they understood it, and Judas said, I'm going to add some additional perspective around this, so I'm wanting to remind you of things that you've already learned. And so we use that ability to go back and remind. one another. Maybe that's what we need in ways to encourage spouses and children and fellow believers is to say, let's go back and remind ourselves of what it is that we've known in the past but maybe have set aside or gotten so busy that we haven't had a chance to think about clearly in recent times. Rather than hitting a person's sin head on and getting personal about it, sometimes the approach might be to go back and say, let's go refresh our memory about what we know. And that, in some ways, is a non-confrontational way to get back into the mind and start to recall things that, at least at one point, took root and maybe were getting a little loose in present times. But at any rate, that's what Jude is doing. He has a desire to remind these believers.

I bring up what's called the faith rest drill. This is also another terminology that comes from Charlie Clough in his Bible framework. I think it's very good in terms of its base definition. I think as grace-minded, identification, truth-focused believers, we could carry this out into a greater sense of how it involves beholding the Lord. But at base level, the Faith Restoreal has these three basic ways of going about recalling the word of God. And I think that it's based in scripture.

We see time and time and time again, even in the book of Hebrews, we see time where Moses and Joseph and so forth were recalling back, they were recalling a scripture, a piece of scripture that applied to them. And then they had a private prayer meeting, just a conversation in the soul with the Lord, and they used that piece of scripture to envelop the situation. And so Charlie's a military man, and he often uses military analogies to help one get their mind around the fact that there's an enemy who is attempting to challenge the viewpoint that you have. You start with divine viewpoint, you get carried away into human viewpoint, and he says this faith rest drill is something that you need to never even have to question yourself about. You will crawl a scripture that applies to this situation. You have a private meeting regarding the scripture that you can envelop the situation.

Lord, this situation that I'm dealing with is just like what happened in so-and-so scripture, and I'm going to wrap that story right around this issue, and I'm going to keep it. close to my heart and I'm going to think about it, recall it, remind myself surrounding the way that the Lord was faithful or the way that the Lord was, in this case, carried out punishment towards those who had this attitude and I'm going to hold on to that in a prayerful mindset until I can trust you with this situation, ultimately behold you through your word and allow you to do the living through me.

And so he just says that the military training may seem boring and repetitive, but it teaches you to respond the way you were trained when things get really stressful, so when things are tough. When you're having a hard time dealing with the apostate teachers, even in the present church age today, he's saying that you need to already have in your mind the way that you're going to deal with the situation. If you're having a struggle, what do I do here? What do I do here?

And you're scrambling, it's just like a military exercise where you've not trained your mind to think about how to approach the issue. in such a way that, yeah, it's personal and involves the Lord Jesus 100%, but there's an act of the will, and it's called faith, and it's not a work, but it is an exercise of the mind, and faith has to have an object, right? And so that's where this recalling and reminding and getting back to the faith and the facts is like the train on the tracks, and then your feelings follow.

And so this all ties together and that Hebrews 11.22 is some of those Old Testament believers recalling the word of God and enveloping it around their situation and trusting the Lord with it based on his faithfulness in that time.

Adding to that, the scripture says that strong meat belongs to those who by reason of use have exercised their senses to discern between good and evil. And so that continual acknowledgement of the truth has allowed those people that know the strong truth to live properly. That's a good point. Yeah, that's really good.

So, whatever you call it, the idea of faith, enveloping your situation based on the Word of God, based on the facts. It's not just faith in a vacuum. It's faith based on facts. What facts are we recalling? What are we talking about? So Jude has several that he's going to talk about in these verses. He's now, I desire to remind you, though you know all things once for all. So this word know is to possess information about to be equated with, to understand, to even honor. So it's not just, yeah, I know it. It is an honorable place where that knowledge resides in the mind. You understand it, you get it, and you hold it in a high esteem.

And if you don't mind, just someone grab 2 Peter 1.12, and we'll see how Peter mentions the same idea of knowing. Okay. Therefore I will always be ready to remind you of these things, even though you already know of them and have been established in the truth which is present with you." Established in the truth which is present with you. Notice that Peter says remind as well.

So this is a parallel verse that we find in Peter. So we can expand and say, in the same way that Peter is reminding them of what they know, we see the same exact words for remind and know being used in 2 Peter. We even see further that they're established in the truth. And that's something that would very clearly relate to Jude's audience as well. They're established in the truth. So Jude is reminding them of something that they already understood pertaining to all things.

So what are these all things? Well, all things in this context is about the issues of apostasy. He's not talking about all things with regards to salvation and all things with regards to Christ's second coming. That's not what he's talking about. He's saying, all things with regards to what I'm talking about, you already know this stuff. Does that make sense?

And then he uses the term once for all, and I think that that was also communicated earlier in verse 3, to contend for the faith, and we use that once for all, but the word once is this word hapex, and we've been looking at that same word in the Hebrew study with Vern, and we've got several definitions here, and we just want to apply it and make sure we're clear on what it means.

So, the word once is haphexen, it means literally once for all. So Vincent, who Weiss comments on, he says, not formally, but once for all. And so to use Verne's definition, and I think it's a good one, once done, perpetually valid. So let's look at Hebrews 9, 27, and 28 and just see how that same word once is used for the definition of once done, perpetually valid in the context of Hebrews.

And as it is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment, so Christ was offered once to bear the sins of many. To those who eagerly await for him he will appear a second time, apart from sin, for salvation. So just to pick on that, there's our death. We die once and then face judgment.

Christ came once, once done perpetually valid. So his sacrifice is perpetually valid. In other words, it wasn't just valid for the generation that was present for his death. The effect of that sacrifice on the cross is perpetually valid for all mankind from that point forward. So, once done, perpetually valid.

And it's very clear, you know, in light of the salvation that Hebrews 9.28 mentions. And so, in the same way, though you know all things once for all, in other words, you knew them, you obtained information, you were established in the truth once, and it was perpetually valid for you from that point forward. Is that clear? Seem to make sense there?

And then he moves on to a specific example in verse 5, the C part. So we've got the A, B that we looked at, and now we're looking at that C portion. And it says that the Lord, this is what they knew once communicated, they knew it and now it's still perpetually valid. That the Lord, after saving a people out of the land of Egypt, subsequently destroyed those who did not believe. So we've got some interesting perspective here that Jude's bringing to the table for these believers. First of all, we use the word saving. He was saving, the Lord was saving a people out of Egypt.

We got to ask ourselves, just like we have to ask every single time. I think Christianity has by and large not done a good job, especially in modern day times, to define what save means. They give it a once for all definition and it's perpetually valid, right?

But that's not the way that the word saving is used in this context. And so there's a lot of different types of saving. And if you look at this word a little bit closer, it might be better translated delivered. So, you know, in my Bible, I'd mark out saved and write delivered so that I kept in mind the real thrust of the word as opposed to what kind of comes to mind with Christianese, so to speak, and other instances of the use of the word salvation.

But in here, it's talking about not salvation from sin, but deliverance from the oppression of Egypt and the Pharaoh. So we've always got to consider the context. That's just an interpretive principle that we need to keep in mind when we're looking at words like this.

But that the Lord, after delivering a people out of the land of Egypt, subsequently destroyed those who did not believe. So he saves them and then he destroys them. Well, if he was saving them from their sin, and then he's going to go destroy them, you know, that's kind of weird.

But remember, it's delivered. And there's a sequence here that we want to look at. But Judah's reminding them of how God rescued his people from their slavery in Egypt in order to form them into his own special people. So God had a particular promise that he had made, and he was going to continue to keep that promise by delivering out of Egypt to make Israel their own people and give them the land. That was what he delivered them unto. But when they got there, Exodus 6, chapter 6 through 14, we get the commentary on what Israel did.

Not only did they want to go back, because they had way better food back where they were in Egypt. They had better accommodations in terms of some of the things that the flesh needed. However, they were free, but what about these things that we enjoyed while we were there, even under slavery? And I pick slavery over being free and not having that nice dinner at night. Or at least what seemed to be nice compared to what I'm dealing with in the wilderness, the barren wilderness. So we have that commentary. We won't go through all that. I think we're all familiar with it.

But this is one of the pieces of scripture that is constantly brought back in the New Testament to be reminded of for New Testament believers. So we should know this and be able to recall God's history regarding His delivery of His people out of the land of Egypt just in the same way that Jude's audience should have as well. But we also know that when they left Egypt, they were not faithful to the Lord. An entire generation, they perished in the wilderness because they did not believe.

And that's interesting. So let's read Hebrews 3, 16 through 19, just to get New Testament perspective of the exact same event. For some, when they had heard, did provoke, albeit not all that came out of Egypt by Moses. But with whom was he grieved forty years? Was it not with them that had sinned, whose carcasses fell in the wilderness? And to whom swore he that they should not enter into his rest, but to them that believed not?

So we see that there they could not enter in because of unbelief. unbelief, those that did not believe. So they were delivered. They had access to a very, very monumental time in history where God provided miraculous ways of escape for them to leave their state of slavery into the land that he had promised. So they had access to information. They had access to God's will and his action on Egypt and them in such a way that we won't have. We won't have that exact same miraculous context surrounding our event or our situation. Not in the same way. Al?

Makes you think of the, what have you done for me lately type of thing. That Christians, when they're letting their human nature speak to them, think about, well, God's supposed to deliver me from this difficulty, from this stress that I'm going through. After all, He saved me. He delivered me.

And they expect that deliverance to produce satisfaction and happiness. But as we're reminded in None But the Hungry Heart over and over again, that the way of faith depends on the character of God and not on the circumstances that we find ourselves in. And it's so easy to let the circumstances drag us down in our emotions or our thoughts and the rest. of all the scriptures that talk about the patience, all that we went through in the book of James, over and over again, about the trying of your faith, the testing of your faith, the proving, the day-to-day experience of working out You know that verse, work out your own salvation, and fear and trembling. What salvation?

For it is God who works in you, both to will and to do. That's right. It's considered all joy, isn't it? And so, how in the world does that work? And that's what the book of James was all about, and it's a great, great So what you said earlier about there being progressive revelation, that progressive revelation continues, especially after we're saved and know more of the character of God. Then God can start working on molding us and transforming us. That's a good point. All that good work. Once we recognize that it's not about us, but it's about His character, and His ability, and His work. And these, not believers, but these, Israel had access to knowledge about the Lord in a most amazing way.

They were going through a trial. They had to, first of all, trust that leaving all that they had known for years on the other side of the sea, and how are we going to get there? I don't know. They faced a massive trial of testing, but as a people, they went.

But once they went and saw and understood the faithfulness of God, they still did not believe. And so we have a sequence here, and I want you to notice it. First, we have delivery, which was revelation about God. He revealed how He was faithful to do the things that He had said He would do. So they understood, and that's a very small way of communicating all that they learned, but just to summarize it, they had a massive amount of revelation concerning God and His faithfulness to His promises. Second, the revelation was not taken serious and resulted in destruction. And we see that in Numbers chapter 14. So Jude compares this to his reader's context. People who were enlightened but still did not believe, is what it says at the bottom of that.

So this is what apostasy is about. Apostasy isn't someone coming next to Holly Hills and saying, you know what we're going to do? We're going to buy that lot right there, and we're going to put a church there, and it's going to be called the Church of Satan, and we're going to stand in opposition. We're going to scream across the street back and forth at you. That's not what you see happening here. The way of apostasy, if you think about apostasy, where does apostasy have its root?

So how did Satan try and succeed in many instances to bring a person from having been enlightened to not believing? You think about the very first instance that we see with him interacting with humankind. He's not going to go create some other tree and say, this tree looks better than that tree, and blah blah blah. He's not trying to create this massive opposition. Apostasy works by sliding in into an existing body, whatever that body is, whatever that truth establishment of truth is, sleeks in and slowly starts to chip away at it until it becomes something altogether different.

And we can look back in history and see how that's happened a million times over. We can think in our own heart how that's happened a million times over. We can see how churches that we're all familiar with once started and became this. We can see how educational institutions, Harvard, Yale, started out with a an authority in God's Word.

And over time, it wasn't like one day it all changed. There was a slow apostasy that crept in and altered the mind to a point of unbelief. And so we see this relationship of being delivered, having been enlightened, resulting in destruction. And it's important to note that from apostasy they never believed. But they went along with it until they got to a point where they could insert a little bit of doubt, just in the same way that Satan works in our heart and in massive, you know, he works in the minds of all of us to create doubt in the Word of God.

And that's what we're seeing here is this process. We're going to see more of that. as we look at the next example in verse 6. It says that, moving on to verse 6, "...and angels who did not keep their own domain, but abandoned their proper abode, he is kept in eternal bonds under darkness for the judgment of the great day." So, you know, this is yet another instance where now we're moving from mankind to the angelic realm. We talk about there being a creator and a creature distinction, probably the most fundamental truth that a person could ever understand before anything else makes sense to them in the Word of God.

It's defined in Genesis 1.1, in the beginning, God. being separate from his creation.

You'll notice that, and not to get off on a huge rabbit trail here, but the creator-creature distinction is probably the most attacked apostate perspective in our Western world today. You step into any educational institution, and the very first thing that you're going to have happen, without even realizing it, is this destruction of the creator-creature distinction. The creator is kind of just a super creature. And we're all on this kind of chain of being, we're all connected, and this God, whatever divine perspective you have, Buddha, you know, whatever it is, maybe it's your own humanism, it is just greater, a little bit greater than the rest. And so it's degrees of variation, but not altogether differences.

And so apostate will attack, especially in our Greek-Western minded world, will attack that creator-creature distinction, and that's how you slide right in. Because the moment you can get the creator down on the creature level... you've got a foothold that you can build because now the authority is dispersed across creation as opposed to being distinctly separated from creation altogether. And that's a massive, massive area of attack.

Why is Genesis under attack so much in educational institutions? And why do ministries like Answers in Genesis exist? Because you cracked the first six books of Genesis and you've cracked everything else. you can slowly chip away at it over time. All you need is a little bit more time and energy, and apostasy can run its full course if you can crack the creator-creature distinction.

So, just as an example, That's one area of apostasy for sure. It's very big in our world today. It was in Paul's time too. Romans 1 exists for that very reason. They traded the truth for a lie. They traded what the Creator said for what the creature said. That was present even on Mars Hill where Paul is defending for the God. It's not a new tactic. It's the same old, same old. In fact, Satan did it.

Did God really say? Let's question the Creator. Is He really all that unquestionable? Let's think about that. In the prior verse we had mankind, creatures in the human realm, falling into enlightenment and then unbelief. And now we have angels who were enlightened and did not believe. So we look at this example of Israel's apostasy to now that of the angels.

I'm just going to touch on a few major words here to help us. Actually when we look at verse 7 in a moment, this verse will become even clearer. Just notice that I'm going to move through that in order to make it really clear in verse 7. But the domain here literally carries the idea of the beginning sphere of one's authority or rule. A dignified place because it's number one. So in other verses throughout the New Testament, that same word for domain is used for beginning.

In the beginning, John 1.1, same word. In the beginning, and that's the domain of where that creature, or if it's in the context of the creator, it talks about his domain. But you have to consider who's being talked about.

In this case, angels are created type of being, separate from mankind, and that distinction was made very clear by the Lord. And He made it clear. You are not mankind. Mankind is not you. But the angels, having known that, and having this dignified place of rule, We're not satisfied with it in the same way that Satan was not satisfied You know being a subset of God. So these angels were not satisfied with not having access to to humanity Okay, and so this domain was where they started and they had, so to speak, burnt their bridges behind them and had descended to a new sphere. And so angels, having once known their original place and position which God had designed and designated, apostates are not ignorant, they hate the will of God. So it was this willful choice, and angels do have a will, it was this willful choice to not want what they were created to be.

And you'll notice that that's what's going to happen in the next verse. And the same thing for Israel in the previous verse. God said, you are a new people set apart for teaching the entire nations about how I relate to man. Well, we don't want to be that. Let's just go back to where we were. Well, here's the land flowing with milk and honey. We've seen it. It's going to be quite the miraculous event needed to capture this land. That's too much. Let's not do it. We're fine. Let's not go that route.

So, he's saying, I designed this for you. I've given this to you. by faith it's accessible to you, or you can remain, in this case with the angels, you can remain in this dignified sphere of authority that I've given to you, the angelic realm, or you can choose against my will, and you know what my will is, and you can choose against it to sin against me. And that's what the angels are doing here. So as a result of having abandoned their place and position, Also their knowledge. They knew. They had been told. They understood. They understood their place in God's creation.

God has kept, in that word kept, notice that we see that He has kept in eternal bonds. that were kept is a perfect tense, so it has ongoing action from the point that it took place. It's perpetually the case for us, even now, that these angels are in an eternal bond under darkness for the judgment of the great day.

So we've got an issue of judgment here. We've used a chart from Verne which outlines the different judgments throughout the scripture, and not all of them, but it attempts to summarize them. I just took a snippet, a slice out of it. We've got believer's judgments and unbeliever's judgments and so forth. It's always good to note where and who we're talking about and when that judgment takes place.

In this case, we're talking about the judgment of Satan and fallen angels. That's the larger doctrine of judgment that we're talking about here. There's no resurrection associated with this particular judgment. The time occurs after the end of the millennium or during the final rebellion. The place of judgment is not applicable, but people group being Satan and his angels. The basis is allegiance to the satanic kingdom. The results of judgment being that of the lake of fire.

And we see Jude 6 as being one of the verses that we're talking about here with regards to that. Matthew 25-41, 2 Peter. 2 Peter and Jude are talking about the same thing. And Revelation 20-10. Matthew and Revelation give a larger perspective of rebellion in the angelic realm. This is talking about a specific rebellion, but it fits underneath that larger category.

So we'll talk about how that works as we get clarity on verse 7. So let's look at that. So now Jude moves to, he's already covered Israel, he's covered the angelic rebellion, now he's talking about the rebellion at Sodom and Gomorrah. Just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, since they in the same way as these indulged in gross immorality and went after strange flesh are exhibited as an example and undergoing the punishment of eternal fire.

So we've got several words here, and I think the New American Standard does a good job. King James and maybe some of the others are not going to communicate as clearly. But the words just as, in the same way as these, these words connect us directly back to the previous verse. So it's a continuation of thought.

Two examples that Jude uses, but he connects them and intertwines them together to make the relationship very, very strong for the believer who is attempting to try to understand what Jude is saying regarding apostasy. So he connects the previous verse, 6, as a comparison of apostasy that results in destruction or punishment. What is it that he connects? He connects this indulgence in gross immorality.

And you can see the Greek word there, ekporneo, and you can see the word that we all recognize there, where we get the word pornography and porn and so forth. And that's what it is. This is carrying the idea of the same types of sin that the angels had, that men had in Sodom and Gomorrah. There's some differences, but the sin, in terms of how it motivated and how it worked in the mind, are the same. And that's what Jude is connecting here. So they're fornication.

And this takes us back to Genesis 6, 1 through 4, where we have an account of the sons of God here, fallen angels, and so in the previous verse, cohabiting with women of the human race. So this was a sin against the created kind, right? You have the angelic realm, and you have the, both creatures, okay, the angelic and human realm, mankind, fit into the creature realm. They're not the creator, they're creatures, but they were distinct and separate. They had different makeups altogether. And so, in the instance of Genesis 6, 1 through 4, and we're not going to cover all of that, that's a very challenging set of verses, and with 10 minutes, we're not going to be able to do that.

However, what we do see, I believe, is what Jude is referring to here as an instance where you take Satan's mindset. I want to corrupt the seed of man. How can I corrupt the seed of man? Well, let's get down there and corrupt the seed of man. These women are really pretty. Let's take attack. I don't want to be contradictory, but there is a very different perspective to this passage. Sure there is. I'll let you teach that. But it does violate, as you mentioned, the creation order to consider this aspect. And there is evidence in scripture that points very strongly to that not being the case. And so that's just... I think what we have to do is realize we're not going to be able to attack those two different perspectives in this class today.

But I think that in considering all those passages in light of a contextual study, it would be interesting to see where it landed. Regardless of how you land on those particular verses today, there is a very strong connection of the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah to that of the angels. And so, it would be hard to make the connection with just the fallen angelic realm, you know, prior to the issue of verses 6 through, or chapter 6, 1 through 4. I think it would be hard for Jude to make these connections if he didn't have that in mind.

But again, I appreciate the fact that there's a differing viewpoint, and we'll definitely leave that for another time to discuss. Maybe that's something we could chat up with Vern on that, and Roger, and even Mike. But in terms of this sin against created kind, here the sin is against gender distinction. So unlike what I'm suggesting, that the angelic realm was wanting to corrupt the human race in Genesis 6, 1 through 4, here you can also corrupt the human race if you have the issue of homosexuality being the constant norm. because you can't reproduce, right? So there's a correlation there, a very strong one that I see in the scripture.

In Romans 1.27, if any of you guys want to read that, we can just remind ourselves what it says. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another, men committed indecent acts with other men and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion. Okay. So that's what we have in mind here.

When we talk about the word strange, strange flesh, another of a different kind. And so, if it's going to be connected back to verse 6, like these just as and in the same way as these seems to suggest, another different kind, so you've got angels attempting to corrupt the human race with humans, and then you've got men with men.

And so, sin runs its course to this degree. And apostasy is present in these spheres. If you think about how homosexuality has entered our Western world today, it's almost seated in every major political area of challenge. I mean, it can be tied to almost anything today.

And it's a platform for apostasy, is what the Scripture says. And I'm not suggesting that we don't exercise the Lord's grace towards those who struggle in these areas. I'm not suggesting that at all. I am only suggesting that, or not suggesting, I'm communicating what I believe the Word of God says and that it is a seedbed for apostasy. It's one of the methods in which apostasy enters into the body of truth and corrupts it.

And he says the word example, so this is the only time that this word occurs in the New Testament here, or I'm sorry, in Jude rather. It only occurs in Jude, occurring only in Jude 1, 7, making the suffering of Sodom, Yeah, it shouldn't be 1-7, it should be 7. Jude 7, that's why I was like, what am I saying there? Only occurring in Jude 7, making the suffering of Sodom and Gomorrah an example of the future suffering of God's judgment.

So, let's read 2 Peter 2-6, just to get that final perspective there. And turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into ashes, condemned them to destruction. making them an example for those who afterward would live ungodly. Okay, so even Peter uses the same example, right? Sodom and Gomorrah. And then we have this word eternal. We've talked about the punishment of eternal fire and so forth. I should, well, let's see what I have.

So in 2 Peter 2.6, no, I don't think I mentioned it. With regards to the angels, just to go back, we did talk about the parallel passages in 2 Peter with regards to the angels being confined. Your translation probably uses the word hell. The actual translation is Tartarus. That's right. It's the only time it's mentioned.

And it's a special confinement. for those angels who committed that sin, that they are bound, chained, so to speak, until the final day of judgment. And what Jude is doing is comparing the issue and the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah to that same judgment of the angels to Tartarus as the action of immorality after strange flesh in the same way. So what we're saying here is that we've got a very, very serious connection with Sodom and Gomorrah and that of the angels, one that should be almost striking. It should almost take you by surprise.

And when we look at that word eternal here, it's better, I think, to render that as everlasting rather than eternal. So I might mark that out too just to get the real thrust there. Since the suffering has a beginning but no end. So eternal meaning no beginning, no end. Everlasting meaning had a beginning and goes on. What did you reference, Tartarus?

It was 2 Peter 2.4. I didn't talk about it when we were there, but I thought I would do it now to make that connection with how Sodom and Gomorrah's everlasting punishment is compared to Tartarus.

So, apostasy, sleeks in, unnoticed, begins to corrupt the truth with human viewpoint, And eventually what you have is a body of believers slowly starting to dwindle away in the presence of apostasy. And I think Bob talked about being on guard in our own minds and our own body for those same types of things. And that's what Jude's perspective was there. And he uses three very clear examples in the Old Testament of where apostasy took root. and belief remained the case, and things ended in punishment and destruction.

And so we'll move on with these warning against false teachers next week, but three very interesting verses that take us back and remind us and encourage us to recall the full counsel of God's Word as it applies to even the situations today, keeping in mind progressive revelation and how it applies or doesn't apply to us, but not how It may not be appropriate in the same sense, it may not be appropriate in the same way, but it still carries the weight of established truth, and we need to understand that, and have that framework of thinking that envelops the apostasy that we even face today. So, I'll leave it there, and I'll pray, and we'll close.

Could you just explain the difference between eternal and everlasting again? Sure. So, eternal has no beginning and no end. Everlasting has a beginning but no end. regardless of which way of the two main ways of interpreting Genesis 6 1-4 fundamentally it's going against what God had planned and what God had laid out so whether it's a creator created the distinction or whether it's following your own will from the flesh a violation of God's plan, a deliberate choosing of your own desire, your path.

So the basic underlying principle is still... Yeah, I think you're right. The doctrine doesn't change in terms of what it is. In other words, I wouldn't go to the mat. It's not going to change one's understanding of how God's faithfulness works or how salvation works. Which is true of a lot of things in Genesis 1-6. Yeah, we have to be very wise and careful. Yeah, so, thanks Al. Let's pray.

Lord, we thank you that your word is complete and where we lack certain understanding or differences of mind, Lord, we can definitely see the clear doctrine of how you communicate yourself and that apostasy is not one where the knowledge is not known. Your will is made clear to the point where we're responsible. We're responsible creatures and the angelic realm is responsible as well to you. You didn't leave us in darkness. You gave us clear understanding of who you are and how you work.

And we're responsible to exercise volition, to operate by faith in regards to these things. And Lord, I just pray that as we understand better through these verses how apostasy works, that we would just be critical of our own mind and how the sin nature attempts to drag us out, lure us away, bait us to the flesh, and conceive sin in our own life. And we might remember these stories and envelop these historical moments in time around the issues of our own apostasy that the sin nature places in our mind and also that of which happens outside of us, those that attempt to do that in the church and in family. Lord, I thank you for truth. I thank you that we can be established and that we can be confident. Thank you for this morning and the continued learning in the main service. It's in your name we pray. Amen.