“Jude 1:3”

Monday, January 01, 2018

Jude 1:3
“Beloved, while I was very diligent to write to you concerning our common salvation, I found it necessary to write to you exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.”

Ty Duncan recently taught from Jude and this passage was brought out as the central thought of the book. It makes a fitting memory verse to begin this new year.

Consider that disciples of must contend for the faith because:

1.        Men have turned the grace of God into lewdness and deny God (1:4). Men have, since early times, perverted the grace of God. It should not surprise us when they do this today.
2.        The Lord after He had saved the people out of the land of Egypt destroyed those who did not believe (1:5).  There is no solid support for the notion that when a person is saved he is permanently and forever sealed and can never sin so as to be lost! He must continue in the faith to inherit Heaven, our Promised Land. If this is not the application of the text, then what is saying?
3.        Even the angels who did not keep their proper domain are doomed (1:6). If angels cannot get away with sin, why should we think we can? “But if you do not do so, then take note, you have sinned against the LORD; and be sure your sin will find you out” (Num. 32:23).
4.        Sodom and Gomorrah’s downfall serve as an example of what it means to suffer the vengeance of God (1:7).
5.        Men have rejected authority (1:8).
6.        Men speak evil of what they do not know (1:10). Ignorance is often at the source of much evil talk.
7.        There are spots in our love feasts (1:12). Our “love feasts” are not church-sponsored meals as some have fallaciously asserted. Paul never authorized such a practice (1 Cor. 11:22, 34). Our love feasts are not composed of any kind of literal feast any more than these wrongdoers are literally “spots,” “clouds,” “late autumn trees,” or “raging waves of the sea.” “Love feasts” is a figurative expression describing our worship time before God generally and possibly the Lord’s Supper specifically. The Greek word for “spot” was used in Homer’s Odyssey in the sense of a rock or reef in the sea which destroyed ships (see 3:298). Jude is speaking in the same way about men who come into the church and with raging waves spiritually and morally collide Christians into a rock (cf. 1 Tim. 1:19).
8.        The Lord is coming to execute judgment (1:14, 15). Judgment is sure.

Let’s become contenders of the faith so as to preserve the integrity of stance before God.

--Steven J. Wallace

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