Jude, when he had intended to write a letter about “the common salvation,” was driven, because of the attack on the Christian Faith by false teachers within the church, to write a different, more militant kind of letter. He had to urge Christians “to contend for the faith that God has once for all entrusted to the saints.” He supported this ringing call to arms by recalling how the Lord throughout the centuries had rewarded such devilish perversions of His truth with the severest of judgments.

When as in our time, that kind of attack on the faith is prolonged so that Christians have to keep on fighting it off, they may be tempted, without realizing it, to have their own appreciation for and grasp on the faith somewhat narrowed by the continuing conflict. Harry Blamires, in his little book, The Christian Mind, shows how in having to fight secularism we have ourselves been “secularized,” moved much more than we ourselves realize, to try to fight on the enemy’s ground with the enemy’s weapons.

A recent visitor to the Netherlands called attention to the fact that the activities of the orthodox “Concerned” people there had, to some extent, restrained the present slide of the Dutch Reformed churches into apostasy. Without their efforts, conditions would be worse. While such restraining influence is to be appreciated, we may never be satisfied with merely slowing down a movement in the wrong direction, if, whether rapidly or slowly, the church is still going in the wrong direction! There is no future for them or for us in letting ourselves and our families be carried along by an unfaithful church into its own apostasy. We may never be contented with merely “putting on the brakes” to slow down such a course. We, as well as the concerned brothers there, have to refuse to go along in the wrong direction—and we have to quit “buying the gas” that keeps the vehicle going in that direction!

Instead of letting ourselves be dragged where we ought not to be, we must, as Blamires said, “shift our ground” and “set about reconstituting the Christian mind” (p. 117). It is interesting and instructive to see how both the Apostle Peter in the introduction to his (second) letter (as we saw last month) and Jude in the conclusion of his, guide us into such a constructive course.

Building on the Faith

Instead of letting ourselves and our families be carried along by false teachers into their own apostasy, Jude urges us to be “building yourselves up on your most holy faith” (v. 20). The word “faith” is and often may be used to mean either our act of believing or what we believe, and the prevailing tendency in the church of our time is to use it to refer to our actions, feelings and experiences. That is NOT what Jude means by “your most holy faith,” for he says that we must “build ourselves up” ON it. That “faith” is not our actions, feelings or experience, but that mentioned in verse 3, “the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints” for which he was urging us to earnestly “contend.” This “faith” is the revealed gospel reality on which we saw the Apostle Peter also focusing all attention in the first chapter of his second letter (November article). The most pervasive and destructive error in the Christian churches in our time is the shift of their foundation from God’s revelation to human experience. Our Lord concluded His “sermon on the mount” by warning that only those who come to Him and hear and do His word will be building a house that will stand in a storm (Luke 6:47ff.; Matt. 7:24ff.). When, as in our time, the storms of error threaten the churches and their faith, Jude urges us to work at that kind of building. To state it more prosaically, this means that the Lord’s way to prepare Christians to withstand and overcome all kinds of error is by their studying, teaching and preaching the Bible and its doctrines. That is what built them up when they were once delivered from an ancient paganism; that too is the way they will have to be rebuilt as a resurgent popular paganism is currently sweeping them away.

“Praying in the Holy Spirit”

While the order to be busy “building up ourselves on the faith” stresses our activity, we must also remain aware of our own inability and our dependence from beginning to end on the saving grace of God. The Holy Spirit was promised to all who ask for Him (Luke 11:13) as the indispensible guide into all the truth (John 16:13). Accordingly, we must pray for His presence and guidance if we are to accomplish anything. “Unless the Lord build the house, they labor in vain who build it” (Ps. 127:1).

“In the Love of God”

Our prayers are one side of the relationship with God into which He in His grace brings us. We are to “Keep yourselves in the love of God.” The Apostle John who stresses so strongly our need to abide in truth in the same breath stressed our remaining in the love of God: “In this the love of God was manifested toward us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him . . . He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (1 John 4:9–11). The Apostle Paul who so stressed sound doctrine also warned, “If anyone does not love the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be accursed” (1 Cor. 16:22). The Lord Himself, while He praised the Ephesian church for its rejection of false teachers, also warned it that if it did not return to its lost “first love” it would lose its light (Rev. 2:16).

A Sure Hope

Living in this relationship with the Lord, brings a confidence about the future as we are to be “looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life.” This “hope” must never be reduced to a mere wish as the word often is in daily language; it is as sure as the promises of God. We are to anticipate, as we already begin to experience something of the reality of “eternal life” (John 3:36; 5:24).

An Evangelistic Outreach

While we are ordered to build up ourselves upon the Faith, we must not be preoccupied with self but must also look at all kinds of people around us. Although many of them may be strangers or enemies to the Faith, we are to see them as lost people who need the same grace of God as we do and we are to “have compassion” or, literally, “have mercy” on them. As we “look for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life,” we are to have and show that kind of mercy or loving concern for them. We are to try to lead them out of their ignorance and “doubts” into the gospel that we have been given.

We are to try to save them “with fear, pulling them out of the fire.” That startling expression shocks us into considering what the real predicament of everyone apart from Christ is. In our time it is very unfashionable to say that every non-Christian is like someone caught in a burning building and needing to be rescued, but God’s Word says that that is the simple truth. As Harry Blamires observed in The Christian Mind (p. 114), in our secular age people live with the false “pretense that, inside or outside, (the truth) conditions are pretty much the same.” God’s Word says that the non-Christians’ house is afire and we have to work with all of the urgency of a fireman trying to get them out of it.

Necessary Caution

Firemen must be constantly aware of the dangers of their work—Remember the local fireman who lost his life on the job. Therefore “fear” or caution is necessary. Because the error is so dangerous, threatening with “eternal fire,” Christians trying to help those who are caught in it must be careful that they themselves do not become victims of it. (How many “missionaries” have not themselves been lured into the very errors from which they were intending to save others? That has characterized the dreary history of many, perhaps most, modern missions!)

A different, equally striking illustration stresses the same point. We are to be “hating even the garment defiled by the flesh.” That expression recalls the Old Testament ceremonial laws about avoiding things that were “unclean.” Although those ceremonial laws are no longer applicable after the coming of Christ, their warning against the contagion of moral and spiritual error is at least as urgent now as it was then. Those ceremonial laws, incidentally, protected God’s people against what we in our time are beginning to understand as germ-caused diseases. In the light of current discoveries, the warning seems even more relevant than it may have seemed when it was given.

In hospital visits I have sometimes been surprised by unexpected orders that all visitors don sterile coats, gloves and masks. What was the reason for such awkward requirements? The staff had suddenly become aware of a spreading staphylococcus infection that must be stopped if the hospital would help rather than endanger its patients. A recent TV program highlighted Australian hospital studies that showed this to be a much more serious and difficult problem than had been suspected. It showed that doctors who neglected to wash their hands between visits to patients were some of the worst offenders! (Could it be that a similar carelessness among the churches’ theological “doctors” or teachers has often made them sources of heresies instead of healthful teaching?) At any rate, the important point that Jude makes is that if we are to succeed in building up the Christian churches’ resistance to destructive heresies, we will have to obey some elementary laws of sanitation and beware of spreading by our own carelessness the very thing we are supposed to combat. It is a saddening fact that in a time when we are increasingly alerted against the dangers of contaminated foods and drugs, educational and government leaders (abetted by Liberal churchmen) defend the free spread of much more destructive moral and religious teachings as a “civil right,” and then wonder why the troubles of our society multiply. If we are to bring the healing gospel to people around us we will have to stop spreading the moral and spiritual contamination that makes people sick.

Encouragement

Shouldn’t this reminder of the size of our assignment and its dangers make us fearful and discouraged? It should not! Jude in ending his letter directs us to God “who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to present you faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy.” If we had only ourselves and our own resources, we would be as helpless and hopeless as everyone else. But the gospel is the help and hope that the Lord gives us. It is not an uncertainty, but a sure thing. In alerting us to danger, He is able to keep us from stumbling. By His gospel He is at work making each believer “faultless.” And that future in His presence promises overflowing joy! Doesn’t that sure prospect incite us to devote ourselves with renewed enthusiasm to Christian building, praying and working, and to trying to bring the same wonderful gospel to the many around us who also need it?

Thanksgiving

The enormity of the grace that God is giving us prompts us to share ever more deeply in the enthusiastic thanksgiving with which this letter ends: “To Him that is able to” do all this,

To God our Savior,

Who alone is wise,

Be glory and majesty,

Dominion and power,

Both now and forever. Amen.

PDJ