The Book Of Jude, v.4

v.4

“Who are these others!?” That’s the question that I keep asking when I watch my favorite TV show LOST. If you have not heard of LOST, it is the show about a group of plane crash victims who survive on a deserted Island. Well, seemingly deserted! There are these mysterious island dwellers who have been on the island from before the time of the plane crash and they seem at best, a little maladjusted! These people kidnap kids, they abduct pregnant women and attempt to deceive the castaways by subversively infilitrating their collective. My favorite line (I know what your thinking, but there will be a point here momentarily!) in the second season is when Michael Emerson’s character “Henry Gale” is asked who these “Others” were. With a smile on his face, he replies, “Why, we’re the good guys.” Of course you are!

In Jude’s time, these “Others” are called “certain men.” We are not given names or identity of belief. It is a nebulous title, but there is serious description with regard to their character. They are “subversive,” having “crept in unnoticed.” They are “ungodly,” meaning that they lack a fear or reverence of God. They were opportunists, “turning” or “making use of the grace of God” for their own purposes. When Jude employs this term, he is not saying that grace can be turned into something it is not. He is saying that these men are wrongfully employing grace. Just like when the people who were buying and selling in the temple had turned the House of Prayer into the Den of Thieves.

But what does it mean to “turn the grace of God into lewdness?” The NIV tranlsates this verse “who turn the grace of God into a license for immorality.” These certain men are marked by taking God’s grace, a heavenly measure given to believers to keep them from sin, and seeking to use it as a covering for wickedness. Don’t be fooled though; God’s grace cannot function in a way that is unnatural to it. It’s just that these men seem to believe that God’s grace entitles them to live any way that they want. Of course, they are mistaken.

God grace, His unmerited favor, is given to us as a failsafe. We will fail, we will sin. But when we sin, God’s grace covers a multitude of sin, and even extends greatly beyond it. Grace is for believers, so they might know that there is assurance of salvation. However, when our motivation is to sin and just believe that God will forgive us, then we are joining with these “certain men” in turning God’s grace into a license for our sin.

Their actions are a complete denial of God and the Lord Jesus Christ. They deny God in that they think that God’s people can mingle themselves with sin. They deny Jesus, the Christ, by continuing to sin in spite of His death FOR sin.

To these men, to people like them today, God has pronounced His judgment. Literally, He has written it like a King who has laid out His sovereign decree. They are condemned already. True, they are not condemned fully, presently. But the road that they are on will only lead to one place: judgment.

The point of this is that we need to recognize that sin is what we have been saved from. The most nefarious part about these certain men is that they are soft on sin and that is their agenda, to set us who are faithful on the same course. Christians: BEWARE!