God uses a Righteous One, Judas

"God uses a Righteous One, Judas" - Jude 3-6 Judas to unmask the apostates of whom another Judas, Judas Iscariot, was an apostate traitor. All that is true good Judas (Judah) is that he was a servant of Jesus Christ and the brother of James. Judas, for this reason, knew who the Messiah was. An apostate is a person who professes to be a true believer but has never actually been regenerated (new birth). It is known because after a while, he willingly abandons the faith and maliciously renounces the Savior (Desem).

I. The apostate had never been converted.

A. He hardens in his unbelief and stubbornly opposes the Christ of God.

1. "Let you contend (the meeting of effort with effort against opposition) ardently for the faith?"

2. Attacks were being launched against the sacred deposit of the Christian life and efforts had already been made to look at the great fundamental doctrines (main, essential).

3. God's people were to be kept without arrangement, snare for money by inspiration, inerrancy (no errs, no containment) authority and sufficiency (capacity) of God's Holy Word.

4. Judas' concern was that the faith of the recipients was in serious danger, to such an extent that he found it necessary to write to them as soon as possible about the common salvation, that is, the salvation that he shared with all other believers.

5. It was necessary to defend the faith, that is, the truths of the Sacred Scriptures that have been handed down to us from hand to hand.

6. The only immutable traditions (firm, unalterable, stable) that Christians have are the truths of the gospel.

7. Faith has been passed and we neither need nor pay attention to anything else.

8. This is our response to the leaders of false cults with their books "who claim equal authority to Scripture."

9. (4) Some men had crept in covertly (hidden, secretly) maliciously, dissembling.

10. It is an underground movement of intrigue and deception (farce, lie).

11. These fifth columnists (infiltrated to reveal what he hears and sees, he is a traitor) had already been destined for this condemnation before.

12. When man chooses to finally get lost, it is because of his own sin and disobedience.

13. What is conveyed by this expression is that the condemnation of apostates has been determined very much in advance.

14. If men chose to turn away from the Christian Faith, then their condemnation is the same as that of the unbelieving Israelites in the wilderness, that of the rebellious angels, and that of the Sodomites.

15. They were not predestined to apostatize, but apostatizing (set apart) by one's own choice faces the predetermined punishment (the act of fixing, establishing, or stipulating a thing in advance) for all apostates (rebelling against God).

16. Two outstanding traits of these wicked are their corrupt conduct and doctrine.

17. In their conduct, they turn the grace of our God into licentiousness.

18. They twist Christian liberty into license and allow them to serve into liberty to sin.

19. In their doctrine they deny God the only Sovereign and our Lord Jesus Christ.

20. By doing so, they deny His absolute right to rule, they deny His deity, His vicarious death, (faculty to replace another individual), His resurrection, and in fact they deny all the essential doctrines of His person and work.

21. Although they profess a great liberalism (freedoms) in the sphere, they oppose in a dogmatic (doctrinal, essential), virulent (harmful, aggressive, violent) way the Gospel, the value of the precious blood of Christ, that He is the only way of salvation.

22. Let's take care of our lives and that we are not capable of being against Christ of the Bible, and they have invented a liberal Christ, whom they have stripped of glory, majesty, dominion and authority.

23. (5) There is no doubt about God's attitude toward these apostates.

24. He has revealed it in the Old Testament on more than one occasion.

25. Jude now wants to remind his readers of three such examples: the unbelieving Israelites, the angels who sinned, and the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah.

26. The first example is that of Israel in the wilderness: the Lord having saved them, brought them out of Egypt, then destroyed those who did not believe (Numbers 13 and 14; 1 Corinthians 10:5-10).

27. God had promised the land of Canaan to the people.

28. That promise also included all the training that was necessary.

29. But they accepted the bad report of the spies at Kadesh and rebelled against the Lord.

30. The result was that all the men who were twenty years old and older when they left Egypt perished in the wilderness, except for Caleb and Joshua (Hebrews 3:16-19; Numbers 14:28-30).

31. (6) The other apostasy and rebellion is of the angels who sinned.

32. All we know of them with certainty (quite sure, truth) is that they did not keep the dignity (nobility, honesty, the value of human beings, the value of the human) that had been assigned to them, that they left their own abode and are now kept under darkness, in eternal prisons, awaiting their final judgment. Amen