Like many other epistles, the Book of Jude is a rebuke directed at certain people in a church or a congregation.
However, unlike most other epistles, Jude was probably was is known as an encyclical epistle, meaning that it was not written to a single church but was meant to be circulated from church to church, and read in each one.
Because of this, the letter of Jude is a letter to Christianity as a whole, in a sense even more so than books like Corinthians or Ephesians. You can see this in that its rebukes and its commands are general enough to apply directly to any church, whereas most modern churches don't have all that many disputes over, say, eating food sacrificed to idols- which was one of the main controversies addressed in Corinthians.
I know that Wikipedia is not a great source, but there was one thing their article said that I really liked. It described the Epistle of Jude as “combative, impassioned, and rushed.”
Whereas Paul's writings generally seem calm and almost pedantic (excepting his occasional outbursts which, admittedly, do happen), and he works through everything step by step, the Epistle of Jude seems like something written at 4 AM, and it covers a LOT of ground very quickly.
We'll start in verse 4.
For there are certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation. Ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ.
So this is the problem, the reason he is writing the letter. There are ungodly people coming into the church, and they are corrupting both the morals and the teachings of the congregation.
Though Jude does not state outright, and the letter certainly does not limit itself to a specific set of people, some commentators think that the godless whom Jude wrote about were an esoteric sect of Judaism called the Gnostics.
The Gnostics took a lot of influence from Zoroastrianism and other mystical religions of the Ancient Near East. They believed in one supreme God, which they called the Monad, but believed that the Universe was actually created by a lesser, corrupted spirit of the order of the Aons. They called this corrupt spirit the Demiurge.
Many Gnostics actually believed that the Demiurge was the same person as Satan, who was in turn the same person as the Jewish and Christian God. The Gnostics claimed that these strange beliefs were the true teachings of Jesus, which of course led to conflict.
Regardless of who these specific ungodly men were, Jude proceeds to compare them with three classic examples of sinners from the Old Testament, and then note the judgments that came upon those sinners.
First are the Israelites.
Jude 5: I will therefore put you in remembrance, though ye once knew this, how that the Lord, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed them that believed not.
What happened is that, after God had brought them all the way to the promised land, Moses sent some scouts to check out the territory. They returned from their mission and reported that they'd seen giants, and advised the people to turn away.
Only two of the scouts, Joshua and Caleb, advised them to continue and take the Promised Land, pointing out that they could overcome the giants through God's strength (Numbers 14:8-9).
But the people followed the majority report, and because of this God banished them to wander around in the wilderness for forty years, until all those who had wanted to turn back had died out.
So there's the judgment. But what was the specific sin of the Israelites? The writer of Hebrews addressed the very same question, and concludes thus in Hebrews 3:19:
So we see that they could not enter in because of unbelief.
The problem was that they did not trust God to fulfill his promise and to keep them safe. They feared the giants more than they feared God. They thought that the giants could somehow stop God from fulfilling his promise.
They fell into the way of the world and feared the powers of the flesh, when they should have remained separate and holy.
And this comparison between the Israelites and the Godless of the church is very interesting.
God saved the Israelites from slavery to Egypt, God saved us from slavery to sin.
But the Israelites who did not believe in God- even after he saved them!- were destroyed. The same thing applies to us today. God has offered us freedom and the promised land, but we can always reject him and stay in Sin.
The second example of sin and judgment concerns the fallen angels, the Watchers.
Jude 6: And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day.
Compare that with 2 Peter 2:4 :
For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to Hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment;
The phrase 'cast them down to Hell' is all one word in the original language, the word 'tartaroo,' which derives from Tartarus.
In Greek mythology, Tartarus is the Underworld of darkness where the Titans were imprisoned after rebelling against Zeus.
So a better translation would be 'cast them down to Tartarus.'
Regardless, what are these fallen angels they're talking about? Both Jude 6 and 2 Peter 2:4 are referencing Genesis 6:2.
That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.
We know that Jude would have been familiar with the deuterocanonical Book of Enoch because, later on, he quotes from it.
The Book of Enoch tells the story of the angels (the Sons of God) rebelling and going to earth. They are eventually captured by God's angels, and imprisoned in the Underworld.
Jude says that these fallen angels are “reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day.”
So, yet again, we have a classic example of an Old Testament group of sinners, and then the mention of their judgment, in this case the final judgment.
But, as with the Israelites, we must ask: what was the specific sin of the fallen angels?
Jude says that they “left their own habitation.” That is, they left Heaven and came and lived among humans.
And I think we can conclude that at least a major part of their sin was that they abandoned their post. They stopped fulfilling the job appointed to them by God.
I do notice that all angels mentioned in the Bible have jobs.
There are soldiers.
Revelation 19:14 talks about the “armies in heaven” riding on “white horses.” In 2 Kings 6, God sends an army of “horses and chariots of fire” to protect Elisha.
We read about Cherubim, with their four faces and their almost sphinx-like role as guardians of God's Throne.
There are the flaming, six-winged serpentine Seraphim, there are the twenty-four elders whose job is praising God. There are even some beings who have the menial task of simply being wheels on God's chariot!
What the fallen angels did, the sin that got them banished from Heaven, was that they abandoned their jobs in the kingdom of Heaven.
How does that apply to the godless in the church?
Well, I have come to notice that there are definite parallels between the angels of Heaven and the Christians of the church.
Though the word 'saint' has come to mean, in Catholicism, sort of the highest level of Christian, the Scriptural use of the term is simply as a synonym for 'Christian,' for 'believer.'
Remember that the word 'Christian' was probably not invented until after the New Testament was written, so in a sense 'saint' is actually a more Biblical term for the followers of Jesus.
The word translated 'saint' in the Greek is 'hagios,' which literally means 'holy' and, in this case, would be more properly rendered as 'holy ones.' And that phrase 'holy ones' is used in the Old Testament as an alternate term for angels.
1 Corinthians 12:14: For the body is not one member, but many. If the foot shall say, because I am not a hand, I am not of the body, is it therefore not of the body?
Everybody has a role in the church! It may not necessarily seem like the most important job, but every single task in necessary.
1 Corinthians 12:17: If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where were the smelling?
We members of the church, who scripture calls 'holy ones,' the exact phrase used to describe angels in the Old Testament, we are the Kingdom of Heaven.
And if we don't do our job in the church, if we don't fulfill our assigned ministry, we're committing the exact same sin as the fallen angels.
The third and final Old Testament example is that of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Jude 7: Even as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.
Jude says that the two cities are set forth as an example, and that is certainly true. They were seen as the platonic ideal of evil, the iconic example of darkest sin.
Now, as with the others, we need to identify the specific sin of Sodom and Gomorrah. Well, Jude says that they were “giving themselves over to fornication and going after strange flesh."
In more general terms, the prime crime of Sodom and Gomorrah was one that Jude references over and over again: lasciviousness.
However, Jude then emphasizes the relationship between the godless of the church and the godless of Gomorrah by mentioning three core sins they have in common.
Jude 8: Likewise also these filthy dreamers defile the flesh, despise dominion, and speak evil of dignitaries.
Like the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, the godless in the church 'defile the flesh' and commit lasciviousness.
Like the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, they despise the authority, the dominion, of God.
But the third point is a bit confusing.
It says that the godless, like Sodom and Gomorrah, “speak evil of dignitaries.”
Commentator John Gill writes that the word 'dignitaries' refers to either Angels, specifically the heavenly beings called Thrones, to church authorities, or to judges.
Interestingly, Thrones are traditionally ascribed the role of judges. Spiritualist writer Rosemary Ellen Guiley wrote that the Thrones “mete out divine justice and maintain the cosmic harmony of all universal laws.” The Thrones are commonly associated with the Ophanim, the wheels of God's chariot-throne.
Personally, I think that Jude was purposely ambiguous as to whether he meant church leaders or angelic beings.
The point is that the godless treat the church leadership in the same way that the people of Sodom and Gomorrah treated angels. When angels came to Sodom, the people of the town tried to mob them, and the angels only escaped by blinding them all!
Just as the denizens of those doomed cities were too proud, and lacked the humility to respect their leadership- and even tried to attack the very angels of God!- the godless in the church “deny the only Lord God” by proxy when they speak evil of those that He has placed in authority over them.
One last point about these verses. We need to realize that Jude did not just select three random examples of sin and judgment.
All three examples- the Israelites, the angels and the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, are actually connected intimately.
Numbers 13:33: And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.
This is the spies talking, the spies that swayed the masses into not trusting God, because of which He condemned them to wander about the wilderness for forty years.
They're saying that these giants were descendants of Anak, himself a descendant of “the giants.” And the word translated 'giants' is the word “nephilim,” the same word used in Genesis 6:4 to describe the descendants of the fallen angels.
These Caananite giants were the Nephilim, the cannibalistic descendants of the fallen angels!
So because the angels kept not their first estate, the Nephilim were born. And because of the Nephilim, specifically the Sons of Anak, the Israelites were scared. And because they were scared, the people did not trust God or believe that he would keep his promise. And because they did not trust God, they had to wander in the wilderness for forty years.
Sin is a domino effect.
But here's the question.
Why does Jude say all this?
It might seem like the obvious answer is- to threaten the godless! But the letter isn't addressed to the godless.
Jude 1: Jude, the servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James, to them that are sanctified by God the Father, preserved in Jesus Christ, and called.
So why does he spend so much of the letter talking about how bad things are going to happen to these other people? It's because we, as Christians, are still liable to fall. We all sin all the time, everybody knows that!
But it isn't like God is going to make us wander around the Near East for forty years when we don't trust him enough, or chain us up in the Underworld when we don't bring a dish to the church potluck, or throw fire at us from the sky when we reject his authority in our lives!
The point isn't- 'you shouldn't do these things because you'll be punished.'
The point is that you shouldn't do these things because they grieve God's spirit, and he hates them so much that he destroyed two entire cities where the people were serving their own lusts, and he condemned an entire generation of Israelites to wander around in the desert until they died because they did not trust him enough, and he banished holy angels to darkness forever because they were not doing their assigned ministry!
The final section of Jude contains an important reminder. In verse 24 Jude dedicates the letter to God and he says- 'now unto him that is able to keep you from falling.'
Truth is, any one of us could be like the Israelites, or the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, or the fallen angels. In fact, everyone of us would be if it was not for God, preserving us in peace.
The sin of the Israelites was that they fell into the ways and fears of the world, the sin of the angels was that they abandoned their posts, the sin of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah was that they were too proud to obey God's laws, respect his authority, or respect the authorities he had set up over them.
In contrast to the ungodly, we must be set apart from the world, not join in its sin. We must use our gifts and our talents to help the church, not take and provide nothing. And though we must keep ourselves from sinning, we must also realize that we too are fallible, the it is God who will judge, and that all which keeps us from being like the ungodly is Jesus.
In other words, we must be Holy, we must be Helpful, and we must be Humble.
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