Jude 1:4 For there are certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men… I. THE INSIDIOUSNESS WITH WHICH FALSE TEACHERS EFFECT AN ENTRANCE INTO THE CHURCH. They "creep in unawares." Now craft, you will observe, is the assumed Scriptural characteristic of all heresy (Matthew 7:15; Ephesians 4:14; 2 Corinthians 11:13). The word which the apostle uses to describe this method of entrance is one which supposes that they had recourse to certain surreptitious and fraudulent means. It literally means the getting into a house under ground, or by means of some clandestine and unsuspected entrance. Let us note some of the byways by which false teachers get an entrance for their erroneous teaching. 1. One way is they keep back the full scope and tendency of their doctrines. Things that are to be really believed are only partially discovered, the rest being wrapped up in skilful ambiguities, only to be elicited when some superior disputant will press their doctrines to their legitimate consequences. 2. Another of the byways by which false teaching creeps into a Church is by a skilful mixing up with it a good deal of sound and wholesome doctrine, which is always paraded with a great show of orthodoxy. The apostle therefore in the text exhorts us to see that we look to a man's teaching as a whole. He may teach truth in regard, of all the attributes of the Divine nature, and yet if he obscure or distort or keep back other truths, if he tamper with the great doctrine of our justification by faith in the atonement, we are to denounce him as a deceiver and an antichrist. II. THE REASON WHY THESE FALSE TEACHERS ARE PERMITTED TO HAVE A CERTAIN MEASURE OF SUCCESS. They have "crept in," being "before of old ordained to this condemnation." 1. First, you will observe, the apostle meets the supposed objections advanced on the general score of the Divine predestination — on that fixed immutability of purpose which, however contrary things may appear to us, will cause that God shall "work all things according to the counsel of His own will." There can be no counsel against the Lord; there can be no unforeseen obstacle to the spread of His gospel. He ordains the chosen vessel to preach, and He ordains the means by which this preaching may for a time be thwarted. 2. "To this condemnation." What does the apostle mean by this word? Does he mean that they are ordained to the irrevocable judgments of an angered God? to the future penalties denounced against the disobedient? I think not. A deluded teacher may bring in false doctrine, may even for a time draw after him many unstable souls, and yet he may, through the enlightening and recovering grace of the Spirit, be brought to see the error of his ways, and afterwards become valiant for the truth of God. It is said with regard to these false teachers, that the longer they continue to deal out poisoned food to their people, the more likely it is that they should be given over to a judicial blindness, which must, unless the grace of God should take it away, issue in the final perdition of their souls. III. THE GREAT DOCTRINES which it is the aim of these false teachers to subvert. Men "turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ." 1. And first, as to the expression, "the grace of God." In its primary import the word means favour, goodness, benefit, something whereby one is spontaneously moved to do an act of kindness for another. Hence the word is used as a comprehensive designation for all the blessings of the gospel. These doctrines of grace these false teachers were seeking to abuse, to turn to the hateful account of their own licentiousness and sin. 2. "Turning the grace of God into lasciviousness"; that is, not necessarily into any particular form of deadly sin, but that they turned "the grace of God," the free mercy of God vouchsafed to us in Jesus Christ, into a pretext for any and all forms of self-indulgence and self-pleasing which might minister to the gratification of the carnal mind. Examine any system of error, and you will find that more or less it resolves itself into some form of experiment on the Divine mercy, a calculation upon God's willingness to do that which He has said He never will do — a presumptuous expectation that we may make as wide as we will that gate which God has declared to be narrow — a belief that without a changed heart, without anything that could come up to the Scriptural notion of holiness, it would be possible for a man to see the Lord. And thus it is well said by the apostle afterwards, that this turning the mercy of our God to their own worldly and selfish and unrighteous purposes practically amounted to a denial of "the only Lord God, and our Saviour Jesus Christ." (D. Moore,M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: 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. |
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