Jude 8-13

⁸ Likewise also these filthy dreamers defile the flesh, despise dominion, and speak evil of dignities. ⁹ Yet Michael the archangel, when contending with the devil he disputed about the body of Moses, durst not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee. ¹⁰ But these speak evil of those things which they know not: but what they know naturally, as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt themselves. ¹¹ Woe unto them! for they have gone in the way of Cain, and ran greedily after the error of Balaam for reward, and perished in the gainsaying of Core. ¹² These are spots in your feasts of charity, when they feast with you, feeding themselves without fear: clouds they are without water, carried about of winds; trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots; ¹³ Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever.

In Romans 8:5, the Apostle Paul laid out for us two realms of existence when he wrote, “For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit.” He goes on to describe “the carnal mind” as being “enmity [at war] against God” (Romans 8:7). The “flesh” describes the fallen human nature apart from God’s saving grace and transformation brought at salvation by the Holy Spirit. In Galatians 5:19-21, he wrote a list of the things that the flesh produces: “adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like.” Many of those works and attitudes are addressed by Jude in his letter to identify those “certain men” who have “crept in unawares.” The point is that if a person’s life is controlled by the “flesh” and not the Spirit of God, then inevitably these patterns and others like them will flow out of their hearts and lives. We can identify eight patterns of attitudes, motives, and living that flow out of the heart of a professing Christian who has never truly been saved. Over the last two weeks, from verses 8-11, we looked at the first five of these: irreverence, pride, ignorance, envy, and covetousness. This week, verses 11-13 will give us the final three of these deadly patterns we should beware of.

The sixth pattern that we have in these verses is that of murmuring. The final Old Testament example found in verse 11 is that of Korah. In Numbers 16, Korah led a group of 250 Israelites in rebellion against Moses and Aaron, God’s established leaders. They desired the positions that Moses and Aaron had and were discontented with serving as the Kohathites as a part of the Levitical system. Their reasoning was that “all the congregation are holy” (Numbers 16:3), which meant that they thought that anyone should have been able to do what Aaron and Moses did. In judgment, God opened the ground and consumed Korah and the other “self-appointed” leaders and then sent fire to consume the 250 men that were with them. Korah’s rebellion actually led to the entire congregation murmuring against Moses and Aaron for what happened to Korah and his followers and God killed 14,700 of the people with a plague. Jude pulls Korah’s rebellion as an example from the Old Testament of the danger of murmuring. The “certain men” that Jude wrote about are identified by such a pattern. They continually have a problem with authority, gossip, and murmur to stir the congregation against God’s true leaders in the church.

The seventh pattern that Jude 8-13 gives to us is found in the first part of verse 12. Jude wrote that, “These are spots in your feasts of charity, when they feast with you, feeding themselves without fear.” “Spots” are hidden reefs in shallower waters that hide just below the surface of otherwise seemingly pleasant waters for ships to sail on. These reefs would puncture the hulls of the ships. Jude’s point is the destructiveness of these false converts. Everything looks good on the surface. They are “feeding themselves without fear” when the church gathers, but just underneath the surface of appearances, there is something extremely destructive that can bring an entire ship down. The idea here is that Jude describes a person with continual destructive tendencies (trouble follows them no matter what they do) that is able to just blend in with the church and participate in the all of the normal activities without realizing that there is something terribly wrong. “Without fear” highlights their lack of fear of God that leads to a lack of understanding of the seriousness of what they are doing. They are able to overlook or brush off the continual trouble that follows them as the fault of others, etc. Paul described the same type in 1 Timothy 4:2 as those who have “their consciences seared with a hot iron.” We must beware of destructiveness. The sign that there’s a wolf is wounded sheep.

The final pattern that Jude identifies for us is found in the second part of verse 12 and verse 13. Jude comes full circle back to verse 4 where he identified the first mark of false disciples as hypocrisy. Here, Jude uses a few more analogies from nature to describe the “emptiness” of these converts. “Clouds without water” are clouds that promise rain and refreshment but do not deliver on the promise. “Trees whose fruit withereth” is describing trees that should bear fruit in the fall, but produce none. “Twice dead” describes how they are dead in that they produce no fruit and they are dead to the very “roots.” “Raging waves” describes them as wild and uncontrollable that produce and wash up all manner of debris (“their own shame”) onto the shore. “Wandering stars” describes them as shooting stars that flash across the sky for a moment, but then vanish. They promise light and direction (like stars used to navigate at sea), but do not last. All of these analogies serve to show that these “certain men” appear promising and look one way, but actually produce nothing. They look the part, but are not what they present to be. They have “a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof” (2 Timothy 3:5).

What do we make of these deadly patterns? While these words and this message are direct and seemingly harsh to us, God has given these words to protect us. It is to protect us as the body of Christ from allowing such behavior to cause harm to our church family, but it is also perhaps given to protect us from ourselves. Maybe you’ve seen some of these patterns in your own life. What do you do if that is the case? The simple answer is to turn to Christ in repentance and faith. Inevitably, the people that Jude describes in his letter reach a fork in the road where they humble themselves and truly come to Christ or they persist in pride and hypocrisy and harden themselves “past feeling” (Ephesians 4:19). The answer is always humble repentance and faith.