Jude 4 – For certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.
In boating, the goal is to have the boat in the water, but not let the water enter into the boat. If you are in a boat at sea, and it starts to take on water, you know you have a crisis on your hands.
The world is a bit like a tumultuous ocean, and the Church is supposed to be like a boat passing through that sea picking up people who are adrift and rescuing them by pulling them into the boat. When the world starts to flood into the Church, there is a crisis.
This is precisely the backdrop for the book of Jude. Having watched his big brother, Jesus Christ, die for sinners, raise from death, and return to Heaven, Jude was part of the first days of the early church. Some years later, the zeal of the first Christians began to wane, and new generations of Christians were starting to fill the church up with the world, which created a crisis that threatened to sink the Christian Church altogether.
If you can image a crew on a boat at sea many miles away from the shore bailing water and patching holes, frantically hoping to prevent the brutal death of everyone onboard, then you can imagine the backdrop for the sense of urgency that Jude writes with.
The same worldly waters that were leaking into the ark of the church in Jude’s day continue to leak into the Church in our day – prideful rejection of godly authority, spirituality without the Holy Spirit, and sexual sin of every sort propelled by gender confusion and a celebration of pleasure in most any and every form. The woke apostasy facing the Church today is the same sewage Jude was bailing out of the boat in his day.
Begin reading Jude once a day for all the weeks you are studying this great book of the Bible (it takes 5-10 minutes).
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