The Conduct of Apostate False

Jude 8‑13

Tonight we're going to continue our study of the wonderful epistle of Jude brief as it is. Jerry was saying, "You went zipping through second and third John, what happened in Jude? You can't seem to get through." Well, it's very deep and there's very many profound truths here that have to be dealt with.

I remember when I was in high school that I had a very good friend. We played ball together and did a lot of things together. We were kind of buddies. We double dated and all that kind of stuff and went to parties together and we just really were pretty close friends. His family claimed to be a Christian family. He claimed to be Christians. I remember one time we went down to Pershing Square and decided that if everybody else could get on a soapbox; we'd get on a soapbox. And we voted together that it would be me and it was a tie and I opted to do it so I got up and I was wailing away. I considered him a great friend.

And then we parted company. I went off to college. He went off somewhere else. The next time I met him he proudly told me that he was an atheist. That was very hard for me to understand. I really grappled with that. I further found out that his moral life had sunk to a very low ebb. He had totally disregarded God and he had fallen into a category that the Bible calls apostates‑‑somebody who knows the truth, who acquiesces to the truth intellectually and then walks away willfully abandoning what they know to be the truth for a kind of life that they themselves choose.

I was reading the other day as I was flying somewhere the biography of Billy Graham by John Pollock. And I was interested to read about a certain man who at one time was a part of the Billy Graham organization. And this man left the Billy Graham organization and is now a very well‑known rejecter of the faith, a denier of Jesus Christ's deity.

I remember also when I was ordained ... I remember that well. That was a grueling experience, as it is for many of the young men around here. It was especially grueling for me. And I remember that there was one man there who was very pointed in the questions that he asked. He was the pastor of a rather well known church at the time, a Bible church, one that taught the Word of God. And his name appears the first name and the sort of the John Hancock of my ordination certificate. Today he is a denier of the deity of Jesus Christ. He's a professor at USC who does everything he can do to turn young people away from Christianity. He also falls into the category of an apostate‑somebody who knows the truth, has all the information about the truth and willfully turns his back on the truth for his own pursuits.

Now, such people are the subject of the letter of Jude. Those people Jude has in mind as he pens this epistle under the direction of the Holy Spirit. And they are very common. Apostasy, as terrible as it is, is as common, in a sense, as it is terrible. It is to know the truth and reject it.

Deuteronomy 32:15 says: "He forsook God which made him and lightly esteemed the rock of his salvation." That's apostasy.

First Chronicles 28:9 says, "If thou forsake Him, He will cast thee off forever."

Isaiah 1:28 says, "They that forsake the Lord shall be consumed."

Jeremiah 17:5, "Cursed be the man whose heart departs from the Lord."

Let me show you Ezekiel 18 and further words of insight into this whole area of apostasy. Ezekiel 18, talking again about apostasy, verse 24: "But when the righteous," now I want you to notice something that's very important. When the term righteous is used here, it is not referring to righteousness of God imputed to a man; it is referring to self ‑righteousness, to a man's own efforts at religion. 'When a religious man," and that is a man who is attached to some degree to the true religion, "When a religious man turns away from his religion and commits iniquity and does according to all the abominations that the wicked men does, shall he live?" All his righteousness, or his religiosity, even though it's the true religion, "that he hath done shall not be mentioned in his trespass that he has trespassed and in his sin that he has sinned, in them shall he die." A man who is attached to the form of righteousness, a man who is trying to carry out the religious effort, is really a man whose righteousness is as ... what? As filthy rags, according to Isaiah. Such a man when he reverts back to sin is going to die in his sin.

Yet you say the way of the Lord is not equal. "Hear now 0 house of Israel, is not My way equal? Are not your ways unequal?" Don't judge God. When a righteous man turns away from his righteousness and commits iniquity and dies in them for his iniquity that he hath done, shall he die. And it's talking here about apostasy, departing from the true religion.

Ezekiel 33, verse 12, a further word. "Therefore, thou son of man, say unto the children of thy people, the righteousness of the righteous shall not deliver him in the day of his transgression. As for the wickedness of the wicked, he shall not fall thereby in the day that he turneth from his wickedness." talking there about the salvation of an evil man. "Neither shall the righteous be able to live for his righteousness in the day that he sins, when I shall say to the righteous that he shall surely live if he trusts to his own righteousness and commit iniquity," and there's the key, if he's trusting in his own self-righteous, "all his righteousness shall not be remembered but for his iniquity that he's committed, he shall die for it." verse 18, "When the righteous turns from his righteousness and commits iniquity, he shall even die for it."

Now, that's all saying the same thing, that self-righteousness doesn't help, that being attached to a religion superficially, even though it's the right religion, and then turning way from it is disaster. God speaks pointedly about the judgment of such. In John 6 it tells us about some disciples who departed from Jesus, in verse 66: "From that time, many of His disciples went back and walked no more with Him." There were some people who attached themselves, outwardly righteous, attached themselves self ‑righteously to Jesus Christ but at a certain pointed time when they heard something they didn't like, they walked away. Now what is going to be the judgment of those? John 15:6, "If a man abide not in Me, he is cast forth as a branch withered and gather them, cast them into fire and they are burned." And of course, it's talking about the judgment of hell, being reserved for apostates who know the truth and walk away from it.

In Hebrews, further it says in chapter 6, somebody who knows all this, has tasted all of it and falls away, it's impossible to renew them again to repentance. They become hopeless.

Now, the evil of apostasy, which is willful rejection of the truth, is compounded‑‑now mark it‑‑is compounded when a person is not just an apostate but becomes a false teacher in addition to being an apostate. There are a lot of people who have walked away from the truth; there are less people‑‑but enough of them‑who having walked away from the truth now become propagators of Satan's lies. There are liberals, there are modernists‑‑as they've been called historically‑‑there are false teachers who apostatize, that is they depart from the truth, they once knew the truth, they once at some point were attached to the truth, they abandon it and then they become the teachers of lies.

Peter speaks about such in 2 Peter chapter 2, "There were false prophets among the people and there shall be false teachers among you secretly bringing in destructive heresy, denying the Lord that bought them and bring upon themselves swift destruction. And many shall follow their evil ways by reason of whom the way of truth shall be evil spoken of." There are going to come false teachers. They not only have departed from the faith, but they are propagating lies about the faith. They are propagating Satanic error and they have effect. Verse 3 it says: "They make merchandise out of people but their judgment now for a long time now for a long time lingers not, their destruction slumbers not, God is going to judge them."

So, the Word warns very firmly against apostasy, and doubly against becoming an apostate false teacher...teacher of lies. And there are many of those kind of people. People who used to be somehow connected to Christianity, maybe even in pulpits, and now propagate lies, the lies of Satan.

Nowhere though in the Scripture is there any more graphic description of such than in Jude. And that's what we want to look at. Maybe Matthew 23 and 2 Peter are a close comparison, but nothing is more graphic in my mind then the way Jude describes these false teachers. Verse 8, let's read verses 8 to 13 and get the whole text and then we'll discuss it.

In like manner, also these dreamers, defile the flesh, despise dominion and speak evil of glories (or dignities). Yet Michael the archangel, when contending with the devil he disputed about the body of Moses, dared not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee. But these speak evil of those things which they know not: but what they know naturally as (well, it says brute beasts, we'll talk about that in a minute) and those things they corrupt themselves. Woe unto them! They have gone in the way of Cain, and ran greedily after the error of Balaam for reward, and perished in the gain sayings of Korah.

Now, again, fitting the pattern of Jude, Jude just fires out these statements without giving you much background because he is calling to remembrance information that the folks already know. We'll spend a little time looking at this passage tonight and seeing what it has to say stopping at verse 11 and picking up verses 12 and 13 next time.

Now, there are four things that I see in verses 8 through 16 in a description of apostates. Four things in characterizing them: their conduct, their company, their character and their condemnation...their conduct, company, character and condemnation are covered in verses 8 to 16. We're going to take the first two tonight‑‑their conduct and their company‑‑next time their character and condemnation.

Let's look at their conduct, verses 8 to 10. Now we need to just give you a little very, very brief background. Jude has just shown them in verses 5 to 7, now watch, that apostasy is nothing new, it's old. It's as old as the children of Israel in the wilderness, verse 5. It's as old as the angels who kept not their first estate, verse 6. It's as old as Sodom and Gomorrah, verse 7, nothing new. And God has always judged apostasy and God always will judge it. So, he has given three case histories of God's judgment on apostasy. And now, he applies God's attitude of judgment to the present apostates, whereas verses 5 to 7 deals with the past, verses 8 to 13 deals with the present and the future look at apostasy.

Now, remember verses 5 to 7. He says that in verse 5 Israel murmured in Egypt, sinned against God, believed not God and were destroyed. They were apostates in the wilderness. They did not believe God. Then he talks about the angels who corrupted what should have been their domain, corrupted their natural existence and co‑habitated with women producing the strange beings that God had to destroy in the flood and they are apostates. They departed from truth. They departed from the thing that God had designed for their existence and God destroyed them ... even as He did the children of Israel in the wilderness, all of whom died of that generation without entering the land. Thirdly he mentioned Sodom and Gomorrah which had apostatized from the truth it knew, the truth it had been exposed to from Abraham and no doubt from Lott departing from the truth, going after the angels to have relationships with them in homosexual fashion, as we saw, and God wiped them out.

Now, he takes all three of those illustrations and sums them up in verse 8: "In like manner also these present time false teachers, which he calls dreamers, do three things; they defile the flesh, despise dominion and speak evil of dignities." And those are the three things he just discussed in the three case histories. An apostate, when he reaches the inevitable end of his apostasy, defiles the flesh as Sodom and Gomorrah did. He sets at naught dignities, or authorities, or dominions, like the sinning angels who despised the regulation of God. He blasphemes, and that's the word "speak evil." As did the children of Israel when they murmured against God, they were really blaspheming His character.

So, he says the things that have been past true about apostates are true even today. And the word "likewise" or "in like manner" these dreamers are doing the very same thing. It's amazing to me that apostates continue to do what they do when they know what the Bible says about apostasy. Amos 4:11 says, "I have overthrown some of you as God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah, and you were as a f ire brand plucked out of the burning, yet have you not returned unto Me, says the Lord?" I destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, I destroyed some of you and you still haven't returned. Apostasy continues to go on; people persist in denying the truth, walking away from God, walking away from the Bible, walking away from Jesus Christ.

So, the present‑day apostate, Jude says, are arraigned for the very same sins. What were they? Lust, like Sodom and Gomorrah, rebellion like the angels, and irreverence like the children of Israel in the wilderness, and it's the same today.

Now, Jude calls them‑‑look at the word "dreamers," your text may say filthy dreamers but the word "filthy" is in italics, it's not a bad word to put in there, it sort of gives the idea but not quite accurately. Just the word in the Greek, the only word is there is "dreamers." And the word simply means "to dream or to see delusions." False teachers do not see the truth, they see delusions. They see what they think is the truth because Satan has blinded their evil minds. They are deluded.

Now, there are several words for dreaming. There is one word, onaros, and this word refers to a dream that is purposeful or a significant dream or a sometimes significant dream like often the prophets of old would have a dream in which God would speak. That is not the word here. The word for dreaming here is a word that means "a confused state of the soul, an abnormal imagination, a kind of dream where the ego is controlled and held captive by ungodly, sensual confusion." That's the way it's used in other places, sort of the idea of arbitrary fancies from a perverted mind which make it deaf to reality and truth. They were beguiled false teachers. They are deluded. They sleep in sin and they dream false dreams of truth. You can understand that because sometimes you've had dreams that were so vivid you really thought that you were seeing the reality and you were so glad when you woke up. Well, they see those dreams and they assume them to be true and they never wake up. They're like dreamers with unreal sensual images; pictures filling their minds put there by Satan, fantasies about what truth is and they go around propagating what they think is the truth.

Now, three things characterize these dreamers. Number one, they defile the flesh, verse 8, they defile the flesh. You know, you can always sooner or later, you can always see a false teacher exposed on an immoral basis. They may hide it for a while but they won't hide it for the life. God knows and usually it gets out in the open. I remember when we used to be on the television, my dad did down here at KCOP years ago, there were several false teachers. You know, they proliferate on radio and television, they just milk people. And we had a few real winners down there, one of them is still around town, his name is O.L. Jaggers (?) and he had several homosexual bodyguards and he had a life that would make a black mark on a piece of coal, he was just about as immoral a man as you could imagine coming from so, many different directions.

But there was another guy that some of you might remember, his name was Dan Gilbert. Dan Gilbert wrote many little books and Dan Gilbert used to come in some Sundays to preach a sermon and he was so stone drunk that the announcer had to read his sermon on his television program. And then, of course, the next week he'd come in and he managed to get in the place somewhat sober and he would give his message and his appeal and so forth and so on, and money would come in to carry on his ministry. Finally they found him murdered in a motel and it was a sorted rotten story about his vice and immorality.

False teachers have this kind of thing. You say, "Why? Why would you say that?" Because the Bible says that these dreamers defile the flesh. Listen to me, there is only one agency who can control the flesh and that is the Spirit of God. And if a man does not have the Spirit of God, he has no control over his flesh and sooner or later, no matter how he tries to carry on a moral front, the sordidness is going to come to the fore, the man is living in too much evil to hide it. Any man that is so captive of Satan that is he is a false teacher, sooner or later is going to have some kind of moral consequence in his life. Now maybe it never does become visible in some cases, but usually it does. They defile the flesh. And here the word sarx and the idea of defiling here means to spot or stain. Its first reference meant to stain by blood guiltiness, it came to mean any kind of stain and when you connect it with sarx the flesh, it means a sexual immorality. False teachers are usually involved in sexual immorality. You may not always see it, but the Word of God says it is characteristic. Sometimes there may be an exception, there may be a guy that Satan just keeps super morally clean in order to make him believable, but that is really rare because that person, no matter how much Satan wants him to stay clean, is going to have a tough time dealing with his flesh if he doesn't have the Spirit of God and if he's that much a child of Satan.

     Look at 2 Peter to support the point, 2 Peter 2:10. And here he is describing false teachers again. This whole second chapter describes them and he says in verse 10: "Chiefly them that walk after the flesh, they walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness." In the lust of uncleanness... verse 12, and again you'll see this as Jude practically quotes this text here, "But these as natural brute beasts made to be taken and destroyed speak evil of the things they understand not and shall utterly perish in their own corruption." Verse 18, "When they speak great swelling words of vanity, they allure through the lusts of the flesh." again, an indication that false teachers are bound up in the lusts of the flesh. Verse 20, it talks about them having escaped the pollutions of the world and then being entangled in them again, the latter end worse than the beginning.

Listen, when a man has divorced himself from the only power which can effectually control the flesh, he will walk in his own lusts. Look at 2 Peter 3:3, "Scoffers will come in the last days, walking after their own...what? ... lusts, desires." Men who deny the Lord and forsake the truth may be able to hide the pollution for a little while but God will expose it in heaven for sure and maybe eventually even here. False teachers are immoral. Apostates are immoral, defilers of the flesh. And I think the reason the Bible tells us this is because sometimes we can be fooled by these people. They seem so nice on the surface. Some of the people in the cults seem so very nice. You remember what the Word says.

Now secondly, these filthy dreamers not only defile the flesh, they despise dominion...they despise dominion. Now the word "dominion" is authority. This is the arrogant sin. This is contempt for the commands of God, contempt for the Word of God, contempt for any truth that they wish to deny. The word "despise," outheneo means to do away with something that has been established, to reject. And they reject authority. You say, "What authority?" Listen, the word "authority" is kurioetata (?), and it means, kurio is kurios, Lord. They absolutely reject Lordship, that's the way to translate that word. They reject Lordship.

You say, 'Well, what does that mean?" Well, it could apply to human authority, it's a broad term. It could apply to civil government. It could apply to church government, they would reject the church leaders, they would reject the national leaders, but basically it applies to the Lord. False teachers reject the Lordship of Christ and they pursue their own desires. But have you ever noticed how false teachers are very often not only rejecters of divine authority but rejecters of all authority? I think that's interesting to notice. So very often liberals, apostates are actively fighting for revolutionary causes against the government, against the church, whatever it is. Maxwell Coder (?") says this: "Jude 8 supplies a key to the otherwise inexplicable fact that apostate religious leaders are often found associated with subversive organizations which seek to overthrow the authority of the United States. Not until the tide of apostasy began to rise during the twentieth century was there any effort to set aside the dominion of the government which our fathers established, yet it was written 1900 years ago that apostates would follow such a course."

It is characteristic of apostasy to be in rebellion. Why? Because they are agents of Satan, and believe it, he is in rebellion. He is rebelling against the government, against the home, against the church, against every divine authority that God has ever established. And so very often these people are advocates of open sex, free love, premarital sex, anything you want, they're against the kind of government we have. They want to belong to the organizations that are overthrowing the government. They want to march on city hall, they want to protest this, they want to sit down and do this. They want to paint red paint al 1 over things and burn things and do this and all with the clergy, see.

I remember when we went to Mississippi to preach the gospel, we got into terrible problems because of the fact, I did‑‑the rest of the guys weren't in my particular case, but I got into all kinds of problems because I was a minister. And they said, "Look, we'll deal with anybody but a minister, we don't want you down here." I said, "I'm only coming down here to preach the gospel." well, it was a ... you know, I was ... no way I could convince them, they thought I was going to come down there and upset the whole sociological applecart. It was a tragic thing.

Fight against government. Fight against this. Rebel against authority ... it's characteristic. And most of al 1, people, most of all, they rebel against the Word of God and the Lordship of Jesus Christ. They don't want the Lordship of Christ. They deny Him.

Verse 4, look at it, verse 4: "There are certain men crept in unawares who were before of old, pre‑written to this condemnation, ungodly men turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness and denying the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ." They are rejecters of Lordship. Apostates fight divine authority. They don't want to bear what the Bible says. They don't want to hear what the Word of God says. They don't want you to talk about the fact that judgment is coming on those who do not obey the truth of God. They don't like that. They deny authority. They reject it as well as defiling the flesh.

Third thing about them, verse 8, "They speak evils of glories," doxos, and the word "speak evil" is blasphemeo, from which we get blasphemed. They blaspheme glories and it's a continuous present tense. They continually blaspheme dignities. Some say, "Well, what are these dignities? Are they angels?" Well, some say it's angels, but doxa is never used in the Bible to speak of angels. So, I'm not sure that it's particularly speaking of angels; I really think it is speaking about the glories of Christ. I think when it says they blaspheme glories they are speaking against Christ primarily, against God. Defile the flesh, despise dominion, blaspheme God, that's what an apostate does.

This third one is illustrated in verse 9. He says, "Boy, and for them to blaspheme, speaking evil of some dignified individual, speaking evil of someone who has a glorious position, that is a terrible thing to do. Do you realize that Michael, the archangel, when contending with the devil he disputed about the body of Moses, dared not bring against him a railing accusation but said, The Lord rebuke thee?" Did you know that Michael, super‑angel, Michael didn't even speak a word against Satan? What kind of a fool would speak a word against God? Michael never stepped out of his bounds. When there was to be an accusation against Satan, what did he say? "The Lord rebuke you."

The Lord take care of it. And he's just simply using this as an illustration. If Michael wouldn't even speak a word against the devil, what kind of an idiot would speak a word against God Himself, blaspheming Him? The devil is an exalted creature and Michael recognizes that. And Michael isn't going to say, "You dirty so‑and‑so devil, blah, blah, blah." He just says, "The Lord deal with you." He never steps out of his bounds.

And you say, "Well, what is all this in verse 9?" well, let's look for a minute. Michael, of course, is a great angel, the archangel, THE archangel. I don't believe there was more than one; I believe he was number‑one angel. Maybe once he was number two before Lucifer got the axe and that's why he felt like he did about it. Lucifer became Satan. But now he is THE archangel, chief angel. When he was contending with the devil disputing about the body of Moses, I can't tell you anything about that, people, because this is the only place it appears in the Bible. You say, "What do you mean? What is going on here?" Well, let me give you what I think might be the case.

Moses died, that you know. Everybody does that. Moses died. Moses died and you know where Moses was when he died? He was up on the mount all by himself. He died all alone; there wasn't anybody to take care of him. So, The Lord said, "All right, Michael, you go down there and bury Moses for me." That's interesting, isn't it, that angels would actually do that? I don't know how they do it, they have an angelic shovel or whatever, but He just says, "You go down." Well, that's probably right. "You go down and you bury him." Well, he got down there and the devil was there and said, "Hold it, Michael. You're not going to get this guy's body." And they had a little argument. You say, "What were they arguing over?" Well, most Bible commentators feel that the fact that Satan was arguing with Michael indicates that Satan was trying to preserve the right to maintain and hold on to the body of Moses. Why he was probably saying, "Well, don't you know that Moses was a murderer? He violated the commands of God, the very commands which he himself received later in his life? You, why he has not right to have that kind of burial, his body doesn't belong to you he's a murderer