Jude 8-11    Filthy Dreamers

Jude is writing to Christians whose Church has been infiltrated by false teachers. He writes to encourage the Christians to be true to what they had received from the apostles and to warn them of the consequences of forsaking the faith. He takes them back to three characters from the Old Testament in order to strengthen their resolve to obey the Word of God rather than the nonsense being peddled by the false teachers.

Jude regards the false teachers as wicked men who are filthy dreamers. They are peddling as truth the figments of their own filthy minds and evil dreams and they are peddling this error for their own personal gain. These false teachers are not a new phenomenon and this little book demonstrates that from the time of Cain man has substituted the figments of his own imagination for God’s revealed truth.

Cain    Genesis 4:1-8

He refers us first to Cain, the first-born of Adam and Eve. Here it is revealed that the religion of unregenerate man is essentially defective. Cain and his brother Abel reveal to us that the secret of right living is faith in God. Acceptable worship from the beginning of time was a matter of Divine revelation and obedience to what God had revealed. God revealed to our first fathers the manner of acceptable worship. Acceptable sacrifice comes from faith that is obedient. It is obedient faith that makes a sacrifice acceptable. A disobedient formal sacrifice is worthless. That was the problem with Cain's offering and his reaction demonstrated that his heart lay at the root of the problem.

Only spiritual worship as revealed by God through the Holy Spirit commends people to God. This is illustrated in the life of Abel. He possessed faith and he revealed his faith by offering a sacrifice acceptable to God. Religion under the guidance of the Holy Spirit has a positive influence on character. The quality of Abel's piety, its depth and spirituality, cost him his life, and made him at the same time the first martyr for true religion.

 Faith prepares men not only to live out their faith, but enables them to be ready to die for their faith. Abel had religious convictions for which he was ready to lay down his life. Cain, on the other hand, feared the fate, which he deserved.

Martin Luther was one of the leaders of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. When he travelled to his historic trial at the Diet at Worms, the people crowded the windows and housetops of the city to see him as he went past. They knew his danger but they were aware of a greater danger, theirs and his, and the cause of reformed religion on the earth. Their concern for him was: “Will he stand firm for us? Will he stand for the faith to the death”? “In solemn words they cried out to him not to recant. ‘Whosoever denies Me before men,’ they cried to him in a kind of solemn petition”. Luther stood for the human race. Would his faith fail? If it did then the faith of the people would fail. If his would stand, then theirs would stand and the Reformation would triumph. It was not so important that he should live, as that he should stand in unconquerable faith. Much depended on the faith of that one man. Much depended on the faith of Abel. Where would Eve find hope again, with Cain a murderer and Abel dead? Where would Seth get an example, along with Enoch and Noah, and the other saints prior to the flood? Where did Abraham and the patriarchs get their inspiration? Abel's faith shone out as a beacon light through all those early centuries and the heroes of faith who were inspired by him all lived loyally. “These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off was assured of them, embraced them and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For those who say such things declare plainly that they seek a homeland. And truly if they had called to mind that country from which they had come out, they would have had opportunity to return. But now they desire a better, that is, a heavenly country. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them. Heb 11:13-16. Covet a faith to live by but seek a faith like that of Abel to die by.

Balaam:   Numbers 22-34

Now he turns their attention to Balaam. Balaam was the man whose donkey had greater spiritual insight than had the prophet.

The Israelites were still in the wilderness but they were now a strong nation. They had met and defeated the desert tribes, and were now threatening Moab, which lay between them and the Promised Land. Balak, king of Moab, looks to defend his territory, and, like a wise general, studies and adopts the tactics of his successful enemy. He has learned that Moses, a prophet of Jehovah, leads the Israelites and that his prayers in the battle against Amalek secured the victory. Balak went looking for a prophet to defend his nation.

Hundreds of miles away, near the headwaters of the Euphrates, there lived another prophet of Jehovah, whose reputation was known throughout the whole region. Balak sends for him. The Israelites have a prophet and now he will have a prophet. He recognises that in the battles fought by the Israelites it was a spiritual force that won the victory. He will employ that force on his side. Moses is a prophet of Jehovah; his prophet shall also be a prophet of Jehovah's. A very shrewd man is Balak. Holding to the Oriental custom of devoting an enemy to destruction before battle, he will match his enemy even in this respect as nearly as possible. It may surprise some that a prophet of Jehovah should be found outside the Hebrew nation. This reminds us that God has His witnesses in all nations.

Balaam came from the ancient home of Abraham and the people of that region may still have been monotheistic. Balaam probably knew all about the Israelites: their history from the patriarchs to the present, their exodus from Egypt, their religion, their development under the guiding hand of Moses, their power in battle, and the energy with which they were slowly moving up from the desert to the rich slopes of Palestine, He would have known that this was a migration inspired by a faith very similar to his own. These Israelites were not his enemies, and he would not readily wish to treat them as such. When the messengers of Balak come to him with their hands full of rewards, asking him to go and curse Israel, he weighs the matter up, devotes a whole night to thinking it over, carries it to God in the simplicity of a good conscience, and refuses to go to Balak.

So far he seems a true man, acting from considerations of mingled wisdom and inspiration. The messengers retrace their long journey home but Balak is determined to get his man. He now sends more important officials with larger gifts.

He is a shrewd man, and knows all about the human heart. He not only sends gifts but sends them by the hands of princes and, with the gifts, promises of promotion to great honour. Balaam is now tested by a triple temptation: flattery, riches, and power. He could resist one of them but all three of them put a different complexion on things. Flattery could not seduce him, money could not buy him, and ambition could not deflect him, but when all three were united, flattery dropping sweet words into his ear, gold glittering before his eyes, and ambition weaving its crown before his imagination Balaam could no longer resist. Balak eventually got his man, but not at once. Men like Balaam do not readily yield to evil. The undoing of a strong character is something like building one up. They both take time. This was the greatest spiritual crisis in Balaam's life. This was the first step in the downward journey away from God. It was the day of God's power towards Israel, and it could also have been a day of God’s grace to Balaam but he allowed it to pass. From this time on Balaam’s downward course was rapid. He perished in the rejection of grace and mercy.

You may also suffer a crisis in your life as Balaam did. A time, perhaps a moment, on which your eternity depends. There may be nothing to mark it out as a great crisis at the time. The Spirit of God may strive with you, but strive gently. There may be some conviction in your mind, but it all may depend on your yielding up your heart to Christ. When you have sufficient light and you know what you should do, if you allow any second thought to come in, anything selfish or worldly, then the Spirit may take a back seat in your life for the rest of your life. Your day of grace, like Balaam's, may pass by. It does not need to be any awful temptation, one which everyone would advise you to resist. It may be some offer which many would advise you would be foolish to reject. It could be something that the world thinks would be to your advantage but, if you give way to the temptation, you have no idea what unforeseen consequences may follow, step by step, with unerring certainty. Let Balaam impress upon your heart what great and eternal consequences may depend upon one little act. God had revealed His will and that should have been enough. What was it that gave this bias to Balaam's will, and led him still to inquire, when he knew what he should do?. Scripture gives a complete answer to that question. In Balaam’s case he had a besetting sin, and we are told what it was. It was the sin of covetousness; He wanted the wealth (2 Peter 3:15).

There are two lessons which this should impress upon our hearts. First, we should see and understand the amazing power and awful effects of one besetting sin. We see how it perverts the will, how it keeps the heart from resting on the plain word of God, how it leads to neglect of spiritual things, and how it hurries the soul onward to a place it never dreamt of going to. The other lesson is the deceitfulness of the human heart. Its wishes may be quite opposite to its most solemn professions. At the very moment when we seem to be guided by the will of God it may be that we are following some personal desire of our own.

We sometimes forget that God is the searcher of the heart, and that He deals, and will deal with us, not according to what we profess to be, but according to what we are, according to the real state of our hearts.

Korah:              Numbers 16

God has brought the Israelites out of Egypt. One of the first lessons which they had to learn was that their new-found freedom did not mean license to do all that seemed right in their own eyes. From that thinking springs up self-will, division, quarrels, revolt, civil war, weakness, profligacy, and ruin to the whole nation. Without order, discipline, and obedience to law, there can be no true and lasting freedom. Order had to be maintained, the law obeyed, and rebellion punished. The well-being of the Nation depended on the people’s total obedience to God’s Law. In those circumstances the word was, obey or die. As for any cruelty in putting Korah and those who supported him, to death, it was a small price to pay in order to preserve the nation of the Jews to be the teachers of God’s Law to the world. Moses was not their king. It was God who brought them out of Egypt, God was their king. That was the lesson which they had to learn, and that was the lesson they had to teach the other nations also. Not Moses, but God was King and He must punish the rebels to demonstrate that He is not a dead, but a living God, who can defend Himself, and enforce His own laws. God can execute judgment without needing any man to fight His battles for Him and God does so. The powers of nature, the earthquake and the fire, were the methods God used to punish these rebels.

Think about the earth opening and swallowing them up. Who sends the earthquake? Who sends the fire? Do they come from the devil? Do they come by chance or from some blind powers of nature?

This chapter answers, “No; they come from the Lord, from whom all good things come. They come from the Lord who delivered the Israelites out of Egypt and who so loved the world that He spared not His only-begotten Son, but freely gave Him for us.” You cannot read the Bible without seeing how that great lesson was stamped into the very hearts of the Hebrew prophets. They continually spoke of the fire and the earthquake, and continually declared that they obey God and do God's will. The man who fears God need not fear them.

God was their hope and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore would they not fear, though the earth was moved, and though the mountains are carried into the midst of the sea.

We too, need the same lesson in these days. We too need to fix it in our hearts, that the powers of nature are the powers of God; that He orders them by His providence to do His will, when and where He will. As the Psalmist says, the winds are His messengers and the flames of fire His ministers. This we shall learn from the Bible, and from no other book. God taught the Jews this by a strange and miraculous education that they might teach it in their turn to all mankind.

Jude uses these Old Testament characters to teach the Christians of his day eternal lessons concerning the folly of listening to false teachers. The Holy Spirit uses Jude to teach us those same lessons today. Make the Word of God your authority in spiritual matters and judge every teacher by his or her faithfulness to that Word.