Dangerous Influences

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Transcript:

Tonight, I’d like to talk to you about the subject of dangerous influences, bad influences. And we all hear about people being bad influences. I know for years, not only being a teenager in the youth group, but then as a college student working with the youth group, I’d hear all the concerns about bad influences.

And the number of parents I heard talk about how their kid just fell in with the wrong crowd. And I thought it was interesting. Nobody’s kid ever was the wrong crowd.

It’s just their kids fell in with the wrong crowd. Somewhere out there is a group of kids that just is the wrong crowd, and they’re the ones corrupting everybody. No, that’s not true.

We know that bad influences abound, and sometimes we can be those bad influences, maybe. Jude, as the brother of Jesus writing to the churches in his day, was writing about some people who were bad influences on the church. As a matter of fact, they went that step beyond just being a bad influence to being a dangerous influence.

If you haven’t already, turn with me to the book of Jude. We’re going to continue on with this study of the book of Jude, and we’re going to look at verses 12 through 19 tonight. It’s going to be a similar theme to what we’ve studied already, because this is one of the shorter books of the Bible.

I’ve on purpose been here recently studying some of these shorter books, both in the Old Testament and the New Testament, because we don’t often pay a lot of attention to them because they’re short. But they were written for a purpose, and sometimes I think their short length gives them a little bit more emphasis, because they don’t mince words. They say what needs to be said and get finished, And I could probably learn from that.

But the book of Jude, he deals with warning the churches about these dangerous influences that are taking place. So we’re going to, as I said tonight, we’re going to look at verses 12 through 19. Starting in verse 12 here of the book of Jude.

It says, from Adam prophesied, Look, the Lord comes with his tens of thousands of his holy ones to execute judgment on all and to convict all the ungodly concerning all the ungodly acts that they have done in an ungodly way and concerning all the harsh things ungodly sinners have said against him. These people are discontented grumblers, living according to their desires, their mouths utter arrogant words flattering people for their own advantage. But you, dear friends, remember what was predicted by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ. They told you in the end time there will be scoffers living according to their own ungodly desires.

These people create divisions and are worldly, not having the spirit. So in this passage, Jude was describing the antinomian teachers who had become a real problem in the churches in his day. They were dangerous, and he was describing them as being dangerous, untrustworthy teachers.

They were a bad influence. Now, to refresh your memory, or for those of you who haven’t been with us each time in the past that we’ve gone over this, the antinomians were of the mindset that because of the grace of Jesus, because he forgives us, we can just do whatever we want, and we can sin as much as we want because, hey, there’s grace. It comes from the word anti, which we know means against, and nomos in Greek, which is the law.

So they are against any law, any standard external to themselves. So they’re hostile toward anything that puts any kind of limits on their behavior. And I’ve explained to you, there are a couple of extremes, and there’s a biblical truth to be found in the middle of those extremes.

Because on one hand, we see the law in the Bible, and it’s possible to take the law to an extreme. We see grace in the Bible, and it’s possible to take grace to an extreme. Taking the law to an extreme says, if I can just be good enough, if I can just live up to these laws, then God will be okay with me.

Well, that’s true, but the problem is we can’t possibly. But legalism says we can. Legalism says we should.

Legalism says we must, according to this law, we must live up to every aspect of this in order to please God, in order to be worthy of God’s love. Now, grace taken to an extreme over here on the other side, says because of the grace of God, because he forgives everything, because he overlooks in his grace every time we fall short of the law, then there is no longer any standard and we can just do what we want. It’s what Paul was talking about when he said, should we continue in sin that grace may abound?

In Romans, Paul was dealing with antinomians there who were saying, hey, the more sin we do, the more grace there is. What a great idea, right? No, in the middle is the biblical truth where the law and grace are held in tension.

Yes, there is a standard of God’s law that says what is right and what is wrong. Now, the problem with that is you and I cannot live up to that law. It’s impossible.

It’s impossible. If the law is the standard, if the law is the sign saying you must be this holy to ride this ride, guess what? None of us are holy enough because God’s standard is absolute sinless perfection.

So there is a standard because the laws of God proceed from the nature of God. I had professors in college who used to say, and they’d use this every time to trip Christian students up, those of us who were brave or foolish enough to admit that we were Christians in their classes. They would use this to try to trip us up.

And they’d say, and it’s a variation on something from ancient Greek philosophy, but they’d say, is right right because God says so, or does God say so because it’s right. Hear me on this. Are the rules this because God said so, or did God say so because there’s some other standard by which God judges right and wrong?

And it’s a catch-22. It’s like what the Pharisees always used to try to do to Jesus. Because here, if we say, well, it’s right because God said so, that sounds good.

That sounds biblical. Think about it this way. What they would then say is, okay, so if God said that murder and adultery were okay, would they suddenly become okay? Oh.

And suddenly the law of God sounds very arbitrary, and it’s just God trying to push people around. On the other hand, if you say, no, it’s just right and wrong, and that’s why God says so, because it just is right. There’s some other standard.

Ah, then suddenly God is subject to some other standard, some other external standard, and suddenly God is not actually as in control as we think he is. And I wish, I wish I could go back in time. I wish I had a time machine to go back in time because I figured it out a few years after that.

It bothered me. You know how you can go through college, you can go through high school classes for that matter and not remember a thing you were taught. That stuck with me and it bothered me for years.

And it was a few years into pastoring, I’m reading and I couldn’t tell you what passage of scripture I was reading, but it hit me, there’s a third option. That’s what Jesus was great at doing, what the Pharisees was figuring out the third option. There’s a third option.

It’s not that there’s some external standard, and it’s not that God just arbitrarily decided right and wrong. It’s that the law and right and wrong flow from the nature of God. It flows from who He is.

Why is honesty right? Because God is a God of truth. Why is faithfulness in marriage, faithfulness in any of our relationships, faithfulness in our business dealings.

Why is that right? Because God is faithful. Why is murder wrong?

Because God is a God of life. He’s the giver of life. See, all of this flows from who He is.

And so He Himself is the standard. I know I’m getting way too into philosophy here, but I think it’s important for us to understand that the law reflects who God is. And so His standard is absolute sinless perfection.

Now bring that back to the discussion here about grace and the law. We can’t get rid of the standard because it comes from who God is. The standard can’t change unless God changes, but we can’t live up to the standard.

That’s why there’s grace. God said, let me deal with the standard for you. Not let me get rid of the standard, let me fulfill the standard.

And so he sent Jesus to die on the cross so that he would take responsibility for our sins. Those sins would and the slate would be wiped clean and we would be clothed in the righteousness of Christ. The standard has been met in Jesus Christ, but that is not an excuse for us then to go out and ignore the standard because by the death of Jesus, God showed that the standard still mattered because otherwise God could have snapped his fingers and said, okay, fine, there’s no law. I’ll just forgive you.

No, the standard was, the standard still had to be met. And so where we come in in the balance of these two is to recognize that God’s law is God’s law, there is still a standard of right and wrong that flows from who God is, and grace is there for when we fall short, but grace also changes us to make us want to desire, to make us desire to live according to that standard, not because we think that’s how we’re going to get to heaven, but because we want to please him. And so as people who have been made right with God, legally, we want to then come and as to the best of our ability, as we’re empowered by his spirit, we want to be faithful to him in our behavior.

But they were taking it out of context and saying, oh, grace just means you can do what you want. No, grace means we have the opportunity to live for him because all those times that we fall short of the standard have now been taken care of. And I know when we start throwing around words like antinomianism, sometimes our eyes start to glaze.

I love philosophy and theology and all of those thinky things. But sometimes I’ll listen to preachers talk about them, and my mind will start to wander and I’ll start to glaze over until we think about how it applies to us today. And when we realize these are the same things still being taught today, we have, and I don’t want to get political, I’m not going to name names, but we have presidential candidates out there today who are saying, oh, some of these things that God’s Word says, they don’t actually mean that.

You can go get the mayor or senator or whoever’s study Bible after the campaign is over. I’m sure they’ll be writing one. But no, God’s standard has not changed, but there are still people out there saying today in Washington, people in Hollywood, people in Nashville, and people in the churches all over this country saying, oh, because of grace, we can do whatever.

It sounds good, but it’s not biblical. And it’s the same thing that Paul was arguing against. It’s the same thing that Jude was arguing against here. And writing about these teachers, those who were teaching this, he said that they were dangerous. Look at the way he describes them here.

In verse 12, he called them dangerous reefs. Dangerous reefs. It’s an odd phrase until you think about a lot of people being sailors.

I mean, this was the Roman world. The Mediterranean was just a big giant lake in the middle of them. And that’s how they would ship people.

That’s how they would ship goods across the empire was on their little wooden boats. You didn’t want to run across a reef, an underwater reef of rocks or coral, I guess something that could poke a large hole in your boat and bring it down and possibly lose everything and everybody on board. Dangerous reefs.

They would be there just under the surface of the water. They’d be hard to make out. They’d be hard to see, but they could do an awful lot of damage.

And he said that these teachers were dangerous reefs. In verse 12, they’re dangerous reefs at your love feasts. If you’re confused by that, that’s not something that took place in the 60s.

He’s describing the Lord’s Supper. He’s describing the Lord’s Supper. That’s one of the terms that they used to use to describe the Lord’s Supper because they would get together and they would feast on the broken bread and the cup that represented His blood, and they would remember the love of Jesus Christ, and they would ponder on his love for them and their love for one another, and they called it the love feast. And he said, these people show up at your Lord’s Supper, and they eat with you without reverence, and they’re dangerous reefs.

Well, of course, they have no reverence. We’ve learned in previous chapters that they blaspheme anything that stands between them and their enjoyment. Any external standard in God’s Word or anywhere else that puts any kind of constraint on what they want to do, they’re going to be against it.

So they come to the Lord’s Supper, and these are the kind of people who in 1 Corinthians were turning the Lord’s Supper into a big drunken party. He said, they’re not there to worship. They’re just there to fulfill all their other appetites.

And they come in like these dangerous reefs, this wild irreverent treatment of the Lord’s Supper. It was basically a mockery of the death of Christ, and their influence was going to shipwreck people if they didn’t cut them out of the fellowship, if they didn’t deal with it. They were these dangerous reefs.

Why are the reefs dangerous? Because they sink ships. So he says, you’ve got to be aware they are there just under the surface, and if they’re not dealt with, they’re going to hurt you too.

There are some views that cannot coexist in the church. That’s not me saying that. That’s biblical. I mean, at the end of Romans, Paul talked about, mark out those who cause division and avoid them.

I’m not talking about a difference on a minor point of theology here. I know we don’t all agree 100% on everything. I think if we sat around and talked about it, we’d probably see some different possibilities and some interpretations of some difficult passages.

We may have different views of the end times. We may have some different views on some different things. That’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m not saying we have to march totally in lockstep, that y’all check your brains at the door and just believe what the pastor tells you. I hope, I hope that after all my time here, you know that I believe the opposite. I want you very much engaged in the scripture and your brains turned on and check what I say against the scriptures.

But I am telling you, I am telling you there are some views that cannot coexist in the church. They either have to be driven out. You don’t have to do it in a mean way, but those ideas either have to be driven out or they will infect the whole church.

They’ll cause all kinds of division in the church. They won’t peacefully coexist. And this idea of antinomianism, this very loose, whatever we want to do, sin is okay, kind of viewpoint is one of those ideas. So I don’t want you to think I’m calling anybody out and saying, you disagreed with me on this, you’re out of the church.

No, I mean something like this where there’s no sin is fine because there’s grace. He said that idea was a reef that was going to sink some of their ships if they didn’t deal with it. He said this is dangerous.

Hey, he described, I could spend all night talking about each of these because it’s so relevant to what’s going on in our world today. In verse 12, he calls himself a shepherd. He said they’re shepherds who only look after themselves.

That’s not much of a shepherd. The shepherd’s there to watch over the sheep, not take care of themselves. But he said as teachers, they were claiming to shepherd the sheep, but their only real concern was their own self-interest. And I’m not naming names here only because I can’t remember the name, but when I read stuff like this, my mind goes back to the TV preacher who a year or two ago was asking money so he could buy another private jet to keep him away from the sheep.

He was talking how annoying it was, all the people wanting him, they’d see him on an airplane and they’d come up to him wanting him to pray for them and how he couldn’t be bothered by the little people. So he’s out there telling the sheep, if you’ll give the money to God, Sign my name on the check, but give the money to God. He’ll bless you.

He’ll bless you beyond your wildest dreams. And he’s out there fleecing the sheep to be kept away from the sheep. No, there’s more than one. Yeah, that’s just the one that comes to mind.

That’s the sort of stuff where you’re dealing with a shepherd who pretends to be shepherding the sheep, but really is focused on taking care of himself. He said there, Jude said these people in his day were selfish shepherds. He calls them in verse 12 also waterless clouds.

Now this was puzzling. I get the idea of waterless clouds being dry and lifeless, but I had to do a little more digging into this one. And when you realize that a lot of them, especially if Jude was riding from Jerusalem, a lot of them were out in desert areas in the Middle East. You don’t get a lot of rain and you don’t get it very often.

And so when you would begin to see rain clouds on the horizon, especially at the end of the dry season. Have you ever seen those nature documentaries where they make it look like the animals are just on their last leg? They’re out there in Africa.

They’re out on their last leg, and it’s all hope is lost, and then suddenly you hear thunderclaps, and the rain moves in. I don’t know that it’s that dramatic, that everything’s about to die in the next 20 seconds if rain doesn’t come through, but you sort of get the sense that that’s how it works. Now, imagine if those rain clouds come sweeping through this desert area, And they look like rain clouds, but when they get there, they’re just dry.

We’ve had a bunch of them, yeah. But imagine being desperate for that water, and then it shows up and you’re disappointed. Well, that’s kind of where they were.

And it made a lot more sense when I started thinking about it from the perspective of people in the desert waiting for those rain clouds to come, and then it does nothing. These teachers were a disappointment. They were disappointments in the desert because they couldn’t offer any spiritual refreshment to God’s people.

And he talks about, in this verse, being carried along by the winds. They’re just moving around. They are unstable spiritually.

They just blow from one dead heresy to the next, and they’re not able to offer any real spiritual life or refreshment. Waterless clouds. I love that.

I love that picture. Now that I understand it, I love that picture that Jude gives us. He says they’re barren trees.

Look there in, I believe that’s in verse 12 also. Trees in late autumn. You know, in late autumn, after the leaves have fallen off, there’s all the fruits gone, there’s nothing left.

But he also says, he throws in, they’re fruitless. They’re twice dead, so I’m guessing they haven’t borne fruit for a couple of years, and uprooted. They’re not bearing any fruit again anytime soon.

These trees were dead, devoid of both the root and the fruit. And he said that’s what they were, these teachers. There was nothing life-giving about the teaching that they were bringing.

Verse 13, he says, They were wild waves foaming up their shameful deeds. These waves were stirring things up. And some of the writers I read on this passage give the idea that he was probably talking about when he says that they were foaming up their shameful deeds.

He’s giving the imagery of us of garbage being washed up on the shore from what’s underneath. You know, I’ve been to the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of hurricanes. I can’t remember which one.

But I know we already had a trip scheduled, and we went once to the Florida Panhandle just a couple months after a hurricane had hit. It wasn’t a direct hit. But you’d look out there, and, you know, the water looked nice.

But you get down there on the beach, and you see that with every wave coming up, it’s washing up shingles, and it’s washing up bicycles. and syringes. I mean, from a distance, the waves look nice, but there’s a bunch of garbage there swirling around just under the surface, and every wave is foaming that up onto the shore.

And what he’s showing us here is that they were in the churches, and they were stirring things up like wild waves, and the garbage of their wicked lives was being beached on the shore. Now, they might look good as calling themselves Bible teachers, but they couldn’t hide what was going on in their lives for very long. They couldn’t hide the effect of this sinful teaching for very long.

And in verse 13, he also calls them wandering stars. Now, I had some ideas about what that might mean, and I was evidently very wrong. I don’t mind telling you that.

I studied on this. What is a wandering star? It seems that Jude was describing shooting stars.

This makes way more sense than what I thought. It appears that he’s describing shooting stars. And we’ve probably all seen a shooting star at some point in our lives.

When you notice them, they stand out. You may not always notice them, but the ones you notice, you notice because they’re moving and nothing else is, and they catch your attention. And a lot of times they look really bright.

That’s because they’re closer than the other stars out there. They’re inside our atmosphere. And yet they’re just, They’re just there lighting things up for a brief moment, and then they’re gone.

And you know what? Those shooting stars never shine again, do they? Those wandering stars never shine again because they are hunks of rock and space debris that are burning up on reentry, and most of them burns up, and what doesn’t burn up is just a hunk of rock that impacts the earth.

And just like those flash for a minute, and they appear bright for a minute, and then they’re dark forever. He said, these false teachers are wandering stars for whom the blackness of darkness is reserved forever. These antinomian teachers were like shooting stars that appeared to be brilliant for a moment, but disappear into darkness forever.

That’s a pretty good way to describe their teaching. And so he describes them to the early churches, not just to describe them, not just so they could identify them, but as a warning to the earliest Christians to stay away from them. I mean, I certainly don’t want to hang out with stars that are going to be consigned to eternal darkness and waves that bring up garbage and dead trees.

I mean, that doesn’t sound like anything I’m interested in. So he’s warning them, dangerous reefs, stay away. And he references here in verse 11, I’m sorry, verse 14, the book of Enoch, which is a non-canonical book.

It means it’s one that was not recognized as scripture. Some people have had problems with this. They’ve said, well, then Enoch should, if he quotes it in this way, Enoch should be in Scripture.

No, the Apostle Paul quoted pagan Greek poets. That doesn’t make them Scripture. It just makes it a cultural reference that people would have understood.

The book of Enoch may record some things that are historical fact. It may have some wisdom to it, but there’s no indication anywhere that it’s inspired Scripture. I’ve even thought about how Jude uses the word prophesied.

Well, it’s entirely possible that Enoch, in the book of Genesis when he spoke about what was going on, that he did prophesy, that he did speak on God’s behalf. We know from the book of Genesis that Enoch walked with God in a way that was unusual for anybody in his day, but that doesn’t mean that everything that was written about him suddenly belongs in the Bible. So I’m just in case there’s any question from any of you all as you study through the book of Jude about the book of Enoch, why is it not in there?

Well, It’s not inspired Scripture. Jude is just telling a story that they would understand. Just like if I tell you, I think I’ve given this example before, if I reference the story of George Washington and the cherry tree in a sermon, it’s not necessarily because I believe it actually happened exactly the way we were taught in school.

There may be some kernels of truth to the story. But it’s because it’s a cultural story that most people, at least my age and older, will understand. I don’t know that they teach that anymore.

I don’t think they say much good about the founding fathers anymore. But it’s a cultural story that people will understand. So, with that in mind, he gives this example, this reference from the book of Enoch, making the case that the judgment of God lays at the end of this road of their teaching.

What they were teaching is the same thing that people were teaching in the days before Noah that got the world in so much trouble. Same thing that was being taught in the days of Sodom and Gomorrah that got them in so much trouble. And he’s making the case that if you follow this road of what they’re teaching, the judgment of God lays at the end of it.

See, in verse 14, he says that Enoch prophesied, Look, the Lord comes with ten thousands of his holy ones, verse 15, to execute judgment on all and to convict all the ungodly concerning all the ungodly acts that they have done in an ungodly way and concerning all the harsh things ungodly sinners said against him. So Enoch was basically saying, and Jude was referencing this to make his readers understand God is going to execute judgment one day. These antinomians say, oh, there’s just grace.

It’s all grace. We can do whatever. No, God will execute judgment.

And if that was their attitude, it indicated they probably weren’t born again to begin with, and so they were really going to face the judgment of God. God will execute judgment. It says in verse 15 that he will convict the ungodly.

They’re not going to escape. It says in verse 15, he will bring all ungodly acts to light, because he talks about the ungodly manner. He’s going to judge the ungodliness, and he’s going to judge all of their ungodly actions.

Let me see. Concerning all the ungodly acts that they have done in an ungodly way. Think about that.

Think about the double whammy there, how bad that was. They didn’t just do ungodly things. They did ungodly things in an ungodly way.

Now, I don’t know how you do ungodly things in a godly way, But I think the fact that it’s pointed out here that they did both the thing and the way, means God’s paying attention to all of this. He’s not going to miss any of this. He’s going to bring all the ungodliness to light, not just the actions, but the condition of the heart, the way they did it.

And he’s even going to judge their ungodly words because he talks about all the ungodly things that have been said. And so it’s a warning from Jude to these churches. Stay away from them.

you don’t want to go down the same road because nothing lies down at the end of that road except the judgment of God. It may look, this sin, this teaching that sin is all right may look fun when you’re on the on-ramp, but once you get down past the last toll booth, there’s nothing good that lays on that road. So ultimately, the problem with these false teachers was that they were demonstrating that they had rejected Christ because he said they were living in an ungodly way.

Verse 16 tells us they were following their own desires. Okay, it says, We know they were following their own desires, but it also says they were never satisfied because they were discontented grumblers. Think about it that way.

They were getting all that they ever wanted, living according to their own desires, and they still weren’t happy because they just wanted to go into greater and greater depths of darkness. Their hearts were filled with pride that spilled out of their mouths in arrogant words. Because he talks about the arrogant words that came out of their mouths.

And Jesus said, out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. So what was coming out of their mouths tells us what was in their hearts. And they were to the point where they would say anything to get whatever they wanted.

They were flattering people to their own advantage. So everything about the way that they were living was ungodly. And all of this was in spite of Jesus’ warnings.

Now, he refers to the warnings that came from the apostles of the Lord Jesus Christ, but Jesus is the one who told the apostles. You can go back to Matthew 24 and other passages where Jesus talks about the judgment of the world. That’s where the apostles learned all this.

So even though they heard from the apostles the warning about the judgment that was to come, it was really Jesus’ message. And so they were ignoring this. They knew from Jesus’ teaching that sin had to be judged.

They knew from Jesus’ teaching sent through the apostles that there would be a judgment day. And they knew from Jesus’ teaching sent through the apostles that the only way to avoid this was if they would repent and take hold of his grace that he offered in Jesus, that they refused. And we know, folks, that if they had repented, we know that if they had repented, Jesus would have changed their hearts, wouldn’t he?

Everything we see in Scripture teaches that when we’re born again, everything becomes new. Doesn’t mean it becomes easy overnight. It doesn’t mean we become sinless.

But we know that Jesus changes the heart. And I’ve explained to you before, repentance, that Greek word that’s translated repentance means a change of mind. It doesn’t mean we become sinless.

It doesn’t mean we walk away from our sin in the sense that we never do anything wrong again. What it means is our perspective changes where we come into agreement with God about our sin. We recognize that it’s wrong.

We recognize that it’s an offense against Him. When we slip and fall into sin again, we don’t just wallow in it, we hate it. That’s the mark of a repentant person.

And we seek his power to help us not do it again. We know that if they had repented, Jesus would have changed their hearts. And yet their hearts showed no evidence of change.

It showed every evidence. Their hearts showed every evidence of just looking for ways to justify these same old sinful behavior in light of grace, by misusing grace. And so what made these teachers so dangerous to the church was not ultimately that their behavior was so far from Christian morality, although that was a problem.

What made them dangerous was not that their behavior was so far from Christian morality. What made them dangerous was that their hearts were so far from Christ. Because Jesus changes hearts and he transforms lives. When we come to Jesus, the desire is not to sin as much as we c

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