But conflict is not always avoidable. That is Jude’s whole point in writing his epistle. To remain faithful to the truth, sometimes it is even necessary to wage “civil war” within the church—especially when enemies of truth posing as brethren and believers are smuggling dangerous heresy in by stealth.
WHEN IT’S TIME TO GO TO WAR
Jude’s words stress the pressing urgency and the absolute necessity of the Truth War: “I found it necessary to write to you exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith” (v. 3). The expression “contend earnestly” is translated from a strong Greek verb epagonizomai, literally meaning “agonize against.” The word describes an intensive, arduous, drawn-out fight. There is nothing passive, peaceful, or easy about it. Jude “exhorted” them—meaning he urged and commanded them—to wage a mighty battle on behalf of the true faith.
Jude himself says he felt the necessity to write this command. He employs a verb that speaks of pressure. In other words, he sensed a strong, God-given compulsion to write these things. He was not writing them because he took some kind of perverse glee in being militant. He was not responding to a momentary whimsy or personal anger. This was critical, and since the writers of Scripture never wrote by human self-will, but only as they were moved by the Spirit of God (2 Peter 1:21), the extreme urgency of Jude reflects the sovereign influence of the Holy Spirit, and therefore also the mind of Christ.
We thus have an urgent mandate from God Himself to do our part in the Truth War. The Holy Spirit, through the pen of Jude, is urging Christians to exercise caution, discernment, courage, and the will to contend earnestly for the truth.
Notice what we are supposed to be fighting for. It is not anything petty, personal, mundane, or ego related. This warfare has a very narrow objective. What we are called to defend is no less than “the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.”
Jude is speaking of apostolic doctrine (Acts 2:42)—objective Christian truth—the faith, as delivered from Jesus through the agency of the Holy Spirit by the apostles to the church. As he says in verse 17: “Remember the words which were spoken before by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Notice: no one discovered or invented the Christian faith. It was delivered to us. It was not as if someone mystically ascended into the transcendental realm and drew down an understanding of the truth. We don’t need an enlightened guru to open the mysteries of the faith for us (cf. 1 John 2:27). The truth was entrusted by God to the whole church—intact and “once for all.” It came by revelation, through the teaching of the apostles as preserved for us in Scripture. Jude speaks of “the faith” as a complete body of truth already delivered—so there is no need to seek additional revelation or to embellish the substance of “the faith” in any way. Our task is simply to interpret, understand, publish, and defend the truth God has once and for all delivered to the church.
That is what the Truth War is ultimately all about. It is not mere wrangling between competing earthly ideologies. It is not simply a campaign to refine someone’s religious creed or win a denominational spitting contest. It is not a battle of wits over arcane theological fine points. It is not an argument for sport. It is not like a school debate, staged to see who is more skilled or more clever in the art of argumentation. It is not merely academic in any sense. And it is certainly not a game. It is a very serious struggle to safeguard the heart and soul of truth itself and to unleash that truth against the powers of darkness—in hopes of rescuing the eternal souls of men and women who have been unwittingly ensnared by the trap of devilish deception.
WE MUST NOT TAKE OUR
CUES FROM PEOPLE WHO
ARE PERFECTLY HAPPY TO
COMPROMISE THE TRUTH
WHEREVER POSSIBLE “FOR
HARMONY’S SAKE.” FRIENDLY
DIALOGUE MAY SOUND
AFFABLE AND PLEASANT. BUT
NEITHER CHRIST NOR THE
APOSTLES EVER CONFRONTED
SERIOUS, SOUL-DESTROYING
ERROR BY BUILDING
COLLEGIAL RELATIONSHIPS
WITH FALSE TEACHERS.
This is a battle we cannot wage effectively if we always try to come across to the world as merely nice, nonchalant, docile, agreeable, and fun-loving people. We must not take our cues from people who are perfectly happy to compromise the truth wherever possible “for harmony’s sake.” Friendly dialogue may sound affable and pleasant. But neither Christ nor the apostles ever confronted serious, soul-destroying error by building collegial relationships with false teachers. In fact, we are expressly forbidden to do that (Romans 16:17; 2 Corinthians 6:14–15; 2 Thessalonians 3:6; 2 Timothy 3:5; 2 John 10–11). Scripture is clear about how we are to respond when the very foundations of the Christian faith are under attack, and Jude states it succinctly: it is our bounden duty to contend earnestly for the faith.
Notice carefully: Jude is not suggesting (nor am I) that Christians should contend among themselves over every petty disagreement or divide into factions over every personality conflict. In fact, that is the very thing the apostle Paul condemned in 1 Corinthians 3:3–7. Divisiveness and sectarianism are terrible sins that hurt the church when major divisions are manufactured out of petty differences over trivial, doubtful, indifferent, or less-than-vital matters (Romans 14:1).
Now, you might think that the difference between a picayune disagreement and a serious threat to some core truth of Christianity would always be obvious and clear-cut. Usually, it is. Most of the time, it is easy enough to see the distinction between a peripheral issue and a matter of urgent and fundamental importance. But not always. And here is where mature wisdom and careful discernment become absolutely crucial for every Christian: sometimes serious threats to our faith come in subtle disguise so that they are barely noticeable. And false teachers like to surround their deadly error with some truth. Therein lies the seduction. We must never assume that things like the teacher’s reputation, the warmth of his personality, or majority opinion about him are perfectly safe barometers of whether his teaching is really dangerous or not. We also shouldn’t imagine that common sense, intuition, or first impressions are reliable ways of determining whether this or that error poses a serious threat or not. Scripture, and Scripture alone, is the only safe guide in this area.
As we are about to see, that is one of the key lessons church history has to teach us.
4
CREEPING APOSTASY: HOW FALSE TEACHERS SNEAK IN
For certain men have crept in.
—Jude 4
You can’t necessarily tell a false teacher by the way he or she appears. Every false religious leader is, after all, “religious” by definition. Looking saintly is practically part of the job description. Jesus referred to purveyors of false religion as wolves in sheep’s clothing (Matthew 7:15), and “whitewashed tombs . . . beautiful outwardly, but . . . full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness” (Matthew 23:27). In other words, their religion is an effort at clever camouflage.
Like the Pharisees whom Jesus targeted with those words, most false teachers are experts at feigned piety. Their masquerade can be quite convincing. They maintain a carefully polished veneer of charm and innocence—and at least the appearance of some kind of “spirituality.” They usually come with permanent smiles, gentle words, likable personalities, and vocabularies full of biblical and spiritual words.
There are notable exceptions to this rule, of course. Grigory Rasputin, for example, was a licentious Russian Orthodox mystic, religious healer, and self-styled “holy man” whose influence corrupted the court of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and helped bring about the downfall of the Romanov Dynasty in the early twentieth century. Rasputin looked and acted the way we might expect an overtly evil man to be. He rarely bathed, by all accounts he smelled bad, he was loud and rude, and his lascivious appetites were legendary. Yet he still managed to accumulate a large following of mostly female admirers, many of them coming from the highest ranks of regal St. Petersburg’s society.
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br /> And who could forget Gene Scott, the eccentric televangelist from Southern California whose trademarks included a fat cigar, the lavish use of profanity and off-color remarks (even in his televised teaching), an extremely autocratic style, and a perpetually surly attitude, which he wore on his sleeve? His lifestyle was as flagrantly self-indulgent as his preaching style was crass. Donors to Scott’s “church” signed pledges granting him sole authority to use their contributions any way he pleased. He was the polar opposite of what most people imagine a spiritual leader should be. He nonetheless attracted a significant following and amassed millions in personal assets.
If someone so plainly debauched and unspiritual can gain a large following of clueless disciples, imagine the dangers false teachers pose when they try to seem genuinely devout. Just picture what an enemy of the truth could do if he pretended to be a sincere believer and gained a reputation in the church as a respectable teacher.
As a matter of fact, most false teachers are not so conspicuously unspiritual as Rasputin or Gene Scott. They usually do a passable job of imitating the fruit of the Spirit. They disguise themselves as ministers of righteousness (2 Corinthians 11:14–15). They seem quite sincere. They look and sound and seem harmless enough. They know how to use spiritual-sounding language. They can even quote Scripture with some degree of skill. They know the truth well enough to use it for their own ends—sometimes taking cover behind one truth while they attack another. They know exactly how to gain trust and acceptance from the people of God.
Rarely are their assaults on the truth open and head-on attacks. Instead, they prefer to work underground, drilling little holes in the foundations of truth itself. They do this by suggesting subtle re-definitions, by making crafty modifications, or by suggesting that contemporary Christianity needs to reimagine, update, or simply jettison some supposedly obsolete doctrine. They usually try to sound as innocuous as possible while planting as many doubts as they can. Those doubts are like sticks of dynamite in the foundation holes they have drilled. They are actually working toward the wholesale demolition of the entire structure.
That is what Jude was speaking about when he warned about false teachers who “have crept in unnoticed” (v. 4). He was not describing an utter pagan who slipped in the side door under the cloak of disguise and covertly attended a single church service. He was talking about people who had already gained widespread acceptance and respect as members of the flock. In the worst cases, they had even attained some status as leaders and teachers in the church. They were now using their influence to undermine the Christian faith quietly and subtly for their own wicked ends.
Although at first glance these men might have seemed like valid and respectable leaders in the church, they were in fact the most dangerous kind of false teachers. They were spiritual parasites, feeding on the church for their own selfish benefit. Despite whatever facade of spirituality they must have worn, their real motives were the same as the most wantonly licentious spiritual deviant. Under the mask they wore, they too were secret Rasputins—“ungodly men, who turn the grace of our God into lewdness and deny the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ” (Jude 4).
Jude 12 in some English translations refers to these imposters as “spots in your love feasts” (v. 12). The Greek word translated “spots” is a very specific term often used to signify dangerous reefs in the sea, hidden just under the water’s surface. In other words, these false teachers represented a deadly spiritual hazard. They deliberately lay in wait. They were hard to spot. But they were capable of causing disastrous spiritual shipwrecks (cf. 1 Timothy 1:19).
Yet Jude says, “In your love feasts . . . they feast with you without fear, serving only themselves” (v. 12). The term love feasts is a reference to the Lord’s Table ordinance established by Christ for the church and the common meal that accompanied it. So Jude was speaking about people inside the church, familiar communicants at the table, who looked safe, seemed nice enough, and were well-known to people in the church. But in reality, they were counterfeit Christians with an evil agenda.
Can someone like that be even more dangerous than the hostile critic who stands outside the church and overtly opposes everything the Bible teaches? Absolutely. False teachers and doctrinal saboteurs inside the church have always confused more people and done more damage than open adversaries on the outside. Is an attacking enemy who promises his arrival in advance and wears a uniform for easy identification as dangerous as a terrorist who is hidden and acts with deadly surprise? The answer is obvious.
AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING . . .
Since day one of church history, Christians have found it necessary to resist wave after wave of relentless assaults from countless enemies in the Truth War. But the most determined enemies and the most serious threats have always come from within the visible church herself. Someone who claims to be a Christian attacks some essential Christian truth, and the battle is on.
SPIRITUAL TERRORISTS
AND SABOTEURS WITHIN
THE CHURCH POSE A FAR
MORE SERIOUS THREAT
THAN MANIFESTLY HOSTILE
FORCES ON THE OUTSIDE.
FROM THE VERY START OF
THE CHURCH AGE, ALL THE
MOST SPIRITUALLY
DEADLY ONSLAUGHTS
AGAINST THE GOSPEL HAVE
COME FROM PEOPLE WHO
PRETENDED TO BE
CHRISTIANS—NOT FROM
ATHEISTS AND AGNOSTICS
ON THE OUTSIDE.
This pattern of attack from within became clear very early—even before the New Testament canon was complete. Jude was certainly not dealing with an isolated incident or a rare anomaly in some remote congregation. The enemy sows his tares everywhere the gospel goes, it seems. The New Testament indicates that false teachers rose up very early from almost every quarter of the primitive church. Don’t forget that every writer in the New Testament at one point or another touches on this issue of false teaching inside the church. The theme also permeates Christ’s messages to the churches in Revelation 2–3. The glorified Lord repeatedly commends those who have remained vigilant and who have purged false teachers from their midst (2:2, 6, 9); and He likewise rebukes those who seem oblivious to the problem—or even worse, who deliberately tolerate heretics in their congregations (2:14–16, 20).
It is also quite clear from the biblical record that spiritual terrorists and saboteurs within the church pose a far more serious threat than manifestly hostile forces on the outside. From the very start of the church age, all the most spiritually deadly onslaughts against the gospel have come from people who pretended to be Christians—not from atheists and agnostics on the outside. Moreover, the numerous occasions when false teaching showed up in the early church involved a surprising variety of errors.
An incident in Thessalonica, for example, reveals the extremes to which false teachers will sometimes go. Someone apparently orchestrated a scheme to make people in the Thessalonian church think the Lord had already returned to gather His people to Himself and the Thessalonians had been left behind. They received a phony letter, purporting to be from the apostle Paul, notifying them that the day of the Lord was already here (2 Thessalonians 2:1–2). A wave of fear swept through the church. “The day of the Lord” in Scripture always speaks of a time of cataclysmic judgment—a massive future outpouring of divine wrath that will ultimately usher in the final judgment and destruction of the whole sin-cursed universe (cf.2 Peter 3:10). The Thessalonians no doubt began to wonder if their current sufferings might be only the beginning of many worse things to come. Had they for some reason been left to endure the Great Tribulation?
Evidently, the bogus letter had even been corroborated both “by spirit” (probably through a false prophecy) and “by word” (possibly by a lying witness who claimed to have heard the message from Paul’s own mouth). But it was all just an elaborate ruse designed to discourage and confuse that church.
In another episode, referred to in 2 Timothy 2:17, P
aul warned Timothy against the influence of Hymenaeus and Philetus, “who have strayed concerning the truth, saying that the resurrection is already past; and they overthrow the faith of some” (v. 18). That apparently wasn’t an unusual case either, because Paul urged Timothy to be on guard against other heretics of the same sort and to shun them (v. 16).
The apostle John had a similar word of caution about the influence of a power-hungry leader in the church named Diotrephes, “who loves to have the preeminence”—and who had apparently made a career of opposing the apostle John (3 John 9).
So it is absolutely clear from Scripture that heretics, apostates, rebels, and false teachers infiltrated the church very early and in surprising abundance. And when Jude wrote this Spirit-inspired caution about the influence of false teachers who sneak in unnoticed—“ungodly men, who turn the grace of our God into lewdness and deny the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ” (v. 4)—he wasn’t speaking only to a single church facing an unusual peril. This is a message that applies to every true believer in every age.
What, specifically, might have prompted the urgency of Jude’s message? He seems to have been addressing a significant and widespread error of a particular sort. Evidently, whatever threat he had in mind wasn’t the teaching of a single individual, and it wasn’t merely the vague possibility that some unknown person here or there might start teaching another lie. He was responding to a coordinated assault involving multiple false teachers whom Jude had in mind specifically—“certain men”—who posed a real and present danger.
The Truth War Page 10