In the body of the epistle we have already had the coming of the Lord in judgment, that is to say, bound up with the awful departure from the truth which was to be found in the Christian profession. This is what many souls are very unwilling to face. It is natural for man to think that everything must be progressive—the truth as well as all else. No one ever drew that from the Bible, and every part of the Bible from the first book till the last, shows us man set in a place by God, and abandoning it for Satan. And there is the same story here. No doubt it is unspeakably terrible to find that what bears the name of Christ should turn out worst of all. I need not say the guilt of that is entirely man's, and that the secret source of that evil is still Satan, as Satan is always behind the scenes in his antagonism, not only to God, but more particularly to the Lord Jesus. He is the One that Satan hates and hates most of all, because He became Man to glorify God where man had failed, and as Man to glorify God even about sin. Therefore, there is, what we might call, a natural antagonism in the devil, being what he is, against the One who is to crush him at last. He well knows that, and there will come a time when, as he knows, he will have but a short time. That time has not yet come, but it is coming, and coming fast.
So Jude introduces the coming of the Lord in a very remarkable manner—not by a new prophecy, but by the recovery to us of one of the first prophecies that ever were uttered, and, certainly, the first prophecy that took the shape, the ordinary shape, that gave its character to all others that follow. For nothing could be more in the prophetic character than these words: “And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam (to distinguish him from the Enoch who was the son of Cain) prophesied of these, saying, Behold the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints, to execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds, which they have ungodlily committed, and of (what people think little of) their hard words which ungodly sinners have spoken against him.” “Words” are the common expression of man's iniquity, because he cannot do all that he would like to do, but there is nothing that he cannot “say.” Consequently it is said, “For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.” This character of evil, so far from being a light thing, is one that is presented with the utmost gravity, and that by Enoch before the flood: and it is nowhere else preserved. Here, thousands of years afterward, Jude was enabled to disclose this to us—by what means we do not know. The Holy Ghost was perfectly capable without using any means. Whether there were any, we know not, but we know that there it is, and that this is the certain truth, not only of God, but through Enoch before he went to heaven.
But there is another connection with Enoch that we have now to look into, in the verses that close the epistle. That is, that we may regard a latent connection with the blessed manner in which Enoch was taken out of the scene altogether. Now, this fell to Jude and not to Peter. I have already compared the very great marks of distinction between Peter's treatment of these very cases and Jude's. Peter's view is purely as a question of unrighteousness, and he looks also at the teachers as being the most guilty parties in that unrighteousness—generally done for gain, or fame, or for some earthly motive of the kind that is not of God. Jude looks at it in a still deeper light; for he does not make so much of the teachers. The awful thing to Jude was, that the church, that the body of the saints, who ought to be the light of God—the heavenly light of God in a world of darkness—that they were to become the seat of the worst evil of Satan; and this through letting in (no doubt, by carelessness, by lack of looking to God) these corrupters. That is his point of view. Not so much unrighteousness as apostasy. There is nothing so terrible as apostasy. In the case of unrighteousness it might be merely that of men going on with their badness. But apostasy always supposes that people have come out of their badness professionally, that they have received the truth professedly, that they have professedly received grace from God in Christ the Lord, and have turned their back upon it all. There is nothing so bad as that. So that you see, if there were not the gospel, and if there had not been the church, there could not have been so bad an apostasy as that which Jude contemplates here from first to last.
We have, first of all then, as I have already shown, the tracing of that apostasy as it presented itself to Jude by the Holy Ghost. And he takes his great figures of it from Israel, which after it was saved became the enemy of God, and fell under judgment. Peter does not say a word about that; he looks at merely wicked men, consequently he is more occupied with the evil that brought on the deluge. Jude does not say a word about the deluge, because there was no question of a people being saved. There was a family—a few individuals—but there was not a people. Jude looks at the church, and compares the church getting wrong and losing everything after, apparently, having gained everything: according to the picture of Israel, that it was saved out of Egypt, and nevertheless, that it all came to nothing.
We see how beautifully the figures employed, and the illustrations used, are all perfectly in keeping with the great differences between the two epistles of Peter and Jude. And I mention it again, as I have already done, as a proof of the blindness of men in our day, in what they call “higher criticism.” They will have it that the one epistle is only a copy of the other. Why, they are perfectly contrasted the one with the other. Here are some points, of course, that must be common—the wickedness of man, the grace of God, the truth of God. All that must be common to the two epistles.
But the character of the truth in the one case is simply, men corrupting righteousness into unrighteousness—that is Peter. In Jude it is men, that were blessed by the revelation of grace, turning it to licentiousness, those who had not merely the authority of God, but the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ. Peter does not say a word about that. It is God's authority. Even the Lord is there looked at as Master—a Sovereign Master—not in the attitude of “our Lord Jesus Christ.” Jude adds that. So Noah is the great figure in Peter; whereas Enoch, and not Noah, is the figure before us in Jude.
Now, I ask, how could the wit of man ever have done that? Even when people have read the two epistles, many Christians have not noticed these differences, yet there they are. What learned men see is, the apparent resemblances between the two. But that is an altogether unintelligent way of reading anything. Because, even if you look at all the men of the world, well, they all agree in being men, but just think how foolish a person must be who could sec no difference between one man and another because they are all men! That is just the way these learned men talk. They see no difference between Peter and Jude, the one copied the other. Whereas the striking thing is that, although they both go over the same ground they look at it in different ways—both full of instruction, yet such instruction as only the Holy Ghost could give.
Oh! how solemn when we read this last epistle, which bears upon the apostasy of Christianity, or rather of Christendom, of those that were introduced to the richest blessings of God's grace and truth in Christ, yet turning to be the bitterest enemies of it (not only abandoning it, but) treating it with contempt and disdain, and with hatred to the last degree.
That is exactly what we have in the middle of the epistle. We saw the characters that it takes, particularly Cain, Balaam, and Core—the beginning, middle and end, I might say. The unnatural brother that hated, not a mere man only, but his own brother, and slew him. The bitterest enemies of the faithful are always those who profess to be faithful and are not. There is no bitterness so deep as an unworthy bearer of the name of Christ. Well, that is Cain. Not a word of that in Peter. That belongs to Jude and is here.
Then Balaam figures in Peter because he is a false prophet that figures the false teachers, which are more the thing in Peter, but not in Jude; for here it is the saints, the body of the saved ones—at any rate in profession. That is what alarmed and shocked him. And he puts it forth for us, that we might now understand it, that we should not be too much perplexed by any of these terrible things that might break out at any time in our midst. There never was a more foolish idea, perhaps, entertained by some of us, that whoever might go wrong this could not happen amongst those called brethren. Oh! foolish brethren! to flatter themselves in such a way as that. Why you, we, for I take my place along with you in it altogether—we are the persons most liable to have the highest flown expressions and pretension to the greatest piety, while there may be an enormously evil thing going on. How are we to judge of such things? By the word of God. And you will always find that those that are carrying on in that way slip from the word. They do not want the word. They want something new, something that will go on with the times, something that will make the brethren more popular, something that will get bigger congregations, and all these things that are flattering to human vanity; and the consequence is they are naturally afraid of the word. No wonder. No one ever quarreled with the word of God, if the word of God did not condemn them. Every person who loves the word owes to it all his entrance into blessing—he derives all from that precious word, and that precious word reveals Christ. Consequently we should not be occupied about pleasing others and about their work, but with Christ. And we want all God's children also to be occupied with Christ as the only ground of any solid and sure peace. [W. K.] (To be continued)