Lectures on the Epistle of Jude [Paperback]

About This Product

The lectures on the Epistle of Jude consider in detail this epistle that particularly addresses the days of decline in Christendom.

Excerpt- And so He will in the end, but in a way totally different from what he, the writer, supposed. For there is no true acknowledgment of Christ. He is simply acknowledged as the Messiah from a Jewish point of view, but there never will be deliverance for the Jew in looking for the Messiah according to their thoughts. It is the Messiah of God, the Anointed of Jehovah, the true Messiah that came, and they rejected Him. But when He comes to deliver them by and by, they will be brought to say, “Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.” They will then give up all their unbelief, they will welcome Him, and He will come and deliver them, and He will save them out of all that strait of trouble in which they will then be.

But He will not judge His own people. He was judged for them, He bore their judgment on the tree, and He will never judge them. Nor is there one word in the Bible—Old or New Testament—that insinuates in the most distant manner that the Lord will inflict judgment on His own people. That He will judge His people is a common thing in the Old Testament. But that will be, as a King, their difficulties, their disorders if there should be any; and He will also vindicate them from their enemies. It is in that sense that He will judge His people.

Moreover, God carries on a moral judgment now in respect to His children. “If ye call on the Father, who without respect of persons judgeth according to every man's work, pass the time of your sojourning [here] in fear.” This is still going on. The Lord dealt with the Corinthians in this way. When they were in such a bad state, and profaned the table of the Lord, coming boldly and taking the bread and the wine as if they had been in a good state, the Lord laid His hand on them—some were sick, some fell asleep—were removed by death. All this was a temporal judgment. That is what the Lord does now, and that judgment is for our good and profit.

We see the same thing in a family. It is the judgment that a father carries on in his family, or any person charged with the care of youths put under him—young persons of either sex. Well, there is a judgment for their good. That is a totally different thing from what is called in John 5 a “coming into judgment.” It is even a different word employed—a different form of the word. From Psa. 143 it is evident that the Old Testament saints knew better than that. At any rate, the Spirit of God gave them better knowledge, for there it says, “Enter not into judgment with thy servant: for in thy sight shall no man living be justified.” If God were to enter into judgment with the believer, it would be all over with him, because even the believer would be bound to say, I don't deserve to be saved. And if God were to look at all the faults in a believer's life, He might say, If that is what I have to look at, I have no reason to save you, you do not deserve it. But the ground of a believer's salvation is not that he deserves it, but that Christ deserves it for us. Christ has completely met all God's nature, and, further than that, He has borne all our sins and iniquities in His own body on the tree. God will not judge them again as if they had not been sufficiently borne, as if the judgment at the cross were not an adequate one. God will never say that about what Christ endured, and that is just what faith lays hold of. Therefore the uniform doctrine of the Bible—of both Old and New Testament—is this, that believers are not to come into that future judgment which the Lord will execute at the close of all things; but because we have now life, and are God's children, He watches over, and cares for us, and carries on a moral judgment; and besides this, the Lord Jesus carries on now a judgment of the church.

Table of Contents

1. Jude Introduction

2. Jude Preliminary Remarks

3. Jude 1

4. Jude 2-3

5. Jude 3

6. Jude 4-5

7. Jude 6-8

8. Jude 6-8

9. Jude 9

10. Jude 9

11. Jude 10-13

12. Jude 10-13

13. Jude 14-15

14. Jude 16-19

15. Jude 20-21

16. Jude 22-23

17. Jude 24-25

18. Jude 24-25

19. Jude 25