THE LETTER OF
JUDE
The very brief letter of Jude has a single focus: to warn believers against succumbing to false teaching. Jude helps Christians stay true to the faith by painting a grim and gloomy picture of deviant teachers. Arrogant, immoral, and greedy, these teachers are destined for the terrible judgment God has in store for all who deny and defy him. Who would want to follow such people to their condemnation? This is the question that Jude puts before us in this letter. In a world with so many distorted ideas about Christianity, we need to be reminded of the dangers of false teaching.
Jude wrote this letter to combat false teachers in the early church. Jude focuses less on what these people were teaching than on the way they were living; at the heart of Jude’s critique is the charge that they were libertines—they assumed that God’s grace revealed in Christ gave them the freedom to do whatever they pleased (v 4). They had no respect for authority (see vv 8-9). They engaged in many sinful behaviors (vv 16, 19). These profligates, who claimed to be Christians (v 4), were effectively denying the Lord and were therefore destined for the condemnation of all who rebel against the Lord.
This brief letter is oriented entirely around an outbreak of false teaching. After the letter opening (vv 1-2), Jude explains the situation prompting his letter (vv 3-4): The imminent danger posed by the false teachers required that he write a very different kind of letter from the one he had planned to write.
In vv 5-16, Jude elaborates on the character of these false teachers. This section unfolds in an A-B-A’ sequence. Jude first uses three scriptural examples to illustrate the condemnation that the false teachers face (A, vv 5-10). He then cites three more scriptural examples to castigate them for their ungodly attitudes and behavior (B, vv 11-13). At the end of this section, he returns to their condemnation, citing Jewish tradition to hammer home his indictment (A’, vv 14-16).
Jude then appeals directly to his readers (vv 17-23), urging them to hold fast to God’s truth and to reach out to believers who might be tempted to follow the false teachers. The letter ends with a notable doxology (vv 24-25).
Jude identifies himself as “a brother of James” (v 1). This James is almost certainly the “Lord’s brother” (Gal 1:19; see Mark 6:3 // Matt 13:55) who became a leader of the Jerusalem church (Acts 15:13-21; 21:18) and wrote the letter of James. Jude was therefore also a brother of Jesus (Jude is spelled “Judas” in Mark 6:3 // Matt 13:55). Jude and the other brothers of Jesus did not follow Jesus during his earthly ministry (John 7:5), but evidently became believers after the resurrection (see 1 Cor 15:7) and traveled to spread the message about the resurrected Lord (1 Cor 9:5).
We know so little about Jude that we cannot pin down a date or destination of the letter. It was probably written after AD 45, to allow time for the kind of false teaching described here to develop. It was probably written before AD 90, when even a young brother of Jesus would have been old. The close relationship between 2 Peter and Jude suggests that the two might have been written at about the same time (see 2 Peter Introduction, “Relationship to Jude”).
False Teachers. False teachers of many varieties have disturbed God’s people over the years. Jude’s letter is a powerful reminder of their potential to harm the community and a stark depiction of their terrible fate. Jude’s description of the false teachers makes dynamic use of OT and Jewish traditions. Jude compares the false teachers to the rebellious Israelites in the wilderness (v 5), to the angels who rebelled against God (v 6), and to the sinners of Sodom and Gomorrah (v 7). The false teachers are like Cain (see Gen 4), Balaam (see Num 22–24), and Korah (see Num 16). Like all of them, false teachers are rebels against the Lord and will experience his judgment.
Defending the Faith. In v 3, Jude implies that there is a defined body of doctrine in the early church to which all Christians need to adhere. Paul assumes the same thing when he urges Timothy to “guard what God has entrusted to you” (1 Tim 6:20; see 2 Tim 1:14).
To be a Christian means to have faith in God and love for others; it also means to confess gladly the truth that God has revealed in Jesus Christ. We cannot truly express faith in God unless we acknowledge the truth that he has revealed. For this reason, early Christians, even in the NT period, formulated creeds to summarize the essentials of Christian truth (e.g., 1 Tim 3:16). These creeds were often crafted to counteract a false teaching. If we are to heed Jude’s call to “defend the faith,” we need to know just what that faith is. Too many Christians spend too much energy in debating nonessential details and too little in learning the essentials well. Only by learning the essentials will the faithful be able to explain their faith to others and to guard Christian truth from false teaching.