“To Him who is able to keep you from falling and to present you before His glorious presence without fault and with great joy – to the only God our Savior be glory, majesty, power and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and forevermore! Amen!” (Jude 24-25)

 

Lesson 8 – Jude

Vs 10-11 (NIV)

Yet these men speak abusively against whatever they do not understand; and what things they do understand by instinct, like unreasoning animals-these are the very things that destroy them. 11 Woe to them! They have taken the way of Cain; they have rushed for profit into Balaam’s error; they have been destroyed in Korah’s rebellion.

 

     Jude clearly shows that those who are “talking big” don’t know a thing about the realm of the angels and of the Spirit of God. Have you ever been in a conversation with someone who’s blowing and going on about something that you know they don’t know squat about? I find that the louder and longer they go the less they know.J  These people are mocking and making statements about things they really don’t understand. On the serious side, are there times when I make uninformed statements?

     The next part of verse ten is simply Jude making the observation that they talk about others but can’t even control their own natural (animal) instincts. In fact, they sink lower than animals. So what can this verse say to us? Well, easily we can understand that we shouldn’t mock or make statements about things we have no knowledge of or haven’t researched. Second, we need to look at our lives are we doing things that even animals won’t do.

      But another aspect of this is… no person is born without a sense of the spiritual things but can lose that sense if they never use it. Example: if I once played the piano but didn’t play for 30 years (true story) when I sit back down to the piano it will be torture to the ears! If you played football or basketball in high school but didn’t pick up a ball again until you were seventy, there would be no way you could make excellent plays. If you learned basic French but didn’t use it for ten years, I would highly recommend you take a re-fresher before enjoying a trip in France and expecting to understand the language. In the same way, if we as children once knew God but for 20 years never followed him, do we really know Him? If we consistently refused to listen to God and make our instincts and opinions the sole dynamic of our conduct, in the end we will have a very hard time hearing the voice of the Lord, if we can hear it at all. It is a terrible thing for a person to get to a stage where they are deaf to God and blind to goodness; but that’s where the perpetrators were in this little book of Jude. Can you hear God’s voice today?

     In verse 11 Jude goes to some very well known Old Testament losers. Cain was a murderer of his own brother (Genesis 4: 1-5). Balaam’s story is twofold, first he is greedy with a capitol G. But later in his life he actually leads the nation of Israel into the worship of Baal with dreadful and repulsive moral consequences (Numbers 22-25, 31: 8, 16). Korah rebelled against the leaders of his nation, (Moses & Aaron) he wanted their job, and he perished because of it (Numbers 16: 1-35). So Jude is saying these folks who are teaching falsely, have an evil (murderous) intent, they are greedy, they lead others into sin and they defy the legitimate authority of the church, preferring their own way to the way of God. Have I ever been guilty of any of these actions, especially the last one?

Resources: from “Interpretation Commentary Jude by Pheme Perkins; “Beacon Bible Commentary – Jude” by Delbert Rose; and “The Letters of John and Jude” by William Barclay