Sunday School | Jude

Here's how we know you're ready. Do you know? The secret of your readiness is you just shut up. Okay? Could what do you think? So, we have received some laments that the first minutes of this class are just like this, and it's hard to hear. So get your last grape, say goodbye to your friend, no more happiness, no more relationship, and be quiet. Okay? That feels better. That feel pretty good? What do you think? Alright. Well done. Good job.

Okay. You guys. So if you're just dropping in here, what we've been doing for the last couple of months, hey, Rachel, is studying one book of the New Testament every week. So we're walking through week after week picking one book. Romans got two weeks because it's Romans. But they're all in here. So if you've missed any or all—oh, by the way, the Richmonds are here. John and Debbie Richmond, old, old friends been here for a million years, moved away to some godless state, but they're back for the weekend. We're delighted to see you. If you wanna grab any of them, this is everything we've been doing. Okay? And so we get these summaries of every book and today we're on Jude. You need the document. You always need the document but you really need it today. So if you don't have the Jude doc, grab them. Bob's passing them out. Wave at Bob. He'll hook you up. Anybody up here? Need Jude? Jude. Jude. You're good? Okay.

Here's the thing you guys, generally speaking, when we're doing these summaries, the short books get a two page summary. Like when we're doing James or something—I don't even know how long James is. Short books get a little one and the long books like Corinthians and Romans, they get the long ones. This is the shortest book. Jude is not even a page long and it gets a four pager. And that's because it is without question the strangest book in the New Testament. Okay? Revelation is the most complicated. Hebrews is second most complicated. So it's not that it's complex, it's just that it is super, super, super weird. Okay?

And it's weird for a couple of different reasons. Okay? The first thing that I want you to see—we're gonna try to unpack this. First reason that it's weird is that Jude, as he's writing this letter, he's using source material that we would typically find highly suspicious. We would not be like, what are you quoting that for? What are you doing with that? Okay. That's the first thing that's weird.

The second thing that's weird is that in illustrating his primary subject matter—well, his subject matter, just like Second Peter last week, is false teachers. Okay? So that's not strange. But when he illustrates his lessons about false teachers, sourcing things in some very unconventional places, he says some stuff that you're gonna have a very hard time believing is true. And he treats it like, yeah, obviously, you know, we're in the Rockies. Right? He's gonna say it's very obvious. But to you and I, the things that he's gonna source is like, that's not obvious and I don't know what you're talking about and where did you get that from? And the whole thing is just super super weird. Okay?

But this is not my fault. This is what Jude says. This is not me being a freaking weirdo. This is not me being a heretic, I promise you. I'm gonna teach Jude straight and if you follow what Jude is saying, it is a major major head scratcher. Okay? Y'all ready? Excited? Some of you have heard that we've done this a little bit in this class before. Let me just kinda take you through the big picture. Hands down, it's the strangest book.

Who is Jude?

Who's Jude first of all? What's that? Jesus. It is Jesus' brother. Now, he identifies himself as James' brother, but James is also Jesus' brother. And so the brother of James is the brother of Jesus.

His name wasn't really Jude. Do you know what his name really was? Judas. Could you think of any reason he might not have gone by Judas? Can you imagine? It's like naming your kid Adolf. You're like, well, that's gonna go badly. Right? Okay.

So Judas—Jude, Judas—is Jesus' brother and he meant to write a letter about something. He wanted to write these guys, he had something to say and then something happened. We don't know what, but something happened that knocked him off his path and he says, you know what? I'm gonna write a different letter. He says it like this. He says, this is in verse three:

Dear friends, although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt I had to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted for the saints. For certain men whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you. — Jude 3

So he meant to write a particular letter and then he got news about something. Some information came to him, something about false teachers and the trickiness. He saw somebody coming over the wall. He saw the false teachers coming in.

He's like, "You know what? Forget the first letter. Forget what I was gonna do. Instead I need to do this." Okay? So far so good?

Now, a couple of things to think about as you walk through Jude—things you're looking for. We're gonna go through Second Peter in a little bit. It's possible—possible, but we don't know—that the thing that got his attention was Second Peter, the letter we looked at last week. I'm gonna show you later how incredibly similar Second Peter, in particular Second Peter chapter two and Jude are. Okay? So maybe he came across Second Peter's letter and said, "You know what? That's a really good point. I need to write these guys the same letter that Peter wrote to them and go after them." Maybe. That might not be true.

We don't actually know if Second Peter came before Jude or Jude came before Second Peter, but it would be impossible to convince a reasonable person that these letters are not related. They're just way, way, way too similar. Okay? I'll show you that in a little bit. Something happened—maybe Peter, maybe something altogether different. Maybe Peter was ripping off Jude—said, "We gotta talk about the false teachers." Okay?

But something in the passage that I already read to you—he says something that's very, very important to understand the rest of the entire argument. Go back to that. Look at verse three again.

Dear friends, though I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt I had to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints. For certain men whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you. — Jude 3-4

There's something that was written about long ago. If you're reading this doing normal verse-by-verse exegesis, and he says this thing was written about long ago, what's the question you should ask yourself? Where was it? What are you talking about? He's saying, "I'm not making this up. This thing that we have, we've all read before—this old, old, old news, that long ago prediction, that ancient prophecy—it's coming to pass." Okay? So we should stop and ask, "Oh, what are you talking about? What's this? Is it something Moses wrote? What are you talking about?"

Does anybody know the answer to this question? When Jude says there's an ancient prophecy that is coming to pass, what's the ancient prophecy? Anybody know? He's gonna give you two clues. Number one, he's gonna quote it verbatim later in the letter. And number two, he's going to allude over and over and over to a particular written thing that we have.

What is he talking about, Gina? The Book of Enoch. He's talking about the Book of Enoch. Okay? So here's how this works. Jude is only one chapter. So you might call it Jude 1:14 because you're assuming it's the first chapter, but it's really the only chapter. So we just call it Jude 14.

Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied about these men. — Jude 14

What you see there in verse 14 is the same thing he's talking about in verse 3. In verse 3 he says, "Certain men whose condemnation was written about long ago," and then in verse 14 he says, "The seventh from Adam prophesied about these men." Do you see that those are the same thing? Verse 14 is saying what verse 3 is saying—that there's some ancient prediction about these guys. Okay? And then he gives you the language.

See, the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of his holy ones to judge everyone and to convict all the ungodly of all the ungodly acts they've done in the ungodly way and of all the harsh words ungodly sinners have spoken against him. — Jude 14-15

Enoch did not like these people. He calls them ungodly using every form of speech there is. Right? The Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of his holy ones to judge everyone.

If you go try to find that quote that he is ascribing to Enoch, the seventh from Adam, you're not gonna find it in your Bible. It doesn't exist in the Old Testament. It's not in Genesis or Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, you know.

Enoch is a character, a person you see in the book of Genesis, but it's not recorded in Genesis. You with me? Okay. But he's saying that happened—it was a prophecy. He's using technical language to describe that this is a divinely given message to Enoch. And we're like, okay, that's interesting. I didn't know that. I've never read that. I've never seen that. Where did you get that? Well, the answer is really complicated and borderline heretical and we really don't actually know. Okay?

Because when Jesus quoted Enoch, he doesn't say he's quoting the book of Enoch. He's quoting the man. Right? He's not referring to a book, he's referring to a man. Now here's the problem: we don't know what the man said. We don't know what Enoch said. How do we know what Enoch said? But we do have this book known as First Enoch.

The Question of First Enoch's Authority

Now, what Jude is saying right there in Jude 14 and 15 is exactly what First Enoch chapter 1, verse 9 says. No question. It's 100% what it says. The problem is nobody thinks First Enoch is an authentic record of what Enoch said. It is what we call the pseudepigrapha. It's part of a collection of Jewish books called the pseudepigrapha. So like a pseudonym—if you write under a pseudonym, it's fake. The pseudepigrapha are things that are understood to be falsely ascribed to somebody.

So I write a letter, right, and I sign it, Jake Otterman. And Jake's like, what? I didn't write that. It's now pseudepigraphy. I wrote it but I'm claiming he wrote it. Okay? Now, maybe you'd like that, maybe you wouldn't. Generally, you don't like it when people do that.

So, did Enoch write First Enoch? The answer is nobody thinks so. I don't know, but it is probably the case. The best way that I resolve this—because Jude is not ascribing this to the book of First Enoch, he's ascribing those words to the man of Enoch—that is probably the case that Enoch said something, actually really said something. And in particular, he said these very things. The things that he said got captured in this book that got edited and corrupted and maybe the entire book was not written by him. But I could write something and then every once in a while quote Jake and then sign Jake's name to the whole thing. And he could say, well, I didn't write that document but you faithfully quoted me here, here, here, and here. Okay. That might be the best way that we should understand this.

What's still weird about it though, you guys, is this letter does not merely quote First Enoch one time. It says something, ascribes it to the man Enoch. It's a verbatim capture of what's in First Enoch. And over and over and over, he is alluding to things that permeate the letter of First Enoch. It's all over the place. Okay?

And the reason that's weird, the reason that's troubling for those of us that believe there are 39 books in the Old Testament and 27 in the New, is that one of those books in the New Testament gives an enormous amount of affirmation to a book that's in the pseudepigrapha. Does this make sense? This is why Jude is hands down the super, super weirdest book.

So what I've included for you—if you want to, you could buy a copy of the pseudepigrapha, which I don't recommend. I think it'd be a waste of your money. But what I have done rather than that is I've just quoted all these things from Enoch. If you go through and you read it, you'd be like, oh my gosh, that echoes that and that echoes that and that sounds like that. And he's using this language, he's using this imagery. Jude is drawing unmistakably from some source that he ascribes to the person of Enoch that we have captured in the book of First Enoch. You with me? So far so good?

So that's a very strange thing. If he was quoting from Deuteronomy, we'd be saying, see, that's proof that Deuteronomy is God's word. If he was quoting from the Psalms, he'd be like, of course he is.

The Psalms are scripture. He's quoting from First Enoch and we're like, I don't know what to do with that because it's really, really strange. So far so good?

Okay, Jude. Why you say that a little—why did you say it louder. Why—so you're asking why was Jude included in the canon of scripture? Okay. So the first thing—Jude's question is: when there was that council that got together to decide what was in the Bible, why did they decide to include Jude? And I would first of all caution the characterization that they decided what was in the Bible. Rather, I'd say they officialized what had long been recognized as the Bible.

So when these letters—when Paul would write these letters, when Peter wrote his letters, what was happening for the church is they collected them. They would take Romans and be like, you know what? This one's really good. Make a copy of it and then send it to the next town and make another copy, make another copy. So these letters in the New Testament that we have—when John's Gospel was written, it was duplicated, it was read, it was treasured as a divine revelation of who Jesus is.

What doesn't happen for three hundred years—until basically when all of the persecution starts to calm down a little bit and the church could get together and say, let's make sure that we're all on the same page here. We all think Romans, we all think John, we all think—and overwhelmingly, it's not a function of arbitrarily deciding out of some corpus of 500 books which 27 to keep. But it was simply a recognition of what had long been true, including the inclusion of Jude. Jude had been read, Jude had been duplicated, Jude had been kept and maintained. We have tons and tons of manuscript evidence for the authenticity and the inclusion of Jude long before the church ever put this official stamp of approval on it.

That's a longer conversation for how we recognize and determine and understand the canonicity of scripture. But Jude was long in because everything that it's saying is true. And I think it's probably useful to say that the Jewish audience that would have read this would have also recognized the authenticity of the history of these events, of these stories. It's something we haven't even gotten to the weirdest part. The weirdest part that's coming—we're like freaked out by that—they would have been like, yeah, that's exactly what happened. That was just a known thing. So it wasn't as weird to them as it is to modern ears.

How are we doing? So far so good? Okay. So when you read Jude, you just have to know he's quoting something that exists in First Enoch that he ascribes to the person of Enoch and that he treats as authentic biblical prophecy. Let's take a look at what that prophecy is before we go any further.

Here's how he says it. This is verse 14 again:

See, the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of his holy ones to judge everyone and to convict all the ungodly of the ungodly acts they've done in the ungodly way and of all the harsh words that ungodly sinners have spoken against him. — Jude 14

What's that describing? Final judgment. You feel good about that? It's what we would understand as the second coming, right? This is the second coming, which is stunning to me because Enoch is early, early, early in the story. He's the seventh descendant of Adam. He's super early in the story. This would be—this could vie for the earliest prophecy in the Bible, even though it wasn't recorded in the Old Testament. It doesn't get captured until the New Testament. But its origin is super, super, super old. Which means maybe the earliest prophecy, the earliest prediction in the Bible is actually about the last thing that's ever going to happen. It's about the second coming.

Long, early, early, early in the story, God revealed to Enoch that the way the story is going to end is that God is going to come in power to this earth and clean up all the mess. That is a very old thing.

The way he describes it here in Jude—he'll say back in verse three:

Certain men whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you. Their condemnation was written about long ago. — Jude 3

God is not surprised by this. This is not a plan B. This was the plan all along. If you go to Second Peter chapter two—and we still got to get to Second Peter in a minute—if you go to Second Peter, the way that he's going to describe this—well, you can actually just go to your back page if you want. You can see this. When he says in verse three:

In their greed, they will exploit you with false words. — 2 Peter 2:3

Listen to this, their condemnation from long ago, from Enoch—he doesn't mention Enoch but he's talking about the same thing. Their condemnation from long ago is not idle and their destruction is not asleep. Sometimes we struggle, God makes a promise and we're like, could you please fulfill the promise already? Like how long do I have to wait for this?

The answer for this one, which is the last thing that's going to happen, is one of the very, very, very first things that was ever promised. That the day is coming when all the ungodliness in the world will be done away with. And Jude is saying, you guys, the day is closer now than when we first believed. And this condemnation that Enoch predicted a gazillion years ago is not sleeping. It feels like it's sleeping. We often feel like the promises are asleep, but it's not. The day is coming when God will judge all the wicked and some of us who very reasonably include ourselves among the wicked will nevertheless be spared. Right? That's what Jude's talking about. How are you doing? Can you live with this so far? Okay.

Here's the second super weird thing. Not just this weird canonicity question. Oh, and he also quotes something else that's even stranger called the Assumption of Moses. You can look that one up if you want to. I've made allusion to it here in the book, but we won't take time on it. The other thing that's really weird is that in the midst of this judgment, in the midst of this strangeness, he's going to describe an event that is so odd and so puzzling. So once again, go to this center column here. This is the weird stuff. Look at verse five, six, seven—five, six, and seven. He says, "though you already know all this"—okay, Jude, that's kind of to my point earlier. Like, this is not weird to them. They're like, yeah, this is, we talked about this. Okay?

Though you already know all this, I want to remind you that the Lord delivered his people out of Egypt but later destroyed those who did not believe. — Jude 5

He's making an argument that God is able to be particular and precise. He doesn't just have to like, if he wanted to kill, you know, seventeen of the people in this room, he wouldn't have to just burn the whole thing down and say, "so sorry for all the collateral damage." Right? He can be particular in the way that he exercises judgment. Okay?

So he says this: the Lord delivered his people out of Egypt but later destroyed those who did not believe. And by the way, those people who did not believe are not the Egyptians. Those are the Israelites he's talking about. And the angels who did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their own home—to which you might think, wait, what? Which angels? What was their proper position? When did they abandon their own home? What are you even talking about? Okay.

He says, "these he has kept in darkness bound with everlasting chains for judgment on the great day." Okay? So anybody want to throw out a candidate? What are the angels who left their positions of proper authority and had some weird thing go down and then got all thrown into some prison to be waiting for the day of judgment? Who is he talking about?

Satan and the fallen angels. Satan and—yes. But there's a subset of them. Gil?

Nephilim. Okay. So Gil is right. He's pointing back to this era of the Nephilim. Okay? Which is super weird. So go to Genesis—there's a passage in Genesis six that's super weird but not so explicit that you can't paper it over and make it be like not as weird as you don't want it to be. Okay? Enoch is going to rob you of that opportunity. But here's what it says, and this is Genesis six:

When men began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful and they married any of them that they chose. — Genesis 6

So what that might mean is that the sons of God saw the daughters of men were beautiful. That might mean that like faithful followers of God, the sons of God, saw that the daughters of men—which is like, I don't know, like the women in some pagan cult—that they were beautiful. That's happened before. Plenty of Christian men have been drawn away to, like, bad women. And maybe that's what is happening and everything's fine and we can live with that and let's just keep moving. Okay?

But that's not what it means. Do you know what the phrase "sons of God" means every time it occurs in the Bible? It's talking about angels. What this passage is saying, absolutely saying, is that angels, angelic beings, non-humans, saw that the daughters of men, human beings, human females, were beautiful and they married any of them that they chose. Which, who knew that was even possible. Okay?

And then it says this:

My spirit won't contend with man forever. He's mortals. Days will not be a hundred and twenty years. — Genesis 6

And then as Gil said, the Nephilim were on the earth in those days and also afterward when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. So it doesn't exactly say that the Nephilim were the children. It stops short of saying the Nephilim are the descendants of these hybrids between angels. And when I say angels, hear that as demons. These are bad angels. Angels and humans have children that are Nephilim. Genesis doesn't quite say that. It just says, "Hey, look, there's angels having sex with humans and having babies. Also, there are Nephilim." It doesn't actually make the connection. Enoch steals all of that.

Look at here's what Enoch says. This is First Enoch. First Enoch is not scripture, but it seems to be Jude's source material or something very like it. He erases all the helpful ambiguity. And he says it like this:

And it came to pass when the children of men had multiplied, that in those days were born under them beautiful and comely daughters. And the angels, the children of the heavens, saw and lusted after them and said to one another, "Come, let us choose wives from among the children of men and beget us children." And all the others together with them took under themselves wives and each chose for himself one and they began to go in unto them and to defile themselves with them. And they became pregnant and they bear great giants who consumed all the acquisitions of men. And when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind.

Is that the strangest thing in the New Testament? You might want to say, "Yeah, but Enoch didn't—or Jude doesn't say any of that. All that Jude says is that the angels who did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their own home, these he has kept in darkness bound with everlasting chains for judgment on the great day." He doesn't say anything about sex or sexual immorality. So how do you even know that's what he's talking about?

Well, the answer is that is what he's talking about. Look at the next verse. Look at verse seven:

In a similar way, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion.

If Sodom and Gomorrah gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion, and if they did that in a similar way to what the previous verse was talking about, what was the previous verse talking about? Sexual immorality. Do you feel it? He is absolutely saying that what you had in Sodom and Gomorrah—and by the way, do you remember what was the pinnacle of sexual immorality in the Sodom and Gomorrah event? They tried to enact this event. Men wanted to have sex with angels. This is the event. The angels come down to judge and they're like, "Hey, bring some of the men that have come down here." And what we're seeing is what Sodom and Gomorrah is—interspecies, I don't know what you call it. It's an event where men are trying to rape angels. And what Jude is saying is that's shockingly similar in an inverted way to what happened in Genesis 6 where women were being taken and chosen and gotten pregnant by demons. That's what he's saying happened.

Are you guys good now? Everything okay? It is the strangest book in the New Testament and that is absolutely what he's talking about. So we won't have time to fully unpack what all the implications of that are. Is it even possible? How does this work? Why would human eggs be compatible with angelic sperm? Why do angels have sperm? I mean, it is so puzzling. Everything about it is so weird. But that is what Jude is talking about.

Jude's Use of Extra-Biblical Sources

Now here's what I want you to see in all of this. It's so puzzling. I don't understand all of it. I don't believe that First Enoch is scripture. It's not—nowhere do we raise it to that level. But we do know that the Bible routinely sources things outside of its own self. Right? So Paul will quote the Cretan poets and say, "As one of your poets have said, all Cretans are liars, you know, brutes, evil, gluttons." There's all this time that we'll source things outside.

What's unique here, though—it's a little bit different than that—is that he's quoting something that sounds so much like First Enoch in a way that treats it with great credibility. He's sourcing things and saying, "That guy was right when he said that." Doesn't mean it's scripture, but that prophecy seems to be of divine origin. And he's—by the way, you've gotta know—Jude's not freaked out by any of this. Jude is not warning. He's not saying, "Hey, this is gonna be hard for your ears to hear. Slow down."

He's just assuming it. This was all part of their common culture to understand all of these things. And what I'm telling you Genesis six means is uniformly what Judaism thought it meant for hundreds of years. This is not a novel thing. It's weird to us. It wasn't weird to anybody for hundreds and hundreds of years. And so if you wanna go back and you wanna do some research on it, feel free. The guys from the Bible Project have done a little bit of work on this and they would say the same thing that I'm telling you. And the best commentary on this I can even give if you wanna look at some of the best on this stuff—I've read it all—this is what it means. This is what it's saying. So we just gotta deal with it and take it.

Jennifer asked about Numbers 13, when they go into the land. Yes. So the Nephilim show up a couple of different times, but it's never made explicit in the Old Testament except for Genesis six, which is veiled, that these would be human-angel hybrids.

Generally speaking, whenever the Nephilim show up in the Bible, the order of the day is to kill them all because they're huge and they're evil. Some believe, and I think there's plausibility to this, that the reason the flood happened is because of the Nephilim. The image you get right before the flood was like everything was evil. Everything has just gone to waste and ruin. And so we gotta kill everybody.

If it's possible—and this might be the case—Satan knew that a promise had been made in Genesis three that one day the woman is gonna bring forth a seed. The seed of the woman will come and crush the snake. If he knew, and he did know, that his demise or at least the assault against him would come through some human being born of a woman, it would be reasonable if he had as a strategy to completely pollute the gene pool, to ruin the thing, to flood humanity, that you would never have any purebred humans anymore. You just have these human-demon offspring. And the whole thing gets ruined.

It's also possible that he succeeded to such a wild extent that God cleared the decks and killed everyone because the population was so infected, and then he began again. If I were to tell you that God would kill every human being on the face of the earth and start again, I don't think you'd believe me unless you'd already read that he had done precisely that. Can we agree that that was a rather drastic action to take? I mean, good grief, he drowned the world. And you must wonder, why did he drown the world? What would be so grievous that it would require clearing the decks and starting again? This has some consistency with that—that may have been what was going on.

The Letter's True Message

Now here's what the letter is really about. The letter is about the goodness of judgment. It's about the goodness of judgment, but it's also about the supremacy of mercy.

Look at how many times he's gonna say things like this. Certain men whose condemnation was written about long ago have slipped in among you. Though you know this, I wanna remind you: God destroyed people. There's a judgment coming. There is this punishment of eternal fire. He's gonna say that things are coming that will destroy them. He's gonna say in verse 13 that blackest darkness has been reserved for them forever.

Certain men whose condemnation was written about long ago have slipped in among you. — Jude

Though you know this, I wanna remind you, God destroyed people. — Jude

Blackest darkness has been reserved for them forever. — Jude 13

Who gets blackest darkness according to this? Stay with the imagery that he's using. Wandering stars. What does it mean for a star? Stars get blackest darkness. What does that mean? If you're a star, you're necessarily lit up and you get blackest darkness. What does that mean? It's dead. It's dead. It's extinguished. It's an image of destruction. It's an image of death.

This is what he's doing here. The blackest darkness—if a star is blackest darkness, that means it's like a black hole. Does every star turn into a black hole? Whatever goes through supernova and then it craters and it's dead—that's what he's talking about. He's talking about death. He's talking about destruction. He's talking about judgment. He's talking about condemnation.

The whole book is saying, don't worry. I know you live in a world where all these bad guys are prospering. They are thriving. They are lying and all these lying liars are getting away with driving you out of your mind. But I want you to remember, way early, Enoch promised that the bad guys are going to lose.

Sometimes in order if we're gonna live the peace loving lives, if we are gonna not be a bunch of vengeful killers, we have to trust that God's promise to clean up all the evil will be kept. It doesn't feel like it's being kept very well. Do you notice this? His promise is it will be kept and so you don't have to do it.

And instead, because of the goodness of judgment and the certainty of judgment, we are something else. We are a people whose lives are endlessly marked by mercy.

Look at how often he—this is a very short letter. He's gonna say:

Mercy, peace, and love be yours in abundance.

He says:

Keep yourselves in God's love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to return to life.

He says:

You are to be merciful to those who doubt. You are to snatch others from the fire and save them. To others, you are to show mercy mixed with fear, hating even the clothing stained by corrupted flesh.

This whole book is about the certain coming of God's judgment even against some very evil demonic things. But in the meantime, while we wait for judgment, we ourselves are not—we do not look at the justice of God and from that take permission to walk around with swords cutting people's heads off. We are Christians. We are endlessly merciful, gracious, kind, patient, loving, loving because we know the day of God's judgment is coming and it's not my job.

We're to be a people who love mercy, who show mercy, who wait for mercy. You with me?

Jude and Second Peter

Okay. That's what you're looking for. The final thing and I'm supposed be looking for Tiffany. Where is Tiffany? Okay. So Tiffany's coming in just a sec. We've got a special guest for just the last couple minutes.

The last thing I want you to see—if you go to the back, you go to this colorful page on the back. As I mentioned earlier, Jude and Second Peter are overwhelmingly related to one another. Nobody knows: Did Peter borrow from Jude? That's probably not my lead. Did Jude borrow from Peter? I think so, but I might be wrong. Or did Jude and Peter both come across some other third source that they were both influenced by and drawing from? I don't know.

But if you read through them, they're clearly related. If you look through and you do this little color comparison that I did, some stuff I ran out of color so some stuff's underlined, some stuff's bold. If you go through it, you're gonna see overwhelmingly lots and lots of same language. And that can be helpful, it can be insightful to read. How does Jude phrase it? Oh, that's interesting. And then how does Peter phrase it? And these things relating can add color and context to each other.

There's a very clear relationship there. So if you decide you wanna study Jude this week, give yourself a little bit of time in Second Peter Two. Even Second Peter Three picks it up, but mostly the stuff's contained in chapter two.

Gary: Isn't it likely that the Holy Spirit just said the same thing to two different men?

Tim: Yeah. Okay. So is it possible that the spirit of God was speaking to both the same? Yeah. But I don't think that's likely because when we look at the scriptures, we have a view—and it's the broad orthodox view—that scripture has two authors, right? Each book. So Jude wrote Jude and the Holy Spirit wrote Jude. And Peter wrote Peter and the Holy Spirit wrote Peter. Okay? Those are true.

And so when we see it, we have to look at it at both levels of the divine coordination. If there was merely sameness of theology, sameness of ultimate purpose, then we would expect to see that everywhere. We see same theology in Exodus that we see in Zephaniah, right? And we don't believe that they're in cahoots. That's just the spirit of God.

But if you do this comparison, the language is so particular at a human level that everybody thinks that these things were related. And I certainly do. And there's no problem that it would be the case anymore—no more of a problem than we think that Matthew, Mark, and Luke had insight into the things that the other wrote, right?

That they're both looking at the same event, but they don't record the same event just at the same conceptual level—but literally verbatim similarities. And it would be very strange if that wasn't reflective of them being aware of one another's work. There's nothing that questions this. I have an extremely high view of scripture. That's not a faithless kind of interpretation of that.

Bob, Tiffany, come on up.

Is verse 18 kind of giving credence that maybe Peter wrote it first? Because it's almost verbatim—it is verbatim—but chapter three?

Yeah, that's where I say. Most of it's in Second Peter chapter two, some of it's in chapter three. This line here—"in the last days"—the way that Peter puts it is "in the last days, scoffers will come scoffing." Jude says:

"In the last days, there will be scoffers who will follow their own ungodly desires." — Jude

Bob is pointing out that the thing in Jude is in quotation marks. So is he intentionally quoting something that Peter said? Possibly. It's possibly the case. I don't know—I've read a bunch of stuff, different theories. It doesn't particularly matter, but they're just related. If you read one, it will give you insight into the other. That'll be helpful.

I don't have any more time because we have a guest. Tiffany, come on up.

Guest Speaker: Tiffany's Mission Work

You guys, I just asked Tiffany to join us for a minute. Tiffany is one of our very own serving Christ far, far from home. I'm going to give her a chance to tell a bit of that story for about five minutes.

Tiffany, welcome. So glad you're here.

Thank you. This is a little weird for me because back when I was actually part of this church, this was the sanctuary. If you've been here long enough, you might remember when this space was a sanctuary.

My name is Tiffany. My parents, Mike and Sally, have been part of this church for a long time since the nineties. When I first started coming, I was in about tenth grade—so like 1996 or something. I was part of the youth group during that time, and that's actually when I was first introduced to missions work. I was aware of missions, but that's when I took my first mission trip. We went to Bolivia and Peru back in '98, I think.

For me it was more of a selfish decision. I just wanted to go travel to another country. God had given me an adventurous spirit and that's what I wanted to do. So I wanted to open with that to encourage you guys—if you're interested in missions work, and you feel like you're making a selfish decision just because you want to travel and go on a mission trip, God can use that and redeem that because He has for me over the years. So long story with that, but I'm just thankful to be part of God's kingdom work in Papua New Guinea.

There's your world map over there, and I think they have the country of Papua New Guinea highlighted. It's the big island just north of Australia on the other side of the world. My friends Bill and Kelly Housley have been missionaries there for about twenty years, and I've been very interested in their work and just very humbled by the way they do tribal missions.

Basically, they went into a tribal location in the bush, in the jungle, twenty years ago. They learned the language. The language wasn't written down, so they came up with an alphabet for it. They started to teach the people literacy, started to translate the Bible—which is still ongoing—and helped plant a church. Now there's a thriving church with elders that has planted multiple other churches in about ten other villages that are part of that language group and a couple of neighboring language groups. Papua New Guinea has over 850 different languages. It's one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world. There's lots and lots of work to be done there. Most of them are not written languages.

They've been faithfully serving with the Inupong tribe for many years. The word "Inupong" means man eater because they used to be cannibals—it's an intense kind of place. But the whole goal is to leave the ministry in the hands of the people. So they no longer live in the tribe. They take visits a couple of times a year, but the people are continuing the work.

Enter Ramu Valley Academy—that's the school where I teach. I'm a science teacher. I'm a nerdy bird biologist, loving to travel and do research. I worked in the field of wildlife science for twenty years.

I've loved my career and the things that the Lord has made possible for me, but it's so beautiful to see how he has very specifically equipped me for this type of work—teaching in this context. The kids that we're teaching are the children of the second generation of people in this village, in this people group who know about Christ. If you ever hear a person sharing their testimony that says, "Oh, I grew up in a Christian home," that's a common thing in the United States, but it's not a common thing in Papua New Guinea. So when some of our kids are starting to say, "Oh, I grew up in a Christian home," it's so exciting for my friends in particular to hear that. They can actually say that they grew up in a Christian home. It's really, really cool.

This school, we just started it three years ago. I've only been a part of it for six months, so I don't feel like I've deserved a break to come back here so soon, but that's just when our kids have their summer break. So I'll be here about every August—about a month or two after I was living in Papua New Guinea.

A couple months in, I got a message from Quig that said the vestry had decided to support me financially, which is amazing and so humbling. I am well supplied—I have absolutely no needs financially. When this opportunity came up, I was actually still thinking short term. I love my job, love my career, and I've placed too much of my identity in my career—actually, that's part of my testimony. So I contacted my friends and said, "Hey, I'm still interested in your school. Would love to maybe come and just teach a short course—like a two-week course on birds or nature or something."

When she wrote me back a couple days later, she said, "Actually, we just found out that our science teacher is leaving really soon." And that's when I was like, "Okay, God, I get it." Talk about changes and sacrifice—it's very, very difficult, but it's also very rewarding. So I think it's beautiful. I'm always very encouraged by this church and how missional this church is. You have very close ties with Rwanda and other places, and so I'm just thankful to be a part of that.

I've got pictures and video. I've got a newsletter. The reason I brought this card up is—if you think there's still a stack of these cards out in the North Texas place—there are QR codes on the back. You can sign up for my newsletter or go to my blog website and see pictures and stories and stuff. So thank you. That's all.

Let's just pray for one second for Tiffany.

Lord, what a gift to have her be with us here from being literally as far away from here as you can possibly be. And then we pray for the work in Papua New Guinea. The gospel would spread. These churches would grow. More churches be planted. More linguists, more translators would go so that everyone everywhere throughout Papua New Guinea would hear the gospel in their own language.

I pray that the work that Tiffany does—to teach kids, to make it possible for other missionary families to serve there and know their children are learning—that they would discover that the heavens declare the glory of God, that you have written it in the sky, that you reveal yourself through nature. Would you give her a peculiar ability to reveal your supremacy, your goodness as she teaches these folks?

Lord, we love you. Thanks for loving us. Amen.

Alright. We'll see you guys next week.