Let's turn back to the book of
Jude. I just looked a bit last week at
Jude verse 4 and in my infirmity I would like to see what we can
learn from our Lord out of the latter part of that verse. But
we might as well read those first few verses because I just love
the way June begins with a great declaration of the Gospel. He
declares himself to be the servant. of Jesus Christ and brother of
James, to them that are sanctified by God the Father and preserved
in Christ Jesus, and call mercy unto you and peace and love be
multiplied. Beloved, when I gave all dividends
to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for
me to write unto you and exhort you that you should earnestly
contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.
And this is the reason why. 4. There are certain men crept
in unawares who were before of old ordained to this condemnation,
ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness
and denying the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ. And so we've been looking at
this remarkable letter that concludes the epistles of the New Testament. We looked last week at these
ungodly men. They crept in. They crept in as by a side door. They crept in unaware. And of
course, the thing is that when we read through this list of
characteristics of these people, they turn the grace of God into
lasciviousness and they deny the only Lord God, and they're
filthy dreamers, verse 8, and they defile the flesh and they
despise dominion. They speak evil, verse 10, of
things of which they know not. They corrupt themselves. They are walking, verse 16, after
their own lusts. They are mockers. They are sensual,
not having the spirit. All of those things need to be
seen in light of the fact that the only way these people crept
in unawares was that they were there in the midst of the believing
church. looking as if they were believers.
These are characteristics which are uncovered, uncovered by the
grace of God in the lives of His people, uncovered by the
preaching of the Gospel, but uncovered only by God Himself.
They are not things that are seen through carnal eyes. We
are warned again and again about the false Christs and the false
shepherds and the false apostles that come. And they come, as
Satan does, masquerading as an angel of light. It is there. And it's no marvel for Satan,
this is 2 Corinthians 11, 14, no marvel for Satan himself is
transformed into an angel of light. For these, for such, are
false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into
the apostles of Christ. So therefore it's no great thing,
seeing Satan's behind all this, it's no great thing if his ministers
also be transformed as ministers of righteousness. So it's no help to us if we just
look at all these things through carnal eyes and we see that they
are turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness as if
they are actually living lives of lasciviousness. It actually
means lustfulness in excess. It means to be unrestrained in
lustfulness. It often is referred to in conjunction
with fornication and sexual immorality, but in the scriptures these things
are spiritual pictures, aren't they? And one of the great words
in this, the great words that we need to take hold of as children
of God, is that they turn the grace of our, I love the personal
pronouns in the scriptures, you notice that there, they turn
the grace of our God into lasciviousness. They talk of grace, they would
talk of grace, everyone talks of grace, the Catholic Church
talks of grace, but it's not the grace of our God, and they
deny the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ. So they may
have a Jesus, and they may have a Lord, and they may have a Christ,
but it's not the ours, not the ours of this common salvation,
not the ours of this faith, this faith, the faith, verse 3, which
was once delivered to the saints. They are people who are discerned
only in the preaching of the Gospel and we need to see beyond
things with carnal eyes to see what these men are really doing. We have three descriptions of
them here, don't we? We have their character revealed. They are ungodly men. We have their conduct revealed
in what they proclaim. They turn the grace of our God
into lasciviousness. And we have the reality, a reality
that is only brought to light by the Spirit of God, the reality
of their creed as it were. They are denying the only Lord
God and our Lord Jesus Christ. So we'll just look at those things
today briefly, if the Lord allows. They are ungodly men. It's a great description of all
of human nature, isn't it? All of humanity are ungodly.
And we can just look at some of the characteristics of the
ungodly. In verse 5, at the end of verse 5, they are then that
believed not. They believed not. They really
didn't believe the faith that was once delivered to the saints.
They really didn't believe the character of God revealed in
that opening verse, the God who sanctifies, the God who preserves
and the God who calls. And what they do know, and they
can know an awful lot, They know it naturally. The religious
man can know a lot naturally. It speaks of a path that the
vulture's eye hasn't seen. The vulture's eye sees very keenly
and sees very well from a great distance, but the vulture is
an unclean bird. And so they can see a lot, but
without the grace of God and without the Holy Spirit working
in them, all of what they see ultimately is darkness. Verse
12 describes something that they lack. They lack fear of God. To know God is to know Him in
such awesomeness of His holiness that fear and trembling is the
natural response. That's how Job, when Job met
God, it's interesting to go through the list of men when they meet
God, don't they? When Job met God. He said, I
am vile, and he abhors himself. When Isaiah met God, he was trembling,
wasn't he? Woe is me. And Daniel met God. And when John, the apostle John,
as an old, experienced, beloved apostle, when he met God, when
he met the Lord Jesus Christ in the opening chapter of Revelation,
he fell down, didn't he? as though he were a dead man.
These men have no fear. Nothing causes them fear. They
have preached peace to themselves and they believe their own lies. They preach peace to others and
they'll find others who will preach peace to them. They'll
have others who will join with them in that council. They are
without fear. They are also unstable, verse
13. They are unstable and they are
unaware of their own shame. And the sum total of what they
do with all of their supposed religion and all of their godliness
in verse 15, at the end of verse 15, these ungodly sinners, they
speak against Him. And in reality they are walking,
verse 16, after their own lusts. So they are unrestrained by God. They are allowed to go their
own way, unrestrained. Verse 19, they are sensual. So all of their activities are
directed and governed by human sensations and human feelings
and they have not the Spirit of God. These ungodly men, these
ungodly men, I have no fear of God, I have
no knowledge of God, and with them there is no worship of God.
And all they have is a fleshly religion. A fleshly religion,
as we saw in the book of Galatians, that can be extraordinarily zealous.
It can cause men to go on a journey all the way from Jerusalem to
what is now western Turkey. And they can go there, they can
go there to make a fair show in the flesh, is Galatians 6.15. And they constrain you to be
circumcised only lest they should suffer persecution for the cross
of Christ. For these men, they think themselves
to be something, when in reality they are nothing. And at the
end of the day we find that they are children of the bondwoman
and not children of the free. One of the things that is so
important to contemplate in terms of this world that we live in
is that spiritual realities always go before temporal ones. and
spiritual lasciviousness always goes before open immorality. And so where there is a prostitution
of the Gospel, where there is a denial of the God, denial of
the grace of our God and denial of the only Lord God and our
Lord Jesus Christ, there we will see, there we will see So whenever
you see open immorality and things that are abhorrent to God and
the children of God, we must say what happened, what happened
in the spiritual life of that people for that to occur. We
must always try and look beyond it all. These men, that's their
character. Their character is to be left
as natural men. But natural men with a dose of
religion are far more dangerous than natural men without any
religion whatsoever. And they turn, this is what they
do, they turn the grace of our God into lasciviousness. They turn the grace of our God,
the Gospel that's declared in that opening verse, the Gospel
that we try and declare, that salvation is of the Lord, and
salvation is by grace alone, and it's free, and it's unconditional,
it's absolute, it's immutable, it's unchangeable, it's immutable.
It's that God. a God in salvation who sanctifies,
a God who preserves, a Holy Spirit who calls irresistibly, that
salvation is all of God and the Gospel that saves is the Gospel
that sanctifies. And we don't need to put people
back under law and works, we just keep preaching the Gospel.
And what people say, what's the response of people to that? If
you just preach free, sovereign grace, electing love and redeeming
love, sanctifying love, If you just preach that, people will
be led to lead licentious lives unless, unless you put people
back under the law and some constraints, and some constraints of rules
and regulations, they will lead lascivious lives. That's what
Jude is talking about here. He's talking about these ones
that scoff at the Gospel of God's free and sovereign grace. But
also this turning it into lasciviousness can be done in so many different
ways, can't it? It can be done, as so many people
do in this day of ours. They turn the grace of God into
lasciviousness by declaring that the grace of God is a common
thing. Grace is common to all. And grace,
because it's common to all, like the love of God and the death
of the Lord Jesus, it's common to all, is actually acquired
by something that men do, that somehow salvation is a cooperative
activity. They continue to say that grace
is common to all men, that common grace is useless grace, because
common grace, as this verse says, common grace denies our God,
it denies the character of our God and it denies our Lord. Turning the grace of our God
into lasciviousness is doing what so many do these days, isn't
it? It's saying that it's now an evil thing. It's an evil thing
to expose sin because God's love is common and God's grace is
common and it's universal and that we must not stand dogmatically
on both the holiness of God and the holiness that He works in
His people. It's not our right to say anything
about the way people behave. It's turning the grace of our
God into lasciviousness. And that's what Romans 3.8 says,
wherever the Gospel comes along in all of its power, people will
say, as we've been told, it's just too good to be true. It's
just too good to be true. We must do something of our own.
And Paul, wherever the true Gospel is proclaimed, people will slanderously
accuse those who preach it. of allowing, as Paul says in
Romans 3.8, as rather some reported and some
affirmed that we say, let us do evil that good may come. If grace is absolutely free and
absolutely sovereign and salvation is in the hands of God and people
are saved from the beginning of the world, then the response
of the unregenerate man is, well it doesn't matter what I do,
I can do as I see fit. And there was a Gnosticism that
went around in those days where it said that really you could
actually display how godly you were by living as wickedly as
you possibly could because all your flesh was nothing but evil,
so the activities of your flesh didn't matter at all. But also
you can turn the grace of our God into lasciviousness, into
fornication, is by joining with those, joining with those in
fellowship who deny the grace of our God. I don't have time
to go through it but I'd love for you to go home at your leisure
in your time and read some of the chapters of Proverbs and
read the chapters of Proverbs and the women that are described
there. That enticing woman is the woman in Revelation that
has taken the whole world captive by her deceitfulness. But I'll
read some of these verses. It is a captivating delusion
and we need, as the God, enables us to be warned and to be kept
from it. The wise man says, My son, attend
unto my wisdom and bow thine ear to my understanding, that
thou mayest regard discretion, and that thy lips may keep knowledge. For the lips of a strange woman
drop as honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil. but her
end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death, her
steps take hold on hell, lest thou shouldest ponder the path
of her life." Her ways, it's interesting, isn't it? This is
talking about religious whoredom, brothers and sisters. This is
talking about that great whore. that great whore of deception.
But it's interesting, isn't it, what he says, what the wise man
says, lest thou should ponder the path of life, her ways are
movable. We've just read in Jude, haven't
we, that these are, in verse 13, the raging waves of the sea,
faming out their own shame, wandering stars. They are moving, aren't
they? They move in their doctrine and
their theology. And she is movable. God's people
are set firm on the foundation of the Lord Jesus Christ. Hear
me now, therefore, O ye children, and depart not from the words
of my mouth. Remove thy way far from her,
and come not nigh the door of her house, lest thou give thine
honour unto others, and thy years unto the cruel. It goes on and
on. If you keep reading, you'll find
that this enticing woman is willing to draw people away in deceitfulness. It is this deceitful religion
of man, this natural religion, this natural worldly religion. In chapter 6 he says, My son,
keep thy father's commandment and forsake not the law of thy
mother. Bind them continually upon thy heart and tie them about
thy neck. When thou goest, it shall lead
thee. When thou sleepest, it shall
keep thee. When thou wakest, it shall talk with thee. For
the commandment is a lamp, and the law is a light, and the reproofs
of instruction are the way of life, to keep thee from the evil
woman and from the flattery of the tongue of a strange woman. Lust not after her beauty in
thine heart, neither let her take thee with her eyelids. For by means of a whorish woman,
a man is brought to a piece of bread, and the adulterous will
hunt for the precious life." He's saying be separate from
them, be wise about this, this lasciviousness, this fornication,
this false gospel, this denial of the grace of our God. Then
there is this warning, verse 27. Can a man take fire in his
bosom and his clothes not be burnt? Can one go upon hot coals
and his feet not be burned? So that he goeth into his neighbour's
wife, whoever touches her shall not be innocent. Anyway, when
you have time, I pray that the Lord might cause you to read
on further. Say unto wisdom, say unto wisdom,
chapter 7, verse 4, Thou art my sister, and call understanding
thy kinsmen, that they may keep thee from the strange woman,
from the stranger which flattereth with her words. Don't you remember
in verse 16 of Jude it spoke of these people. They walk after
their own lusts, and their mouths speak great swelling words, having
men's personal aberration because of advantage. They'll speak great
swelling words, but great swelling words will be spoken of them,
and people will be drawn away after them. So there are many ways of this
grace of God being turned into lasciviousness. I don't know
about you, but I have been openly mocked by people. I had a man
come up to me some years ago and just repeated the word, grace,
grace, grace, grace, grace. He said, all you ever do and
talk about in your church is grace. He did it in a sad and
mocking way. These men, that's their character. They're ungodly. Their activities
ultimately is about turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness.
And the end, the end result of it all, the end of their creed,
is their denying the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ. Denying the only Lord God. What is it to deny the only Lord
God? It seems as if it would be so
easily discerned, wouldn't it? And yet Jude has written this
letter and the rest of the New Testament is warning about those
who claim to be believers and yet by their actions and by their
confessions of faith and the things that they hold on to and
the associations they have, they actually deny Him and deny His
character. And Anas and Sapphara didn't
deny the reality of the Lord Jesus Christ, the reality of
God, but they denied Him. They denied His character in
their lives. 1 John 5.10 says, He that believeth
on the Son of God hath the witness in himself, and he that believeth
not God hath made him a liar, because he believeth not the
record that God gave of his Son. Ultimately they are denying the
record that God gave of His Son in the Scriptures. Once again
I want to remind you that Jude mentions nothing about these
people's open immorality. There is no way in the world
you can get into the pulpit and into a position of leadership
in the churches that the apostles were pastoring. without you looking
very much like the men out with morality. They weren't openly
wicked men. The Judaising deceivers that
Paul was dealing with in Galatians were not openly wicked men. You
couldn't get into Paul's pulpit and be an openly wicked man.
You couldn't be the people that John is warning about in 1 John,
2 John and 3 John. and be openly wicked in the presence
of him and those people. They are deceitful, aren't they?
They creep in unawares and the way that they creep in is they
masquerade as ministers of righteousness. They creep in. They weren't openly
corrupt. And their perverting of the Gospel
is a spiritual perversion, isn't it? It's a perversion of the
Gospel of free and sovereign grace is a denial of the character
of God. At the end of the day, to deny
the Gospel that we proclaim, the Gospel of sovereign grace,
of free and sovereign grace, is to deny the very character
of our God, to make it common, to make grace and love common
and universal to all men, is a denial of the very character
of God as it's revealed in the very opening verse of this book,
that they are, to them, there are particular people that are
sanctified by God the Father, a particular people that are
preserved in Jesus Christ and a particular people that are
called And the particular servants of God have written these things.
It's to deny His deity, to deny His absolute sovereignty. Our
God, we love to proclaim the fact that our God is in the heavens
and He does, He has done whatsoever He hath pleased. Our God reigns
and grace like our God reigns sovereignly. It is the throne
of grace that people come to, a throne. Our God reigns and
grace reigns. It is to deny Him, isn't it,
if salvation in any way at all is up to the work and the will
and the worth of man. And people find God most offensive
when He is declared to be absolutely sovereign, when He is declared
to be the potter. And as our Lord Jesus Christ
said, is it not lawful for me to do what I will with my own? And that's what people rage against,
don't they? That God is absolutely sovereign,
sovereign in the disposal of all that he does, sovereign in
the salvation of his people, and yet as we saw last week,
is absolutely right in all of his justice and his judgement.
When God saves people it's all because of God's doing. When
men are damned it's all because of their own doing. As I reminded
people last night, last week, the people that have these judgements
of God endued upon them and have had them upon them for the last
2,000 years have this letter in their hands. and went to the
judgment of God, still bold and proud about their own ways. Our God is sovereign. I love
Acts 15.8 and it says, No one unto God are all his works from
the beginning of the world. No one unto God are all his works. Hebrews 4.3 says that he knows
all of his works were finished from the beginning of the world.
The other thing that people find offensive about the reality of
our God is that he reveals himself spiritually to his own. He reveals himself spiritually
to his own and in his own. When the Lord Jesus Christ declared
the absolute deity of God and the sovereign hand of God in
election and salvation, the people of his own hometown took him
out on a cliff to throw him down. In Matthew 11. The Lord Jesus,
in verse 25, said, I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and
earth, because Thou hast hid these things from the wise and
prudent and hast revealed them unto babes. Even so, Father,
for so it seemed good in Thy sight. All things are delivered
unto me of my Father, and no man knoweth the Son, but the
Father. Neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son, and
he to whomsoever the sun will reveal him. And then he says,
Come, come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and
I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn
of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and you shall find
rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden
is light. God's children find the declaration
of the absolute sovereignty of God a delight. We find that yoke,
that band, easy. We find the burden of carrying
that light, don't we? We find it something which settles
on us comfortably and easily. Even so, Father, for so it seemed
good in Thy sight." Sovereign grace is revealed and only revealed
spiritually by God in a sovereign way upon His own. And God's children
bow to that and find it delightful. And God holds those who deny
Deny the record that God has given of His Son. Wholesome,
accountable. See, the natural unbelieving
man is happy to have a God anywhere, doing anything. except sitting
on the throne, distinguishing, separating, choosing, electing. One of my friends in Sydney that
I'm hoping to spend some more time with soon, he was asking
me about election. I said, surely your church teaches
you about election. He said, I've never heard about
it in my church. He's been there for years, he's never heard about
it. But as I said to him when I met him some weeks ago, that
the election is one of the titles, it's one of the names that God
the Father gives His Son. This is My servant, Mine elect
one, Isaiah 42. God's children love the character
of God as it's revealed. So to change His character, to
not bow and in reverential awe, delight in the God that reveals
Himself in the scriptures, is to deny Him. It's to deny His
grace as being absolutely sovereign and efficacious. And it's to
deny, finally, it's to deny the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus
Christ. See, there is an our Lord Jesus
Christ, isn't there? Martin Luther said that many,
many people will go to hell because they can't use personal pronouns
in regard to God. He's our Lord Jesus Christ. He's my God. He's my Saviour. God's children are led to cry
out to him, Abba, Father, my Father. He says, I go to my God and to
your God. There is a personal relationship
between His people and others. And this is their lasciviousness,
isn't it? This is their fornication. He's mixing the natural understanding,
the natural understanding of men. All that they know, verse
10, they know naturally as brute beasts and in those things They
corrupt themselves and they speak evil of things which they know
not. They speak evil of the very things that we find most delightful.
They speak evil of particular redemption. They speak evil of
reprobation. They speak evil of the things
that cause God's children. What happened to the Lord Jesus
Christ on the cross and what He achieved, the perfect, perfect
completed work of our Lord God on behalf of all of His people,
sins were put away forever. that righteousness is brought
in, a righteousness that perfectly fits all of God's children for
heaven. These people understand these
things. They speak evil of those things
which they know not. So they deny the deity of our
Lord Jesus Christ. Isn't it lovely how the the apostles
giving His titles again and again, almost throughout the New Testament.
When the Lord Jesus is referred to outside of the Incarnation,
He's almost invariably referred to with His titles. Lord Jesus
Christ, Christ Jesus. The Lord declares His deity,
His absolute sovereignty, His holiness in all that He does,
and the completeness and the perfection of all that He does,
as God, with the hand of God. and that righteousness with which
he represents his own. He is, as we see in Acts 3, the
just one, the just and holy one. He is a just God and a saviour. Everything he does in the salvation
of his people is in accord with perfect justice. Everything he
does as our saviour, as our Lord, is to magnify all of the character
of our God. So to deny anything of that character
that we see revealed so clearly in the scriptures is to deny
our Lord Jesus Christ. They are not denying historical
facts, they are just denying the character of him. And to
deny him as our Lord Jesus is to deny his sinless humanity. that He brought in everlasting
righteousness and as a man He perfectly and completely obeyed
and satisfied God's holy law and now it's fulfilled. It's fulfilled perfectly and
completely and God is satisfied with His Son and all of God's
people are equally satisfied with His Son. His death is our
sin-bearing substitute. The fact that sins were put away
perfectly and completely. They are put behind the back
of God. They are separated from us as
far as the East is from the West. They are in the bottom of the
sea in a bag. They are covered as it were with
a thick cloud. The perfection of His work as
a man and now as a man The man, Christ Jesus, reigns from Heaven's
glory and He is on His way back to gather His people and it will
be a display of all the character of our God. They deny Him. They deny Him. by perverting
His grace. And they deny the fact that He
is the Christ, that all the promises of the Old Testament are yes
and amen, that this Christ now rules and reigns and He intercedes
for His own in heaven. See verse 15, they speak against
Him. That's a great description, isn't
it? So many of the religious world today, they speak about
Him and then they deny Him. And in reality, in their preaching,
they are speaking against Him. They turn the grace of our God
into lasciviousness. The word they use almost universally,
don't they, is that little word, but. It's all very well for you
to say that, but, Yes, I agree with all that but. I get sick
of the butting goats. They're butting here and they're
butting there. They're always butting. And yet
God's people don't like that word but. It turns the grace
of our God into lasciviousness. The Lord warns again and again
and again, come out from among them and be you separate children
of God. Come out from among them and
be you separate. Be wise about their doctrine. Look again and again deeply beyond
the simple things that they say. Look what they say about the
Lord Jesus Christ and Him crucified. 2 John 7 for many deceivers are
entered into the world who confess not that Jesus Christ is come
in the flesh. sinless life of the Lord Jesus,
there's also particularly to deny the fact that on Calvary's
tree he put away the sins of his people and he put them away
forever. That's what he came in the flesh
for, to bear the sins of his own people in his body on the
tree. So anyone who declares that somehow the Lord Jesus died
for all humanity is actually denying that Jesus Christ came
in the flesh. It's not a historic event necessarily. You can read the encyclopedia
and find that Jesus Christ came in the flesh. It's actually denying
what he came for and what he achieved. Anyone that confesses
not that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, this is the deceiver
and an antichrist. Look to yourselves that we lose
not those things which we have wrought, but that we receive
a full reward. Whosoever transgresseth, abideth
not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God. They have not God. He that abideth in the doctrine
of Christ, he hath both God the Father and the Son. Look how
serious it was for the Apostle John. If there any come unto
you, and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into your house,
neither bid him Godspeed. For he that biddeth him Godspeed
is the partaker of his evil deeds. The end result of all this is
that it is a just activity there, God, society's own, and it is
a just activity of our God that these men should have this condemnation. The condemnation is of this condemnation. It's the condemnation of them
preaching it, the condemnation of them being allowed to walk
after their own lusts and not be restrained of God. The condemnation
of corrupting themselves, the condemnation of them turning
the grace of our God into lasciviousness and denying the Lord Jesus Christ,
our Lord Jesus Christ. They corrupt themselves. God's
judgment is just. They are reserved. To whom is reserved the blackness
of darkness forever. May the Lord protect us and preserve
us from that of free will works religion,
that lady who tempts and entices countless multitudes. Let's pray.