Can you please explain Jude 1:4-7?
Before we go “verse by verse” to explain them, let’s look at verse 3, “Beloved, while I was very diligent to write to you concerning our common salvation, I found it necessary to write to you exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.” Jude wanted to write something about the salvation which was the “common possession” of each believer, but the Holy Spirit inspired him to write about a growing apostacy within the church instead. Most of this book deals with that apostacy and in view of this Jude needed to exhort the saints to “earnestly contend for the faith.” This simply means they were to “defend the truth about Christ” that false teachers were seeking to destroy. (The words “the faith” do not refer to our personal faith in Christ but rather “the truth about Christ that has been given to us to believe.”)
Verse 4 reads, “For certain persons have crept in unnoticed, those who were long beforehand marked out for this condemnation, ungodly persons who turn the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ” (NASB). These are the “false teachers” that Jude needed to warn the saints about. They had come into local churches secretly, pretending to be believers in Christ and the saints had no idea they were mere professors and not true believers. In verses 8-13 we see a detailed description of their ungodly character and how they were having intimate fellowship with the saints and were accepted as teachers among them. The Apostle Paul warned of such men in Acts 20:28-30, “Be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God which He purchased with His own blood. I know that after my departure SAVAGE WOLVES WILL COME AMONG YOU, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves MEN WILL ARISE, SPEAKING PERVERSE THINGS, to draw away the disciples after them.”
In verses 5-7 Jude brings out 3 examples of God’s PAST JUDGMENTS of apostates to assure the saints that all apostates will indeed be judged in due time. You can read about their future judgment in verses 14-15. Here are the 3 examples:
Verse 5: “Now I desire to remind you, though you know all things once for all, that the Lord, after saving a people out of the land of Egypt, subsequently DESTROYED THOSE WHO DID NOT BELIEVE.” This refers to Israel’s SIN OF UNBELIEF as they journeyed from Egypt to Canaan and how God destroyed them for their unbelief (Numbers 13 & 14; 1 Corinthians 10:1-10; and Hebrews 3:17-19).
Verse 6: “And the angels who did not keep their own domain, but abandoned their proper abode, He has kept in eternal bonds under darkness for the judgment of the great day.” Here we have a fall of angels and their SIN OF APOSTASY. This sin is different than that of Lucifer and the angels who followed him in his rebellion against God. This sin involved angels leaving their assigned place in heaven to intermarry with women here on earth (Genesis 6:1-4). Unlike Satan and his angels who have not yet been consigned to the bottomless pit (Revelation 20:1-3), these angels are in “pits of darkness” until the final judgment day (2 Peter 2:4).
Verse 7: “Just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, since they in the same way as these indulged in gross immorality and WENT AFTER STRANGE FLESH, are exhibited as an example in undergoing the punishment of eternal fire.” Here is the SIN OF HOMOSEXUALITY recorded in Genesis 19:1-11. Like the angels who sinned, their sin was “gross immorality” by leaving the “natural use of the body” in homosexual acts (see Romans 1:26-27). God judged them with fire by “reducing them to ashes” and thus “made them an example for those who would live ungodly lives thereafter” (2 Peter 2:6). (DO) (634.1)