EVENING
SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 7/26/2025 6:36 PM
My
Worship Time Focus: PT-2 Introduction to “Apostates Illustrated”
Bible
Reading & Meditation Reference: Jude 8-13
Message of the verses: “8 Yet in the same way these men, also by dreaming, defile
the flesh, and reject authority, and revile angelic majesties. 9 But Michael
the archangel, when he disputed with the devil and argued about the body of
Moses, did not dare pronounce against him a railing judgment, but said,
"The Lord rebuke you!" 10 But these men revile the things which they
do not understand; and the things which they know by instinct, like unreasoning
animals, by these things they are destroyed. 11 Woe to them! For they have gone
the way of Cain,
and for pay they have rushed headlong into the error of Balaam, and perished in the rebellion of Korah. 12 These are the
men who are hidden reefs
in your love feasts when they feast with you without fear, caring for
themselves; clouds without
water, carried along by winds; autumn trees without fruit, doubly dead, uprooted;
13 wild waves of the sea, casting up their own shame
like foam; wandering stars,
for whom the black darkness has been reserved forever.”
Before I begin to look at the rest
of this introduction to Jude 8-13 notice the eight times that I have
highlighted different things in these verses, as the first three identify
people and in the last five Jude uses metaphors to help describe these
apostates that he has been writing about.
Now in the last SD on this
introduction I quoted from John MacArthur’s commentary and he was writing about
terrorism, and then came to a halt about terrorism which leads him into the
following: “The same features that make
political terrorists so dangerous in the world make apostate teachers even more
dangerous in the church.” I suppose that
the reason it makes it much more difficult in the church is because that the
church is only make up of a few people compared to how many that are in a
country. MacArthur then goes on to write
“Because they often come disguised as angels of light (2 Cor. 11:14) or wolves
in sheep’s clothing (Matt. 7:15), apostates are difficult to identify. And, because of their own self-deception,
they willingly (albeit unwittingly) embrace their own eternal ruin for the sake
of their poisonous lies. In destroying
souls, they themselves commit spiritual suicide.” Now committing suicide I think that he is
talking about not only the apostates ending up in hell but those who follow
them also end up in hell.
“Since it is important for
freedom-loving nations to fight ideological terrorists, it is infinitely more
crucial for believers to expose and reject spiritual terrorists. Political terrorists can inflict material
damage and physical death, but apostates disguised as genuine teachers can
subvert God’s truth and entice people to believe damning lies.
“Jude realized the immense danger
that apostates pose to divine truth.
Therefore, he exhorted his readers to ‘contend earnestly for the faith” (v. 3), to keep battling for the
pure doctrine of ‘our common salvation’ against
those who would undermine the gospel.
But because the false teachers had ‘crept
in unnoticed’ (v. 4), the challenge came in recognizing and exposing them
before they inflicted harm.
“With that in view, this passage
continues to depict the true face of the apostates. They were so ungodly and so spiritually
dangerous that Jude used the most stinging and condemnatory language to
describe them. In so doing, he presented
three characteristics of the apostates’ nature, three correlations to past
apostates, and five comparisons to natural phenomena.”
Let me just say that I am begging to
understand why it took John MacArthur fifteen sermons to go through this letter
with only 25 verses in it, and let me also say that this book, to me goes along
with what John wrote in the third chapter of Revelation as he described the Laodicean
church, which I believe that in this world today what is found in the majority
of churches in the world.
7/26/2025 7:03 PM
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