Jude continues to speak of the reprehensible behavior of the ungodly. He said yesterday that they are secretly slipping into the churches. They look just like everyone else in the congregation. They dress the right way. They say the right things, at least at first. But, so slowly that the church members don't realize it's happening, they are infiltrating the church with lies. They are hindering those who are interested in finding their way to Christ, and they are dragging some who are already saved back into sin.
He's also going to make a mysterious statement about a particular group of angels whose sin was so grievous that God put them in prison where He's holding them til the day of judgment. We are going to be looking at this subject today and tomorrow.
Jude begins by saying this of those pretenders who claim to belong to the Lord but instead are serving the flesh: "They are ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only Sovereign and Lord." (Jude 1:4b) Grace doesn't give us a license to sin, but there were those who taught that it does. They may have been saying something like this, "Since you are saved by God's grace through your belief that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, don't you have forgiveness for your sins of the past and of the present? Isn't Christ's sacrifice enough to cleanse you of your future sins too? Then what does it matter what you do? You are living under grace and you don't have to follow a set of rules. Your soul belongs to Christ, but your earthly body belongs to you. Do what you want with it." There were in Jude's day doctrines which taught a distinct separation between the body and the spirit, as if only what is done in the spirit matters. These false teachers claimed that nothing we do in the body matters because the body is going to perish and return to dust. They believed it was only what we do with our spirits (what we believe in our minds and feel with our hearts) that has any eternal significance.
Jude says these people have perverted God's grace. They are trying to take advantage of the grace of God by living according to their carnal natures in direct opposition to the gospel message. Christ didn't give Himself for us so we could wallow in immorality. He gave Himself for us so we could be transformed into new creatures (2 Corinthians 5:17). As new creatures we are not to live in captivity to the flesh but are to live according to the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Christ never taught that it was alright to live immoral lives, so to claim that it's fine to live wantonly in sin is to deny Christ the place He rightly deserves in our lives---as our King and Lord.
Jude now delivers a stern warning against believing false doctrine by reminding his readers of the fate of those who rebelled against God in the wilderness after He rescued them from Egypt. "Though you already know all this, I want to remind you that the Lord at one time delivered His people out of Egypt, but later destroyed those who did not believe." (Jude 1:5) God delivered all of Israel out of Egypt, but not all of Israel gave their hearts to Him. Those who rebelled against Him received the punishment they earned for themselves. In the same way, Christ died for all, but not all have given their hearts to Him. Those who rebel against Him will be like those who died in the wilderness, never having made it to the promised land. God's promises are for those who belong to Him. The promises belong to those who have made Him their King and Lord, not for those who live in opposition to His holy principles.
It's not only human beings who face the wrath of God for opposing Him. Even angels are judged for rebellion. If God is willing to punish angels, He won't hesitate to punish humans. "And the angels who did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their proper dwelling---these He has kept in darkness, bound with everlasting chains for judgment on the great Day." (Jude 1:6) This is a mysterious statement. We know that Satan and the fallen angels which are known as "demons" are not bound with chains. If this were so, then Satan could not be roaming the earth like a roaring lion seeking whom he can devour (1 Peter 5:8). If this were so, then Satan could not have tempted the Lord Jesus in the wilderness and he could not tempt us today. If the fallen angels are imprisoned, then how could we explain the incidences of demonic possession in the four gospel accounts? If no fallen angels are loose, then no one was possessed, and this would mean that Jesus did not perform exorcisms. So Jude has to be referring to a different group of angels than Satan and those who followed him in his rebellion.
The group of angels chained in darkness is likely the group of angels who, in Genesis 6, are known as the "sons of God" who married and had children with human women. The crime of these angels was so heinous and so against the plan of God for mankind that He could not allow them to remain free until the day of judgment. They had to be stopped immediately and permanently.
If the angels who mated with humans are bound with chains, then we can assume that their crime was far worse than that of Satan and his followers. We know the angels who mated with women apparently did it out of lust, for the Bible tells us that they found human women beautiful. But what was going to be the far-reaching result of such unions? Would the entire human race have become creatures who were not redeemable by the grace of God? Humans are quite capable of making "gods" of themselves; how much more would they have believed they had no need of God if they were a blend of humans and angels? Would there have been any limit to their wickedness? If God is going to harshly judge humans who hinder others from being saved, how much more is He going to judge angels who tried to render humans incapable of being saved? Satan, though he tries to tempt us to sin and tries to offer us anything in place of Christ, can't change the fact that God created us with a need to know Him. As the saying goes, we were fashioned with a "God-sized hole in our hearts". But what the sexually immoral angels did may have had the power, over time, to change the human race in such a way that we felt no need to know our Creator.
The matter of angels marrying human women is a complicated and controversial subject. It's going to take us more than one session to look into the matter, so we will pick up here tomorrow where we will find Jude comparing the sin of these angels to the sins of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah.
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