‘Beloved, while I was giving all diligence to write to you of our common salvation, I was constrained to write to you exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.'
‘Beloved.' A common address also used by Peter, John and Paul, etc. Love was at the centre of their Gospel, and the church's teachers came to them with hearts filled with love.
Note his stress on the fact that he had been diligently setting out to write to them about the glorious truths of the Gospel. They are thus people towards whom he feels a pastoral responsibility, and who were presumably expecting to hear from him. But as a result of news that he has clearly recently received, he now feels that he must exhort them to fearlessly defend the true Gospel, that body of truth which had once for all been delivered to God's people (His saints - compare Romans 1:7; 1 Corinthians 1:2).
‘Our common salvation.' This would seem to emphasise that he was writing to both Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians. Compare Ephesians 2:11-22. Alternately it may simply be seeing all genuine Christians as one together.
‘To contend earnestly for the faith.' This may refer to a body of doctrine seen as ‘the faith', possibly the ‘Testimony of Jesus' (see 2 Timothy 1:8; Revelation 1:2; Revelation 1:9) made up of the reminiscences of the Apostles about the life and teaching of Jesus, and including the inspired ideas based on them as found in Apostolic communications from such as Paul (2 Peter 3:15-16), James and Peter. Or it may signify simply that they were to contend for the necessity for belief in the Lord Jesus Christ as the only Saviour (Jude 1:4; compare Acts 4:12). But either way it clear that it was being denied by these ‘godless men' who had come in among them.
While we cannot be sure what the false beliefs of these godless men were we do have certain hints;
· Firstly Jude's emphasis on ‘our ONLY Master and Lord Jesus Christ' (Jude 1:4), and on ‘the ONLY God our Saviour, through Jesus Christ our Lord', suggests that they believed that there was more than one god, and more than one saviour (possibly contrasting the God of the Old Testament with the God of the New, as Marcion would after them, or by including Him in a pantheon).
· Secondly he describes them as turning the grace of God into lasciviousness (Jude 1:4). This suggests that they were taking the Gospel of God's active grace in salvation through faith as an excuse to live licentious lives, possibly on the grounds that it glorified God by providing more sins to forgive and demonstrating the greatness of His unmerited love (compare Romans 6:1-2), or on the basis that it demonstrated the unimportance of the flesh, and focused attention on the growth of ‘the spirit'. Possibly the idea was that by keeping the flesh active and busy, the spirit could be freed from its hold in order to develop separately.