CRITICAL AND EXEGETICAL NOTES
Jude 1:12. Spots.—Lit. σπιλάδες, rocks; Vulg. maculæ (compare 2 Peter 2:13). “Rocks in your love-feast, causing stumbling and shipwreck.” Feeding themselves.—Seeking their own interests; getting their satisfaction out of leading you astray, forwarding their own purposes. Clouds … trees.—Figures of useless things, that may be noisy and may make a show, but prove wholly mischievous (compare 2 Peter 2). Twice dead.—When it fails to yield good fruit, and when it wholly loses vital sap.
Jude 1:13. Raging waves.—With evident allusion to unrestrainedness of sensual passions. Wandering stars.—Figure from the shooting stars, or the comets. Suggestive of the shortlived fame and baleful influence of these false teachers. “They too were drifting away into the eternal darkness.”
Jude 1:14. Enoch also.—Here is almost a verbal quotation from the apocryphal book of Enoch, or from the tradition embodied in that book. See Illustrations. Seventh from Adam.—Some symbolical importance attached to this numbering which cannot now be recovered.
Jude 1:15. Execute judgment.—To exercise universally judicial administration. This must not be taken as a quotation from inspired Scriptures.
Jude 1:16. Persons in admiration.—Or loudly praising persons for the sake of what they can get out of them.
Jude 1:18. Ungodly lusts—Lit. “after the lusts of their own impieties.”
Jude 1:19. Separate themselves.—Carrying with them a certain following, and so making schisms and sects. Sensual.—Better “sensuous.” The Spirit.—Who, if He dwells in us, surely controls the natural ambitions and passions. The word for “Spirit” is without the article in the Greek, so it may mean simply “unspiritual.”
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Jude 1:12-19
Three Types of Mischief-makers.—In Jude 1:11 three men are introduced as types from the Old Testament history of the men who were putting the faith and purity of the Christian Churches in such grave peril. They are Cain, Balaam, and Korah. But it is evident that St. Jude had more in his mind associated with these names than we can find in the Scripture records. Round these three names Rabbinical and other legends had grown up, and in the Jewish mind there was a kind of horror at the mention of these names. It was saying the severest thing that could be said of the mischief-makers to liken them to Cain, or Balaam, or Korah. The Rabbinic legends represented Cain as the offspring, not of Adam, but of Sammael, the evil spirit, and Eve, and as the parent of other evil spirits, and therefore as connected with the idea of foul and unnatural impurity. The point prominent in the remembrance of Balaam is his scheming to ruin Israel through enticements to sensuality. And a strange Rabbinic legend, while it placed the souls of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram in Gehenna, represented them as not tormented there. The paragraph now before us divides into three sections.
I. The Cain type of mischief-makers (Jude 1:12-13).—We need not follow those precise suggestions which come from the legendary additions; we may keep to those which connect with the Scriptural narratives. Then the Cain type represents self-seekers. Cain did not want anything absolutely wrong. His want was unworthy, and revealed an unworthy disposition, simply because it was so utterly self-centred and selfish. And there ever have been men in Christ’s Church, who proved to be most serious mischief-makers, not because they have done things positively wrong, but because they have brought such a self-seeking spirit into it. Nothing more surely, or more utterly, spoils the peace of Christ’s Church, than the presence of a member who is merely “seeking his own things.” Such a man, like Diotrephes, “loves to have the pre-eminence,” and will be sure to push and strive to get it. Precisely what the self-interested man cannot bear is to have any favour shown to a brother, an Abel. Rejoicing in a brother’s blessing or success he cannot do. The poor soul can do nothing but rejoice in his own; and fret—and fret other people—if neither success nor blessing come to him. St. Jude is intensely severe in dealing with the Cain type of mischief-makers. They appear at the love-feasts, when everybody ought to be mindful of his brother, and finding every way of expressing brotherly love; and in a sharp sentence he shows the selfish men sitting at the feast, “feeding themselves without fear.” If there are any delicacies on the table, they have got them. If their neighbours right and left have had for a long while empty plates, they neither see nor care. We know the men only too well. The Church of to-day is troubled with their presence and influence. St. Jude likens them to four things; declares how certainly they must come into Divine judgment; and vigorously denounces the spirit which is so manifest in their conversation and intercourse. The four things to which they are likened are:
1. “Clouds without water,” self-contained, that have no blessing for anybody. Aggravating clouds, that show themselves as grandly as they can, wandering about the sky, but never break and pour refreshing rains upon the thirsty earth.
2. “Trees whose fruit withereth.” Aggravating trees! Watch them in spring-time—there is good show of blossom; watch them in summer—the fruitage seems enlarging; come to them in autumn—there is nothing for you: all is shrivelled. A tree for show, that had no blessing for anybody in it.
3. “Raging waves”; this suggests a darker side of the selfish man. He is always fussy, always worrying, always wanting to put everybody else straight; always mounting up like the waves, and making a great noise, and doing nothing, only showing his own noisy helplessness.
4. “Wandering stars,” who will come into no sort of order, persist in taking their own way, and will surely find the woe of being out of God’s order. Then St. Jude declares how certainly all self-ordering, self-seeking men must come into Divine judgment, taking his sentences (Jude 1:14-15) almost precisely from a familiar literary work of his day, known as the book of Enoch. It is precisely the same basis of Divine judgment that our Lord presents in His judgment parable, and in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. Those who did no ministry were the self-contained, self-interested professors. The rich man was wholly self-satisfied, and never once thought of ministering. The great judgment of God falls upon those who, while bearing the Christ-name, were nothing to anybody, and did nothing for anybody—even as Cain. And upon them St. Jude pours out his denunciations, as well he might. See these men in any Christian Church. They are the grumblers, the dissatisfied, the boasters. They are the men who make much of the rich, flatter them, to get what they can for themselves out of them. “Their mouth speaketh great swelling words.” Alas! how often we have heard them! You would think the world was made, and the Church founded, entirely for the honour of these men. And they have “men’s persons in admiration because of advantage.” They are “courtiers, flatterers, and parasites.” The temper characterised is that which fawns as in wondering admiration on the great, while all the time the flatterer is simply seeking what profit he can get out of him whom he flatters. There is no real Christian life unless the Cain spirit is wrought out of a man; unless self is dethroned, and sonship and brotherhood enthroned.
II. The Balaam type of mischief-makers.—A portion of Jude 1:16 evidently is suggested by the remembrance of Balaam. It is not essential to the selfish man that he should seek money only; but where there is gain-seeking there is an additional power for mischief-making in Christ’s Church. The gain-seeker is always a selfish man; but the selfish man is not always a gain-seeker. Balaam always had his eye upon the rewards of divination, and he could do mean and shameful things under the inspiration of that gain-seeking. Illustration may also be taken from Simon the Sorcerer, and from Demas. The love of money is partly a bad bias of natural disposition; but as such the Christian professor is bound to resist it and work it out. “The love of money is the root of all evil.” Let the covetous, grasping spirit get into any Christian community, it will speedily effect its spiritual degradation and ruin. All high and holy motives fade away when the sordid ones are forced to the front.
III. The Korah type of mischief-makers.—These are the credit-seekers, who are sharply defined by St. Jude as “they who separate themselves.” They are the schismatics and sectarians. They want to be first. They can only get first by being “otherwise” in something. All sects that have broken off from the fellowship of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church have been led into their separateness by some Korah-typed man. For all true freedom of thought and life, within due bounds of authority, the Church provides, and this freedom should suffice for all who are humble-minded, and supremely want the honour of Christ, and the unity and blessing of God’s people. Credit of superior knowledge, or of keener spiritual insight, will soon make a man masterful within the Church of Christ, and there are always weak souls who are easily carried away by the positiveness, the dogmatic tone of the over-confident man.
These three types of Church troublers have been found in every age, and are found among us to-day. But he whose supreme aim is “the glory of Christ” can be no “self-seeker”; he whose great concern is being a blessing to others can be no “gain-seeker”; and he whose whole effort is devoted to securing the welfare of the community can be no mere credit-seeker. We must not be after the pattern of Cain, or of Balaam, or of Korah. “One is our master, even Christ, and all we are brethren.”
SUGGESTIVE NOTES AND SERMON SKETCHES
Jude 1:14-15. The Book of Enoch.—That there is a very close resemblance between this passage and the book of Enoch
(2) will be seen by comparing the following translation: “Behold He comes with ten thousand of His saints, to execute judgment upon them, and destroy the wicked, and reprove all the carnal for everything which the sinful and ungodly have done, and committed against Him.”
Jude’s Use of the Book of Enoch.—As the book of Enoch had probably been in existence for a century before St. Jude wrote, and was easily accessible, it is more natural to suppose that he quoted here, as in previous instances, what he thought edifying, than to adopt either of the two strained hypotheses:
(1) that the writer had received what he quotes through a tradition independent of the book of Enoch, that tradition having left no trace of itself in any of the writings of the Old Testament; or
(2) that he was guided by a special inspiration to set the stamp of authenticity upon the one genuine prophecy which the apocryphal writer had imbedded in a mass of fantastic inventions.—A. Plummer, D.D.
Book of Enoch by Different Authors.—One of the most curious remains of early Christian literature that have come down to us is the Apocalypse, or book of Enoch. It is the product of different authors. The main bulk of the work, describing the visit of Enoch to paradise, and the vision of the future history of the world which was revealed to him there, was written by a Jew about 30 B.C. The rest of the work has been proved by Hilgenfeld to have been composed by a Christian at the beginning of the second century. It is this part of the book which has been assigned by Ewald and others to the first century before Christ, and regarded as evidence that the leading conceptions and terms of Christianity were already familiar to the Jewish people before the coming of Christ.