Bible Lesson 99

DEFENDING THE FAITH

“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 delivered to the Saints.” Jude vs. 3

In this lesson, we want to look at what the half-brother of Jesus and the brother of James, felt was of utmost importance for Christianity. Jude felt it necessary, relatively shortly after the death of Christ, at least before the destruction of the Temple, in A.D.70, to write to the church then and now, that we must always be awake and aware that false prophets and others who are not children of God, purposefully work to confuse and mislead those who are simple or do not have full knowledge of the gospel. Jude had wanted to write a letter concerning salvation and how it blesses those who have submitted themselves to the gospel in faith; however, God had somehow changed his mind and caused him to write instead of the perennial problem of the church which is false prophets and those who will not follow the simple but exact teaching of the Word of God, the Bible. Jude begins this epistle by identifying himself as ‘Jude’, a bondservant of Jesus Christ and brother of James.

It is interesting to note that although Jude had been the half brother of Jesus, He has had an experience that identifies him more than a half brother and instead of a bondservant or willing slave, of Jesus Christ. Then in verse one of his epistle, Jude specifies to whom this epistle is written, and that is to every truly saved person who lived then or will live before the end of time.

There would have been many back then who would read or hear of this epistle who were not truly saved, some perhaps liking part of the gospel, but rejecting the rest, or simply hangers-on with some group that was saved; however, only truly saved, born again children of God can ever fulfill the demands of this epistle. Jude says that he is writing to those who have been ‘called’ by God’s irresistible grace to the New birth and that newness of life that comes in true salvation.

Then Jude goes further to identify his intended audience when he says that this epistle is for those who are ‘sanctified’ by God the Father, and ‘preserved’ in Jesus Christ. That means those who have always been loved by the Father and whose latter end is heaven and all of its glory. God has always had a plan, and from before the foundation of the world, God had elected a particular person to be called the church.

All of those people would be called, in time, and reborn in Christ, and be obedient to the word and will of God in their lives. (Ephesians 1:4; Titus 1:1; John 13:18; John 15:16; Matthew 20:16; John 6:44; Acts 22:14; 2nd John 1, 13; Romans 8:29; 1st Peter 1:2; Ephesians 1:11).

Now, having said that, let me be quick to say that our job as preachers, teachers, and evangelist, is to preach the truths of the Word of God to every one exactly the way God has written it. God did not choose to identify those whom He had elected or chosen, so we do not attempt to identify them, we simply preach ‘Thus saith the Lord’, and God will do the rest.

Jesus Christ says that we are to preach to those who will hear and He will save those who are chosen to be saved. Jesus Christ, just before His ascension back into heaven spoke to and said ‘But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.’ (Acts 1:8).

In Matthew 28:19-20, Jesus told his disciples and us, that we were to ‘Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.’ We are to preach, teach and disciple those who want to hear, and if we preach the truth as God gave it in His Word the Bible, God will use our preaching to save those that He has elected before the foundation of the world. We as Preachers or whatever we call ourselves (Pastor, teacher, Bishop, Etc) have a duty and it is not to save anyone. That is God’s business and His alone. We are to obey God’s commands that are in His Word and God works in that to do His will.

We must know about the elective purpose of God because that glorifies God and takes us out of the loop for glory. God will glorify us in time if we are faithful to do His Will. Never allow anyone to draw you into the old sinner’s argument about God being unfair if He elected some and rejected others because God did not reveal who is elect and who is not. We all have the same assignment from God and that is to first recognize our sin problem. We are sinners with a nature that is depraved and we can and will, under the proper circumstances, do anything that our mind can conceive. (Genesis 6:5). We are not even close to being people who could or should question the Almighty about being fair. He is God and whatever He does is fair He sets the standard for being fair.

Instead of wondering why he just saves some of us, we should be amazed that He would save any of us. Now, I dealt with the cornerstone of Christian belief (election) at the beginning of this lesson, so that we could begin at the beginning, in our call for defending ‘The Faith’. Any person who does not intend to give God the authority to decide to elect or chose some people to be saved and not select others is a person with a god complex or an idea that they are god and will not allow anything that does not make sense to them.

I know that is a silly way to think but we live among silly people in this sin-sick world. Before we can earnestly contend for the Faith, we must properly believe, (have saving faith), and believe that God is the Creator, sustainer, and savior of mankind. If you are a new convert or child in the faith, you will have the Holy Spirit to give you that rock-ribbed faith, trust, and knowledge that God is in complete charge and that He only does what is right. That does not mean that everybody is going to heaven, but those who go to hell will be in the only place that they could be satisfied.

Why would we need a lesson on defending ‘the Faith” Simply because we have so many people that are Biblically illiterate in our congregations today. That is a terrible thing to say but even more terrible is the fact that it is true. People who know exactly nothing about the Bible are defending ‘their faith’, but not ‘The faith’. No wonder we are so confused and at such cross purposes in our denominational churches. We should not be, but the chances are, that many of you who read this are not aware of what the Faith is.

Most of us have many facts but do not have the Biblical wisdom that activates those facts. Is it really important that we know more than ‘let’s just love Jesus and get along with everyone including the world and the worldly” The answer is given to us by Jesus Christ Himself when He said to us that in the day of judgment, not everyone who says unto Him, Lord, Lord, shall enter into heaven but only those who do the will of His Father which is in heaven'(Matthew 7:21). Your question for yourself and for others that say that they love Jesus and are church members should be’. Are you obeying all that He commanded you’ If you are not, then you do not know Jesus and you are not loved by Him or His Father! (John 14:15, 21-24).

That means that you are not saved and you are still under the wrath of God; and if you do not yield your life to Jesus Christ, you will go to hell for eternity. I hope you have not bought into the cheap grace preaching that has been going on for so long in our modern age; but if you have, now is the time that you need to go to the cross and submitted your life totally and completely to Jesus Christ and began to learn of Him and study His Word and obey all that He has said to us.

Many people in our day say, well, that is just too intolerant, too narrow, and too one-way; but that is the way that God set up the entrance into His heaven. God does not force anyone to do those things; however, God in extending His love to those who are to be saved, causes them to want to do them and to do them (Philippians 2:13). As far as God being intolerant, He is! It has to be His way because He is God and only He understands and knows the best way for His creatures to live. God’s way is narrow and unless you want to enter through the strait gate and walk the narrow way that leads to eternal life, you will never know the love of God (Matthew 7:13:14). God has made ‘one way’, the way, and the only way to know the redemptive love of God is through His One and only Son, Jesus Christ and His work on the cross and his death to redeem those who would obey (John 3:16-21; John 10:1-12; Hebrews 5:8-9; Romans 8:1-14).

God created and placed our Federal head (Adam and Eve) in a state of innocence. They did not have any idea about right or wrong because they walked in the light and the energy of God the Creator. Adam and Eve had a direct connection with God because He walked and talked with them in the cool of the day (Genesis 3:8). Their lives were fed by the nature of God because they had the Holy Spirit to guide them. Yet in just a short while, the tempter, Satan who had taken over the person of the serpent, was able to confuse them about what God had said. You will remember that God had placed them in the Garden of Eden (a literal paradise) and given them one command that they were to keep. That command was not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’.and God told them that in the day that they ate of the fruit of that particular tree, they would die. It is good for us to realize that in the Garden of Eden, there was every tree that would ever be in God’s world; and they all offered up something to Adam and Eve.

Some were good for fruit, some for nuts and all things good to eat, so Adam and Eve had a superabundance of good things to eat. The Bible goes on to tell us further than that; they pleasured their beauty for the young couple. God had planted another special tree in that garden and that tree was the tree of life, near the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We know that Adam and Eve were rational thinking people because they were God’s special creation and they were made like God.

They had not practiced their senses of rationalism because when the serpent comes along and quotes scripture with just one word changed to cause Eve to think less of her Creator than she should ‘.She immediately fell into his trap! We know from the Word of God that what God had said, or commanded, was, ‘Of every tree of the garden you mayest freely eat; But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shall not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shall surely die.’ The devil knew what God had said, and he quoted scripture very close to what God had commanded, when he told Eve something like ‘Has God said, you shall not eat of every tree of the garden’

That sounded something like Eve had heard but it turned God’s Word around and stood them on their head. God had said that Adam could eat of all of the trees of the garden, except one tree and that was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Eve than being impressed by the serpent’s grasp of scripture began to corrupt the scripture herself. She said that God had said they could eat of every tree in the garden except for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which they were not to eat of, and they were told not to touch it, lest they would die.

Satan, as the serpent, had Eve where he wanted her because he had her in a conversation where she appeared not to understand what was said. The devil goes on to convince Eve that God was keeping something back from them because God knew that if they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, their eyes would be opened and they would be as gods (Genesis 3:1-6). That speaks to the plan of Satan or Lucifer from before the foundation of the world. Even in heaven as an apparent Archangel, it had been his dream to be God himself (Isaiah 14:12-14).

Adam and Eve chose the bad instead of the perfect; because you will remember that we saw a few lines back that there was another tree in the midst of that garden and they were not forbidden to eat of the fruit of that tree, and that tree was the tree of life. So Adam and Eve could have eaten of one tree and lived forever, but instead, they chose to disobey God and eat of the tree that caused them to die Spiritually the moment they ate it and to begin the process of physical death at the same time. How often do we choose the very worst thing available instead of obeying God and choosing to live life more abundantly’

Adam and Eve failed God by disobeying in the very morning of their creation, yet we find the half-brother of Jesus Christ sometime after Christ’s death burial and resurrection as he leaves off the subject that he had intended to write about. There was great danger in the church of that day because people were not being particular enough and standing strong enough, to keep the message of God pure. Think about this for a moment’.think about the serpent, which must have crept into, or slithered into Adam’s church, so to speak, just as Jude says that false prophets had crept into their young churches. The serpent and the false prophets either crept in unawares or presented themselves as something other than what they were and were welcomed in (Jude 4).

Each of them had the same purpose and it was to make merchandise of everyone in the assembly that would listen to their false preaching and teaching. You may be asked, ‘Is that a problem in our day” The answer is that it is more of a problem in our day than it was back in Jude’s day, and what makes it worse is that we are nonchalant about the problem in most churches today. In too many congregations we want, and demand, to hear only smooth things, like Judah, did when Isaiah prophesied to them in the 30th Chapter of Isaiah (See Isaiah 30:8-11). They were not interested in hearing what God had to say to them, they were interested only in what they wanted and that was to hear things (right, wrong, or indifferent) that pleased them.

We are, sadly, in that same mode in many churches in our day. Jude had that problem and it was because the church had become less than militant it seemed to want numbers, like so many churches in our day. Some of those that were welcomed into the fellowship of the churches back in that day, were false prophets, children of the devil whose purpose it was to confuse and conflict the truths of God.

Now, I can see already that God is going to give me more to say on this important subject than I will be able to deal with in this first lesson, so what I will do is to, like always, give you everything that God has given to me. That seems to be what Jude had to deal with in his letter. He had wanted to write a nice letter outlining the precepts of salvation, but God had changed his mind and caused him to write this stark warning to those Christians who would read his letter. We have read it and it charges us all, if we are truly Christians, to stand and defend ‘The Faith’ that was once for all delivered to us by God. Jude references the whole Bible as he confronts apostasy in the church. Is the 21st Century Church guilty of Apostasy’ It most definitely is and it has been wrong about the Bible for so long that whenever anyone accuses that something is wrong or is heresy, the congregations will side with the false professors.

Many church members’ understanding and knowledge of scripture are so nonexistent that we stand for many things that God has not said. For instance, we like to believe like the Unitarians, who believe that everyone will be saved, and we know from the Bible that only those who truly believe and trust Jesus Christ and His work on Calvary for their redemption will be saved. Since we will require more than this one installment of facts concerning our faith and how important it is that we never allow it to be diminished or embellished in any way, we will have to deal with it, in much the same way would eat an elephant, one bite at the time. What we need to take away from this initial installment is that there is such a thing as truth, and not simply that there is the truth but that that truth is absolute.

What God has given us concerning Himself and His word that we call the gospel, is the absolute truth and it is that truth that sets us free, or saves us (John 8:32). It would not be enough for us to say that you should read your Bibles, because it takes more than reading the Bible to give us that connection to God’s grace that saves us, it takes reading, studying, meditating and agonizing over the Word of God. It takes a determination and dedication to know the God of the Word and to know His forgiveness that comes only through His Son Jesus Christ (Romans 10:17).

We must lay aside our plans and ideas and our self to properly understand God. We must believe to the point that our faith causes us to walk not by sight but by faith as the Word of God and His Spirit, prompts us, and guides us on our way. So what are we to believe’ We are to believe everything that the Holy Bible teaches us and as the Spirit of God teaches us. Does that mean that we are to believe that God, in the beginning, created all that we know’ Yes, without hesitation! Are we to believe the miracles that are spoken of in the Old Testament’ Yes, and if you are truly saved and indwelled by the Holy Spirit of God you will believe every single thing that the Bible teaches. How can I be sure of that’ Because the Bible speaks of itself and say to us that every Word of God is true or pure (Proverbs 30:5; Psalms 12:6; Psalms 19:8; Psalms 119:140; Psalms 119:89; John 17:17; 2nd Timothy 3:16-17; 2nd Timothy 4:1-5).

Another part of ‘The Faith’ is that our belief must be, that God is, and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him (Hebrews 11:6). The truly saved person will believe that God is Eternal, Holy, Just, Merciful, and Almighty. He is Omniscience, Omnipotent and Omnipresent, and much more. We must believe that God is our Creator, our Sustainer, and our Savior. We will believe that He is a triune God, one God that manifests himself to us as three distinct persons, Father in heaven, His only Son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, all of which are co-equal but one in the Godhead. What I would have you get straight in your heart and mind before the next lesson which will continue in our study of defending the faith is that we must have the sure foundation of God and His Word to build on. We will build on the only foundation that exists for true salvation and that is God and His Word. God is the only thing that has always been. God is self-existent, never having a beginning, and having no end. He is a personal God, a God that we can know and have fellowship and relationship with. He is the God that not only knows all about us but has granted us life to live on the earth. God has also promised us that if we trust and follow after His plan for our lives that He will give us an eternal inheritance in heaven. He is the God who created all that we know or will ever know. He is the God that has as part and parcel of His nature the attributes of Omnipotence, Omniscience, Omnipresence, Grace, Mercy, Love, Justice, and Wrath. He is not a God to be played with, He is not to be mocked. He has given us a few years on this earth to find the entrance into His plan for our lives and to then walk that narrow way that is laid out for us in His Word, the Holy inerrant Bible.

God tells us in His inspired Word the Bible that Only He is infinite, that we are finite, and that our days are numbered (Psalms 90:12; Hebrews 9:27). God warns us that there are two gates, two roads, two destinations that will be taken, and traveled by men as they live on the earth, and there are no exceptions. We will either go through the gate that has been provided by God and walk that road or path that God defines in His Word and enter into heaven, or we will take the gate that the devil offers and walk his road or path and spend eternity in unimaginable terror and pain in the flames of hell (Matthew 7:13-14). Understand now, there are two gates and only two ‘. two roads and only two’. two destinations and only two!

It is not confusing we will either determine to know God and His way and obey what we know, or we will ignore a good way as we follow the devil and go to hell. The thing that we need to teach our congregations is that the Bible is true, and that truth is absolute, it is never relative or subjective, it is true all the time, regardless of how we may feel about it. When we deal before God, we must understand that He is the Creator and we are but creatures, He is wise and at our very best we are simple and foolish, He is going to judge our actions and lives at a point in the future, and we will have no defense for our actions unless we have bowed and submitted and committed our lives to Jesus Christ. Let me emphasize the fact that we will be judged by the Word of God, the Bible and what we thought about it, what we have heard from preachers and teachers about it, what most people want to believe about it does not change it one bit (Psalms 119:89).

Yes, God is love (1st John 4:8,16). However, that does not mean that God loves every individual without regard for how they live. God’s love is reserved for sinners, that have realized that they are sinners in the Biblical sense and have fled to the cross of Jesus Christ and now live in and by Him, as they obey all that He has commanded. I know that most of you have heard that it doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you are sincere. That my brothers and sisters are the devil’s lie and you will go to hell if you believe it. You can be sincere and believe’.. but that makes you sincerely wrong! We must come away from man-centered religion because we have come to the point that we have made people believe that they can worship God in their spare time and with their pocket change and that is heresy. Let’s make up our minds to worship the true God, that Almighty God who says what He means and means what He says regardless of what we want to believe. Think on the things we have said and ask yourself if you are ready to dedicate your life to loving Christ enough to obey Him.

Until next time,

may God bless and keep you

This is Bro. Bob