Sermon Tone Analysis

Summary

This meeting focuses on Jude 4-5.

In Jude 4, the false teachers who are Jude’s opponents are said to have long ago “been designated for condemnation.”

What does this phrase mean?

In Jude 5, the author shocks his readers by informing them that it was Jesus who saved the Israelites from Egypt.

Not surprisingly, that verse is controversial.

Join us as we unravel Jude’s comment and show how it relates to the Old Testament’s theology of a Godhead, the ancient “two powers in heaven” doctrine.

Introduction

So we’re going to focus on Jude 4 and 5, those two verses.

We got into verse 4 a little bit on the previous episode in the characterization of the false teachers, but we’ll hit a little bit more (there is one thing I sort of saved just for this week) and then go on into verse 5.

But let’s just start by reading verse 4 and then when we get to verse 5, then that will be evident.

So Jude 4 says… I might as well read verses 3 and 4 just to flavor the context here.

long ago were designated for this condemnation

The part of verse 4 that I reserved for today for this episode is this line “long ago were designated for this condemnation.”

This is ESV, so what ESV translates as the word “designated” is a perfect passive participle of prographo, which more literally (if we were going to be real literalistic about this translation) it would read, “Certain people have crept in unnoticed who had (or have) been written about long ago for this condemnation.”

So the question is, is this some kind of note about predestination, or is it a prophetic prediction, or is it more or less just Jude saying, “Hey, these people are going to reap what they sow?”

I think it is certainly right to say that the predestination idea is NOT self-evident in this.

Prographois not the normal verb choice for predestination, like in certain passages in Romans.

So it’s not self-evident at all.

The verb choice seems to indicate he is thinking about a type of people that his audience have been forewarned about, and so that would raise the question of, “Well where were they forewarned?”

I’m going to quote again from Gene Green’s commentary on Jude (one of the commentaries on Jude that I like).

He writes:

Jude’s use of “prographo,” (to write in advance) appears to point to the way their doom was prophetically predicted.

Then he cross-references Romans 15:4 here for a similar use of the verb.

This verb, however, is not commonly employed in the context of predictive prophecy, but in the literature of the era it repeatedly arises in legal contexts.

The

verb is attached to the concept of making official decrees, either in marriage contracts, deeds of sale, or public notes.

The substantives programma and prographe are the office decrees or notices themselves.

Then he cites LSJ (which is Liddell and Scott’s lexicon) and BDAG (which is the Bauer, Danker, Arndt, and Gingrich lexicon), and Moulton and Milligan—that lexicon for the vocabulary of the Greek New Testament.

So there are lots of examples of this in legal contexts.

Back to Green.

He says:

Jude’s emphasis is not simply that the doom of the heretics was predicted, but also that it was decreed and publicly announced.

While the predictive sense is not absent entirely, his principal point concerns the official and public condemnation of the heretics.

That’s the end of the quotation.

I’m going to throw in another quote here from Herb Bateman’s commentary because he adds some important details to this.

Herb writes:

This descriptive clause has at least two baffling interpretive challenges.

To begin with, Jude alludes to written material (οἱ προγεγραμμένοι, hoi progegrammenoi; “those who were written about”)) about these intruders.

Furthermore, this material was written at some point in the past (πάλαι, palai; usually “long ago”).

Was Jude speaking of direct prophecies written specifically about these certain people, or was he speaking of godless patterns of rebellious behavior traceable in written texts?

Some commentators suggest Jude refers to books in heaven (1 En. 81:1–4; 89:61–71; 104:7; 106:19; 108:7; cf.

Jub.

5:13; Rev 20:12; Apoc.

Bar.

24:1)..

I’ll just stop there.

If you remember we talked about the heavenly books or the Book of Life, the heavenly tablets.

And some of those were just as Herb is describing here about things done or condemnation for certain works.

So then he continues to write:

Others propose Jude references godless people in other New Testament texts.

Paul, for instance, predicts that “fierce wolves will come in among you, even from among your own group”” (1 Tim 4:1–3; 2 Tim 3:13; cf.

Acts 20:25, 29–30; Mark 15:44; Matt 7:15; 1 John 4:1–2; 2 John 10; 2 Pet 2:1–3:4; Did.

11–12; Ignatius, To the Ephesians 9:1).

You also get this in Early Patristics or Early Church Fathers like Ignatius and the Didache—this notion, again, of Jude referencing godless people that would arise from within.

So Herb writes here:

Still others put forward the idea that Jude alludes to prophetic material in the Old Testament (Isa 37:26; 48:5).

So that’s an allusion to—a prediction—in the Old Testament about what happens with bad behavior, and the same thing is there for Isaiah 48:5.

It is a similar idea.

So Herb writes:

Jude is not necessarily specifying a specific written text, but rather people who long ago were written about and thereby appear frequently in Jewish literature.

For instance, Jude is about to call his readers to remember three different patterns of past rebellions and God’s diverse judgments of them: the exodus generation, angelic beings, and Gentile urban centers (Jude 5–7).

This is where Herb is saying Jude is going to get into some of these things from the Old Testament that were typological.

They showed patterns of behavior and what happens.

Herb continues and says:

Second, Jude is also about to apply three other assorted patterns of rebellion by three men from the past to these dubious intruders and tell of God’s forthcoming condemnation of their rebellion: Cain, Balaam, and Korah (Jude 11:13).

Thus Jude may merely employ a form of ancient typology as a means to point out the ungodly characteristics of these “certain people.”

Yet is seems very likely Jude has a particular text in mind (e.g., 1 Enoch 1:9) because he alludes to it in Jude 14-15.

Thus it would appear that Jude has both a written source and specific godless people (speaking typologically) in purview.

That’s the end of Herb’s quote.

So the point here is that it is clear Jude references specific texts and that he references Old Testament typological groups or individuals elsewhere in his epistle.

I mean, Herb just gave us the verse numbers; Jude 5-7, Jude 11-13, Jude 14 and 15.

So that helps inform us here in verse 4 about how to read what he says.

Jude is looking at some texts, either in the Old Testament or the Pseudepigrapha (and probably both), that predict the downfall of such people and uses Old Testament analogies or types to make that point.

Again, for those for whom typology might not be a working part of their vocabulary or their Biblical knowledge, a type is like a predictive thing.

It’s not verbal prophecy.

It’s nonverbal prophecy.

It’s a particular person or institution or event that foreshadows something yet to come.

And in this case, Jude is picking on some specific characters in the Old Testament: Cain, Baal, for instance, and Korah.

And he’s also referencing verses about what happens with this kind of wanton self-destructive behavior.

That’s the end to which it is going to lead.

So this is what Jude is doing.

He is not saying that all of this was predetermined or pre-ordained, but he is using Old Testament passages and maybe a pseudepigraphal passage and certainly Old Testament types to foreshadow that, “Hey, you all should know that false teachers like this… You should already know what their destiny is because of this material.”

So let’s move to Jude 5 and Jude 5 says this:

Now if you think about that, that’s a shocking statement because it puts Jesus in the Old Testament.

Jesus is the one who gets credit here in Jude 5 for saving the people in the Old Testament.

Some texts will say it’s Yahweh.

Some texts will say it’s Elohim.

Some texts will say it’s ha panim—the presence.

Other texts will say it’s ha malakh—the Angel of the Lord.

So I would often ask, “Well, which one is correct?”

And the answer is “all of them.”

But Jude here is saying that Jesus is in that mix.

Now we could say that the Angel of the Lord was the preincarnate appearance of one of the Persons of the Godhead—specifically the Second Person of the Godhead before we had the incarnation, before we had Jesus of Nazareth.

So there’s an immediate connection right there, but the connection is explicit here in Jude 5.

5 Now I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus, who saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe.

The issue here, other than just the impact of the statement (because it would be a strong statement of the pre-existence of Christ) is that there is a text-critical issue here.

Not all manuscripts say “Jesus.”

Some say “Lord.”

Some have something else, but a number of them do have Jesus here.

So there’s a text- critical issue that if you look this up, some of these resources will be familiar.