Jude

Jude calls the faith something “once delivered unto the saints” (1:3). The word for once, hapax, means once for all: the faith was handed over whole, and is not added to afterward. It returns in verse 5, where the readers “once knew” the history Jude recalls. The verb for contend, epagōnizomai, stands nowhere else in the New Testament, and means to struggle for something. The danger does not come from outside. The intruders have “crept in unawares” (1:4) and sit at the church’s feasts of charity (1:12). The defence Jude gives is to remember: “remember ye the words which were spoken before of the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1:17).

The word krisis comes three times. The angels who left their own habitation are kept “unto the judgment of the great day” (1:6). Michael the archangel, disputing with the devil about the body of Moses, “durst not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee” (1:9). The railing accusation is, word for word, a judgment of reviling, and the words Michael used are the LORD’s own to Satan in Zechariah 3:2. Last, Enoch foretells the Lord coming “to execute judgment upon all” (1:15). The intruders “speak evil of dignities” (1:8), while an archangel left even the devil’s sentence to the Lord. Jerome drew the lesson: The devil deserved a curse: but it should not have come out through the mouth of an archangel.

Jude writes to saints “preserved in Jesus Christ” (1:1), and the verb, tēreō, recurs at each turn of the letter. The angels “kept not their first estate,” and God “hath reserved” them “in everlasting chains under darkness” (1:6). For the wandering stars “is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever” (1:13). To the beloved it comes as a command: “Keep yourselves in the love of God” (1:21). The command does not stand alone: the doxology, using another word for keeping, phylassō, gives glory to “him that is able to keep you from falling” (1:24). Augustine asked of that verse, When Jude says this, does he not show that perseverance in good to the end is a gift of God?

Jude’s greeting is “Mercy unto you, and peace, and love, be multiplied” (1:2), and his readers wait for “the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life” (1:21). They are then to show it: “of some have compassion, making a difference” (1:22), where the verb is from the same root. Others they are to “save with fear, pulling them out of the fire; hating even the garment spotted by the flesh” (1:23). The same pictures stand in Zechariah 3, whose words Michael speaks in verse 9. There the LORD calls Joshua the high priest “a brand plucked out of the fire” (Zechariah 3:2), and the order is given, “Take away the filthy garments from him” (3:4).