“22 Keep being kind to those who waver in this faith and convince those who doubt. 23 Pursue those who are singed by the flames of God’s wrath, and bring them safely to Him, snatching them out of the fire. Show mercy to others with fear, despising every garment soiled by the corruption of human flesh.”[1]
Jude highlights three different types of people within the church who have been influenced by the words and lifestyle of false teachers.[2]
· Those who doubt. “I think or feel this wavering way.” Be kind, and offer convincing truth to stabilize their faith.
· Those whose doubt leads to wrong action. “I think I will walk down a wavering road because of it.” Pursue them and grab them out of the judgment that follows their actions.
· Those who try to take other down with them. “In fact, I want you to join me.” Show mercy, but with great caution, and with no mistaking the sinful pollution their lives carry with them.
I want to try some analogies about how these three situations are different, and why our responses are different.
SCENARIO #1: Hot Headed Basketball Player
· I can see frustration building, so I get his attention and gesture, “calm down.” It’s an inner battle. I’m gentle….
· He’s about to go OFF and get a technical. I yank him off the floor immediately and get in his face. This inner battle is going to get him in trouble because he’s going to act on it in the wrong way. I snatch him from the referee fire.
· He’s muttering, swearing, making the whole bench agitated. Now he is polluting the team. It’s time to head to the locker room. You need some social distancing or quarantine, because you are infectious.
SCENARIO #2: My College Roommate
· “Should I go to a packed, closed room for a concert where we all sing along at the top of our lungs in a COVID hotspot for 3 hours?” He’s having an inner battle. You gently talk about how it is a bad idea, because it’s a bad idea.
· “I have called an Uber to take me to the concert.” This inner battle is going to get him in trouble because he’s going to act on it in the wrong way. You snatch him from the medical fire and cancel that Uber.
· *spends 3 hours at the packed concert full of people who were coughing and sneezing and singing at the top of their lungs.* Now he is polluting the dorm. I pray for his health and decision making and maybe even help him pay for his doctor visit, but he can’t live in this dorm without a quarantine.
SCENARIO #3: A Brother/Sister In Christ
· “I’m struggling with how to balance freedom in Christ and responsibility in Christ.” Inner battle. Gentle. Let’s talk and pray and study Scripture together.
· “I’m thinking I will go to Vegas for a week and just experience everything I can.” The inner battle is about to lead into sinful actions. It’s time to be more forceful and intervene.
· “I got a bunch of guys from church to go with me…” Let me stop you right there. Now you are polluting the body. I love you, but you are infectious right now. Your presence is spiritually toxic because you are dragging those around you into your sin. [3]
So, let’s explore each of these a bit more. I’m not going to tell you how to apply the different approaches. You are going to need the Holy Spirit and probably the advice of other Christians to know how to enter into a particular situation where someone is struggling in their Christian faith. There is not a ‘one size fits all’ approach. May God give us wisdom.
THOSE WHO ARE WAVERING
Show mercy and patience. It would be easy to get frustrated, or just throw arguments at them. But Jude leads with something relational: mercy and kindness. Offer convincing reasons that point them toward the truth, but with mercy and kindness. You are on the same team. This is a bruised reed that we don't want to break (Isaiah 42:3). We have received God’s unmerited mercy; we should pass this on to those who are wavering. I like how William Barclay summarizes what he sees as our duty as a fellow Christian in this situation:
“Study to be able to defend the faith and to give a reason for the hope that is in us. We must know what we believe so that we can meet error with truth; and we must make ourselves able to defend the faith in such a way that our graciousness and sincerity may win others to it.”
THOSE WHO ARE SINGED BY THE FIRE.
Almost everyone agrees that this is imagery from Zechariah 3:1-4:
Then he showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the Lord, and Satan standing at his right side to accuse him. The Lord said to Satan, “The Lord rebuke you, Satan! The Lord, who has chosen Jerusalem, rebuke you! Is not this man a burning stick snatched from the fire?” Now Joshua was dressed in filthy clothes as he stood before the angel. The angel said to those who were standing before him, “Take off his filthy clothes. ” Then he said to Joshua, “See, I have taken away your sin, and I will put rich garments on you. ”
Remember the filthy clothes for the third category. As for the fire imagery, when Amos (speaking for God) unfolds a laundry list of sinfulness, he notes:
“I overthrew some of you as I overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. You were like a burning stick snatched from the fire, yet you have not returned to me,” declares the Lord.”
So this is the imagery. There are people in the church so corrupted by the false teachers they have gone beyond just wavering and are now actively living in a way that is deserving of the just judgment of God being poured out in them either now[4] or in eternity. God’s people are not to push them away; they are to pursue them and actually act as God’s instrument in pulling them away from the direction of the fire. William Barclay once again:
“There are those who have to be snatched from the fire. They have actually started out on the wrong way and have to be stopped, as it were, forcibly, and even against their will. It is all very well to say that we must leave a man his freedom and that he has a right to do what he likes. All these things are in one sense true, but there are times when a man must be even forcibly saved from himself.”
THOSE WHOSE SIN IS SO INFECTIOUS THAT EVEN BEING AROUND THEM POSES A DANGER
Jude is probably referencing the false teachers and those in the church who have given their allegiance to them. If you remember from previous sermons, this had resulted in significant immorality. Their false ideas had led to a blatantly sinful lifestyle.[5]
Jude does not mince words about how dangerous they are. The “soiled” garments is Jude’s version of the Hebrew word for “filthy” found in Zechariah 3:3. This word refers to human excrement. And Jude’s word for clothes refers to undergarments. In other words, the sinful practices (“corrupted flesh”) of these people are disgusting, like crap-filled underwear. Jude’s words, not mine.
So if false teachers are that disgusting, how are they so dangerous? Because we don’t see them as disgusting. Wolves don’t slip into the fold by looking like wolves. Hidden reefs don’t loom above the waves. They are dangerous because they look so amazing even as they begin to kill us.
Maybe the best modern parable on this is vampires. Stay with me here. The original Dracula book was far more Christian than you realize,[6] and Hollywood took his very unappealing version and made vampires sexy. What makes them so terrible now is that we know they are undead, damned. We know they are monsters. But there is something about them that draws the victim. To Bella in Twilight, they glitter in the sun. There’s a reason the first Twilight book cover features an apple. It’s the oldest temptation: something evil is made to look good.
Taylor Swift has an interesting song called “Illicit Affairs” on her latest album. In it, she notes how what looks good at the beginning ends badly.
And that's the thing about illicit affairs and clandestine meetings and stolen stares,They show their truth one single time, but they lie and they lie and they lie
A million little times.And you know damn well: for you, I would ruin myself
A million little times.
This is what sin does. It lies and lies and lies. And it ruins us. In the worst case scenario, this is what false teachers and their followers in the church do: they lie and lie and lie, and ask us to ruin ourselves a million little times.
So when we are around those whose very presence spreads the infection of sinful ideas and actions we might not know it. We might think it looks and sounds amazing – the monstrous can look bright and dazzling in the right light. We may be deceived. We might not recognize all the lies, and we might be experiencing ruin even while we think we are having fun.
Most of the pastors and commentators I read believe the “mercy” Jude says we should show is primarily in the form of sincere prayer are not beyond redemption. Our history never has to be our destiny.
But I suspect this mercy goes beyond that. Mercy is not a vague theory; it’s practically experienced. So we pray for those who are lost in even the deepest depths of sin, but we also find a way to be present with a mercy that is tempered by “fear.”
Think of “fear” as significant caution as we have contact with someone like this. It would be easy to become infected. We pray for them as an act of mercy that reminds us that God is merciful to even the worst of us. We can all do that. But we might need to do some social distancing if our spiritual immune system is low. We might need some church discipline that creates some space between someone who is toxic and those who are susceptible. And we will definitely need to be oh, so careful, as we move closer to help.
Yet even here God's wondrous grace can exchange the excrement-covered garments (Zec 3:3) for festive garments of righteousness. For no one, not even the most defiled sinner, is beyond salvation through faith in Christ's redeeming work. (Douglas Moo)
In this is where we land: in the grace of God.
I love this verse in Jude. Every scenario has hope, from the doubter to the vampire. And it tells us how to point toward that hope.
Be kind. Don’t be a jerk. Don’t call people names or bully them.
Offer truth. You can do that while being kind. Kindness isn’t wimpy. Kindness is about the attitude; Truth is about pointing toward reality.
Pursue. We don’t wait for the drowning to swim to us. We swim to them.
Show mercy (even if it has to be tempered with caution). We can all pray. I suspect that changes our attitude. We can pursue even if we pull up 6 feet short and with a mask on. We can rescue the drowning even if it’s just by throwing them something to float on so they don’t die while waiting for the lifeguard.
Kindness. Truth. Pursuit. Mercy. Once again, a compelling vision of life in the Kingdom. In this kind of community, there is freedom to be honest at the very beginning of wavering so that future hardship can be avoided.
In this kind of community, there is reason to never lose hope even when we are spiritually toxic, because neither God nor his people have given up.
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[1] This verse in Jude likely inspired a few lines in an early Christian document called the Didache: “You shall hate no one, but some you must reprove, for some you must pray, and some you must love more than your very life.”
[2] Warren Wiersbe calls these three groups of people The Doubting (Jude 1:22), The Burning (Jude 1:23a), The Dangerous (Jude 1:23b).
[3] There’s an episode in The Walking Dead where a deeply traumatized young girl starts to wonder if the Walkers (zombies) are just normal people. The adults with her try gently to explain to her that’s not true. Soon they find her trying to hang out with them to prove them wrong, and they literally snatch her from the zombie ‘fire’. She’s angry, but at least she’s safe. Then they find out she is planning to kill someone in their group to prove to them that becoming a Walker is no big deal. Now, it’s not just about her. The lives of others are on the line. Note the escalation: it’s a similar pattern to what Jude is describing.
[4] Amos’ Sodom and Gomorrah reference was a ‘real time’ example.
[5] When Paul wrote to the Corinthian church (1 Corinthians 5) about an unrepentant, incestuous church member, he said, “So when you are assembled and I am with you in spirit, and the power of our Lord Jesus is present, hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.” I think this is excommunication, and is an act of mercy (see the reason) with ‘fear’.
[6] https://www.premierchristianity.com/Blog/Why-Dracula-is-the-most-Christian-show-on-TV