Apostasy

The following excerpt is from the Thru the Bible ministry of Dr. J. Vernon McGee.  I recommend finding a copy of his works and/or listening to his radio broadcasts.  Those who oppose God and His Word find Dr. McGee unattractive and dislike his plain language.  I think he drives home the truth well is the reason.  His exposition of the Book of Jude is accurate and pegs the apostates of today.

I had a dream 30 years ago right after I became a Christian.  I was attending an Episcopal Church and liked the priest.  In my dream a priest was scattering big kernels of a bright and rich looking yellow corn to white birds.  Black birds came and took the corn away from the white birds.  The church has since indulged in idolatrous practices and now has decided apostasy is the way they want to go.  The modern apostates teach that the Bible is not true and doubt the existence of God.  There is the mistaken belief that all religions lead to God.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Within Christendom there are many false teachers who are apostate.

This is Jude’s third example of apostasy in the past. He has mentioned Israel in their unbelief, the angels which kept not their first estate, and now the people of Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities about them. These cities were so completely judged that they probably are buried beneath the Dead Sea today. Some people believe that they have located them. I am not sure whether or not this is true, and the exact location is unimportant. The important thing to know is that God destroyed these cities because the people defiled their flesh. They were given over to homosexuality or sodomy.

It is interesting that in the parlance of our day sodomy is called homosexuality, adultery is called free love, the drunkard is a respected alcoholic, and the murderer is temporarily insane. Satan is doing a good job of indoctrinating the world with a new vocabulary. Nevertheless, sodomy in God’s sight is gross immorality and the vilest sin of all. The fact that God has judged men in the past for sins of sensuality ought to be a warning to our generation. God will judge any civilization that moves too far in this direction, and I wonder if we haven’t done just that.

These apostate teachers are the ones that we are to beware of. As Jude puts it back in verse 4, they "crept in unaware"; that is, they came in sideways, they came in the side door, they slipped into the church under false colors. Their credentials and their creeds were not the same. They pretended to be something they were not.

There are four points of identification of apostate teachers that Jude gives to us in this verse:

1. They are "filthy dreamers." You will notice that the word filthy is in italics in the Authorized Version, which indicates that it is not in the better manuscripts, and we can actually leave it out. They are dreamers—they live in an unreal world, a world that does not exist. My feeling is that the theological liberal has never dealt with reality. Liberalism is rather romantic. It sounds good on paper. It is nice to be able to solve all your problems by positive thinking, but there is a lot of power in negative thinking also. We need today to learn how to say no as well as to say yes. Liberals are dreamers in the sense that they will not face up to reality.

Many years ago I read an editorial in Woman’s Home Companion which refers to a group of liberals who have since disappeared from the scene (however, there is a new crop of them abroad in the land today). The editorial reads:

A pledge "to have no part in any war" has been taken by a large body of leading Protestant clergymen in the east. Among them are some of the wisest and most influential ministers we have—men such as Fosdick, Holmes and Sockman in New York for example. This Covenant of Peace Group declares that war settles no issues, is futile and suicidal and is a denial of God and the teachings of Christ. It asserts that the "chain of evil" which holds us to war can and must be broken now. This is noble doctrine. However much events may lead us to differ with it, when these bold and sincere men stand in their pulpits and preach this rejection of all war, let us remember that these clergymen by their record have earned the right to their belief. In a great democracy suppression of the clergy in war or in peace can never justly become an instrument of policy, as it has under the dictators.

 

Such antiwar philosophy was carried over recently into the years of the war in Vietnam. It got us into a great deal of trouble and difficulty. The protest meetings that it inspired in this country actually prolonged the war and led to the killing of a great many more American boys who would not have been killed otherwise. Such thinking is to not realize that we live in a big, bad world and that reality is something you have to rub your nose into. It is something that you simply cannot ignore. Even steel-belted tires have to get down and go over the rough places, and some of them go flat, by the way. These men are dreamers. They are dealing with that which is not real at all. As long as we have a big navy and as long as we have atom bombs, it is nice to sit back in the cloister of the church and to make brave statements like this, but it just doesn’t work out.

I have a notion that these men stay out of the ghettos and other such places at night, although they may talk very bravely in the daytime. In a denomination which has boasted of how they want to work among the minority groups, they have closed one of their churches which was located in a minority community. I think they have made a big mistake in doing that.

These men are dreamers, and they have gotten into the church and have used the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. Imagine making the statement that war is a denial of the teachings of Christ! The Lord Jesus made the statement, "When a strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace" (Luke 11:21). The way you are going to protect your own is by being armed. He also said that the king who is going to war is going to sit down and figure it out (see Luke 14:31). He didn’t say it was wrong to figure it out. He said the king had better figure it out, and if he is smart, he will figure out how he is going to carry on that war. May I say to you, these men have failed to face up to what the Lord Jesus Christ really said. He told His disciples, when He first sent them out, that they were to take nothing with them, not even a pocketbook (see Mark 6:7–9). However, when they had returned and He was sending them out to the ends of the earth, He said, "Be sure and take your pocketbook. And you had better take your American Express and Diner’s Club cards and your gasoline credit cards. Also, it might be well to have a sword. You will need it to protect yourselves" (see Luke 22:35–36). May I say to you, what nonsense this is—these are dreamers who talk like this. It sounds good to say you don’t want to have a part in war. All of us can agree with that. That’s sort of like Mother, apple pie, and the American flag—we all are for it. It’s great to have no part in war, but we have to face up to reality also. This is a deceptive message that they bring. It’s nice to preach it to a well-heeled crowd on Sunday morning when there is no war and everything seems peaceable.

2. The second thing that Jude says about the apostate teachers is that they "defile the flesh." The thought that Jude has in mind here is that they engage in base and abnormal immorality. This is the same as the "strange flesh" in the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah that he talked about earlier. Many churches today have gone on record that they approve of homosexuality. My friend, God judged the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. The angels are also a warning to us because they are going to be judged—they are being held for a judgment. And God would not let even His own people whom He had brought out of Egypt enter the Promised Land because of their unbelief. All these are examples to us today, and we had better recognize the fact that God will judge our "new morality." It is neither new morality nor new immorality; there is really nothing new about it. It goes back to Sodom and Gomorrah, and it goes back even to the days of Noah.

3. These apostate teachers "despise dominion," which means they reject authority. They are the crowd that wants to get rid of the death penalty. They are the crowd that wants to turn everybody loose to do his thing in his own way. We are seeing what is taking place as a result. Society has broken out today like a cancer in the body politic. We thought we were a civilized people, but we are nothing in the world but a group of savages. And it is because of this matter of despising dominion, of rejecting authority. We want certain laws repealed. For example, we don’t want divorce. The argument given is that there is no reason to have divorce laws, that we ought to just let people stop living together. This breaks right across the morality of any nation, my friend, for the home is the bedrock of any society. During the war in Vietnam, it was tragic to see men with their collars buttoned in the back leading in the protest marches. I felt that the collar buttoned in the back was a real token that they were going in the wrong direction.

4. False teachers "speak evil of dignities." This means that they disrespect dignities. They protest against rules and those in authority. In other words, they take it out on the police because they represent authority, or they take it out upon men in high places. The president, the governors, and the mayors are made responsible for anything that happens in the nation or the state or the city, regardless of whether they are responsible or not. Why? Because there has been a loss of respect for authority. Now I will grant you that some men in authority have not been worthy of respect, but the office certainly demands respect. Jude will give us an example of this in the next verse.

Let’s notice again the characteristics of these apostates who have come into the church. They came in the side door. They are ungodly. They turn the grace of God into lasciviousness. They deny the Lord Jesus Christ. They are dreamers, they defile the flesh, they despise dominion, and they have disrespect for dignities. These are the things that characterize them, and they are dangerous because of the way they have come into the church.

For ten long and weary years, the Greeks laid siege to the city of Troy, but they did not make a dent in the fortifications. It seemed impregnable, and they could not get an entrance into the city. Then there came forth a suggestion. The suggestion was to build a wooden horse with soldiers concealed inside, to leave it outside the gate, and then to pretend to sail away. So they made the wooden horse, the soldiers were put inside, and it was put by the gate of the city of Troy. Well, curiosity got the best of the Trojans. When they saw the Greeks sailing away, they thought the war was over. They went out, saw the horse, and decided to pull it inside the city. It certainly was a novelty, something to have. That night, the soldiers who were on the inside climbed out, and they were able to unlock the gates of the city from the inside. In the meantime, under cover of darkness, the fleet of Greek ships returned. They had only pretended to sail away. What an entire army of mighty men could not do from the outside in ten years, a few soldiers did from the inside. In the same way, the church has been harmed today from the inside and has been taken over by liberalism. Actually, the church has never been harmed from the outside. Persecution caused it to grow by leaps and bounds. Today we are witnessing the destruction of the church from the inside—it’s an inside job. Christ was betrayed from the inside, not from the outside. One of His own betrayed Him over to His nation; His nation betrayed Him over to the Romans, and the Romans brought Him to the Cross. The church is being betrayed today by the ones who have gotten in by the side door.

The apostasy that was a little cloud the size of a man’s hand is now a raging storm that is lashing across the church, casting up foam and fury. We need to hang out this epistle as a storm warning because the apostasy is here in our midst today. I do not say this with any joy or bitterness, but I make it as a statement of fact. All the great denominations of the past are largely gone; that is, they have departed from the faith, probably never to return. They’ve gone into never-never land. As far as I know, there is no record of a church or any organization or an institution, having once departed from the faith, ever returning. I am told there have been some individuals who have, but I do not know any of them.

The Wesley movement which began in England, for example, was a come-out movement. It was begun when the church became cold and indifferent in that day, and the church of Wesley became a warm incubator in which to reproduce life. But I am sorry to say that today in many places it is a deep freeze that preserves the outward form of Wesley but does not have the warmth and the life that was once there.

I must be very frank to say that I do not think that fundamentalism as it is today is the answer. I perceive a real weakness which I think will ultimately undermine even fundamentalism. That weakness is this: fundamentalism has been exact and precise in doctrine, but in many places it has been devoid of ethics and morals. There are no high principles and practices. There has been a moral breakdown outside of contemporary society, and, fortunately, it is mirrored in our conservative churches. I was with a group sometime ago which is a fine group, but they are an illustration of what I mean. They are insistent and even belligerent about doctrine and about separation. But when it was called to their attention that one in their midst was guilty of immorality, they actually defended him! The ethical practices of another individual smelled to high heaven although he called himself a fundamentalist. May I say to you, this group took a ho-hum attitude. This hurts the cause of Christ a great deal because it comes from the inside.

We are living in days of apostasy. It may be that there are some who would say to me, "Preacher, you are really being sensational. Aren’t you exaggerating just a little bit?" I don’t think I am, my friend; in fact, I am not sure but what I am giving this in low key to you. I would like to pass on to you the results of a study that was made and some statements made by liberal preachers some years ago now. The situation today is even more alarming than this:

Out of a poll of 700 preachers, the following results were given: 48% denied the complete inspiration of the Bible; 24% rejected the atonement; 12% rejected the resurrection of the body; 27% did not believe that Christ will return to judge the quick and the dead. A Washington, D.C., minister said, "We liberal clergymen are no longer interested in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. We do not believe we should even waste our time engaging in it. So far as we are concerned, it makes no difference whether Christ was born of a virgin or not. We don’t even bother to form an opinion on the subject." An Arlington, Va., minister said, "We have closed our minds to such trivial consideration as the question of the resurrection of Christ. If you fundamentalists wish to believe that nonsense we have no objection, but we have more important things to preach than the presence or absence of an empty tomb 20 centuries ago." A leading minister in Washington, D.C., said flatly, "In our denomination what you call the ‘faith of our Fathers’ is approaching total extinction. Of course a few of the older ministers still cling to the Bible. But among the younger men, the real leaders of our denomination today, I do not know of a single one who believes in Christ, or any of the things that you classify as fundamentals."

 

My friend, have I exaggerated? Have I overstated the case of whether we are in the apostasy or not?

In the next few verses the modern apostate teachers are defined and described. You will not find anywhere language more vivid, more graphic, more dramatic, more frightening than the description of the apostate in the last days.

These are spots in your feasts of charity, when they feast with you, feeding themselves without fear: clouds they are without water, carried about of winds; trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots

Again let me share with you Dr. Wuest’s translation, which makes the description of the apostate teachers even more vivid:

These are the hidden rocks in your love feasts, sumptuously feasting with you without fear, as shepherds leading themselves to pasture, waterless clouds carried past by winds, autumn trees without fruit, having died twice, rooted up.

 

What a picture we have here!

"These are spots in your feasts of charity." The word spots is better translated "hidden rocks" by Dr. Wuest. The picture is of hidden rocks which wreck a ship. They make what Paul calls "shipwreck" of the faith, and Paul names two men who evidently ran into an apostate, a hidden rock, and made shipwreck of the faith (see I Timothy 1:19–20). An apostate may be compared to the tip of an iceberg. Very little of it is visible, but if a ship runs into it, the ship will go to the bottom of the sea. Oh, how many people there are, especially young people, whose faith has not only been shaken but wrecked by a person who is an apostate!

"These are spots in your feasts of charity." The "feasts of charity" were love feasts which were held in the early church before the communion service. It was a time of fellowship when believers brought food and shared a meal together. The poor could bring very little, but it was a time of sharing what they had. Well, the apostates came in with ravenous appetites. They could eat more than anyone else—"feeding themselves without fear." They were shepherds who were feeding themselves instead of their flock. Not only in the matter of food but also in their failure to teach the Word of God to their flock, it was evident that they were concerned only about themselves.

Milton describes this kind of situation when he writes of his friend, Lycidas. In his poem, he expresses his grief for the young man who had been a great preacher and expositor of the Word but was drowned in the Irish Channel. Milton describes the situation in England as it prevailed in his day: "The hungry sheep look up and are not fed." What a picture of an apostate in the pulpit!

"Clouds they are without water." They may look as if they are filled with the Word of God, but they are empty and dry. They may wear robes and speak in pompous, pontifical voices with great authority. They have had courses in public speaking and homiletics, and they know how to spiritualize a text of Scripture and make it mean something entirely different from what God intended. They are like beautiful clouds that drift across the sky without giving any refreshment to the earth.

In my boyhood days I can remember chopping cotton in the summertime and watching the clouds pass over. Oh, how I prayed for rain so I could quit chopping cotton, but there was no rain in those clouds. They were nothing but snowy white puffs. There was no water in them at all. Well, that is Jude’s picture of apostates. They do not have the water of life. They actually know nothing about the Word of God.

"Trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots." When the Lord Jesus gave the warning against false teachers, He said, "… by their fruits ye shall know them" (Matt. 7:20). Jude says that the apostate has withered fruit, he is "twice dead, plucked up by the roots." It was Dwight L. Moody who said that when a man is born once, he will have to die twice and that when a man is born twice, he will have to die only once. Well, Jude says that the apostates are spiritually dead, dead in trespasses and sins—and yet trying to lead others! Also the apostate’s body will have to die; so he is twice dead. What a picture of the apostate—

J. Vernon McGee, Thru the Bible Commentary [computer file], electronic ed., Logos Library System, (Nashville: Thomas Nelson) 1997, © 1981 by J. Vernon McGee.

The new Bishop is an apostate and I hope he will change his mind.  The assumption is made that the Bible does not teach about homosexuality in a negative way or somehow it does not matter, it does.