“Jude, a bond-servant of Jesus Christ, and brother of James, To those who are called, sanctified by God the Father, and preserved in Jesus Christ: Mercy, peace, and love be multiplied to you. 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 for all delivered to the saints. For certain men have crept in unnoticed, who long ago were marked out for this condemnation, ungodly men, who turn the grace of our God into lewdness and deny the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ” (Jude 1:1-4).

In the years leading up to World War 2, the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain tried to avoid war by continually giving in to the demands of Adolph Hitler. He was famous for saying he believed it would be ‘peace’ in our time. But the more Germany was appeased, the more it wanted to take. It became clearer that the only appeasement Hitler would accept would be a total surrender. His opponent, Winston Churchill, bitterly opposed appeasement, and said about Chamberlain, “He was given a choice between war and dishonor. He chose dishonor and he will have war anyway.” Churchill said this about appeasement: An appeaser is one who feeds the crocodile hoping it will eat him last.

In the church, we sometimes find a similar situation. We find threats to Christianity in the form of false teaching, false worship, false practices. As these threats grow, Christians can just hope these threats will go away, but that is the theory of the turtle.  Like Hitler, false teachings and teachers do not go away by themselves. At some point, Christians have to be willing to fight, to defend, to contend for the faith. That’s what the small book of Jude is about. The book of Jude is the fourth shortest epistle in the New Testament, behind Philemon, and 2nd and 3rd John. It’s a letter that came out of an urgency in the writer’s heart. He wanted to write to help his readers to stop appeasing false teachers, and to begin manning the defences, and launching some counter-attacks.

Though there were particular threats in Jude’s time which are different to ours, the dangers have not grown less since his time. With the Internet, false teaching and false teachers no longer have to show up in our churches. They can do their work during the week on screens, through earphones, in books. Like never before, we need the Spirit-inspired truths of the book of Jude.

I. Jude’s Exordium

“Jude, a bondservant of Jesus Christ, and brother of James, To those who are called, sanctified by God the Father, and preserved in Jesus Christ: 2 Mercy, peace, and love be multiplied to you” (Jude 1:1-2).

In the first century, you began a letter with the author’s name, and then wrote who you were writing to, and you typically added a short, polite greeting, like the Greek word charein. The author identifies himself as Jude, which is the same name as Judas. Judas is the Greek form of the Hebrew name Judah. There are really only two contenders for who this author was. The first is the apostle Jude, or Judas, who is mentioned in Luke 6:16. Remember, of the twelve Jesus had two disciples named Judas: one was Judas Iscariot, and one was Judas the son of James. This obviously was not written by Judas Iscariot. The other Judas cannot be the author because here this Judas is said to be the brother of James, not the son of James. That only leaves one other Judas, related to James. We read in Matthew 13:55 “Is this not the carpenter’s son? Is not His mother called Mary? And His brothers James, Joses, Simon, and Judas? Jesus had several half-brothers and half-sisters through Mary. One of them was James, who became the pastor of the church at Jerusalem. Another was named Judas. It’s he that is writing here, and identifies himself as the brother of James.

Why didn’t he identify himself as ‘the brother of our Lord’? The answer has to be: humility. Neither James, nor Jude, presume to use their physical relation to Christ as a boasting point. Since God can raise up sons of Abraham from stones, and since Jesus told a crowd that his true mother, brothers, and sisters are those who do the will of the Father, neither of these men use the fact that Jesus was their half-brother as some kind of qualification. Indeed, as Gentiles were now coming into the faith, they wanted to get away from the idea that ethnicity gave you spiritual standing with God. So Judah identifies himself as the brother of James, but as a bondservant, a doulos, of Jesus Christ. Far from claiming some sort of special relationship to Christ, he describes himself in the lowest possible relationship to Christ – a slave, a purchased possession. There was a time in Jude’s life when he
rejected his half-brother, but at some point, probably shortly after the Resurrection, Jude came to faith. He turned from trusting in his own righteousness, leaning on tradition, and turned to the one, who according to his human nature, was his half-brother, but according to His divine nature, was His Creator, Lord, and Saviour.

He then names whom he is writing to. He is writing to those who are called, sanctified by God the Father, and preserved in Jesus Christ. All those who are called, set apart by God the Father, and preserved in Jesus Christ are the recipients of this letter. Those are three ways of referring to a true, born again believer. If you are a true Christian, then at some point, God called you to salvation. You heard the Gospel, and it felt like this message had your name on it. The Spirit was drawing you in. Once you believed on the Lord Jesus Christ, you were set apart, which is the meaning of sanctified. God took you out of the Devil’s family, out of being used as a vessel for unrighteousness, and put you in His family, and reserved you for His use.

And not only did God call you and set you apart, He preserves you as well. The word here means to guard, to keep, to protect. If God is going to pay such a high price to redeem you, He is not going to lose you, so in Jesus Christ, you are preserved. Both of those words sanctified, and preserved are in the passive perfect, which means this is something God has completed in the past, which has continuing effects into the present. Jude lovingly wishes his readers a multiplying of mercy, peace, and love.

Now why do you think Jude has taken all this time to describe himself, and to describe his readers? Why didn’t he just say, “Jude, to all Christians, greetings”? The answer is that Jude is setting up the content of his letter. He has to say some hard things, and he wants them to know he is not lording it over them, but is serving them. But he wants his readers to know that there is a real difference between the people he is writing to, and the people he will be writing about. He is not writing to false teachers, to apostates. He is writing to true believers about false teachers. And in these first lines, he encourages them with the truth that if they are in Christ, they are kept in Jesus Christ, they are set apart, called. This is a theme which will come up again in this book: But you, beloved, building yourselves up on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life… Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, And to present you faultless Before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy” (Jude 1:20-21, 24).

  – David De Bruyn, Professor of Church History, Shepherds’ Seminary Africa