Free Bible Commentary
“Jude 1:8-10”
Categories: Jude“Yet in the same way these men, also by dreaming, defile the flesh, and reject authority, and revile angelic majesties. But Michael the archangel, when he disputed with the devil and argued about the body of Moses, did not dare pronounce against him a railing judgment, but said, ‘The Lord rebuke you!’ But these men revile the things which they do not understand; and the things which they know by instinct, like unreasoning animals, by these things they are destroyed.”
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Jude begins his scathing rebuke of the false teachers in verse 8. He was appalled and alarmed by the perversion of these men and the havoc that they were wreaking upon the Lord’s people. He was more concerned about addressing their character and their recklessness than the particular form of the perverted doctrine they were teaching. They were arrogant and ignorant and had zero respect for God-given authority, and they behaved more like dumb animals driven by base instincts than reasoning, sensible human beings. The Truth means little or nothing to egomaniacs who only live to satisfy self, so they will pervert the Gospel in any way that best serves their own purposes.
It is difficult to determine just how “dreaming” factored into the distortions of the false teachers. It could have been that these “inventors of evil” (Romans 1:29) were so absorbed in their wickedness that they dreamt about ways to pursue evil even in their sleep. The prophet Micah wrote about “those who scheme iniquity, who work out evil on their beds! When morning comes, they do it” (Micah 2:1). Another possibility is that they insisted God had revealed His will to them through dreams and visions, and cited these as authority for the lies that they advanced. Either way you look at it, they were caught up in a dream world that meant a nightmare for anyone who crossed their paths.
There is no biblical or preserved extra-biblical account of the archangel Michael disputing with the devil over the body of Moses (verse 9). There is some question as to whether Jude was referring to a real-life event or appealing to a piece of popularly accepted Jewish lore. Either way you look at it, the point that Jude wanted to make is not affected and easily understood. If the much more powerful archangel Michael refused to “pronounce a railing judgment” against Satan, then the false teachers should refrain from “reviling” against God’s apostolic authority and about the things that they “do not understand” (verse 10). If an archangel was willing to give place to the wrath of God and leave judgment to the Lord, mere mortal men should refrain from unleashing their verbal fury against the things and people they don’t agree with.
I love what Duane Warden wrote on page 490 of his Truth for Today Commentary on “1 & 2 Peter And Jude” about these teachers being creatures of instinct so I will just quote it:
“Their own survival and their own aggrandizement were the driving forces behind what they did. Not only that, but the false teachers ‘[did] not understand’ the matters they proclaimed. Jude hinted that when Christ is the subject, there is a level of understanding that is born of embracing the gospel. Christians live in Christ as a fish lives in water. By contrast, the false teachers lived in the sphere of the flesh. They were as likely to understand what it meant to be in Christ as a hamster would be to understand what it means to live in water. Just as one would have to live in water to understand what that kind of life is, one must be in Christ to understand the peace He offers and the way of life He has for His people. Regardless of what ‘these men’ claimed, they were not following Christ. For that reason they were without understanding.
“Like Jude, Paul asserted that Christians understand spiritual matters on a level that the non-believing soul cannot know. The matter comes up in 1 Corinthians: ‘But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised’ (1 Cor. 2:14). Jude reasoned similarly. These men, he maintained, did not know Christ. They relied on ‘instinct’ and lived on a purely functional level. They were ‘like unreasoning animals’. The very things they claimed to be for the good of Christians led to separation from God. Jude had no doubt where the path of the false teachers was leading. He wanted his readers to know that ‘by these things they [would be] destroyed’. Jude was concerned that his brothers and sisters would follow them to the same destruction, which is why he wrote as he did (vv. 3,4).”
Please read Jude 1:11-13 for tomorrow.
Have a blessed day!
-Louie Taylor
