That is the word that Jude, in his 25-verse epistle, uses repeatedly to describe men who, in the early church, had “crept in unawares” and were “turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Jude3)
These deniers and deceivers are commonly called apostates. A dictionary definition is “a person who renounces a religious or political belief or principle.” In the New Testament, they are also called “false prophets,” (2 Peter 2:1), “grievous wolves,” (Acts 20:29), and “ravening wolves,” (Matt 7:15). Jude has a blistering list of adjectives that describe these people, who have run “greedily after the error of Balaam.” (Jude 11) He calls them “spots in your feasts,” “clouds without water,” “trees whose fruit withereth,” “raging waves of the sea,” “wandering stars,” “murmurers, complainers, walking after their own lusts, and their mouth speaketh great swelling words, having men’s persons in admiration because of advantage.” (Jude 11-16)
They have been ever-present as a nemesis to God, His Son, His Church, the truth, and truth bearers of all ages. Jesus, Paul, John, and Peter all raise the severest of warnings against these ungodly worms, whose sole intent is to deceive, deny, and damn ignorant and unsuspecting adherents to their “hard speeches.”
One writer said of apostates: “One is reminded by way of contrast with the Lord, whom these men deny. He is the rock of our salvation, they are hidden rocks, threatening shipwreck to our faith. He comes with clouds to refresh His people forever; these are clouds which do not even bring temporary blessing. He is the tree of life; they are trees dead. He leads beside the still waters; these are like the restless troubled sea. He is the bright and morning star heralding the coming day; they are wandering stars presaging a night of eternal darkness.” (Unknown)
They are false teachers who, Peter says, bring in damnable heresies, “even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction.” (2 Pet.2:1) It should be unequivocally stated that these people were never saved. They pervert the grace of God through their pernicious ways and “through covetousness they shall with feigned words make merchandise of you.” (2 Pet. 2:2,3). When Peter says that they denied “the Lord that bought them,” he is in no wise saying that they were at one time saved (having been “bought”), that they have denied the faith, and that in so doing have lost their salvation. The Lord that bought them is the same One of whom Paul said He was “the savior of all men, specially of those that believe,” (I Tim.4:10) and of whom John the apostle wrote when he affirmed that Jesus Christ “is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.” (I John 2:2) Christ died for all men, and in that sense is the savior of all men; his death is “sufficient” for the salvation of all, but “efficient” only for those who believe. These ungodly men will go to hell having rejected their only hope, the savior of all men, Jesus Christ.
Pastor and Bible teacher John MacArthur describes these persons aptly: “Apostates have received light, but not life. Apostates have known and accepted the written word but never met the Living Word. . . . They know intellectually that all of this is true, but they have never made it their own. It is a deliberate rejection after the truth is known.” (John MacArthur, sermon on Jude 3-4, “The Description of Apostates”) Jude likens them to the angels that kept not their first estate, or to the men of Sodom and Gomorrah who went after strange flesh and “are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.” (Jude 6,7)
In a DVD promo for livingthequestions.com, a project that claims to “re-educate thinking Christians,” one proponent of an anti-conservative evangelicalism said: “I think the atonement is the worst heresy ever perpetrated against Christianity.” On the video, liberal theologian Marcus Borg is quoted as saying: “We live in a time of transition in the church. . . . [It is moving away from an] older, conventional understanding, which is usually semi-literalistic and quite doctrinal and after-life oriented.” That vision, Borg goes on to say “has become unpersuasive.”
Os Guinness and John Yates, whose church recently left the American Episcopal Church (AEC), say that the AEC no longer holds to the historic, orthodox Christian faith. “Some leaders expressly deny the central articles of the faith—saying that traditional theism is ‘dead,’ the incarnation is ‘nonsense,’ the resurrection of Jesus is ‘fiction,’ the understanding of the cross is ‘a barbarous idea,’ the Bible is ‘pure propaganda’ and so on. Others simply say the creed as poetry or with their fingers crossed.” (Washington Post, 1/8/07)
This raw apostasy is not new, and it is not going away. One Episcopal Bishop was quoted as saying, “In the fall of 1988, I worshipped God in a Buddhist temple. As the smell of incense filled the air, I knelt before three images of Buddha, feeling that the smoke could carry my prayers heavenward. It was, for me, a holy moment, for I was certain that I was kneeling on holy ground. . . . I will not make any further attempt to convert the Buddhist, the Jew, the Hindu, or the Muslim. I am content to learn from them and to walk with them, side by side, toward God who lives, I believe, beyond the images that bind and blind us.” (Quoted from a message by David Reagan in “Voice in Wilderness,” August 2001)
In an article about the “Jesus Project”—an effort by a group of academics professing objectivity and neutrality to determine the historicity of Jesus—Christianity Today referred to the work of Robert Price, who claimed he used to be born again. (12/17/08) In a book he wrote, entitled Jesus is Dead, Price said: “(1) Not only is there no good reason to think that Jesus ever rose from the dead, (2) there is no good reason to think that he ever lived or died at all.”
In light of the above statements by modern-day apostates, one can appreciate more fully the tenor of the alarms sounded by the half-brother of Jesus, Jude, in his brief epistle! No wonder he closed his strongest-possible warning with these poignant words:
“But ye, beloved, building up yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Ghost, Keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life.” (Jude 20,21)
YOU and GOD 