A SEVEN-LEVEL COMMENTARY BOOKLET
📖 Contend for the Faith — Booklet Three
The Portrait of the False Teachers — Part 1 of 3: The Charge (Jude 1:8–10)
LANGUAGE • CULTURE • HISTORY EDITION
With illustrations from thirty years in the pulpit
Chuck Trusty · Pastor, Dardanelle, Arkansas
⭐ Introduction
This is the third booklet of five, covering the longest section of the letter: Jude’s full exposure of the intruders. The rules are unchanged — no commentary consulted, no scholar leaned on; the Greek text, the King James text, the culture of the first century from its own witnesses, and demonstrable history. The language dictates the doctrine. Sermon illustrations from thirty years of preaching appear in shaded From the Pulpit boxes; the AuthorNote style stands ready in Word for the author’s own hand. Because this section is the longest in the letter, Booklet Three is issued in three parts: Part 1, The Charge (verses 8–10); Part 2, The Three Roads and the Five Pictures (verses 11–13); and Part 3, The Sentence and the Speech (verses 14–16).
Verses 8 through 16 form one sustained indictment, and Jude builds it like a prosecutor: the charge (v.8), the contrast that shames it (v.9), the diagnosis (v.10), the three precedents (v.11), the exhibits (vv.12–13), the ancient warrant for arrest (vv.14–15), and the defendants’ recorded speech (v.16). Each unit below receives the seven windows.
⭐ Verse Eight — Jude 1:8
Level 1 — The Plain Text Reading
A faithful reconstruction from the Greek reads:
Yet in the same way these men also, dreaming, defile the flesh, and set aside lordship as nothing, and speak abusively of glories.
“Likewise” is the hinge back to verses 5–7: after three exhibits of judgment on boundary-breakers, these men do the same things — and they do them dreaming. The Greek gives three present-tense verbs, three counts in the charge: they pollute the body, they nullify authority, they rail at glories. Body, throne, heaven — the three boundaries of verses 5–7, crossed all over again by men who should have just read their own sentence.
Level 2 — The Child-Friendly Reading
Have you ever had a dream so real that when you woke up, for a minute you were not sure what was true? Jude says these false teachers live their whole lives like that — as if they were dreaming . . . in their dream-world, wrong feels right, rules feel silly, and holy things feel like jokes.
So they do three things . . . they treat their bodies — which God made — like they cannot be dirtied . . . they treat God’s authority like it does not count . . . and they make fun of things so glorious that even mighty angels speak of them carefully . . . here is the sad part: Jude has just finished telling three true stories about what happens to people and angels who act this way . . . these men heard the stories too . . . but a dreaming man does not listen to alarm clocks — and that is exactly what makes dreaming dangerous.
Level 3 — The Word-Order Reading
- “Likewise” (homoiōs) opens the verse — before the men are even mentioned, they are bolted to the three judgments just described. Whatever follows is the same pattern, resumed.
- “These… dreaming” (houtoi enypniazomenoi) — the participle stands attached to all three verbs that follow. Dreaming is not a fourth crime on the list; it is the condition in which all three crimes are committed. Everything they do, they do asleep to reality.
- The three counts then land in a deliberate ascent: “defile the flesh” (the sin against their own bodies), “despise dominion” (the sin against rule itself), “speak evil of dignities” (the sin of the loosened tongue against glories). From the mattress to the throne room — the corruption climbs.
- Each verb is present tense: this is their ongoing occupation, their settled way of life, not a lapse.
Level 4 — The Theological Reading
- SIN REPEATED IN THE FACE OF SENTENCE ALREADY PASSED. “Likewise” is the most damning word in the verse. Israel fell, angels are chained, Sodom smokes — and these men do the same things anyway. The doctrine is sobering: precedent does not restrain the flesh; only regeneration does. “The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God” (1 Corinthians 2:14) — and verse 19 will state the diagnosis outright: “having not the Spirit.”
- THE DREAM-STATE OF APOSTASY. Scripture’s picture of false confidence is sleep: “let us not sleep, as do others” (1 Thessalonians 5:6); the virgins who “slumbered and slept” (Matthew 25:5). These men are worse than asleep — they are dreaming: actively generating a private reality in which their defilement is liberty and their railing is courage. Isaiah drew the same picture: “as when an hungry man dreameth, and, behold, he eateth; but he awaketh, and his soul is empty” (Isaiah 29:8). Every doctrine invented to license sin is a dream in exactly this sense — vivid, self-authored, and gone at daybreak.
- AUTHORITY SET ASIDE IS THE MASTER DENIED, APPLIED. “Despise” translates athetousin — to nullify, to set aside as invalid, the word used of rejecting God’s commandment (Mark 7:9) and frustrating His grace (Galatians 2:21). Verse 4 said they deny the only Master; verse 8 shows the denial in working clothes: lordship as a category is set aside. A man who will not have Christ as despotēs will eventually find all “dominion” (kyriotēs — the lordship-word built on kyrios) intolerable — in the home, the church, and the state. Rebellion is rarely retail; it is wholesale.
“To find the rest of God, we are first required to leave the land of ‘self’ and begin our journey toward God’s will. We struggle with rebellion in our life just like the nation of Israel did in their lives.”
Level 5 — The Word-Study Reading
en-oop-nee-ad-zom’-en-oy — “dreamers,” literally “dreaming ones.” Present participle of enypniazomai, “to dream” (from en + hypnos, “in sleep” — hypnos gives English “hypnosis”). Its only other New Testament use is Acts 2:17, quoting Joel: “your old men shall dream dreams” — there, God-given revelation; here, self-generated delusion. The KJV’s “filthy” is supplied from the context of the first verb: these are men whose dreams dirty them.
mee-ah’-ee-noo-sin — “defile”: to stain, to pollute — used in John 18:28 of ceremonial defilement and Titus 1:15 of the defiled mind and conscience. What Sodom did in verse 7, these men continue in verse 8 — the participle chain has become a present-tense practice.
ath-et-oo’-sin — “despise,” literally “set aside as void, nullify” (a-privative + tithēmi, “to place”: to displace what was set). The same verb: “full well ye reject the commandment of God” (Mark 7:9); “I do not frustrate the grace of God” (Galatians 2:21). The landmark-moving instinct again — what God has set, they un-set.
koo-ree-ot’-ay-tah — “dominion”: lordship as such, the abstract noun built on kyrios (Lord). Used of exalted rule in Ephesians 1:21 and Colossians 1:16. They do not merely resist a ruler; they void the category of rule.
dox’-as — “dignities,” literally “glories”: beings or realities clothed in splendor. The word’s plural, applied to persons, points at the majestic ranks of the unseen world — which verse 9 will immediately illustrate from the highest of them.
Level 6 — The Historical Reading
Facts only in this window: what the manuscripts read, what the first-century record shows, what the culture was.
THE TEXT. Verse 8 is stable in the manuscript tradition; the three-count charge stands in all major witnesses.
DREAMS AS AUTHORITY-CLAIMS IN THE ANCIENT WORLD. In the first-century world — Jewish and pagan alike — dreams were a recognized claim to divine authority. Scripture itself legislated for the abuse centuries earlier: “If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams… thou shalt not hearken” (Deuteronomy 13:1–3), and Jeremiah records the LORD’s complaint against prophets “which prophesy false dreams” (Jeremiah 23:25–32). The documented first-century traffic in dream-revelation is the cultural backdrop against which “these dreamers” landed on Jude’s readers: men claiming visionary warrant for fleshly practice were a known species, legislated against in the Law and mocked by the prophets.
THE PARALLEL WITNESS. 2 Peter 2:10 describes the same profile in close verbal parallel: “them that walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness, and despise government. Presumptuous are they, selfwilled, they are not afraid to speak evil of dignities” — the same three elements: defiled flesh, despised rule, reviled glories. Two inspired witnesses, one criminal profile.
“Likewise also these.” With one word Jude turns from the three examples to the men themselves — like Israel, like the angels, like Sodom. Not that they did each identical sin — the likeness is the pattern. They crossed the bounds God set — and the same judgment that fell on those three stands over them.
Now a word on “dreamers” — because there is a sharper edge on it than we may notice. It is true, as the lesson has said, that these men live asleep to the real world — awake in a dream where wrong feels right and holy things feel like a joke. But mark this too. The word Jude picks is the false-prophet word. God warned in Deuteronomy of “a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams” who says, “Let us go after other gods” — “that dreamer of dreams shall be put to death, because he hath spoken to turn you away from the LORD” (Deuteronomy 13:1–5). And Jeremiah heard the same lying tongue: “I have dreamed, I have dreamed… they prophesy false dreams… yet I sent them not” (Jeremiah 23:25, 32). So their dreaming is not just a private fog. It is a claimed word from God. They give themselves a license for the filth — and throw off all authority — on the strength of a revelation God never gave them. A permission slip written in their sleep — and passed off as heaven’s.
And what does the dreaming produce? Jude lays it out in three present-tense verbs — a settled practice, not a slip: they defile the flesh — they despise dominion — they speak evil of dignities. That last one is the most brazen, and verse 9 sets the standard right beside it. Michael the archangel, disputing with the devil himself over the body of Moses, “durst not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee.” An archangel would not rail even at Satan — and these men rail at everything. That is the measure of the pride.
Put it together and it is one thing — a clean break from all authority and from the reality of judgment. The body is theirs to defile — God’s rule is theirs to set aside — heaven’s dignities are theirs to mock. And it comes to nothing grander than this: if it feels good, do it. And that is exactly where verse 4 began — turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness. The dream started there. Verse 8 is what it looks like with its eyes open. — C.T.
Level 7 — The Devotional Reading
AN ALARM HAS NO POWER OVER A MAN WHO PREFERS THE DREAM.
Jude sounded three alarms — a fallen nation, chained angels, a burnt plain — and verse 8 opens with these men sinning right through them: “likewise.” Do not assume that information alone will rescue anyone, including you . . . the question is never merely whether you have heard the warning, but whether you are awake to it. “Awake to righteousness, and sin not” (1 Corinthians 15:34).
PRIVATE DREAM-WORLDS ARE BUILT ONE EXCUSE AT A TIME.
No man wakes up one morning railing at glories. He begins by furnishing a small private reality where his one pet sin is reasonable . . . the dream expands to fit everything he wants – authority is the last furniture moved out . . . watch the small renovations of conscience — the little rooms where “surely God does not mind” gets whispered . . . that is where the dreaming starts.
RESPECT FOR AUTHORITY IS A SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE, NOT A PERSONALITY TRAIT.
These men made irreverence look like boldness . . . but the ability to honor what God has set above you — in the home, the church, the government (Romans 13:1), and heaven itself — is a mark of being awake, not weak . . . the next verse will show that the mightiest created being in Scripture is also the most careful with his tongue.
⭐ Verse Nine — Jude 1:9
Level 1 — The Plain Text Reading
A faithful reconstruction from the Greek reads:
But Michael the archangel, when, disputing with the devil, he was arguing about the body of Moses, did not dare to bring a judgment of railing against him, but said, “May the Lord rebuke you.”
The verse is a courtroom contrast. The dreamers of verse 8 rail at glories they have never met; Michael, the chief of angels, standing face to face with the fallen glory himself — the devil — over a matter he was surely right about, did not dare pronounce the abusive sentence. He deferred the verdict to the only Judge entitled to render it: “The Lord rebuke thee.” The highest created rank in Scripture would not take up the weapon these men swing daily.
Level 2 — The Child-Friendly Reading
Michael is the mightiest angel God ever made — the Bible calls him “the archangel,” the chief angel, the captain . . . one day, the Bible says, Michael and the devil were in a dispute about the body of Moses — after Moses died, God buried him secretly (Deuteronomy 34:6), and the devil wanted to argue about that body.
Now if anyone ever had the right to yell at the devil, it was Michael. He was stronger, he was right, and the devil is the worst being there is. But Michael did not trade insults. He said, “The Lord rebuke you” — which means, “You are not mine to sentence. I will let God handle you.”
Think about that . . . the greatest angel was humble about his words — and the false teachers in verse 8, who are much, much smaller than Michael, mock things far above themselves . . . the lesson is simple: the closer you really are to God, the more careful your words become.
Level 3 — The Word-Order Reading
- “Yet Michael the archangel” (ho de Michaēl ho archangelos) opens with the full title — the verse announces the highest possible witness before describing his restraint. The higher the rank, the heavier the example.
- “When contending with the devil he disputed” — the Greek participle here is diakrinomenos, “disputing” — and Jude will use the same verb again in verse 22 of doubters to be treated with compassion. The word’s reappearance ties the letter together: Michael disputes with the devil; the church deals gently with the disputing-in-heart.
- “About the body of Moses” — the occasion is stated but not explained; the first readers evidently knew the account (the historical data is in Level 6).
- “Durst not” (ouk etolmēsen) — the hinge of the verse: did not dare. Not “could not” — did not permit himself.
- “But said, The Lord rebuke thee” — the words themselves are Scripture’s words: they stand, nearly letter for letter, in Zechariah 3:2, where the Angel of the LORD answers Satan’s accusation against Joshua the high priest. Michael’s restraint is not improvisation; he answers the accuser with the recorded formula of God’s own court.
Level 4 — The Theological Reading
- REBUKE OF THE DEVIL BELONGS TO THE LORD. Michael’s sentence — “The Lord rebuke thee” — is quoted from Zechariah 3:2, the scene where Satan stands to accuse the high priest and the LORD Himself silences him. The doctrine the language enforces: judgment over Satan is the Lord’s prerogative, not a creature’s — not even the chief creature’s. Believers are taught to resist the devil (James 4:7), to stand against his wiles in God’s armor (Ephesians 6:11), to give him no place (Ephesians 4:27) — but nowhere to revile him. The power that expels him is never the believer’s mouth; it is the Lord’s authority.
- BEING RIGHT DOES NOT LICENSE RAILING. Michael was on God’s side of the dispute, against the worst being in creation — the one case where verbal violence would seem safest. He declined it. Truth spoken abusively is a contradiction in the mouth of God’s servants: “the servant of the Lord must not strive; but be gentle unto all men… in meekness instructing those that oppose themselves” (2 Timothy 2:24–25). The dreamers’ railing is thereby exposed for what it is: not courage but trespass — the seizure of a gavel that belongs to Another.
- THE DEVIL IS REAL, PERSONAL, AND ALREADY OVERMATCHED. The verse assumes what Scripture teaches throughout: a personal adversary, mighty but created, contending over God’s servants even in death — and answerable to a word from the Lord. The believer’s confidence stands not in bravado toward the enemy but in the Lord who rebukes him: “greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world” (1 John 4:4).
“We believe — which means that we do not doubt, but that we are absolutely positive: that Satan is a fallen angel; that Satan is the archenemy of God; that Satan is the archenemy of man; that Satan is unholy; that Satan is the god of this world; and that the destiny of Satan is an eternity in hell. Angels worship — angels sin — angels are not all-powerful.”
Level 5 — The Word-Study Reading
ar-khang’-el-os — “archangel”: archē (first, chief) + angelos (messenger). The word appears in the New Testament only here and in 1 Thessalonians 4:16, where “the voice of the archangel” attends the Lord’s descent. Michael (“Who is like God?” in Hebrew) appears by name in Daniel 10:13 (“one of the chief princes”), Daniel 12:1 (“the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people”), and Revelation 12:7, where he commands the angelic armies against the dragon.
dee-ak-rin-om’-en-os — “contending”: disputing, taking issue — from dia + krinō (to judge): to judge back and forth. The identical participle returns in verse 22 for those “making a difference” / wavering. Even in dispute, Michael’s weaponry stopped at argument; the sentence he left to God.
ook et-ol’-may-sen — “durst not”: did not dare, did not presume. Tolmaō is the verb of bold venture. The dreamers of verse 8 are all daring; the archangel is all restraint. In Scripture’s economy, the direction of daring runs opposite to rank: the smaller the creature, the looser the tongue.
kree’-sin blas-fay-mee’-as — “railing accusation,” literally “a judgment of blasphemy/abuse”: a verdict delivered in the language of reviling. Michael refused not merely rudeness but the rendering of sentence itself — the krisis belongs to the Lord (compare v.6, “the judgment [krisin] of the great day”).
ep-ee-tee-may’-sai soy koo’-ree-os — “The Lord rebuke thee.” Epitimaō: to rebuke with authority — the verb used when the Lord rebuked winds and sea (Matthew 8:26). The optative mood again (as in v.2): a solemn committal to God. The words match the Greek Old Testament of Zechariah 3:2 — Michael answers the accuser out of the written record of the accuser’s last defeat.
Level 6 — The Historical Reading
THE OLD TESTAMENT DATA ON MOSES’ BODY. Deuteronomy 34:5–6 records the facts behind the dispute: Moses died in Moab, “and he buried him in a valley… but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.” The burier is God Himself; the grave was deliberately hidden. Scripture also records Moses appearing, bodily visible, at the transfiguration (Matthew 17:3). Between those two texts lies the event Jude cites.
THE ACCOUNT IN JUDE’S CULTURE. The dispute over Moses’ body was known to Jude’s first readers from a Jewish writing of the period. Early Christian writers of the second and third centuries record as a matter of fact that the episode stood in a work called the Assumption (or Testament) of Moses — a book that has survived into the modern era only incomplete, its ending (where the episode stood) lost. What can be stated as history: the story circulated in Jude’s era; Jude’s readers needed no explanation; and Jude, writing under inspiration, certified this much of it as fact. As with Enoch’s prophecy (vv.14–15), quotation certifies the words quoted — not every page of the source (compare Paul citing a Cretan poet as true, Titus 1:12).
ZECHARIAH 3 — THE SCENE BEHIND THE SENTENCE. Zechariah 3:1–2 records the court: Joshua the high priest in filthy garments, “Satan standing at his right hand to resist him,” and the answer — “The LORD rebuke thee, O Satan… is not this a brand plucked out of the fire?” Jude will draw on this same scene again in verse 23 (“pulling them out of the fire; hating even the garment spotted by the flesh”). It is a fact of the letter’s language that one Old Testament courtroom supplies both Michael’s words here and the rescue imagery there.
Before we take up verse 9, we must not let go of verse 8. These filthy dreamers are doing the very thing Michael the archangel refused to do. That is the whole force of the verse, and if we lose the connection we lose the argument.
Begin with what Michael would not do, because Jude does. He “durst not” — ouk etolmēsen — did not dare. Not “chose not.” Not “declined.” The chief of angels did not have the nerve. And what he did not dare bring was a krisin blasphēmias, and the first of those two words puts us in a courtroom: krisis is a verdict, a sentence, the act of judging. So the phrase is not merely harsh talk. It is a sentence handed down in the language of reviling. Michael refused both halves of it — he would not revile, and he would not pass the sentence at all. Any judgment, any pushback, belonged to the Lord. He would not get into a shoving match with the devil.
Now set that beside verse 8 and the indictment lands. In their own minds these men had climbed high enough in pride to feel qualified to speak in a way the archangel would not speak. Jude even hands us the word to prove it: they blaspheme glories (blasphēmousin, v.8), and what Michael would not utter was a judgment of blasphēmia (v.9). The same root, one verse apart, and it is no accident. What is the daily occupation of the small men is the thing the great one did not dare. Verse 16 says the same of them from another angle: “great swelling words.”
Here is the point I want pressed home. Michael was on the right side. He was on God’s side of that dispute, against the worst being in creation — and if ever there were a case where a hard word would be safe, that was it. He still would not pronounce sentence. Being right does not give a man the authority to take the gavel out of the Judge’s hand and pass judgment on the wrong side himself. That has been God’s work from the Garden, through the Flood, through the Exodus, and it is God’s work still.
But mark carefully what Michael did do, or the lesson will be turned into an excuse for cowardice. He contended. The word is diakrinomenos — he was in an active dispute with the devil. He did not stay silent, he did not stay neutral, and he did not walk away from the confrontation. He resisted fully. What he would not do was revile, and what he would not do was sentence. So the pattern is not silence in the face of evil; the pattern is full resistance, zero railing, and the verdict left on God’s bench.
And notice how he resisted. He did not compose an answer of his own. “The Lord rebuke thee” is nearly letter for letter the word of Zechariah 3:2, spoken in another courtroom where Satan stood to accuse Joshua the high priest. Michael reached for words God had already used. That is worth teaching by itself: when a man stands face to face with evil, his own words will drag him into the shoving match — God’s words will not. It is the same weapon the Lord Jesus took up in the wilderness: “It is written.”
So when we are confronted by evil, or by an evildoer, Michael has given us the pattern. Resist. Dispute if the truth requires it. Answer out of the Book. And then leave the sentence where it belongs. “If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men” (Romans 12:18) — and where it is not possible, the next verse still holds: “Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves… Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord” (Romans 12:19). It may not be possible to live peaceably with every man. It is always possible to leave the judgment to God. — C.T.
Level 7 — The Devotional Reading
THE STRONGEST TONGUE IS THE MOST GOVERNED ONE.
The archangel’s restraint was not weakness — no being in creation had less to fear from the devil . . . it was reverence: a refusal to handle what belongs to God. Any fool can rail – it takes strength under command to say, “The Lord rebuke thee,” and stop there. Measure spiritual maturity — yours and your teachers’ — not by the boldness of the mouth but by the government of it.
FIGHT THE DEVIL BY THE BOOK.
Michael answered Satan with Scripture’s own recorded formula — the words of Zechariah 3:2 — exactly as the Lord Jesus answered him in the wilderness with “It is written” (Matthew 4:4, 7, 10). The believer’s warfare is not improvised insult but remembered Scripture . . . if the archangel would not engage the enemy without the Book, neither should you.
LEAVE THE GAVEL ON GOD’S BENCH.
There is a kind of preaching and talking — about the devil, about wicked men, about the church’s enemies — that mistakes contempt for conviction. Michael teaches the other way: full resistance, zero railing, verdict deferred to the Judge. “Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves… Vengeance is mine – I will repay, saith the Lord” (Romans 12:19).
⭐ Verse Ten — Jude 1:10
Level 1 — The Plain Text Reading
A faithful reconstruction from the Greek reads:
But these men speak abusively of whatever they do not understand; and whatever they do understand — by instinct, like the unreasoning animals — in those very things they are being destroyed.
The verse is a two-edged diagnosis, and both edges cut. Where knowledge is required, they have none — and rail anyway. Where they do possess knowledge, it is the kind that requires no soul — appetite, instinct, the knowledge a beast has — and that is precisely the arena in which they are rotting. Ignorant of everything above them, expert only in what is beneath them, and dying of their specialty.
Level 2 — The Child-Friendly Reading
Jude says the false teachers have two problems, and together they make one sad picture.
First: the things they make fun of — holy things, heavenly things — they do not understand at all . . . they are like a person mocking a book they never read.
Second: the things they do understand are the things an animal understands — being hungry, wanting things, grabbing what feels good. A dog does not think about whether it is right to steal the steak off the counter – it just wants it. God gave animals instincts, and that is fine for animals — but He gave people so much more: a soul, a conscience, His Word . . . these men ignore all of that and live on instinct alone . . . and here is the saddest part: the very things they chase are the things that are ruining them — like a fish that thinks the worm is a free lunch, and never thinks about the hook.
Level 3 — The Word-Order Reading
- “But these” (houtoi de) — the pronoun snaps back from Michael to the dreamers, and the contrast is the message: the archangel, knowing most, dared least; these, knowing least, dare most.
- “Whatever they know not, they blaspheme” — the first clause files the charge of ignorant railing, using the verb of knowing (oidasin) that belongs to understanding and perception.
- “Whatever they understand naturally” — the second clause switches to a different knowing-word (epistantai) qualified by physikōs, “by instinct, by nature” — and immediately supplies the comparison: “as unreasoning animals” (hōs ta aloga zōa).
- “In these things they corrupt themselves” (en toutois phtheirontai) — the closing verb is present passive: the corruption is happening now, from within, in exactly the department of their expertise. The sentence ends with the trap already sprung.
Level 4 — The Theological Reading
- TWO KINDS OF KNOWING, AND THE ONE THAT SAVES IS MISSING. The Greek distinguishes knowledge gained by perception and reflection (oida) from raw acquaintance (epistamai) — and gives these men only the second, throttled down to instinct (physikōs). Spiritual things are closed to the natural man: “the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14). The doctrine is the same one verse 19 will state — “sensual, having not the Spirit.” Mockery of holy things is not evidence the mocker has examined them; it is evidence he cannot see them.
- MAN MINUS GOD TRENDS TOWARD BEAST. Scripture’s anthropology is vertical: man was made in God’s image (Genesis 1:26), a little lower than the angels (Psalm 8:5), designed to look up. When a man lives purely by appetite, he does not become a free spirit; he becomes livestock — “man that is in honour, and understandeth not, is like the beasts that perish” (Psalm 49:20). The intruders traded the image for the instinct.
- SIN CARRIES ITS OWN CORROSION. “In those things they corrupt themselves” — the judgment in this verse is not future fire but present rot. Sin destroys the sinner with the sinner’s own energy: “he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption [phthoran]” (Galatians 6:8). The wage is being paid out continuously (Romans 6:23), long before the great day settles the account.
Level 5 — The Word-Study Reading
foo-see-koce’ — “naturally”: by instinct, by unreasoned nature (from physis, nature — the root of “physics”). Only here in the New Testament as an adverb; Peter’s parallel uses the adjective of the same beasts (2 Peter 2:12, “natural brute beasts”).
al’-og-ah dzo’-ah — “brute beasts,” literally “unreasoning living things”: a-privative + logos — creatures without word, without reason. The insult is precise: men who blaspheme what is above reason have sunk below it. The same phrase stands in 2 Peter 2:12.
fthi’-ron-tai — “corrupt themselves”: present passive of phtheirō, to spoil, ruin, decay — the vocabulary of rot. The tense is the theology: not “will be corrupted” but “are being corrupted,” now, in the very exercise of their appetites. Compare 2 Peter 2:12, “shall utterly perish in their own corruption.”
Level 6 — The Historical Reading
THE TEXT. Verse 10 is stable in the manuscript tradition.
THE TWIN WITNESS. 2 Peter 2:12 carries the same portrait in closely matching words: “But these, as natural brute beasts, made to be taken and destroyed, speak evil of the things that they understand not; and shall utterly perish in their own corruption.” The two letters preserve, in inspired stereo, one diagnosis: railing where knowledge is absent, ruin where instinct rules.
THE CULTURAL EDGE OF “ALOGA.” In Greek moral vocabulary, logos — reason, word — was precisely what separated man from animal; to call a man alogos was to strike him from the human column. Jude’s readers, Greek-speakers, heard the full force: men who mock the doxai (glories) above them have resigned from the logos within them.
“But these.” Set that little phrase against verse 9 and you have the whole point. Michael the archangel — who knew exactly what he was dealing with — would not so much as rail at the devil: “The Lord rebuke thee.” But these men rail at what they cannot even understand — “these speak evil of those things which they know not.” Do you see the contrast? Michael handled what he knew with reverence — these blaspheme what is over their heads. Reverence that knows — set beside a loose tongue that does not.
Then Jude marks two kinds of knowing in these men. What they know not — the spiritual things above them — they blaspheme. And what they know naturally, “as brute beasts,” by raw instinct — appetite, the body, the pull of the flesh — “in those things they corrupt themselves.” The very instinct they trust is the thing that destroys them. It is like a hurt animal striking at the hand of the one trying to help it. It cannot understand the hand — so it bites the help — and it keeps running after the instinct that is killing it. These men blaspheme the help they do not know — and run headlong after the nature they do.
Do not miss what this says about a man left to himself. Every man is a sinner by nature — “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23) — but these men have handed themselves wholly over to that nature, and are led by it the way a beast is led by instinct, with nothing above it to answer to. That is what a life looks like with no light in it but its own appetite.
And here is the line that keeps us from despair. What these men know naturally runs them to ruin — but what a believer knows supernaturally runs him to safety. “The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God… neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14). The child of God has been given a knowing the brute-beast man does not have — “ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things” (1 John 2:20). And that, in the end, is what tells the sheep from the wolf. Not that one is a sinner and the other is not — for all have sinned — but that one has been given the Spirit’s knowing, and the other has nothing but instinct. Natural knowing ends in ruin. Supernatural knowing ends in the hand of Christ. — C.T.
Level 7 — The Devotional Reading
MOCKERY IS NOT A CREDENTIAL.
The loudest scoffers at holy things are not those who examined them and found them wanting, but those who never had eyes for them at all . . . do not be shaken when sacred things are ridiculed by men who have never once handled them with understanding. A blind man’s review of a sunrise tells you about the man, not the sunrise.
FEED THE PART OF YOU THAT LOOKS UP.
Every person has appetites, and appetites are not the enemy — unexamined ones are. A man who feeds only his instincts is training himself downward, one meal at a time. Feed the upward faculties daily — the Word, prayer, worship, holy thinking (Philippians 4:8) — or the animal appetites will happily eat every meal alone.
THE BAIT IS ALWAYS PAID FOR BY THE FISH.
“In those things they corrupt themselves” — their pleasures were the mechanism of their decay. Sin’s genius is to make you the engine of your own ruin: nobody corrupts you – you are corrupted in what you chase . . . ask of any appetite you are presently feeding in the dark: what is this making of me? The hook is in the worm, not beside it.
Continued in Part 2 — The Three Roads and the Five Pictures (Jude 1:11–13).
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