Sunday Bible School- Reading Jude- Anna Anderson- July25

Sunday Bible School 20th July 2025

Anna takes us through how we can read the book of Jude well.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Bible School is more of a kind of seminar style. So rather than listening to the preaching upstairs, which tries to kind of uh cover everybody, whether the people are still seeking uh whether they've been Christians for years and years and years, um, Bible School is a bit more of a chance to dig a bit deeper, maybe into one of the books of the Bible or a Bible theme and help you to navigate uh this wonderful book that we call the Bible, uh, that can sometimes be a bit hard to understand, hard to read. And um, so uh that's what we're gonna do. It's wonderful to have Anna who's gonna be speaking to us this evening, and as part of our vocational leadership track, um, studying at Bristol Baptist College, um, and uh yeah, is going to speak to us on the book of Jude. So I'm just gonna say a little prayer and then we're going to uh take a chance to listen. If you've got questions, you can either, as we go along or when we come to the end, there'll be some QA as well. But uh let me pray for us. Lord, thank you so much for your word. Thank you that it uh speaks to us today. Although it was written um a couple of thousand years ago, there's something about it that is your living word. And although it's sometimes it's hard to understand some of the the context and the and the themes, but actually there's something about truth that speaks to us. There's something like food that feeds us. And uh pray this evening as we look at this little letter called Jude. I pray that we'd find food and inspiration as we listen to Anna. In Jesus' name I pray. Amen.

SPEAKER_00 1:20

Thanks, Tim. Thanks, hi everybody. Um, nice to see uh you all this evening. Um, just a quick show of hands. Who's read the book of Jude? Okay, great, excellent start. Um, I remember when I first became a Christian, I wanted to get through as much of the Bible as I possibly could, and I thought I'm gonna start with the shortest books. So Jude was one of the first ones I read. Whew, okay. Um, I mean I had read a gospel and then I dived straight into Jude and all the little ones at the back. And it's quite a meaty topic, isn't it? Um it's quite a meaty little uh letter, but it is short, and that's great. But um one uh theologian said this about Jude is appropriately nestled towards the back of the New Testament, revered and conveniently forgotten. Because whilst you might have read the book of Jude, how many of you have ever had a prophetic word where someone's giving you the book of Jude? Or maybe have you ever come across it in a little devotional? Not very often. It's not one of those books often um it comes up. Therefore, it's worth having a little look at because um it is in the Bible and it's an interesting uh topic. So we're gonna look today, and we're gonna I'm gonna try and do it in um in a scholarly manner as much as I can. Um, I'm not a scholar, I have done a little certificate, but I'm not a scholar by any means. But this is how uh theologians would go about looking at any book in the Bible. So um when you're reading the Bible, you can use this to help you. And there's three layers that we try and look at. And the first one is the world behind the text, the world behind the text. And this is the world of the audience that would have very first heard the text. So in this instance, it's the people that heard it first when Jude spoke it, um, or when he sent it. And we we like to dig into that because we want to know about their culture, we want to know about their customs, we want to know about what they thought, the lens with which they viewed the world, because we all have lenses, don't we? And it's totally different to the lenses we view the world. And so it's really, really important because the author's world is not our world. And so that's the first thing. The next thing we want to look at is the world of the text. We want to go into the text itself. We want to know what it means, what the words mean. Um, we want to know what type of uh book it is, we want to know um what the author was trying to get at when he used certain words, and we want to really investigate that kind of the language that's there and all the hidden meaning that comes with that, which can be, you know, that's a really great thing to do. And then finally, we want to see, and I'm gonna probably do the least on this, but um, the world in front of the text, that's our world. We're the audience that are listening to it right now. How does it apply to us? How can we get the most out of the book of Jude or whatever we're reading? So, those are three layers, the three worlds of the text, and we're gonna look at. So the first one I'm gonna start with is the world behind the text, the world of Jude, the world of the people he was writing to. So, first of all, who was he? Now, if I would say to you who wrote the book of Timothy, you'll go, No, it's not Timothy. But who wrote the book of Jude? Well, Jude wrote the book of Jude. But scholars have a bit of a hard time working out initially who is Jude, because it was a really popular name back then. Um, you've heard of Judah in the Bible, you've heard of Judas in the Bible. Both of those names are linked to the name Jude. That's what his name would have been. But we can work out that he, Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ, and a brother of James. And if he's a brother of James, that means he's actually the half-brother of Jesus as well. Because James, who wrote the book of James, is the half-brother of Jesus. And um, we kind of encounter him in the Bible in uh Matthew's gospel. Uh, Matthew says this it's not, um, is not this the carpenter's son, is not his mother called Mary, his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas. That's the one we're talking about here. He is the one who wrote the book of Jude. But um, you know, we know that it's him because all of Jesus' brothers, whilst they didn't believe in him when he walked the earth, after his resurrection, they became believers, they became followers. And we know that um the church in the Palestinian area was run by a lot of his family. So in Jerusalem, his brother James ran that church, and we later know from historians that it was later run, or when he was um he died, it went to uh Jude's first cousin, which is unusual because it would usually pass from brother to brother down that way. So that means that Jude was busy elsewhere, he was busy doing something different. He was a travelling preacher, a travelling missionary, and he probably travelled around the area near to where Jesus grew up. And we think that probably all scholars believe that he was right into this particular area. That's not a country, that's a little area. If you see, there's um Galilee at the top and the Dead Sea down there, and this area here called the Decapolis, the Ten Cities, around there, Greek-speaking cities where there would have been a mixture of Greek people, um, Gentile believers who would have come to faith in Jesus, and people who were came from the Jewish faith as well. So that's who Jude was writing to when he wrote this letter. And we know a little bit about this from scholars because they look at what Jude is saying to this area. His letter is a little bit different than the letter of like Romans, for example. Um, this letter was written to a church that was in trouble. You know, probably Romans had their own troubles as well, but this particular church we read has got some alarming stuff that's going on too. And this book is called a Catholic Epistle. It's a general epistle, a little bit like the books of Peter and of James, and they kind of address specific challenges that are going on. So when we kind of read these letters, it's like we're hearing half of a telephone conversation. We're hearing the bit that Jude is telling them the solutions or the problem, and so we can work out what is going on in those kind of places. So, what kind of book is the Book of Jude? Well, it's a letter, and it's a letter that kind of falls into two broadly different types. It's a letter that's advising the people, he's advising them about these people that have caused problems, and we're going to delve into those in a minute. Um, he's telling the people about the bad characters. Now they're going to have to fight the next word, it's a top of the remote language all the time. And it's quite the reason why that kind of fighting as a language, the passion that you discussed. Because he wants to motivate the director of what's going on. He doesn't want the So, what is the crisis that he's writing about? And it's so bad that actually he's changed what he was going to write about. And this picture sums up in amongst them has snuck in some people that are going to cause real harm to. Now, these people that are snuck in are Christians, they're just they're teachers. They're traveling around. They could be prophets, and they've come in presenting themselves probably as really great teachers, good Christians, full of Holy Spirit, full of the gifts, but actually, their behaviour says otherwise. And Jude wants to alert the church to this danger. Now we know from like history, we know from the church writings around this time that aren't in the Bible, that the church was full of charlatans. We'd have this particular letter called a Didi K, which is a church letter that went round, which is filled with lists upon lists from lists. Use the other one. Use the other one. Sorry, everybody. There you go. Oh, wow, loud. Did you all hear what I said the last part? Now I know that you have to kind of hold this one specially, so is that right? Okay. Um so this particular letter, the Diddy K, it lists long loads of rules about how to behave if you're a church leader. And one of the things it says in this letter, which isn't in the book of Jude, but we can use to help us understand the book of Jude, is it says that if a prophet or a teacher turns up at a church, they cannot stay three days. They can stay two days, but on the third day, they either have to leave or they have to do some work. You cannot come to a church and just idle. So you have to be put to work. So Judas got that in his mind as he's writing. This is what is going on in the church at large, and it probably applies to this place. Also, this the prophet, if he's talking or she is talking in the spirit, she must he or she must not ask for dinner. So you can't say, Oh, the Lord said to me, it's time to lay the table and have some food. No, that will not do. The prophet is not allowed to do that. And the Didi K says this, so it must mean that people turned up hungry, wanting stuff, and said, Oh, I feel like you know, the Lord's the Holy Spirit is telling me it's time for food. You can't do that. Okay, so this is the kind of thing that Jude is talking about in this letter. These people are sponging off this community and they're dangerous because of it. And um, Jude starts some extensive criticism. This isn't light stuff. He really wants this group of people to know the danger of these people. So he he's kind of he focuses in with lots and lots of proof. Now, I used to be a history teacher, and I love proof. I love evidence. So I kind of like Jude's letter for this reason because it is packed with evidence. And he really goes to town. He he uses um some lovely language that wouldn't be inappropriate in some GCC English language uh exam. He also goes to town and uses some stuff from the Old Testament and he uses some extra Testament writing, some things that do not appear in the Bible, which can throw you a little bit because he's referring to things you're thinking, I don't, I've never heard of this before. But he really wants to go in hard with all the evidence, but before he does that, he softens the blow and he says this I want to remind you, all right, although you already know this, and he's using a technique that letter writers would use at this time to try and say, I don't want to shame you by telling you things that you should know but you don't know, so I'm going to pretend you do know so that you feel okay about yourself. And so he's doing that because he does care about his audience, he really does care about them. And he, if you look at compare it to say Paul, when he writes the Galatians, remember he says this, oh ignorant Galatians. There's none of that in the letter of Jude. He goes it quite softly, he wants to treat his audience nicely, doesn't he? But he does want to layer and layer some examples upon them. And he does this in a rather poetic way. And his writing actually is so kind of well scripted and well put together that some people, some scholars say, hang on a minute, he can't be uh Jesus' brother. He's just some artisan, isn't he? Some you know, carpenter's brother from Galilee. He can't speak this well. Well, most scholars now agree he can, and he's learnt a lot of Greek and he's writing in a really good way. And he puts his letter together in this kind of threefold way. He starts off with three examples over here: a mixture of things from the Old Testament and intertestamental writing. He goes in the middle with a random bit that we will never have read, probably, because it comes from a piece of text that's never been found. So this bit here is totally nothing that we would have in our kind of register. And our final three examples are from the Old Testament. So he is really showing his audience he knows his biblical knowledge, he knows his scripture, and he wants to say to them, These people have been prophesied before, you should have been expecting them, and now they're here and they're going to cause you difficulty. So he starts off with this um the first example, and he starts off by talking about um uh yeah, he first of all he starts off with the three examples and says from this they don't, these examples, they're people who didn't listen to authority and they pollute their bodies. Now I'm not talking about having a McDonald's here, that kind of pollution of their bodies. They don't treat their bodies nicely, they do not behave morally, is what he's saying. And because their behavior is so bad, they therefore are not taking the authority of Jesus Christ seriously. And he uses these Old Testament examples to show them these people are like these people in the past. And the first lot he he mentions is the Exodus generation. The generation of people that had left Egypt, escaped across the Red Sea, and they'd got to safety. Now, if you remember that back there in Exodus, this generation of people, they get there, don't they? They have this amazing uh like you know rescue experience in the hands of God, and then they get so close to the Promised Land, and then they chicken out, don't they? They chicken out and they say, We don't really trust actually that where we're going is going to be safe. We're kind of missing Egypt, we're kind of missing the lovely food we had back in Egypt. We want to go back there, and so God, who's just rescues them, allows them, most of them, except a couple of people, to actually live their entire rest of their lives in the wilderness. He's allowing them to kind of have a bit of judgment because they didn't obey his authority. And Jude is saying here, these teachers, they're like this. They're not obeying Jesus' authority, and they're not doing this because they're behaving badly. And this is where we kind of get to the slightly weird bit in Jude. The slightly weird bit in the second example. The angels who did not keep their positions of authority. Now, if anyone has ever read uh Genesis 6, put your hand up, you can remember that funny little bit in Genesis where it talks about the angels that leave their positions of authority. Now, it actually talks about the sons of God who leave their place that they have been and they go somewhere else. And this is what it says in Genesis. It says, When human beings began to increase in number on the earth, and the daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them that they chose. When Jude talks about these angels that have left their position, he's talking about these sons of gods. Now, in the intertestamental period, that bit between the Old Testament and the New Testament, angels featured a lot in Jewish thinking. They were very uh they were quite, well, they were just fascinated by them. They were fascinated by the hierarchy, they were fascinated by the stories of them. And this particular story was elaborated on much in a much bigger way in a book called The Book of Enoch. And in this story, it talks about how these angels have come to earth, they've married women, they've had sex with them, they've had children. And God, of course, does not like this, and so he deals with them, and he sends them to have been judged, he sends them down to be in everlasting chains, kept in darkness for the day of judgment. And this is the information that we get from the book of Enoch, which isn't in the Bible, but we kind of use that to help us understand what Jude is talking about here. He is saying that these teachers are like these fallen angels, these angels that have stepped out of their bounds of authority. So at this point, we kind of have to pause a little bit. We have to do a little sidestep and go back to the story behind the text. Because who is Enoch? Who is Enoch? Well, you might have heard of him because he does turn up in Genesis again. Enoch is the one who walked with God, but then was no more because God took him away. Just like Elijah, he's the one that never dies, he just gets taken up into the heavenly realms. And that's all we know about Enoch, really. We don't know much more about him. He's related to Adam, but he was a fascinating character in the intertestamental period. And there was a book called that he apparently wrote, which tells us all of his adventures up in the heavenly realms, and it tells us what he he thought about lots of things, and um it isn't in canon, it is not in scripture, but it's one of those books that actually is kind of interesting to scholars because it tells scholars lots of extra information that we just don't get from the Bible that helps us understand little teeny tiny bits of the Bible, like in Jude. Now, the problem with this is it's can sometimes people make people go, oh, but it's not in the Bible. No, it's not in the Bible, but neither is Narnia. Put your hands up if you read Narnia. Put your hands up if you've ever heard Narnia mentioned or anything by C.S. Lewis mentioned in a preach. Yeah. And um, you know, in two or three hundred years' time, people might not have read Narnia. And they might think, hang on a minute, what are they talking about? They're listening back to a podcast, and Aslan's been mentioned. You know, it's kind of like that. This is a story that may or may not be kind of a prophetic book, but is a book that at the time was really important to this generation of people, and so they really want to know, we want to know what was important to them and obviously important to Jude. And so the book of Enoch does feature, and it features later on as well. If you notice later on in the verse of the book, I think about verse 14, he refers to Enoch again, and then he goes again into another example, and this time he's going straight into the Old Testament, and he talks about um Sodom and Gomorrah. And everyone, we're probably aware of Sodom and Genorrah in in Genesis, it comes up quite often in scripture as the people who were kind of represented judgment and evil because of their behavior. Now, scholars quite often kind of debate why Judas used it here. Some people say it is because of their behavior, their sexual immorality, and the word that Jews use is it's kind of like sex outside of marriage. That's what he uses as the word. Um, some other scholars say it's to do with what Ezekiel talks about when he mentions it about the Their arrogance and their luxurious lifestyle, and they're you know, they're not caring about the poor. They say that could be it, but actually, other people have grabbed hold of a little phrase that Jude used. Remember, he says this in the same way. That little phrase there, the same way, it tells us that Jude is linking Sodom and Gomorrah to something else. He's linking it back to that funny story about the angels. When that angels descended and married women in the same way as Sodom and Gomorrah, if you remember, those angelic people turned up and they wanted to go out and violate them, the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. And so he's saying it's the same thing, it's just back to front. Now it's humans trying to have sex with angels, and that's what Jude is saying. Now, at this point, we have to kind of pause and go, hang on a minute, is that what the teachers were doing back then? No. Jude is simply saying that was behavior that was out of bounds, and their behavior is out of bounds. It is not under Jesus' authority, it is not appropriate behavior. And then we kind of go even further into it, and this is that um, oh yeah. Um what we just yeah, that's it. They go to this funny little bit in the middle where they heap abuse, these teachers, on celestial beings. What does that mean? Well, he's saying they slander angels, and that's not meaning that they're saying, oh, I hate these angels, they're really rubbish, it's not like that, he's not talking about that. He's saying that actually he they are being judgmental about things, and he uses this funny little story about the archangel Michael, which you can see here. Now, in intertestamental writing, again, not in the Bible, this angel, who's the head of all angels, was put in charge of Moses' body, and this body, instead of being buried, the devil apparently turned up and said, I want the body, because remember, Moses murdered someone, and I want to take him. But the archangel, rather than telling the devil to, you know, sling his hook and be rude to him, because after all, he is the devil, and that's okay to say his behavior's wrong, he doesn't. And what he actually does is he says, God's gonna deal with you, and God's gonna also deal with Moses' body. Because Jude is making the point, we are not to judge, they are not to judge. Even the devil you don't judge, only God gets to judge. But these intruders, they think they're so spiritual and so grand that they are judging whomever by their standards. So, already we've kind of come across some quite strange things in the book of Jude. And we're only halfway through. And so he comes now to the other set of examples, and this time these are things that we kind of know about. He talks first of all about Cain. Remember Cain and Abel? Cain killed his brother. Jude is saying the same thing here. He doesn't say these intruders are killing people, but they're killing people's soul. Now, to Jewish intertest in the inter-testament period, the Jewish people looked at Cain as a person who started all the bad stuff. So he got blamed for everything evil. And so they're saying that these teachers, like Cain, are going to start some evil stuff. Also, then he could go and says, they're greedy, just like Balaam. Do you remember Balaam, who was the prophet who was supposed to, he was asked to curse the nation of Israel for some money? He kind of thinks about it for a moment and then doesn't. But the thinking about it is the problem. He was greedy. And they're saying these interluders, these interluders, these people that have come there are just like Balaam. And then he's also saying they're a little bit like Korah and the rebels, those ones that actually rose up against Moses, the ones that stood against Moses and said, We don't like the fact that or the person who's got all the authority, got all of all your authority, and God just deals with them straight away. You find that story in numbers if you want to go and have a look at it. And in that story, God literally takes the people, and a big eruption happens, a massive earthquake, and they get taken to judgment. Jude saying, These teachers could end up being treated the same way. They are dangerous. And then he goes into like some lovely little bit of descriptive language. They are dangerous to the church. They're going to come along to your love feast. In the days before the Eucharist was given out, before communion was done like we did it, people would gather and have a supper, just like the Last Supper. And it was a place where people did prophecy. These teachers came and they gave their dreaming ideas and they didn't do it properly. They're dangerous. They're like the wolf preying on the sheep in Ezekiel. They're feeding themselves rather than looking after their flock. They're like clouds that come along but have no rain. They're totally fruitless. They promise something and give nothing. They're like the waves that turn over, the chaotic waves, and they just spew up shame. They bring shame on themselves, they bring shame to others. They're like the tree. Sorry, I'll do that on that. That's the tree there. They're like the tree that's twice dead. Its roots are dead, and there's no fruit, even though it's autumn. And again, this interesting little thing about angels. They're like the wandering stars, he says. Wandering stars, like angels, or apparently supposed to keep the stars in place. But when stars move, it's because angels are falling. This is what these interlopers are like. They're dangerous, they cannot be trusted. So, what does it mean for us? Well, we need to contend for the faith. And this is how Jude kind of ends his book, doesn't he? He goes back. And this time, after all these harsh words, he softens completely. He comes back, and you remember that he really likes these people he's writing to. He really cares. He wants them to contend for the faith. And it two things really strike me, actually, and I think I was really struck by this when I was um reading it through again. Is that Jude doesn't say, these people, they're so evil, they're so awful, you need to get rid of them straight away. They need to be booted out. Quite the opposite. Jude is like, be merciful, be merciful to people, be merciful to these people, even. That's really so important. Be merciful because God's merciful. And so, where do we land with it? Well, you know, oh, the last few years we hear awful things, don't we, about Christian teachers that have fallen. We hear a lot about that last couple of few years. And I think, you know, one of the things that we need to remember when we read the book of Jude, when we kind of think about nowadays, what is it saying to us? We're not going to behave like some of those people, but we need to remember that we need to be authentic. Our words need to match our actions, and I do need to remember that too. If I declare that Jesus is Lord, my behaviour must declare that Jesus is Lord. And I think that is where, yeah, we have to sort of land with this one. And before we kind of go into some questions, yeah, we've got five or so minutes. Um, I just wanted to read to you the doxology, which I think is one of the nicest bits in um well in Jude, obviously, but actually in the in the New Testament, it's a beautiful doxology. A doxology is a praise, it is a praise of God, his attributes, and it's a praise of things he has done and will do. So I'm just going to pray that over us now, the doxology which he ends with in verse 25. To him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy. To the only God, our Saviour, be glory, majesty, power, and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and forevermore. Amen. Amen. Is there any questions? Have a think for a minute. Yeah, that's a really good question. I think um scholars look at the language of it and how it's written, and it it mirrors quite a lot of Greek um speeches in some respects, so they think it definitely would be something that was read out. So it would have been kind of it's a mixture between a preach and a letter. So yeah. Oh, yeah, I've had to j research Jude a lot. I well, I'm not an expert in Jude. Okay, so Cain and Abel are the story right at the very start of the Bible. So so they're the children, the offspring of Adam and Eve. So we're gonna go right back at the very start. So the falls happened. Adam and Eve have been kind of expelled from the Garden of Eden. They have these children and there's rivalry. It's like the fall has happened, there's sin, and they're the first example. And the Jewish people looked to Cain as a lot of a starter point for a lot of evil. Where you know, Christians, um, we look to the full, we looked to Adam and Eve and what happened in the Garden of Eden. They quite often look to Cain, but they also look to those fallen angels, are mentioned in Genesis 6. Um, in that kind of Inter Testament period, there was a lot of writing about how um yeah, those fallen angels would have caused things like you know, witchcraft and war and all the horrible stuff in the world that they came as a consequence of those fallen angels. Hi, Kesia. Do we think he wrote more letters and we've lost them, or did we have some of them and they didn't make them survive?

unknown 32:48

I know.

SPEAKER_00 32:48

That's a good question. I I don't know. I mean, that's the thing, isn't it? Probably yes. I mean, it'd be it'd be interesting to see what he wrote to the other churches. If he's writing to one of those places in the six cities, um he might have written it written a completely different letter to somewhere else. So, yes, very likely. And it's one of those books that actually um lots of people have kind of struggled whether it should be in the Bible because it it mentions things that are kind of extra. And so, for example, Luther wasn't a big fan of the book of Jude, he wasn't a big fan of the book of James, and so sometimes we kind of have our our lens can be a little bit like because we're influenced by some of those reform thinking. Um, yeah, so yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:36

Um, the church is selling as they have and giving them to those in need of quality more people that's running out.

SPEAKER_00 33:46

Yeah, so I I oh the learn from it now, okay. So I think um this the book I refer the the book the Diddy K that I refer to was written at the end of the first century into the second century because of all the issues. So I think initially it starts well, doesn't it? There's travelling people, they go around, they're you know, it's generosity. And of course, there must have been people who thought, oh, this looks a good thing. I can we see elements of that, don't we, in Acts where some people try and get on board because they want to make a bit of cash. And I think that's happened, and then you read kind of church history where that interlaps, overlaps, and you can see, oh yeah, now they're having to put some rules in place. And actually, when you track with church history all the way through these kind of church letters, they're gonna kind of get stricter and stricter in a way until we get a sort of a church system where there's bishops and there's priests and all these kind of the the structures that we see in the church today to kind of protect from these people, these travelling prophets. What can we learn from it today? I think we just have to be open to the spirit. This is really important. Jude is pressing us to be open to the spirit, open to our community, but also test and weigh what people say. So if someone's coming with a prophetic word, we encourage prophecy. But does it kind of match up to what the Bible says? Does it do those things that are said in Acts? I guess that's yeah. Yeah. Okay, I'm just gonna find it and read it. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think again, it's kind of um it's also it says, yeah, these people slander whatever they do not understand, and the very things they do understand by instinct as irrational animals do will destroy them. He's sort of saying, like, you know, they might be saying I think he's trying to say they might say things and conjure a feeling in the room, but actually then they go off and behave like animals. You know, they're behaving in a fleshy way, they're not behaving as Jesus said. So although they might make a feeling, you know, they might conjure that almost like it's magic, I suppose. Actually, look at their behaviour. Does it match? And I think that's again, it's that authentic thing. It's all very well kind of being someone who's filled with Holy Spirit, but then as soon as they leave the building, go and behave in a way that doesn't match it. I think that's what they're trying to say there. But I again, uh Tim, would you have anything you'd like to add to that? Well, I think yeah, I suppose in terms of prophecy, I would say that you know, you you can hear a prophetic word and think, oh, that resonates with me. And then you have to kind of text away and pray, and I think does it match what scripture says? If it's something that's like it might resonate, but it doesn't really match scripture, it's probably, you know, I think that's probably okay. And I guess obviously this is written in a time before there is scripture. You know, they know they know the Old Testament, they've got that, they've got this inter-testament writing, but they don't have the scripture that we have now. So um, and there was a big kind of move of prophets that would kind of uh, you know, there was kind of a movement called Montanism later on in the in the first century, you know, when they ecstatic prophecy would happen. And, you know, probably a lot of it was fine and some of it wasn't. And eventually the church said now it's heresy. So it's again it's kind of what it's work worth testing away and testing away and all the way through. I mean we we don't know what they're teaching. We don't know what they're teaching. They could have been saying exactly the right things, but their behavior is what he's saying. So even if they're saying Jesus is Lord and professing all the things that are in the Old Testament, their behavior doesn't match it, and that's what he's saying in Jude here. So we don't have the same kind of in other letters we know a little bit what false prophets might say, but this we don't. So I think yes, they were probably false prophets because their behavior didn't match. I think that's I would say.

unknown 38:46

I don't know, maybe.

SPEAKER_00 38:49

I I I suspect it probably wasn't. It was like house church, they gathered, and probably, you know, people would turn up, they want to be generous. They're not allowed to stay more than three days, we know that later, but at this point, perhaps people were staying longer, they're perhaps idling around, they were perhaps, you know, prophesying. I don't know. Um this is kind of we read between the lines because we've got this, and we have to kind of infer. So I don't know. Yeah, Brad. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think what he's saying there is he's he's saying don't judge, don't go around judging people, but actually God is a God who he's reminding us that God is a God who does judge. And I think sometimes we can we can we can totally embrace Jesus and He forgives us, He's merciful to us, and of course He is merciful to us. God is always that, but there is going to be judgment. Matthew 25 says, doesn't he? At some point we're gonna meet Jesus, and he might say to some of us, oh my gosh, I don't want this to happen, but I don't know you. And that's you know, I think he's reminding us that, Tim. Do you think? Anything else? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:34

So uh thanks so much and uh I think so it's I'm really moving the book I I don't know how if you've got a brother um and how you get on with them. Uh and I mean two finishes off here, it says, but you've dear friends, by building yourself up in the most holy faith and praying the Holy Spirit, keep yourself in God's love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus to bring you to eternal life. And again, just talking about his brother, it's not just our brother Jesus, it's uh the Lord Jesus Christ, actually King Jesus. And somehow just that that he is so in love with his brother, and his brother's love was the church, and here's these people trying to rip off the church, and so it's there's that, like you're saying, there's that real sense of injustice. Oh, these guys shouldn't be doing that to to King Jesus' bride to his church, and um, so it's a really great little book. So if you've never read it, go home tonight. You can read it in five minutes. Um so uh we're taking a break now, and uh, so there's no Bible school, uh Sunday Bible school in August, but we have got Bible school happening on Tuesdays. Uh so uh the first one is on the book of Job. Uh Phil Thomas, Dr. Phil Thomas is going to come and do the first one of those. So that's um uh first Tuesday, Tuesday in August, and then we're gonna do Proverbs, Psalms, uh Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes. Uh so do join us to Bible school uh during August.