Erick-Woods Erickson
Why Jude 5 is one of the most profound verses in all of scripture
“Now I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus, who saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe.” Jude 5
TRANSCRIPT: I want to step back from politics and try to reground us. We’ve had several weeks of, well, contentiousness in politics and squabbling on the right, and sometimes we lose sight of the bigger picture, and so I want to tell you about a Man. To tell you about that Man, I want to actually read one of the most profound verses in the entire Bible. That verse is Jude 5, and it really is one of the most profound verses in the Bible, and I will explain to you why as we talk about this Man. This is from Jude,
“I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus, who saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterwards destroyed those who did not believe.”
This is Jude who identifies himself as a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James, the Early Church would’ve known that this is Jude, the brother of Jesus. Now, some Christian traditions believe that Mary and Joseph never had children, maybe Joseph had children by a prior marriage, so maybe they’re first cousins. I would say I’m in the camp that says they’re half brothers and sisters of Jesus. He had half brothers and half sisters. The Early Church, a lot of them seem to believe them to be the half brothers and sisters of Jesus. And I think that’s true. It’s notable, Jude says he’s a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James. He doesn’t identify himself as a brother of Jesus. Instead, he says, Jesus saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterwards, destroyed those who did not believe.
It’s probably one of the most, if not the most profound verses in all of scripture because he’s talking about the Man Jesus. We forget sometimes that the God, Jesus, the one who spoke the world into being, who was the Word and was with the Father and spoke creation, as James John says in the beginning, “Was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God.”
We forget He’s a man, that the God of the universe condescended to become born a baby in a manger and to go through life. We forget about the Man Jesus. And I think to really appreciate the God Jesus, sometimes we got to realize He was fully man. In fact, early Christian traditions and many reform traditions believe that Jesus, the Man did not know He was God, but believed by faith He was God, that essentially, every Christian tradition says Jesus had two natures. He was fully God, He was fully man. He had a man’s will and He had God’s will. He had a man’s nature and He had God’s nature, and until the resurrection, there was a firewall between the two. And so by faith, He believed, “He grew,” the scripture says, “in wisdom and understanding.” Now, some Christians think, the whole time, He knew He was God.
I am in the camp that says He, the Man Jesus, believed by faith. He had a mother who told Him the angel Gabriel appeared. He could summon the Holy Spirit just as Moses and the prophet’s could. He was a prophet. He was fully God, but He was fully man. And you need to understand you can’t put so much emphasis on Jesus as being God to deny the emphasis on Jesus being a man because the God Jesus was not going to be tempted by the devil in the wilderness. The Man Jesus could, the God Jesus was not hungry, the Man Jesus could be hungry. The Man Jesus could feel pain, the Man Jesus could feel the separation from God, the Man Jesus could be tempted, He could be overwhelmed to the point of crying tears in Gethsemane. Gethsemane makes no sense if you can’t understand that Jesus was not just God, He was fully man.
And so I think you need to understand to appreciate Him a little more to ground yourself a little more in who was Jesus. You have to understand Jesus, the God of all creation, also had a human family and it was a dysfunctional family that did not like Him.
Mark 3:13-21,
“He went up on the mountain and called to Him those whom He desired, and they came to Him and He appointed twelve whom He also called apostles so that they might be with Him and He might send them out to preach. And having authority to cast out demons, He appointed the twelve, Simon, to whom He gave the name, Peter, James, the son of Zebedee, and John, the brother of James, to whom He gave the name, Boanerges, that is son of Thunder, Andrew and Philip and Bartholomew and Matthew and Thomas and James, the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus and Simon the Zealot, and Judas Iscariot who betrayed Him. Then He came home and the crowd gathered around again so that He could not even eat, and when His family heard it, they went out to seize Him for they were saying He is out of His mind. His family heard it and they went out to seize Him for they were saying He is out of His mind.”
This is the God of all creation who had a family that did not like Him. They thought He was nuts. His mother, Mary, had the angel, Gabriel, appear to her to tell her she would give birth to the Messiah and she’s participating in an intervention of her son because she says He’s out of his mind. She knew He could do things. I mean, look at the wedding in Cana, and yet she’s with His brothers and sisters.
This is from Mark 3:31,
“His mother and His brothers came and standing outside, they sent to Him and called Him and a crowd was sitting around him and they said to Him, “Your mother and your brothers are outside seeking You,” and He answered them, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” And looking about it, those who sat around Him, He said, “Here are my brother and brothers. For whoever does the will of God, He is my brother and my sister and my mother.””
He had a family, He had a mother who had divine revelation, who by miracle gave birth, and yet there she was with His brothers to pull Him out of the crowd because His family thought He was out of His mind. Mark 6 pulls the curtain back a little more.
“He went away from there and came to His hometown and His disciples followed Him, and on the Sabbath, He began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard Him were astonished saying, where did this Man get those things? These things, what is the wisdom given to Him? How are such mighty works done by His hands? Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James and Joseph and Judas and Simon. Are not His sisters here with us? And they took offense at Him.”
So this is why those of us who think that these were His half brothers and sisters, think this as opposed to first cousins because the pattern and practice in that culture at the time was that the first son was named after the grandfather, the second after the father. Jesus, of course, was especially given a name, but Joseph, his earthly dad, his father was James, and then he was Joseph, and this is the pattern here in Mark. His brothers were James and Joseph and Judas and Simon. We call Judas, Jude. We don’t want to confuse him with Judas Iscariot. James and Jude would write two books to the Bible identifying themselves by their relationship to each other, not to Jesus. But it’s notable they would do that. It’s notable we would get to this point because these are the brothers with their mother who staged an intervention of this Man Jesus.
They tried to stage an intervention. His brothers did not like Him. Friends, if you’re in a dysfunctional family and you don’t get along with your brothers and sisters, you may be somewhat Christ-like. His brothers didn’t get along with Him. They didn’t like Him. They did not like Jesus. Mister Goody Two Shoes, too perfect. Never sinned, too perfect. You could see the resentment. They were sinful creatures. They were filled with sin. You know how when there’s someone in your life who’s a little too perfect, you resent that person. They clearly resented Jesus.
In John 7,
“Jesus went about in Galilee, He would not go down about in Judea because the Jews were seeking to kill Him. Now, the Jews’ Feast of Booths was at hand, so His brothers said to Him, leave here and go to Judea that your disciples also may see the works you are doing, for no one works in secret if he seeks to be known openly. If you do these things, show yourself to the world, for not even His brothers believed in Him.”
His brothers did not believe in Him. His brothers whose mother had an angel appear to her and say, you’re with Messiah. The virgin who gave birth staged an intervention with these brothers who did not believe in Jesus. They didn’t want anything to do with Him. You can’t understand the sarcasm in English here, but what His brothers are essentially saying is, hey man, if you think you’re so great and special, go show yourself in the city and hope you don’t get killed. They were essentially willing Him to go die. They were tired of Him. They didn’t want anything to do with Him. They said, “Go, go to the city, let the city see you. You think you’re such hot stuff, don’t get killed.”
“And Jesus said to them, my time is not yet come but your time is always here. The world cannot hate you but it hates Me because I testify about it that its works are evil. You go up to the feast. I am not going up to the feast, for my time has not yet fully come. After saying this, He remained in Galilee. But after His brothers had gone up to the feast, then He also went up, not publicly, but in private. The Jews were looking for Him at the feast and saying, “Where is He?” And there was much muttering about Him among the people, while some said He’s a good man, others said, “No, He’s leading the people astray.” Yet for fear of the Jews, no one spoke openly of Him.”
His brothers knew what would happen. His brothers wanted it to happen. They didn’t like Him. We get a sense they wanted it to happen because guess what, it happens. He’s crucified.
From John 19,
“So the soldiers did these things, but standing by the cross of Jesus were His mother and His mother’s sister, Mary, the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene, when Jesus saw His mother and the disciple whom He loved standing nearby, He said to His mother, “Woman, behold your son.” Then He said to the disciple, “Behold your mother,” and from that hour, the disciple took her to His own home.”
You can read the gospel accounts of the crucifixion from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. John, we know, was Jesus’s best friend. Luke interviewed the eyewitnesses, including Mary, we’re pretty sure, given some of the translation you can tell happened between Aramaic and Greek there in the opening chapter of Luke. Marks is John Mark and it’s Peter’s telling. Peter didn’t write, John Mark wrote it for him. Matthew is the Apostle, Matthew.
You can read their accounts, they were there, they saw, they listed the people who came to the crucifixion. You know who they didn’t list? You know who’s not there? You know who didn’t witness it? You know who wasn’t there to comfort Mary? Jesus’s brothers. Joseph was not there. James was not there. Jude was not there. Simon was not there. The sisters do not appear to be there. None of them were there. They were not there to comfort Mary. Jesus has to look down from the cross and say to John, “Here is your mother,” and to Mary, say, “Here is your son,” because His own brothers, His own family wouldn’t come comfort Him, comfort His mother. They wouldn’t be there. They wanted nothing to do with their brother, Mister Goody Two Shoes set Himself up and got killed just like they thought He would do.
They weren’t there. As an aside, Jesus on that cross looked down, said to the crowd, said to God, Father, “Forgive them. They know not what they’re doing.” You want to be more Christ-like? Forgive. Jesus didn’t, on the cross, crucified, hands out, nailed to the cross, say,” I’m waiting for an apology, people, let me hear you say you’re sorry.” He looked at the mess, he said, “Father, they don’t know what they’re doing, forgive them.” He didn’t wait for a apology acceptable to Himself. He just forgave.
If you can’t forgive, what you’re saying is your conscience is more pricked than Christ on the cross. You want to be more Christ-like, don’t wait for the apology, just forgive. Christ forgave. Christ forgave his brothers. Paul writes that after the crucifixion and the resurrection, Jesus appeared to His brothers, to the apostles.
In Acts 1:12-14, we read,
“After all of these things happened, they returned to Jerusalem from the Mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a Sabbath day’s journey away.” And when they had entered, they went up to the upper room where they were staying, Peter and John and James and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James, the son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Zealot, and Judas, the son of James, but there with one accord were devoting themselves to prayer together with the women and Mary, the mother of Jesus and His,” who? “His brothers,” His brothers who wanted nothing to do with Him in life, His brothers who told Him, “If you think you’re such hot stuff, get on out of here, go to the big city and hope you don’t get killed.”
His brothers who staged an intervention for Jesus, His brothers who would not show up at His crucifixion to comfort their mother, His brothers who wanted nothing to do with Him or His friends, His brothers who are there praying with the apostles and His mother after the resurrection. Something had to have happened. Something profound had to have happened. And that gets me back to the beginning where I began.
“Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James, to those who are called beloved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ. May mercy, peace and love be multiplied to you. Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints, for certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord Jesus Christ. Now, I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus, who saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterwards destroyed those, who did not believe.”
This is the man’s brother. This is the man’s brother who wouldn’t show up at His execution, who told Him to get out of town, who staged an intervention, who told a crowd of people, this man is out of His mind, and now this man, Jude, identifies himself, not as the brother of Jesus, but as the servant of Jesus, and says one of the most profound lines written in all of scripture, “Jesus is Yahweh.”
That’s what this means, “Jesus, who saved the people out of the land of Egypt.” Who do the Jews believe saved them out of a land of Egypt? Yahweh, a pillar of fire at night, a pillar of cloud in the day, who parted the Red Sea, who did the twelve plagues of Egypt, who got them to the promised land. This man’s brother is saying, “That’s my brother,” but he can’t bring himself now to say, that’s my brother, he says, “I’m a servant of Jesus. He’s our only Master and Lord.”
Jude goes from thinking my brother’s nuts, I hate him, to, He’s Yahweh. Something had to have happened. And the Bible is not this static thing fixed in history. These people are real. You got to wipe a lot of people out of history to wipe Jesus and His brothers and others out of history because they’ve got documented history there. Polycarp and Ignatius are two of the early leaders of the Christian Church. They studied under John. We know John wrote the books of the Bible. He wrote because Polycarp and Ignatius testified to them. They talked about the miracles John himself did.
They carried on the tradition. We can connect them. They both went to their death. Ignatius was carried into the Circus Maximus, disemboweled and set upon by wild animals all proclaiming the gospel. Polycarp was summoned by the local officials, put onto a funeral pyre. They trusted the man so much. They did not even tie him up, but they burned him alive. He cooked them dinner and fed them before they executed him. They begged him to recant Christ. And he gave his famous line in 80 and some odd years, “Christ has not turned His back on me. How can I turn my back on Him?”
I paraphrase that somewhat badly, but Polycarp would not reject Jesus. He knew John. He was an eyewitness to John. Ignatius knew John. Then there was Clement. Clement is mentioned in Philippians. Clement knew Peter and Paul. Clement was tied to an anchor and thrown into the sea. Clement is written about in the New Testament. Clement wrote so much. We can take most of the gospels and put them back together because Clement, Polycarp, and Ignatius — they quoted from the gospels so much, we have to wipe them out of history to wipe the apostles out of history, to wipe Jesus out of the history. These are eyewitnesses. When John writes that Jesus’ brothers didn’t show up at His execution, John’s an eyewitness. Why do we give up on the eyewitnesses? We have more documentary evidence of Jesus’ life closer in time to when Jesus was alive than we do for Nero. We know Julius Caesar’s history of the Gallic campaign.
The earliest copy we have is from 850 years after it actually happened, but we don’t write it out of history and say it didn’t happen. We believe it’s true. Only in our lifetimes do we have secular atheists say, you got to tell us about Jesus, but don’t let us read from the eyewitnesses. So read from Eusebius, who wrote the history of the Early Church, who tells us that the Romans wiped out Jesus’ entire bloodline. You want to know what happened to His brothers and His sisters and His sisters’ husbands and children, the Romans exterminated them. They were so concerned about this Man Jesus, that they wiped out His entire bloodline.
His brother, James, who wrote a book of the Bible, who rejected Him in life, who went to the intervention, who didn’t go to the execution, became a leader of the Early Church. He’s documented in the Bible. We know from the eyewitness accounts that the people of Jerusalem, the leaders came to him and said, we want you to tell everybody that this guy’s not the Messiah. We know you didn’t like him. Instead, he says he was wrong. He says his brother is Yahweh. Enraged the local leaders of Jerusalem, carried him to the top of the temple and threw him off, and then stoned him to death because he was still alive when he hit the ground, proclaiming his brother was the Messiah, the brother he rejected in life, he died proclaiming the Messiah.
Jude and Jude’s children were exterminated by Nero, disemboweled. He said his brother was Yahweh. Something had to have happened. These men who the eyewitnesses said rejected the Man Jesus in life went to their graves proclaiming Him the risen Lord. Jesus’s family did not like Him in life, but something happened because they were willing to go to their deaths, horrific deaths proclaiming Him the risen Lord. Maybe it’s because He rose. Something had to have happened. Can you just imagine the scenario of the apostles? They rope in Jesus’s brothers who don’t like him and they say, “Hey guys, we got a great idea. We are going to say that this guy’s the Messiah. We’re going to passionately believe it so much when He goes to His death. We’re going to dig up His body and we’re going to hide it, and when they come to tell us to recant, we’re going to say, no, no, it’s real, and guess what, we’re all going to die. We’re all going to get executed!”
They’re like, “Yeah, let’s do it!”
They were willing to go to their graves for this. They were willing to be executed, to be tortured, to be disemboweled, to be crucified upside down. Doubting Thomas went all the way to India proclaiming the gospel in India, was killed there. All of the apostles, except for John were executed. Peter, upside down, crucified. Paul lost his head, severed from his body by the Romans. James, his brother, thrown off a roof and then stoned to death. His brother, Jude, disemboweled. All of his other brothers and sisters and their families, executed to exterminate Jesus’s bloodline because the Romans and the local authorities in Jerusalem were convinced if they wiped out the bloodline, if they killed them all, everyone would stop this nonsense, that this Man was the Messiah.
And here I am two thousand years later telling you one of the most profound verses of scripture is from Jesus’s brother who refused to even acknowledge that He was his brother and said, “Jesus saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterwards, destroyed those who did not believe,” and that will happen again. Jesus will come and save you out of this planet and destroy those who do not believe. He will return. His brothers who rejected Him in life staked their lives on it after His death. Something had to have happened for them to do that. Something had to have happened profound.
Now, here’s the thing, I can’t convince you of it. No logic, no pattern of reason, no argument can bring in emotional people to believe that Jesus is God. I can tell you the stories and you can dismiss the stories. You can say I got it wrong. You can say that this is fairytale, that this is redactions and revisions through history of con artists and hucksters. I think you can make a reasonable case that God is real. So much of even science is built on faith. You can’t really see the nuclear particles. You can’t see what’s beneath them, the corks. Quantum physics is hard to understand. You can’t see before the big bang. You can’t really even see the big bang. We can reach out with the web telescope and see near the edge of the universe, but we can’t really see what came before. By faith, I say before was God, by faith, the scientist who doesn’t believe doesn’t know, but it’s all by faith to a degree.
I think a reasonable person can reasonably argue that there is a legitimate case for God, but to then argue that Jesus is God who came into the world, condescended Himself, grew a sinless person. I can give you the histories. I can give you the documentary evidence but at the end of the day, it’s by faith that you have to believe. But I can point out one more thing — if I’m right, you can talk to Him. You don’t need me to convince you by reason or logic or history or documentary evidence or emotion. This Man Jesus is also fully God. Something profound must have happened to this man for His brothers who rejected Him in life, to go to their deaths proclaiming Him the risen Lord who rescued people out of Egypt.
And if that’s the case, He can hear you, and you can be comforted by Him. This Man whose family rejected Him in life, who wouldn’t come to His execution, when you feel isolated and alone, He can comfort you. This Man who went into the wilderness, who was tempted and tried by the devil himself, He can comfort you. This Man who cried tears in Gethsemane, worried and in dread of the pain that would come, He can comfort you in your time of need and in your pain, because He conquered it.
This Man Jesus. You can’t trust any politician. Maybe there’re even friends you doubt you can trust. Maybe you’re struggling with trusting anyone. You can trust Him. His brothers, His friends, they all went to their deaths putting their trust in Him as a cause greater than themselves. Something profound had to have happened. And I would submit to you, that profound thing is the resurrection, for His brothers who rejected Him in life to in death proclaim Him the risen Lord. He had to have risen. And if I’m right, and you’re struggling, you can cry out to Jesus and say, Lord, Lord, be with me. And He will.
And when you’re struggling in despair about the state of the world and the state of your marriage and the state of your family and the state of your life and the state of your country and the state of your being and the state of your bank account, when you’re worried and in dread about anything, cry out to Him. Something profound happened in Jerusalem, enough that the men who were His family, who did not like Him, were willing to die for the belief that He’s God, for the belief that He’s alive. Maybe you should give it a try. Cry out to Jesus, maybe He’ll answer.
