The Truth War (14 page)

Rarely are their assaults on the truth open and head-on attacks. Instead, they prefer to work underground, drilling little holes in the foundations of truth itself. They do this by suggesting subtle re-definitions, by making crafty modifications, or by suggesting that contemporary Christianity needs to reimagine, update, or simply jettison some supposedly obsolete doctrine. They usually try to sound as innocuous as possible while planting as many doubts as they can. Those doubts are like sticks of dynamite in the foundation holes they have drilled. They are actually working toward the wholesale demolition of the entire structure.

That is what Jude was speaking about when he warned about false teachers who “have crept in unnoticed” (v. 4). He was not describing an utter pagan who slipped in the side door under the cloak of disguise and covertly attended a single church service. He was talking about people who had already gained widespread acceptance and respect as members of the flock. In the worst cases, they had even attained some status as leaders and teachers in the church. They were now using their influence to undermine the Christian faith quietly and subtly for their own wicked ends.

Although at first glance these men might have
seemed
like valid and respectable leaders in the church, they were in fact the most dangerous kind of false teachers. They were spiritual parasites, feeding on the church for their own selfish benefit. Despite whatever facade of spirituality they must have worn, their real motives were the same as the most wantonly licentious spiritual deviant. Under the mask they wore, they too were secret Rasputins—“ungodly men, who turn the grace of our God into lewdness and deny the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ” (Jude 4).

Jude 12 in some English translations refers to these imposters as “spots in your love feasts” (v. 12). The Greek word translated “spots” is a very specific term often used to signify dangerous reefs in the sea, hidden just under the water's surface. In other words, these false teachers represented a deadly spiritual hazard. They deliberately lay in wait. They were hard to spot. But they were capable of causing disastrous spiritual shipwrecks (cf. 1 Timothy 1:19).

Yet Jude says, “In your love feasts . . . they feast with you without fear, serving only themselves” (v. 12). The term love feasts is a reference to the Lord's Table ordinance established by Christ for the church and the common meal that accompanied it. So Jude was speaking about people inside the church, familiar communicants at the table, who looked safe, seemed nice enough, and were well-known to people in the church. But in reality, they were counterfeit Christians with an evil agenda.

Can someone like that be even more dangerous than the hostile critic who stands outside the church and overtly opposes everything the Bible teaches? Absolutely. False teachers and doctrinal saboteurs inside the church have
always
confused more people and done more damage than open adversaries on the outside. Is an attacking enemy who promises his arrival in advance and wears a uniform for easy identification as dangerous as a terrorist who is hidden and acts with deadly surprise? The answer is obvious.

AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING . . .

Since day one of church history, Christians have found it necessary to resist wave after wave of relentless assaults from countless enemies in the Truth War. But the most determined enemies and the most serious threats have always come from within the visible church herself. Someone who claims to be a Christian attacks some essential Christian truth, and the battle is on.

SPIRITUAL TERRORISTS
AND SABOTEURS WITHIN
THE CHURCH POSE A FAR
MORE SERIOUS THREAT
THAN MANIFESTLY HOSTILE
FORCES ON THE OUTSIDE.
FROM THE VERY START OF
THE CHURCH AGE, ALL THE
MOST SPIRITUALLY
DEADLY ONSLAUGHTS
AGAINST THE GOSPEL HAVE
COME FROM PEOPLE WHO
PRETENDED TO BE
CHRISTIANS—NOT FROM
ATHEISTS AND AGNOSTICS
ON THE OUTSIDE.

This pattern of attack from within became clear very early—even before the New Testament canon was complete. Jude was certainly not dealing with an isolated incident or a rare anomaly in some remote congregation. The enemy sows his tares everywhere the gospel goes, it seems. The New Testament indicates that false teachers rose up very early from almost every quarter of the primitive church. Don't forget that every writer in the New Testament at one point or another touches on this issue of false teaching inside the church. The theme also permeates Christ's messages to the churches in Revelation 2–3. The glorified Lord repeatedly commends those who have remained vigilant and who have purged false teachers from their midst (2:2, 6, 9); and He likewise rebukes those who seem oblivious to the problem—or even worse, who deliberately tolerate heretics in their congregations (2:14–16, 20).

It is also quite clear from the biblical record that spiritual terrorists and saboteurs within the church pose a far more serious threat than manifestly hostile forces on the outside. From the very start of the church age, all the most spiritually deadly onslaughts against the gospel have come from people who pretended to be Christians—not from atheists and agnostics on the outside. Moreover, the numerous occasions when false teaching showed up in the early church involved a surprising variety of errors.

An incident in Thessalonica, for example, reveals the extremes to which false teachers will sometimes go. Someone apparently orchestrated a scheme to make people in the Thessalonian church think the Lord had already returned to gather His people to Himself and the Thessalonians had been left behind. They received a phony letter, purporting to be from the apostle Paul, notifying them that the day of the Lord was already here (2 Thessalonians 2:1–2). A wave of fear swept through the church. “The day of the Lord” in Scripture always speaks of a time of cataclysmic judgment—a massive future outpouring of divine wrath that will ultimately usher in the final judgment and destruction of the whole sin-cursed universe (cf.2 Peter 3:10). The Thessalonians no doubt began to wonder if their current sufferings might be only the beginning of many worse things to come. Had they for some reason been left to endure the Great Tribulation?

Evidently, the bogus letter had even been corroborated both “by spirit” (probably through a false prophecy) and “by word” (possibly by a lying witness who claimed to have heard the message from Paul's own mouth). But it was all just an elaborate ruse designed to discourage and confuse that church.

In another episode, referred to in 2 Timothy 2:17, Paul warned Timothy against the influence of Hymenaeus and Philetus, “who have strayed concerning the truth, saying that the resurrection is already past; and they overthrow the faith of some” (v. 18). That apparently wasn't an unusual case either, because Paul urged Timothy to be on guard against other heretics of the same sort and to shun them (v. 16).

The apostle John had a similar word of caution about the influence of a power-hungry leader in the church named Diotrephes, “who loves to have the preeminence”—and who had apparently made a career of opposing the apostle John (3 John 9).

So it is absolutely clear from Scripture that heretics, apostates, rebels, and false teachers infiltrated the church very early and in surprising abundance. And when Jude wrote this Spirit-inspired caution about the influence of false teachers who sneak in unnoticed—“ungodly men, who turn the grace of our God into lewdness and deny the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ” (v. 4)—he wasn't speaking only to a single church facing an unusual peril. This is a message that applies to every true believer in every age.

What, specifically, might have prompted the urgency of Jude's message? He seems to have been addressing a significant and widespread error of a particular sort. Evidently, whatever threat he had in mind wasn't the teaching of a single individual, and it wasn't merely the vague possibility that some unknown person here or there might start teaching another lie. He was responding to a coordinated assault involving multiple false teachers whom Jude had in mind specifically—“certain men”—who posed a real and present danger.

Interestingly, Jude nowhere names these men or comments on the specific content of their false teaching. His main concern here is simply to underscore the absolute necessity for faithful Christians to be truth warriors. He is writing about the
principle
of contending for the faith, and he is highlighting the common characteristics of all false teachers. That is the big picture we need to keep in mind, and Jude didn't cloud the issue by being any more specific than he had to be. But he does clearly seem to have a specific group of false teachers in mind. He may have been talking about the Judaizers (the same false, pharisaical cult Paul confronted repeatedly). Or he may have been dealing with some of the very early gnostics
.
Both sets of false teachers fit Jude's description perfectly. Those are the two waves of widespread heresy that stand out most clearly on the pages of the New Testament.

It is worth taking a closer look at what Jude and the apostles were up against.

THE JUDAIZERS

The Judaizers mounted one of the earliest, most widespread, and most dangerous onslaughts against the gospel. They insisted that to be truly justified, Gentiles needed to observe certain Old Testament rituals (especially the rite of circumcision). The book of Galatians is Paul's answer to that heresy, and remember, he starts his reply to the Judaizers by summarily pronouncing a divine curse on them and their false gospel. The same false teaching is also addressed in Acts 15, in the book of Hebrews, and here and there throughout the New Testament Epistles, so this was quite a pervasive error and one of the very earliest examples of false doctrine that rose up from within the church.

Of course, the Judaizers claimed to be Christians, and they were accepted by almost everyone in the church as authentic believers. As a matter of fact, in Galatians 2:12, Paul refers to those who brought this error to Antioch as “certain men [who] came from James”—so the original Judaizers may have been men of some status in the Jerusalem church (where James, brother of Jude, was a leader). They may even have been sent by James on a legitimate mission to seek aid, to minister, or simply to establish ties of fellowship with the Gentile churches in the regions where Paul was ministering. But they seized the opportunity to undermine the clarity of the gospel and to confuse Gentile believers.

Because their teaching fatally corrupted the gospel, Paul instantly saw that the Judaizers' doctrine needed to be refuted and firmly opposed lest the gospel be lost to error within the church. Other key leaders in the early church, however, including the apostle Peter, were not as quick to see the danger. Galatians 2 is Paul's description of his obviously frustrating struggle to get the other apostles and key church leaders to take this heresy as seriously as he did. That is the same chapter where Paul recounts the famous incident in Antioch when he had to rebuke Peter publicly. He did so because Peter seemed to lend credibility and encouragement to the Judaizers.

The Judaizers' doctrine grew out of an extremely subtle error, which, at first glance, hardly seemed worth much of a fight. J. Gresham Machen (a famous theologian and author who took a bold stand against liberal theology at the start of the twentieth century) observed that from a purely rational point of view, the difference between Paul and the Judaizers might seem “very slight.” The whole difference could be boiled down to a single point and stated in a simple proposition. In Machen's words:

The difference [between Paul and the Judaizers] concerned only the logical—not even, perhaps, the temporal—order of three steps. Paul said that a man (1) first believes on Christ, (2) then is justified before God, (3) then immediately proceeds to keep God's law. The Judaizers said that a man (1) believes on Christ and (2) keeps the law of God the best he can, and then (3) is justified. The difference would seem to modern “practical” Christians to be a highly subtle and intangible matter, hardly worthy of consideration at all in view of the large measure of agreement in the practical realm.
¹

Machen then envisioned how a modern thinker might wish to deal with the kind of dispute Paul had with the Judaizers. Of course, in Machen's time, as in ours, the prevailing view was that for the sake of promoting moral reform in secular society, evangelicals should actively cooperate with anyone whose views on moral and spiritual issues so closely align with their own. Machen even envisioned what an ecumenical coalition might have meant in Paul's context. What if Paul regarded the Judaizers as “co-belligerents” and worked alongside them to try to sweep paganism out of the Galatian region? Machen wrote:

What a splendid cleaning up of the Gentile cities it would have been if the Judaizers had succeeded in extending to those cities the observance of the Mosaic law, even including the unfortunate ceremonial observances! Surely Paul ought to have made common cause with teachers who were so nearly in agreement with him; surely he ought to have applied to them the great principle of Christian unity.
²

Many Christians in Machen's generation wanted to declare a truce like that with modernism. Today there is the same pressure from evangelicals who want to accommodate
post
modernism. But, said Machen:

Paul did nothing of the kind; and only because he (and others) did nothing of the kind does the Christian Church exist today. Paul saw very clearly that the difference between the Judaizers and himself was the difference between two entirely distinct types of religion; it was the difference between a religion of merit and a religion of grace. If Christ provides only a part of our salvation, leaving us to provide the rest, then we are still hopeless under the load of sin.
³

In other words, the problem with the Judaizers was not merely that they disagreed with what Paul taught—but that their disagreement involved such a vital point. The whole gospel hinged on the very proposition that the Judaizers denied:
Sinners are justified
solely on the basis of what Christ has already done on their behalf,
and not in any way because of anything they do for Him.