The Truth War (19 page)

Furthermore, the evil borne by false doctrine is no incidental or unintentional side effect. The actual goal—and the inevitable result—of all false doctrine is to “turn the grace of our God into lewdness” (Jude 4). That is also the true aim and ambition of every apostate. According to Jude, in the mix of the evil motives behind every heresy, you will always discover an appetite for evil things. The driving passion of all false teachers is their lust (vv. 18–19). It may be a craving for carnal pleasure (v. 7), greed for money and material things (v. 11), or a rebellious hankering after power (v.11). Many times it is all of the above. Look closely at any false teacher and you will see corruption caused by lust—manifest not only in the love of money and power but also in an inability to control the flesh.

Peter said exactly the same thing. Scoffers are driven by “their own lusts” (2 Peter 3:3). In fact, Peter says that one of the primary objectives of every apostate teacher is to lure people back into the bondage of immorality after they have been exposed to the liberating truth of the gospel: “When they speak great swelling words of emptiness, they allure through the lusts of the flesh, through lewdness, the ones who have actually escaped from those who live in error. While they promise them liberty, they themselves are slaves of corruption” (2:18–19).

The many striking parallels between 2 Peter and Jude indicate that both epistles were most likely written to deal with the same outbreak of apostasy. Although neither epistle can be definitively dated, it appears 2 Peter was written before Jude, because as pointed out in chapter 3, Peter was prophesying that false teachers would come, and Jude was warning that they were already there. Like Jude, Peter warned that heretics would originate within the church: “There will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Lord who bought them, and bring on themselves swift destruction. And many will follow their destructive ways, because of whom the way of truth will be blasphemed” (2:1–2).

And don't forget that the apostles Paul and John frequently gave similar warnings about the imminent danger of apostates within the visible church (Acts 20:28–31; 2 Timothy 3:1–9; 1 John 2:18–19). So did Jesus (Matthew 7:15; 24:23–25). It is surely significant that the Holy Spirit gave us so many reminders to remain constantly on guard. False teachers abound, and they are playing a devious charade that is a serious and perpetual threat to unwary Christians in every age and every place.

But don't imagine for a moment that God is fooled or His plans are really thwarted by the subtleties of lying, false teachers. In fact, consider the implications of all the various biblical warnings and prophecies declaring that false teachers will arise from the church. In Jesus' words, “Take heed; see, I have told you all things beforehand” (Mark 13:23). These are not merely warnings designed to make us fearful; they are also prophecies that prove God knows what He is doing. He has a plan for the false teachers too. He will accomplish all His good pleasure despite their best efforts. And because Christ Himself is building His church, the gates of hell will not prevail against it. The powers of darkness cannot win the Truth War.

Jude hints at this in verse 4 when he refers to the false teachers as “certain men . . . who long ago were marked out for this condemnation.” That phrase is an implicit affirmation of God's sovereignty over the efforts of the false teachers. Try as they might, they cannot overthrow or even slightly derail the eternal purposes of God. In fact, His eternal plan included their ultimate condemnation! Jude simply states this truth without any further explanation or argument, but because so many people find the topic of God's sovereignty so difficult—
especially
when we consider God's sovereignty with respect to evildoers—it is worth some effort to try to gain a better understanding of the biblical perspective on a dilemma all of us find troublesome from time to time: Is God really sovereign over evil? If so, why hasn't He already put a stop to it?

Those are some of the hardest questions in all theology. Let's try to simplify them as much as possible.

FALSE TEACHERS CANNOT
THWART GOD'S SOVEREIGNTY

God is absolutely sovereign, even over false teachers. That is the main truth Jude wants to emphasize when he declares that the damnation of false teachers has been planned and prepared by God already. Their judgment was “marked out” long ago. The Greek word Jude employs is
prographo
—literally, “written out in advance.” Their condemnation is preprogrammed and prerecorded in the eternal decrees of God.

Jude's statement clearly suggests, first of all, that God's ultimate judgment against the false teachers is unavoidable. Their apostasy marks them as men who are past any hope of redemption (Philippians 3:18–19; Hebrews 6:4–6; 10:26–27; 2 Peter 2:20; cf. Matthew 12:31–32; 1 John 5:16). Thus he takes a very hard line against them. There is no point in trying to persuade them, appeal to them, or rescue them from their own heresy. We
do
seek to rescue their victims from a similar fate, of course (Jude 22–23), but the false teachers themselves are people who have already seen the truth and rejected it. They are deadly, children of destruction, sons of wrath marked out for judgment.

The text also plainly means that God Himself decreed their destruction as part of His original plan. Their end was predetermined “long ago.” (“Ages ago” might capture more of the true sense of the Greek expression. It is very similar to the language of 2 Kings 19:25, where God says to Hezekiah, “Did you not hear
long ago
how I [ordained judgment],
from ancient times
that I formed it? Now I have brought it to pass” [emphasis added].) In other words, the verdict concerning these apostates is not something God decided just recently. It was decreed before time began, in eternity past. It is still in effect even now—with full, infallible, divine authority.

This, of course, is an unqualified affirmation of the absolute sovereignty of God. Every tiny detail of His eternal plan will be fulfilled to absolute perfection. His grand design has always included both the false teachers and their inevitable destruction. So their evil work never disrupts any component of His plan or derails even one aspect of His good intentions. On the contrary, long ago, in God's own perfect wisdom and eternal purpose, the apostates themselves were an integral part of the original plan—and even their final doom was forever settled by God's eternal decree.

SCRIPTURE PUTS NO LIMITS
ON GOD'S SOVEREIGNTY.
HE EXERCISES SOVEREIGN
CONTROL EVEN OVER FALSE
TEACHERS AND EVERYTHING
THEY DO. HE SETS THE
LIMITS OF THEIR APOSTASY
AND CIRCUMSCRIBES THE
BOUNDARIES OF THEIR
INFLUENCE. LIKE SATAN IN
THE TEMPTATION OF JOB,
THEY CAN DO NOTHING
MORE THAN WHAT GOD
SOVEREIGNLY PERMITS.

Jude is declaring the same thing Peter affirms in 1 Peter 2. These men were “appointed” by God to doom and thus ordained to judgment (v. 8). “For a long time their judgment has not been idle, and their destruction does not slumber” (2 Peter 2:3). In other words, the condemnation of these false teachers has always been operating. Their ultimate destruction is an absolute certainty, ordained from the beginning in the immutable plan of God.

Do not misunderstand the implications of this. Scripture puts no limits on God's sovereignty. He exercises sovereign control even over false teachers and everything they do. He sets the limits of their apostasy and circumscribes the boundaries of their influence. Like Satan in the temptation of Job, they can do nothing more than what God sovereignly permits.

That does not mean, however, that God is the agent or the direct cause of any evil. We are not to imagine that God actively makes wicked people diabolical in the same sense that He sovereignly conforms true believers to the image of Christ. “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am tempted by God'; for God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He Himself tempt anyone. But each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed” (James 1:13–14).

God's sovereignty in no way makes Him responsible for the evil that corrupts the hearts of apostates. The fact that He has already decreed their condemnation in no way absolves them of their own guilt. Their willful renunciation of the truth is a sin for which they and they alone are entirely responsible. God does not compel them or entice them to sin. Scripture is absolutely clear about that. Guilty sinners will not be able to plead in the judgment that they are somehow “victims” of God's sovereignty, or that God is in any way to blame for their transgressions. God does not make anyone sin.

Nevertheless, God often exercises His sovereignty over the minds and wills of sinners for judicial purposes in a way that actually seals their doom and hastens their condemnation. For example, the apostle John, paraphrasing Isaiah 29:10, wrote, “He has blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts, lest they should see with their eyes, lest they should understand with their hearts and turn, so that I should heal them” (John 12:40).

Even that does not suggest that God ever coerces anyone to do evil. Consider these three main ways Scripture says God brings His sovereign influence to bear on the sinner's will: He turns stubborn hearts to stone. God sometimes hardens the hearts of evildoers (Romans 9:18). He does this the same way the sun hardens a lump of clay; not by sovereignly injecting an alien evil motive into an otherwise pure heart. In a classic sermon on Romans 9 and the hardening of Pharaoh's heart, Jonathan Edwards said this:

When God is here spoken of as hardening some of the children of men, it is not to be understood that God by any positive efficiency hardens any man's heart. There is no positive act in God, as though he put forth any power to harden the heart. To suppose any such thing would be to make God the immediate author of sin. God is said to harden men in two ways: by withholding the powerful influences of his Spirit, without which their hearts will remain hardened, and grow harder and harder; in this sense he hardens them, as he leaves them to hardness. And again, by ordering those things in his providence which, through the abuse of their corruption, become the occasion of their hardening.
¹

God doesn't need to infuse evil intentions into a false teacher's heart to seal that person's apostasy and thus fulfill the divine decree. God simply withdraws the light of His truth, the influence of His Spirit, and the mercy of His grace—and the evildoer's own evil motives are sufficient to guarantee his own doom. He confounds unbelievers' vision. God also sometimes withholds or obscures the truth from those who hate truth anyway. In effect, He “blinds” them (John 9:39; 2 Thessalonians 2:11–12).

Of course, bright light can be as blinding as utter darkness. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it” (John 1:5). When God sovereignly blinds someone who already loves darkness more than light (John 3:19), it certainly doesn't mean God Himself is operating in the realm of darkness or that there is any darkness in Him (1 Timothy 6:16).

He employs evil agents for His own good purposes. Sometimes the Lord will engage Satan or other “second causes” to provoke actions that stem from evil motives in the heart of a sinner (compare, for example, 2 Samuel 24:1 and 1 Chronicles 21:1; see also Ezekiel 14:7–9). But again, every evil motive behind every sinful act stems from the fallen creature, never from God.

Of course, God's own motives, purposes, and actions are emphati cally pure and holy all the time (Genesis 50:20). He accomplishes good in and through
all
things (Romans 8:28)—and that includes all the evil done by all the powers of darkness. So while God may properly be said to “foreordain,” “predetermine,” or “decree” the actions of evildoers (2 Samuel 12:11; 16:10; Acts 2:23; 4:27–28), He does not
approve
the evil in the act. “God is light and in Him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). The will to sin always stems from the sinner's own heart, not from God. He is never the author or efficient cause of evil.

UNDERSTANDING GOD'S SOVEREIGNTY
AND THE FACT OF EVIL

Whenever we consider God's sovereignty and the reality of evil alongside each other, it poses some difficult doctrinal and philosophical dilemmas. We might get sidetracked discussing those questions for a long time. But it is not necessary to trace and untangle every thread in the tapestry to see the big picture. Jude makes the main idea stand out as boldly as possible when he says the false teachers are marked out for condemnation. Here, in simple terms, is the whole point of the matter as Scripture lays it out for us: God will ultimately overthrow every wicked deed and every malicious intention of every evildoer. In the meantime, He is free to use every evil deed done by fallen creatures to bring about ultimate good. In fact, He does so without fail. But in no case does God ever do evil so that good may come.

Before leaving the subject, let me stress that two common errors must be avoided in our thinking about God's sovereignty as it relates to evil. One, of course, is this notion (sometimes advocated by certain hyper-Calvinists) that God actively and directly causes evildoers to be evil. As we have already seen, that idea violates several emphatic statements of Scripture that God is never the source or the direct agent of evil. “[He is] not a God who takes pleasure in wickedness, nor shall evil dwell with [Him]” (Psalm 5:4).

THE PICTURE OF
DIVINE SOVEREIGNTY IN
SCRIPTURE IS THAT GOD
POSITIVELY ORDAINS
WHATSOEVER COMES TO
PASS. HE ALWAYS ACTS
WITH A PURPOSE.
EVEN THE WICKED
UNWITTINGLY DO HIS
BIDDING, AND THEY THUS
FULFILL HIS SOVEREIGN
PURPOSE IN THE END.

But an opposite error lies at the other end of the spectrum. We are not to think God's command over evil and evildoers is limited to a kind of passive, prescient foreknowledge in which He reluctantly and grudgingly gives His consent to something He knows evildoers are going to do anyway.