Study in the Epistle of Jude # 29: Verse 7

by Chris McCann

EBible Fellowship (http://www.ebiblefellowship.com)

Welcome to the Electronic Bible Fellowship’s Bible study. We are currently going through the book of Jude. We have come to verse 7, which speaks about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as being “set forth for an example.” We have been examining what the Bible has to say regarding Sodom and Gomorrah, and we found that Sodom is used by God in the Bible as a portrait or picture of the New Testament corporate church. We have seen this in many different verses.

In Ezekiel 16, we have found some especially interesting and significant verses regarding the reasons God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. There, God gives a list of their sins. The number-one sin that brought about the destruction of Sodom was not homosexuality, as we are a little surprised to read, but pride. It says in Ezekiel 16:49-50:

Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. And they were haughty, and committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away as I saw good.

God is saying that the chief sin of Sodom was pride. We have spent some time looking at pride, and we have seen that, spiritually, it has to do with those who devise a gospel of their own understanding out of their own minds rather than being faced with the true Gospel of the Bible. These are the people who do not like the way in which God has laid things out in His Word, so they add a little bit of their own works. In so doing, they forcefully bring salvation unto themselves. They exalt themselves to the highest place imaginable, which is salvation—being seated in heavenly places in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ (Ephesians 2:6).

This was the iniquity of Sodom, and this is the sin of the church of our day with its freewill gospel and its easy-believeism. Anyone can walk in off the street at any moment, including the vilest sinner, and instead of hearing the true Gospel of the Bible, they will be faced with a gospel that will instruct them to accept Christ. They will be told to do some sort of work, some simple action of saying a few words in a sinner’s prayer. Immediately, they have taken to themselves salvation, except that salvation has not actually taken place.

Man does not have the power to speak a word and make a new creation, which is what happens when someone becomes saved (2 Corinthians 5:17). God is the only One who has that kind of authority and power (Ezekiel 36:26). He is the Creator. Man cannot say a few words in a formula and suddenly bring a new spirit into being. God has not given man that type of power.

An individual walking into a church should be faced with the Gospel that would teach him of his sins and the fact that he is under the wrath of God and subject to spend an eternity in Hell. He should hear a Gospel that would make him ponder and meditate on those facts for a little while and deal with the real possibility of being thrown down into Hell. He should be troubled with that kind of revelation from the Word of God, with the knowledge that unless God has mercy upon him, he will indeed be cast into eternal damnation.

However, instead of being troubled and disturbed by the Gospel of the Bible, immediately he can have satisfaction. Immediately, he can do away with the uncomfortableness of the true Gospel and enter into what he believes is a right relationship with God by doing an act or a work that will exalt him upon high.

Yet God says that this is not at all how it works. Anyone who does exalt themselves in this way, God will resist. He resists the proud and gives grace to the humble (James 4:6). Pride has much to do with false gospels. It has much to do with other attempts of getting right with God besides the only Way (John 14:6), which is through the Lord Jesus Christ.

In Ezekiel 16:49, we go on to read of some of the other sins of Sodom. The next one listed is “fullness of bread.” The sin of Sodom, the iniquity of Sodom, was fullness of bread. This is somewhat unusual. Why would God list this as a sin? What is the problem with having a good and bountiful supply of bread?

Let us look at what bread spiritually represents. Bread, in the Bible, is a representation of the Lord Jesus Christ, of the Word of God, and of the Gospel itself. Jesus said that His flesh is as bread (John 6:51). The manna that fell upon the Israelites in the wilderness during their forty years of sojourning (Exodus 16:35) was “the living bread which came down from Heaven” that Jesus relates to Himself in the Gospel of John.

Does the church of our day have fullness of bread? Yes. They have the Bible, they have the whole Word of God, and they have the complete revelation from God Himself. Just think how much “bread” we have today. We have Bibles plentifully, we have tracts, and we have all kinds of books that individuals have written regarding the Bible. We have the Gospel going out by radio, by Internet, and by satellite TV. We have the Gospel in just about every way imaginable. We can take hold of audio tapes of the Bible and play them all night long while we sleep. We can have Gospel stations on and running in our house twenty-four hours a day where we can listen to the wonderful hymns of faith and hear the Word of God read and taught. Therefore, there is fullness of bread in the church.

The Lord Jesus Christ has not dealt unfaithfully with the churches, but He has dealt rightly with them. He has given them the true bread from Heaven. That is why Sodom, being a picture of the church, has fullness of bread.

There is nothing wrong with that is there? Where is the sin in that? The sin comes when you have a plentiful supply of this bread, a great abundance of the Gospel at your disposal, and yet you do nothing with it. You are not sending forth the Word of God into the entire world. You are not using the resources of your time and money to get the Gospel out to those who are dying in their sins all across the face of the earth. Instead, you are hoarding it to yourself. You are keeping it for your own.

That is what many churches have done. They are still conducting themselves as if they are in the fifteenth or sixteenth century. That was a time when it was God’s plan for evangelism to primarily take place within the church body, the congregation. However, we are now in the twenty-first century. We are in a time when there has been a great population explosion so that there are now over six billion people in the world. How can a church only be concerned with its small membership of fifty or a hundred or five hundred or even a thousand members? How can it mainly want to take care of only its membership? What about the other six billion or so people in the world? The church has the Gospel, how is it going to reach them?

This was the sin of Sodom, and it is the sin of the church of our day. They have failed to carry out the great commission (Mark 16:15). They have failed to carry the Gospel into the whole world.

To be fair, even though the church did develop missionaries, overall it was not designed for this kind of a task. That is one reason why God brings the church to a close at the end of the era of the New Testament Church Age and the beginning of the Great Tribulation. They simply cannot fulfill the task of bringing the Gospel to the whole world. Yet, there ought to have been a great amount of effort and a great desire to reach the peoples of the world. Instead, the sin of the church, as Ezekiel 16 continues, is “abundance of idleness.” They have the fullness of bread, yet they are idle.

This is the picture of someone standing around with his hands in his pockets. He is not working or doing anything constructive or useful with his time, but rather wasting it. Time is a precious thing to waste. God says that we are to redeem the time (Ephesians 5:16). The days are evil and very short. Each and every day, over two hundred thousand people around the world die. Now, here is the church that has the Gospel. They have fullness of bread, yet they are idle, as idle as anything could be. They have abundance of idleness. They do not have a tremendous concern for these people. They do not weep for them and their bowels do not yearn for them that they might hear the Gospel. Rather, they are idle. They are wasting the time that God has given them. This is a horrible sin for the church.

In 1 Timothy 5:11-13, we read about idleness. There it says:

But the younger widows refuse: for when they have begun to wax wanton against Christ, they will marry; Having damnation, because they have cast off their first faith. And withal they learn to be idle, wandering about from house to house; and not only idle, but tattlers also and busybodies, speaking things which they ought not.

Here is the picture of a younger widow who is going about and involving herself in gossip because she is idle. She is going around causing trouble, being a busybody, speaking about things that she ought not to speak about and stirring up gossip and bad feelings about other people. That is the picture of idleness, especially when they are “speaking things which they ought not.”

What does the corporate church speak? They ought to speak the Gospel. Yet when there is abundance of idleness, they are speaking things which they ought not to speak.

What is that? What ought not a pastor to speak? He ought not to speak lies and he ought not to speak things that are not true to the Word of God. However, in a situation where there is an abundance of idleness, we will find busybodies. We will find those who are going from house to house, from church to church, speaking things which they ought not to speak.

These things are being spoken from the pulpit—that is where there is idleness. They are talking from the pulpits about social gospels and political gospels. They are involving themselves in all kinds of doctrines that are erroneous. They are teaching things that have no basis in the truth of the Word of God. They are speaking all kinds of things.

It is not as though they are not occupying their time with their words, but the problem is that they have multitudes of words coming out of their mouths. All across the church world, the pulpits are full of individuals who are speaking and preaching and teaching, but they are teaching things that they ought not to teach.

They ought to teach the Gospel of the Bible. They ought to teach that man is a sinner under God’s wrath and that God is furious with him and ready to throw him down to Hell. They ought to teach that salvation is completely in God’s hands, and that the sinner cannot bring salvation to himself.

However, this would greatly trouble the church. This would bring a great disturbance into that peaceful congregation that really only meets together each Sunday to say hello to one another and have some small talk and a cup of coffee and a piece of cake, and then say good-bye until next Sunday. This is where the true Gospel ought to be declared so that those individuals do not leave so comfortably. They should not go home with their hand strengthened in their evil way (Jeremiah 23:14), but they ought to go home with the idea that God is angry with sinners, and because they are sinners, that means that they might end up in Hell. For the most part, though, for about 99.9% of the churches, these things are not being declared. There is an abundance of idleness going on in the church today.

Ezekiel 16:49 concludes with:

…neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.

This was Sodom’s sin. They did not “strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.” If we go to Isaiah 35:3-5, we see what is in view by this language of “the poor and needy.” We read there:

Strengthen ye the weak hands, and confirm the feeble knees. Say to them that are of a fearful heart, Be strong, fear not: behold, your God will come with vengeance, even God with a recompence; he will come and save you. Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped.

To strengthen the hand of the poor and needy is to declare the Gospel of the Bible that will bring salvation. The churches are not strengthening the hands of the poor and the needy. They are not teaching the true Gospel.

Jeremiah 23:14 says:

I have seen also in the prophets of Jerusalem an horrible thing: they commit adultery, and walk in lies: they strengthen also the hands of evildoers, that none doth return from his wickedness: they are all of them unto me as Sodom, and the inhabitants thereof as Gomorrah.

This is the sin of Jerusalem, and this is the sin of its prophets. We have to remember that a prophet is simply someone who declares the Word of God. This is the sin of the church’s teaching. This is the sin of the pastors and elders and deacons of the world today. Instead of strengthening the hands of the poor and needy, they are strengthening the hands of evildoers.

What does the hand represent in the Bible? It represents the will of man. Therefore, with the gospel that they are bringing, they are strengthening a man’s resolve to continue in his evil ways, because they see no need for him to turn. “God loves me after all,” he thinks. “Why should I change? Why do I need a new heart or a new spirit? The pastor told me that God loves me.” Those who say such things are strengthening the hands of those who are still in their sin to continue to do evil. They are strengthening the hands of evildoers.

In Ezekiel 13, we find the same idea. God there is discussing the building of a wall. The building of a wall points to salvation. Once an individual is saved, he is added to that wall. That is the picture, for example, in the book of Nehemiah. However, here in Ezekiel 13, the wall that is being constructed is being built with “untempered mortar” (Ezekiel 13:10). Their gospel, in other words, is a faulty gospel, a false gospel.

Consequently, God says that this wall will fall and its foundation will be revealed. The Lord Jesus Christ will be shown not to have been the foundation, not to have been the building stone upon which this wall was built. All of those in the churches who have claimed salvation and claimed to be a Christian will one day be shown to be hypocrites. They will be shown to be those who made a profession that was not true in their hearts. They will be shown to be those who were never truly saved. God faults the false prophets in Ezekiel 13:22, saying:

Because with lies ye have made the heart of the righteous sad…

When there is an individual whom God is dealing with (he might be in the drawing process, or he might be someone whom God has already saved), God looks upon that person as righteous because he is righteous in Christ. Yet there he is, sitting in a church. The preacher is preaching a message that is trying to stir up man to take some act, to reach out and bring salvation to himself. However, since God is drawing him, he will not be able to follow that kind of teaching. He will be distraught and disturbed in his soul. This preaching, therefore, is making the heart of the righteous sad. This is a gospel that is troubling to him. It could be that this individual does not have much understanding of the true Gospel at this point in his salvation. He could be someone whom God has recently saved and that is why he is in this type of place hearing this type of gospel.

Ezekiel 13:22 continues:

Because with lies ye have made the heart of the righteous sad, whom I have not made sad…

God’s plan is to save that person. In order to do that, the person needs to be under the hearing of the true Gospel. He needs to hear the Word of God rightly taught. This is not happening in the church. God goes on to say what is happening there. He says:

…and strengthened the hands of the wicked…

This is the same thing as strengthening the hands of the evildoers. If you have ever handed out tracts, such as the “Does God Love You?” tract, who is the least likely person to take one? Is it the individual with purple hair? Is it the individual with rings everywhere imaginable? Is it the individual who looks as if they are about the meanest person you have ever seen? No, they will take the tract—no problem. The one who will normally not take the tract is the one who says, “Of course God loves me! I am a Christian. I go to church. I do not need that tract—save it for someone who needs it.”

Their hands have been strengthened. They have been confirmed in their evil way by the teaching of their congregation. The pastor has affirmed them by saying, “Yes, you are a child of God. You have done all the right things. You have confessed your sins, accepted Christ, and said the sinner’s prayer. You come to church and pay your tithes. You must be a child of God.”

However, nothing has changed in that person. Their heart of stone remains. It is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked (Jeremiah 17:9). The great multitude of their sins are upon them, and the wrath of God is heavy on them, only they do not know it anymore because their hands have been strengthened in going down their evil way. God finishes this verse:

…and strengthened the hands of the wicked, that he should not return from his wicked way, by promising him life:

If this is not a short summation of almost all the gospels other than the true Gospel, then I do not know what is! They are promising him life, so that he has the false assurance that he is a child of God.

In our next study, Lord willing, we are going to continue looking a little longer at Sodom.