Study in the Epistle of Jude # 30: 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 in this Epistle, which speaks of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as an example of “suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.” We have recently been looking at the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and we have seen that, in the Bible, they represent the church. They typify the churches and congregations of the world. However, there is another significance to Sodom, which can be seen once we turn to Revelation 11. We read in verse 3:

And I will give power unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth.

This “thousand two hundred and threescore (1260) days,” if we use a thirty-day (30) month, is three-and-a-half years. This language is tied to the seventy (70) weeks that we read about in Daniel 9:24. Daniel received a vision from God where God told him, “seventy (70) weeks are determined upon Thy people,” and in the middle of the seventieth (70) week “shall Messiah be cut off” (Daniel 9:26).

It can be shown that this is exactly what happened. Sixty-nine (69) weeks take us right up to the ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the seventieth (70) week begins as Christ starts His three-and-a-half year ministry. Then He is cut off at the Cross, in the mid point of the seventieth (70) week. The last half of the seventieth (70) week stretches throughout the entire New Testament period typified in Revelation 11 by “a thousand two hundred and threescore (1260) days.”

God is using the two witnesses as a picture of the witness of true believers within the churches and congregations of the world. They have prophesied and declared the Word of God over the last nineteen hundred and fifty (1950) plus years since the Cross. They brought the Gospel to the world. That is all very interesting information, but what is shocking is what we read a little further on in Revelation 11. In verses 6-7, still speaking of the two witnesses, it says:

These have power to shut heaven, that it rain not in the days of their prophecy: and have power over waters to turn them to blood, and to smite the earth with all plagues, as often as they will. And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them.

We are stunned and shocked by this. It is incredible. The two witnesses, who identify with God’s bringing of the Gospel through the churches of the world, have an end. They have a time when their testimony is finished. This is certain. It is absolute. It is definitely, without question, what God is saying. This means that if the testimony of the two witnesses will one day be finished, the church will one day be finished. The corporate church and its witness to the world will one day come to an end.

When will this be? Can we know? Are we given any clue as to when this will take place? Yes, because it says “when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them.”

If we turn to Revelation 20:2-3, we read:

And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, And cast him into the bottomless pit…

This is the beast that is coming up out of the bottomless pit in Revelation 11:7. This is Satan, who was bound at the Cross. Satan was defeated and wrapped about in chains, as it were, when Jesus went to the Cross. Satan was confined. His ability to frustrate God’s salvation plan was greatly limited because of what Christ had done at the Cross. Therefore, God refers to this as a binding point of Satan and the casting of him into “the bottomless pit.” Revelation 20:3 continues:

And cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season.

When we read in Revelation 11:7 that the beast is coming up out of the bottomless pit and overcoming the two witnesses, this can only be the time of the Great Tribulation, which is also identified as “a little season” here in Revelation 20. This is the time when God is going to bring about judgment on His church. 1 Peter 4:17 says that judgment must begin at the House of God. The Lord looses Satan to accomplish this judgment. Satan is loosed to bring judgment on the church.

Once the thousand (1000) years are finished and Satan is loosed, the two witness’s testimony is finished. That thousand-year period is not a literal period. If it were, then one thousand (1000) years after the time of Satan’s binding at the Cross would mean that in the year 1033 AD, Satan would have been loosed. Of course, as we read in the Bible, Satan is loosed right near the end of the world, so that could not have been the case. The world did not end nearly a thousand years ago. It has continued on until our present day.

The number one thousand (1000) is not to be taken literally. It points to the completeness of whatever is in view. That is how God uses numbers that are multiples of ten (10) in the Bible, whether they are the number ten (10) or one hundred (100) or one thousand (1000). The number ten (10) and its multiples point to completeness.

We see this in Psalm 50:10 where God says that He owns the cattle upon a thousand hills. We know that God is not limiting Himself in that way. He is not saying that there are only one thousand (1000) hills upon which the cattle are His. Rather, He is using the language of one thousand (1000) hills to say that He owns all the cattle upon all the hills in all the world. It is the completeness of ownership that God is relating to us by the number one thousand (1000).

So it is with a thousand (1000) years. They represent the completeness of the New Testament era, the completeness of time that was assigned for that period of God’s salvation plan. The actual number of years will be over nineteen hundred and fifty (1950) when we add it all up. When we go from the Cross to the loosing of Satan and the beginning point of the Great Tribulation, it is well over a literal thousand (1000) years. Yet, it is God’s prerogative to use numbers as He pleases and as He sees fit.

Satan is bound one thousand (1000) years. Then there comes the end of the era of the New Testament Church Age, and he is loosed. Now God is using him as a destroying weapon in His hand to overcome the saints, as we read in Revelation 11:7.

When we read that the beast comes “out of the bottomless pit,” this can only tie in with one point in history, which is the Great Tribulation. We know this as fact. There is no question about it; there is absolutely no speculation about this at all. We know as absolute truth that according to Revelation 11, once the Great Tribulation gets underway, which coincides with the loosing of Satan, the end of the Church Age will come to pass. The end of the Church Age, in other words, is simultaneous with the loosing of Satan and the beginning of the Great Tribulation. We know this because God ties the two together in Revelation 11:7 when He says that the two witnesses have finished their testimony at the point when the beast is ascending out of the bottomless pit and making war against them.

This means that there will come a point of time in the history of the world when the churches, no matter what denomination they are—whether Catholic or Protestant or Reformed or liberal—will cease to be used by God to bear witness to the Gospel of the Bible. They will no longer be the messengers of God in sending forth His Word into the world. “They shall,” as God says, “have finished their testimony.”

We know that this is what the Bible teaches. There is no question about it. God is coming right out and saying it in Revelation 11:7. The only question is “When will this be? When will the Great Tribulation begin?”

Since those questions are a little bit more than our study in Jude can handle right now, we are not going to try to answer them except to say that we are presently living in the time of the Great Tribulation. We are presently living in the day when Satan has been loosed and when the testimony of the churches has come to an end.

Let us go on to read verse 8 in Revelation 11. This is the reason that we have come here, because there is a reference in verse 8 to Sodom. We read regarding the two witnesses:

And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified.

Once again, God is connecting Sodom to the church. Where is that “great city” where the dead bodies of the two witnesses are lying? It is “Sodom,” the church of the Great Tribulation.

It goes on to say in the next few verses that they shall not suffer their dead bodies to be put in graves. This is a horrible picture of a dead church; a church that has lost the blessing of God, a church that is helpless and ineffective in bringing the Gospel to the world.

That “great city” is referring to Jerusalem, “where also our Lord was crucified.” Jerusalem is a type and figure of the New Testament church, which God says is spiritually called “Sodom and Egypt.” We are not surprised any longer that Jerusalem is called “Sodom.” We have seen several verses that link Jerusalem or Israel or Samaria to Sodom. One of those verses was Isaiah 1:10, where God was speaking to Israel and said, “Ye rulers of Sodom.” He spiritually identifies the church of the Great Tribulation—the church that has gone apostate and has fallen away from the truth, and the church that is unfaithful to the Word of God—as “Sodom.”

Therefore, we are very interested in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah because it relates to the Great Tribulation and to our present day. God has linked Sodom to the dead church of the Great Tribulation. God has tied together the church, after the testimony of the two witnesses has come to an end, with Sodom.

Let us turn back to Genesis 19, where we read the historical account of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. We read in Genesis 19:1:

And there came two angels to Sodom at even…

“There came two angels to Sodom.” Who are these two angels, and why did they come? Where did they come from?

To answer these questions, we have to turn back to the previous chapter. We read concerning Abraham in Genesis 18:1-3:

And the LORD appeared unto him in the plains of Mamre: and he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day; And he lift up his eyes and looked, and, lo, three men stood by him: and when he saw them, he ran to meet them from the tent door, and bowed himself toward the ground, And said, My Lord, if now I have found favour in thy sight, pass not away, I pray thee, from thy servant:

Later on, these apparently three men are going to tell Abraham that at the set time, the “time appointed” in the next year, Sarah shall have a son. Sarah laughed within herself at this. Then verses 13-14 say:

And the LORD said unto Abraham, Wherefore did Sarah laugh, saying, Shall I of a surety bear a child, which am old? Is any thing too hard for the LORD? At the time appointed I will return unto thee, according to the time of life, and Sarah shall have a son.

Now let us read verses 16-17, which say:

And the men rose up from thence, and looked toward Sodom: and Abraham went with them to bring them on the way. And the LORD said, Shall I hide from Abraham that thing which I do;

After this, the Lord goes on to reveal to Abraham that He is going to destroy Sodom for their wickedness. He is going to visit Sodom to see if all the evil that has come up into His presence is so. God has seen the evil things taking place in Sodom, and He will visit them in judgment and take vengeance upon them.

These men, as we can see from the language of Genesis 18, were an appearance of God. God appeared as these three men to Abraham. That is why Abraham calls them Lord. The three men, in all likelihood, are pointing to the three persons of the Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

God, for His own purposes, has two of these men—or angels—(who are likewise a representation of God) go to Sodom. God is visiting Sodom. They meet Lot sitting at the gate of the city. God has entered, and Lot ushers them quickly to his house because he is fully aware of the wickedness of the city of Sodom. It is an evil place. Historically, it was greatly corrupted with men doing whatever they desired to do. There were wicked men roaming the streets, and they would do whatever they pleased. There seemed to be no law in Sodom. The law was whatever men wanted it to be, and whatever was right in their own eyes was what they were doing.

We then read in Genesis 19:4-7:

But before they lay down, the men of the city, even the men of Sodom, compassed the house round, both old and young, all the people from every quarter: And they called unto Lot, and said unto him, Where are the men which came in to thee this night? bring them out unto us, that we may know them. And Lot went out at the door unto them, and shut the door after him, And said, I pray you, brethren, do not so wickedly.

The sin that Sodom is very famous for is the sin of homosexuality. That is referenced in Jude 7, which says:

Even as Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example…

Sodom was involved in homosexuality, men desiring men and “working that which is unseemly” (Romans 1:27). This was a great and terrible abomination to the Lord, just as all sin is. All sin is an abomination to God and reprehensible to Him, and homosexuality is just another one of those sins.

God has visited Sodom, and He has seen first hand what is going on in this city. Lot is trying to protect his visitors, his guests. He is trying to hold back the evil of this place. Let us keep in mind that Sodom is a picture of the church. That is what Revelation 11 demands it be—a picture of the church of the Great Tribulation. It is a drawing that God has made, a historical parable that God is giving, which provides us with information concerning the church of our day. The men of Sodom are a representation of those who are in the churches and congregations of the world today.

I know that this is a horrible thing to say. How can we relate these men of Sodom, who were so evil, to people who are in the churches today? How can we relate them to the elders and the pastors and the deacons and the individuals in the church?

It is because this is how God has spoken of them. God is the One who says to the rulers of Israel in Isaiah 1, “Ye rulers of Sodom.” God calls them “rulers of Sodom,” indicating that the people of Israel are as the “men of Sodom.” The leaders of Israel are ruling over the inhabitants of “Sodom and Gomorrah.” What they are doing in the churches is somehow spiritually identified with what took place historically in Sodom.

Let us, for example, look at the sin of homosexuality. What will develop from that particular sin besides the disease of Aids? In Romans 1:27, God says that they received “in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet.” Yet in our day, we see men marrying men and women marrying women.

What will result from that kind of union? When a man marries a man, will they be able to produce children? When a woman marries a woman, will they be able bear children?

In our day, it is possible for a woman to bear a child using some sort of artificial means. A homosexual man can even adopt children in our day because the world has totally lost sight of all that is good and right and pure and holy. The world does allow, or will allow in the days to come, homosexual couples to adopt children. It is possible to have children in those ways, but using the natural means that God has given—the reproductive means that God has established between a man and a woman—what will result?

There will be nothing that will result. There will be no children. There cannot be any children that will come from such unions that are ungodly. God never intended for men to be with men or women to be with women. Therefore, they cannot reproduce. They cannot bear children or bring forth fruit.

Homosexuality is the sin, spiritually speaking, of the church of our day. They have gone after “strange flesh,” not the meat of the Gospel, not the flesh that the Lord Jesus Christ has given for the world to eat. They have gone after “strange flesh,” other kinds of gospels.

The churches and congregations of our day are very much like the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah. The churches have the evil sin of homosexuality because they cannot reproduce themselves with their false gospels and doctrines and teachings. The church’s gospel cannot bear fruit. God is not blessing the gospel that the churches are sending forth. Therefore, it is very similar to a union of two men or two women. There can be no fruit.

In our next study, Lord willing, we are going to continue to look at Genesis 19 and to learn more about Sodom and Gomorrah, which Jude 7 has led us to.