Study in the Epistle of Jude # 38: Verse 8

by Chris McCann

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

Welcome to the Electronic Bible Fellowship’s Bible study. We are in the book of Jude, and we have been looking at verse 8. We have seen in verse 8 that God is speaking to filthy dreamers who defile the flesh. As we have seen, God is not indicating that during the New Testament Church Age people would be receiving revelation from God in dreams or visions. This is no longer possible. Revelation 22:18 shut the door and closed off any possibility that anyone in this world would ever again receive revelation from God besides the Bible itself. The Bible is more than sufficient. We have so much tremendous revelation of God in His Word. We have a complete and thorough communication from God toward man, and we do not need anything else.

As a matter of fact, we cannot handle what we already have. We cannot grasp the full meaning and intent of what God has given us in His Word. There is no one who could ever say, “I have learned everything there is to learn about the Bible. I took a course, I studied, and I read the Bible through from beginning to end—that is it. I do not need to learn anything further.”

Anyone who would say something like that is revealing their ignorance of the wonders of the Bible. They are revealing that they have a natural mind that cannot see the deeper spiritual dimension or the spiritual riches of the Word of God (1 Corinthians 2:14). That is the only way anyone could ever think for a second that they had learned everything there was to learn about the Bible. It is extreme arrogance and pride to think so. There is no man who could say, “I have learned it all,” even if he has diligently studied the Bible for fifty or sixty or seventy years. Even if there was a man who went about studying the Bible from morning until night all the days of his life, he still could not say, “I have uncovered all the riches of the Word of God. I have discovered all the parabolic meanings. I have dug into the Word of God and found all its gold and all its silver and all the treasures of the Bible.” There is no one who could even come close to saying that they thoroughly know the Bible.

We have to be very humble when it comes to realizing our limitations and how weak we are. Our finite, human brains just cannot contain or hold all the information that the Bible presents to us. The Word of God is tremendous, and that is no exaggeration.

I am not speaking in such a way as to lift up the Word of God to a place that it does not deserve. These are simply plain and truthful statements regarding the Word of God. We just cannot comprehend the great and tremendous truths of the Bible.

In Isaiah 55:8-9, God gives a statement that is very significant and very pertinent to what we are discussing here. He says:

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.

This is our problem when it comes to the Bible. God has given us a written, detailed account of His thoughts. The Bible is the Word of God coming forth from the mind of God. These are God’s thoughts. This is a revelation of the person and character and wonder of the Almighty Being called God.

His thoughts are higher than our thoughts, than man’s thoughts. How much higher are they? Consider the picture that God presents in Isaiah 55. His thoughts are higher than our thoughts—as high as the heavens are above the earth. How much higher is the universe than the earth? If we were to travel on the fastest rocket that would be launched into space, and we kept going and going at the fastest speed of this rocket, we would continue on indefinitely. There would be no end to our journey. Man has never reached the furthest depths of the universe or arrived at its end.

That is how high God’s thoughts are in relationship to the thoughts of man. His thoughts are so high and lofty that there really is no comparison. Man’s thoughts are tiny, finite, puny little thoughts coming out of puny little minds—whereas God’s thoughts are magnificent, all-comprehending, and all-powerful.

God, the One who is thinking these thoughts, has given us His Word—the Bible. Are we to presume that after a casual reading through the Word of God, there is nothing more for us to learn? That is pure arrogance on man’s part. It is a complete failure to understand just how deep the Word of God is.

Even worse are those who recognize that the Bible is the Word of God; that is, those who are in churches, theologians, learned men within the congregations, those who say that they have done a thorough study of the Bible, doctors of the law, and professors of theology, yet who have approached the Word of God in a manner that is not humble whatsoever. Instead, they have come to it in a manner that has lifted themselves up above the Word of God. They have placed their thoughts above the thoughts of God. They have studied the Bible, it is true; but they have studied it in the light of their own reasoning and in the light of their own minds.

What a tremendous limitation it is for a man to study the Word of God by trying to figure it out with his own understanding! What a limitation it is to study the Bible while leaning upon one’s own understanding and one’s own thoughts and reasoning!

Naturally, they have come to very wrong conclusions. They have arrived at erroneous doctrines and erroneous gospels because they have not come to the Bible in a manner worthy of approaching unto the King of kings and Lord of lords, the Almighty God (Revelation 19:16). They have come to the Bible as though it were any other book written by men, as though it were a dictionary or some work put together by the greatest minds on earth.

However, that is not how the Bible is written. This is the Word of God. We have to come to it humbly, as creatures unto our Creator. We come as humble servants humbly seeking truth. We come recognizing and admitting that we are not capable of ourselves to understand this Word.

There are great parts of the Bible that God has written in order to keep man humble. There are parts that are so complicated that men have read them for hundreds of years, even thousands of years, and not understood them. However, there is an understanding to these parts.

How can we therefore understand the Bible? How can we understand portions of the Word of God? The only way is to use God’s methodology for arriving at truth, and that methodology is designed and guaranteed by God to foster humility in those who are seeking truth, in those who are coming to Him because they know that they cannot use their own minds.

We do not read a verse of the Bible and then conclude, “Well, this is what I think.” That is absolutely forbidden by God. He says in 2 Peter 1:20-21:

Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.

No prophecy of the Scripture, no word of the Bible, no book, no verse, no chapter, is of any private interpretation. That goes for Calvin and it goes for Luther and it goes for Knox and for any other theologian. No man may say, “This is what the verse means because this is how I have reasoned it out. I have arrived at this conclusion from my own brilliance and my own knowledge as I have studied the Greek and the Hebrew.” That is forbidden; we are not to turn to man’s mind to find truth.

How then can we come to truth? How can we arrive at any kind of understanding of what God is saying? Is it all left up in the air? No, God has designed a methodology to keep man humble, and that methodology can be found in 1 Corinthians 2:12-13, which says:

Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual.

The Bible is a spiritual book (John 6:63). The book of Genesis is spiritual, the Psalms are spiritual, Corinthians is spiritual, and Revelation is spiritual. We compare spiritual things—that is, a verse that is before us—with spiritual things. We search out the words and see where else that same Greek or Hebrew word has been used in the Bible and look at the context in which it is used. By that, we allow God to define His own terms and to set His own definitions for the words. It is these definitions that really form the basis of understanding.

It is only because you know the meaning of the words you are looking at right now that you can understand the point that I am trying to make. When we come to the Bible, we need to know the definition of the words we are reading.

You might say, “Of course I know the definition of words.” You might know them from Webster’s Dictionary and you might know them from your schooling in this world, but we must remember that the Bible is a spiritual book. We need to find out spiritual definitions, and we need to learn the spiritual indications of what God is saying. The only way to do this is to follow God’s methodology. We compare one word with another word, but only in the Bible.

For instance, we do not find a Greek word in the Bible, as some theologians do, and then search the era, the epoch of time, in which that word was written. We do not search the writings of men during the first century AD to see how that word was used in the common culture of the day. That is another falsehood, another wrong way of coming to truth. We do not go outside the Bible. The spiritual words of the Bible must be compared with other spiritual words. The writings on tombstones or any other writings outside the Bible that are unearthed and discovered by men are not spiritual. They are writings that are natural, writings that are coming from mankind. We do not compare the Holy Word of God with those writings. We must find the comparisons within the Bible.

That is how the Holy Ghost teaches. It is no longer man who is interpreting and saying, “Well, I think that this means this with my mind.” Rather, we have allowed the mind of God, which is found on the pages of the Bible, to interpret His own meaning for the words found there. Therefore, we are now learning from the spiritual dictionary, the Bible. This is God’s methodology.

Then, of course, we have to harmonize our conclusions with everything else that the Bible says. Everything must fit together and fall into place like the pieces of a puzzle in order for us to arrive at truth. If we come to a spiritual conclusion, so we think, by following the methodology of comparing Scripture with Scripture, yet that conclusion does not harmonize with some other teaching of the Bible, then we have come to a wrong conclusion, and we must continue studying.

This is how God has designed things. We are constantly turning to the Bible to search out words and to search out the context, to search out the Word of God itself. We are not turning to the writings of men in any way—not to theologians and not to secular writings. The Bible is what God has given to us.

Going back now to Jude 8, we read:

Likewise also these filthy dreamers defile the flesh…

Let us remember that we are positive, with no question about it, that God is no longer bringing revelation through dreams. That is not what He is referring to when He speaks of these men who have crept in unawares as filthy dreamers who defile the flesh. Rather, God assigns the idea of dreamers to those who are bringing the Gospel, because the Gospel is a compilation of visions and dreams. As we are bringing forth the Word of God, we are like dreamers, as Acts 2 says, “Your old men shall dream dreams.” However, if the Word of God that we are bringing forth is not a faithful word that is true to what the Bible has said, then we are defiling the flesh. In that circumstance, we are filthy dreamers. We are ungodly men, as God so much insists upon in the Epistle of Jude.

In order to see what this is really saying, let us go back to Jeremiah 23:25-32, which says:

I have heard what the prophets said, that prophesy lies in my name, saying, I have dreamed, I have dreamed. How long shall this be in the heart of the prophets that prophesy lies? yea, they are prophets of the deceit of their own heart; Which think to cause my people to forget my name by their dreams which they tell every man to his neighbour, as their fathers have forgotten my name for Baal. The prophet that hath a dream, let him tell a dream; and he that hath my word, let him speak my word faithfully. What is the chaff to the wheat? saith the LORD. Is not my word like as a fire? saith the LORD; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces? Therefore, behold, I am against the prophets, saith the LORD, that steal my words every one from his neighbour. Behold, I am against the prophets, saith the LORD, that use their tongues, and say, He saith. Behold, I am against them that prophesy false dreams, saith the LORD, and do tell them, and cause my people to err by their lies, and by their lightness; yet I sent them not, nor commanded them: therefore they shall not profit this people at all, saith the LORD.

God here is very definitely connecting false prophets, those who declare the Word of God falsely, with those who are saying that they have dreamed. This is the focus of what He is saying in Jude when He speaks of filthy dreamers who defile the flesh.

When someone makes a statement regarding the Word of God and says, “This is what God has said; thus saith the Lord; this is the truth of the Word of God,” yet they go on to give details of a false doctrine and a false gospel, this is revealing that they are prophets “of the deceit of their own heart.” It is as though they are delivering a false dream. The information that they are bringing forth did not come from the Word of God, which we remember, is a compilation of dreams and visions that God has given His people. Therefore, their declaration, which God did not give, is as a false dream. They are filthy dreamers. They have defiled the flesh.

What does it mean to defile the flesh? Let us turn to Titus 1:15-16. We read there:

Unto the pure all things are pure: but unto them that are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure; but even their mind and conscience is defiled. They profess that they know God; but in works they deny him, being abominable, and disobedient, and unto every good work reprobate.

God is indicating here that to the pure, everything is pure. Everything is pure to the child of God because the child of God is without sin. He has been forgiven, he has been made righteous in Christ, and he has a new heart and a new spirit. Nothing can defile him; he is a true believer.

“But unto them that are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure.” They are not saved and they are not forgiven of their transgressions. Their sins remain. Therefore, they are under God’s judgment; they are under the wrath of God. Nothing that they do is pure or holy or just, and nothing that they do makes them righteous. Everything that they do is defiled.

We notice that God links being defiled to unbelieving. This is what He is focusing on in Jude. He is focusing on those who are professing with their mouths to be children of God and praising God with their lips, but whose hearts are far from Him (Isaiah 29:13).

This is the constant emphasis in the Epistle of Jude. This is the emphasis being placed on these men who have crept in. This is the emphasis being placed on the people of God who were delivered out of Egypt yet perished. This is the emphasis being placed on Sodom and Gomorrah, which were figures of the corporate church. The corporate church of our day is also in view in this language. There are great multitudes who say they are Christians, yet they are not. Only as they profess these things with their lips are they Christian; in their hearts, they are unsaved men. Their flesh is defiled and they are still in their sins.

Lord willing, we will continue looking at verse 8 in our next study, which goes on to say:

…despise dominion, and speak evil of dignities.