Study in the Epistle of Jude # 49: Verse 11

by Chris McCann

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

Welcome to the Electronic Bible Fellowship’s Bible study. We are currently going through the Epistle of Jude and we have come to verse 11, which discusses the false prophets who have gone in the way of Cain. We have been looking at Cain, and we are going to continue looking at the historical account in Genesis 4 of Cain slaying Abel. The plan is to then move on and take a look at Balaam, who is the next person discussed in Jude.

In Genesis 4:12, we read:

When thou tillest the ground…

This is the Lord who is speaking, and He is talking to Cain. In the previous verse, He addressed Cain and told him that he was cursed from the earth because the ground had opened her mouth to receive his brother’s blood. It was as though the blood of Abel was crying out unto God for vengeance against Cain. We have looked at this and we have seen how the souls of them who were under the altar in Revelation 6 were crying out to God for vengeance. God begins to take vengeance upon those who are typified by Cain—the unsaved in the churches during the time of the Great Tribulation. Verse 12 continues:

When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.

We have seen that this had to do with the fruit that comes from the ground. God is indicating that when the church is under His wrath, when the time of judgment that begins upon the house of God has begun, the church will no longer yield fruit. They can continue ministering the Gospel, but they will be fruitless because Christ will no longer be present in the churches and congregations. Then it goes on to say, beginning again with the end of verse 12 and reading through verse 14:

…a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth. And Cain said unto the LORD, My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth…

Twice God says that Cain will be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth. Let us look again at Amos 8. The word “fugitive” is translated there as “wander.” Amos 8:11-12 says:

Behold, the days come, saith the Lord GOD, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD: And they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east, they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the LORD, and shall not find it.

The relationship to Genesis 4 is that there is a famine, just as God said to Cain that the ground would not yield its strength unto him. Spiritually, the focus is on the hearing of the Word of the Lord—there is a famine of hearing. As we read the account in Amos 8, God is indicating that a church can have the Bible and they can even have a faithful sermon or two preached, but no one will become saved. They have one missing ingredient in order for salvation to occur, and it is the most essential ingredient. You can have the Word of God and you can even have a right declaration of that Word, but salvation also takes God’s blessing of the Word that is preached to the heart or the ears of the hearers in order for them to become saved.

This famine is not necessarily that we do not have enough Bibles in the land. Of course we have plenty of Bibles in our country, and they are even sufficient to go around the world, but that is not what the famine is. The famine is not even that some are not teaching certain doctrines faithfully. Some do teach election, some do teach that there is a Judgment Day, and some do teach that the Bible alone is the Word of God.

Rather, the famine comes once God has brought the judgment upon the church and He Himself and His Spirit have left and forsaken it (2 Thessalonians 2:7). At that point, there will be a famine of hearing the Words of the Lord. Romans 10:17 says, “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.” In order for someone to hear, God has to open up their spiritual ears; He has to give them ears to hear.

God is indicating that once the Great Tribulation begins, there will be a famine of hearing. Then what happens? After this famine occurs, after the ground no longer is yielding its strength, spiritually speaking, to those who are typified by Cain in the churches, then they shall wander from sea to sea. They will be as a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth. They are going to roam the earth, going from the North to the East, and they will run to and fro to seek the Word of the Lord, but they shall not find it. They will be wanderers in the earth.

We certainly have this today. There are some in the churches who recognize that the church is not teaching the Word of God faithfully, and they are struggling and trying to find a faithful church. They go to the Presbyterian church this Sunday and they may attend for a few weeks, but then there arises the understanding that this church is teaching some things that are not quite right or faithful to the Word of God. They pack up themselves and their family and they go to another church they heard about—maybe another denomination, perhaps a Reformed church of some kind—and they visit there for a few weeks until something arises there, as it always does in this time because God is not present.

God is not keeping the churches faithful, so they are developing all kinds of wrong teachings. Yet there are some poor souls who are caught in a trap. They are caught with this hope that somewhere out there, somewhere, there is a faithful church—they just have to find it. They just have to do enough seeking and they will find it. As a result, they pack up again and they continue to the next church.

This process can go on with some people for many years, yet they are still reluctant to admit that the reason they cannot find a faithful church is because God is through with the churches. They cannot find a faithful congregation anywhere because God has given up the churches into the hands of Satan. Since God’s Spirit is not present, since God, the One who is faithful, is not in the midst of the church, there will be no faithful church. However, they do not want to admit this. They hold on to this faint hope. This would be similar to someone who is experiencing famine and holding on to a report that there may be water over in a certain area or that there may be corn somewhere, just as Jacob and his sons heard that there was food in Egypt. Except, in this situation, they are hearing that possibly there might be a church. Maybe they have to travel to another state, and some have done this—they are wandering as fugitives in the earth to and fro. What a terrible judgment this is upon the churches and congregations!

I have heard of one individual who apparently holds to many truths of the Bible. He lives in the New England area, and for many years, he has not been able to find a faithful church. He has looked and searched and he has not been able to find one. However, he has also heard the information that the Church Age is finished and that God is calling His people out of the churches, yet he will not acknowledge that this is true. He will not recognize that this is the teaching of the Bible. He holds on to this drastic hope that somewhere out there in some state there is a faithful congregation, even though his own experience testifies to the fact that the Bible is true and that we are living in a time of Great Tribulation.

Today, many false christs and false prophets have arisen (Matthew 24:11). We are living in a time when the man of sin has taken his seat in the temple, showing himself that he is God (2 Thessalonians 2:3-4). Even though these individuals are roaming the earth, in a sense, the very fact that they are roaming in such a manner is a witness and a testimony to the truth of the Bible that the Church Age has come to an end. Yet they will not admit it; they are as Cain who was a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth.

Why does Cain say “from Thy face shall I be hid” in Genesis 4:14? Let us read the verse to get the context. It says:

Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth…

The language of being hidden from God’s face is found in a few places in the Bible, and we will look at two of them. In Isaiah 59:2, we read:

But your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, that he will not hear.

There is this barrier now between God and man because of man’s sin, just as a barrier developed between God and Cain. There is a barrier that man’s sin has established, as though God has hid His face from man.

God has also hid His face from the church because of their iniquities and their transgressions against the law of God. We see this in the other verse that we will look at, Ezekiel 39:23, which says:

And the heathen shall know that the house of Israel went into captivity for their iniquity: because they trespassed against me, therefore hid I my face from them, and gave them into the hand of their enemies: so fell they all by the sword.

Once God has visited His people, as He does during the time of Great Tribulation, and once He has seen their iniquities, which have hidden His face from the church, He gives them up and delivers them into the hand of their enemies. This was historically typified by God’s delivering up Jerusalem and Judah into the hands of the Babylonians and into the hands of king Nebuchadnezzar, who was a representative, a picture, of Satan himself.

During the Last Days, the final stage of earth’s history, which is right up against the end of the world, God looses Satan (Revelation 20:7). He uses him as a destroying weapon in His hands to bring destruction upon the corporate church worldwide. As God is delivering the church into the hands of Satan and his emissaries so that those with other kinds of gospels overrun the congregations and those who are not saved take positions of leadership in the churches, God has hid His face from the church itself, just as He hid His face from Cain.

What does it mean when in verse 13 Cain says unto the Lord, “My punishment is greater than I can bear”? Why does Cain say that? What is meant by that? What punishment was so terrible to Cain that it was greater than he could bear? We do know that there will come a time when this sort of a statement will most definitely be true of every single unsaved person in the world who has ever lived. Can you imagine finding yourself before the judgment seat of Christ in an unsaved state? God is now examining you and looking at how you lived your life with all your sin and rebellion against Him—which would be everything you have ever done in thought, word, and deed because you have done it all apart from the glory of God. You have done everything apart from service to God and to Christ; everything was to fulfill your own desires because that is the nature of an unsaved person.

There you are, bearing in yourself multitudes of sins and evil deeds that you have done, and you are guilty above all—there is no question about it. You cannot even open your mouth; the Law of God is condemning you and has closed your mouth and shut it so that you can make no defense for yourself. The light of the glorious Gospel of God Himself is staring you in the face, and God’s brilliant presence is before you. The sentence will be passed upon the deaf and dumb sinner. The punishment will be “Away with you,” and you will be cast into the pit of Hell forevermore. This is an eternal condemnation, an eternal damnation (Mark 3:29), a place where the fire is never quenched (Mark 9:46), where the blackness of darkness lasts forever (Jude 1:13), where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth (Luke 13:28)—to use the language of the Bible. The punishment goes on and on forever without end. There is no escape; there is no way out. There is no pardon or parole, no end of the suffering; it is eternal damnation.

The cry will certainly go up from vast numbers of mankind, if not every single human being standing for judgment, “O God, my punishment is greater than I can bear.” Who can bear an eternal damnation? It almost shook the Lord Jesus Christ to the core of His being. As He was in the garden of Gethsemane, there was a great heaviness that came over Him. It says in the Gospel accounts that He was in agony and He prayed three times that the cup of God’s wrath might depart from Him. However, it could not because it was the will of God. He had to bear the punishment, the wrath of God, that was equivalent to an eternity in Hell for all those He came to save.

He did endure; He did go through the fires of Hell and come out the other side. That was the glorious truth of the Resurrection, the mighty wonder of salvation—that Christ arose from the dead and from the second death of Hell itself. Yet, it definitely shook Him. We read in Hebrews 5:7, “He had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears.” He was crying out to God that the cup might pass from Him because eternal damnation is so terrible.

It is only because Jesus is eternal God that He could withstand the wrath of God to that degree and come out the other side of Hell victorious. No human being, no individual, no sinner ought to expect that they will likewise overcome Hell and come out the other side—it is not possible. No frail, finite, tiny human being is going to escape eternal damnation. They will be subjected to the punishment for their sins, and the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). That death is the second death (Revelation 21:8). They will be subjected to the fulfillment of that punishment, which lasts for a whole eternity. Eternity never comes to an end; it goes on and on and on forever—that is what eternity is. No man will rise from that death. No man will come up out of the pit of Hell.

We can see why man would cry that his punishment is greater than he can bear. He will be crushed again and again under the weight of the wrath of God like a grape in the winepress. As the juice of the grape, the blood of the grape, is pressed out of it, so will man’s blood, his life, be pressed out from within him as God’s heavy hand will bear down upon him (Rev 14:19-20). Our God, who is a consuming fire (Hebrews 12:29), will light a fire that shall burn unto the lowest Hell (Deuteronomy 32:22). It is kindled in His anger and shall never be put out. The Bible says that the fires of Hell will never be quenched (Mark 9:43-48). This is a terrible punishment that is certainly greater than any human being can bear.

This is why the Bible warns us of the judgment to come. This is why God has sent forth His messengers into the world with the Gospel to warn man that this day is coming. Especially in our day, we are warning man that not only is this day coming, but it is coming fast. It is coming quickly, it is right around the corner, and the judge is standing at the door (James 5:9). We are close to the end of the world—the judgment on the church is evidence of this and the beginning of it. The process has begun. The day of the Lord has begun. We are close to Hell itself, to the day when it will be created and man will be cast off.

Now is the time to cry out to God for mercy. Now is the time to beseech the Lord that He might have mercy upon you and save you from your sins. Now is the time—not after God has passed judgment. He says in James 2:13, “He shall have judgment without mercy.” Once the judgment is passed, there can be no going back. There can be no removal of God’s punishment; there can be no removal of the sentence that has been passed upon the sinner. Now is the time to approach unto God, while it is still the day of salvation (2 Corinthians 6:2).

What, though, can we learn spiritually from the context of Genesis 4 as Cain says unto the Lord, “My punishment is greater than I can bear”? We have seen that this account is spiritually dealing with the end of time, because in verse 3 it says that it was “in the end of days” that these things came to pass. It was “in the end of days” that Cain rose up and slew Abel, that Abel’s blood cried unto God from the ground, that God cursed Cain and made him a fugitive and a vagabond a wanderer in the earth, and that the penalty was given that the ground would not yield its strength. We have seen how all these things relate to the church that is typified by Cain, the church that has gone in the way of Cain and that seeks to get right with God through its own works.

Does the church cry out to God that its punishment is greater than it can bear as God’s heavy hand is upon it during the Great Tribulation? Yes, we do find that in Lamentations 4. Lamentations is a book written by Jeremiah that is dealing with the destruction of Judah and Jerusalem by the Babylonians. Spiritually, it is pointing to our day of the Great Tribulation. We read in Lamentations 4:6:

For the punishment of the iniquity of the daughter of my people is greater than the punishment of the sin of Sodom, that was overthrown as in a moment, and no hands stayed on her.

“The punishment of the iniquity of the daughter of my people is greater” as Cain cries out to God, “My punishment is greater than I can bear.” His punishment was a punishment of wandering the earth, of going to and fro. So it is with the church of our day, the corporate body. They are not destroyed in a moment. God is not destroying them on the Last Day as Christ returns (even though that will happen to the whole world), but God has begun a judgment process in which He has removed the Light of Truth from the churches and given them up to Satan himself. They are being plagued and afflicted with all manner of gospels. All kinds of spiritual attacks and assaults by Satan are coming upon them. We can see this as it is described in the book of Revelation where God speaks of different plagues being poured out upon the church.

“The punishment of the iniquity of the daughter of my people is greater than the punishment of the sin of Sodom.” God relates this to Sodom because, historically, they were destroyed as in a moment—fire and brimstone rained down upon them. Yet the church is involved in a drawn-out process of destruction where again and again they are overcome, again and again they are defeated. There is no help for them. There is no Comforter for them (Lamentations 1:16). God is not with them but against them (Jeremiah 21:13). What a terrible, awful punishment it is for the churches!