The Wide Path of Unbelief

If you have your Bible with you, and I hope you do, the book of Jude is where we are this morning.
Back in the fall of 1999, I was in Grand Rapids, so this is 24 years ago,
in Grand Rapids, Michigan for a weekend. I was there as one of the speakers at a marriage event,
and I knew that the event was going to be over on Saturday night. I would not be able to get a...
flight home after the event was over, so I would spend the night in Grand Rapids. And often when I
do that, if I'm in a city and I can't get a flight out on Saturday night and be home here, I will
book my flight for Sunday afternoon so that I can get up and go to church in whatever city I'm in
and just have the chance to see how God's people worship in other places, worship together with
other brothers and sisters. And so I was going to be in Grand Rapids looking for a place where I
could go and worship. I called a friend of mine and said, hey, is there a place you would recommend
I check out? And he said, well, actually, there's a new church that has just gotten started down in
Grandview, Michigan. or excuse me, Granville, Michigan, just south of Grand Rapids. And he said
it's in an old strip mall, and like a Steinmart or something that had been abandoned,
they turned it into a church. Now, this is what it looked like. It was in the round. So the...
Podium was in the middle. The preacher was in the round. There were kind of the jumbotrons up above
there, and they projected what was going on up on the jumbotron. And so I woke up on Sunday
morning. I dressed. pretty much like this, khakis and a sport shirt, and wound up at church.
And I'm thinking Grand Rapids is pretty conservative. I wonder if I will be underdressed. And I
walked into this church, and I was the most overdressed person in this church. I mean, these were
people in T-shirts and shorts, and they were coming out for the weekend, and they were chill,
and it was fine. There were 2,500 people. It was a big church. It was new,
but it was exploding. And I remember the music that morning was pretty sparse.
I think it was a guitar player and a cellist was all they had. And they did three or four songs.
I don't think I knew any of them. And then after they were done, this guy gets up.
He was dressed in black jeans and a black shirt and had Buddy Holly glasses and spiked bleached
hair. And I thought, this is the guy who's going to give the announcements. And he got up and he
said, turn in your Bible. And I went, oh, he's the pastor. This was 1999 when there weren't a lot
of pastors dressing like this guy, right? So he said, turn in your Bibles to Ephesians.
And I remember I opened to Ephesians. And he got right into it and gave a solid orthodox message
from Ephesians chapter 3 that he was a great communicator. And it was a solid message.
And at the end, he closed in prayer. And when he said amen,
I mean, it was like amen was like everybody got up and he was saying,
here are some announcements. But everybody had tuned him out at that point. And I got out of that
morning and I called Mary Ann before I flew home and I said, I have seen the future.
Because I really felt like I had stepped, again, 99, not a whole lot of this. I'd stepped into this
big church, casual folks. and a pastor who looked super hip,
and I was amazed. So this is the guy. His name is Rob Bell.
Rob was a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary. He graduated in 1995. He began his ministry as
the youth pastor at Calvary Church in Grand Rapids, which was a conservative, I think a Baptist
church. He started the church that I went to, Mars Hill, earlier. the same year so they had 2,500
people and it was in their first year the first morning they had their first service they had a
thousand people show up so something was happening in fact two years later Mars Hill was the
fastest growing church in America with 10,000 people coming on Sunday morning a year after that
Rob released a series of short films, five of them, that were creative parables about God and life
and faith, called them NUMA. Some of you saw these when you were in youth group back in the day.
They were really super creative and well done and people loved them.
They were a best seller. And then in 2003, Mars Hill took a controversial step when they added a
woman to the eldership. And people started going, okay, what's going on here?
2005, Rob purchased a book called Velvet Elvis, Repainting the Christian Faith.
Now, when somebody wants to repaint the Christian faith, you need to ask, what's wrong with the
current colors? And the idea was they were out of date. And this book famously,
in the book, he compared the Christian faith to a trampoline. And he said,
you know how trampoline, you got the platform and it's held up by all these springs. He said, well,
let me ask you a question. He said, if you unhooked one of the springs with the trampoline, could
you no longer jump on the trampoline? In fact, here's what he said. He said, what if the spring
that you unhooked, the virgin birth, was seriously questioned? Can a person keep on jumping?
Can a person still love God? Can you still be a Christian? Is the way of Jesus still the best
possible way to live or does the whole thing fall apart? And if the whole thing falls apart, if we
re-examine and rethink one spring, it wasn't that strong in the first place, was it?
You see where this is going?
How many springs can you undo before the trampoline doesn't work anymore?
By 2007, the church report in America named Rob Bell is the 10th most influential Christian in
America.
Time Magazine interviewed him. 2011, he published a book called Love Wins, and this is where he
began to defend the idea that what's called universalism, that all of us when we die will go to
heaven. Everybody will. He started to question whether there is a hell,
and it caused a firestorm of controversy, including a tweet that came from John Piper,
who tweeted, Farewell, Rob Bell.
Time Magazine featured his book and called him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
In 2011, Rob left the church he had founded to pursue a film and TV.
a project that he wanted to work on with Carlton Cuse, who was a part of the team that came up with
Lost. So he moved to Hollywood to work on a TV and film project. In 2012,
he announced his support for same-sex relationships in a book that he wrote called What We Talk
About When We Talk About God. He also connected during that time with Oprah,
and she branded him as her favorite spiritual mentor. and started having regular conversations with
Rob about faith and spirituality and putting that on her channel. Let me show you a couple of
clips. Here is Oprah introducing Rob to her viewers.
I love that you say that for many people, faith and doubt are opposites, but...
They really are excellent dance partners.
Even though Rob has always been a man of great faith, after turning 30, he started to question what
he'd been taught his whole life, to accept the Bible word for word. He immersed himself in biblical
history, drawing inspiration from Jewish rabbinical scholars whose faith was actually strengthened
by questioning. Rob felt empowered to embrace his doubts head on, and he gained the confidence he
needed to make a leap of faith. Okay, so Rob's leap of faith is a leap away from what he'd been
taught all his life about God and the Bible towards something else. That's his leap of faith.
And so where does that leap of faith take him? Where does he land? Well, he and Oprah describe how
they understand God. Oprah says God is the all. So watch this clip.
My definition of God is the all, the all in the all. Through the all, above the all,
in the all. And then you on page 18 basically say the same thing. I understand God to be the...
These are your words. The energy, the glue, the force, the life, the power, the source of all we
know to be. The depth, the fullness, vitality of life from the highest of the highs to the lowest
of the lows and everything in between. I think that's the all. Yeah,
exactly. Yeah, exactly.
Okay, so... Rob and Oprah are now on the same page in their understanding about God. And, you know,
here in that definition that she read from him, some of that stuff is right and true. Some of that
stuff is just the energy, the glue, the force. Those are not Bible terms for God.
He gets that from his own imagination, from his own thought of what seems right to him.
Oprah, when she's coming up with her definition of God, doesn't say, where is a source that I can
go to to find what God is like? She says, what do I think God is like? I think he's the all.
Now, this morning's sermon is not about Rob Bell. I bring him up because he is,
actually he's kind of old news at this point, although he has a new book that has just come out
called Where Do You Park My Spaceship, which is a work of fiction described as a galactic saga of
struggle and survival, an interplanetary tale of love, loss, and bread. It's book one of Where Do
You Park Your Spaceship series.
But this is not about him. Rob is a case study for us.
in a phenomenon that's being described in the book of Jude, a phenomenon of people who are being
led in the wrong direction by false teachers who are taking them in the wrong direction.
It's the phenomenon we saw last week when we started Jude looking at how... teachers will creep
into the church unaware. They look like they're solid. They don't stand out as false teachers when
you see them. But over time, they begin to pervert the grace of God and lead people away from the
faith once delivered for the saints. And it's happening all over the place.
One of my burdens for spending time in this book is the number of people I am seeing in...
our day in this generation, who are being drawn out,
who are being pulled away from the faith, the voices that are saying, you need to question that,
you need to challenge that. Now, I have nothing wrong with questioning or challenging matters of
faith. It's a good thing to pressure test your faith.
But when you start hearing other voices who are saying, well, what if this is true? What if that's
true? And they're taking you outside the Bible, as Rob is doing. then you need to,
there needs to be an alarm system in you that goes off that says, time out, danger, Will Robinson.
All of this begins in the same place. Here's the issue. In our day,
we're seeing an epidemic of the authority of experience replacing the authority of God's word.
Let me say that again. Because that's at the heart of what every false teacher is doing. Every
false teacher, he or she is elevating your personal experience, your wisdom,
your intuition, your thoughts, your sense of what's right and wrong. That becomes the ultimate
arbiter of truth. And the Bible is supposed to conform to that rather than the Bible being the
source of authority and truth. And your thoughts, opinions, feelings, experiences conforming to
what the Bible teaches. That's the fundamental issue that's at the heart of all false teaching.
What's your source of authority? Is it God's word and everything comes under that?
Or is it something else and the Bible comes under that?
Instead of aligning our thinking and values with scripture today, we're looking at people who are
trying to align scripture to fit. their thinking, and their values. What we saw last week,
and you can be sure that those who are creeping into the church, leading people away from the
scriptures, there is a destination for them, Jude says. It is a destination of destruction.
They were long ago designated for condemnation. God's going to judge them. And in the verses we'll
look at this morning, Jude is going to give us three biblical historical examples from scripture
that deal with how false teachers were dealt with by God. Three examples of God bringing judgment
on those who wander away from the truth of his word. He's warning his readers that they need to
guard their own souls against being seduced by false teachers and wind up being ultimately
shipwrecked spiritually in the process. I think Tom Schreiner, the professor at...
Southern Seminary gets this exactly right when he says Jude's main point in these verses is clear.
He says no person in the believing community can presume on God's grace thinking that an initial
decision to follow Christ or baptism ensures their future salvation regardless of how they respond
to the intruders.
Now, you may read that and the question may come to mind and go, wait, can somebody who is a true
believer, a true follower of Christ be deceived and led astray and wind up facing God's judgment?
Well, we're going to look at this passage and see what it says about that. And that's one of the
questions we'll wrestle with this morning. Jude, beginning at verse 5, we're going to look at
verses 5, 6, and 7. Before we read these verses together, let me pray again.
Father, we need you.
To be our teacher this morning, we need you to be the one who opens our hearts to hear the truth of
your word. Lord, I pray that I would be a vessel of that.
I pray that anything that I say that is out of line with your word would be quickly forgotten.
Lord, I pray that your word would penetrate our hearts deeply and you would form and fashion us
into the likeness of your son. I ask it in Jesus' name.
Jude, beginning at verse 5, follow along as I read. The Bible says,
now I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus,
who saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe.
And the angels... did not stay within their own position of authority but left their proper
dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day.
Just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality
and pursued unnatural desire, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.
We'll stop there. Amen. May God add his blessing to this reading of his word. The grass withers,
the flower fades, but the word of God lasts forever. So in these three verses,
Jude gives us an example of God bringing judgment on those who started off in the right direction.
Children of Israel, the angels, Sodom and Gomorrah, they started in the wrong direction, but they
wound up shipwrecked and were not allowed. In verse five, well, let me go through just how this.
Verse 5 talks about the liberated Jews who came out of Egypt. Verse 5 says,
because they did not believe, the result was they were not allowed to enter the promised land.
That was the judgment that God brought on them. And then verse 6 says,
there were angels who rebelled against God's authority over them. They left their proper dwelling
place. This is a bit cryptic, by the way. We'll see it's most likely a reference to something that
happened in Genesis 6 when the Bible says the sons of God married the daughters of men.
But they rejected God's authority over them. They chose autonomy and self-governance. Their
judgment was that they're being kept in eternal chains. in gloomy darkness. And then the final
group facing God's judgment are people of Sodom and Gomorrah. Verse seven says they indulged in
immorality and unnatural desire. They chose obedience to passion over obedience to God and his
word. And as a result, they face a punishment of eternal fire. So that's kind of the summary.
Here's what they did and here's the consequence for that. Now this morning, we're gonna focus just
on the children of Israel on verse five. And next Sunday we'll talk about the angels who left their
habitation and the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. And just as a heads up, as we look at these verses
next week, I want to talk about how rebellion against God's design for gender and sexuality,
which are wrapped up in those verses, is a leading-edge issue in our current day and how it's
causing the shipwreck of faithful followers of Christ who are being led astray by...
wrong teaching, false teaching about issues related to gender and sexuality.
But that's next week. This morning, verse 5 is going to be our focus. And this is all about what
happened during the Exodus. So here's what we'll see this morning. We're going to look at the
history of what happened during the Exodus. We'll see how the Exodus is a metaphor for salvation.
We're going to address the question, can saved people be led astray?
Can they fall away? We're going to put all of this in the context of false teachers and what they
teach and look at the implications for us. Okay? So here we go. Before we dive into this,
though, I want to go back to how verse 5 starts. Look at verse 5. It starts with, now I want to
remind you, although you once fully knew it. So he's starting by saying, I want to remind you of
something. Here's what strikes me about that. Jude is apparently writing to Jewish Christians.
He's assuming they have an understanding of these three stories because he doesn't go into a whole
lot of detail. He assumes they know about the Exodus and what happened. They know about the fallen
angels and what happened. They know about Sodom and Gomorrah and what happened. And so he brings up
these events, but not a lot of elaboration. He's also assuming that...
though they knew these things, somehow they've forgotten things they knew because they were
forgetful people like you and like me.
Who has had the experience of getting up to walk into another room,
arriving in the other room, and not remembering what you went into that room for?
Yes, you've had that experience. For you young people who haven't had it, it's coming. And it's
coming with more frequency. We are forgetful people. It's easy for us to forget things.
When it comes to the things of God, his greatness, my sin,
his promises, what's true about him, what's true about me, what's not true, we forget these things
throughout the day, every day, as we're going through our life. The psalmist,
we sang this morning, bless the Lord, O my soul. All that is within me, bless his holy name.
Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.
Moses in the Exodus had to warn God's people not to forget God and his commandments.
Deuteronomy 6, here's what Moses said to the people. He said, when the Lord your God brings you
into the land that he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to give to you, with
great and good cities that you did not build, houses full of good things that you did not fill,
cisterns that you did not dig, vineyards and olive trees that you did not plant. When you eat and
when you're full, take care lest you forget the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
out of the house of slavery. God knows as soon as things are going good, we have a tendency to just
forget God and his blessings. that we have these blessings from his hand.
We begin to think this is how it's supposed to be. I have these blessings because I deserve them,
because I earned them, because I accomplished these things.
And Moses is telling God's people, when you get there and you start to experience blessing,
don't forget God. Now think, these are the people. who had been slaves in Egypt.
It wasn't that long ago that it was more bricks, less straw. They were crying out,
asking God for deliverance. God miraculously delivers them. He sends Moses. They see the plagues.
They experience the Passover on that night when their children are spared and the other baby boys
are killed. They saw the Red Sea part. They saw their enemies. collapsed into the sea.
They saw the provision of manna and quail in the wilderness. They saw a cloud leading them by day,
a pillar of fire at night. They saw water come from the rock when they were thirsty in the desert.
The list goes on. How could these people forget God
after all he'd done for them?
Later in Deuteronomy 8, Moses drives this point home a little more forcefully. In fact, if you have
your Bible, turn to Deuteronomy 8. You need to maybe... this as you're reading through it. This is
a long passage, but it's good for us to just spend a few minutes remembering this this morning.
Deuteronomy 8, beginning at verse 11.
Take care lest you forget the Lord your God by not keeping his commandments and his rules and his
statutes which I command you today. Lest when you have eaten and are full and have built good
houses and live in them, when your herds and flocks multiply and your silver and gold is multiplied
and all that you have is multiplied, then your heart will be lifted up. You will forget the Lord
your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, who led you through
the great and terrifying wilderness with its fiery serpents and scorpions, its thirsty...
where there was no water who brought you water out of the flinty rock who fed you in the wilderness
with manna that your fathers did not know that he might humble you and test you and do you good in
the end beware lest you say in your heart my power and my might my hand have gotten me this wealth
you shall remember the Lord your God for it is he who gives you the power to get wealth He may
confirm his covenant that he swore to your fathers as it is in this day. And if you forget the Lord
your God and go after other gods and serve them and worship them, I solemnly warn you today that
you will surely perish. Like the nations that the Lord makes to perish before you, so shall you
perish because you would not obey the voice of the Lord your God. What Moses is warning the Jews
about in the wilderness in Israel is what Jude says is happening. In his day,
they've forgotten God, they've followed other gods, they're going in another direction.
Same thing happens to us. Like I said, we get forgetful. When we face challenging circumstances,
it is so easy for us to forget God's goodness, his care, his mercy,
his promises, his love. to know that he's with us, that whatever we're facing, he'll go through it
with us. It's easy to be frightened by what you're experiencing. It's easy in times of prosperity
to forget the goodness of God and think, I deserve this, I'm entitled to this,
I earned this.
When we face those circumstances or when we go through the normal experiences of life,
we can go through day after day just forgetting all about God, not... not entertaining a thought
about him. He's our spare tire God. If we get in a jam, we can go get the spare tire,
but for the most part, we're fine. Jude says,
I want to remind you of things I know you already know because it looks to me like some of you have
started to forget these things.
Sometimes when you come here on a Sunday morning and hear a sermon, some of you are learning new
things, gaining new insights into the scriptures, and I... trust most Sundays when we're going
through a text, the Holy Spirit is even showing you things that have nothing to do with what I'm
saying as you go through this because that's the work of the Spirit here. I present the Word.
The Spirit is the one who opens your eyes to see things that might have nothing to do with anything
I said up here, but that's the divine empowerment of the work of the Spirit. But a lot of Sundays,
you come and you hear things and you say, I've heard that before. I know that. It's a reminder of
things you already know because you need to be reminded. Because I need to be reminded. I love the
little phrase that you find in the middle of Lamentations chapter 3, you know,
where the writer is talking about afflictions and wandering and wormwood and gall. I don't even
know what those are, but I don't want any of them. Okay. The writer says, I'm troubled.
My soul is bowed down within me. I get depressed. I lose hope. And then he says, but I will call
this to mind.
I will remember what I need to remember. I will, as an act of my will,
call to mind what I need my heart to dwell on. When my heart is anxious,
I can either choose to follow the anxiety or I can call to mind what is true. I can speak to my
soul.
David in the Psalms. Why are you so downcast, O my soul? Here's what you need to do.
Put your hope in God.
I will call these things to mind. And what does he call to mind? The steadfast love of the Lord
never ceases. His mercies never come to an end. They're new every morning. Great is your
faithfulness. In the midst of my adversity, I will rehearse what I know to be true.
I will call it to mind. You are easy prey for a false teacher and for false teaching if you are not
remembering and calling to mind the promises of God and his goodness. If that's not the pattern of
your life, you are a sitting duck for the false teachers. That's what happened for the children of
Israel in the wilderness. They forgot the character and promises of God. They began to doubt him.
They moved from belief to unbelief. There's a specific manifestation of this unbelief that is where
God brings judgment on the Jews in the promised land. So let's move to that. Let's talk about what
happened when God led his people out of Egypt to enter the promised land.
but they were kept out because of this act of unbelief. This is a story from Numbers 13 and 14.
Go ahead and turn there. We're not going to read it all because it would take too long, but I'll
summarize the story. But there are a few passages in Numbers 13 and 14 I want you to see.
So God has brought his people out of Egypt. He's brought them to the edge of the promised land, the
land of Canaan. Of course, the problem with Canaan is that Canaan is full of Canaanites.
And so they're standing there. They're supposed to take the land. In order to take the land,
they're going to have to go in and defeat the Canaanites who are there, wipe them out completely.
God says, the Canaanites are wicked. They're an abomination to me. I want you to utterly destroy
them. You're going to have to go in and take them. So in Numbers 13, God tells Moses, I want you to
send spies into the land because we're getting ready for battle and you need to have your battle
plan put together. So verse 1, the Lord spoke to Moses saying, send men to spy out the land of
Canaan,
Now notice in these verses, here's why I wanted to read that. Send men to spy out the land.
What's the next line? Which I am giving to the people.
That's the promise. I want you to send in spies to get this. I'm going to give you this land.
Why are we sending spies? Why do we have to do this? Why don't you? Because it's my plan that you
go in and conquer the land, but I'm going to give it to you. Go in, plot your course,
but you're going to get the land. You will win the victory. Now, you probably know the story.
Twelve spies went into the land. They came back out. They spent 40 days surveying everything.
They come back out, and they come back. The report is the land is great.
Milk and honey, there's fruit, but there are two problems. The people are big and strong and the
cities are fortified. In fact, the people are so big and strong that we feel like grasshoppers in
front of them. But one of the spies who had gone in says, yeah,
they're big, they're strong, and their cities are fortified. God has promised the land, we will
defeat them. They go, I don't know, they're big, they're strong, their cities are fortified.
And then they start to go, why has God done all of this to us? He brings us here and they're big
and they're strong. Numbers 14, verse 2. They grumbled against Moses and said,
would that we had died in the land of Egypt or that we had died in this wilderness. Why is the Lord
bringing us into this land to fall by the sword? Our wives and our little ones will become prey.
Would it not be better for us to go back to Egypt? And they said to one another, let us choose a
leader and go back to Egypt.
These whiners have forgotten that God said, I'm going to give you the land.
Yes, there's going to be a battle.
But Caleb, joined by Joshua in chapter 14, verse 8,
says, If the Lord delights in us, he will bring us into this land and will give it to us, a land
that flows with milk and honey. Only do not rebel against the Lord and do not fear the people of
the land for they're bred for us. Their protection is removed from them and the Lord is with us.
Do not fear them. In other words, didn't you hear God say he's going to give us the land? So at
this point, God looks at the unbelief of these people and the whining that comes from their
unbelief. And he says, I'm going to wipe them out. And Moses intercedes.
And finally, God says in verse 20 of Numbers 14, I have pardoned according to your word,
but truly as I live and as all the earth shall be filled with the glory of the Lord,
none of the men who have seen my glory and my signs that I did in Egypt and in the wilderness and
have yet put me to the test these 10 times and have not obeyed my voice, none of them shall see the
land that I swore to give to their fathers and none of those who despised me shall see it, but my
servant Caleb because he... a different spirit and has followed me fully I will bring into the land
into which he went and his descendants he and his descendants shall possess it so that's the story
this is why the children of Israel wandered in the wilderness for 40 years instead of going into
the promised land because God said I'm going to give you the land and they said but they're big and
they lost faith they melted in their unbelief and God brought judgment on it Now,
here's the thing about that story. On one level, it's a history lesson. This is what happened to
these people. God rescued them. They whined and they complained. Ultimately, because of their
unbelief, they were judged as unworthy to enter the promised land. Only Caleb and Joshua,
who believed God, were allowed to live and to enter. But on another level, this story of being kept
out of the promised land, like a lot of Old Testament stories, is a metaphor. It's a type.
That's the word for it. Theologians talk about stories in the Bible that are types.
They are stories of what happened, but they're there to point you to a bigger truth.
Some examples of a type. When Abraham takes his son up on the mountain to sacrifice his son and
he's about to kill him and God provides a ram in the thicket and there's a substitute for the son,
that's a picture. That's a metaphor. That's a type of something else, of God providing a substitute
for sin. Or Joseph, who rescues his brothers from the famine.
Remember, his brothers had thought they'd killed him. They'd left him for dead. He winds up in
Egypt. He rises to a place of authority. Then when the famine comes, his brothers come down to
Egypt, say, we need food, and he rescues them and delivers them. So that's a picture,
that's a type of someone else who God is going to send, who his brothers will kill and toss away,
but who will eventually rise up to bring deliverance. You see how these types work?
So the Old Testament's loaded with these kinds of types, these spiritual living parables.
One of the biggest types in the Old Testament is what we're looking at here. When God leads people
out of bondage and slavery in Egypt, and takes them through the wilderness into the promised land.
So that's a picture of God delivering you for bondage to slavery and sin, taking you into the
wilderness of this life, and one day taking you into the promised land to live with him.
It's your justification, your sanctification, your glorification. That's what the whole exodus from
Egypt. God sends Moses, who is a type of the deliverer. He leads people out of bondage.
He leads them through the wilderness and brings them home to the promised land.
As it is in salvation, when you're saved, you go on a journey before you get to the promised land.
You're in that journey now. This life is your time in the wilderness. This is our wilderness
period. That's our journey of sanctification. It's a long and hard journey. We stumble,
we fall, we whine, we complain. But we can see, we keep our eyes fixed on the land God has promised
to us. And that's what Jude wants us to see when he brings the story of the Exodus. There's danger.
We need to be alert as we wander in the wilderness before we get to the promised land. And we need
to avoid lapsing into unbelief. Now, just let me make a side observation here.
Jude says that it was Jesus who delivered the people. Did you notice that in verse 5? Jesus
delivered them from Egypt. And Jesus is the one who will ultimately destroy those who do not
believe. Jude understands and wants us to realize. Jude's recognizing the guy who was my half
-brother who I grew up with. He was there in the Exodus. He was working in concert with God in this
deliverance. He was working as a rescuer and redeemer even then. Pretty remarkable realization for
Jude to make about the half-brother he grew up with. Now,
if the story of the Exodus is a picture of our salvation, Jesus leading us out of bondage into the
wilderness toward the promised land, there are a couple of questions that come up, like, Can a
person who has been let out of bondage and is in the wilderness fall into unbelief and not make it
to the promised land?
Can that person ultimately be excluded? Somebody who was brought out of bondage, can that person be
ultimately excluded from the promised land? We're going to spend a little time here. I'll give you
the answer first. And then I'll give you the caveats on the answer. The answer is, if you're a
genuinely converted follower of Jesus, a child of God, you are eternally secure in him.
If you've been brought into the family of God, that can't be revoked. God does not kick his kids
out of the house. Nothing can separate you from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus.
He will get you home. He'll get you across the river into the promised land. This is sometimes
referred to as the doctrine of eternal security. It's what the Bible teaches. Some people will
refer to it as once saved, always saved. Maybe you've heard that. And it's true,
but you need to be careful how you think about that. Because some people, when they say once saved,
always saved, what they hear is that if you, in a moment, make a sincere profession of faith in
Christ, and you mean it in the moment, and you wake up the next morning and go, I don't know what I
was thinking last night when I prayed that prayer. That was crazy. I don't believe that.
I don't know what was going on. And then you live the rest of your life in ongoing denial and
unbelief. There are some people who think, well, if you were sincere when you prayed that prayer,
that's all that really matters.
And I would say to those people, the Bible says the heart is deceitful and desperately wicked. Who
can know it? Who knows about the level of your sincerity in that moment?
If you want to know if a person is saved, I think it was Spurgeon who said it this way,
if you want to know if a person is alive, you don't go back and say, tell me about your birthday.
You take their vital signs now to know if they're alive. You had a birthday.
But a person who is alive in Christ is going to show that they're alive in Christ by being alive
today, in the moment. They're going to be faithful. I know people who have relatives who have lived
immoral, godless lives. denying Christ, nothing to do with him. But they say, but I know he'll be
in heaven because when he was six, he walked that aisle and prayed that prayer. If that's what you
mean by once saved, always saved, I'm here to tell you there are big theological problems with
that. The Bible has a problem with that. The story Jude is referencing here is a problem with that.
So instead of talking about once saved, always saved, I prefer to talk about what's called the
perseverance of the saints, which is if God is truly at work in you, you will stumble your way
through, but you will persevere. You'll get back up and start walking in the right direction again,
even when you fall down. If God's really done a work in your heart, bringing you to an awareness of
your sin. causing you to be born again, if he's brought you from death to life, if he's brought you
out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of his marvelous light, he will keep you safe on
the journey as you follow him. He who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it.
How can you know if that's real in you? How can you know if God's done that good work?
How can you know if you're really trusting him, if you're really following him? Not perfectly, but
consistently. Well, here's the first thing I will tell you. The fact that you're concerned about
the question is a good indicator because people who aren't saved aren't concerned about whether
they're saved or not.
So most of the time, if you're asking the question, I wonder if I'm really saved, that's an
indicator that God's doing something in your heart and life.
But I will also say that a true believer can have an extended season of doubt,
a period of hard-hearted unbelief, a season of unrepentant immorality.
I've seen this in my own lifetime, my own experience. It can happen, but if that person who is in
the desert is truly a child of God, God will wake them up in the desert and bring them out.
When? I don't know. How long will they be? I don't know. If they're a child of God, God's going to
do that work. He will send the hound of heaven after them and rescue them from the pit they're in.
God always comes after his lost sheep.
So what's going to happen with Rob Bell? I don't know.
Is Rob Bell in the desert? I don't know. What I can tell you right now is Rob Bell is a false
teacher, but I don't know what his eternal state is. And you know what? I don't have to know. It's
not my business, not my job. God will take care of that.
If a person who once seemed to be faithfully following Christ is now off in the wilderness
spiritually, rather than trying to say, well, I wonder if they're really saved or not, leave that
to God. You just share the gospel with them because that's what they need. You say,
well, what if they're a believer? They need to remember the gospel. What if they're really a child
of God? They need to be reminded of the gospel.
That's what you share with them. If the person was never truly converted in the first place, they
need to hear the gospel. So share the gospel with them.
If you see somebody who was once at church and is no longer interested, you can't know whether that
person is a genuine child of God in the desert or somebody who was never really a child of God in
the first place. Whichever it is, take them the gospel.
Both the person who was never really a part of God's family and the person who's gotten off the
track, they're both lost and they both need to hear the good news. So the...
question that comes up for a lot of us is, what about me? How can I know about me if my profession
of faith is real? Like I said, if you're worried about it, that's a good sign. Then I'd say, what
path do you find yourself on every day? Are you pursuing Jesus? Are you growing in an understanding
and knowledge of his word? Are you hungering and thirsting to know him more? Do you see spiritual
fruit in your life? Is he changing your heart? Is he helping you grow in grace? Are the fruit of
the Spirit present in your life? Is there growing humility? Are there other people you can go to
who would say, you're not the same person you were five years ago. I see God at work in you
spiritually. If that's the case, even if you're stumbling, you're on the right path. Keep going.
And trust God to get you home. Dick Lucas, the British pastor, is right when he says,
there are people in our churches today who look and sound like the people of God but who will not
be saved on the last day because they rebel against God's promises and rule. Do you rebel against
God's promises and rule or do you delight in them?
God says, follow me. The Bible has a clear warning for all of us with regard to this.
In fact, Paul, looking at the same Exodus story in 1 Corinthians 10,
I want you to turn there because this is worth looking at. It's another long passage, but we ought
to spend time just reading through it. 1 Corinthians 10, beginning at verse 1. This is a warning to
those in the church, because Paul doesn't know if those in the church, how many of them are
believers or unbelievers. The wheat and the weeds grow up together. We don't know who they are.
But here's what he says, verse 1. For I do not want you to be unaware, brothers. that our fathers
were all under the cloud, all passed through the sea, were all baptized into Moses and the cloud
and in the sea, all ate the same spiritual food and drank from the same spiritual drink.
They drank from the spiritual rock that followed them. The rock was Christ. Again, Paul says, that
was Jesus back there in the Exodus. Nevertheless, with most of them, God was not pleased, for they
were overthrown in the wilderness. Now these things took place as examples for us that we might not
desire evil as they did. Don't be idolaters as some of them were, as it's written, the people sat
down to eat and drink and rose up to play. We must not indulge in sexual immorality as some of them
did. 23,000 fell in a single day. We must not put Christ to the test as some of them did and were
destroyed by the serpents, nor grumble as some of them did and were destroyed by the destroyer.
These things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction on whom
the end of the ages has come. Therefore, let anyone who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall.
It's a warning to us to make sure we stay pursuing, that we persevere in the profession of faith we
first made. Tom Schreiner again says, the Israelites destroyed in the wilderness probably believed
they were truly part of God's people. Their disobedience demonstrated otherwise. Similarly,
Some in Jude's community may have thought they were genuinely part of God's people, but Jude
insisted that their continued faithfulness was the only way to demonstrate it. You want to know if
you're a child of God? Stay faithful. Keep walking. Keep pursuing Jesus. Imperfectly,
but keep pursuing. If you're able to live a persistent, unrepentant,
uncaring... disobedience toward God's word, if that's how you're able to live, doing things you
know you shouldn't be doing, living life, making choices you know you shouldn't be making, not
caring at all, hardening your heart toward God, no matter how many other good things you're doing,
you're in spiritual danger. You need to ask God to show you if you're truly his child.
Now, keep in mind, and I'll wrap this up quickly. I know we've spent a lot of time here, but this
is so important. Jude's letter is about being careful not to be led astray by false teachers who
have crept into the church. When the Israelites were in the wilderness, when they were judged, who
were the false teachers in that setting? Well, the spies who came back from the land and gave the
report, they're big and we can't beat them, were false teachers. They were telling everybody.
else something that wasn't true. They were saying, we know what God says, but we don't think it's
true. We know God said he'll give us the land, but those people, they were false teachers. They
were not pointing people in the direction of faith in God. They were saying, trust us. Trust our
insight. Trust our wisdom, our observations. Trust the science.
We know what's true here.
I said this at the beginning of the message, but I'll say it again. We have to have our antenna up.
in this day for people who are elevating their experience above the word of God as a source of
truth.
People who are saying, listen to your heart, look to your story, listen to that voice inside you,
follow your own passions and your desires, follow your heart, listen carefully. It's not your
thoughts and feelings and experience that matters.
It's not that they're completely irrelevant.
Your brain and your emotions have been given to you by God for a purpose, but they're not ultimate.
False teachers in our day want you to put your faith in you, what seems right to you.
They'll lead you away from God toward unbelief. If they do that, they'll say, you know what?
Don't get so hung up on the Bible. Test the teachers. Test me.
When you hear somebody telling you this is what God said, you should test that. The Bereans did.
You need to do that too. I'll give you one more illustration here. Some of you know the name Joshua
Harris. I met Joshua when he was 19 years old. He had written a book called I Kissed Dating
Goodbye, a huge bestseller back in 1997. That's the book. That's Joshua.
He was a pastor for more than a decade when he went to seminary. And then after being in seminary,
he... Came out and announced that he and his wife, Shannon, were getting a divorce and that he no
longer believed what he had been teaching, what he claimed to believe, what he taught. Just a few
weeks ago, his ex-wife, Shannon, released a memoir, a book called The Women They Wanted,
and talks about her experience as Josh's wife, as a pastor's wife, and how it messed her up really
badly. And by the way, a lot of what she went through was wrong and harmful and sinful and did mess
her up. My heart breaks for what she went through. They went through a ton, both of them.
Josh and Shannon both went through a ton of church hurt, and it was stuff that was clearly wrong.
But I want you to hear what Shannon is saying in her book. She's telling readers that, she says,
we need to rethink Genesis 3. Maybe we should see Eve as being brave,
a woman who took initiative.
Here's the quote. What if Eve did exactly right by taking the fruit? What if she was supposed to
have wisdom?
She says that today she's learning to trust her own intuition, her own inner voice, her heart, her
wisdom, instead of following what all those Christians around her were telling her to do. That's
the pattern in our day. People who experience hurt and pain, they've been sinned against, they've
been wronged. I think Josh and Shannon were. Instead of clinging to God and holding on for dear
life and publicly, they publicly celebrate their freedom. They find this new life of unbelief and
call for us to come join them in their journey. I will tell you where their path will take them,
to destruction.
I'll close with this, my last word for you on this verse this morning. Every day you and I are at a
crossroads. Every day we have to decide what path are we going to follow. We're going to follow the
path Jesus is calling us to follow, the one he's pointing us to. They call it the narrow way, the
way, the truth, the life. Or are you going to follow the path that the culture is telling you to
follow? Here, you'll find what you're looking for here. You'll find signs all over our state
highways as you're out driving that look like this. Signs that say, do not enter wrong way.
Because if you go on those roads the wrong way, you will hit something head on and it will not go
well for you.
The Bible says in Proverbs 14, 12, there is a way that seems right to a man.
The end thereof is death. Destruction. The false teachers,
the people who point us away from trusting in God and his promises, point us to celebrate unbelief,
to celebrate doubt, to embrace it. It's a good thing. They are leading you on a path of
destruction, pointing you in the wrong direction. That's the warning Jude has for us in this verse,
and it's a warning I think we need to take to heart in our day. Let me pray. Father,
these are sober things for us to think about in our day.
We want to be people whose lives are marked by grace and kindness and mercy, empathy,
concern and caring for those who have been hurt and harmed, who've had evil done to them.
But Lord, we need wisdom to be protected against unbelief.
We confess that apart from your grace, we would lapse into unbelief easily.
And even with your grace, we are tempted.
So Lord, give us strength, we pray. to follow hard after you.
And when we veer in the wrong direction, Lord, bring us back home until that day when we cross into
the promised land. We pray these things in Jesus' name.