Remember What You Were Told

For most of this letter Jude has been talking about somebody else. At verse 17 he turns and speaks to the people he is writing to, and he calls them beloved, which is the word he used back in verse 3 when he explained why the letter exists at all. What he asks them for is smaller than anything he has said about the men who crept in.

But you, beloved, remember what was foretold by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ when they said to you, "In the last times there will be scoffers who will follow after their own ungodly desires."

The instruction is remember. Not watch, not investigate, not draw up a list of names, but remember what was foretold. Jude does not summarize the prophecy either. He quotes it, so the family hears the apostles' own sentence rather than his account of what they meant by it, and the sentence they hear says that scoffers were expected.

Which puts the men in the room in a different light. They are not evidence that something has gone wrong. They are the thing the apostles said would come, arriving on time. Being told in advance does not make trouble smaller and it does change what the trouble means, and that change is the whole of what Jude is offering this family here.

These are the ones who cause divisions, who are worldly and devoid of the Spirit.

Three things get said about these men, and the order matters. Divisions come first, and division is the one a family can actually see. Worldly comes second and devoid of the Spirit comes third, and neither of those can be checked from a chair at the table. Jude names the damage the group is already living with, and only then the condition underneath it, which is the order anybody in the room would meet it in anyway.

So the instruction here is a small one and it is not an easy one. Remember what you were told. The people in the middle of the trouble are asked to recall a sentence rather than to produce a response to it.