Jude 24-25
If you happen to close your Bibles, you can open them back up to Jude in just a very brief introduction to the book of Jude. It was written in a time really not too dissimilar to our own time. As Reuben read it, you could probably pick out many cultural things that seem to align with the times that we are living in. The gospel had great success for decades, but then false teachers infiltrated and began drawing people away from the pure gospel once for all delivered by the apostles.
People were in danger of being led away and devoured by wolves in sheep’s clothing. People were both being led away and falling away from the true faith, and Jude wanted to address this. He wanted to write to them just concerning their common faith. But this was a real concern for him, a real threat to all of them. He wanted to warn his listeners, to hold fast to what they had been taught, to snatch others who had stumbled into sin, snatch their souls back from the brink. He wanted them to hold to what was taught by the apostles, to keep themselves in the love of God, verse 21.
He wanted them to be on guard against falling into error and maybe ultimately apostasy and forsaking the true faith. This is really something that we all need to consider and be on guard against. We all must take heed lest we stumble, as Paul’s told the Corinthians, in 1 Corinthians 10:12. This is really what the Puritans called the practice of watchfulness, or they called it a spiritual discipline, to examine their own hearts.
Paul exhorted Timothy to do just that when he told him to watch your life and doctrine closely, because things can creep into our own heart, our own mind, our own life, and we have to watch our life and our doctrine closely. The bulk of the book of Jude is a dire warning to believers to look out for false teachers; it’s a dire warning against false teachers.
But what we’re looking at tonight is just the end of the book, that provides one of the greatest comforts for those who live in an age of a rebellion and apostasy. It’s the doxology of the book, which often times we can get to the end of the epistles of Paul or any of the other books, and the end matters. We just kind of brush right past them, but especially in this book, I think a lot of people don’t do that. They stop because this is one of the most encouraging truths, wonderful truths that we have in the Word.
When there are threats everywhere to draw us away from Christ, we have the wonderful hope of Jude 24 and 25. Let’s just read that again, “Is now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to make you stand in the presence of His glory, blameless with great joy to the only God our Savior through Jesus Christ our Lord be glory, majesty, might and authority before all time and now and forever. Amen.”
We’re going to see tonight, just as we look at this briefly; while we do need to be watchful over our own soul to keep from falling away, Christ, he is our sustainer and he is our sovereign savior, who will lead us home in the end. So we have two points for this evening, your sustainer, verse 24 and your sovereign, verse 25. Very simple outline, two points and each point will have two sub points.
But point number one: your sustainer, Christ will sustain you as his own, “Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling in, to make you stand in the presence of His glory, blameless with great joy.” Able, there is a word that means, to possess the capability, whether because of personal or external factors, to possess the capability of experiencing or doing something. This is the word. I’m sure you’ve heard of this, dunamai, where if we get our word dynamite.
This verb is used over 200 times in the New Testament and it simply means, to be able to, and it really doesn’t have any special theological meaning in and of itself. The noun form, dunamis, does, but the verb form doesn’t. However, here it is, what follows that, indicates the special theological meaning and as we look at this, “now to him who is able,” verse 24, that first part is parallel to verse 25, “to the only God our Savior through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
So the, “to him who is able” is God through the agent Jesus Christ; obviously the, him, in verse 24 is talking about Jesus. He is the one who is able to keep us, not us ourselves, not anyone else, though we are our brother’s keeper and we do guard one another and we look after one another, none of us has the capability that Christ has here to keep us from stumbling.
Christ, he is able. He has the capability of doing the following two things: to keep you and to make you stand or to present you. So the two sub-points here is: He is able to bring about the result of keeping you, to keep you, and to present you. But first we’ll look at, to keep you. This word, to keep, has a pretty broad range of meaning.
Six things in the lexicon are listed. I’m not going to read them all to you, but it has the range of meaning, to carry out sentinel function, so a guard, watching; guarding the meaning, to protect by taking careful measures, to guard and protect something, to be on one’s guard against something, or to continue to keep a law or commandment from being broken.
So God, through the agent of Jesus Christ, he carries out the function of this sentinel in our life, spiritually speaking, to guard us, to be the watchman over our lives. And we know he sits in heaven. He sees all things. He knows all things. He is the one who takes careful measure to watch over us, to guard us from threats, to protect us from all that would threaten us. He is, we might think of the night guard, who never falls asleep on duty. He has no weakness, no shortcoming that prevents him from doing his protective duty.
So when all kinds of threats and dangers assail us in this life, he is that sentinel, that shepherd who guards the door, so to speak. He is the overseer of our souls, Peter says in 1 Peter 2:25. This ought to bring us a tremendous amount of comfort, that this is what Christ has promised to do for us, to keep us, to guard us, to watch over us.
It ought to provide us a great comfort that we really fear nothing in this life. Maybe just to illustrate this a little bit, when I went up with the students to YMCA last month, my wife and youngest daughter, they were at home alone and one night Kayla woke up at midnight. She heard some sound and she woke up at midnight. It’s just her and my youngest daughter there and she found the home unsecured.
Somebody could have easily infiltrated the house while they had been asleep and she was unsettled to say the least. Had she woken up and found that someone she had trusted was sitting at the front door watching over the house would have given her great peace. She would have went back to bed peacefully rather than wondering, is there somebody else in the house, somewhere that I don’t know about?
There are innumerable spiritual threats out there. We often leave ourselves, sometimes unwittingly, vulnerable to some of these threats. It is a great comfort to know that Jesus Christ, the omnipotent one, is a shepherd over our souls, he stands watch. He takes careful measures to keep and guard and protect us, spiritually speaking, but the text says, “He does so He is able to keep you from stumbling.”
Stumbling is often used in the Bible as metaphorical language referring to sin. James says that same Greek word is here James 3:2, “We all stumble in many ways. If anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man able to bridle the entire body as well.” So is Jude here using this word in the same way as James is there, as in Jesus is able to keep you from stumbling into sin daily, or is he using it in a different sense here?
“So now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling,” is that him in the sense that James uses it daily, he’s able to keep you from stumbling, or does he have something else in mind there? I think because of the context that this is not a daily struggle with sin, but an ultimate reality. Flip back just a page or two to the book of 2 Peter. Peter likewise uses this word, stumble, in an ultimate and final sense, to refer metaphorically to apostasy and turning away from Christ all together.
2 Peter chapter 1, verses 10 through 11, Peter writes, “Therefore, brothers, be all the more diligent to make your calling and choosing sure; for in doing these things, you will never stumble; for in this way the entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ will be abundantly supplied to you.” So there’s the clear idea of the ultimate sense in mind of either ending up in the Kingdom of heaven or not.
Jude likewise wanted to reassure his readers that Christ will ultimately keep them, guard them, protect them, and bring home those who are his. But if this is talking about an ultimate sense at the end of our life, how does Jesus keep us until the end or, we might ask, what are the means by which Jesus will keep us, guard us, protect us until that final day? How will he sustain us and keep us until the end?
Church members, church leaders, the Bible, prayer, those are all means by which the Lord is going to keep us. It’s not just this supernatural power that we don’t have to do anything, that God is going to keep us to the end. Those are the means by which he is going to keep us. The means by which he keeps us. Yes, his grace and his mercy, but it is through the full knowledge.
If, if you’re still in 2 Peter, look back at verses 2 and 3, in chapter 1, Peter exhorted them very similarly said, “Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the full knowledge of God and Jesus our Lord; seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness through the full knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence.”
As we grow in our knowledge of him. We are kept in him. Both Peter and Jude make sure to say that this is not just intellectual knowledge. Back in Jude verse 5. Stay in 2 Peter for a moment, but back in Jude verse 5, he said, “I want to remind you,” though that, “though you know all things, that Jesus, having once saved a people out of the land of Egypt, subsequently destroyed those who did not believe.” So there’s the point of those who intellectually knew they had intellectual knowledge, but they didn’t believe.
God, through the agent of Jesus Christ, he carries out the function of this sentinel in our life, spiritually speaking. Bret Hastings
Peter puts it this way in verse 4, if you’re still in 2 Peter 1, “For by these He has granted to us as His precious and magnificent promises, so that by them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust. Now for this very reason also, applying all diligence, in your faith supply moral excellence, and in your moral excellence, knowledge, and in your knowledge, self-control,” and in yourself controlled perseverance, “and in your perseverance godliness, and in your godliness, brotherly kindness, and all your brotherly kindness, love. For if these things are yours and are increasing, they render you neither useless nor unfruitful in the full knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
And then he goes on to the section we read earlier about ultimately being saved “and being diligent to make your calling and election sure.” So these are the means by which Jesus keeps us to the end, as our increasing in the knowledge of our Lord, always growing in our knowledge and always believing by applying it. If we continued on in the chapter of 2 Peter, he explains a couple more means by which our calling and election are sure.
I don’t want to read all of that 10 through 21, but the other means that he gives is God’s word and godly leadership. But you can go back to the book of Jude and we’ll see how Jude puts that. Jude simply puts it in verse 8, that those who stumble, they have done so in part because they dream up their own truth. “They defile the flesh, and they reject authority.”
So the means by which Jesus will guard our souls until the final day is his grace. The means of grace, his word, prayer, our diligence to apply all that we’re learning, our submission to the Holy Spirit and submission to spiritual authorities that he has placed over us to guard our souls. Just like he placed Jude over those and Peter over those who they wrote to and the benefit of submitting to godly authority is you can then be sure that you stand in Christ and you are utilizing the means by which God gave you to guard your own soul from apostasy.
In verse 21, Jude said, “Keep yourselves in the love of God.” That’s how you do that. You cannot hold to the promise of verse 24, that Christ will keep you, if you’re ignoring all of the other stuff to keep yourself in the love of God. So “keep yourselves in the love of God,” as Jude says in verse 21. That is the means by which he will keep you from stumbling and when the end of your life comes or the end of time comes and he returns.
He will also and this is sub-point B, make you able to stand before God to present you, is the point. Sub-point B: to present you. The verb is, he will make you stand. Jesus Christ is able to make you stand, and then he gives three modifiers for this standing. First, he’s able to make you stand in the presence of His glory, Second, blameless, and third, with great joy.
So first in the presence of his glory. This is actually a pretty astounding claim when you think about it, in the context of scripture, people don’t stand in the presence of God’s glory. I’m sure if we passed around the microphone for this, you could cite examples you know of in Scripture, when someone found themselves in the glorious presence of God, what did they do? They fell on their face. This is the case in Exodus 20, when God is on Mount Sinai and the people are there, they’re crying out to Moses. You go before God. We don’t want to go.
Judges 13 Manoah and his wife are fearful because the Angel of the Lord appeared to them and he thinks God’s going to kill him, because he’s seen God face to face. Isaiah 6, we’re all familiar with that. Ezekiel 1, Ezekiel falls on his face. Luke 5, when Peter realizes that Jesus is the Christ, he falls on his face. In Revelation 1, John does the same thing. So this is an astounding statement that Christ is able to make you stand, to stand you in the presence of His glory. But this is because, he will present us, blameless before him.
All those examples of men who fell before him in terror did so because of their sin. All our guilt has been taken care of in the cross of Christ. We have been justified, cleansed, we’ll be presented before God without sin, because we’ve been adopted. We’ve been sealed with the Spirit, which means we’ll stand before him blameless, with great joy. This word here, for great joy, it’s a literal reference to a piercing proclamation or a piercing exclamation of joy.
The verb means to be exceedingly joyful or overjoyed. I don’t know if you guys have ever been around a kid or had a kid who could scream so loudly when they’re excited that it just pierces your ears. That’s the kind of piercing exclamation described here. Maybe if you’ve gone to a sporting event where the stadium is packed full of people and the home team scores and it’s just this eruption of noise, it’s deafening. That’s the idea here.
Not only are we going to be in the presence of God, but because we are blameless, we’ll be there with the greatest degree of joy and exaltation and praising God, exclaiming his greatness with all of our strength, with the greatest degree of joy. Sin is gone. There’s no fear there. Any shame over sin that we have felt in the past, it will be gone. There will be pure joy and exuberant jubilation as we stand in the presence of our glorious God and as we get to live with him forever.
So Jude’s point here is Jesus Christ is capable, able to do the impossible. He is able to make us, wretched sinners, stand before the holy and glorious one, not in terror, but in great joy. He is able to keep us, guard us, protect us from stumbling, until that day. Christ is our guardian, sentinel. No matter what happens in this life, if we are his, he will bring us and present us before God at the end of time. So let us not grow complacent.
One wrong response to verse 24, and this can happen particularly in Calvinist camps, people who believe in the sovereignty of God is they forget about all the means that God has mentioned throughout his word and they say, God’s going to keep me. I don’t have to worry about that. That would be complacency. We don’t want to let complacency set into our hearts. We want to be watchful over our own souls. Make our calling and election sure by growing in our knowledge, applying what we know, submitting to his Spirit, submitting to his Spirit filled leaders, that he has given us.
But yet we have this great hope if we do that, that we can trust, that he is able to sustain us to the end. That brings us to our second point. So he is your sustainer, but he is also your sovereign. Look at verse 25 again, “to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord be glory, majesty, might and authority before all time, now and forever, Amen.” He is our sovereign savior, God through the agent of Jesus Christ. He will keep us to the end.
If you notice, if you have an LSB or an NASB, that little word, be. The verb, be, is in italics, which means it’s supplied by the translators to help us understand the sentence better. It’s implied in the original, but it’s supplied there for our ease of understanding. But there is no verb in this verse anywhere. It’s implied, but it’s left out and I think it’s to emphasize the timeless, boundless, infinite truths that are contained, which any verb tense that you could put in there would limit all of those things.
So here we have two sub-points as well. Our sovereign, he is both infinite and eternal. So those four words, glory, majesty, might, and authority, indicate that God is infinite. I just want to briefly look at each of these terms and then we’re going to tie them all together. What I think Jude’s point is.
The term glory here is doxa, and it above all else expresses God’s honor, glory, and power. It does not refer to his essential nature, that is his invisible attributes that Paul talks about in Romans, but to the luminous manifestation of his person, the visible representation of him. That’s that term glory.
Majesty is a word that is mostly used in doxologies in the context with this same word, glory. But one lexicon says it refers to a state of greatness or preeminence. So that one kind of focuses on those invisible attributes, the greatness of God versus the visible manifestation of it.
And then there’s that word, might. It’s a word that either refers to the ability to exhibit or express strength or to exercise ruling ability. Some translations, the NASB, the ESV, render this as dominion. And I like that a little bit better because, might, kind of seems more localized, like as a personal strength within the person. Dominion indicates the ruling power that he has. So I like that word dominion a little bit better. He has dominion or might to rule not just over a small locale, but over the entire universe.
We have this great hope if we do that, that we can trust, that he is able to sustain us to the end.” Bret Hastings
And then there’s this word, authority. This word authority also has a wide range of meaning. It could refer to a state of control over something, freedom of choice or right potential of resource to command and control and govern or refers to the sphere in which this power is exercised. This one might refer to the local authority, that you see worked out, as some king exerts his authority. This local place that’s seen because his authority is manifest and rules are followed and it’s his authority is exerted.
So in tying all of these things together, God is infinite. And let me explain how I think he’s using these words. So we could say perhaps that glory refers to the local, visible expression of God’s presence. Majesty then expands out beyond that, it reflects the greatness of his invisible nature that is unseen. Might expresses the universal power and his dominion over all things, and then authority comes back to that local expression of that strength, and it brings all things into subjection to him.
So it begins extolling God’s local expression in his glory, expands that scope out to all things, the greatness of God, the infinitude of God, and all of that is exerted in dominion over all things, and then he brings it back to the local expression of the authority to rule over, we could say, every individual heart. In other words, there are no bounds to his power, his nature, his majesty, his dominion, his authority. They are infinite and yet locally manifest in every person, every Christian, every church.
The next one, that his eternality. So it says at the end of the verse, before all time, now and forever. The Greek literally reads from all the ages now and into all the ages. God had no beginning and he will have no end. He is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. For both of these things, how do these things bring us encouragement? Well, God is infinite. There is no bounds to his power. He is the one who will guard us and protect us, and there is nothing that can overpower him. He is not in some cosmic battle with Satan. He is sovereign over all things and we consider his eternality, how this brings us comfort, that he is able to keep us.
We know from experience that we read in James, we all stumble in many ways every day. How do we know one day God’s not going to just give up on us and he’s had enough of us? Well, his eternality indicates that that’s not going to happen. He is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Malachi 3:6 brings us this comfort, it says, “For I Yahweh, do not change, therefore you, O sons of Jacob, are not consumed.”
So because God is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow, the promises he has given us, that he will keep us, means that there is nothing we can do to change that. Malachi, God was speaking through him to a people. Basically, what he’s saying was if I changed then I would just destroy you. If I was not the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, then I would destroy you because of your rebellion. But yet I am the same. No matter what we do, nothing can separate us from the love of God.
His grace is unchanging, it is infinite, it never runs out and that’s no excuse for us to sin, but it is a great comfort when we do, to be reminded of those gospel truths, we’re brought great encouragement that Christ will keep those who are his, because he is infinite in power; he is eternal and unchanging. Yet these truths, they must not make us complacent. It must spur us on, even as Travis talked about this morning, to target the hearts of one another, to encourage one another, to press on to grow in the love of Christ, to love one another that way and we do so.
We keep ourselves in the love of Christ by utilizing the means that he has given us through his Word, diligent to apply it, submitting to the Spirit, submitting to the faithful shepherds he has given us, being our brother’s keeper, overseeing one another’s souls, but we must keep ourselves in the love of God, but we also must not find confidence in and of ourselves, that is not what is the ultimate power.
The ultimate power comes from God. It is him who overseas our soul, who guards it. Ultimately, it’s not up to us. It’s not subject to our weakness, our failures, our frailty, all of these things will be overcome by Christ in his ultimate and omnipotent power, because he is our perfect High Priest, our perfect good shepherd, our perfect guardian of our souls. And this truth in verse 24, rather than making us complacent, it should just dispel any fear of judgment, give us great courage to press on to “work out our own salvation in fear and trembling.”
So I would just encourage you, beloved, even in light of what we learned this morning, press on, it’s not in any of your strength. Continue to utilize the means that he has given you to keep yourself in the love of God. But we find great comfort in this, that it is Christ who keeps us. He will take careful measure to protect us and keep us until he returns for us or takes us home. Let’s pray.
Father, these are such great and glorious truths that bring my own heart and soul comfort. I know many sensitive souls can despair over their sin and how they have offended you. Many could even turn to relying on their self, on their self-reliance in this life of keeping themselves in the faith. This is nothing of us, it is all of you and yet there are means that you have given us.
And I just pray that you would help us, strengthen us for the work of the ministry to minister to one another. If we have to snatch some from the fire, turn one another back, call each other, exhort, strengthen one another in our own intellect, in our own volition and in our emotions; strengthen one another to stand firm, to keep ourselves in the love of Christ. And it is by those means that you will keep us. Help us just to look to those promises to trust in you and fear no evil, fear no coming days of evil, but to trust in you. Lord, we pray in Jesus’ name, Amen.