The Jude Effect: Final Warning
What would you say is the most urgent issue facing the Church today? More growth strategies, better stage lighting, more visibility on social media? Certainly not. It’s much more serious. The most urgent issue facing the Church today is whether it can survive without the preservation and proclamation of the true, apostolic gospel.
And no. It cannot.
God established the Church as the “pillar and ground” of truth. However, because the proclaiming of the gospel has been deemed too offensive in many churches today, its members are lacking the spiritual discernment needed to recognize or preserve themselves from apostasy—belief in a false gospel. Pastors preaching a compromised gospel leads to apostate churches.
Apostrepho is to deliberately defect from the true faith and to embrace Satan’s lie which claims there is another gospel. You see, the true gospel cannot dismiss the cross. It calls for repentance, demands surrender, confronts sin, crucifies pride, and transfigures lives. But many have exchanged repentance for entertainment and truth for emotional worship experiences. How did we get here?
Almost 80 years ago, A.W. Tozer wrote: The Church has suffered untold injury at the hands of well-intentioned but misguided persons who believed they knew more about running God’s work than Christ and His apostles did. Rather than improving on the biblical pattern, these pragmatic tools have been, one and all, hindrances to the effective proclamation of biblical truth. They have so altered the divinely-planned structure of the New Testament Church that if the apostles were to return to earth today, they would hardly recognize today’s church as being anything like what the Bible intended them to be.
Hence the urgent need for a verse-by-verse study of the Epistle of Jude. It was written by the half-brother of the Lord Jesus around 60-70 A.D. Christianity was under attack politically from the Roman government as well as doctrinally from the false teachers who had infiltrated the churches. The purpose of Jude’s letter was to urge the second generation of church leaders to stand firm in proclaiming the essential doctrines of the Christian faith that were “once for all delivered to the saints,” which meant that nothing could be added to it or taken from it without compromising the whole truth.
Jude is the only book given entirely to the Great Apostasy. As the Book of Acts describes the beginning of the Church Age, the epistle of Jude describes the end of the Church Age, the Age of Apostasia.
As evidenced today by the masses of people who have fallen away from the true faith and have now embraced Satan’s lie, there’s no doubt we are living in the Age of Apostasy.
Jesus said false teachers would arise. (Matthew 24)
Paul said false teachers would arise. (2 Timothy 4:1-5)
Peter said false teachers would arise. (2 Peter 2:1)
John said false teachers would arise. (1 John 4:1-3)
Jude said they have arrived! (Jude vs. 3)
According to the New Testament, the primary purpose of the Church is to proclaim the reality of a holy, infinite, and yet personal God, by preaching the pure gospel of Jesus Christ. Only by proclaiming the whole truth can sinners be drawn and reconciled to God through their expressed faith in the Person and work of Jesus Christ. However, many pastors are more interested in building a brand than building the Kingdom and calling God’s people to live holy lives.
Even before Tozer, William Booth, the Founder of the Salvation Army, wrote: The chief danger that confronts the coming century will be religion without the Holy Ghost, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without God, heaven without hell.
Jude says that day is here. They crept in unnoticed and they will be among us until the rapture of the Church, as well as with those who receive Jesus Christ as their Savior during the Tribulation. Only when Jesus comes again will He defeat and destroy Satan and all of his followers.
If we are to perpetuate the true gospel to the next generation, the issue the Church must focus on is the proclamation of the unvarnished gospel truth. According to the most recent surveys, contemporary churches are growing largely through “transfer growth” from the smaller churches. For many, this may be their first step toward apostasy as they trade solid Bible teaching and preaching for the cool stuff—coffee bars, fog machines, and video screens—corporate entertainment without doctrinal accountability.
Just as those who came before us will answer to Jesus for not guarding the truth in their day, so will today’s spiritual leaders answer to Jesus for the compromised gospel we are handing down to our children, and that includes parents as well as pastors. It should break our hearts and bend our knees to learn that about 70% of today’s youth who are being raised in evangelical homes will leave the faith before they finish the first year of college, and very few
will return.
The placement of Jude’s letter in the Bible should alarm us, for it is the last book of the Apostolic age. In other words, Jude affirms where we are in the Church Age today. The next event is the “snatching away” of the Bride of Christ, followed by the Tribulation.
