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Read Introduction to Jude

 

“Likewise also these dreamers defile the flesh, reject authority, and speak evil of dignitaries.”  

 

Jude now turns from his three illustrations of apostasy in the Old Testament to describe four earmarks of apostates in his own day.

Likewise

Jude compares the apostates of his day to the apostates of the Old Testament (vv. 5-7). In the face of the fact that Old Testament apostates underwent severe punishment, apostates of Jude’s day went pell-mell into apostasy themselves.

also these dreamers

Apostates live in the unreal world of dreams. Since they do not live in objectivity, but in imagination, they do not face reality. They do not need to live under any authority except the authority of their own making. The only other time the word “dream” occurs in the New Testament is in Acts 2:17, where Luke uses it for prophetic dreams. Jude may mean that these apostates claimed special revelations for themselves. They justified aberrant doctrine by claims to direct revelations. These direct revelations produced falsehoods. They lived in unreal fantasy worlds of their own making.

PRINCIPLE:

False teachers reject objective truth in favor of subjective experience.

APPLICATION:

Many people spin their theological ideas out of their own web. Personal divine revelations today are unreliable. Because someone claims to have a dream does not make it true. The only reliable source of revelation is the Bible. God gave us an exhaustive, unabridged revelation of Himself and everything He wants us to know to operate in this world. He put it in writing so that it could not be distorted.

“I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy lies in My name, saying, ‘I have dreamed, I have dreamed!’ ” Je 23:25

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