Jude wants to snuggle up with his fellow believers but feels compelled to contend with those who are teaching false doctrine that has led to licentiousness in the church. These false teachers have “crept in unnoticed.” Jude says they “pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ” (Verse 4). The noted philosopher George Santayana penned one of the great truths about human history: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” His observation echoes a somewhat more cynical version written earlier by the German philosopher Friedrich Hegel: “The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.” Further, Aldous Huxley said, “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.” What surprises me most about these three quotations is that all three come from men who are atheists or agnostics. They may think they have a market for their ideas, but they are merely saying something Jude told his readers thousands of years earlier. He reminds his readers of an important historical truth that some may have forgotten. Jude 5 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.”
The Old Testament is full of reminders to God’s people of God’s miraculous works in their lives in the past. The Exodus from Egypt is one of the more common historical events that proved to the world that the God of Israel was greater than all other gods. Whereas the pagan gods had their worshippers fight for them, feed them, carry them around, and protect them. The God of Israel carried His people through the Red Sea, fought and destroyed the Egyptian Army, fed them in the wilderness, and carried them from slavery to freedom in the promised land. The three wise men quoted above were not thinking of any Biblical lessons. But they knew that something had been forgotten that should have taught us a very important lesson. What Jude is reminding us of is that God is mighty to save. He did so in the past, and He can still save today.
Even after such a great deliverance, some came out of Egypt with them and did not believe that God could save them from the hands of the giants they saw dwelling in the land they were supposed to take as their own possession. Shaddix says, “Jude has in mind Numbers 14 when the twelve spies returned from their reconnaissance mission into the promised land. The majority report of ten said, ‘We can’t do this. They are giants, and we are grasshoppers.’ The minority report of two (Joshua and Caleb) said, ‘No problem. After all, grasshoppers plus God can beat any giants!’ However, the people who had seen God do so much, now in unbelief, said, ‘Well, he can’t do this.’ The result: every person twenty years old and over died. All of them! They missed the promised land. They missed God’s best. Forgetting God’s grace and greatness, they dug their graves in the wilderness within sight of the land God had promised, saying, ‘God did it before, but I cannot trust him to do it again.’”[1] Jude wants his readers to remember that “unbelief” leads to catastrophe. We are to remember God’s work and apply that to our lives, knowing that He is still able today. Those who were “destroyed” in Jude’s words were those who did not believe. Jude knows well that salvation is based on faith and not works. It wasn’t their failure to do something. It was their failure to believe something. It was Jesus, according to Jude, that saved the people from Egypt. It is Jesus who saves us today as well. John 3:16 makes it clear, “God so loved the world that he sent His only begotten Son so that whoever would believe (have faith) in Him, would not perish but have everlasting life.”
[1] Shaddix, James, and Daniel L. Akin. 2018. Exalting Jesus in 2 Peter, Jude. Nashville, TN: Holman Reference.