Great Expectations

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.  And the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day- just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.  -- Jude 5-7

(Hey) Jude understood that we need reminding more than we need teaching.  He sounds a little like John in his first epistle when he says, "But you have been anointed by the Holy One, and you all have knowledge."  It sometimes seems there is nothing we can learn that we do not already know.  It is not new facts or information we need but a refreshing of realization and insight.  The word John uses is eido, related to eidon, "to see".  There is a distinction between eido or oida which signifies a full, complete, even perfect knowledge and ginosko which is more about progress in knowledge. 

So, too, Jude uses the same word to indicate that our knowledge was once fully mature and perfected, and it is still available to us if we will look once more upon it, allowing ourselves to be reminded of the truth we know.  Jude says that Jesus was the Deliverer who brought His people out of bondage.  But the Deliverer is not the delivery boy.  God does not reject anyone.  We are forced, on occasion, to use language such that it sounds as though God has turned away and left us, but the rejection is always done by man.  It is humanity's failure to trust in and embrace reality that results in killing, stealing, and destroying. 

This is as true for fallen angels as for fallen men, or for any other class of being under God.  We desert the light and forge chains of darkness and despair that will hold us in thrall until there comes a judgment.  Jude wants to make sure we understand the nature of the consequences — "eternal chains" hold the mighty powers and authorities that rebelled against their Sovereign.  "Eternal fire" consumes the sin of the cities of the plain.  The plain of the Jordan near the Dead Sea no longer smolders and smokes with the judgment that fell upon Sodom and Gomorrah, but the fires of judgment are eternal in their consequences.  God will do whatever it takes to deliver us from our delusions and our rejection of reality.

"Unnatural desire" is not a statement of disgust but a statement of fact.  To focus strictly on homosexuality is to miss the greater point.  Immorality, whether of the kind we traditionally associate with Sodom or of any other variety, is built upon an exaltation and embrace of the unreal.  Little Richard had some problems in this area.  He claimed that God spoke to him one day and told him that he was a man not a woman.  "If you had been a woman," God said, "your mother would have named you Martha."  This is terribly obvious.  The reason the Bible seems to come down especially hard on homosexuality is that this particular lie is so easy to expose.  You really have to deliberately shut down all your senses including your common sense to accept it.  Chastity Bono can call herself 'Chaz', get hormone injections, grow a beard, and have that operation — what do you call it? addadictome? — but if you check the DNA in her blood or tissue, it is still XX.  That is the reality.  We can dress people up, cut them up, remold and remake them on the outside, but who and what they are remains stubbornly unchanged. 

Perhaps there is a lesson there. 

You can take the Israelite out of Egypt, but what matters is whether you can take Egypt out of the Israelite.  God reveals to us through a series of dramatic historical events that merely getting a man out from under the control of the taskmasters does not make him a free man.  Placing a man in a new environment and new circumstances does not make him a new man.  Jude says that Jesus "afterward destroyed those who did not believe".  Did not believe what?  They did not believe something that was "too good to be true".  I can imagine that is how those former slaves looked at it.  Freedom, abundant life, forgiveness, mercy, peace and joy are all part of the offer, and we cannot believe that it is real.  We pass it off as dreams or ignorance or insanity.  We turn away from the truth to chase shadows.  We bypass life to embrace corruption and death. 

God will never disappoint us. 

It might be well to think on both sides of that.

With the merciful you show yourself merciful;
with the blameless man you show yourself blameless;
with the purified you show yourself pure;
and with the crooked you make yourself seem tortuous.
(Psalm 18:25-26)

To the pure, all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure; but both their minds and their consciences are defiled.  (Titus 1:15)