Contending? Not Culturally Acceptable. Jude 3
The idea of contending for the faith, the
set body of doctrine that is unchangeable, as established objectively by God,
is not culturally acceptable today. If you believe that the Bible is the Word
of God you have set yourself over against all of pop culture, all of the opinions
of the masses and the elites in our culture; and you are increasingly a minority.
There is a statistic that approximately seven per cent of Americans are
evangelicals, and the term evangelical itself is a fairly broad term. We at
It is just amazing to see how within
conservative, dispensational, fundamental, evangelical Christianity since the
end of World War II there has been such a massive shift. And some of this has
occurred in just the last twenty years. There have been assaults on the nature
of the church, assaults on the role of the pastoral ministry, and these have
their roots that go back into the 1970s. We have seen the very face of the
church in
This is part of what Jude is writing about.
He is challenging this congregation that they need to contend for the faith. If
they are not willing to contend for the faith then what will happen is these
evildoers and evil teachers will take over the control of this congregation and
it will be rendered not only spiritually ineffective but they will become
spiritually inoperable and will be destroyed spiritually and judged by God.
But this whole idea of contending for the
faith is not culturally acceptable today. If we are going to proclaim that we
are going to defend the faith of Scripture then we are going to come under
attack, even by many Christians, because they believe that contending is
necessarily contentious. But that is not true. That is a total abuse of
language. As we look around we ought to be asking the question: from whence did
these changes come? How did the church go through this? We can give the broad
answers: a certain amount of negative volition, trends toward emotionalism and
subjectivity, but we need to understand some of these trends in a little more
specificity in order to be able to correctly perceive and understand where we
are, how we got here, and what you and I need to do in order to be a corrective
for this. That doesn’t mean that we are going to reverse the course of our
culture but in terms of our own lives we need to understand what it means to
contend for the faith.
2 Timothy
2 Tim
These influences are all around us, and
the younger that a person is the more they have been influenced by this kind of
thinking, the more they have been brainwashed, re-educated, reprogrammed by the
education system of our culture, by the media, television shows, songs. All of
these things promote this value system. And this sets their mind a certain way
so that when they walk in the doors of a church like this there is a huge
hurdle for them to get past from the very beginning because they are hearing
ideas and concepts that they have been taught were wrong. That even applies to
Christian kids who have grown up in church because they were taught one thing
but they caught something else. They caught a virus from their culture which
the Bible calls worldliness, and this virus has infected them by they don’t
know that they are sick with it.
We have been talking about the authority
of Scripture. We have to judge every area, every nook and cranny, of our
thinking by the light of God’s Word. Then we have to change it, and that is not
always easy. We understand that God works behind the scenes in the process.
Jude 1:3 NASB “Beloved, while I
was making every effort to write you about our common salvation, I felt the
necessity to write to you appealing that you contend earnestly for the faith
which was once for all handed down to the saints.”
The word “appealing” [or, exhorting] ends
with an ‘ing’ indicating this is not a finite verb,
it is a participle. A participle connected to the infinitive simply helps
complete or fill out the idea. But participles are used as a modifier of verbs
in order to give us some additional information about that. So how does the
concept of exhorting relate to the concept of writing? What we will see is that
this is a participle expressing purpose—‘I am writing to you for the purpose of
exhorting you.’ This word that we find here is a Greek word that we find many
times in the Scripture. It is a very common word to express the desire on the
part of the writers of Scripture to move their audience from where they are to
where they need to be, to challenge them, to urge them to a course of action,
to push them and to motivate them, to be engaged spiritually and to apply the
Word of God to every area of their life. It is the Greek word parakaleo [parakalew]
and it is related to the noun parakletos
[paraklhtoj]
which is a title for God the Holy Spirit as our strengthener.
It is often translated “comforter” but that is a weak idea. The word has the
idea of urging or motivating someone to a course of action. So God the Holy
Spirit is the one who is encouraging, pushing us forward in the Christian life.
This particular grammatical structure here
is a present active participle, the present tense indicates that it is
happening at the same time as the main verb, and the participle should be
understood as a participle of purpose: “I write to you for the purpose of
exhorting you to contend.” This word “exhort” is one of those many biblical
words like “holy, righteous, redemption” that we hear a lot, but when we hear certain
words all the time it tends to become white noise and we don’t really pay
attention to it, and we are not really sure what it means. In terms of
definitions it has a range of meanings. It means to exhort, which means to challenge
somebody to a course of action, to urge someone to a course of action, to press
them earnestly to do something, to appeal to them to take a course of action.
It is sometimes translated to encourage, to urge, to
incite, to persuade. When it comes over to expressing the purpose of literature
it is a word that has the idea of a literary type; it is an exhortation; it
could be a sermonic type. Jude is writing this as an exhortation, it is not
going to be a doctrinal discourse but is written for the purpose of getting the
people in this congregation motivated to engage in a problem that has already developed
and is in their midst.
The course of action is that they are to
contend earnestly for the faith. The Greek word is epagonizomai [e)pagwnizomai]
and it has the idea of expressing a kind of struggle, a fight, of dealing with opposition.
Having said that, we suddenly realise that we may have
another problem. That is, that there are a lot of people today who don’t
want to fight. They just want to be left alone: just leave me alone, let me
live my spiritual life, but I don’t want to be involved in anything that may be
considered contentious or some kind of battle. One of the reasons is that
because unfortunately we are not mature enough as a lot of believers to contend
in an uncontentious manner. Jesus was involved in a lot of contentiousness as
the Pharisees, Sadducees, scribes and Herodians
opposed Him, but He did not react in a contentious manner. He contended without
being contentious. He challenged them.
And as those who are in Christ, we are to
carry out that same kind of role; we are to challenge the culture around us. We
are not supposed to just let it go by. If we are a believer in the Lord Jesus
Christ Jude is saying we have to make waves sometimes. We have to pick our
battles; we can’t fight every battle. But we have to be careful not to run from
the battles because we just don’t have time or we are not prepared. If we feel
we are not prepared then we need to be in Bible class three times each week and
listening to Bible teaching on the other days. That is how we become prepared;
that is how we become equipped for the battle. The role of the pastor-teacher
is to equip the saints to do the work of the ministry, and part of the ministry
is to contend earnestly for the faith.
This verb is a present passive, but it is
only passive in form but active in meaning. It is a present passive infinitive,
it expresses a purpose. We are to contend for the faith. Jude is writing to
them for the purpose challenging them to the goal or to the end result of
contending earnestly for the faith. The word epagonizomai
means to strive for something, to work against opposition. It would describe
the work of an athlete who wants to sin at the games. In order to win at the
games he has to train. In order to train he has to manage his time well. That
means that he has to not do some things that that may be good things to do in
order that they may not limit his training. Spiritually, this means something
different. We are to contend earnestly, we are to fight, strive, exert ourselves for the faith.
The word translated the faith here is
simply the Greek word pistis [pistij].
It doesn’t have an article, which means it is emphasising the quality, the
essence of faith, i.e. the Christian belief system. It is accurately translated
into English as the faith because that is the idea that is presented in
the Greek. The idea is that it is the faith that was once for all given
to the saints indicates that there is a specific, finite body of
knowledge/truth that is revealed or given to Christians. It is that set body of
truth that doesn’t change over time that we are to fight for. We are to fight
to preserve it, fight to proclaim it, fight to thoroughly investigate it and
study it. It is to be a concentrated and dedicated struggle that we are to be
involved in.
There is something else about this that we
learn. That is, this represents a specific kind of literature that is found in
the ancient world as well as today. This approach is called paraenesis,
a literary or rhetorical style of exhorting someone to a specific course of
action. Within the meaning of exhortation the style is composed of two things.
The first is encouragement, something positive, and the second is dissuasion,
something negative. Going back to the athlete illustration, the dissuasion is
getting rid of the excess weight and the encouragement is the positive exercise
that is going to build strength and stamina. So in paraenesis
literature there are two things going on. One is something positive: this is
what you should believe, this is what you should do;
and something negative: you don’t want to believe this, you don’t want to
believe that, you don’t want to do this, you don’t want to do that. So it has
the positive side of stating what should be done and why you should do it, but
also the negative side of showing and explaining why the alternative is wrong
or does not work.
We live in a world today where this is
being challenged in a lot of ways. It is not socially acceptable to focus on
the negative, it is seen as critical. But the classic way of teaching or instructing
anybody on anything was to not only teach it to them in a positive sense but
also to contrast that with either that which was wrong or wasn’t quite right in
order that by analysing the truth in contrast to the error someone develops a
clear understanding of what they believe, why they believer it, and how to
implement that into their life. So we learn by contrasting the wrong or the not
quite right with that which is right.
But there is something that is inherent in
all of what has been said that runs counter to everything in our contemporary culture
today: using the terms right and wrong. Using the terms right and wrong imply
some sort of external standard. Where do we get that standard? Today most
people believe that the standard just comes from our culture or sub-culture. So
can we say anything negative about them? Any kind of evaluation like this is perceived
as being wrong today. We have a lot of young people today (40 and under) where
this type of teaching is inherently wrong. Before they ever hear it they know
it is wrong because: ‘Oh, you are saying that what somebody believes and how
somebody teaches something is wrong. You’re just being judgmental and critical.’
That is how they are approaching it.
This has happened here in this church.
Somebody comes in and hear the teaching where the truth of Christianity or
Scripture is juxtaposed to false views that are taught within Christianity, or
false views that are taught in the world, and they say, ‘Well, you are emphasising
apologetics too much,’ or ‘you are being too critical of other people. I just
want to know the positive; I don’t want to know the negative.’ That shows right
away they are operating on a pagan view of knowledge, a pagan view of truth,
and they have so inculcated and imbibed this from the culture that they don’t
even realise how pagan their thinking is. The very form of their thinking has
been shaped by the culture in which they have grown and developed, and in which
they have been educated. This is one of the things where they need to let the
Word of God correct them on, slap you in the face and say, you’re wrong. They
are thinking wrong because that is not how they learned, that is not how
anybody in the Bible teaches. They all teach by virtue of polemics which are
taught all through the Old Testament. Polemics are when something is stated in
a certain way that is in direct contrast to the popular view that would be in
the culture surrounding them.
This is one of the things that we are
facing today. The term is a worldview. The English translation comes out of a
technical term in the German which has to do with how someone perceives or
understands the world around them. Whenever we think in terms of understanding a
worldview or how people perceive the world around them there are certain
elements that are always going to be present. There is going to be a belief in
an ultimate reality. That ultimate reality is a personal infinite God as we
have in Christianity, or is that ultimate reality an impersonal force in the
universe? So we either have a personal God or an impersonal god, there is no in
between.
Divine revelation is based upon dependent
use of logic and reason. That is, it is not anti-logic, anti-reason, like mysticism;
it is based upon understanding God’s Word using logic and reason as God shows
us it should be used within the framework of Scripture.
What has happened today is, we are in this category where rationalism and empiricism
were rejected. That was dominant viewpoint of what was always known
historically as modernism. Modernism came out of the historic Enlightenment. In
the Enlightenment there was an emphasis on what man can achieve through the use
of reason and empiricism. But man could never really find answers, and so
modernism was deemed a complete and total failure philosophically, and the only
hope was mysticism. But we have a new brand of mysticism today because if I can’t
find truth how do I know if there is any truth? But everybody acts as if there
is something true. They say this is right or wrong. Africans say something else
is right or wrong, Japanese say something else is right or wrong. Maybe we are
all right! Everybody is right so let’s all get together and if there is no
external objective absolute then everybody is right and nobody is wrong. This
plays out in a lot of different ways, the silliest of which is that we don’t
want to have winners and losers in children’s soccer games so we are going to
give everybody the world cup. Of course, in the real world that is totally fallacious
and it produces a generation of losers, which is what we have today—people who
don’t understand competition and think everything should be given them on a
silver platter. This is a reaction to modernism, so it has been called post
modernism.
Postmodernism comes along with something
called multiculturalism. It started off as something that really wasn’t that
bad. It was the idea that we ought to understand the diversity in the world: that different cultures do things in different ways, and
there should be a measure of respect for different cultures in what they believe.
That is true. But in the light on the rejection of modernism what happened is a
realisation that all of these different cultures have different truth claims,
they all think this is right. One culture has their faith, another
culture has their faith, and another culture has their faith. We
can’t really, since there is no external vantage point—we’ve thrown out the
Bible so we can’t judge anybody by external absolutes—we have to say everybody
is right. Anybody who comes along withy a claim of exclusivity is just “dangerous.”
Anybody who believes in Christianity is automatically deemed a bad person
because Christianity is considered to be exclusive, and exclusivity is “evil.”
People have been drinking this toxic waste
dump of a philosophy for so long that anybody who comes along and say this is
right and that is wrong is inherently an enemy of society. If you talk about
something being biblical what people hear is that this is going to oppress
them. Because they deem freedom as being able to believe whatever they want to whenever
they want to because nobody has an absolute to say one thing is right and one
thing is wrong. So part of the mental baggage of this contemporary generation
is the idea that inclusiveness is good but exclusiveness is bad. They view
Christians as separatists to reject the cultural mainstream. In
multiculturalism the cultural mainstream sets the standard. So
contemporary society embraces this kind of diversity for diversity’s sake as
the ultimate standard. If we don’t embrace that diversity and validate
everybody and whatever they believe then we are anti-cultural, anti-society; we
are just the enemy.
All of this influences the church. We have
to understand this fundamentally when we start to contend for the faith. It is
a battle for the mind. It starts between your ears. If you are going to
contend for the faith the first battlefield is between your ears. This is what
Paul is talking about in 2 Corinthians 10:4 NASB “for the weapons of
our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of
fortresses. [5] {We are} destroying speculations and
every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and {we are} taking
every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.”
We have to understand what these thoughts are. The world says, ‘If you are going to try to cast down arguments you are the enemy.’ This is becoming more and more evident today. So the foundational objective for every Christian is to contend for the faith. Therefore we have to know what the faith is, and then we have to contend for it. And that immediately marks us as being counter-cultural and the enemy.