Jude 1:5-7

Jude 1:5-7. In these verses we have examples of the judgment spoken of in Jude 1:4. It is only necessary, says the writer, that I should remind you of facts with which you are already familiar. You have been instructed in the Gospel; you have accepted what is a revelation of righteousness as well as of love; and you have once for all had the perception of all that is essential to salvation, whatever may be said by those false teachers who boast of their profounder knowledge and superior wisdom (gnosticism as it came to be called): how that the Lord having saved a people (an entire nation, His own) out of the land of Egypt, the next thing he did was to destroy them that believed not. These words may refer to the destruction mentioned in Numbers 25:1-9, or it may refer to their entire history which is, in brief, salvation and judgment, true of them at first, and true of them even to the close.

Jude 1:6. A second example is taken from angels, those who kept not their dominion, their rule (or principality, as in Romans 8:38, a form of the same word; or their original, ‘their first estate,' a meaning less in accordance with Scripture usage). They were placed over material creation as rulers under God, but they left their proper office and abode, and set up a kingdom of their own (Colossians 1:13), and are therefore kept under darkness unto judgment of the great day. Who they were and how they sinned has been much questioned. The notion that they are ‘the sons of God' mentioned in Genesis 6:4, and that they fell through fleshly desires, is affirmed in the Book of Enoch; and some have thought this explanation to be the meaning of the passage in Genesis. But it is very doubtful whether Jude quotes the Book of Enoch; and if he does, he certainly differs not unfrequently from its teaching. The passage in Genesis, moreover, refers rather to the intermarriage of the descendants of Seth and of Cain. Further, this interpretation is inconsistent with what is said by our Lord of the angelic nature, and it is, besides, an anticipation of the sin mentioned in the next verse. Probably, therefore, the verse points to a sin of another kind, and to an earlier time. Milton's account is probably nearer the truth (cp. 1 Timothy 3:6).

Jude 1:7. A third example is taken from the Gentile cities of Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them, having given themselves over in like manner as the people of those cities did, or as these false teachers have done, and having gone after strange (different) flesh; practising shame, man with man, and even man with beast. How true this is of the tendency of some teaching may be seen in classic writers, and in such testimony as Irenaeus gives of the practices of the Nicolaitans (Jude 1:20).

they lie before the eyes of men (either in the region they once occupied or in their history) an example and a proof of eternal fire, still suffering as they do the punishment [of their sin]; or it may be taken, an example and a proof [of what I am affirming], suffering as they do the punishment of an eternal fire. The argument is either analogical or positive. As Sodom and Gomorrha suffered the punishment of a fire that consumed them utterly, so that they will never be restored, so the wicked will suffer as long as they are capable of suffering. This is analogical. Or, as Sodom and Gomorrha are really suffering the punishment of which the fiery overthrow of their cities was the symbol, so shall these men be punished. This is positive, and is favoured by all those passages in which death is used not as material death only, but as continued life the cessation not of being but of well-being the destruction which is not annihilation.