Duelling With Jude v.3.

v.3 “Beloved, while I was very diligent to write to you concerning our common salvation, I found it necessary to write to you exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.”

After the opening salutations Jude now jumps straight into the letter proper. Whereas with the letters of Paul and Peter the salutations would have been followed by a section praising God, Jude (whose name translates as “praise”) does not.

Jude actually explains that he had initially wanted the whole letter to be one positively praising God and exploring the wonders of God’s salvation (Jude, it seems, was like name, like nature), but instead he had to curtail those desires to dedicate this letter to the cause of challenging the false teachers and their false teaching.

We will come to explore the false teachers and their false teaching in the following verses, so instead, by focusing purely on the content of this verse we can see how important it really is to aim to step up to Jude’s exhortation, ‘to contend earnestly for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints”.

Jude explains that he “found it necessary” to exhort these Christians to fight for the faith. Instead of proceeding to write to them concerning their “common salvation” (something he desperately wanting to do), instead he felt constrained and compelled to contend for the faith in the face of its opposition. This shows that, for Jude, this battle was a necessary, but not a pleasurable, thing. It also hints at Jude’s obedience to the leading of the Spirit as Jude wrote what God ultimately intended to be a part of our completed Scriptures.

When Jude writes that he is exhorting these Christians to “contend earnestly for the faith” we are given the picture of an athlete in training. That the original Greek is an infinitive in the present tense reveals that this means to ‘fight with a struggle’ both in the now and the on-going.

In my youth I had a passion for fitness and I can recall being particularly impressed by the training regime of the heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson. He would wake up at 4am each morning, force down a protein and carb breakfast and then go out for a 5 mile run. He wouldn’t just do 200 sit ups, 50 press ups, 50 tricep dips and 50 shoulder shrugs – but he would do them all 10 times each every day. Then he’d move on to weight training, before coming on to the boxing training itself. All of that was for 6 days a week every week, with 10 hours of training each day!

If an athlete really wants to succeed, then he or she really needs to “contend earnestly” in their training; that is to say, to fight with a struggle; to battle to push their body to its max, and beyond, each and every day. How earnestly do we think we actually contend for our faith if we are being honest? Is there any earnestness or contention involved at all?

“The faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” refers, not just to doctrine, but to the substance of belief – the substance being articulated by its doctrine. Paul explains how this faith had been delivered “once for all” in 1 Corinthians 15:1-8: The essential truths of Jesus Christ regarding His work of salvation had been witnessed first hand by Peter and the Twelve disciples, then to over 500 brethren, and then by all the apostles. These truths had been once for all delivered to the saints – by the apostles.

Note the unity here. It has been the aim of some modern liberal theologians to show how certain apostolic teaching, such as Paul’s, is in conflict with other apostolic teaching. This is something that must be vehemently denied. There is, as Paul explains in Ephesians 4:4, 5, “one body and one Spirit, one Lord and one faith”, and this faith has been once for all delivered to the saints.

It must also be pointed out how Jude makes the distinction that this faith has been delivered once for all “to the saints” specifically. Those who have been ‘set apart’ or ‘sanctified’ by God, which is all of those who make up the true church of Jesus Christ, stand in stark contrast to the “ungodly” false teachers that we will come to first meet properly in the next verse.

There is one faith, which has been once for all delivered by the apostles to the saints – to all of us who have been brought in by God’s grace to His church – and all other teaching must be rejected, resisted, and fought against. There is emotion in Jude’s writing. This is something that he is passionately concerned for and we must recognise this in Jude and be encouraged to do likewise.

Douglas Moo suggests that “we live in a time when believers do not get excited about truth”.[1] That, in turn, suggests that we do not care about it anywhere near as much as we should. Could this possibly be a fair representation of the church today?

We can see in the writings of the early Church Fathers how important it was to them to ‘earnestly contend for the faith’. We are still benefitting from the writings of Athanasius, Augustine, and many others, as they sought to correct errors and heresies that were entering the church. In my own church we recite quite regularly the Apostles’ Creed that had initially been formulated to fight against heresies.

It’s not always good to “fight” with other Christians over theological differences, it has to also be said. If we are finding pleasure in it then we are almost certainly doing it for the wrong reasons. We need care and discretion about how we do approach this matter. It was Augustine who famously wrote, “In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, and in all things charity.” Yet we still find him contending earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints! There is a difficult balance to be found and a lot of wisdom (as well as charity) is needed.

Let me close by pointing out how Jude began this verse by calling these brothers and sisters in Christ his “beloved”. Jude wanted them to know that they were loved by God (v.2) and they were loved by him. That left me being reminded of the hymn that was written by John Fawcett (1740-1817):

“Blest be the tie that binds

Our hearts in Christian love;

The fellowship our spirit finds

Is like that to above.”

We are united by love in Jesus Christ; where there is one Lord and one faith - the truth of which is something worth fighting for.

[1] Douglas J. Moo, 2 Peter and Jude: The NIV Application Commentary, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), p.237.