Jude 1:12-13 - Homiletics

A perfect Church a vain expectation.

"These are spots in your feasts of charity," etc. The teaching of our Lord's great parables gives us no warrant to look for a perfect Church till the end. Popular ideas of the purity of the primitive Church are far from being borne out by fact. The New Testament writings themselves, especially the Epistles to the Corinthians, the Pastoral Epistles, Jude, 2 Peter, and the Apocalypse, indicate with the utmost plainness how mixed the early Churches were, and to what an extent they-suffered from grievous and varied evils. Neither have we any scriptural warrant for setting up impracticable terms of admission to the Christian Church, or impracticable conditions of discipline within it. The facility with which the most sacred usages and ordinances admit of abuse, e.g., the perversion of the simple and beautiful institution of the love-feasts, shows the necessity of jealous watchfulness over ecclesiastical practice, and the wisdom of denying ourselves the most appropriate forms for the expression of Christian life and worship, when these become misunderstood, lifeless, or associated with evil. The most fatal form of selfishness is the selfishness which takes advantage of religion, and assumes the cloak of spirituality. Mark Jude's lurid picture of the brood of deceits, sensualities, and blasphemies that spring from it. Study, too, his equally lurid picture of the degradation, the emptiness, the death-in-life of such a life—the treacherous hopes like rainless clouds with which it beguiles and embitters, the barrenness worse than that of exhausted autumnal trees to which it is doomed, the shame which is the issue of its passionate license.—There is a double punishment of fleshly sins. Their retribution comes in the penal law which works in nature and makes them in part their own avengers in time. It comes, too, in the nameless awards of eternity, which axe in reserve.