Jude 1:5

5. Put you in remembrance Parallel to 2 Peter 3:1, “I stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance.”

Once For all knew, by their early knowledge of the Jewish Scriptures. The well-known truths had long slumbered in their memories, but must now be aroused to meet the crisis of their fulfilment. Jude now gives a triad of similar cases of guilt, followed by condign punishment, recorded in the Old Testament scriptures. FIRST EXAMPLE. The Israelite people.

The Lord Here we are surprised by the fact disclosed to us by modern scholarship, that the true reading is doubtless not Lord, but Jesus. Somewhat similarly we have the unexpected Christ in 1 Corinthians 10:2-4, and Hebrews 10:28-31. Yet Jesus here is the more surprising as it is the more purely human name of the Lord than Christ. Some would read Joshua, of which Jesus is the Greek form, as in Hebrews 4:8; but Joshua did not save and then destroy the people. We have, therefore, the conclusion that to Jude, the maternal brother of Jesus, Jesus was Jehovah.

Destroyed them For sins, and especially lusts. From the Phenicians or Canaanites came the rites of Ashtoreth, in which courtezans were the priestesses, houses of license were the temples, obscene images were the idols, and debauchery was the worship. Against this fulness of iniquity the religion of Jehovah was arrayed, and when Israel apostatized thereto Jehovah destroyed him.

Believed not Adhered not to the pure worship of Jehovah, but yielded to the seductions of idolatrous lust.