Pastor, teacher, and author Adrian Rogers has introduced people all over the world to the love of Jesus Christ, and has impacted untold numbers of lives by presenting profound truth simply stated. Thanks for joining us for this message. Here's Adrian Rogers. I want you to take your Bibles, please, and turn to the book of Jude. It's the next to the last book in the Bible.
Easy to find. Find the book of Revelation and turn left, and you'll come to it. It's the next to the last book in the Bible. We're preaching through the book of Jude, which deals with apostasy, and we're talking about the apostasy of the last days. And we've come to verses 12 and 13, and here we have a picture of an apostate, a picture of an apostate.
I mean, how are you going to recognize an apostate? I heard of a man who went into a bank, wrote a note and shoved it to the teller. And the note said, "This is a holdup. Put all the money in a bag and send it back to me." And the teller picked up a pen and wrote him a note and shoved it back to him. It said, "Straighten your tie, stupid!
They're making your picture." Now. Why do they want the picture of a bank robber?
So they can put it in a post office, and you can say this man is armed, dangerous. Beware! Let us know if you see him. You need to be able to recognize a criminal, and so if they can possibly do it, they want a picture of him made.
Now, here God has given us a picture of a spiritual felon, a spiritual criminal.
Somebody who is dangerous, and someone that you ought to be able to recognize, and so God has described him. And here you have his picture beginning in verse twelve. These are spots in your feast of charity when they feast with you, feeding themselves without fear. Clouds they are without water, carried about of winds. Trees whose fruit withereth without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots.
Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame. Wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever. And here, in five clear, graphic word pictures, God gives us the marks of an apostate, so that we can recognize an apostate when we see an apostate.
Now, dear friend, do not think that what I'm saying today is not relevant. It is vitally relevant. You're going to find out that the devil is not against religion. The devil is immersed in religion, and the devil uses religion. As a matter of fact, it was a religious crowd that crucified the Lord Jesus Christ.
And most Americans don't need religion. They need to turn from religion to Jesus Christ. But when I preach about earnestly contending for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints, as Says that we to contend for, there are people who call that narrow and bigoted. And dear friend, we somehow all un-American if we don't just put our arms around everybody else and say your religion is just as good as mine. In most cases, that is true because they're all no good.
But dear friend, I want to tell you something. There is a faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. That's not what I'm saying. It is what God is saying here in His Word. But once great churches and once great denominations and once great schools have been honeycombed with apostasy and liberalism, and it is a heartbreak indeed.
As a matter of fact, in Miami, Florida, there was a council that met the National Council of Churches. They had an assembly, a general assembly in Miami Beach, and it showed how they were moving away. There were a survey was made. Of 521 laymen and clergy, not just clergy but laymen and clergy who were attending this conference as to their beliefs, and I want to tell you what the heartbreaking results were. A little more than half of them believe that Jesus was divine.
Just over 50 percent believed in the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ. I'm talking now about preachers of the gospel or supposed preachers of the gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. More than one third declared that the devil definitely doesn't exist. Only 62 percent of them look forward with complete assurance of some kind of existence after death. Only 25 percent of them believe the miracles in the Bible.
Only twenty-five, and I'm talking to you, dear friend. Not about those outside the church. I am talking about leadership. Who was it that said, "If the gold rusts, what shall the iron do?" I mean, these are the so-called spiritual leaders. They are apostates.
But there's something about an apostate that will not let him just go away from an Orthodox church and start his own church. What he does is he comes back into that Orthodox church. What he does, he comes back into that Orthodox denomination. As Jude says, they have crept in. That word means literally they've come in through the side door.
And they undermine the work of the Lord Jesus Christ in the church.
Now you need to understand, dear friend, that Jude says that we are to earnestly contend for the faith. Earnestly contend. That word, earnestly contend, has in it the word that we get our English word agonize from. We're to agonize for the faith. There is to be a battle for the Bible.
And, dear friend, there are six areas of truth that you need to get burning in your heart. And in your soul, not only do you need to learn how to recognize an apostate, but you also need to know what the great battle for the Bible is and what those areas of truth that are under attack are today. And I want to just list them for you before I even give you the portrait of an apostate, the picture of an apostate. Truth number one is the virgin birth of the Lord Jesus Christ, that He was born of a virgin, Isaiah chapter seven and verse fourteen.
Somebody says, "Well, what difference does that make your eternal destiny?" Engines on the virgin birth of the Lord Jesus Christ. If Jesus Christ was not born of a virgin, he was sinful as you are. If he was sinful as you are, there could be no blood atonement because a holy God would not accept an unholy sacrifice. No blood atonement, no salvation, no salvation, no regeneration, no regeneration, no heaven for you. And my dear friend, without the virgin birth of the Lord Jesus Christ, you are lost without hope.
Not only the virgin birth of the Lord Jesus Christ, but his full deity. There are those. Today, who do not accept the full deity of the Lord Jesus Christ, I want to tell you, dear friend, Jesus was not just a great leader, not just some religious figure, not just some prophet. He was God, a very God. Greatest the mystery of godliness, God was manifest in the flesh.
That's what the Bible says. The Word was made flesh and dwelt with us. And the Word was with God, and the Word was God. I want to tell you the third area of truth that is under attack today is the Blood atonement, the substitutionary death of the Lord Jesus Christ on the cross for our sins—that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures. The blood of Jesus Christ, God's Son, cleanses us from all sin.
The liberal and the apostate does not like the preaching of the blood of Jesus Christ, especially repugnant and abhorrent to him is the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, blood atonement. Another area of truth is the bodily resurrection of. Lord Jesus Christ, that He came literally out of that grave.
Now there are those liberals and apostates who talk about the deathless spirit of Christ that goes marching on and all of that. Oh, my friend, I want to tell you that the faith that we preach and believe in is the faith of an empty tomb. And never ever minimize the resurrection of Jesus Christ and then his visible return. Jesus Christ is coming back to this earth literally, actually, bodily, physically. Jesus Christ is coming back to this earth again.
And then the last thing is the inerrancy, the infallibility, the immutability, the impeccability, the authority of the Word of God. That this book is God's inerrant. Infallible Word.
Now, apostates do not like those truths that I've just mentioned to you today. And so, dear friend, not only do you need to recognize an apostate when you see one, but you also need to know what the great fundamentals of the faith are.
Now, these indeed are not all of the things that we believe, nor are they indeed all of the fundamentals of the faith. But I can guarantee you, if you take those six things and pretty well have a checklist when you meet one of them, to know really what apostasy is.
Now, let's look at these five word pick. This portrait of an apostate, this picture of an apostate that Jude gives us, so that we might hang it in the gallery of our mind and say, "Beware, beware!" He mentions five graphic descriptions of apostasy. Number one, the apostate is dangerous, like a sunken rock. Look, if you will, in verse twelve. These are spots in your feasts of charity.
Now, what does the word "spot" mean there? This is a word that is used only one time in the Bible, so far as I can find, one time. And actually, a better translation, or the literal meaning of the word, is a sunken rock. A sunken rock. They're like a hidden rock beneath the surface.
And you see a rock that's out of the water is not nearly so dangerous. You can see that it can be put on a chart. You can say, "Hey, there's a rock. Be careful!" But a rock just beneath the surface—any of you ever been out in a boat when that boat is going aground? I have.
You know, you're so happy. You're going out fishing, or you're going out to to sightsee, or you're going out sailing. You're just having a wonderful time. You're just skimming along, and all of a sudden, there's a horrible sound and a lurch. And you look down, and your feet are getting wet, and water is coming in.
You've gone aground, and a rock has ripped the belly out of that boat.
Now, why does why does Jude say that they are rocks? In your feast of love, the word here is the agape feast. You see, the early church did it many, many times. They would get together for a great feast. They called it the agape feast.
And here they're having a wonderful time, and God's love boat is just sailing along, and everybody is so happy. What wonderful fellowship! What love! And and everything seems to be so blessed. And then suddenly, everything seems to come to a grinding halt, and there's a horrible rending sound, and the old ship of Zion is wounded.
In her side, what has happened?
Some devilish apostate has become a rock in the river of love. And has divided that he might destroy the fellowship of God. How dangerous is apostasy! It causes division. The thing that holds us together is our love for the Lord Jesus Christ, our unity in the full deity of Christ, the Word of God, and the great truths that we preach.
Destroy that, dear friend, and you have destroyed this church. And that is the reason that we must earnestly contend for the faith, because apostasy, apostasy, is dangerous to the fellowship of. A church, it is dangerous, like a hidden rock.
Now, the second thing about apostasy: not only is it dangerous, like a hidden rock, but it is deceptive, like a waterless cloud. Look again, if you will, in verse 12. The Bible says, "Clouds they are without water, carried about of winds." Now, what is a cloud without water? You have to remember that Jude is writing from the Middle East, and rain is vitally, vitally important. And the rainy season only comes for a very short interval, and when it comes, it is so very important.
Can you imagine a farmer in a time of drought? He's been praying and asking God for rain, and he looks and he sees a cloud on the horizon, and it's just boiling and coming—a dark cloud. And he says, "Oh, look! We're going to have rain. Thank God, Mother!
Look, God has sent rain." And then that cloud, just driven by the wind, just passes right over, and not one drop of rain. What a disappointment! A cloud without water.
Now God says that apostates are that way. I hate to tell you this, folks, but when God said that they creep in. You remember that over here in verse four, certain men crept in unawares.
Well, liberals are creeps, but now he says they're bags of wind. They're cloud, just driven by the wind, a pompous windbag. They promise much, but they produce little. Put in your margin Proverbs twenty five verse fourteen. Whoso boasteth himself of a false gift is like a cloud and wind without rain.
How terrible it is to see a cloud and expect rain and not get it. B. H. Carroll told of a drought in Texas. He's one of our Baptist forefathers.
He said this: I have witnessed a drought in Texas. The earth was iron and the heavens brass. Dust clouded the thoroughfares and choked the travelers. Watercourses ran dry. The grass was scorched and crackled.
Leaves twisted and wilted. Stock died around the last waterholes. The ground cracked and fissures opened up, and the song of birds died in their parched throats. Men despaired. The whole earth prayed, "Rain, rain, rain!" Oh God, send rain!
Suddenly, a cloud rises above the horizon and floats into vision like an angel of hope. It spreads a cool shade over the burning, glowing earth. Expectation gives life to desire. The lowing herds look up. The shriveled flowers open their tiny cups.
The leaves untwist and rustle with gladness. And just when all trusting, suffering life opens her confiding heart to the promise of relief, the cloud, the cheating cloud, like a heartless flirt, gathers her drapery about her and floats scornfully away. Leaving the angry sun free to dart his fires of death into the open heart of all suffering life, God says, dear friend, that an apostate is like that. People come to apostate churches, and the tragedy of it is that this Sunday, literally millions of people will go sit in an apostate church and hear an apostate preacher. A pompous, religious windbag—a cloud without water—they will look up and still go away thirsty for the water of life.
Oh, they have their clouds all right—Sunday schools and church services and radio programs and Bible conferences and magazines and books and tracts and mission societies—but every one of them is a cloud without water, and they come to these churches and they will go away without the water of life.
Now that service may be dull and boring, or it may be set on fire with satanic zeal. But I'll tell you, there be no Holy Spirit there, there be no Bible truth there, there be no conversion there, there be no joy there, there be no victory in Jesus there. And the sad thing is that so many of the people will not even know what it is they have missed. Apostasy, apostasy, clouds without water. The apostate, my friend, is dangerous.
He's like a sunken rock. The apostate is deceptive. He's like a waterless cloud. Thirdly, the apostate is dead. He's like a fruitless tree.
Look again in verse twelve. Trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots. You see. A Christian, Psalm One tells us, is to be like a tree, planted by the rivers of water, that brings forth his fruit in his season. His leaf also shall not wither, and whatsoever he does shall prosper.
But an apostate is a tree. He takes up space. He's in the garden. He's in the grove, but he's a dead tree.
Now there are a lot of things you can do with a dead tree. You can transplant it, but it's still dead. An apostate can move from one church to another, or one denomination to another, but he's still dead. Tell you something else you can do with a dead tree: you can prune it. And that is, you can try reformation and turning over a new leaf and try to get rid of all these bad things in your life.
But what good is it to prune a dead tree? I'll tell you something else you can do: you can cultivate it. You can water it and fertilize it, but if it's dead, it's not going to grow. And I want to tell you, dear friend, an apostate is not going to be helped by Bible study and by prayer and by good deeds and church attendance and everything else as long as he's dead in trespasses and sin. No good to cultivate a dead tree.
You can rename it. You can say, "Well, now you're a live tree." Renaming the tree is not going to change the tree if the tree is dead. One lady told a pastor. She said, "You know," said she was a Methodist. She said, "I just believe I'm going to become a Baptist." She told her pastor that.
He said, "Well, I guess be all right. Won't hurt to change the label on an empty bottle." And I don't mean infer by that. Not either Baptist and Methodist or Methodist, either one or apostate as such. Apostates are found in every denomination. You can decorate the tree.
You can tie fruit on to it. There are a lot of things you can do with a dead tree. But I'll tell you, dear friend, ultimately about the best thing to do with it is to burn it. That's what God is going to do. He speaks of these trees that are plucked up by the roots because they're twice dead.
Number one, they're dead and don't produce any fruit. But there's a second death when they're plucked up by the roots and thrown into that fire. And the Bible says the lake of fire is indeed, dear friend, the second death. And if you're not born twice, you're going to die twice. You're going to be twice dead.
You're going to die physically in your sins, and then you're going to die eternally in hell. There's one thing that you cannot get from a dead tree, and that is. Fruit, and Jesus said, "You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you and ordained you that you should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain." And the Bible says in Galatians chapter five, verse twenty-two, that the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, gentleness, goodness, longsuffering, temperance, mercy. Against such there is no law. This fruit, dear friend, we do not produce; we bear fruit.
But there's one thing about an apostate, an apostate can imitate Christianity, but he cannot bear the fruit of the spirit. And there can be no fruitfulness in the life of an apostate. Jesus said, "Every tree which my heavenly Father hath not planted shall be rooted up." Matthew chapter 15 and verse 13. What is an apostate? Listen to me.
An apostate is dangerous, like a sunken rock. What is an apostate? An apostate is deceptive, like a waterless cloud. What is an apostate? An apostate is dead, like a fruitless tree.
Now, fourthly, I want you to see that an apostate is disturbed, like the raging sea. Look again, if you will, in verse 13.
Now, raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame.
Now, an apostate is a seething sea of discontent. There is never an apostate that has peace in his heart. And he's not at peace with himself. He's not at peace with God. And when he comes into a church or into a denomination, he'll be a troublemaker.
Isaiah 57. Put it in your margin, verses 20 and 21. The wicked are like the troubled sea when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked. Raging ways of the sea, spewing out their own foam in shame.
Now that's what Jude is saying about an apostate. He's like a a raging wave, spewing out its own form, leaving it on the beach of humanity. Let me tell you something about an apostate, folks. As I have been studying, especially First Peter chapter two and the book of Jude, I found out that apostates have deep moral sin in their lives.
Now that's something you need to learn. A person can be an unbeliever. He can be an unbeliever and live a pretty moral life. A lot of unbelievers do. Nicodemus was one of them.
He was lost, but he lived a moral life.
Some of them, as a matter of fact, put us to shame by the cleanliness of their lives. But not an apostate. When a person has heard the truth and known the truth, and he turns from the truth, something happens to an apostate. His moral discernment is destroyed. He has kicked his conscience to death.
There is something in him. The restraint is taken away. I've already showed you that from the book of Jude before. And down in the heart of an apostate, you'll find deep sexual sin, or some kind of immorality, or some kind of deep greed. And you read this book of of Jude, and he mentions apostasy and links apostasy with Sodom and Gomorrah.
And in the book of Peter, Peter says that apostates are like a sow that goes back to the wall and. Like a dog that returns to his own vomit, and here again, here's what Jude is telling us about how the apostate just belches out from the deep recesses, the murky caverns of his heart and of his soul, his shame. He's like a raging wave of the sea. He is deeply disturbed in his heart. He's not at peace with himself.
And dear friend, he doesn't want you to be at peace with you. And that's the reason apostates are so dangerous. And the world is full of them. Apostate. Preaches.
I've been to school. I've been to seminary. I've been to college. I have had seminarians and college buddies who became apostates. They studied for the ministry with me.
They sat in the same classes with me. These boys who claim to believe the truth, and after a while, somehow there was some professor or someone who destroyed their faith, and they got into apostasy. And what they once believed, they rejected, and what they rejected, they ridiculed. And I watched them one after another go down into sodomy. Go down into divorce, go down into fornication, debauchery of all kinds.
There's something about apostasy, dear friend, that is different from most other sins. You read the book of Jude, and you'll pick this up. And here is what Jude is saying: They're like raging waves of the sea. There is a unrest. There is a disquieting in the heart of an apostate, and before long he will spew out the foam of his shame.
That's what he's saying here.
Now, what is an apostate? My dear friend, an apostate, an apostate is disturbed like wild waves, and then finally, an apostate is doomed like a wandering star. Look again, if you will, in verse thirteen. He calls them wandering stars. To whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever?
What is a wandering star? A wandering star is a star that has no orbit. A star that is not fixed, it does not stay in place. You know the Bible says in Judges chapter five, verse twenty, that the stars run in their courses. You see, we live in a solar system.
That means that the Earth is one of a number of planets that revolve around the Sun, and it is the Sun that keeps those planets in their orbit. That's what keeps the Earth from just flying off into space, because we're held by the gravitational pull of the Sun, and we all revolve. Our solar system revolves wonderfully and meticulously around the Sun. But have you ever seen what we call a shooting star, a meteor? I remember when I was a youngster, about 13 years of age, down in West Palm Beach, Florida.
One night, I was walking home. It was a cool Florida summer evening, and I saw the most brilliant thing I'd ever seen in the heavens. It started in the north and it shot toward the south, and it was brilliant. It went like that right through the sky. I was just amazed.
No one else was there to see it. I thought, "Oh, I hope my brothers, my sister, my father, my mother, somebody saw what I saw as that as that meteor just went through the sky, and then just like that, became a cinder." And if it was like so many meteors that did not enter the Earth's atmosphere, it simply hit the Earth's atmosphere and then skipped off into space. No longer held by the gravitational pull of the sun, but it goes as a wandering star out into the blackness of space, sucked down into some black hole forever and ever and ever into what the Bible would call a bottomless pit. That's what hell is going to be like. The Lord Jesus warned about hell, and He said in Matthew chapter eight and verse twelve, "But the children of the kingdom shall be cast into outer darkness, and there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth." Peter says of the apostates that the midst of darkness is reserved forever for them.
And here's what Jude says about them: "To whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever?" Can you imagine what hell will be like for an apostate? Never will he see the twinkle of the stars. Never will he feel the warmth of the sun. Never will he know the luster of the moon. Never will he see the smile of Jesus and the light of glory, the Shekinah glory of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Everlasting blackness and darkness. Jude has already talked about the eternal fire of hell.
Now he speaks of the eternal blackness of hell. What is an apostate like? Our hearts ought to be broken for the apostates. How we ought to pray for the apostates! Because my dear friend, an apostate is dangerous, like a hidden rock.
An apostate is deceiving, like a waterless cloud. An apostate is dead, like a fruitless tree.
An apostate, my dear friend, is disturbed. Like a raging sea, an apostate is doomed, like a lost star. And the more I look at the Word of God, the more I am becoming convinced that it is almost impossible for an apostate to be saved. I believe apostates have committed the unpardonable sin. Many of them have.
They have known the truth. They have seen the truth. They have refused the truth. They ridicule the truth. They blaspheme the truth.
They mock holy things. And many of them stand in pulpits. God help us. And Jude says, "Dear friend, I want you to know an apostate when you see one. I want you to be able to recognize an apostate.
I want to give you a picture, a portrait of an apostate." And Jude says, "In these last days, that we are to earnestly contend for the faith." That was once for all delivered to the saints, dear friend. We have God's infallible, inerrant Word that tells us how the Lord Jesus Christ, the Virgin-born Son of God, lived a sinless life, died on the cross to pay for our sins with His blood. His blood atonement was buried, raised again the third day, is now in the heavens, and one day Jesus Christ is coming back to this earth, literally, actually, visibly, bodily, to rule and to reign.
Now, don't you forget the truth—the truth as it is in Christ. The most dangerous thing in the world is to come, dear friend, to a Bible preaching church and hear the truth and not receive the truth, because when you do, you endanger of becoming an apostate. Lord God, I pray today that they, dear Lord, will know the life, the purpose. The joy, the soul rest, the power of knowing Jesus, Lord. I believe that salvation is a supernatural miracle, and Lord, we're so dependent upon you to bring conviction and understanding.
Lord, it is the work of your Spirit, the work of regeneration, based on what Jesus did on the cross. We confess that, Lord. Lord, now we intercede for the lost, and we stand for them against Satan. We lift them to you, in Jesus' name, Amen. If you would like to learn more about how you can know Jesus or deepen your relationship with Him, simply click the Discover Jesus link on our website lwf.org.
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