Jude 1:18

The Text

Jude reminds his readers of something they already heard, and he quotes it back to them: the apostles said that in the last time mockers would come, people who walk after their own ungodly lusts. That is the whole verse. No new revelation, no fresh warning, just a memory jogged. Jude has spent fifteen verses piling up images of the intruders (waterless clouds, rootless trees, wandering stars), and now he stops describing them and says, in effect: you were told. This was on the list. The apostles handed you this along with the gospel itself, and you filed it away and forgot it, and now it is sitting at your table eating your bread.

The Core

The startling thing is not that mockers exist but that they were expected. Jude's whole pastoral strategy rests on it: the shock of corruption inside the church is not evidence that God has lost the thread. He said this would happen. That reframes everything. A faith that cracks the moment a leader falls or a friend turns cynical was never resting on God's word; it was resting on the church's performance. And notice the diagnosis Jude quotes: mockery is not primarily an intellectual position but an appetite. They walk "after their own ungodly lusts." The sneer follows the desire, not the other way round. First a man wants something forbidden, then he finds it funny that anyone believes it is forbidden. That order matters enormously for how you read your own doubts.

The Common Thread

Jude is doing what Israel was always commanded to do: remember. The people saved out of Egypt were told to keep the story on their lips precisely because they would forget it, and Jude has already reached back to that generation in verse 5, the ones who were rescued and then perished in unbelief. Now he applies the same medicine to the church. The gospel has never travelled alone; it has always come bundled with warnings. Jesus himself said the wheat and the weeds grow together until harvest, and the apostles passed that realism on as part of the deposit. So the thread running from Sinai to Jude's congregation is this: God saves a people, tells them the truth about what is coming, and keeps them by their memory of his word.

The Mirror

Here is where it stings. Read the sentence again and ask which end of it you are on. Not the caricature of a mocker, the loud atheist on the internet, but the quieter version: the small internal eye-roll when someone in your group prays too earnestly, the way you have learned to talk about your faith at work with a protective layer of irony so no one thinks you actually mean it. And ask the harder question Jude presses: what do I want, that makes this cynicism convenient? Usually there is something. A relationship you do not want examined. Money you do not want questioned. An anger you have decided to keep. The mockery arrives afterwards, dressed as intelligence, and it feels like growth. Jude says it is appetite wearing a costume.

Take ten minutes now. Write down, on paper, the one Christian conviction you have quietly begun to find embarrassing. Underneath it, write what you would be free to do if it were not true. Then look at the two lines together.

The Intertext

Peter warned of the same thing in almost identical language, saying scoffers would come in the last days asking where the promised coming of the Lord had got to; the mockery there is aimed directly at the delay, at the apparent silence of God. That is worth noticing, because it tells you what the sneer usually targets: not doctrine in the abstract but the fact that nothing seems to be happening. And Paul, saying goodbye to the elders at Ephesus, told them wolves would rise up from among their own number. Both apostles put the danger inside the house. Jude is not inventing a genre of paranoia; he is quoting a settled apostolic expectation that the church's worst wounds would be self-inflicted and predicted.

The Detail

The Greek word for mockers, empaiktai, is built on the verb for playing, the word you would use of children at a game. A mocker is not first an arguer but a player: someone who treats what is holy as material for sport. That is why mockery is so hard to answer. An argument can be met with an argument, but a joke cannot; the whole point of the joke is that engaging it seriously makes you the fool. Jude's intruders have discovered the most efficient way to dismantle a community's reverence: make the sacred funny, and never stay still long enough to be pinned down. Which is also why Jude does not argue with them. He remembers instead.

The Main Character

Jude calls himself a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James, which is a remarkable way to avoid saying that he was also the brother of Jesus. He wanted to write a warm letter about our common salvation, and instead found himself writing this: fierce, crowded with images of judgment, almost breathless. You can hear the grief under the anger. He keeps calling them beloved, three times, even while describing the rot at their love feasts. That combination is the mark of a real pastor: he refuses to soften the diagnosis and refuses to withdraw the affection. And he ends not with a threat but with a doxology about the One who is able to keep them from stumbling, which tells you what he actually believed was holding these people up.

Reflection

Where in my life did a desire arrive first, and a convenient new opinion arrive afterwards?

Jude answered mockery with memory rather than argument. What specific words of Scripture do I actually have in my memory to stand on when my faith is made to look ridiculous?

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