The Terrorists Among Us

We know, of course, in Oklahoma and in America, the devastating results of terrorism.

! We're very much aware that there are terrorists among us. Part of our education here in Oklahoma came with the destruction of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, a building I was in many times as an FBI agent.

And certainly we know from the attacks on 9-1-1, and ironically today is the 18th anniversary of that horrendous attack. Thousands of our citizens were murdered. Countless lives were changed by terrorists that lived among us.

In fact, the whole world was changed on that day.

Now, Jude realized that this infiltration came with deadly results. Jude knew that such terrorists were not a passing fad, but would plague the church for as long as the church exists on planet Earth.

Now, Jude had a name for these terrorists. He didn't call them terrorists. He called them apostates. He realized the immense danger that apostates pose to truth and to the purity of the church.

That is why the Holy Spirit commanded us through Jude's writing to contend earnestly for the faith. That's in verse 3.

The challenge was to expose these terrorists because they had crept in unnoticed. Verse 4. The role of church leadership was then and is now to expose the apostates before they inflict irreparable harm to the church.

To expose the dangerous apostates among the true church, it was necessary to know how they behaved. You've got to know what to look for.

The best and perhaps the only way to do this is to know the characteristics of an apostate's nature. And that is found in the inerrant word, in the authoritative word, in verses 8 to 10 in the book of Jude.

And that's our focus for this evening. Let me read those verses. Verse 5. Yet in the same way, these men also by dreaming defile the flesh and reject authority and revile angelic majesties.

Verse 6. But Michael, the archangel, when he disputed with the devil and argued about the body of Moses, did not dare pronounce against him a railing judgment, but said, The Lord rebuke you.

But these men revile the things which they do not understand, and the things which they know by instinct, like unreasoning animals, by these things they are destroyed.

Now, we looked at a variety of apostates last week. We looked at apostate Israel. We looked at apostate fallen angels.

We also took a brief journey into the debauched society of Sodom and Gomorrah, where they had apostate Gentiles.

The apostates in those cultures gave off certain characteristics. The passage talks about these false believers dreaming.

Well, dreams seem harmless enough. I have all kinds of dreams. I wake up at night, go to the bathroom, and I want to hurry back to bed to go to sleep so I can see how it's going to finish.

I want to know how it works out. Yeah. Don't leave me hanging here, you know. When he talks about these false apostate believers dreaming, he's talking about they had a phony vision for the church.

False teachers, even in our day, put a lot of stock in dreams. They believe that dreams are authoritative. And many of them hold to getting new revelation from God.

I heard one one day say, if I give you the latest revelation, believe what I say, even if it conflicts with the Bible, because I have the latest information from God.

And that was on radio, and I tried to reach through and choke him, but all I did was hurt my fingers when I hit the radio. At least one church in our community has a dream interpreter on paid staff.

I might add it's not Baptist. Now, I am going back a few years to my police chief days, but that's only 14 months ago.

These new truths are really nothing more than lies and distortions designed to lead people astray. In using such devices as dreams and visions, the apostates are able to substitute their own counterfeit authority over that of scripture or godly leadership.

Part of the pattern of substituting dreams for revelation is a vivid use of the imagination. And apostates are able to do this at will because they've already rejected the word of God.

That doesn't stand between them and their dreams. They reject the word of God as the sole ground for ultimate truth.

And we've got to remember that behind the apostate's thought process is a mind that has been taken captive by Satan and his demons.

I'm reminded of Paul in Romans chapter 1 where he says he gave them over to a depraved mind. He gave them over. He gave them over. The Old Testament concept of a dreamer was often associated with false prophets.

Moses warned about them very sternly in Deuteronomy chapter 13 beginning in the first verse. He said, Let me back up.

Let me back up. You shall keep his commandments, listen to his voice, talking about God, serve him, and cling to him. But that prophet or that dreamer of dreams shall be put to death.

They had a rather strenuous punishment for that. He shall be put to death because he has counseled rebellion against the Lord your God who brought you from the land of Egypt and redeemed you from the house of slavery to seduce you from the way in which the Lord your God commanded you to walk.

So you shall purge the evil from among you. Boy, can you imagine if we had the Old Testament standard today? There would be a lot of guys.

We wouldn't have very many televangelists, I can tell you. The Apostle Paul had this to say in Colossians chapter 2. Lee taught this. Let no one keep defrauding you of your prize by delighting in self-abasement and the worship of the angels, taking his stand on visions, he has seen, inflated without cause by his fleshly mind, and not holding fast to the head from whom the entire body, being supplied and held together by the joints and ligaments, grows with a growth which is from God.

Hard to believe, but I got involved with dream interpreters and psychics a number of years ago when I was police chief.

Six years earlier, we had a man in this town, pretty well known, that had gone missing. His family hired these types of people at great expense.

They're not cheap. A family spokesperson came to me in my office and said that they'd been working with these dream interpreters and employing visions and psychics and that they knew that this missing man had in fact been murdered and was buried years ago in an earthen dam that was under construction.

Told me where the dam was at. Told me where the dam was at. The family had gone so far as to meet with the Army Corps of Engineers and were told by the Corps that in order to dig up that portion of the dam, it would number one be necessary to drain the lake.

And the total cost of draining the lake and tearing into part of the earthen dam was at $16 million. That would be the cost.

And this spokesperson said, I would like to bring these dream interpreters and the psychics to meet with you. To which I said, no, I'm not going to meet with them.

I refuse. And she was taken aback. And she said, well, when can we expect the city to pay for the dig?

And I said, never in a thousand years. If he's buried in an earthen dam, he's in a nice, final, resting place. He may even like fishing. I don't know.

Maybe he's fishing at night or something. But no, we're not going to do that. They were shocked that I not only refused to meet with them, but that I wasn't going to fork over.

I mean, I didn't have the authority to do it. I wouldn't have done it if I'd had the authority. Well, I was attacked, I found out, by the dream psychic industry.

They attacked me. I later heard I was even written up in one of their publications as being totally uncooperative, an unbeliever, and yada, yada.

I did get a call from a good friend of mine. He's a retired FBI agent, a very famous FBI agent. I've been to his home, spent the weekend with him. But he called me and he said, this woman worked her way into speaking at the FBI Academy one time.

And so he said, I had a dollar bill in my pocket and a serial number. And I said, tell me the serial number of the dollar bill in my pocket. She was a psychic. She said, well, you just don't understand.

He said, no, I understand perfectly. What's the serial number? And she couldn't even get one number in order. I mean, you know, it was just so fraudulent. Anyway, I wouldn't meet with them.

They wrote me up in their publication. About a year went by and we had him listed on our computer and the FBI computer as a missing person.

And about a year later, we found him. He was living the good life with a rich woman in one of the Dakotas.

And they were about to get married. No, he had not dug his way out of the dam. To my knowledge, to date, the dream interpreters and the psychics have not printed a retraction concerning my decision.

But I did get a call from one of them, a lady from California. And she said, I understand that guy surfaced alive. And I said, yeah. She said, well, I just want you to know, you know, we never actually said he was buried in the earth and dam.

I said, well, that's what it sounded like to me when you called and said he's buried in the earth and dam. No, we didn't mean that, literally. So they, oh, they were backtracking. They were backtracking.

So Jude mentions to us that apostates are false dreamers that infiltrate the church. He then goes on to outline three characteristics of their true nature, their immorality, their insubordination, and their irreverence.

And let's deal with their immorality. Our passage in verse 8 says these men defile the flesh. The word flesh in the original Greek means to pollute, contaminate, soil, or corrupt.

In context, it is referring to a moral and or physical defilement connected to sexual sin. One common factor among apostate teachers and preachers is their immorality.

And we've seen it time and again, haven't we? And, you know, you can only do that so long and it's going to surface. It's going to surface. And we live in a day when such immoral behavior has plagued the church.

And, of course, in our day, such failures are spread across television and the Internet at the speed of light. And the big name guys, many of them have fallen. But, you know, John MacArthur had a young preacher come to him.

He had less than 100 people in his church. And he was found. He was a young married guy. They had one child, a baby. He was found in a compromising situation with the older church secretary.

And he was put out of his church. And he came to Dr. MacArthur and he said, do you think I can ever preach again? Stand in a pulpit. And John said, in my opinion, you have one shot at that.

And if you have a moral failure of such a magnitude. And the young man crying, he said, but nobody knows who I am. And John said, but God knows who you are.

You know, he said, it's not a question of forgiveness. It's not a question that you can serve somewhere. But he said, pulpit's a whole different deal. The problem with an apostate is they have nothing with which to restrain the flesh and its immoral appetites.

They are the ones who live in the passion of their lust. Jude explains their problem later in this letter when he describes these apostates as devoid of the Spirit.

And we'll get to that in Jude 19 someday. Absent the Holy Spirit, there is no ammunition to control the fleshly appetite of the apostates.

Peter said such men are free to indulge the flesh in its corrupt desires. 2 Peter 2, verse 10. It is only a matter of time before such fleshly desires come to the surface and manifest themselves in ways that are destructive to the fellowship of the church.

So the first thing that comes to light is their immorality. The second thing that comes to light is their insubordination.

Our passage makes this abundantly clear. The apostates reject authority. They're rejecters of authority.

Anyone in love with their own immorality will naturally reject authority. They'll flee from authority. This is especially true when it comes to church authority.

An apostate by very definition is one who rejects the lordship of Christ. In fact, they will have no one rule over them. This particularly concerns Christ ruling over them, but extends to his shepherds, his pastors, and the elders over the church as well.

Here is the real danger of the apostate. They pull all this off very subtly. Unfortunately, they don't announce to the church when they join, by the way, I'm the new apostate on the scene.

They never tell you that. That is why they are able to creep in unaware. Jesus himself had to deal with such men when he was on earth.

Now, note how the Lord refers to them in Matthew 23, starting in verse 27. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness.

So you too outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. Jesus says here that apostates are pretty on the outside, but once inside they spread disease and corruption.

Another way to put it is, inside they stink like a corpse moldering in the grave. Jesus was not known to shade it when it came to corrupt apostate unbelievers.

So apostates can be known because of their immorality and because of their insubordination. They're also known for their irreverence, Jude 8-10.

And they also revile angelic majesties. But Michael the archangel, when he disputed with the devil and argued about the body of Moses, did not dare pronounce against him a railing judgment, but said, The Lord rebuke you.

But these men revile the things which they do not understand and the things which they know by instinct. Like unreasoning animals, by these things they are destroyed.

We are probably unfamiliar with the phrase, the reviling of angelic majesties. The word revile means to blaspheme.

The holy angels who did not fall with Satan are devoted, of course, to God's holy glory. You see that in Isaiah chapter 6 and other places.

But they devote themselves to God's holiness. They have always played a special role in establishing God's moral order among humans.

Angels communicated God's law. They will be involved in the judgment of the wicked at the end of the age. But by their conduct, apostates blaspheme holy angels and through them they blaspheme God.

After Lucifer fell and became Satan, God worked through Michael. That was his most powerful angel. He is referred to as a protector of God's people.

Michael is a display of angelic wisdom that did not dispute with Satan over the body of Moses. They didn't have a wrestling match.

Instead, he merely called upon God to rebuke Satan. That is a very good lesson for the modern church. I'll tell you, we have churches that spend all their time rebuking Satan.

Thirty years ago, and we were new believers, and we didn't know Genesis from Revelation. Literally. She did, but she couldn't explain it to me.

And I turned on TV. It was a church in Virginia. And the whole service, they were rebuking Satan. And at the end, I thought, they never once mentioned Jesus. Mentioned the Holy Spirit a lot, but never mentioned Jesus.

And even as a baby Christian, I knew that can't be right. It just couldn't be. So we have churches that spend a lot of time rebuking Satan. First of all, we are not called on to do that.

Let God do the rebuking. Let Him handle that. Second, we have no power over Satan. He's a strong being. Let the Lord wield His power, which is infinitely more than Satan or demons.

We should spend our time reverencing and praising God and let Him handle Satan. Jude also tells us that apostates are like unreasoning animals.

They operate by instinct. Apostates may put on airs as they teach, but in the end, they are like brute animals devoid of reasoning and operating by instinct.

They are fools that will be destroyed by their own lying and their own deceptive heresies. And we've seen them. We've seen them fall like tin pants.

Some of you young guys don't know what that is, but some of our old people, we know what that is. And in this way, they bring judgment on themselves. The moment is still there. The moment is still there. The moment is still there.

The moment is still there. Thank you.