Grumbling Malcontents and Last Day Deniers

These are grumblers, malcontents, following their own sinful desires; they are loud-mouthed boasters, showing favoritism to gain advantage. But you must tremember, beloved, the predictions of the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ. They said to you, “In the last time there will be scoffers, following their own ungodly passions.”

Jude 16-18

Manton asks, “What is grumbling? It is the scum of discontent or the bold complaints that flow from a polluted mind.”1 It is difficult to conceive of these descriptions applying to a whole class of teachers. Doubtless we have all witnessed people of this sort applying to be teachers, running their mouths and starting factions in the church. We should also remember that for the vast majority in the early church and for the vast majority out in the mission field, the denominational apparatus (or even the large organizational cushions of the independent seeker church) was not a luxury that faithful teachers could rest upon. The closest we come to this is when independent churches are planted in America by someone actually attempting to be faithful to the Scripture. Such a young man (he is usually young) gets a crash course in the downside of being independent. 

Such start-up churches are magnets for GRUMBLERS and MALCONTENTS. Why is that? It is because, with so many churches to choose from, a person who would not bother to go to seminary and yet tends to throw his weight around at small group after small group—what else can we conclude about such a person than that he is never happy unless he is ruling over a small roost? Yet such is the norm among independent church plants. This was as true in the New Calvinist years as it was during the early Charismatic and independent Bible church movements. 

While the ESV renders the substantival adjective μεμψίμοιροι as “malcontents,” this is redundant to “grumblers,” whereas “finding fault” (NASB) or “faultfinders” (NIV) seems better. To be a grumbler or even a “complainer” (as the KJV uses for the second word) certainly evidences discontent. But this is a constant state which manifests that out loud. 

Although the sinfulness of the teaching has already been covered, Manton hits upon another aspect of THEIR SINFUL DESIRES: “evil desires make people demanding and hard to please.”2 It is all the more subtle when we are speaking of those infant stages—the point of them “creeping in,” to use the expression of verse 4—since this is not likely to be the overt teaching or the rank sin, but testing the waters of self-assertion. And then, as Manton suggests, comes flattery. That is the best sense of SHOWING FAVORITISM. How can it be an advantage is the favoritism is not an appeal to those with weight in the church, whether that be money, position, or popularity?  

The Last Days According to the Apostles

Green reads verse 17 to be a confession to “being outside the ring of those who claim to be apostles.”3 This is a stretch indeed. If the strictest sense of “apostle” is made to mean those whom the Lord sent out in the Gospels, then two awkward truths result. Why are not all seventy (or seventy-two) apostles? Why is Paul an apostle after the fact? This is not a proof that Jude was considered an apostle, but it does expose that Green’s conclusion is hasty, and even potentially distracting without further explanation of the criteria for the New Testament books’ canonicity. Beyond that, in the parallel passage in Peter’s second letter, he actually does the same—“that you should remember the predictions of the holy prophets and the commandment of the Lord and Savior through your apostles” (2 Pet. 3:2).

Here is where scoffing is connected to the Lord’s return in 2 Peter 3. But something must be said about the expression, THE LAST TIME. Wescott-Hort (and thus the NASB, ESV, etc.) work from the singular genitive χρόνου, while the Byzantine Majority Text (and so the KJV) uses the plural genitive χρόνῳ. It is a minor detail considering that either one would seem to still cry out for the same explanation.

In his book, The Bible and the Future, Anthony Hoekema explains: 

“The words ‘in the last days’ (en tais eschatais hēmerais) are a translation of the Hebrew words ‘acharey khen, literally afterwards. When Peter quotes these words [of Joel 2:28] and applies them to the event which has just occurred, he is saying in effect: ‘We are in the last days now.’”4 

What is more, “When the expression is found in the singular, however (‘the last day’), it never refers to the present age but always to the age to come, usually to the Day of Judgment or the day of resurrection.” The same pattern is observed about the word “end” (synteleia), so that “end of the ages” (epi synteleia tōn aiōnōn) indicates the same as “last days,” whereas when used in the singular, “end of the age” (tēs synteleias tou aiōnos), it is specifically its termination point.5

This is crucial background to fielding a persistent modern objection to the New Testament: Didn’t Jesus and the Apostles really expect the second coming to occur in their own lifetimes? There is only so far that preterism can help here. A good number of these texts can find termination points in 70 AD. But not all of them. That is especially true about the whole context of the scoffers that 2 Peter 3 and Jude were discussing. The way in which Peter speaks of the judgment of the cosmos cannot be reduced to the astronomical signs that the Prophets used of the Day of the Lord immediate to their own day, nor to Jesus’ use of the same—if one is persuaded of that meaning in the Olivet Discourse.6

As another New Testament scholar has put it about these descriptives (e.g. “last hour,” “last days,” “end of the ages,” “at hand,” “soon,” and “quickly”), these are less about the quantity and more about the quality of that time. There is a basic way that the Hebrew prophets described the “Day of the Lord” that had two time references in view: one of the first coming of the Messiah and the latter of his second coming. Failure to see this in the First Century was a core reason why Christ was rejected by the Jews (as they were expecting only a political king).

The whole kingdom of Christ, from its inauguration as he ascended to the throne (Mat. 28:18, Acts 2:30-33) to its growth through the church age, to its final consummation, is conceived of the end of the old age and dawning of the new world. The Apostles operate in this same worldview, so that the same writers who thought of themselves as those “upon whom the end of the ages has come” (1 Cor. 10:11; cf. 1 Jn. 2:18), can also write, “But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness” (2 Pet. 3:8-9). In other words, the Apostles conceived of the Second Coming as both very near and yet potentially far away, as the eyes of the flesh judge time.

The idea that their own speculations—not to be confused with the inspired canon—did not know, is no strike at all against the expression, considering its profound depths. Nor is any of this a cause to find refuge in preterism, which such passages warn against, whether the disrepute cast upon the literal Second Coming is from an avowed skeptic or one claiming to be Christian. To claim Christ and deny His real return to earth, the bodily resurrection of His saints at that very hour, and the Final Judgement—this full preterism is a dreadful heresy and utter abandonment of the gospel hope.

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1. Manton, Jude, 186.

2. Manton, Jude, 185.

3. Green, The Message of 2 Peter and Jude, 167.

4. Anthony Hoekema, The Bible and the Future (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), 16.

5. Hoekema, The Bible and the Future, 19.

6. cf. R. C. Sproul, The Last Days According to Jesus (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1998), cf. especially on the “astronomical perturbations” (42).