Of Beasts, Bubbles, and Blemishes

These are hidden reefs at your love feasts, as they feast with you without fear, shepherds feeding themselves; waterless clouds, swept along by winds; fruitless trees in late autumn, twice dead, uprooted; wild waves of the sea, casting up the foam of their own shame; wandering stars, for whom the gloom of utter darkness has been reserved forever.

Jude 12-13

From this whole lesson, we are taught a very old lesson that the modern worldview has done its best to blast away from our minds. Ancient history is connected to the coming apocalypse with such an intense undercurrent that to speak of the present always as “progress” and the future as more of the same, is a delusion that fits all of those descriptions Jude assigns here to the false teachers: “like unreasoning animals” (v. 10), “waterless clouds,” (v. 12) “fruitless trees” (v. 12), “wild waves” (v. 13), and “wandering stars” (v. 13). 

What are all of these things? They are temporary things. Very temporary. They are not only the “lower creatures,” as the old thinkers said, but as the descriptives run onward, they become that which barely ever was. These “waves of the future,” as they dub themselves in a bright flicker of time, turn out to be not even faint echoes of the past, a forgettable moment. Often the most real things can come into sharper focus against the backdrop of the less real. 

How then does Jude reorient us to this more eternal outlook? He does so, first of all, by showing us that there is nothing so new about false teachers that we should not have seen them coming. And we should be confident about where they are going, and on guard lest we go the same way. 

Entropy of the Soul

In order to apprecciate the lesson, the reader must hear hard speech about bad men. At first we might wonder why this would be hard. These are the bad guys and we (Jude’s true audience) are the—well, if not “good guys,” at any rate, by God’s grace, on the side of the good, the true, and the beautiful. But here is the problem: There is nothing in this litany of lust for temporality that is unique to the false teacher. The whole charm of falsity and sensuality is that it promises to make much of myself and yourself. The five expressions—“like unreasoning animals” (v. 10), “waterless clouds,” (v. 12) “fruitless trees” (v. 12), “wild waves” (v. 13), and “wandering stars” (v. 13)—as I mentioned, are types of temporality. But there is diversity among them as well. 

Two verses back, he had already compared the sensual-minded man to a beast. And so he is. The analogy may be offensive, but it is not difficult. We have all heard the lament about our public education, that for over the past century, children are taught that they are nothing but animals, and then we are surprised when they act it out. Jude’s point goes further into the offense even of the philosophical man (or at least, what philosophical man used to be). It was widely believed among Western thinkers that it was precisely thinking that separated man from beast. Aristotle called man “the rational animal.” Nowadays the supposedly thinking man is the ideologue. He no longer thinks of truths, but of “the real world,” by which he means the world of action.

Ideologies are actually the philosophy of the pigs in Animal Farm. It is “higher thought” than the dutiful horse could manage, to be sure. It even got the horse moving, as the pigs no doubt took great pride in. But at the end of the day, ideology is the exaltation of base instincts to the level of commanding the lower elements. 

When Jude’s unnamed antagonists dared to give an alternative narrative about angels only for the sake of rejecting authorities and unleashing passions below, were they not humans degraded to the level of pigs pretending to be human again? So it is with each generation of mere ideologues. But we cannot just turn a blind eye to them. Each generation of practical-minded Christian parents leave their children pray to these.

So a further problem was captured by the Psalmist:

“Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them” (Ps. 115:8).

From this we derive the expression—You become what you behold. The young man (it is usually young men) who falls for these characters will become all of those things. He will fill his soul with waterless clouds and so his soul will become that disintegrating thing.

At least two other lessons can be applied from the rest of the imagery. The ideas of wandering and fruitlessness and, in general, being without substance, make it plain that the “beasts” or the “bubbles” are not what they claim to be. What they invest in will come to nothing. But what they commend to the church only proves unimpressive if one takes the long view. That is why—in addition to staying in the Word—I always counsel people to read at least one biography or portion of church history every year.

While the past is not eternal either, it is closer to it than the present in one sense. While the present is “closer” to eternity in the sense that the Last Day is closer to today than yesterday—that is, marching nearer to it on the timeline—yet the substance of ages past (its wisdom, its examples of virtue, its pattern of what comes closer or strays further to heaven’s norms, etc.)—all of this is a time more like eternity than one’s own time. One’s own time is always the least substantive thing on the time line. This is true by definition. It has the least to say. It has the least being. Simply take a mental picture of “now” now. You couldn’t do it, could you? That is because it is literally next to nothing. And yet these easily-impressed charlatans tell us it is everything. More irrational words have never been spoken.

Here is Jude’s point in a nutshell. Take a step back “from the trees to the forest,” so to speak. History helps us do that.  It is not that one ever becomes wholly immune to being unsettled by false teachers. But the closer one gets to a perspective of permanence, the more the conceptual tools are there to rightly discern the situation.

But They Are Even in the Church!

Here is the main reason such topics are covered in Scripture. We are easily distrubed by those with standing in the church leading astray. We will recall Jude’s earlier line of reasoning. Christ removes those which He had previously joined to the temporal manifestation of His congregation (vv. 5-7). Here Jude uses two expressions that are no longer general principles, but speak to the intrusion of these people into the means of grace. The ESV says, “These are hidden reefs at your love feasts” (v. 12), while the King James calls them “spots,” and the NIV “blemishes.” 

There are a few places in Matthew’s Gospel where the link is made between God’s sovereign decree and the “uprooting” of what seems firmly fixed. John the Baptist had declared to the Pharisees who came to spy on him,

“Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire” (Mat. 3:10).

And when these same Pharisees came to investigate Jesus Himself, and the disciples were concerned that His teaching offended them, how did He respond?

“Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be rooted up. Let them alone; they are blind guides. And if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit” (Mat. 15:13-14).

We often speak about relating divine sovereignty and human responsibility in salvation in general, or in sanctification in particular, or else in prayer or evangelism. What those two statements in Matthew are doing is tracing God’s eternal decree down to the moment of disbelief in the one who rejects Christ, and even to a reminder that this applies to false teachers as well. The disciples needed to hear that so as to not obsess over the Pharisees’ response. We ought not be so impressed with this or that person, that it causes us to forget the big picture explanations. 

The other piece of imagery focusing on them as pretend ministers would surely have recalled the words of Ezekiel 34 and the false shepherds who feed themselves: ‘shepherds feeding themselves.’ The verb form for “shepherd,” poimainó, is used here, so it can mean anything from that to “feed” or “tend.” Now it may be difficult to see in the moment when this is happening as well. An obvious connection is made to that error of Balaam, that is, for gain. So we tend to think of the financial motives. That may be one way for them to feed themselves. It may even be the ultimate way. How to know whether or not that is happening becomes the matter of controversy. 

The lay person often cannot tell who is in and who is out when it comes to other lay people. How much more difficult when it comes to shepherds? However difficult it is, it will be these traits. Young Augustine would have picked the brain of Faustus, but it only took a few moments. We do not all have his profound analysis. But we can know a tree that bears no fruit when we see it, or a cloud that never rains. It is instructive that this subject matter is in a general epistle, and not only in the Pastoral Letters. The implication is what Paul had spelled out about Jannes and Jambres, who had opposed Moses: “But they will not get very far, for their folly will be plain to all, as was that of those two men” (2 Tim. 3:8).