Welcome to the Ten Minute Bible, where we look at one book of the Bible in ten minutes. Well, give or take ten minutes. In this session, we're going to look at the little book of Jude. Now, as you've heard me say many times in this series, in order to understand any book, but especially a book in the Bible, you really need to understand three things. Number one is the subject. which is nothing more than the answer to the question, what is the author talking about? Every book has a overall subject. Now, it may deal with a bunch of subjects, but those minor subjects are subdivisions of the main subject. So when I say a book needs, you need to know the subject, I mean by that the overall subject of the book. The second thing you need to know is how the author handles that subject. I call it how he develops that subject. And the word I really like is the word structure. What is the structure of his development? How does he put that together? Now, in a secular book, There's a table of contents that'll give you some insight into what he's going to do. Unfortunately, that's not true of the Bible. However, there is in a study Bible a table of contents, and it will give you some idea of what the author is going to do in terms of developing the subject. The third thing you need to understand is what I call the situation. In virtually every book of the Bible, not all, but virtually all, there is something that happened that provoked that author to write on that subject to that original audience. Now, if you knew that, you are a long way down the road to understanding that book. So it consists, the situation consists of the author, it consists of the the audience and the purpose. That's the real critical little point here, why he wrote on that subject. Now, with that in mind, let's look at the little book of Jude. What is the subject? Well, that's really rather simple. The subject of Jude is false teachers. He is talking about the presence of false teachers. then the question is, what is the structure? How does he develop that? Now, as you've heard me say, if you've listened to this series, that when you get to the epistles, that they're usually in the format of an ancient letter, which consisted of a salutation, and then it had a thanksgiving, a prayer, the body of the book, and it ended with some personal greetings and a benediction. The Book of Jude follows that format basically. However, it doesn't have the customary thanksgiving or prayer, nor does it conclude with personal greetings. However, it has the salutation, it has a prologue, the body of the book, and it has at the end, instead of a benediction, it's more like a doxology. It's roughly in the form of an ancient letter. If I were going to outline the book, I would say that the salutation is in the first two verses. You know, there's only one chapter in this book. And then there's the prologue in verses three and four. The body of the book starts in verse five. And the body of the book, is divided into two parts. First, he talks about the fact that sinners are going to be judged, and he primarily focuses on the fact that in the Old Testament, God judged different people. But what he's really after are false teachers. That's very clear, because after he deals with God judging sinners in general, that's in verses 5 to 10, then beginning in verse 11 and going through verse 23, he talks about the fact that false teachers will be judged. That's the bulk of the book. That's really the heart of the book, and that's what this book is about. So he describes the false teachers. He gives their characteristics. He gives their conversation, what they talk about, how they're made up, what they're like, but he goes into great detail into the description of false teachers. And then, of course, he ends with a doxology. Now, that takes us to the situation. It's an interesting little book. I mentioned a minute ago that the situation consists of the author, the purpose, and the recipients. The author identifies himself as Jude, the servant of Jesus Christ and a brother of James. Now that's interesting. If he's a brother of James, he's the half-brother of Jesus. So James and Jude are the two half-brothers of Jesus that wrote books of the Bible. And in both cases, they don't exalt the fact that they're related to him by being a half-brother. They both identify themselves as slaves of Jesus Christ. So you might look at this title by saying that he has a spiritual title, or a heavenly title, like servant of Jesus Christ. and he has an earthly title, he's the mere brother of James. Now, he says that he's gonna teach in a second about false teachers. Now, if you've followed me in the last book we looked at was 2 Peter, 2 Peter chapter two discussed false teachers. And so there gets to be a debate as to which came first, the chicken or the egg. Did Peter come first or did Jude come first? And that gets solved real easy for me because Peter says the false teachers are coming and Jude says they're here. So I think that Jude was aware of Peter and he's expanding on Peter. Now, That leads us to the date, and that's the reason I brought up what I just did. If 2 Peter was written in 64, and this was written later, it was probably written much later. So, you know, pick a date. We don't have a lot of information where we can nail down a date, but I think it would be safe to say that it's somewhere maybe around 75 AD. Now, the recipients are believers in general. It's addressed to believers. And yet this particular group of believers are troubled by some false teachers. He calls them ungodly. He calls them dreamers, which probably suggests, you know, in the Old Testament, the prophets got messages from the Lord by seeing a dream. They got a vision by day or dream by night. So the fact that he calls them a dreamers may indicate that they were claiming to be prophets or receiving prophecy from the Lord. At any rate, his point is that they are ungodly, they are libertarians, they're taking grace to the point of license, and they're headed for judgment. So the purpose is to remind believers that God will judge the ungodly. and then to encourage believers to contend for the faith. And that becomes the phrase that's most known in this book, that we're to contend for the faith. So I'd sum it up by saying, that gets right at the message of the book. God will judge the ungodly, including false teachers, and believers are to contend for the faith. Now, I guess that leads us to the question of how does that apply to us or what does that have to do with us? How would you apply it? And I would say that that summary statement really tells us what to do. That we need to become aware of false teachers. Matter of fact, he will say that. in the book toward the end, that we need to remember that false teachers are around. And then he is saying that what we need to know is that God judges them, and in the meantime, we have to contend for the faith. So the question becomes then, how do you contend for the faith? And that's what he tells you at the end of the book. You keep yourself in the love of God, and you go rescue those who are being influenced by the false teachers. So this book is really about false teachers.