Let's begin with prayer. Father, we ask that you would take your word and make it understandable to us in a way that edifies us, Father, in a way that causes us to grow in our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, that this would not be a wasted time, but a time of Progress in him we ask in Jesus name. Amen we're in Jude and Let's start in verse 14 We have this amazing Look that takes us all the way from the time of the early church back through the majority of Old Testament history to a preacher, seven generations from Adam. And if we didn't know the facts, I think my first question would be, what's he preaching about? What was his message? And so here we have this. Verse 14, and about these also, about the ungodly, okay? That's what we're looking at. And about these also. Enoch, in the seventh generation from Adam, so prior to the flood, prophesied saying, behold, the Lord came with many thousands of his holy ones, to execute judgment. Even back then, there was a message of the return of Christ to bring about judgment on this earth, and to judge the ungodly. And as we're gonna see, ungodliness is the blight of humanity. It's the result of sin, it's the result of the fall, and It was a tremendous danger to Israel, just like it is today a tremendous danger to the church, okay? All right. Verse 15, to execute judgment upon all, and to convict, every ungodly person is going to be convicted, proven guilty, to convict all the ungodly, notice how often he uses this word, of all their ungodly deeds, what they do that's ungodly, which they have done in an ungodly way, They're not only doing ungodly things, they're doing them in an ungodly way. You see how this stuff is piling up, okay? And of all the harsh things which ungodly sinners have spoken against him. So as you look at this, ungodly deeds, ungodly way, and ungodly words against him. Okay? And that's, like I said, that's the blight of humanity. And where there are God's people, this battle is going on. In other words, Satan is always trying to introduce ungodliness among the people of God. So what I'm gonna do today is to contrast the danger of ungodliness in Israel to the danger of ungodliness in the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so bear with me. You know, sometimes, quite often, I wake up in the night and I say to myself, really? You're gonna do that? I don't know if I'll ever get over that. But at any rate, let's go to Jude 1.4 first. And here's a warning to the church. For certain persons, Jude says, have crept in unnoticed those who were long beforehand marked out for this condemnation, ungodly persons who turn the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny our only master and Lord, Jesus Christ. Okay, now let's go back to Deuteronomy 29. And in Deuteronomy 29, we have to look, I wish we could do the whole thing, but we at least need to see the background. Now remember, the Jews have come out of Egypt, and they were unwilling to go in and take the land the way the Lord said, and they doubted God. And so the Lord said, every day you spied out the land, you're going to spend a year, 40 years until that whole generation dies off. So they spent, well, it should have taken 11 days to get there. Took 40 years. Okay. But when we come to chapter 29, we're basically come to the end of those 40 years and Moses, who's been there the whole time, gets something from the Lord that he is to pass on to the next generation that's gonna go into the land. So it's framed this way. Verse one, these are the words of the covenant which the Lord commanded Moses to make with the sons of Israel in the land of Moab. Now, here's a really important word. Besides, when we think of Mosaic covenant, what do we think of? Ten commandments and all that that came forth from Mount Sinai or Mount Horeb. This is besides that, besides the covenant which he made with them at Horeb. So the Lord says, I have a covenant for this generation that is besides the other covenant, okay? Verse two, then Moses summoned all Israel. and said to them, you've seen all that the Lord did before your eyes in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and all his servants and all his land, the great trials which your eyes have seen, those great signs and wonders, yet to this day the Lord has not given you a heart to know, nor eyes to see, nor ears to hear. And I've led you 40 years, here he is telling us, 40 years. And I have led you 40 years in the wilderness. Your clothes have not worn out on you. You got any clothes that you wore every day and 40 years you've been wearing them? That doesn't work really well, you know. And yet God, Why is Moses talking about these things? Because it's how God took care of them in the wilderness. He says, your clothes have worn out and your sandal has not worn out on your foot. How many boots you've been through? How many shoes you've been through? How many sneakers you've been through? And not only that, they're not traveling around by car. You know what I mean? They're walking. Pretty amazing. And you've not eaten bread, nor have you drunk wine or strong drink in order that you may know that I am the Lord your God. Okay, so then let's come down to verse nine. where the Lord says this, through Moses, so keep the words of this covenant, that's this new covenant, or this besides covenant, so keep the words of this covenant to do them that you may prosper in all that you do. You stand today, all of you, before the Lord your God, your chiefs, your tribes, your elders, and your officers, even all the men of Israel, your little ones, your wives, and the alien who is within your camps, from the one who chops your wood to the one who draws your water. All right? That you may enter into the covenant with the Lord your God, and into this oath, which the Lord your God is making with you today, in order that he may establish you today as his people, and he may be your God, just as he spoke to you and as he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And he says, this is gonna go farther than that, not with you alone am I making this covenant and this oath, but both with those who stand here with us today in the presence of the Lord our God and with those who are not with us here today. For you know how we lived in the land of Egypt and how we came through the midst of the nations through which you passed, conquered some of them. Moreover, that's on the eastern side of the Jordan. Moreover, you have seen their abominations. and their idols of wood, stone, silver, and gold, which they had with them. Now here we come to the issue. The Lord says this, lest there shall be among you a man or woman or family, whole family, or tribe, one of the 12 tribes, whose heart turns away today from the Lord our God to go and serve the gods of those nations. Those are small g. But they're real gods. I mean, they're presented that way in scripture. They're not the god, almighty, who is over all. But there are gods of those nations. And they follow him. And you know, it's an amazing thing what God did. After the Tower of Babel, the nations just went their ways. They followed these other gods, and God chose Abraham, and he said, you're gonna be my people. From you is gonna come my people. And so the question is, this is a satanic battle, by the way. How's this battle gonna go? God's taking his people out, he's making a covenant with them, Are they gonna stay with that covenant? How does it, in the beginning, go off the rails? We're gonna come to a time, you can come down to the book of Jeremiah, and you got basically the whole land following idolatry. So it might be a good question, how'd that ever get started? Well, this is God saying, don't let it start, okay? Don't let it start. And how can you put into thinking the horror that comes out of following those other gods? They're gonna be like beasts. They're gonna be like a cancer on the earth. and they're gonna take their little children and sacrifice them. They're gonna, I want you to think about this. You know how we have our kids and we love our kids? How do you go from that love of your kids to cutting their throats and burning them up? How do you do that? And the reason, I don't enjoy talking about that, but here's the thing. What has to go wrong to do that? And that's what God is talking about here. He's saying, don't let it happen. All right, now. So, verse 18. Lest there shall be among you a man or woman, or family, or tribe. I think of the tribe of Dan later on, all kinds of ungodliness there, and idolatry with the split of the kingdom. Lest there be among you a man or a woman or family or tribe whose heart turns away today from the Lord our God to go and serve the gods of those nations. Lest there shall be among you a root bearing poisonous fruit and wormwood. Now notice this, here we're gonna enter into the thinking of what would be thought if this was happening. And it shall be when he hears the words of this curse, He will boast saying, I have peace, though I walk in the stubbornness of my heart. And you know, whenever this starts, I think that person can say, I'm gonna do what I'm gonna do. And nothing's happened yet. Now God says he's gonna, you know, it's like the person that says, if there's a God, and he says stupid things, then let him strike me dead. See, there's no God. Insanity. So this person says, I have peace, though I walk in the stubbornness of my heart. I'm not going along with this covenant. In order to destroy the watered land with the dry. In other words, and I don't know exactly how to deal with that. There's quite a bit of idea about that, but it sounds like I don't care if the whole thing comes down. I think we see some of that in our own country. It doesn't matter whether it works or not, we're gonna do it. It's wrong, but we're gonna do it anyway. They wouldn't say it's wrong, but at any rate. Now notice the Lord's response. The Lord will never be willing to forgive him. Rather, the anger of the Lord and his jealousy will burn against that man, and every curse which is written in this book will rest on him. And the Lord will blot out his name from under heaven. then the Lord will single him out for adversity from all the tribes of Israel, according to all the curses of the covenant which are written in this book of the law. Now here's a very sad thing. The next 22nd verse doesn't say, but you're never gonna go that way, and so you won't have to experience any of this. Instead, very prophetically it says, Now the generation to come, your sons who rise up after you, and the foreigner who comes from a distant land, when they see the plagues of the land and the diseases with which the Lord has afflicted it, will say, all this land is brimstone and salt. a burning waste, unsewn and unproductive, and no grass grows in it, like the overflow of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admon, Zeboiim, which the Lord overthrew in his anger and in his wrath. And all the nations shall say, why has the Lord done thus to his land? Why this great outburst of anger? Then men shall, notice, people are gonna know. Then men shall say, because they forsook the covenant of the Lord God of their fathers, which he made with them when he brought them out of the land of Egypt. And they went and served other gods and worshiped them, gods whom they have not known and whom he had not allotted to them. Therefore the anger of the Lord burned against that land to bring upon it every curse which is written in this book. And the Lord uprooted them from their land. Why are Jews all over the world? Why? Isn't it amazing? It all comes back to here and how it started. And you know, I said I want to do a comparison. So think about what has happened in so many churches in our country. It started, churches where the word was preached and people have, you know, older people have fond memories of that time and the fellowship that was there and the people that were saved and the love that were, you know, and all of that. And then, secret people, or people came in secretly, and they shared things that were ungodly. They shared things that were not true. In our own county, this has happened. Churches that had some kind of a foundation, and then, and pretty soon, what happens? It's like a religious club. It's not solid. It's not dealing with truth anymore. And many, many places, the churches, nobody's going there. They shut them down. They close them up. OK. Verse 28, and the Lord uprooted them from their land in anger and in fury and in great wrath and cast them into another land. First the Assyrians came and took out the northern kingdom and then the Chaldeans came, Nebuchadnezzar, and took out the southern kingdom. And you know, I don't understand Verse 29, except here's what I believe, here's what I get from it. It says this, the secret things, this is the end of what, or part of what Moses is talking to them about. He says, the secret things belong to the Lord our God. But the things revealed belong to us. And what's he saying? You know, I love this. What are those secret things? You know, we write away, we want to go, what is that? You know, we read in Revelation, you know, that there's a certain thing, a certain part, and the Lord says, or the angel says to John, don't write that down. And we also, I wonder, that's end time stuff. I wonder what that's gonna be. Well, God chose not to reveal it. But what Moses, I think, is saying, what God is speaking through Moses, the secret things belong to the Lord our God. We don't know what they are, but the things revealed, what's he saying? I just revealed to you what's really important. We don't know the secret things. The question is this, are we knowing and paying attention to the things revealed? Thy word is truth. So here's the thing I've been dealing with. It's just prompted by nothing, but it just bothers me. We sent a check off to a relative of Wynn's, her sister, and didn't get there. So I started looking on, and there's all these stories about mail being stolen. I just read one, I think, yesterday or the day before, somebody had a key was going in that got several hundred thousand dollars worth of checks and stuff, information, you know, you get credit card numbers, you know, it just goes on and on. And it just makes me mad, you know. Now, that check hasn't been cashed, but it's gone, been weeks. And so yesterday, you know, I, neighbor brought over this round so that I could have something to throw axes and knives at. Not that I'm mad, but. And I ordered a set of knives from Amazon. And yesterday I go out to the, you know, they say it's gonna be here today, you know, and all that. And I go out there and there's this heavy brown paper. It's that big. And there's nothing in it. What is going on? It's ripped open on the top. Somebody stole my knives. And why would the post office deliver an empty? But here's the thing. We're living in a very real time of ungodliness. And let me tell you something. It's gonna affect us. Do you know what I mean by that? We as believers don't get to just coast through and not have difficult things. Things are gonna be stolen. As things break down, those things are gonna happen. And so, go to Psalm 43. Psalm 43. This Psalmist, and you say, what are you talking about? I'm talking about what's it like to live in an ungodly nation. Now it's talking about Israel in this Psalm. Vindicate me, O God, and plead my case against an ungodly nation. O deliver me from the deceitful and unjust man. For thou art the God of my strength. Now notice, why has thou rejected me? The writer of this psalm, I think what he's saying there, Lord, how come you're not doing what I would like you to do? Why is it so hard? This may have been written from being a Jew in Babylon. That's one of the thoughts, I think. And then he says this, why do I go mourning? Because of the oppression of the enemy. There's so many of our brothers and sisters in Christ across the planet. They don't have the good things that we do. And life is extremely hard. And some of them are in prisons and families separated. I wondered about, you know, when Syria fell. And this new regime goes through and they're slaughtering people, you know, and they're against Christians. You know, I just think, oh Lord, those are my brothers and my sisters over there. And then I think, what if that were to happen here? What would life be like then, you know? And I think that the Lord gave us this psalm so that we would realize, not gonna be easy if that does happen. And it's not easy for those that are in the middle of it. Okay. So he says, why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy? Oh, send out thy light and thy truth. That's what I need, Lord. Let them lead me. Let them, let the word of God bring me to thy holy hill and to thy dwelling places, and I will go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy. Can you have joy with nothing else? It's an important question, by the way. So much of what we think is our joy is wrapped up in I got this, I got that, I got my family, my wife, on and on, my things, my recreations. What happens if those get touched? What happens if those get taken? Okay. And upon the liar, I shall praise thee. Oh God, my God. Now here's the question. I love this. Don't you love the way the word of God deals with reality? Where we really live. It doesn't say, well, you'll never think like this. It presents a saint that's thinking like this. And so it says, He's asking himself, and I think I have to ask myself this, and we should. Why are you in despair, oh my soul? And why are you disturbed within me? You know, I think about I love that, I think it's the 12th chapter of Ecclesiastes, where it talks about all the problems of getting old. You know, basically it says, and you reach this point where the days aren't as good as they were, you know. And you think about how that's truth. That's reality. But every step along the way, I don't like it. You know, I just don't like it. Then I'm gonna do what I can to slow it down if I can, but it's there. You know, it's coming. It's the reality of fallen people, you know, even among the saved. I mean, our body is not saved. We're waiting for our new body when we go to be with the Lord. And so it says, why are you in despair, oh my soul? And I say this, if I'm in despair, I'm not seeing it correctly. Why are you in despair, oh my soul? And why are you disturbed within me? What's the answer? Hope in God. Trust him, for I shall again praise him. The help, I love this, the help of my countenance. What's your countenance? It's your face, you know? What do you think the countenance of a grumbler looks like? The person who's in despair, and I love that. The help of my countenance, my God. He can put a smile on my face. Okay, then, take you back to a passage we've been to, but let's go to 2 Timothy chapter three. Second Timothy three. I believe this is very simply understood as a description of godless times, the ungodly all around us. But realize this, that in the last days, Now, you may have a question, are we in them or not? But I think we're sure pushing up against them pretty hard, it would seem to me. But realize this, and in the last days, difficult times will come. I'm in 2 Timothy 3, verse one. Okay. What does it say? Difficult times will come. Do you think you could stop that? For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable. watch some of those reels or whatever they are on the internet of believers out talking to students, and I come up with that. Irreconcilable. You know what I mean? So often they shout and yell and then go to personal attacks against, instead of saying, well, let's talk about this. Irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good. So here we are, first service, we're talking about put on the Lord Jesus Christ. What is that? Good. It's being used of him with good deeds and the right attitude and so forth. But what about the world? What about the ungodly? Haters of good. You know what? treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to a form of godliness or religion, although they've denied its power, they denied the power of the gospel, the gospel's the power of God unto salvation, and avoid such men as these. Oh. Father, help us to realistically appraise the days that we live in, help us to Protect our local body and any other body of believers father to be for them and in prayer for them that The testimony of Jesus Christ will be maintained the Word of God will be taught Day after day and that we might hold on as long as we can and that there would be no roots of evil, bitterness, sin springing up in our congregations where the Word is being taught. So make these things real to us, Father. Give us a heart to understand and see these things and apply them, we ask in Jesus' name, amen.