In Like Manner These People – Jude 1:8-9

The false teachers Jude is warning his readers about are claiming to have visions from God that justify their sexual freedom and readiness to disobey God’s clear prohibitions.  The church has had two wrong responses to those claiming prophetic words from God.  One has been to despise all prophesyings (1 Thessalonians 5:20).  The other is to receive all claims to prophecy without testing the validity of the prophecy and the prophet (1 Thessalonians 5:21).  Jude’s readers needed to test the validity of these prophets, which, in effect, he is doing, showing that they are false prophets who use their supposed hearing from God to justify evil.

Yet in like manner these people also, relying on their dreams, defile the flesh, reject authority, and blaspheme the glorious ones. But when the archangel Michael, contending with the devil, was disputing about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment, but said, “The Lord rebuke you.” (Jude 1:8–9, ESV)

Jude here draws the parallels himself between the false teachers and the examples he just mentioned.  The false teachers rely on their dreams instead of God’s words, defile the flesh (like the angels and the people of Sodom and Gomorrah did), reject authority (like the Israelites, angels, and people of Sodom and Gomorrah did), and blaspheme the glorious ones.  

This last accusation is obscure.  The men of Sodom, in a way, might be accused of blaspheming the angels who visited Lot by desiring sex with them.  But it doesn’t seem they were aware that they were angels.  It is more likely that, as Jude’s readers assumed, the law was given by angels (see Hebrews 2) and by disobeying God’s law mediated through angels, they were blaspheming angels.

It is also possible that some part of their teaching showed impertinence to angels, perhaps tied with their belief that they were receiving revelation from God through their dreams that nullified angelic revelation.  If so, it reveals that we can commit two errors: (1) giving too much accolade to angels, even deifying them, or (2) not giving enough respect to them.

Jude backs up his claim by reciting from a book, lost to us but mentioned by early church fathers, called either the Testament of Moses or the Assumption of Moses.  Jude has a penchant, we have seen, for citing non-biblical books.  Though the archangel Michael had been sent by God to claim and bury Moses’ body when he died on Mount Nebo in Moab (Deuteronomy 34:5), he did not presume to contend with Satan but left rebuke of Satan to Yahweh.  This is the same thing Yahweh did when Satan accused the high priest Joshua in Zechariah 3.

Moses warned Israel that false prophets would spring up after him (Deuteronomy 13 and 18), and that even if one of their prophecies came true, if they led the people to worship of false gods, they were not sent from Yahweh.  We need not be skeptical of those who claim the gift of prophecy (we don’t want to “quench the Spirit” as Paul warns in 1 Thessalonians 5:19), but if their prophecies contradict the plain teaching of Scripture, as those in Jude’s day did, we must reject them as prophets.