God’s grace is amazing.
Every wondrous facet of its beauty and winsomeness is radiant in its splendor. Without God’s grace the human race is eternally doomed, hopelessly lost, forever sentenced to everlasting pain and misery.
Because the father of lies is alive and well, change agents seek to pervert the grace of God into a license to lawlessness and sin (Jude 4). How far afield this is from the intended purpose of grace–i.e. to motivate holy and obedient living (Titus 2:12-14).
As explained in Jude 5-7, such a presumptuous perversion of God’s grace ignores three clear facts of history; therefore Jude writes, “But I want to remind you, though you once knew this, that the Lord, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe” (Jude 5).
It is a perversion of the truth to believe and teach that God’s grace excuses unbelief and disobedience.
To demonstrate this fact Jude reminds us that the Lord saved Israel by His grace out of Egypt. He redeemed them from slavery. There can be no doubt about it: they were freed from bondage; they were God’s holy and chosen people (Exodus 19:5-6). Such grace and deliverance, however, did not excuse any of Israel’s subsequent unbelief and disobedience. Those who refused to obey God were destroyed. Incidentally, this word translated “destroyed” is also found in other New Testament passages, such as 2 Peter 3:9, Luke 13:3, and John 3:16. Clearly, this word as used in these three latter passages has reference to a person’s eternal destiny.
It is true that once you become a child of God, you will always be a child of God. But, according to Jude 5, it is not true that once you have been saved, you will always be saved.
The grace of God does not excuse unbelief and disobedience. Only spiritual perverts teach otherwise.
