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. And the angels who did not keep their proper domain, but left their own abode, He has reserved in everlasting chains under darkness for the judgment of the great day” (Jude 5-6).
Not only is it a perversion of the truth to believe and teach that God’s grace excuses unbelief and disobedience (see previous post), it also is a perversion of the truth to believe and teach that God’s grace excuses presumption (v. 6).
At some point in the past there were angels who refused to stay within their God-given, God-authorized sphere of responsibility and service. They presumed upon God; they sought to do some thing(s) that God had not authorized. His response to their presumption was swift and severe: “He has reserved (them) in everlasting chains under darkness for the judgment of the great day.” If this is God’s response to the sin of presumption when done by angels, who would be so foolish as to presume to believe and teach that His grace will excuse the sin of presumption when committed by humans?
The grace of God does not excuse presumption. Only spiritual perverts teach otherwise.
