What Jesus' Brother Jude Wanted Us To Know | Verse 22 | Have Mercy On Those Who Doubt
Having completed his direct denunciations of false teachers and their evil practices as well as having encouraged the saints to build themselves up in their most holy faith, Jude then exhorts his readers in a way that should not escape our attention. His command has proven remarkably helpful for a number of reasons. Anyone concerned with appropriately handling the negative effects of false teaching in the lives of people who have been caught up in error need to heed Jude’s words.
In so many words, Jude, like the other biblical writers, has made it clear that false teachers are typically going to remain unrepentant and remain hardened, their condemnation having been designated from long ago (c.f. Jude 4). He never once tells his readers to “pray for them” as many today are apt to say in order to avoid confrontation. He never once suggests that false teachers are unaware of their falsities. A “true” false teacher is one who purposely teaches heresy under the guise of orthodox Christianity. In other words, a false teacher is one who teaches error as truth.
That being said, there is room for evangelizing the leaders of cultic groups like Mormonism and Jehovah’s Witnesses as they are not operating under the cloak of Christianity. While they may identify as Christians for some semblance of historicity, they are under no illusion as to their separation from Protestantism and many have indeed been saved from their cultic teaching platforms upon hearing the Word of Christ and receiving it in faith. This is much different than those who profess Christ and feign orthodoxy, yet teach what is contrary, or novel, ostensibly as biblical doctrine.
So, then, at this point Jude has moved on from the context of condemning false teachers, to then encouraging Christians to remain steadfast in their faith, to now telling them to “have mercy on those who doubt.”
The false teachers, in other words, were making an impact as they always do.
“They deceive the hearts of the naïve”, Paul told the Romans at the end of his long letter to them (16:18). So much so, in fact, the Galatians had been “bewitched” by them (3:1). Even the Thessalonians were convinced they missed the second coming of Christ because of them (2 Thess 2:2). While the types of false teachings vary, almost in every case it was usually because of the weakness of faith that certain Christians possessed that ultimately led to their being confounded. They were “naïve”, “foolish”, and thus “shaken in mind” when persuasive and plausible personalities cloaked their error in Christian language. As a result, many in the church were wrestling with doubt as they tried to reconcile the different things they were hearing.
Even still, Paul encouraged the church. Paul wrote to the Colossians, as he did many churches, prodding them on in their faith, “in order that no one may delude you with plausible arguments” (2:4).
Like Jude, Paul urges them to “walk in [Christ], rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught” (vs. 6–7). Immediately, he follows up with: “See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.”
While he could become “perplexed” (Gal 4:20) by those who demonstrated doubts and actions that betrayed those doubts, Paul still had confidence in the sovereignty of God’s having chosen a people for His own possession, evinced in his telling the Thessalonians: “But we ought always to give thanks to God for you, brothers beloved by the Lord, because God chose you as the firstfruits to be saved, through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth” (2 Thess 2:13).
The very fact that the biblical writers wrote to struggling churches rather than the false teachers themselves models in itself how we ought to handle these two different types of people. Indeed, Scripture usually distinguishes the teachers from the taught. Paul, for instance, wrote to the Romans that while “we who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak” (15:1) of the false teachers, he says, “avoid them” (16:17).
And this is not to be confused with the “enemies” in Matthew 6:44 that we are commanded to love and pray for. The “enemies” in our lives are merely people who revile us and persecute us for our faith, or perhaps do not like us for reasons completely unrelated to our faith, but this is a whole different category from the surreptitious false teachers who purposely pervert the final word of the Word of God. The false teachers—virtually every single time in Scripture—are denounced as hopeless apostates, i.e. “they went out [from us], that it might become plain that they all are not of us” (1 Jn 2:19).
For those who are unsettled in their faith due to the menagerie of false teachers who had crept into the church unnoticed, Jude simply tells us to have mercy on them, i.e. “have mercy on those who doubt.”
What does this look like?
Having mercy is to shepherd patiently with the truth so that the truth itself makes the error of the false teachers obvious to them. The Greek word, eleeo, that is employed here means to help one who is afflicted or seeking aid.
Those who have doubts are literally at variance with themselves and often hesitant to believe someone who would suggest they have believed wrongly. It would be wrong for us then, Jude says, to immediately demonize them as being complicit with the false teachers themselves by not immediately grasping the divine truth we are trying to share. Keep in mind, it was their fast and thoughtless demeanor that got them wrapped up in error in the first place, so a slower and more methodical attempt to apprehend truth now is commendable and we ought to be willing to take the time with genuine inquirers.
“The Lord’s servant,” Paul tells Timothy, “must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness.” Here is the ultimate reason: “God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will” (2 Tim 2:24–26) (emphasis mine).
The immediate context here in 2 Timothy pertains to those who are unsaved, so by extension the same patience and gentleness must be applied to those caught in the tension of false teachings that have come through a so-called evangelical source. In all likelihood, the need for salvation is what is in need in these circumstances as well.
The takeaway from Jude on this point is 1) that we not waste our time on those committed to deception in the evangelical church, e.g. false teachers, and 2) have mercy on those who doubt as a result of the false teachers.
To the first point—and for the sake of making an immediate application—we must consider all of the charismatic teachers who espouse health, wealth, and prosperity as the promise of the gospel; those who teach their followers to continue speaking words of faith in order to bring into existence the world’s goods. We must avoid them, but have mercy on those who doubt because of them. Perhaps those who doubt remain in unbelief and become just as passionate for hedonism as their idolatrous teacher. There does come a point where we are commanded not to throw our pearls before pigs (c.f. Matt 7), i.e. we do not keep sharing truth when it is constantly trampled upon.
Additionally, the growing trends of novel false teachings nowadays are those that normalize homosexual lust by referring to it as same-sex attraction. By presuming to neutralize the sinful desire as benign and then point to the activity as the only real sin, scores of people have jumped onto the “holy celibate homosexual” bandwagon that effectively perverts the grace of God into sensuality that Jude decried at the beginning of his letter.
The sad reality is that many unbelievers are being coaxed along by major evangelical leaders in a pseudo spirituality that is inherently legalistic as the desires of the heart are never dealt with and never mortified and a disposition of holiness is claimed in light of their self-appointed life of celibacy, or their “gift of godly singleness”. In other words, it has been through the guise of orthodox Christianity that the term “gay Christian” is becoming less shocking and more tenable. Sadly, leaders like Al Mohler, John Piper, Russell Moore and many in their circles are largely to blame for building and amplifying a platform for celibate gay pastors to espouse their spin on sexuality.
Today there is a need for acute, theological criticism of such leaders who know better. Time will tell if they have not simply succumbed to an emotional, political ideology for a moment only to wake-up and decry the direction the ship of same-sex attraction is taking after they personally launched it into the waters of evangelicalism. Time will tell if they will be one of those who continue down the slippery slope of liberalism to unbelief.
I think it is prudent to withhold the “false-teacher” label from the ones I have specifically identified as their track records have shown a bold stance for the gospel of Jesus Christ in the face of opposition. If Michael the archangel did not even slander Satan in Jude 9 then I must also refrain until more evidence makes the case irrefutable. Even then our response should be "The Lord rebuke you," as it was for Michael.
There are countless numbers of toes belonging to denominational leaders and seminary leaders that eagerly rest upon the line of liberalism and many have one foot well past it—shown in their further contribution to the obfuscation of gospel truth by the parroting of liberal social justice politics.
Too many men (and male-supported female leaders) are creating a world of biblically blundering, theological chaos that will inevitably create a massive next-gen tidal wave of church-goers who are far from confident in their faith, having no biblical standard as a comparison, and will thus require tremendous patience on the part of pastors to distinguish and disciple those who hunger and thirst for righteousness rather than relevance.
With these we must be patient and we must pray for an ever increasing level of biblical wisdom.
Dear friends, do not be duped by what appears to be wise and plausible, be desirous of what is biblical! Contend for the faith, avoid the teachers of error, and have mercy on those who doubt by patiently shepherding them to the truth of the Word of God that has been delivered to the saints once and for all.
