Lookahead: So is that to say that if we are being falsely accused that we should play like a carpet and let the perp walk all over us?  I do not believe that God wants us to let the devil continuously kick us around the block.  But I believe that if we can forgive the perp, God will take care of the rest.    

Jude 1:8,9  Yet in the same way these dreamers defile their bodies, reject authority, and slander glorious beings. But even the archangel Michael, when he disputed with the devil over the body of Moses, did not presume to bring a slanderous charge against him, but said, “The Lord rebuke you!”

Jude returns the topic to the sinners in his contemporary church, but still with a throwback to verse 7—and in so doing gives us further information about Sodom and Gomorrah’s (S&G’s) sin.  In the last post, I had theorized that a major component of S&G’s sin was knowingly planning to abuse God’s angels; Verse 8 bears out that the S&G men were trying to slander the angels, defiling their own (former v. latter) bodies in the process.  The Greek word for slander here is βλασφημέω or blasphémeó: to slander, hence to speak lightly or profanely of sacred things.  (Note this is not the same word that is used for accusation or accuser, which is reserved for satan in the new testament; that word is κατήγορος or kategoros.) The definition for blasphémeó seems somewhat toned down to me.  In my frame of reference, blaspheming always seemed to connote saying or doing something so utterly out-of-line that the person is risking eternal damnation on the spot.  But attempting to verbally annihilate the angels’ stature as sacred beings, by expressing S&G’s perverse, sicko intention to have their violently lascivious way with the angels, definitely meets my criterion too.

Side tangent:  An accusation can be true or false, but slander represents untruthful accusations made with the sole intent of destroying a person’s reputation. I have actually encountered people in the workplace who have slandered me and/or my colleagues.  Slander is so tragic in its destructiveness—and difficult people who exhibit this slanderous behavior are very hard to deal with!!  But we can’t lose sight of the real source of these false accusations.  We are not fighting against humans. We are fighting against forces and authorities and against rulers of darkness and powers in the spiritual world. Ephesians 6:12  Knowing the underlying behind-the-scenes cause of this tragic behavior helps to put things in the right perspective—and many times can mean the difference between bitterness and forgiveness in the victim’s future.

The “beings” word in verse 8 is missing in the Greek term “glorious beings.”  The Greek word is doxa, a noun meaning honor, renown; glory, an especially divine quality, the unspoken manifestation of God, splendor.  If you substitute that into the sentence, it reads, sinners “that blaspheme or profane glory itself.” In attempting to profane God’s creation, these sinners are actually going after God. The sacrilegious slander inherent in S&G’s planned desecration was that the angels were carnal beings who would have to submit to such immoral treatment—with God allowing it.  So basically they accused God Himself of being immoral. These S&G people were obviously not the sharpest knives in the drawer.  And, in fact, Jude calls their contemporary counterparts “dreamers” which roughly translates as “crazy men.”

And now these sinners in the “Jude church” were defiling (spiritually and morally), corrupting, polluting, etc. themselves (definition for Greek word, miainó).   So there was some extreme behavior going on.  Essentially they were taking something that was holy and good and true and trying to turn it into something profane and wicked.  Jude was sending out a clear message that they were cruising for a major bruising if they continued in this behavior—one that they might not recover from.  Jude then went on to give an example of the proper angelic conduct which humans should model.  He recounts that even when one of the top good angels contended with satan, the top fallen angel, the former did not accuse the latter or slander him.  He left that up to God.

But even the archangel Michael, when he disputed with the devil over the body of Moses, did not presume to bring a slanderous charge against him, but said, “The Lord rebuke you!” Jude 1:9

So is that to say that if we are being falsely accused that we should play like a carpet and let the perp walk all over us?  I do not believe that God wants us to let the devil continuously kick us around the block.  But I believe that if we can forgive the perp, God will take care of the rest.   

Years ago, a man, in the church that I attended at the time, told me that some of the church members had accused him of having an affair.  Instead of confronting them and attempting to vindicate himself, he had just gone to God with it—without ever saying a word.  Shortly thereafter, God had gloriously vindicated the man and restored him.  In giving this testimony, the man didn’t wax-on about how God punished the perps; he wasn’t rejoicing in their suffering—he was rejoicing in the greatness and willingness of God to save him.  But to vindicate the man so completely, we know that God must have dressed the perps down in a major way as the lies were exposed.  God doesn’t do anything half-way and He will recompense. 

Another side tangent regarding Jude’s account of Michael disputing with the devil about the body of Moses:  “This verse has given more perplexity to expositors than any other part of the Epistle…the difficulty has arisen from these two circumstances: (1) Ignorance of the origin of what is said here of Michael the archangel, nothing of this kind being found in the Old Testament; and, (2) the improbability of the story itself, which looks like a mere Jewish fable.  2 Peter 2:2 made a general reference to angels as not bringing railing accusations against others before the Lord; but Jude refers to a particular case – the case of Michael when contending about the body of Moses.”  www.biblehub.com, Barnes.

In the Jewish Rabbinic literature, there are three positions about Moses’ death—he died but the angel of death was not present; he was caught up into a cloud; or Moses contended with the angel of death for his own body and God decided to conceal the body for future use:

“The different legends agree that when Moses died on Adar 7 (also his birthday) at the age of 120 years, the angel of death not being present. But the earlier and the later legends differ considerably in the description and the details of this event. The earlier ones present the hero’s death as a worthy close to his life…while he is talking with (Joshua and Eleazar) a cloud suddenly surrounds him and he disappears…The event is described somewhat differently, but equally simply, in Sifre. For the statement that Moses did not die at all, compare Sotah 13b.

“When the angel of death, being sent by God to Moses, appeared before him and said, ‘Give me your soul,’ Moses scolded him, saying, ‘You have not even the right to appear where I am sitting; how dare you say to me that I shall give you my soul?’ The angel of death took this answer back to God. And when God said to the angel the second time, ‘Bring Me the soul of Moses,’ he went to the place where Moses had been, but the latter had left. Then he went to the sea to look for Moses there. The sea said that it had not seen Moses since the time when he had led the children of Israel through it. Then he went to the mountains and valleys, which told him that God had concealed Moses, keeping him for the life in the future world, and no creature knew where he was.”¹

Although not formally recorded at the time Jude was writing his epistle, this could have been part of the Oral Tradition that he was hearing during his lifetime.  But we can’t lose sight of the fact that 1:9 isn’t meant to be about Moses—it’s about proper angelic behavior.  Both Peter and Zechariah 3:1,2 refer to that behavior.

He showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of Yahweh, and satan standing at his right hand to be his adversary.  And the LORD (Yahweh) said to satan, “I, the LORD, reject your accusations, satan. Yes, the LORD, who has chosen Jerusalem, rebukes you.

Bottom line, having allocated fifteen minutes of debate time to satan, God did not then give the good angel fifteen minutes to annihilate him in the rebuttal.  God immediately dealt with things at the root.  Even the good angels know that it’s the LORD’s job to take care of the accusers/slanderers in our lives.  And in Joshua’s case, as well as any case that we might have today, God will step in and vindicate us.  It may be a matter of His perfect timing, but it will happen, to His Glory.

¹Wikipedia website:  /wiki/Moses_in_rabbinic_literature