Lookahead: That means that they may wear “Jesus Loves You” tee-shirts with matching baseball caps, and plaster ichthys (🐟) bumper stickers all over their cars, and sing Hillsong worship songs in 5-part harmony, and speak enough fluent Christianese to make a Pentecostal Church Mother weep; but you get the Holy Spirit when you become a true believer. So this means, according to Jude, they are not true believers. And by extension/interpolation, it means they are false believers AKA the “h word” as in hypocrites.

But you, beloved, remember what was foretold by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ when they said to you, “In the last times there will be scoffers who will follow after their own ungodly desires.” These are the ones who cause divisions, who are worldly and devoid of the Spirit. But you, beloved, by building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God as you await the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you eternal life. Jude 1:17-21

The Berean Translation on Bible Hub (thumbs up emoti) parses these verses under the heading of “A Call to Persevere.” I think it’s a good summary.

Jude introduces yet another type of difficult person, scoffers! The Greek word for scoffer is empaíktēs and means mocker, scoffer, by implication-false teacher. The verb form of this Greek word is what the Roman soldiers, the chief priests, the elders, and the scribes did to Jesus during His crucifixion. 😦 And so it continued in the early church era…

Today in 2020, the potential for scoffers exists anywhere—on the political trail, in the church pew, at our jobs. I’m sure some of us have dealt with scoffers in the workplace—people who ridicule others’ out-of-the-box innovations—innovations that, at times, might turn things around in a crisis.

Our Iceberg is Melting was a 2005 book (2017 Revision) that cited the different people types that emerge in organizational crises: “Lucky for you, John Kotter has written a story called Our Iceberg Is Melting. It’s about a colony of penguins who learn their iceberg is no longer a safe place to live…Let’s consider one of the characters — NoNo the penguin. How did NoNo get his name. One theory suggested his first words as a baby were not ‘Ma’ or ‘Pa,’ but ‘No, No.’ This perturbing penguin objected to every idea Fred (hero of the story who wants to save penguin colony from melting iceberg) came up with to solve the melting iceberg problem. I told a coworker about NoNo the penguin. He replied, ‘Yes, we had a NoNo at the last place I worked. That guy hated new ideas.’ I bet you’ve endured more than one NoNo during your career. In the IceBerg story, NoNo is an archetype. Story consultant, James Bonnet calls this the holdfast or threshold guardian archetype. If you’re unable to overcome the resistance created by a holdfast, you may not be up to the challenge or ready to receive the benefits of change.”¹ Bottom line, this type of person can hamstring a team’s entire project and make it totally ineffectual…for good! And if you’re trying to save people’s souls versus saving the annual Return on Sales, the havoc that these NoNo Scoffers can wreak is exponentially more serious.

In “Jude’s church,” the infiltration by scoffers resulted in apodiorizó. From two Greek words: apo meaning from or away from, and diorizó, to divide by limits or separate. The combined word means to mark off, by drawing boundaries to disjoin, part, separate from another, to make divisions or separation.

Apodiorizó is what we are seeing BIGTIME today in the CV-19 global setting. Dr. Rick Rigsby, author of Lessons From a Third Grade Dropout, and with ~16M views of his “Most Inspiring (Commencement) Speech” on YouTube, spoke about the current social unrest in the U.S. Bottom line, he said that God doesn’t distinguish between any one and another; God makes no distinctions between any surface demographic differences; He looks on the heart, and He wants all of us to behave in the same way that He does. Julia Jackson utterly exemplified this during the week of August 24, 2020 when she made the following comments—while her son was fighting for his life in the critical surgery that was necessitated by another White-On-Black-Shooting tragedy: (Reporter: And so your son was shot in the back by police officers. You’re at the hospital; there’s a police officer in the room and you prayed together.) Oh yeah, most definitely…even if he (had been) the one that did it…it would have been harder to do, but it would have been the same scenario…I’ve learned how to (examine my heart) personally in my walk/relationship with God, the LORD Jesus Christ…and when you do that, you get a peace; there’s a peace that I can’t even describe…I have great peace and it allows me to forgive…I have already forgiven…and this forgiveness is not for anybody else but God, and me. (Reporter: Do you have anything to say to the politicians who are out there? Anything you want to say.) For all politicians…You guys are the leaders of our country and I personally have respect for authority. I would like to see our politicians set a better example for the citizens when it comes to the things that are said. I would like to stick to the facts and see them stop having these pillow fights, and just stick to the facts; and then once they start doing that, I think we can start concentrating on what we need to do to fix our country, because this country is in grave danger:…There’s too much hate and murder and etc. Other countries are laughing at us.

Side Note: Oh, LORD, please forgive me for the times that I have fallen short in this area of divisiveness. Please help me to be a little more like Julia Jackson each day!! In the Name of Jesus.

In addition to being divisive scoffers, this type of difficult person is “worldly” and “devoid of the spirit.” The Greek for “worldly” is psyxikós (an adjective, derived from psyxḗ which means, soul, natural identity) – properly, soulish, i.e. what is natural, as it relates to physical (tangible) life alone (i.e. apart from God’s inworking of faith), animalistic, sensuous, natural versus the higher, spiritual aspect of humanity that develops through faith… Why animalistic? They don’t ekh’-o (have, hold, hold fast to, possess, own) the Holy Spirit.

That means that they may wear “Jesus Loves You” tee-shirts with matching baseball caps, and plaster ichthys (🐟) bumper stickers all over their cars, and sing Hillsong worship songs in 5-part harmony, and speak enough fluent Christianese to make a Pentecostal Church Mother weep; but you get the Holy Spirit when you become a true believer. So this means, according to Jude, they are not true believers. And by extension/interpolation, it means they are false believers AKA the “h word” as in hypocrites.

In previous posts I’ve described how surprised I was when, as a Boston Christian Radio devotee in the 90’s, I heard an extremely conservative pastor, from a mainline denomination, preach that—at any given time—he was moments away from depravity. I thought, “Hmmm. He really doesn’t have the demeanor of someone who’s that bad.” But I learn more and more every day about how that confession also applies to me, but for God! Really the only thing that separates me from depravity on any given day is the practice that Jude strongly advocates: by building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God as you await the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you eternal life.

Now we can spend fifty years talking about the “praying in the Holy Spirit” phrase—or just wait ‘til we get to heaven to find out. But, whatever your denominational CONOPS, the Holy Spirit is the enabler and the power-house Who makes this prayer possible. And in so-doing, He builds up the faith that causes us to develop “the higher, spiritual aspect of humanity”; and infuses us with His infinite LOVE—which is the ultimate weapon against any difficult person, no matter how depraved. However we do it, I highly recommend full-duplex bi-directional communication with, by, and in the Holy Spirit whenever possible. Get ‘em saved, and they won’t be depraved. 🙂

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¹ Sneiderhauser Website: /blog/2011/11/nono-the-penguin.html