Beloved, while I was very diligent to write to you concerning our common salvation, I found it necessary to write to you exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints. - Jude 3, New King James Version
My friends, I was fully engaged in writing to you about our salvation ─ which is yours no less than ours ─ when it became urgently necessary to write at once and appeal to you to join in the struggle in defense of the faith, the faith which God entrusted to his people once and for all. - New English Bible
I fully intended, dear friends, to write to you about our common salvation, but I feel compelled to make my letter to you an earnest appeal to put up a real fight for the faith which has been once and for all committed to those who belong to Christ. - J. B. Phillips
There you have three versions of the third verse in Jude’s little-known letter to all Christians. Other versions you consult will have their own ways of trying to convey the sense of compulsion Jude felt as he set himself to write this epistle.
They are all wrestling with three unusually strong Greek words in the original. The first is the word Jude uses to describe what made him change the thrust of the epistle. The second is the word he uses to describe his own charge to them: an exhortation, or an earnest appeal. The third is the word he uses to describe what he is urging them to do: contend earnestly, join in the struggle, put up a real fight.
Jude is urging us all into two projects. One is putting serious energy into spreading the faith. The other is putting up serious resistance to any effort to distort the faith.
Reading this urgent charge should excite any Christian. It means that God has an important job for you to do. You are needed; you can be useful.
Why would God go to the trouble of compelling Jude, by the Holy Spirit, to change his mind about what he was going to write in his epistle? He compelled Jude to change because Jude’s message is urgently needed. Why would Jude say he wants to “exhort,” “strongly appeal,” or “urge”? Because he sees the job urgently needs to be done. And why would Jude say that we need to “contend earnestly,” or “put up a real fight”? Because that degree of effort is what is needed to do the job.
Jude goes on to explain what the problem is. It’s ungodly men who have crept in secretly, men and women who pervert the grace of God. God will surely judge them, he assures us, but we must recognize them and build ourselves up in our faith so that we can contend for it effectively. This is important work. What's cheery about it? An Italian Christian named Ugo Betti once wrote that the greatest blessing any person can have is “useful work.” If that is true, we are all greatly blessed, for here the Bible gives us all a job that is both urgent and useful: “contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints.”
Meditate:
Jude
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