Sorrow

"Such are waterless clouds, fruitless trees in the season, twice dead and uprooted, wandering stars for whom the gloom of darkness is reserved forever"  Jude 12&13.

It is, without doubt, one of the worst things that can be done - when someone is intentionally defrauded of their true value or their true status by deceit and guile. It lies at the very core of our current poverty and misery as a race - we were sold a lie of meaning which negated confidence in the one who cherished us, nurtured us, and furnished our existence with a world filled with good things for us to discover, contemplate and understand. We have become such twisted things that we are no longer those capable of drawing near to the splendor for which we were made, but are severed from the beauty and the majesty of all that was meant to be.

So works the horror of false doctrine.

Truth protects us from becoming beings motivated by or acting through anything other than agape -  an encompassing, volitional love that finds its true joy in honoring and pleasing another. Deceit first mutilates our affections, selfishly conforming our aspirations to an immediate gaining of a desire, be it material or spiritual (and loosing something of infinitely more value as a result). By our acting from such a stance, we become creatures disconnected from anything but our sole obsession. A lie blinds us to what we should see about ourselves and the nature of reality, turning us into those who are at war with the very essence, the very fiber, of what life is meant to be - partaking of a gift which causes us to know love and to delight in sharing that love.

We know that in Eden we were intended to express that manner of life to all that God had made, but since the fall, God had worked through His people, saved by His Son (Jude 5), to speak the truth in love to our fallen world, thus, the church has become the temple, the garden, where the life which is meant to fill creation can be evidenced (Jude 2). As in that first realm, however, the church itself has become the focal point of conflict (vs 3) - the maelstrom at the very heart of the war between love and deceit. We commonly see this in teaching and teachers (Vs 4) which follow the pattern of defrauding evidenced in the garden - they 'turn' (twist) the living word of life into something which causes us to pursue an allure - a "form of godliness" which is hollow - empty of the love of God given to us in His Son (vs 1).

Jude gives us numerous examples of such authorities and leaders (verses 5 to 11), but what is imperative in all of these examples is that these rebels chose not to believe in the word that God Himself had spoken, but sought to establish something other as true, and thereby perpetuate a deceit and a lie. The essence of corruption is to place weight in a mandate which divorces us from the source of life, mercy, grace and care. All to often, our priorities, our decrees, our "anointed" revelations, can become such chains, for they neither truly makes us free as His children, or lift up the one who saves us to the uttermost.

We are admonished to discern such poison, to avoid it, and to take heed to the words of those who have pointed to God's living work, to find our encouragement and aid there, because only then are we keeping ourselves in God's astonishing love (vs 21), and can aid others who are wounded by such guile (vs 22). This is the only remedy to the murder of life. It is our role to see satan crushed by our looking to the life from God in Christ, and not the wiles of those seeking to defraud us from such wondrous grace.