Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Jude · About this commentary
Three Reminders of Judgment
Jude 1:5-7
5 Now I desire to remind you, though you already know this, that the Lord, having saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who didn’t believe. · WEB
Three privileges, three presumptions, one lesson: having been favored is not being safe.
Jude's first weapon is memory — you already know this, he says, and reminds them anyway. Three cases, each a privilege presumed upon.
Israel was saved out of Egypt , and afterward the unbelieving generation fell in the wilderness Numbers 14:29–30; Paul reads the same history the same way 1 Corinthians 10:11. Salvation received is not salvation presumed. The angels did not keep their own domain but abandoned their dwelling — the rebellion Scripture shows as war in heaven, a third drawn down with the dragon Revelation 12:7–9, the angels who sinned delivered to chains of darkness 2 Peter 2:4. Jude turns the letter's verb on them: those who would not keep are now kept, in everlasting bonds for the great day. And Sodom and Gomorrah, given over to immorality, stand as the example of eternal fire — eternal in what it accomplished, not in its burning, for the cities were reduced to ashes and made a specimen of judgment Genesis 19:24–25 2 Peter 2:6. Nothing of them is burning today; nothing of them remains at all, and that finality is the point.
Privilege heads each story; presumption ends it.
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