Three Reminders of Judgment
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. 6 Angels who didn’t keep their first domain, but deserted their own dwelling place, he has kept in everlasting bonds under darkness for the judgment of the great day. 7 Even as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, having in the same way as these given themselves over to sexual immorality and gone after strange flesh, are shown as an example, suffering the punishment of eternal fire.
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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