Why did the Devil want the body of Moses? (Jude 9)

The Devil Wants Your Body Too 

Jude 9 raises the question, Why would the devil dispute with the archangel Michael over the body of Moses? That dispute is framed as part of a larger biblical pattern: the serpent’s deception in Genesis 3 and the “curse” that functions as the devil’s job change into the “dust eater,” the one who draws humanity toward death and Sheol. Moses’ body is a symbol of a larger contest over where humans belong in death—down in the realm of the grave, or up with God—especially in light of Christ, the Lord of life, who descends into Sheol, breaks it open, and opens heaven for the saints. The argument also draws on Second Temple literature (including the tradition associated with the Testament/Assumption of Moses) and places Michael’s restraint (“The Lord rebuke you”) alongside a warning to remain faithful and not follow the patterns of rebellion associated with Cain, Balaam, and Korah. The central exhortation is that the devil contends for the bodies of the faithful, too, so believers must keep Christ on the throne by allegiance to God’s kingdom and fidelity to Scripture, rather than by compromise, self-sovereignty, or the ethics of pagan worship.

Transcript:

The archangel Michael, contending with the devil, was disputing about the body of Moses. What in the world were they arguing about? This comes from Jude 9, and it makes us think, why would the devil even care about the body of Moses, or anybody’s body for that reason? This verse is not just some random weirdness that we should pass over.

Sometimes it feels like you come up to weird things in the Bible, and you want to pass over them. But if it’s weird, it’s probably important, and it tells us something about the way that the ancient person thought about things. What’s happening here is, frankly, Jude is hearkening back to God’s word in Genesis 3 to the serpent, and evaluating some principles from extra-biblical texts from the Second Temple period.

You may have heard that this has to do with a document called The Testament of Moses, or The Assumption of Moses. And he’s gonna argue Jude is for how we should live in the church today because of this really weird text. And so if you think that this is only about Moses and it’s just some weird esoteric thing, you’re missing the real warning of Jude because, and this is sort of my hot take for this video, the devil wants your body too.

So let’s disambiguate some of Jude 9, see how it fits into the grand narrative of Scripture, and then watch for Jude’s punchline here because he’s gonna tell us to remain faithful to the end and not give in to the way of Cain. So, more images that are gonna need explaining. If you like this video, we’re gonna jump in here in just a second.

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Let’s go to Jude 9. Let’s dive right in. I’m gonna read it again. Jude writes, “When the archangel Michael, contending with the devil, was disputing about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment, but said, ‘The Lord rebuke you.’”

And I want to walk through this almost word by word because literally every word is something new happening. So first of all he says, “But when.” He’s talking about a time when something happened, and Jude is assuming that his audience understands whatever this narrative about the archangel Michael contending with the devil is about. So there is something going on that must be contemporary literature.

Now we don’t really know a hundred percent what this has to do with today because, frankly, it’s weird. We have all these documents of the Second Temple period, which would be from the rebuilding of the Second Temple when the Jews returned from exile up until it was destroyed in 70 AD. That’s the Second Temple period. We have all kinds of writings. They’re 2,000-plus years old, really fascinating. But we also know that we don’t have even remotely everything.

And The Testament of Moses, or The Assumption of Moses, as it’s sometimes called, most people agree that those are the same thing, perhaps not, but we know that it’s something that exists because it’s quoted by the church fathers, it’s referred to by the church fathers. Even by the third century, though, it appears that this one only appeared in parts, and perhaps only in translated form. And so we’re not a hundred percent sure what this is all about, though we do have a Latin version of it that is about two-thirds, perhaps three-quarters complete.

But there is a—when this story existed somewhere, even though we don’t know exactly what it is. So, “When.” Tell us about the story, Jude. Well, first he refers to the archangel Michael, and archangel’s an interesting term.

Archē, meaning ruler, and angel, meaning messenger. Now we’ve got some kind of ruling messenger here, and the term angel has kind of an interesting history because angel exists sort of all the way back in the Old Testament, and then it exists in the New Testament. But it’s used, I guess, differently, isn’t exactly the way to say it. It’s used more strictly in the Old Testament for angels. But in the New Testament, you’re gonna get some other things going on where angel becomes a catchall term for divine beings.

So, where in the Old Testament you might have a watcher, from the book of Daniel, you get watchers, and those are divine beings. Sometimes the divine beings who rule are referred to as princes. Another common designation for ruling angels, or ruling divine beings, would be sons of God. You also get seraphim and cherubim. So you get these other designations for divine beings, but they all kind of get lumped into this idea of angel in the New Testament.

Not always. You get Ephesians 6, where the apostle Paul is talking about powers and principalities. He’s kind of waxing eloquent on the variety of different angelic beings, or divine beings, that exist. But here we’re getting a—it’s weird because kind of like an ambiguous, he’s saying angel, which is a broad catchall term in the New Testament, but he’s a ruling angel. He’s an archangel.

And then we get to find out who this archangel is. And he is the archangel Michael. And that’s kind of interesting because Michael only shows up a few places in the Bible. He shows up right here in Jude. He shows up in Revelation 12. Now this is an interesting one, because in 12, you find out that Michael and the devil have a more complicated history than we would’ve assumed.

So they seem to know each other because you don’t just have an argument with somebody you’ve never met before, at least not normally. So archangel Michael and the devil seem to have some kind of relationship, and we see that relationship play out a bit in Revelation 12.

When, in sort of following the incarnation events, John gives us his vision where the dragon that is the devil and Satan, the great serpent of Genesis 3, is cast out of heaven with all of his angels. And who does that? Well, it’s the archangel Michael who wars leads this war in heaven against the devil and his angels, and he casts them out.

So we’ve got a relationship between Michael and the devil that I think we’re supposed to— it’s hard to tell a hundred percent, but I think based on when Jude writes and the timing of The Assumption of Moses, I think that that battle postdates this argument that we’re talking about here. In fact, I think this argument probably has to do with all the way back when Moses handed over the kingdom of Israel to Joshua to bring them into the promised land. And so we’re talking hundreds of years before this.

So this archangel Michael, Michael shows up in another place. He shows up in the book of Daniel. He’s one of the angels, if you will, or the watchers who show up to aid Daniel. And he’s one who says he was hindered by the prince, the prince of Persia, and that prince is a reference to a fallen angel, perhaps one of the sons of God, who was ruling over the heavenly ruler of the Persian empire.

And so he’s trying to prevent Michael from coming in and helping out the Jews. So he gets hung up fighting there. Michael’s placed in a lot of other contexts. He shows up in a lot of the Second Temple literature, famously in Enoch. He plays a very important role there. He seems to be one of the chieftains of the holy ones, one of the non-fallen angels, if you will, and a number of other places in Second Temple literature as well.

So he’s kind of like a top angel. He’s a big deal. And what’s interesting about that is that he’s contending with the devil, or he’s arguing with the devil. And the devil’s kind of a big deal too. Before the devil is cast out of heaven in Revelation 12, he’s doing stuff.

And you get the idea from the prophets, Ezekiel especially, that the devil is high up in God’s court before he falls. People are always like, “Oh, well, obviously he fell before the garden, otherwise why is he there deceiving Eve?” And the answer is that where it does appear that the devil has some kind of rebellion, you could say he has a rebellious spirit, and that would be true. Or you could say he just is a rebellious spirit, or he is, as a spirit, rebellious in his being in some way. I’m starting to think a bit metaphysically, and I’ll try not to get into all of that right now.

But the devil has this rebelliousness about him, but he hasn’t really done anything he’s not supposed to do yet. When we see Satan show up in the book of Job, he enters God’s court with his angels, and he comes into God’s court and asks, and he gets permission from God to go and test Job, and then if you’ve read Job, you know how that plays out.

So the devil definitely is still kind of allowed in heaven at that point, even though it’s obvious, and I think we are supposed to read Satan as somewhat of a deceiving character there. And then he’s cursed. He’s cursed in the garden, and that curse is what I would say is sort of his job change.

When we see in Genesis 3, and we’re gonna dig into Genesis 3 a little bit here in a second, we’re gonna talk about his job change that happens when God curses him. And if you’ve heard me talk about this before, I don’t always think about the curse as a curse so much as a prophecy, I think in a sense. The devil becomes, according to the curse, what he already wanted to be—you could see who he wanted to be or who he was becoming. So the curse is really just a revealing of who the devil was becoming, more than it is God saying, “You were this, and now you’re gonna be this.”

So we’re gonna go to Genesis 3 here in just a second. But notice here, the archangel Michael is arguing or contending with the devil. What are they arguing about? Well, they’re disputing about the body of Moses, and I want to keep that dispute somewhat central because we should be thinking, what does the devil want with Moses’ body? That’s how we should be thinking about this text as we go to dig in.

So with that in mind, the devil wants the body of Moses. We go to Genesis 3. And so you’ve got this whole deceit narrative that you’re probably very familiar with. Go ahead and take a look at it on your own time.

But this is all about this: this is all about Satan, or the serpent, saying, “Eve, you can have your own sovereignty.” God is the determiner of good and evil, but what if you could be like the gods and know good and evil for yourself? And so he’s saying, in a sense, he’s almost saying, “Hey, this apple is really just representative of the idea that you have in yourself the power to determine good and evil for yourself. So don’t let God tell you not to eat this fruit.”

I’m not a memorialist when it comes to sacramental things, but I do wonder sometimes if this tree of the knowledge of good and evil was really just some sort of representative icon for rebellion against God for this reason, because it’s really Eve reaching out and taking her self-sovereignty, and then giving it to her husband to eat also, which is very interesting because he should have protected her from pursuing this self-sovereignty.

And so this is the deceit. The deceit of the garden is that you can be your own god, that you don’t need Yahweh God, you don’t need Yahweh Elohim, but you can be your own god.

And so then Yahweh Elohim, the Lord God, said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” You get this picture of a king, and he’s not in his throne room right now, but he’s gotta go to the throne room so he can do what he’s supposed to do. He’s gonna have people coming in and asking advice, so he needs to go in and sit on the throne.

It’s the famous scene in The Emperor’s New Groove where Kuzco comes into the throne room, and Yzma is sitting on the throne, and he is like, “We have had this conversation.” And he loses his mind. That’s what’s happening here: Eve is sitting on the throne when God comes into the throne room, and that’s how we should think about the garden. This is the Lord’s abode. This is where God comes to commune with his human creation. This is his throne room. It’s his paradise. It’s the mountain of God that shows up in Enoch. In Enoch, you’ve got the tallest mountain that is the mountain of God, and Eden is the mountain of God. It’s his abode, but it’s on earth.

And here in this abode on earth, when the Lord is out of the throne room, he’s off in the garden somewhere, she’s talking to the serpent, and she goes, “Yes, I will take this sovereignty for myself,” and she sits down on Yahweh’s throne in his own palace, if you will. And so, “What is this that you have done?” And you get this pandering, it’s like, “You realize what you’ve done. You’ve tried to usurp authority from the creator of the entire universe.”

And so, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate,” she says.

So then the Lord God said to the serpent. He turns, and he looks at the serpent, and he says, “Because you have done this, cursed are you above livestock and above all the beasts of the field.” I don’t wanna play too much into this thinking, but that word livestock there is behemah, and it’s like he’s—and it’s not the behemoth, so we shouldn’t probably read too much into it, but it is notable that the serpent is cursed even over the rampaging beasts of the field.

And this is that ambiguous way of storytelling where, yeah, we’re talking about a snake, but also the nachash. The nachash is the Hebrew term translated as “serpent,” and it is also a shining one, a member of God’s court. And so you get some of this interplay there, where now it’s fun to tell the story of the serpent, the snake in the garden. And so that’s why he’s described as livestock or a beast of the field. He’s described as a serpent. He’s one of the animals that the Lord God had created. But then he’s also a divine being in the garden, so you get this interplay that helps us to understand and interpret the narrative in both worlds, to understand the traditional Adam and Eve story, but then to also understand spiritually in the patterning of what’s happening in the garden, what’s happening cosmically in reality between God and the spirit world and humankind.

And so what’s happening in the spirit world here is that God is like, “Well, okay, cursed are you above all livestock.” And notice the language again. He’s not saying, “I curse you above all livestock.” He’s noting that, kind of like, “Hey, this is where you’ve gone, cursed are you above livestock.”

Well, what did he do? Because of what he has done in deceiving Eve, now he is going to go on his belly. “On your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.”

So think about biblical cosmology for a second. In biblical cosmology, you’ve got three tiers. You’ve got heaven, earth, and under the earth. And humans were created, for lack of a better term, in an intermediary state between heaven and earth. Earth is not the abode of humans. Earth is the abode of the dead when one dies in the biblical metanarrative. They go down into the earth, into Sheol. And so we need to try not think of the globe for a minute and just think, for lack of a better way to say it, just think of a flat earth, because that allows us to sort of see a hierarchy of the three realms.

And so humans exist between death, which is under the earth, and heaven, which is life. And the reason that Eden is depicted as the mountain of God is that it’s the place where God comes down to meet man. So on high places in the ancient world, it’s believed that those are places where heaven kind of dips down to create a soft place, or a portal, if you will, between heaven and earth, between the ethereal realms and the physical realms.

And so temples are often placed on mountains because that’s a place where the heavens come down so that man can go and commune with God. You get an overlap, a bleed-through, between the heavenly places and the earthly places. And so Eden is the mountain of God, and it’s the place where God comes down to meet with man.

And now what’s happening is that you have, well, you could say, an elohim, or a spirit, which is the serpent, the nachash. He has come down to meet with Eve in the garden, and he’s talked with Eve. But now the curse is, “On your belly you shall go.” And so this is why I describe it as a job change because from this point forward in the narrative, the devil, though he can still enter heaven, his abode is the earth now. He is on the land.

And you could say that humans, because of the curse as well, we go on our bellies too, because we don’t on our own ascend to heaven. We’re not in the earth, we’re not in Sheol, we’re not in the grave, so long as we breathe. When we die, we enter Sheol, we enter the grave. But as long as we live and breathe and speak and all of that, we are on our bellies. We are so close to death. And that’s what we’re supposed to understand about this, is that we are so close to death as human beings. “On your belly you shall go,” too.

And so the curse of Satan is sort of like, now this is where you live, like a human now lives on their belly. So you live on your belly, but it says, “And dust you shall eat all the days of your life.” And that’s really, actually, yanked out of its context, not super important, but if you just read Genesis 1 through 3, even going back to Genesis 2, that word dust is a pretty important word because Adam was created out of the dust of the earth.

I think better, Adam was created out of the clay of the earth. And we should read this, “On your belly you shall go and dust you shall eat,” as, “On your belly you shall go and clay you shall eat.” In other words, what the devil, the serpent here, is going to eat now, because he is on his belly, he is down here with humankind, is he is going to eat the uncreated matter of humankind.

And you go, well, I don’t understand why that’s a problem. But when you go on, and you understand what happens to Adam, remember, “If you eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, surely you will die.” And then the Lord says, “From dust you came, from clay you came, and to clay, or to dust, you shall return.”

And so that means that humans, because of sin, return to the clay of the earth that we were created from. So humans were formed out of the earth. We came out of the matter that is the earth. I suppose it’s a central matter, because we have heaven, earth, and under the earth. And we were brought up, and receiving the very breath that allows us to live, the breath of God breathed into us, and this identity as imagers of God, we’re pulled up out of the earth. And that’s where we come from.

And so we enter into conception, I would argue, we enter into a state of an intermediary state where from the very conceiving of a child, in the womb of a woman, that person, that human being, is now reaching towards heaven and God is reaching towards them. And that continues until that person either is assumed to heaven, which we’ll talk about in a few minutes, or returns to the grave, to the dust or the clay from where they came from. “Dust you came, to dust you will return.”

So when it says that the devil, or the serpent, is now the dust eater, the one who eats death, it basically means that he’s going to do what he was already doing in the garden. That’s why I say it’s not really a curse so much as a prophecy, because what was he doing with Eve? He was telling Eve, “Hey, you can be like God, knowing good and evil.” And then the product of that is, “From dust you came, to dust you return.” So he’s now eating, or becoming consumed with, the things that have to do with death.

Eating is a really interesting piece of imagery. We eat in the Lord’s Supper. In John 6, Jesus says, “If you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you will have eternal life in yourself.” In other words, what you eat is what you become. And so to receive eternal life in the Lord’s Supper—and this is why I’m a sacramentalist—I believe that something very real spiritually is taking place in the Lord’s Supper, that it’s not mere, it’s not just an imagery to remind us of the gospel. No, it’s actually far greater. It’s a participation in the sacrifice of Christ, and that we receive the body and blood of Christ and therefore receive sanctifying and ultimately deifying, glorifying life.

And so here you have the devil, and he is the one who brings death into the world, and therefore he eats death in order to become death.

And he becomes death in order to bring death. And some of the Christian artwork, you get this picture of the devil, and his mouth open and just fangs, and he’s consuming the dead to bring them into his belly, which is Sheol. And so the devil is the death eater who eats, consumes the dead in order to become death, for the earth to become death for humankind.

And so what he’s functionally doing is, and this is where we get some of this imagery of like, the devil is ruling in hell and stuff like that, and I think that imagery is a little bit wrong. I think it’s a little bit right. I think it’s a little bit wrong, but this is where it comes from; now the devil is trying to pull humankind down. What he is about is death. And so he’s pulling humans down. Humans live between heaven and earth, and he’s pulling humans down into the earth, into his belly, so that he can eat what he is, which is death.

And God, namely Jesus Christ, is the Lord of life. And so he comes down in the incarnation in order to bring us up to him. So you get this contrast between the devil and Jesus himself, in which Jesus wants to bring us up to himself. And so this is where you get some of this, and it’s in a way wrong, this idea that, you know, you’ve got good God Jesus, bad God devil, and they’re fighting against each other, and we’re gonna see who wins in the end.

The beautiful thing about the biblical narrative is that Jesus won. We already know Jesus wins. And you see Jesus wins all the way back in Genesis 3 when it says, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” Again, this isn’t so much a curse as it is a prophecy that, hey, God wins in the end. So we don’t have to worry about like, “Oh, this is really scary. Now I understand why the devil wants death for me,” because we already know, in the very moment that this transition, this job change, took place for the devil, that it’s already said right there. Yeah, but don’t be fearful. If you’re faithful to God, if you’re faithful to Yahweh, to Christ, don’t be fearful, because he wins.

And then the rest of the unfolding of the biblical narrative is the redemptive working of God, demonstrating how he won.

I wanna go to another narrative for a second because as we start to talk about Jesus, we’re gonna see some cool things because now, again, the devil’s the death eater, and that brings another layer of significance to Jesus in his death descending into Sheol. And then in the harrowing of Hades, he cracks open Sheol. He takes out of Sheol the saints, the dead, and he rescues them and brings them up, first to the earth, and then the assumption is to heaven.

And that assumption, there’s a little bit of play on words because assumption is the word that we use. It’s a technical term, but it basically means to be brought up to heaven.

And so that’s what’s happening here is that the archangel Michael is disputing with the devil, the one who eats death, the death eater, about who gets Moses’ body.

Jesus was crucified, and he cracks open Sheol. What’s left of Sheol, by the way? So Sheol is depicted as having two sides. Sometimes we describe Sheol as the grave. And in the New Testament, sometimes it says Hades, which is a rough Greek counterpart for the concept of the grave. It’s similar to Sheol. We don’t read the Greek mythologies into it, but when the New Testament authors use Hades, they’re talking about Sheol.

But it sort of has two sides. You get this in the picture of Abraham’s bosom, when you’ve got Lazarus and the rich man in Abraham’s bosom and there’s a great chasm, and the rich man is burning and dying of thirst on one side, and Lazarus has the fountain of water, of pure water, and he’s in the arms of Abraham on the other side in comfort.

So you get these two sides. Well, what happens in the harrowing of Hades is that the good side, if you will, is rescued up to heaven. And so all that’s left is hell. All that’s left is Gehenna. All that’s left is the burning, fiery sulfur pit. And that’s what we see as hell, hell in sort of a New Testament, new covenant context.

And so that’s part of what happened. That’s what happened to hell in that moment, but also something happened to heaven.

Think about Jesus’ crucifixion, and I would challenge you to go and put the stoning of Stephen and the crucifixion of Jesus side by side, and maybe physically do that, print them out, and use markers and pens and draw parallels between the two narratives. And what you’re gonna find is that you’re gonna find at least seven obvious and specific parallels. And then you’re gonna find one obvious and specific place that the narratives diverge. And that’s what I actually want to talk about, where it diverges.

When Jesus is on the cross, and he gives up his spirit, it says that the skies were darkened. And a lot of people in contemporary days are gonna look at that and say it’s because the Father rejected the Son. And that’s actually not true.

When Jesus said, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” he didn’t mean to create some sort of tritheistic separation within the Godhead where the Father can actually reject the Son. That makes no sense based on historic orthodox Christian theology, or we could say Christian Trinitarian theology.

So what’s actually happening there? If you go to Psalm 22, which is what Jesus is quoting, Jesus feels forsaken by the Father. That’s what David says in Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” But as you get to the rest of the psalm, the psalm concludes, “But you have not turned your face away.”

And so Psalm 22 is all about how David feels forsaken by God, but God has never let him go. God has never created any separation. And this is, in a way, what Jesus does on the cross when he says, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He’s creating that exact same tension where you go, yeah, Jesus is God incarnate, but he’s dying on a cross. And it feels like, and perhaps it felt to him like, God had forsaken him, as God had rejected him.

But we need to bring in the theology of the whole psalm, because that’s what Jesus is doing. He’s smuggling a lot in when he says those words. And we need to understand that what Jesus was really saying is, though it feels like forsakenness, my Father has not turned his face away from me. And so we should look at that also and go, no, the Father has not turned his face away from the Son.

And so then you say, well, why did the clouds roll in? The clouds roll in because it’s an image of heaven being closed, not to Jesus. Jesus isn’t forsaken by the Father. Jesus actually holds the key to death and Hades. You could say he wins those when he rises from the dead.

But what happens is the clouds roll in to say heaven is not open, so that when Jesus looks to heaven—remember, think three-tier cosmology, set aside our science class for a minute— you look up to heaven to see God, and he looks up and he feels forsaken because he doesn’t see God. Now, is God present? Yes. The Lord has not forsaken him. That’s Psalm 22. That’s very clear. But he feels forsaken. He does not see heaven.

And because he can’t see heaven, he goes down. Because up is not open, he goes down, and this is part of God’s plan for Jesus in order to open heaven.

Now, you put that side by side with the stoning of Stephen. Stephen, in the book of Act,s has a similar statement where he speaks his last, and then he looks up, and the heavens are open, and Jesus is sitting at the right hand of the Father. And that’s the big difference, is that Jesus, when he rose from the dead, opened heaven. And he opened heaven not just for himself to enter in, but that’s his right as the creator of the universe, including the cosmos. That’s his right. But he has opened heaven for us.

And that’s why today there is only Gehenna down. There’s only hell down. The grave is only for the deceased. But up is for the saint.

And so the body of Moses is disputed. You could say, when Moses dies, it’s before heaven was opened. And so here’s what you have: you have the devil contending for his body. He is saying, “No, he is mine. I am the dust eater. You said yourself back in Genesis 3, I am the dust eater. Moses’ body is mine.” And Michael is like, “No. Moses was a saint, a faithful one of God. He was one of his chosen, one of his elect, you could say.” And so Michael says, “No, the body of Moses belongs to heaven.”

And so the Assumption of Moses is sometimes called the Testament of Moses. You can find it online. You can go look it up. The problem with it is that it’s incomplete. What’s missing? It’s a commentary on Deuteronomy where Moses is handing over the leadership of Israel to Joshua right before his death. And what’s missing is the end of the document where Moses actually dies.

And so we assume that this Assumption of Moses belongs to that part of the document based on some things that were said about it by some ancient writers. That’s really weird how that stuff works. We don’t have it, but we have people talking about it, and so we assume that it’s in there, this dispute with the devil. But we don’t know because we don’t have the end of the story anymore. We just have this incomplete Latin text.

And so that’s what we have in this argument, is the devil saying, “Moses belongs to me,” and Michael saying, “Moses belongs to God.” The devil says, “I will eat Moses in death,” and Michael says, “No, for Moses, the heavens are opened,” even though it happens before the heavens are fully opened.

But we do see that happening with other characters in the Old Testament. Enoch was one of those who were righteous. We’re told in Genesis 5, it’s really funny, it’s like, “Enoch was a righteous man and then he was not,” by which he means he wasn’t on the earth anymore. And that’s elaborated on by the author of Hebrews, who says that he was assumed to heaven without having to die, basically, which is amazing. So he didn’t have to go through; you could say he didn’t have to go through hell to get to heaven in the same way that everybody else does.

But now that the heavens are open, we don’t go through hell to get to heaven in the same way.

And so this is really my final point of this video, that this is what they’re arguing about. And it’s like, “Oh, this is really fun, geeky stuff.” But why is it even in the book of Jude in the first place? Why? It seems like a pretty obscure analogy that he is making.

Well, I’d remind you that it’s probably not obscure in the first century. Jude’s audience probably knew exactly why he was using the story, but I would argue that the devil argues over the assumption of your body too, that now that the heavens are open and our natural place as faithful followers of Jesus Christ, those who are not on the throne, we are not taking the throne in Eden for ourselves. We have kneeled before the throne in Eden, which is the throne of Christ, and we have kneeled before that throne, restoring loyalty to the kingdom of God, and therefore have been received into the kingdom of God.

By the way, that’s the central thesis of my book, The Gospel is Bigger Than You Think. If you haven’t read that, this sort of narrative approach to how the gospel operates is what this book is about. So check that out.

But that’s what’s happening here is we have taken allegiance to Yahweh and therefore to Christ and therefore entered into the kingdom of God. And therefore, when we die, the heavens are open to us.

And so the problem of Jude, the ultimate problem of Jude, is that they were compromising historical biblical ethics. If you read it, he’s gonna talk about some things that are happening with sexual immorality. I think there are really two things going on that are closely related.

One of them, one of the things going on, is people coming into the church and teaching that the acts of the pagans and the worship of the pagan gods, namely sexual immorality, bestiality, and orgies and things like that, are a way that we ought to be worshiping our God, Jesus. And if you’re a Christian today, you’re probably like, that’s insane that people were coming into the church and arguing for that. But that seems to be what it was.

It’s also people, not necessarily teachers, who are causing division in the church because they are affirming these practices of sexual immorality in the life of the church. Feel free to go and look at the division being caused in mainline denominations today over sexual ethics.

I would ask you to ignore some of the stuff that is happening regarding the egalitarian versus complementarian versus patriarchal view of the relationship between men, women, and children. I’d ask you to ignore that whole argument, but really just to look at the way that many mainline churches are bringing in the practice of sexual immorality into their worship. That’s what we’re talking about happening here in Jude. It’s not just an affirmation of these things, but a practicing of them, and then on some level a teaching of them.

So that’s why I say that the problem of Jude is a compromise of historical biblical ethics. You can go read the book of Leviticus, as challenging as that is for some, and you can see all over the law of God that this is a big problem for Israel. God’s people do not worship as the pagans worship. And so then we have churches today bringing these things in. It’s crazy. So read the Bible, it’s there.

So that’s what the problem of Jude is. And we assume that the devil didn’t get Moses’ body, and he was assumed to heaven because God counted him righteous for his faith through his expressed faithfulness.

And then if we go back to the book of Jude, what we find is that you too ought—this is really the exhortation—remain faithful to the end, and don’t go the way of Cain.

Let me read verse 9 in context. I’ll start in verse 8. “Yet in like manner these people,” these who are bringing in the practices of sexual immorality, “these people also, relying on their dreams,” in other words, they’re saying, “The Lord told me,” don’t do that, stick with the Scriptures, “relying on their dreams, defile the flesh, reject authority.” Defile the flesh is a reference to a sort of idiom for sexual immorality. They reject authority. In other words, they’re bringing this into the church. They’re rejecting the authority of the apostles and the elders of the church. “They blaspheme the glorious ones,” they’re even blaspheming the angels.

“But when the archangel Michael, contending with the devil, was disputing about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment.” So you’re like, oh, wow, Michael wasn’t even willing to condemn the devil. Like if you condemn the devil to hell, that seems to make sense. But even Michael isn’t willing to do that, because he still sees a place for the devil in God’s plan.

“But when he, contending with the devil, was disputing about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment, but he said, ‘The Lord rebuke you.’” So he’s even leaving the devil to the judgment of God. I like that. If you’re struggling with people bringing things into the church that you don’t agree with, I think there’s a line, with historical Christian orthodoxy, even regarding historical biblical ethics, where you can say, “I can’t be a member of this church. I need to go to a church that teaches the right things.” I think there’s a line for that.

But it is not for us to put our finger in someone’s face and say, “You belong to the devil and not to God.” I think that we can say, “The Lord rebuke you.” If Michael wouldn’t even condemn the devil to hell, then perhaps we shouldn’t either.

Verse 10: “But these people,” again, that’s the ones who were bringing in sexual immorality, “blaspheme all that they do not understand, and they are destroyed by all that they, like unreasoning animals, understand instinctively.” In other words, let them be destroyed by their own ideologies, because it does. And if you look at what’s happening to liberal mainline churches, especially, they are being destroyed by their own ideologies.

There’s this lie that, “If we just accept everything that the world accepts, then our churches will grow,” and people buy into this and go, “Find yourself in your community, one of these all-affirming, all-inclusive churches.” I don’t really recommend that you go there, seriously, but if you were to go in there on a Sunday morning, there’s probably about 15 to 18 people there. That’s not an ideology that speaks to the world. It really just is not. They’re destroying themselves by their acceptance of immorality.

It is not for us to condemn them. So he says in verse 11, “Woe to them, for they walked in the way of Cain and abandoned themselves for the sake of gain to Balaam’s error.” And he goes on. There are several images here that would take a whole video to unpack each one of them, but I just wanna say that to walk in the way of Cain, think about Cain and Abel, and their story.

Cain offered a sacrifice of the last fruits. And you’re like, no, he offered the wrong fruits. No, he offered the last fruits. That’s a video for another day. And because he offered the last fruits instead of the first fruits, his sacrifice was rejected. And therefore he gets angry, kills his brother, and God sends him to the east, where he goes, and he starts a city.

And that’s really important because he goes and he starts the city of man. So you could say, to create a biblical parallel, that Cain ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He said, “I will be king for myself. I will know for myself. I will keep the first fruits for myself, and I will give to Yahweh second.”

And then he goes, and he starts this city that is the city of man. Think Augustine. And he starts the city of man, founded upon this principle that I will eat of the first fruits, and I will only give to God what is left over, or what benefits me.

But Cain’s city is built on the elevation of man over the creator. It’s the worship of the creation over the creator, if you think Romans, like Romans 1:18 and following. And so that’s the problem. That is what happens: when we put ourselves on the throne, we become those who are consumed by the death of Satan.

So Moses’ body was being argued over between Michael and the devil, and so is your body also, that in death the devil wants your body. And if you are one who goes the way of Cain and you say, “I have put myself on the throne like Eve,” then you came from dust and to dust you will return.

And Jude seems to be saying that it doesn’t matter that you self-call yourself a Christian, that you perhaps say, and you go to church every Sunday, you perhaps agree with the Nicene Creed or anything like that, you lift up words of praise to God. But if the throne in Eden does not have Christ sitting on it but yourself, then you have gone the way of Cain. You have made Balaam’s error, you have joined in the rebellion, and you will perish in that rebellion with Korah. And that’s a scary and sobering thing that we have to wrestle with.

Jesus himself said that there in the church would be weeds among the wheat. And perhaps it’s notable that he even warned that we should not be pulling up the weeds before the time of the harvest, because if you pull up the weeds, we’ll no doubt pull up the good wheat with it, and it’ll also be burned in the fire.

And I think that parallels this idea that Michael wasn’t willing to blaspheme the devil, that we’re gonna leave judgment to God. By the way, we’re gonna leave the judgment of individuals to God, but we are going to judge historical Christian orthodoxy, and we are going to judge historical biblical ethics, and we’re going to do so according to the Scriptures themselves because that is how we walk faithfully with Christ, and we keep Christ on the throne.

And we don’t listen to the lies of the devil that are always saying, “Hey, why don’t you sit up there? Why don’t you be your own king? Why don’t you eat that fruit? You can be like God, knowing good and evil.”

And so that’s what it’s all about. Hope you were blessed by it. Again, check out anthonydelgado.net. Check me out on Facebook. Make sure you like and subscribe to this video. Share it with some friends. Love to know your feedback in the comments. God bless. Christ is king, and that changes everything.