Jude 1:4

Verse 4. For there are certain men crept in unawares.

The reason for the haste in writing and the urgency of the exhortation are here given. Unawares, or slyly, certain men, false teachers, had crept into the church. The word "unawares" implies that the character of these certain men that crept in was not known, otherwise they might have been rejected, kept out, or failed to obtain recognition as members of the body of Christ. The writer, in his description of these men while he denominates them as ungodly, which is a general description proceeds to lay two specific charges against them, and this is necessary that thereby the brethren may the more easily identify them and detect their ungodly approaches:

1. Turning the grace of God into lasciviousness.

2. Denying the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ.

Now these which slyly crept into the church use the favor which God designed to bestow through this agency to its perversion. They insist that all manner of lewd practices are allowable to the sanctified in spirit; such practices are only of the flesh, and do not disturb their spiritual relations with the Master. These practices may be, and are, forbidden to those not of the one body, but to the sanctified it is different. These that slyly crept into the church further insist that Christ had not come in the flesh, because, say they, the flesh is sinful, necessarily, naturally, and without the possibility of change. Macknight seems to think that the denying relates to a denial in the face of persecution, and the denial being made to avoid the punishment under persecution inflicted. This view can not account reasonably for the apostle's haste in writing, and his anxiety to warn against this class of false teachers. That this can not be the correct view is further evident from some additional characteristics given elsewhere in the epistle, some of which, we now proceed to enumerate:

1. They were of old ordained.

2. Their condemnation was fixed.

The coming of this class was foretold; at the time of such foretelling, their condemnation was also asserted. As an inspired writer, Jude, further along, asserts that Enoch, before the flood, made known this class and the certainty of their punishment.