Jude 1:19

These be they who separate themselves Many of the better MSS. omit the reflexive pronoun. The verb is not found elsewhere in the New Testament, but a simpler form, with the same meaning, occurs in Leviticus 20:24. It was characteristic of the false teachers and mockers who are spoken of that they drew lines of demarcation, which Christ had not drawn, between themselves and others, or between different classes of believers, those, e.g., who had the higher gnosis, or exercised a wider freedom (2 Peter 2:19), and those who were content to walk in "the Apostles" doctrine and fellowship" (Acts 2:42). They lost sight of the unity of the Church of Christ and preferred the position of a sect or party; and, in so doing, united the exclusiveness of the Pharisees with the sensuous unbelief of the Sadducees.

sensual, having not the Spirit The adjective is the same as that which describes the "natural man" of 1 Corinthians 2:14, and implies that the man lives in the full activity of his emotional and perceptive nature, without rising into the region of the reason and conscience which belong to his spiritual being. "Sensual," or better perhaps, sensuous, is the nearest English equivalent, but, strictly speaking, it expresses the lower aspect of the character represented by the Greek term. The "sensuous" or psychical man is not necessarily "carnal" in the sense usually attached to that term, but the two words are closely connected with, and indeed overlap each other. The words seem specially directed against the boast of many of the Gnostic teachers, who, looking to St Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 2:14, boasted that they alone were "spiritual" in that Apostle's sense of the term, and that the members of the Church were, as the "natural" or "sensuous," incapable of knowing the higher mysteries of God (Iren. i. 6. 2 4). St Jude retorts the charge, and says that they, who boast of their illumination, are in very deed destitute of every higher element of the religious life. The word for "Spirit" stands without the article in the Greek, and though this does not necessarily exclude the thought that the Spirit of God is spoken of, it is, perhaps, better to rest in the meaning that the false teachers were so absorbed in their lower, sensuous nature that they no longer possessed, in any real sense of the word, that element in man's compound being, which is itself spiritual, and capable therefore of communion with the Divine Spirit.