Jude 4b

"They are godless men, who change the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only Sovereign and Lord."

Wow. They are turning Christianity upside down!

When it comes to worship, God has always been strict. Remember the sons of Eli? Remember the man who steadied the ark? Remember King Saul when he offered a sacrifice? Swift judgment, no compromise, no soft correction. Just judgment. You don't mess around when it comes to worship. God has told us what worship is and how He wants it done. He will not abide men who want to change the heart of worship, which is the truth of the gospel.

These godless men are doing two things:

First, they are using the grace of God a s alicense of live sinfully in the flesh. Just as Paul warned about in Romans 5 and 6. We have been given this wonderful grace that covers our sin, each one, and makes us righteous before God. The more our sin (5:20-21), the greater God's grace to us. But Romans 6:1 is an expected response: should we keep sinning even more so that God's grace will abound even more? Of course not!

But this is what the godless men are doing. They have interpreted the grace of God to extend to future sins. We're safe--God is obligated to forgive us. They have also separated the body from the spirit, as the Gnostics did. Flesh is evil, spirit is pure. They can be totally separate. Your spirit can remain acceptable to God while your flesh does what it wants, because one day the flesh will die and the spirit will remain.

Paul knows the acts of the flesh proceed from the heart (spirit). They cannot be separated like that. Chapter 6 is Paul's answer to that way of thinking. You have died to sin and now live with Christ, so why would you continue in the very sins that nailed Jesus to the cross? Later in Romans 10 he explains that anyone who has been chosen by God will respond with love and obedience and purity.